Five Fortunes Read Online Free PDF Page B

laugh again. “Oh god…”
    Amy began to giggle too. “Yes, this would not be the ideal spot; you don’t want to start waylaying the gardeners. Fortunately, when it happened to me, my husband was at home and I managed to channel it into legal behavior.”
    “Did he know why he got lucky?”
    “Heavens, no, he hadn’t even noticed the cigarettes were gone.
    Thank god. Meanwhile I dreamed about the punk who fixes our Volvo…”
    Carter laughed.
    “Here, this is Jill’s room. Is this it? B12, yes, like the vitamin, we don’t want to be found stealing someone else’s clothes.” Amy pushed the door to Jill’s room open and they went in.
    “Pardon the fact that we hang all our clothes on the floor,” she said. “I assume you know that’s correct procedure for Generation X. Or Y, or whatever Jill is. Do you have children?”
    “No,” said Carter. The room had not yet been seen to by the maid, and there were towels and panty hose and shoes strewn around wherever Jill had finished with them.
    Amy was rummaging in Jill’s suitcase, still full on the luggage rack. She produced a quite enormous pair of green sweatpants and handed them to Carter. Carter held them against herself. Both could see that they were wide enough, but would barely reach below the knees.
    Five Fortunes / 29
    “Wait, wait,” said Amy. “She has half the Capezio store in here…”
    She produced two sets of leg warmers which, when worn one above the other, would fill in the gap between the ankles of the sweatpants and the ankles of Carter. Amy explained the theory and practice of this, and Carter obediently took off her torn shorts and donned Jill’s clothes.
    “I think this is rather fetching,” she said, surveying herself in the mirror. “Thank you.”
    “You’re quite welcome.”
    “I think we’ve managed to miss the rest of stretch class. What are you doing next?”
    “I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Carter. “What is ‘Step’?”
    “It’s like running up and down stairs waving your arms around.”
    The two were out in the sunshine again, on the path to the exercise studios.
    “That sounds horrible. What’s the other one?”
    “Dancercise. Better music, harder routines.”
    Carter decided to start with dance, in honor of her unaccustomed leg warmers. “At the end of the week I look like Margot Fonteyn, right?”
    “Exactly,” said Amy.
    Jill was already in the dance classroom when Carter came in.
    “If you think these clothes look familiar,” she said to Jill, “there’s a reason.”
    Before Jill could answer, Babette, a young woman with a blond ponytail and a bare midriff, pranced in and socked her cassette into the tape machine. “All right, ladies—everyone to the barre, please!
    We’re going to warm up!” In a moment twelve ladies were doing deep-knee bends while trying to follow Babette’s balletic arms. Only Jill could do it. Jill could move as if her joints were made of liquid.
    Carter was fascinated watching her. As the music got faster, she began to pant and blow. Other ladies were moving their feet while their arms dangled. But Jill seemed to inhale the music through her ears and let it out through her limbs. Babette clapped her hands and 30 / Beth Gutcheon
    shouted, “Whooo!” Behind her, eleven ladies turned red in the face, lost track of the sequence of steps, and reached for towels to blot sweat from their eyes. Jill could move as fast as Babette, and if it hadn’t been for her great size, Carter could see you’d have given her points past Babette for grace. This girl was a dancer.
    Carter liked the Fred Astaire music best. She dipped and swayed and twirled around the room, quite forgetting, herself, that she didn’t exactly embody America’s idea of feminine beauty. A little woman in the back row whose tag said RUSTY HAINES changed direction at the wrong moment, causing an entire line of exercisers to pile up in the corner. But Jill, in front, missed the mess and kept dancing. She