Stella pulled a small vellum card from her large bag. On it, in stylized type, were the words “The Workout” and an address in the financial district.
“It moves locations, but this is where it is this month. Every morning at six a.m. and every night at six p.m. The address will change again in March. I have to fly to Nairobi to work with a client tomorrow, but I’ll be back next week if you want to meet me at the Tuesday morning class?”
“Sure.” Janey hoped she hadn’t said it too eagerly. It was a strange thing to make a new girlfriend in your thirties or forties. CJ had been a part of her life for more than twenty years and Beau even longer. They had a group of girls from school, but many of them had moved when they had kids. Janey could count on one hand the number of new friendships she’d made in the past ten years.
“Should I text you?”
“I gave up texting for the lunar New Year,” Stella said, standing and tossing her juice cup into a compost bin. “Don’t worry, I’ll find you.” She was gone as quickly as she’d appeared, leaving behind her the faint scent of magnolias. Janey turned, hoping to see the cute juice guy one more time, but he’d disappeared, leaving Fern Tattoos with her permanent scowl in his place.
Janey shook the remaining raindrops off her jacket, pulled it back on, and made for the door. She’d been so busy talking that she had only finished half the Green. Janey was worried Fern Tattoos would judge her for throwing away perfectly good juice, so she held on to the cup for the walk home. She was halfway there before she noticed that Juice Guy had scrawled his number in black marker on the side of her cup.
CHAPTER FIVE
SweatGoodDaily—We Aren’t a Newsletter, We’re a “Better You” Letter
FREE THE NIPPLE YOGA WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE
By Eden Storm Ellis
Who’s sick of spending way too much money on the latest Fabletics? Why not ditch the sports bra altogether and set your nipples free—just the way Gaia Mother Earth intended.
SweatGood is so excited to announce a new member of our class pass family. Meet Elizabeth Madden. You may know her as the Naked Yogini who brought her Venice Beach style of bendiness to the West Village with her Monday night Free the Nipple Yoga class. This topless yoga class will literally change your life. Promise. Pinkies!
“Free the Nipple is all about creating a safe space for both women and men to love their bodies, and of course it’s also about decriminalizing breasts. We welcome breasts of all shapes and sizes. At the end of each class you’ll feel freer in every possible way. Burn your bralette and join us!” Madden said.
End class with a savasana rubdown with the Naked Yogini’s juicy therapeutic-grade essential oil blends of floral waters and a yummy Kundalini meditation.
Sessions start promptly at seven p.m. in the ZenRiot space on Bank Street. There’s a wait list, so make sure to sign up as soon as possible!!
Janey knew plenty of women who loved not working, but she wasn’t one of them. It was only five days into her “hiatus” and she was bored out of her mind. When she wasn’t attending SweatGood classes—aquatic spin, cardio tai chi, hip-hop Pilates—she paced around the apartment, puffing on the horrid mint cigarettes and going over various ways she could spend her time. Maybe she could go back to school. But what would happen when she started working again? She already had an MBA and didn’t have any real interest in pursuing another degree. She could take a much-needed vacation, but everywhere she wanted to go was a delicious foodie destination—Paris, Tuscany, Barcelona—which would be counterproductive to losing weight in order to keep her job. Going to Paris without cheese, Tuscany without pasta, or Barcelona without paella was like walking into Barneys and buying gum. Everyone seemed to be knitting these days. She could make Boo Radley adorable little lamb’s wool sweaters. Then there were the more serious options. When her dad passed, Janey was given a controlling interest in Sweet Chocolate. Her dad’s right-hand man helmed the company, but he was in his sixties and preferred the golf course to the boardroom. He’d give the job to Janey in a heartbeat if she’d come back. For the past year she’d been listening in on conference calls once a week. It could be a seamless career transition, but she didn’t know if chocolate was her future. And leaving New York now, a single woman, to settle in her hometown surrounded by happy families felt like giving up or the start of a Lifetime movie.
Blargh! She just wanted to go back to work at B.
Janey’s only communication from Beau over the past week came through the delivery of a brown parcel with two smaller packages nested inside. There was no note, but Beau’s home address was scrawled on the upper left-hand corner in his childish script.
One of the packages contained a terribly impressive and technologically advanced scale like the one from SoarBarre. The second—smaller and lighter—contained a slender magenta band. It was called a FitWand. CJ went gaga over it as the two women walked through the West Village to a yoga class on Monday night.
“That’s the newest version. It’s way better than mine.” She raised her arm to show Janey a nearly identical bracelet. “It tells you pretty much anything you want to know about your body…weight, cholesterol, BMI, BGI, BMNOB.” CJ eagerly rattled off a half-dozen acronyms. “It counts your steps, your calories, measures your metabolism, tells you how well you are sleeping. It can even tell you when you’re ovulating.”
“Who even knows if I still ovulate.” She’d started making jokes about her dwindling fertility when she turned thirty-five. It was a defense mechanism that had become a habit. “Why do you think Beau sent these over? Do you think I should call him?” Janey asked, knowing CJ would roll her eyes, which is why she didn’t admit she already had called him and had prepared a curt but witty little speech about the presents. She tried him three times, but he never answered. Sending her the gifts, no matter how insensitive they were, meant he was thinking about her and that meant something. Didn’t it? It had to mean that this was something they’d get over.
Janey couldn’t help but be a little impressed with the petite bracelet. Now that she thought about it, she’d seen these things on women’s left wrists for the past year, but she assumed it was meant to support some kind of cancer charity. “I don’t know if I programmed it properly. It keeps beeping and announcing things in a British accent.”