“I’m forty!” Janey objected with horror. Forty today wasn’t her parents’ forty. She was just heading off to college when Lorna turned thirty-nine. In fact, Janey believed, forty today wasn’t even the forty of ten years ago. It wasn’t even considered old anymore. But, no matter how much you rationalized it, this was one of those milestone years, and the birthday had put Janey on edge, until it came and went without any fanfare at all. She woke up the morning after her fortieth birthday and felt exactly the same.
Her cousin looked at Janey with a mixture of sympathy and skepticism. She began scrolling through her phone.
“Wow. Forty, getting divorced, and out of a job. It’s like you’re the poster girl for sadness.” Ivy got a faraway look in her eye. “That would be a great name for a girl band…Poster Girl for Sadness. Anyway, what do you actually weigh?”
“I think Fiona Apple already was the poster girl for sadness back in the nineties, kid. I have no idea what I weigh,” Janey said, flopping into her overstuffed armchair. “CJ wants to weigh me, but I don’t have a scale.”
“We can go to SoarBarre to find out,” Ivy said.
“There’s a scale there?”
Ivy rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding? There are like six scales. I’m teaching a class at five anyway if you wanna join.”
“Is the class free?” CJ chimed in. “Do we have to sign up? Is it included in SweatGood?”
Ivy just shrugged. “Sure it’s free. Be my guests. It’ll be my good deed for the day. Dr. Ron has me doing a good deed every day. He’s all ‘what you put out into the world is what you get out of it.’?”
Under her breath she added, just loudly enough for Janey to hear, “Namaste, bitches.”
CHAPTER THREE
SoarBarre franchises had become as omnipresent as Starbucks in neighborhoods with large populations of high-achieving women. That meant there were two within a five-block radius of Janey’s Gramercy Park apartment.
The three women set out together, Ivy in the lead. She placed earbuds in her ears and ignored the others, chanting positive affirmations as they marched single file through Fifth Avenue’s late-afternoon crowds.
I am peacefully allowing my life to unfold.
I take the time to show others I care about them.
I am fun and energetic and people love me for it.
I like other people. I like other people. I like other people.
Passersby gave her a wide berth on the sidewalk, the kind usually reserved for men with face tattoos. Nothing about these words made her less angry. And she hated being angry. Growing up, her family had always put a premium on niceness, and Ivy prided herself on being the nicest one out of all her four siblings. It wasn’t the fake kind of nice, either; she’d derived a genuine joy from making other people smile. But her bosses at SoarBarre didn’t want her to make people smile. Their customers paid more when she made them cry.
She did feel good about helping her cousin out, even if it was ridiculous that Janey needed helping at all. Janey Sweet came from what people in Charleston liked to call the “fortunate side” of the family, while Ivy was part of the “less fortunate” relations. Since Janey didn’t need a job, Ivy couldn’t understand why she was so upset about losing this one. Sure, no one wanted to be called fat, especially by her best friend, but Beau wasn’t ever a good friend to Janey. It was so obvious that Beau loved Janey’s money and status and not Janey.
She was a teenager when Janey married Michael, too young to be a bridesmaid and too old to be a flower girl. At their big fancy wedding she’d just kind of wandered around trying to find somewhere to fit in when she discovered Beau, who was Janey’s best man, smoking a cigarette with Michael behind the gazebo. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she overheard Beau say to the groom. Who asked their best friend’s almost husband if he was sure he wanted to marry her?
Ivy never mentioned it to Janey. It was such a weird thing to tell someone and especially hard because she was so much younger than her sophisticated older cousin. She glanced back at Janey. She wasn’t fat, not by any stretch of the imagination. She was taller than average, with broad shoulders, but not thick. Ivy always told Janey that she could be Anne Hathaway’s older sister with her shiny dark hair, killer cheekbones, large brown eyes, and bright red lips that never needed any lipstick.
SoarBarre was carved out of a massive neocolonial bank building from the turn of the century. The architects of New York had once given the best real estate to the places that held America’s money. Now those spaces had been given over to a new obsession. The fa?ade had its windows blacked out with a high-gloss black paint, written over in gold lettering declaring the studio’s mantra: “Pain is gain.” Above the entryway two massive yellow angel’s wings stretched across the sidewalk toward the street, beckoning visitors to join them in this fitness heaven.
When Ivy came here for the first time she’d been intimidated and overstimulated, but now it was just the plain old place she worked. Some people worked in a cubicle and she worked in this fitness industrial complex. Some people wore suits. She wore spandex. Plenty of people would envy this life of hers, so why did she hate it so much? Huge steel doors opened into an enormous raw space where bare copper pipes and exposed air conditioner ducts formed a maze on the ceiling and a DJ perched conspicuously in a booth playing Euro-trash trance. The owners had designed the studio space themselves, and each of the locations was nearly identical, with brutalist concrete walls straight out of Communist China painted in brightly colored graffitied phrases:
PAIN IS GAIN
HURTS SO GOOD
REDUCE, REVIVE, REVITALIZE
IT’S YOUR BODY, BITCH
Giant steel stationary bikes dominated the rooms like metal insects from a steampunk future. A doctor wearing a white lab coat operated sleek metal machines in the corner. He was a recent addition. All new clients were now given a full blood analysis and genetic testing to figure out the most effective type of workout for their bodies.
“Hi, Kim.” Ivy waved to the birdlike woman sitting behind the reception desk. “This is my cousin Janey and her friend CJ. They’re my VVIPs today.” Ivy turned to Janey and muttered, “They want everyone to feel special here so all the members are called VIPs. When we have guests we call them VVIPs or very, very important people. Makes you feel nice and squishy, don’t it?”
Kim placed both her palms down on the onyx countertop, her face sour.