Free A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska

an adolescent addiction to hyperbole.
    Thanksgiving, not far away, will empty Berkeley of many of its young—about thirty thousand—but now, the air sang with the energy of people of all ages busy with ideas and each other. I stepped back from the curb as an old BMW roared around the corner, heedless of those who might be waiting to cross. Always interesting, Berkeley is not always friendly.
    Sandy’s voice, its Chicago accent outperforming all the noises of the street, says, “This Jonah guy’s coming when? This weekend? You’ve got to be kidding me!” I smile shyly. Sandy says, “Condoms! Have you got condoms?” A passing couple looks at us and smiles. I put my head down and my hand up to one side of my face. “You don’t!” Sandy yells. “Your generation never thinks of things like that. That’s why I’m talking to you.” Today, Sandy looks like Margaret O’Brien in Meet Me in St. Louis dressed for Halloween. Sandy’s clothes are big, long, wide on her slim little body. The top is green, the pants some shade of magenta. The sleeves fall over her wrists, the hems of her pants cover her shoes. Even without the voice, Sandy is someone people notice. The more excited she gets, the more she flaps. She is a sail whose sheets no one can catch. She is three sheets to the wind without a need for alcohol to put her there.
    â€œLet’s have a cup of tea.” I point at the café across the street. I am regretting sharing my joyful secret. But I had had to. Keeping the deliciousness all to myself was more than I could manage. As the days passed since I had answered the first letters, tension had mounted. Sometimes, inside my own silence, I felt terror and desire wrapped in a ball, starting somewhere in my middle, rising into my chest, then dropping suddenly to the parts of me I wasn’t used to feeling at all. It might really happen, a man might really touch me. Sometimes, I thought I might faint. So I had told a few friends, one of them Sandy, this young woman with the pink-tipped hair.
    Sandy is on a roll. She throws her hands into the air. Birds dart away. “My generation? Condoms are just part of everyday life. They’re de rigueur. We wouldn’t think of having sex without some kind of protection.” She softens and puts her hand on my shoulder. “But sweetie, I know. I know guys your age, they go way back, they go back to the time when they didn’t use anything, or if they did, it was the girl who was supposed to provide the protection, a diaphragm, something like that. STDs? Never heard of ’em.” I refrain from lecturing her on syphilis and the generations it had ravaged before penicillin. Let her rant. It is too late to stop her or the people who slow to hear her. I hear titters.
    Sandy and I met at a nearby exercise studio where we are regulars. Like her, I am a fervent exerciser. Now. Not always. In the past I had subscribed to Mark Twain’s “Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it passes.” And so I grew fat.
    In 1983, I turned fifty. I weighed 234 pounds. My son was a runaway living on the streets of Berkeley. I was polishing off a goodly amount of scotch each evening. I was living in a house I couldn’t afford, and I was working sixty hours a week. I had not had sex in fifteen years, save with myself, an act grown increasingly unappealing with each ten pounds I added to my five-foot-three-inch frame. Paradoxically, I was a successful teacher of English in a California public high school. I was good at one thing. I was a helluva teacher. Teaching saved me from becoming a full-time drunk but not from becoming an obese, middle-aged, unhappy, distraught, frantic woman. I was bound for an early death.
    At my fiftieth birthday party, one of my friends—in what surely he meant as a friendly, not a hostile, gesture—took many photographs of the people gathered to celebrate