The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club

by Laurie Notaro

  It would be horrible. I hated PE in high school and paid the tallest girl in my class to forge a note with my mother’s fake signature on it that read, “Please excuse Laurie from all future activities involving sweating, perspiring, or getting hot. She has extremely weak pores, and perspiration will send her into cardiac arrest. Her doctors are working on it. Thank you, Mrs. Notaro.”

  But the fitness center was different, Jeff and Jamie said, they had been there. It wasn’t like PE at all. You didn’t have to go into the locker room if you didn’t want to, and there were no uniforms. You could do what you wanted for however long you wanted, and no one bugged you. The more Jeff and Jamie talked about the fitness center, the more I became convinced it was a good idea. Plus, I thought, if I went with my friends, it wouldn’t be so bad. They were slugs just like me. We could all leave slimy trails on the fitness center equipment together.

  So I did it, I joined. I was proud of myself as I made an appointment along with my friends for our evaluation and orientation session.

  On the appointed day, I was late getting home from work and tried frantically to get ready for our first day at “my gym.” Jeff called the minute I walked in the door to tell me that he’d pick me up in ten minutes.

  I dug through my closet and found one sneaker without a mate. I grabbed a pair of leggings off the floor and threw them on, only to find that the seam in the crotch had ruptured all the way to my inner thighs. Shit. A T-shirt is what I needed, I thought, a long, big T-shirt to cover the hole in my precious parts. I spotted one in the hamper, flung it on, but it didn’t come close to covering my map of exposed skin and unshaven areas. In the hamper, under the T-shirt, rested a pair of a former boyfriend’s dirty boxer shorts. I hesitated for a moment, then snatched them, sprayed some Glade in the crotch, and I was suddenly poppin’ fresh.

  I still had to find my other sneaker, which I did just as Jeff pulled into the driveway. I put it on, grabbed a water bottle, and was out the door.

  Our instructor hadn’t been quite so diligent about arriving on time, however, so the attendant showed us into a small lounge area where we were to wait for him.

  “Make yourselves at home,” he told us with a healthy, robust smile.

  “Okay, thanks,” I replied. “Could you get me an ashtray?”

  His eyes got real big and his mouth fell. “Uh” was all he said.

  “She’s kidding, she’s kidding,” Jamie jumped in as she shot me a dirty look.

  The attendant’s face returned to normal, then he left the room.

  Jeff and Jamie both shot me looks. “You promised you’d be good!” they cried together. “We haven’t been here for three minutes, and you’ve already gotten the blacklist ball rolling. We agreed that we wouldn’t tell anyone here that we were smokers!”

  “Fine,” I said. “I didn’t realize that it was such a mission.”

  After a while, our instructor came in, made us watch a film, and had us fill out a questionnaire about our health. After I answered all the questions, he looked at it, reached for my ID tag, and slapped a big black B on it.

  “Um,” I said, pointing to the letter of obvious shame on my card, “what’s that for? Bulky? Behemoth? Biohazard? Babbler?”

  “It’s for your back,” he answered, pointing to a section on the form in which I’d detailed the problems with my slipped disc. “You can’t do the same things that the other people do. You need to work at your own pace, take things easy and slow.”

  What he was saying, essentially, was that I was special. I was different. I was in the slow group. I was going to be the last one picked for teams, just like in grade school.

  Already I was the fitness center flop.

  After all of our forms were filled out, another instructor, Brian, appeared to show us how to work the equipment properly. We entered the gym, and the very first thing we saw, the initial sight that we encountered, was a woman, although I’d rather call her a bunny. She was complete with perfect, flowing hair, a glowing, seamless tan, ripped muscles, and upper arms that didn’t have a trace of the skin swag that swings when you wave at people. She wore a brightly colored, multipatterned shiny leotard with coordinating tights, socks, and wristbands.

  “Hate her,” Jamie and I said as we turned to each other.

  Brian started us off on the leg push or pull thing, I’m not sure what it was, where we placed our feet on a pedal of sorts and extended our legs until we had lifted our weights. Jamie went first, and it looked pretty easy. Then it was my turn.

  I got on the machine, put my sneakered feet where they were supposed to be, and I pushed. I watched my feet as I went push, extend, contract, extend, and that’s when I saw it: a brown oval spot on my shoe, right at the very tip of it. I gasped at myself.

  Cat poo. The cat had shit on my shoe—not that this had been the first time, but every time is equally as horrifying. I couldn’t do anything at all, I couldn’t do anything, except insist that the instructor show us how to use another piece of equipment that hid my feet.

  “We can’t do that,” he explained to me. “You have to follow the order.”

  “Then I think I just pulled a hamstring in my knee,” I added quickly. “If I continue in this exercise, I might need a lawyer.”

  He brought us over to the next piece and showed us how to use it. On this apparatus, we had to lie on our stomachs with our heels underneath a bar, which we had to bend our legs and lift.

  Brian climbed on and off the thing with the skill of a pro, which I guess he was. So I tried it. The bench that we were supposed to lie on was waist high, too high for me to lift my leg over and straddle. I tried it. I looked like an old boy dog with a misplaced hip trying to pee into a kitchen sink.

  “Try getting on from the side,” Brian coaxed.

  So I went to the side and attempted the climb, groping and pushing myself up and onto it, as he and Jamie watched.

  “I can’t do this,” I told him. “I feel like I’m mounting a sea turtle.”

  He nodded. “Your friend told me that you thought you were a comedian.”

  There was no way I could do it, for me it was physically impossible unless I took a running start, circled the gym several times to build up momentum, and when I got to the belly-flop leg-lift thing, flung myself onto it.

  “Let’s try something else,” Brian said, to which I agreed and picked up my backpack to move onto the next thing.

  Suddenly, something shot out of the side pocket and went sliding across the floor, stopping only when it hit the tip of Brian’s Nike.

  A gold, half-empty pack of Camel Lights.

  “So,” he said as he picked it up and handed it to me. “You’re smokers. Comedian smokers.”

  “She is!” Jamie shouted, pointing at me.

  “Oh, don’t be ashamed!” I snapped at her. “It’s a cigarette pack, not a crack pipe.”

  “Might as well be,” Brian sighed. “I don’t think it would be a wise idea to attempt the StairMaster today.”

  “You promised,” Jamie whispered.

  “I’m also wearing some boy’s dirty underwear,” I shot back.

  I should have made copies of that note from high school, I thought. I just should have made copies.

  Good Food

  I didn’t want to go.

  I didn’t want to get dressed up, or do my hair, or put on eyeliner, or try to find a matching handbag.

  I didn’t care about meeting basketball star Charles Barkley.

  I really didn’t.

  But my friend Sara did, and it was only at her insistence that I agreed to go to the dinner thing, even if I did have to wear something nice. It was a free meal at a hoity-toity hotel, anyway.

  My friend Huck had invited us, having won a Phoenix Suns raffle. It was only a dinner, I reminded myself, an hour of polite conversation at best, and most likely, I’d get free dessert, too.

  So I said yes to Sara, tell Huck that I’ll go. After all, he was a good friend of mine, and I was flattered that he
thought enough of me to ask me to be one of his guests.

  Danny Manning would be sitting at our table, Sara informed me, and that was special. I nodded, even though I had no idea who she was talking about. Not all the tables had celebrity basketball players at them, she added.

  “Well, it’s an expensive dinner,” she said casually. “If we had to pay for it, each seat at the ball is a thousand dollars.”

  “Did you say a thousand dollars?” I asked loudly. “A thousand dollars? I could buy a new liver for that much and start drinking again. And back up to that ‘ball’ part that you just kind of threw in there.”

  “It’s a charity thing,” she justified. “Every charity thing is called a ‘ball’ this or ‘ball’ that. It’s just a dinner thing. A dinner-and-dancing thing. We get free Nikes, too.”

  “A dinner-and-dancing thing with a thousand-dollar price tag is a ball, Sara,” I insisted.

  “Okay, it’s a ball, but it’s too late for you to back out,” she said decidedly. “Huck already RSVP’d for you, and Nike ordered your little shoes.”

  I knew I couldn’t afford to buy a ball gown, so the next day I went to a fabric store, bought some taffeta, tulle, and organza, cut the velvet bodice off a vintage dress, basically stapled it all together, and I had a goddamned ball gown in which I was ready to eat a thousand-dollar steak. With a little deodorant and a lot of lipstick, I was as good as I was gonna get.

  Hagarella was ready for her ball.

  Sara picked me up, and we headed to the Arizona Biltmore, the fanciest resort in town. When we got there, we checked in, got our little Nike sneakers, and found our table. Huck smiled as he introduced us to his other guests, two sets of sisters that looked like twins to me. Twin Group A was a fortyish sister/sister duo decked out in more sparkly beads than the rear ends of two Crystal Water trucks, burning my corneas if any ray of light should happen to hit them from any angle.

  Twin Group B, two bartenders from some fancy restaurant also in the Biltmore, exuded snot in their pink Ann Taylor suits and were obviously JUST TOO GOOD to talk to us. We hated them right away, and I think that came out when I repeatedly asked them what color apron they had to wear while performing their duties in the “service industry.”

  But I didn’t care. I was there for my thousand-dollar steak, and I didn’t care, even when the waiter dribbled beer on my head and lap and some wealthy woman stepped on my dress with her free Nike and ripped the shit out of it. Even when Danny Manning could not have given less than a rat’s ass about providing his promised celebrity conversation, and the snotty bartender twins started giggling and then going to the bathroom with his wife.

  When my steak came, it turned out to be a filet mignon, which I would have placed at a two-thousand-dollar dinner, and I dug in. It was wonderful, tender, flavorful, creamy if that’s possible, and I savored bite after bite. I didn’t notice as the Crystal Water Truck Twins downed carafe after carafe of white wine, and I didn’t notice that, immediately after I had shoved a quarter of a yellow squash in my mouth, Charles Barkley was behind me, wanting to shake my hand.

  I looked up, and there he was, his shiny head right near mine, and there I was, trying diligently to swallow whole a piece of squash the size of four DD batteries that I couldn’t even manage to get my teeth over.

  “How are you?” he asked as he extended his hand and I reciprocated. “Are you having fun?”

  I nodded, with wide eyes, I’m sure, shaking his hand as he waited for my reply, which was lodged right smack behind the squash. Squeezing itself up and over my gums and teeth, the reply was suddenly free, and it escaped in a muffled cry—since my tongue was pinned down by the massive girth of the vegetable. I heard the reply as it started, driving itself in slow motion to procure the clearest delivery possible.

  “GOOD FOOD,” is what I said.

  “Good food” is what I said to Charles Barkley, “Good food” was my intelligent and witty answer, “Good food” was the product of the muse that twirled itself outside of my mouth.

  GOOD FOOD?

  A Bosnian refugee with absolutely no command of the English language could have come up with something better than that, I screamed silently at myself.

  He looked at me slightly and tilted his head in a curious motion. Then he quickly withdrew his hand, as if he had suddenly realized my body was covered with weeping lesions, and moved on to one of the twins.

  Stunned by my own inadequacies, I realized that I hadn’t even used my tongue when I spoke.

  “He thinks I’m retarded,” I found myself saying aloud.

  “Oh, how nice,” he must have thought as he tilted his head, “that someone took the little retarded girl to the charity ball. I bet the ball is for her charity. I bet she’s the poster girl.”

  “He thinks I’m retarded,” I said again.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Sara said, trying to console me. “He probably just thinks you have some little mouth deformity.”

  The Crystal Water Truck Twins, on the other hand, were having a grand time. One of them had kicked off her Nikes and was strutting around the dance floor like a stripper. The other one was too busy stalking Charles Barkley around the room, touching him in an overfamiliar way and trying desperately to get his attention.

  She wanted his autograph, and with liquor fueling her determination, she marched to the nearest table and whipped five used napkins off of it, shoving them underneath both armpits. Then she walked up to an innocent woman and just plain snatched the pen out of her hand, all the while keeping her double vision on Sir Charles.

  The dancing Crystal Water Truck Twin had apparently worn herself out and returned to the table, where she picked up Sara’s wineglass and downed it. Her sister, on the other hand, was tapping Barkley on the shoulder like a woodpecker until he turned around. She presented him with the napkins and pen. He smiled politely, yet tiredly, and began scrawling on the dirty linens.

  At the table, however, the second sister had disappeared, and I hoped it was to the bathroom, where a lot of cold water on her face would have done her a world of good. The snotty twins had long ago vanished after exchanging phone numbers with Danny Manning’s wife and taking one last trip to the bathroom together, where I believe they shared a lip liner.

  After she got each napkin signed, the sassy Crystal Water Truck Twin lassoed it around and over her head until she was swinging five of them, after which the basketball player kindly excused himself and rejoined his friends.

  Suddenly, a loud disturbance from underneath the table exposed the dancing Crystal Water Truck Twin, who popped up quickly, smacked her hand on the table, waved, and said, “Hi!” with a giggle.

  “You need to call a cab,” I said with a slight sympathetic smile and a nod.

  We weren’t about to give them a ride, and I wanted to get the hell out of there before the bold twin found her car keys. I grabbed Sara, got our real shoes back, and headed toward the car.

  The ball was over, and my thousand-dollar steak was now being churned and marinated in bile.

  I checked the rip in my dress, and we began to drive away, fully wishing that I had hit that rich lady or at least threatened to sue her for ruining my original gown. I was just about to get really mad when I saw something sparkly and blue on the side of the road with what looked like maxi pads shoved underneath her arms, dumping the contents of the upside-down purse on the grass, obviously looking for keys. Beside it was another glistening figure, passed out cold and belly-up on the lawn of the Biltmore hotel.

  I could only think of one thing to say.

  “GOOD LIQUOR.”

  On the Road

  I’ll be brutally honest: I know nothing about my car.

  I know where the ashtray is and I know how to pump gas. That’s it.

  If you try to teach me how to change a tire, I’ll forget. If you show me how to check the oil, I won’t understand. If you change the adjustments on the driver’s seat, it will take me three weeks to figure out how to get them back. I’m jus
t not that kind of car girl.

  My friend Kate tried to help me by teaching me how to fill my tires up with air. I, of course, don’t own a tire-pressure gauge, so she was particularly careful to show me the right way.

  “You mean I can’t just leave the hissing thing on the tire until the time runs out?” I asked quizzically.

  “Absolutely not,” she replied. “The tire will blow up on you.”

  “And take all the skin off my face,” I said, nodding.

  “No, no,” she answered. “It will explode on the road, when you’re driving. Then just pull over and call AAA.”

  “No, I heard it’s okay unless they blow up in your face,” I informed her.

  Kate knows these things, but I was pretty sure I had heard about the tire thing on 20/20. She knows when her fuel pump is about to go, when her carburetor is making funny noises, and when her transmission is about to drop out of the engine.

  I, on the other hand, don’t pay attention to funny noises. I just turn the radio up louder and pretend it’s someone else’s car.

  I tried to be self-sufficient last week when I noticed that the tires were looking squishy again. I dropped my quarter in the air machine, counted to thirty on each tire, and figured I was done. They looked big, full, and ready to go. My face was intact. Kate would have been proud. It was Monday morning, and I was heading down the freeway because Nordstrom’s was having a shoe sale, and I had to be there first.

  I was making the curve at the busiest portion of the freeway when I heard a terrible noise. A horrible, grinding sound that started at the front of my car and filled my ears. It was far too loud for the radio to drown it out, no matter how high I turned it up. I knew right away what it was. 20/20 was wrong.

  Kate was right. Tires do explode on the road, I thought.

  I remembered her words and pulled onto the shoulder as hordes of cars whizzed by. I carefully got out to see which one was gone, but as I walked around the entire car, I was surprised to see that they all looked okay.

  I got back in the car and started it again, convincing myself that it really had been someone else’s car making the noise, not mine. I hit the gas, and immediately, the sound returned.