Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I would maybe learn to cook. Or take a cake decorating class. I would allow myself to become a little more neutered. I would stop fighting it all so much. What would be so wrong with finally mellowing out? What was I clinging to? I would go to the exercise studio down the block, and I would take that dance class the other moms from school took, where we danced to songs that had once, many years ago, broken our hearts and set us on fire. The songs reminded us that we were once young—that once, we didn’t have to pay a twenty-dollar fee to dance—we didn’t even need to be led in it. Once upon a time, we just knew how to do it. Now we channel all the sex and all the hope and all that was left undone into a cha-cha-cha, or a figure eight of the hips that once didn’t have to be told to swivel. The teacher would play a jacked-up version of the cheez-whiz top 40 songs from high school and college and we would all laugh. But those songs would dig at a pathway to our youth, and so at the end, during the cooldown, when the teacher played the Eagle-Eye Cherry song or the Sade song, now our bodies were moving more slowly, lumpen, leaden, and we would see just exactly what they had become: people trying to remember something but not quite able to.