It didn’t take us long to turn our house into a home, with all the home comforts of places to sit, to dine and to sleep at night. This was largely because of our sweet new neighbors who were willing to take us in their pick-up trucks to buy used furniture. We had a very narrow budget, which is to say, practically no budget at all, but thanks to Craig’s List and an apparent fixation of Seattle upper middle class not to keep anything more than two years, we soon had our house dolled out like Barbie’s headquarters.

Still, things weren’t going according to plan. I didn’t wow the Seattle restaurants with my southern cooking skills and ended up a line cook for a grill house. Linda didn’t fare much better. She found a position in a salon, but with no requests from the customers who wanted specific hairdressers, she was primarily doing shampooing and manicures. Her manager said it took time, but Linda was beginning to question how customers could ask for her if she never had the opportunity to cut their hair.

Briana hadn’t found a job at all. After much prodding and prying, she finally went down to flight service and applied for stewardess training. They answered back that they would love to have her in the program but she was twenty-five pounds over her healthy weight. She decided to lose the weight, then reapply.

Linda and I are both cool with following dreams, but our home was sitting on a rocky future. We squeaked by with the first mortgage payment when it came due, and were beginning to worry about the second as our financial future hadn’t changed. Briana really needed to find a job.

“Why don’t you work at waitressing?” I suggested. “You have lots of waitressing experience.”

“I can’t be around food if I’m going to lose weight. And I can’t work as a cashier, either,” she warned before Linda had a chance to say something. “Cashiers stand in one spot all day. I need to move around. I need to exercise.” Her eyes strayed to the window that peered into the doctor’s yard. Once more, he was out nurturing his lawn mower. Dr. Andrews probably had the shortest grass in town.

“Yes!” She said, her big blue eyes growing bright and sparkling. “I need to exercise! Just give me a few more weeks. Once I start working for the airlines, I’ll be making scads of money. I’ll make up to you for every moment I wasn’t working, honest. To prove it to you, I’m going to begin exercising right away.”

She went upstairs before either of us could say anything, which would have been wasted words if we had been given the opportunity, and clamored back down in a complete change of clothes. She was wearing spandex.

There are few women who can wear a form fitting halter top as successfully as Briana. She has these Greek Statue shoulders and perfectly round breasts that would double whammy a physics professor. The pants corralled in her flaring hips, guiding them down to her dimpled knees, and wrapped tightly around her bottom. As she sauntered out the door, she looked back at us. “Ready to shake it girls?”

I looked down at my clothes; black, polyester pants and a white top that made me look pudgy; the standard uniform of the staff. “Give me a minute”.

I dashed upstairs and found a pair of shorts that were cut above the thigh, and added a multi-strap top that flapped loosely at the waist. I’ve got big boobs, but I also have big legs, and I look best when both are highlighted. I did a couple of hip bumps in front of the mirror, smacked my butt like a cowgirl, then tripped back down, wondering how Linda would dress.

She was wearing a long, gathered dress. No real surprise there. Linda has no taste for formal exercises, but she does like to dance and skip around, and Briana had the music going full blast. Briana is neither a serious dancer nor a serious exerciser but does know all the best ways to show off her body.

Looking as determined as any athlete, she stood with her feet apart, her hands clenched in the middle, and turned her waist from one side to the other. I copied her, while Linda spun around, tiptoed among the roses and blew kisses to the gathering audience.

From this slow twist that illustrated so wonderfully, our magnificent hips, Briana then stretched her arms high above her head, her exposed belly button a perfect balance of flesh between her halter and her spandex pants. I also stretched my arms to the limits of their capacity, and the loose blouse hem rose dangerously, revealing two white, gleaming crescents.

There was no time to correct my era in judgment. Briana was now bending downwards to touch the ground, and with several neighbors watching in anticipation, I had to prove I was just as limber and enticing. I stretched my fingers downward, almost managing to touch my toes, my knees perfectly straight and heard a murmur of appreciation as my butt went into the air, and the loose top slipped forward, exposing even more of my bosom’s healthy development.

Briana decided to turn the exercises up a notch, laying on her side and stretching one leg high above her head. I complied. There is the thing I have going with Briana. We’ve been in competition with each other since we were small children. It’s probably genetic. We are second or third cousins, I don’t remember the order, just that on my mother’s side somebody married someone who was related to my grandmother.

As we stretched our legs to the sky, so did some of the neighbors who had suddenly gained an enthusiasm for exercises. In the meantime, Linda continued to sway to the music until she had gained a small parade of young and old, men and women.

It was all so lovely, I could no longer resist. I jumped up and began dancing to the music, spinning around faster and faster until I laid down on the grass in exhaustion. While I rested, I breathed in the Seattle air. It was sweet, not just with mountains and pine, but with blackberries, cherries and Washington apples. I closed my eyes, drinking it in.

When I opened them, the Doctor was watching me from the other side of the fence. My blouse had become completely disoriented, twisting and flipping up on one side so that one pink, swollen nipple looked around in surprise. “Do you like what you see, Dr. Andrews?” I asked. I smoothed the cloth slowly over the exposed breast and gave him the smile that showed all my dimples.

His mouth pursed, stretched into a straight line, then pursed again. “You girls are a hazard to yourselves and to others.”

He turned and began walking down the length of the fence that separated his yard from ours. His fingers twitched along the boards. I walked along the other side, my fingers scraping along the rough texture of the fence. His side was painted spotlessly white. My side was faded. “Why are you so unhappy?” I asked.

“What makes you think I’m unhappy?”

“You come straight home from work and either go inside or push your lawn mower around. I never see anybody come over to visit. I never see you just hanging out with the neighbors. You don’t do anything to enjoy life.”

“You don’t know what I do when I’m gone from the house.”

“No, I don’t, but I can guarantee it’s not any fun or you wouldn’t look like the cat dragged you in.”

“Unlike you, I have responsibilities. I work in a geriatrics clinic. Half these neighbors are my patients. Here you are, jumping up and down, exposing your… development… How is that good for them? Or do you care? Aren’t you just another Lange, out to exploit anyone you can?”

“That sounds almost like a song. Aren’t you being unfair? I already told you I don’t know my father.”

“Why did you come here? It’s not the type of place for three young, single women. You won’t find more than a dozen young people over the next three blocks. All we have here is a bunch of aging hippies. Why don’t you just leave them alone?”

“It’s my house. I’ve never owned a house before. I’ve never traveled before. It’s my opportunity.”

He sniffed like an old lady and walked stiffly back to his house. That was sort of how our ninth grade teacher reacted when we each attached a condom to our literature exam. Instead of giggling this time, though, I felt annoyed. I wasn’t a little girl anymore. How could he flip me off like that?

I went back inside in a worse mood than when I had first come home. Briana didn’t help matters. “You cheated! You were waving your tits around!”

“I wasn’t! I just picked the wrong top!”

Briana stuck with her exercise plan, which was really a plan to entice the doctor. We always knew if she was outside exercising, because if she was, there would be old folk out there on their lawns for several blocks back, twisting at the hips and reaching for the ground. Even the guy with the cane was busy doing crunches. We wouldn’t have minded any of it except that our economic situation was really cramping our style and it seemed like Briana was reaping all the benefits. By the length of Dr. Andrews grass, it was safe to bet he had also taken interest in Briana’s efforts.

I was stewing, but Linda was getting piping hot. Her attempts to find clientele had netted her one teenager who changed her hair every other week and blamed her failures in the popularity race on the hair dresser and one middle aged woman who wanted exactly the same trim week after week, without fail. Her artistic creativity was bubbling over and she had nowhere to turn except to one of our very much treated and styled heads.

Briana agreed to a lavender streak down one of her twining, golden locks, but Linda ached for much more. She wanted scissors and bottles and lots of gleaming colors to work in a special magic. Briana said no, and the creative frenzy suddenly turned into a shouting match.

“You’re not cutting one lock of my hair!” Screamed Briana. “See here? This is all I want. One little bit of color for the rad effect.”

“You don’t look rad! You look like Goldilocks. You should grow up, change your style. Then maybe you can get a job.”

“I’m going to get a job and when I do, I’ll be making twice the money you’re making. I’ve lost five pounds.”

“You were supposed to lose twenty pounds by now.”

“It all turned to muscle. Muscles are heavier than fat.”

“We have five hundred dollars to put together by the end of the week. Who has to put it together? Me and Jenna because you’re not working!”

“Why don’t you sell the Bronco? You can get eight hundred dollars for it. The young mechanic down the street told me.”

“I’m not selling the Bronco!” I said quickly. “That’s our ride to work.”

“It’s a gas hog. Sell it and buy a little tampon car.”

“What if we wanted to do a road trip? Six hundred pounds of girl power would kill those K cars with the first pothole.”

“We don’t weigh six hundred pounds.”

“Altogether, yeah we come out to around six hundred pounds.”

“Even if we never made road trips, I’m not getting into a tiny car,” said Linda. “I’m six feet tall. I can wear those things like a girdle.”

“Okay, we don’t sell the Bronco. We just ride it out a few more weeks. Something will come up.”

“Nothing will come up as long as you just sit around!” Yelled Briana.

The argument fanned my own creative urges. I began slamming around pots and pans until the whole kitchen rattled, then added a flurry of spices. Within minutes, Briana and Linda had joined in and we cooked up a platter of food like we hadn’t done since leaving North Carolina. We had corn fritters and batter-fried shrimp, scalloped potatoes, barbecued ribs and a banana cream pie for dessert. As the evening was fresh, with a pleasant breeze, we set our feast out on the porch while we discussed our chronic situation.

It’s very hard to be angry when you’re eating good food, and even harder when it’s food you’ve all made together. In my kitchen, I was the chef and they were the line work. It was something we had all agreed upon ages ago.

We were just chilling out, listening to the faint sounds of someone’s music floating out through a window, when Liz, Melanie and the man with the cane drifted over and looked hopefully at our banquet.

“Would you like some ribs?” I asked. “Sit down. Help yourselves. We don’t bite.”

They sat down as eagerly as a dog guards a new bone. “I’m telling you,” said the man with the cane. “We’ve been put on a starvation diet. It’s a conspiracy. You can’t get anything decent from the cafeteria. We’ve got care givers hovering over our shoulders to make sure we eat all the alfalfa sprouts, like damned rabbits. They’re trying to diet us to death.”

I dished out another scoop of scalloped potatoes, which he attacked with a fork in one hand and a corn fritter in the other. “It’s that doctor,” he said, shaking his fork. “Always spying on us. Always telling us ‘do this, do that’ without us making a damned decision on our own.”

“Oh, but he means well. Doesn’t he mean well?” Asked Liz.

“Maybe so,” said Melanie. “But his meaning gets entirely lost on me. Now, take you girls. Here you are getting the whole neighborhood to start exercising. I told my Ralph… I told him every day, Dr. Andrews wanted him to exercise, but did he ever try for a minute? Now then, here he is, out in his yard every afternoon, faithfully. Is Dr. Andrews pleased? Oh no, not at all. He thinks Ralph is going to have a heart attack.”

“I told you it’s a conspiracy,” muttered Mr. Rosenfield, the man with a cane. “He’s experimenting on us.”

“Hasn’t Dr. Andrews ever had a girlfriend?” I asked casually.

“He did one time,” nodded Melanie. “She was the doctor that misdiagnosed Henry’s cancer.”

“Oh, that’s a rumor!” Gasped Liz.

“It isn’t a rumor. She classified the tumor as benign when it was malignant. He was going to sue but he died before anything came about. That’s why she disappeared. Moved to a new town. She couldn’t take the scandal, and of course, neither could the doctor.”

The group of neighbors got up to call it a night. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” said the man with the cane. “This town is full of skeletons and closets.”