Story Excerpts

“Keep your eyes ha-ha . . . Keep your eyes hee-hee . . . Keep your eyes on something that’s not moving.” Thom, the new yoga instructor, stood in the middle of the circle on one leg, with his other heel wedged high into his crotch, his knee bent like a hairpin, both his arms straight up in the air like he was helping to land a plane, yucking it up like he always did. Keep your eyes on me, he meant, standing there like a cactus in a national park, like a rock formation in . . . another national park, like a statue. To aid your balance, ladies, keep your eyes on me.

Around him, fourteen menopausal women stood, also on one leg. One leg each, that is. None of them had a knee bent like a hairpin and none of them had the heel of one foot jammed into the fleshy part of their other thigh. Some of them had a foot on their calf. Others had a foot just off the floor, or a heel off the floor with the toes still touching. A few cupped the side of one aching knee in the instep of their other soothing foot, until Thom spotted the infraction.

“Tree pose, ladies, is foot at the floor, at the calf, or at the thigh. Not at the knee. And remember: Keep your eyes on something that’s not moving.” He got all the way through to the end without laughing this time, then he ruined it with a great, honking snort.

Because while he stood there like a porch support, stony and steady, unmoving except for his dancing eyes and his yapping mouth, all around  him fourteen menopausal women wobbled and bobbled, jiggled and wiggled, wavered and quavered and, each eventually, staggered and fell. Their raised legs hit the wooden floor of the Central Salem Community Center (small hall) with that familiar sound: the thump of failure.

“If you fall out of pose,” said Thom, moving only his lips and his merciless judging eyes, “simply take a deep, deep belly breath and resume.” He always looked at Ann when he said belly, on account of how she was shaped like an M&M, even as far as the skinny little white arms and legs. Like he always looked at Mary E when he said chest in press your chest toward your knees, on account of how her chest hit her knees as soon as she tilted forward far enough to see past it. 

He always looked at Mag when he said Drishti, too, but not one of the four- teen menopausal women who had signed up for Beginner’s Yoga knew what “Drishti” meant. Nor could they look it up because they didn’t know how to spell it. They knew he was insulting Mag in some way, though, on account of him being such a— They had settled on glass bowl, on account of Mary P’s hatred of cussing.

 

“And . . . relax,” he was saying now. “Hey, speaking of relaxing . . .”