by Sarah Fuller
I slammed down my phone and shook my head. “Great. I guess we can never do anything outside during the day.”
If he was offended by this, he didn’t show it. Maybe that was my initial draw to redheads: they are rarely ever offended by anything. I sincerely think they are devoid of emotion. That’s all dandy, until you go on a roller coaster with one and his expression literally doesn’t change the whole time. That’s just wrong.
The Italian looked a whole lot like Seth Green. However, because I’m an asshole, I kept calling him “Seth Rogen” the whole night. He sort-of found this funny.
After about an hour of easy conversation, I excused myself to the bathroom. It’s important to note this was one of my first official dates after the divorce. I wanted things to go well. I even dressed up, which plainly means I wore high heels with my jeans. (I spend my days in yoga pants and flip-flops. That’s my uniform.)
I’m trotting to the bathroom confidently when my heel grazes across the bar’s overly waxed floor, and I slip, landing straight on my ass in front of the whole bar. I know Rogen saw this. Everyone had seen my blunder.
A waiter rushed over and helped me up, asking if I was all right.
“I’m not drunk,” I said in a rush, speeding off for the restroom before anyone else could talk to me.
If there had been a back exit by the bathrooms, I would have taken it and never looked back. There wasn’t, though. I checked.
In the bathroom, I stared down at the devices of my demise. Fucking hooker shoe! Damn, karma was a bitch!
I thought about taking the torture devices off and strolling out of the bathroom all good-naturedly. However, momma taught me right. ‘You always wear shoes in a fancy place.’
Carefully, I returned to the table, taking each step like I was walking across a tightrope. The floor was like the surface of a fucking swamp, slippery and dark. I decided to own my fall.
“Are you okay?” Rogen asked when I finally made it to the table, each step slow and tentative.
I smiled and nodded. “Yes, and I guess we’ve just had our first Fifty Shades of Grey moment,” referencing the famous scene when Anastasia slipped in Christian’s office upon their first meeting.
He arched a single eyebrow and flashed a sideways grin, not missing a beat. “So when are we having our second Fifty Shades moment?”
I couldn’t help but laugh. This dating thing wasn’t so hard if I didn’t take myself too seriously. If I fell on my ass, I just had to get back up again.
“Miss, are you okay?” the bartender asked, having come all the way over to check on me. “I saw you fall.”
I turned to her, shaking my head. “I promise, I’m not drunk.”
“Oh, I know that.” She pointed at the awful floor. “Everyone slips on these hardwoods. It happens pretty much nightly.”
I scowled at the woman. “That seems like something you should look into, not just casually announce.”
Rogen and I dated for several weeks. I’m not going to say I got over the fact that he was a redhead, but since we only saw each other when the sun had gone down, it didn’t seem to matter much.
Fun fact: I once spent an entire day with a redhead at a sunny theme park. Six of the twelve hours of that day were spent reapplying sunscreen. Because I’m an asshole, each time we stopped to fetch the sunscreen, I’d report that I still didn’t need any. “For some reason, I don’t burn,” I said as he slathered on the thick, white cream. “I don’t even freckle.”
The guy, who was three freckles away from looking like he had a full body tan, merely shook his head.
It’s painfully difficult to offend a redhead.
One evening, Rogen came over to hang out, a rare occasion when I didn’t have my daughter. Even still, I reserve a lot of the time I don’t have Eleanor for working.
Rogen was lounging on my couch when he yawned loudly. I didn’t immediately worry that he was bored by my company. Instead, I hopped up and clapped my hands, startling him awake. “Hey, looks like you’re tired. You’d better leave. Can’t sleep here.”
And they say it can’t be done, but I did it! I offended a redhead.
Rogen flashed me an angry look, crossing his arms in front of his chest. “You know, Sarah, you’re too much of a loner. As much as I make myself scarce, you’re still always looking to get rid of me after a couple of hours.” He stood, frustration evident in his expression. “You need someone who is never around. Someone who doesn’t mind seeing you rarely. You need to date a pilot.”
Chapter Six
See You Next Tuesday
When I first moved back to Los Angeles after the divorce, I wanted to renovate myself, like an old Victorian house that had withstood the Great Depression. I started running for exercise, knowing that’s the best way to burn calories. It’s also the best way to get abducted by crazies and bitten by loose dogs.
Before, when I was married and ran at night, someone would know if I didn’t come home. However, these days, if I run in the evening and don’t come home, no one will know…maybe for days. I live in a fairly safe neighborhood, but no place is perfect. Also, the boy next door to me is a rotten teenager who I don’t trust for several reasons, one being that he throws his homemade drug pipes over the fence and onto my patio. Imagine my surprise when Eleanor found one while playing. If I wasn’t so afraid of the little monster, I would have chucked it in his face instead of in my trashcan. Later, I realized it had my fingerprints on it and that it will probably come back to haunt me one day when I run for public office.
On one occasion, I was running on the sidewalk, and the neighbor boy dangled his upper half out of his mother’s passenger car window as they passed, his arms waving. He yelled like the crazed lunatic that he was, making me nearly jump into a thorny bush. I thought his mom should have prohibited such things, and then realized she wasn’t that kind of mother. I’m not judging, I’m just saying we wouldn’t be in the same mommy groups.
When I first moved into the townhome, I was loading groceries into the house, and the teenager didn’t know I had come back out to the car to get more stuff. He threw down his skateboard and yelled from the patio into his house, “Hey, the puta just got back!”
I’ve literally never had a conversation with the family next door. They have no reason to loathe me unless it’s because my orange tree drops plump, ripe fruit onto their patio for them to enjoy. They refuse to make eye contact with me. I keep waving at them, though, and biting my tongue when they fill up my trash receptacle with beer cans.
My Spanish is not so good, but I still knew that the little fucker was insinuating that I was running a brothel—like I’d do that out of my own house. I came around the car right after he finished yelling, and the psychopath just scowled at me, not even a bit embarrassed about being caught calling me a prostitute. And that’s one of the main reasons I don’t think running on the streets at night by myself is a good idea.
Also, I have a fear of dogs that goes back to being chased by packs of strays when I was a child. They’d always stalk me on the way to the bus stop and, because they were dutiful mutts, they would wait for me to get off the bus in the afternoon. I’d run for my life, throwing bits of my leftover lunch behind me to try and keep them from taking a bite out of my calf.
My mother’s method of dealing with this was that she gave me a large walking stick to carry back and forth to the bus stop. She told me to shake it at the dogs and yell.
“Why can’t you just take me to school?” I asked, fearful of being mauled. “The dogs growl at me. I’m afraid of them.”
“Sarah, you can’t run from your problems,” my mother answered, and then headed for her room to take her usual afternoon nap. “If the phone rings, I’m not home. Tell the bank I’m at work.”
My mother, in all my life, has never worked. Not one single day. She was a southern debutant and is still highly offended that I work for a living instead of striving to marry a surgeon.
Back to the renovation of my ass.
Tired of being harassed by my dumbass neighbor, who smokes pot before school every day because he’s really going places, and also scared of dogs, because I left my giant walking stick in Texas, I did what any gal would do in my situation. I went and got a shiny membership that I couldn’t afford at a fancy Pilates studio.
First off, I don’t like to sweat when I work out, and Pilates is perfect for that. Micro-movements and zero cardio ensure my body temperature rarely rises. One day, there was a particularly hard instructor, and I remembered barking at her, “Hey, I don’t come here to sweat. If I wanted that, I’d go to Gold’s Gym.”
“Why do you come here?” she challenged.
I rolled my eyes as I balanced precariously on the reformer machine. “So I can drink wine and eat carbs, obvi.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but she nodded in agreement. That was why most of the ladies did butt crunches every day—to consume calories. However, the truth was that the yoga classes there are like my church; when I tell really religious people that, they are sort of offended. But also, the workouts are challenging, the people interesting and the fodder never-ending. It’s much better working out next to rich socialites than next to sweaty brutes at Gold’s Gym. I came to the studio originally for the workouts, but I’ve been staying for the overheard conversations.
One such conversation happened between two women I eavesdrop on often. One of them probably takes classes just to be able to lift the five-carat monstrosity of a ring on her finger. She’s one of those ladies that, from the back, you swear is a smoking hot twenty-something with her long, lush hair and tight ass. Then she turns around, and you realize she’s well past menopause. Still hot, just not young.
The ladies, per usual, were discussing their Alo leggings, which they treat like disposable pants, only wearing them once before giving them to the poor. I rotate the same three pairs of yoga pants, not only because I’m cheap, but also because I’m allergic to shopping. I still wear the same clothes I did in high school. Even if I wasn’t cheap, there’s zero chance I’m shelling out one hundred and twenty dollars on pants unless they’ll do Pilates for me.
The hot, old lady turns somber suddenly and shakes her head at her friend. “Chanel isn’t doing so well. I fear she’s not going to make it much longer.”
Chanel, I’d learned from over a year of eavesdropping, was her labradoodle—a mix of Labrador and poodle. I’d considered getting one of the hypoallergenic dogs since they have a good temperament. I reasoned that it might heal me of my dog fears. And as a bonus, I could teach it to attack the neighbor boy when he skateboards dangerously close to my parked Prius. However, the price tag on one of these potentially inbred dogs was a deterrent to this budding idea. Three thousand dollars is the amount I’d pay for a jet ski, not for something that shits on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” the lady said consolingly to her friend as we changed the springs on our reformer machine. “You know, after Chanel passes, you could do what I did and have her cloned.”
I whipped my head around suddenly. Was I dreaming? Had I been dropped into one of my sci-fi books?
Turns out no. I was indeed at the twelve o’clock Pilates class.
“Yeah, I’m considering that,” the hot grandma replied to her friend. “And for only fifteen thousand dollars, I think that it would be well worth it. Then Chanel number two and I could start all over from the beginning.”
I gulped and looked down at my faded yoga pants. I was too cheap to replace these suckers because the stitching in the crotch was still passable, but these women dropped fifteen grand like it was bus fare. I get that it was for a good enough reason—to side-step death and aging, which they both looked like they’d done with numerous surgeries. Still, that day, I realized how different my classmates were from me. I was the foreign exchange student from a Third World country who had gotten the golden ticket to Eton College.
We were two very different classes of people. They, like Barbara Streisand, cloned their animals to keep them around forever. I was more like John Wayne Gacy, in that I planned to bury my cat in the backyard after he died. Of natural causes, I’d like to add; I’m only like Gacy in burial practices. I can’t even kill a rat, but we’ll get to that later.
I’m not the only one who can’t afford Pilates classes but doesn’t let that stop them. My friend Sandra got hooked after I dragged her along to a few sessions.
“Seriously, my legs have totally changed shape,” she said to me one day. “I can only imagine how round my butt will be after a few months.”
“So you’re going to keep going?” I asked, remembering that she was already in a contract with another gym.
“Yeah, I told the other gym that I’m pregnant to get out of the contract.”
I shot her a cautious look. “Don’t you think that’s a bit dangerous?”
She shrugged. “Probably, but it doesn’t matter. They say that’s not a valid enough reason for getting out of the contract.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to be one of those fat fake-pregnant women,” I said. “Even they are supposed to work out regularly.”
“That’s why I’m crafting a letter from my doula,” Sandra said triumphantly.
“You still have a doula?” I asked, looking across the playground as our elementary school children played.
Sandra smiled. “No, but I made a letterhead for one and wrote up a note that states I’m not to do any exercises.”
“Wow, you do get that karma is a bitch?” I asked, remembering how hooker shoes, and the floor I fell on, bit me in the ass. Literally.
“It’s fine.” Sandra waved me off. “And these jerks are trying to hold me to a dumb contract, even though Franklin gets bored at their childcare.”
“Remind me never to cross you,” I stated. “You’ll go to some pretty impressive levels to get what you want.”
“I’ll say,” Sandra said. “Turns out we really don’t have the budget for the monthly membership at the Pilates studio.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Henry thinks he can offload a few bottles of bootlegged whiskey each month,” she answered, referring to her husband.
“Wait, you’re going to sell bootlegged whiskey to pay for Pilates?” I asked.
She smiled victoriously. “Yeah, it should just be enough to cover it, as long as I can get out of this other contract. Do you have a wheelchair? It would be great if I was in one when I dropped off the letter from the doula.”
I shook my head. “No, but just imagine what you could accomplish if you used your powers for good.”
My constant exposure to the rich and privileged at the Pilates studio offers me the opportunity to learn about all the trendy LA stuff. Things like goat yoga would have never traveled across my ears if I merely locked myself away, writing all day.
“What exactly is goat yoga?” I asked my yoga instructor, Sammy.
“You do yoga with goats around you,” she explained in her airy voice. “Sometimes they jump up on you, offering a gentle massage.”
I laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
Her grim expression told me that she was in fact not joking. “It’s really good for people who are too self-conscious to try yoga. The goats loosen them up. And as a bonus, a glass of wine is included in the fifty-dollar fee for the session.”
I wasn’t going to offend Sammy again, who was gentle as a lamb. However, secretly, I was thinking that my kinfolk in Texas probably would have paid a tourist to come stretch and exercise with their goats, and thrown in a glass of boxed wine for free.
Most of the ladies at the studio have strange eating habits. Jennifer, one of my instructors, is a vegan who is constantly talking about cashew cheese or these seven-dollar donuts they sell at the health food store next door. My vegan friend explained, when I told him about these outrageously expensive donuts, that it was because nuts are so expensive.
“You mean those shelled things they feed to elephants at the circus?” I asked.
He ignored me, which is what most do when I’ve made an excellent point they can’t argue with, and went on, “Also binding agents are expensive, things like aquafaba and agar agar powder aren’t cheap or easy to come by.”
I’d done my homework and wasn’t going to be defeated by some scrawny vegan. “Right, aquafaba is the cost of a can of beans since it’s the juice the legumes are stored in. And agar agar powder is essentially seaweed, that shit that washes up naturally on Malibu beach. How about I go get you some and make you a donut? I’ll only charge you five dollars.”
I don’t think he was too keen on my offer since he politely changed the subject. Vegans are so damn nice with their pleasant demeanors and preservation of all things that are living. That’s not how I can spot a vegan, though. I know someone is vegan from the sheer fact that they never shut the fuck up about it.
“There’s a really yummy vegan yogurt that is amazing,” Jennifer said one day during class.
“What?” I feigned surprise. “You’re a vegan? I had no idea.”
Over the past few months, I’d heard Jennifer go on incessantly about every substitute for all good things in life from cheese to buffalo wings. Seriously, if you don’t think you’re missing out on anything, then why is it masquerading around like the real thing? Buffalo cauliflower, meatless hamburgers, crispy vegan smoked-mushroom bacon, tofu chorizo. Why copy these foods? Why not just eat your fruits and veggies if you’re not missing anything? Just call it cauliflower or spicy macerated tofu? Why grind up mushrooms and form and color it to look like bacon? You vegans aren’t missing bacon, are you?
Jennifer smiled sweetly at my question. “I thought you knew that I was exclusively vegan.”
