No Shame in Rooms Like That

No Shame in Rooms Like That by David Ebenbach

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I put my hand on her knee. “I’m proud of you.”

She shook her head, looked off into her own imagination. “You should have seen these women. I mean, there were a lot of big women there. Plenty big. And they were going to town. There’s no shame in a room like that,” she said, which sat funny with me, because I wasn’t sure what that said about our living room in comparison, but I kept that to myself.

We settled into the routine after that. Steamed vegetables and poached chicken at home, a little more walking on my way to work, and Sundays with the belly ladies for Tawnya. She looked forward to those lessons all week, practiced in our bedroom with the door closed. She said she was even working her stomach muscles while she was sitting at staff meetings. I liked picturing that, and once I did it myself while I was taking a call from a professor who was having trouble getting to his mid-semester reports. But I didn’t really know what I was doing. I lost a few pounds, from the walking, but not so much that anybody would have noticed. I wondered what I would find under all the layers if I kept going.

Tawnya also brought home a lot of stories about the ladies. Diane was going through a bad divorce; Monique probably needed a divorce; Amy was qualified for a promotion but was still working her way up to asking for it; Sheryl was forty and still single; Aneeta had kids who wouldn’t listen. And so on. I didn’t know these women, but I knew enough about them. Not everything—there was some stuff my wife said she couldn’t share—but enough as far as I was concerned, considering the fact that these women were strangers to me. I did know that a lot of them had kids, and Tawnya seemed like she was interested in that particular subject, at least in the abstract, for the first time in a long time. Still, you have to know when to push and when to not. For the most part I just let her tell her stories and thought about how this sounded more like some women’s rights thing than like belly dance lessons. Like Oprah. Belly dance is on Oprah’s website, as a matter of fact.

It was about a month in when I found out the ladies were going to be putting on a show. We had been invited over to Monique’s place up in Northeast, her and her husband’s place. In the car Tawnya reminded me that Monique worked for the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and that her husband was named Darren and that he was an asshole. Her words. The way she described him, I halfway expected him to come to the door drunk and snarling in a pair of torn drawers, but instead he smiled over his crisp collar and thanked us soberly for the bottle of white wine we’d brought.

“That’s thoughtful of you,” he said. “Come on in.” He was a big man himself.

Monique and Tawnya hugged each other like sisters reunited after a long and awful separation. I couldn’t picture Monique as I Dream of Jeannie, short and round and black as she was, but I knew that it wasn’t a bunch of Barbara Edens in the group. She introduced herself to me with a “I’ve heard so much about you,” and my eyes shot to Darren and to Tawnya—she shook her head, innocent—before I came back with something about hoping it was good things. “Oh, sure,” Monique said, eyes happy. “We only talk about the good things.”

Dinner was some real meat and potatoes. Sauces. I hadn’t seen a meal of this kind in a long while, aside from the occasional cheating lunch.

“We don’t normally eat like this,” Monique was sure to say, laying down a platter of buttery green beans.

“Not anymore,” Darren said. He turned to me from his seat and indicated Tawnya. “What’s she got you eating?” he said. “We’re getting by on turnips and parsnips around here.”

I glanced at Tawnya myself, to see whether she was in a mood for a little good-natured ribbing or not. The look on her face said that she wasn’t, if it had any connection to Darren. So I said, “Well, we’ve made some adjustments. We’re trying to get healthy.”

Darren shook his head and picked up his fork. “Belly dancing. Let me tell you.”

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David Ebenbach is the author of several books, including two short story collections—Into the Wilderness (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) and Between Camelots (University of Pittsburgh Press)—and a guide to creativity called The Artist’s Torah (Cascade Books); he teaches Creative Writing at Georgetown University. Find out more at www.davidebenbach.com.