Pug Hill - Alison Pace [35]
What causes me grave, grave concern is that eight people is actually not enough. The thing about eight is that, including me, it is still only nine. This could mean we all have to get up and make speeches in front of the class a lot more times than if there were, let’s say, twenty people, or even twenty-five. Are there not twenty-five people in all of New York City who need help overcoming presentation anxiety?
My inner math whiz, the one I’ve never come close to letting out, is stretching out inside of me. It’s raising its hand, and for some reason that I don’t fully understand, it’s doing somersaults as it tries to figure out how many people will have to give speeches each week. Two? Three? Four? And if there’s six weeks, then what’s the maximum amount of time we’ll have to spend giving speeches?
My inner math whiz flips over and disappears without answering any of the questions it posed. I think with dread that, worst case scenario, we could each have to stand up and give a speech every week. I don’t need to have an inner math whiz to figure out that I very well could be making a speech in front of all these people six times. Six times seems like an awful lot. I wonder if that’s what everyone is thinking? I wonder if they are looking around the room, in a similarly panicked, though much more mathematically organized frame of mind, trying desperately to figure out the same thing as me.
“Why don’t we all introduce ourselves?” Beth Anne says, freeing me from my fun with numbers. I snap back to the present, contemplate my position in the room and think, Oh no, I bet she’s going to start with me.
“Let’s start here,” she says to the guy right across from me, and really, thank God. I relax ever so slightly.
“I’m Lawrence,” he says, and I wonder if he hates his chair as much as I, right now, love mine. Lawrence, I’d say, is in his late forties. He lisps a little bit on the end of his name. That, along with the way he’s got his legs crossed in a very ladylike way, and the way he’s got his arm stretched out across the chair-desk with his wrist hanging off the end, makes me wonder, I hope not stereotypically, if he’s gay. I notice there’s a gold band on his finger.
“I’m Diana,” says a serene and peaceful-seeming woman in a wrap dress. Next to her are two women in pantsuits, their chairs are angled in toward each other, and they seem so similar, their pantsuits both so elegant and tailored. The way they keep looking up at each other makes me think they’ve come to the class together. I notice how nicely accessorized they are, one has a Marc Jacobs purse slung over the back of her chair.
“I’m Lindsay,” “I’m Jessica,” they say, just short of in unison. I envy their camaraderie, along with their outfits, as much as I am intimidated by it.
“Amy,” says the woman next to them. Her exhausted tone is matched perfectly by the expression of boredom she wears and her tight-fitting black sweater, black skirt, heavy wool tights and clunky boots. She has very short hair; almost white it is so blond. She has black roots, the kind that look deliberate, the kind of hairstyle that makes me feel even more un-hip than I generally do.
“Je suis, uh, I am Martine,” says a very thin blond woman with a French accent. Maybe it’s just the accent but she seems haughty, mean, hostile. And this has nothing to do with the accent, but I wonder if she’s anorexic and then, if she seems hostile because she’s hungry. Anorexics, I imagine, are generally hostile. I would be.
“I am Rachel,” says a woman with black frizzy hair and enormous breasts. Her eyes are very glazed over, a little freaky looking, if you ask me. And I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking that maybe I’m being jealous right now because it’s pretty much a toss up as to what I want more, to have enormous breasts or to be really skinny. But I’m not being jealous, I’m really just being descriptive, this is what they look like.
Then finally, right next to me, “I’m Alec.”
I turn