All That Jazz

This was back when she was teaching advanced jazz and drinking lots of diet soda. She was also smoking a lot of Camel lights. She'd told everyone she'd quit but had a carton in the trunk of her car, under a blanket, and she carried gum and perfume everywhere she went. A can of air freshener handy in her car, she couldn't trust the rolled down window to take away the smell of stale smoke. The girls she taught were old enough to be sneaking cigarettes behind their parents backs, just the smell of their taboccoed fingers bringing back their buzz. Their muscles were young. They wore short shorts and tight tank tops and when they danced a thin layer of sweat barely formed on their exposed collarbones. They all called her Donnie even though her name was Donna.

"Donnie, you always smell like my mom when she comes home from a bar." Donna didn't like this, she stopped using the perfume when she went to teach. She walked into the studio in sweat pants and a t-shirt, hair sloppily pulled up, pieces falling in her face. She assumed this gave her a, "I'm too busy to even care about how I look, and this makes me look fabulous," look, although she avoided herself in the mirror. The girls, the teens, on the other, couldn't get enough of their ripe bodies. Looking a themselves, hands on hips, bending and contorting as if to see if they were ever in the most awkward position on earth, would they still look so good?

"That's not part of the choreography." Donna would say, "And it never will be." The girls would smile and drop their hands and look away from their reflection, then back quickly, just to be reassured; they were still there, they were still beautiful. Donna, although she had always been naturally beautiful herself with plain and honest features, not exoctic, but just your average, grocery store clerk pretty, found the pretty girls boring and was usually mean to them.

"Oh, I don't leave them alone," she'd tell her friend Paisley, "I stand behind them saying, 'your arms are sloppy. tummy in, back long,' even when they look fine."

"You're awful." Paisley would say and offer her a cigarette.

"Oh no, I quit." Donna would answer.

Paisley was a real dancer. The kind with performances and a make-up case and call times and bloody toes. Not like Donna, who just taught other people how to dance, and not even so well. Just recently Donna had asked the girls to make up their own two eight counts at the beginning of a rountine and the moves the girls came up with were the biggest loads of crap that Donna figured she could teach stumps better movement, but them she figured it was probably her. As their arms flailed in what they assumed were beautiful, graceful throws and their legs bent and their feet flexed Donna thought about her car and cigarettes and that smell of stale smoke. It's better to let them think they are doing a good job, that I'm doing a good job, she thought. I am fooling everyone.

what i can do now that i am 25

i'm twenty five now. i can rent a car. not a convertible though, you have to be thirty to rent a convertible. that makes sense. twenty five year olds are responsible, but let them have a convertible and they'd go crazy, top down, hair in the wind, blasting music. they wouldn't enjoy it sophisticatedly like a thirty year old would. have rental car companies seen thelma and louise? ha.

so i rented a car for the first time, well, i rented one in hawaii but i don't really feel like that counts because i was only twenty four and had to pay extra because of that. i pick it up when i get to the burbank airport. it's supposed to be an "economy, " a chevy aveo or something similiar. i have never seen a chevy aveo. i wonder if they exist outside of the world of car rentals, like they were made especially for people on business trips and young women visiting their family wanting to feel more grown up, "oh no, you don't have to pick me up at the airport. i rented a car. a chevy aveo."

i'm looking for a place to housesit in maine for the winter. if anyone has any leads/suggestions please let me know.