Bleeding Hearts(137)

In New Haven, Dessa drove carefully from stoplight to stoplight. She looked at the big Victorian houses on one street and the triple-deckers on the other and the gothic stone piles that belonged to Yale. Then she pulled into the driveway at Fountain of Youth and felt nothing.

Nothing.

Dessa cut her engine and got out of the car. She stood under the hot light of the security lamp that hung over the side door. She looked through the small window there and saw a tall young woman sitting at a tiny desk, typing something into a computer. The exercise rooms at Fountain of Youth were open to members every weeknight until eleven o’clock. That was in the ads Dessa had been listening to, too. That was how she knew it would be safe to stop in after work. I ought to learn to use a computer, Dessa told herself. And then she giggled. Learning to use a computer would get her just as much as learning to type had gotten her. Dessa could type very well, over ninety words a minute, but no one would hire her to do it. No one hired five-foot-six-inch, 340-pound women to do anything if they could help it, but especially not to sit in an office. The only reason Dessa had the job at Braxton was that her mother had had a job there before her. When Dessa had graduated from high school, her mother had gotten her right in.

Sometimes, when Dessa tried to talk to normal-size women in offices and stores, they either ignored her or looked her up and down the way cattle traders would have examined a mess of spoiled meat. Dessa was ready for this one to do something worse, like claim that there were no places left in the Fountain of Youth Work-Out workshop for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Dessa knew there were places, because the last thing she had done at the end of her workday was to call Fountain of Youth and ask.

To get in, Dessa had to ring a buzzer and show herself to a security camera. She held her big cloth bag up protectively in front of her body and wondered what she was doing that for. When the door clicked open, she pushed herself through it and squinted against the bright light. The tall young woman was looking straight at her without flinching. Nobody else seemed to be around.

“I called before,” Dessa said, wishing she didn’t sound so defensive. “About the beginner’s workshop? For the week between Christmas and New Year’s?”

“Oh, right,” the tall young woman said. The name on her little wood nameplate said Traci Cardinale. She opened the long center drawer of her desk and came up with a little packet full of papers in a brightly colored plastic folder. The folder had pictures of balloons all over it and the words “BRING YOUR BODY TO THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH” splashed bannerlike from corner to corner across the front.

“There you are,” Traci Cardinale told her. “Do you want to just take those home to read or do you want to sign up?”

“I thought I needed these to sign up.”

“If you’ve got a check for the fifty-dollar deposit, I can sign you up right now. I can just write you down in the book and your place will be reserved, and all you’ll have to do is show up bright and early on the Monday after Christmas, with exercise clothes and a pair of good running shoes. We always recommend running shoes. They have special aerobics shoes now, but as far as we can tell, they cost a lot of extra money and don’t do any extra good.”

Running shoes. Dessa hadn’t given a thought before this to what she was going to wear to a week of Fountain of Youth workshops. Exercise clothes. That meant leotards and tights. Maybe she should buy a Richard Simmons tape instead. Maybe she should just forget this whole thing.

“I’ll put the deposit down now,” Dessa heard herself say. “Do you have to have a check? Would you be willing to take cash?”

“We’d love to take cash,” Traci Cardinale said. “I’ll just have to give you a receipt. Oh, and you’ve got to tell me how you want to schedule the work-out classes. Buildup or smorgasbord.”

“I don’t understand…”

“With buildup, you do the same thing every day, but it keeps getting a little harder. Like five days of aerobic dance, say, or five days of step aerobics. With smorgasbord, you do something different every day, so you can check out all the different options and see what it is you like.”

“I’ll take that one,” Dessa said.

Traci dug into her desk again and came out with a thick ledger book. She opened it to a page Dessa could see was clearly marked in red felt pen, “C-to-NY-NH” and looked up expectantly.

“I didn’t get your name,” Traci said. “And I need your address and phone number. Do you live in New Haven?”

“I live in Derby,” Dessa said.