I'm doing pilates. It hurts.

I started pilates this week. I go to a small studio in north Brentwood where the people are all neighborhood women who bike there and gossip and talk about boys (well, men) and they keep the door open so the dogs some women bring can walk in and out of the studio at leisure. Walter would appreciate this. It's small; there's only room for about eight machines and one other piece of equipment that looks like a torture device from midevil times. No air conditioning on, none needed in California; windows are kept wide open and the soft magic lighting from the day's near-end filters through, illuminating the sweat on people's foreheads as they groan in pain, groan in pain, and then occassionally swear at their instructor.

I feel strange on the foreign machine, its undercarriage sliding underneath my weight; not quite sure which way to roll my toes (to tuck or to point?), where to place my arms, when to push back from the springs. My instructor is a tiny dancer who yells at me when I breathe in the wrong way, but then places her hands on my knees and looks down at me and says, "We're going to work on this." Then she places her fist on my stomach and says my spine isn't aligned properly and I just nod politely and try to align it and then she smiles.

She had me do some advance exercises last night, and she said, "Fuck! You can curse at me if you need to, you know!" I laughed and said, "But we only just met! I need one more class to yell at you." But the next round came and before I know it, I screamed, "Jesus Christ this hurts!" and she and the other instructor exchanged a look of approval.

The woman to the left of me said, "After my first class I couldn't sit on a toilet for days. Just you see."

At the end my instructor stretched me out on an exercise ball. I sat down and she rolled the ball in such a way that I became some sort of disfigured fetal sort of blob, my ass about to fall off the ball and my head tucked down between my knees, her fists in my back, then her hands massaging my neck.

"There, all done!"

She was a proud mother duck.