Page 59 of My Big Fat Italian Break-Up

‘I’m going upstairs to pack. God only knows Marcy has purposely left half of my clothes behind.’ He grinned. ‘The half she doesn’t approve of.’

The next day, the last day of July, with a heavy heart, my parents and my three aunts headed to the airport to go home. In separate taxis. But I would see them soon again for the wedding, whenever the grounds were presentable for a wedding do.

Despite all of Julian’s reassuring words, I still didn’t want to look like a piece of haggis-in-a-dress at my own wedding. So, after a great deal of research and introspection – and before I changed my mind – I found the only place that stayed open the entire month of August, changed into an old pair of sweatpants and dropped the kids off at ballet and soccer practice on my way to…? You guessed it – the gym! Yes! I was going to do this! I could do this. Shed the weight, build some muscle tone, and look and feel better.

When I got there, all gung-ho, I paid my seasonal package – 400 euros in one hit – and got a cardio detector strapped around me at heart level. I got the heart monitor in case I dropped dead, but a name tag? Suppose I didn’t want people to know my name? Wouldyou, if you looked like me? Wouldn’t it have been better if it had been like… Athletics Anonymous?

Hi, everybody, my name’s Erica and I’m a gym-newbie.

Hi, Gym-Newbie…

Laughing to myself, I pushed through the double doors off the main office and into the main gym hall.

At first I thought I’d got the wrong place. If I expected the place to be filled with hard-slogging people determined to get their figures back, I’d be disappointed. And I was.

It looked more like a disco, with low lights and music so loud it practically pounced on me, making even the walls pulse in empathy. Not to mention the fancy skin-tight gym wear, earrings and make-up. And that was just theguys.

Everywhere I looked, multicolored arms and legs in woolen legwarmers of every pattern and color pushed up and down and out at me, like a huge motley centipede from the Eighties on psychedelic drugs. There was a booming voice directing them somewhere at the front, but I couldn’t see its owner, so I just placed my mat before me and studied the others as they… jumped? Danced? Twisted? In a blind frenzy.

I couldn’t make any sense of it, but it sure was fast – way faster than I could ever hope to move. By the time I’d figured out the beat and eventhoughtof lifting a leg so as to get the gist of it, they’d already kicked out again, first one leg and then the other, and spun round, leaving me dumbfounded and fumbling like a child trying to learn to walk. If I tried any of this, I’d give myself a heart attack for sure.

Well, I had to die of something, so I moved my arms around and followed them in their stomp-act while yanking at my old bra, which did nothing to support my boobs in this situation and were, by the way, swinging heavily every which way as if they had a life of their own.

Even if I was practically standing still compared to them, a thick coat of sweat soon formed on my forehead, trickling down into my eyes and my cheeks, to meet the sweat on my upper lip, which splashed down to meet the sweat between my boobs and so on. (You get the picture.)

‘E uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto!’ the invisible instructor boomed faster and louder, and I increased my fumbling speed, my heart rate out of whack in just seconds.

Just as I thought I’d collapse, the motley centipede picked up speed, the floors now vibrating with all the pounding going on. Not to be any less, I charged into a step that made me look like a huge-hipped grizzly bear on speed.

As the beat increased, so did the volume, proportionally to the stink of sweat (not mine, I hoped), and soon I was gagging for air, wondering what the hell had come over me when I’d decided to join this nuthouse.

I must have the wrong time slot, I told myself. Surely there was another group, one slightly older that didn’t move at warp speed. These people were all way too young and nimble for me, thin as cheese slices which, by the looks of them, they certainly didn’t indulge in, for everywhere I looked I saw tiny asses, narrow hips and inexistent thighs.

They all seemed to be dancing what I thought looked like the Maori ceremonial haka, such was the determination and the ferocity on their faces to eradicate their (invisible) excess fat, the demon that had possessed their bodies, their neck and face muscles stretching under the effort.Demonic fat! Leeeave this poor woman’s body nowww!Well, I could certainly sing to that tune.

Before I could make sense of it, it all stopped – the music, the shouting, the pounding. At the end of the exorcism, the lights went on and peace suddenly fell, faces now shining and smiling, people shaking hands and hugging (yuck), basically clearing the decks now the devil had been defeated.

Once most of them were gone, I spotted a woman on the other side of the gym – huge, much larger than me. She, like me, was older and plainer than the mob who had just left and completely overwhelmed by it all. I smiled and there was a sense of familiarity for her that only lasted a second until I realized it was my own reflection in the bloody mirror.

I cringed and moved closer. Whoa. There had to be some mistake. That wasn’t really me… was it? My ass was huge. Did it really look like that to the outside world? Yikes. I had no idea…

But wait – was I onCandid Cameraor something? Maybe Renata had organized some sort of joke, having convex mirrors delivered to the gym. Or, more simply, the gym just had them to make you work harder and upgrade your subscription payment.

Pure horror seized me as I braved to move in even closer, twisting and turning, inspecting my ass again. How come it didn’t look this big at home? Was it the lighting? The sweatpants?What?I wondered, checking out, while I was at it, a stray hair on my chin. Are you serious? And that face – pale and pasty – was that really me, with the purple smudges under the eyes, the tired face and the wrinkles? Jesus. When did all this happen?

‘Mamma mia, we have a mountain of work to do here, I see,’ came the boomer’s voice across the gym hall.

I whirled round, giving him the hairy eyeball, and he literally stopped in his tracks.

‘Ooh, we have a touchy one,’ he grinned.

‘I beg your pardon?’ My arms were folded now.

‘How much do you weigh? At least 85 kilograms,sì?’

A bit more, actually, but there was no way I was telling him.

Like a miniature version of Mr. Clean, he was half my height and circling me with a keen eye.

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