The notebook on Ivy’s lap was pink and announced in gold cursive on the cover “Leave a Little Kindness Wherever You Go.” Kelli bought it for her at the Columbus, Ohio, airport when she visited her parents last month, and since then Ivy brought the thing with her to group therapy to take notes in the hopes it would cure her newfound anger at the world.
Group therapy (they used to call it consciousness-raising) was all the rage back in the seventies when like-minded housewives got together to talk about divorcing their husbands and getting pixie cuts in the name of second-wave feminism. Dr. Ron Goldblatt brought it back so angry millennials could figure out what was making all of them so angry. He had, in fact, just signed a six-figure book deal with Random House based off his irate twenty-something clients. It was called Pissed, and they already anticipated a Times best seller.
This particular group, handpicked by Ron, was a special breed—all of them working in the health and wellness industry. While they all had jobs that ostensibly should make them feel better, something about what they did made all of them feel worse.
There was the budding yoga instructor whose boss, the poster woman for zen on the Upper East Side, kept telling her she was fat.
Ivy and that girl, Summer, got on right away when Ivy shared her own story about being accepted to the New York City Dance Academy out of high school. Her acceptance letter said, in plain language, “We would be pleased if you would lose twenty pounds by the commencement of fall semester.” At first it hadn’t bothered her. It was important for female dancers to be under a certain weight, otherwise they were difficult to lift. But the weight didn’t melt away that summer, and Ivy went to extremes, eating nothing but lettuce, spending an entire day in the sauna, wrapping her body in plastic garbage bags and running around the block. She’d dropped the twenty by week one of school.
Ivy loved telling this story in group therapy. She’d commanded everyone’s attention for the entire hour.
“What happened next?” Summer asked.
“We had weigh-in every week. Most of the time I was okay. But some weeks I was a pound or so over, and the dorm mom would say things like ‘Little piglet had too much ice cream this week.’ And then I wouldn’t eat for the next four days.”
“That sounds like every single time I go to work,” Summer said quietly. “I can’t even count how many times I show up and my boss points to my belly and says, ‘Too much of the chunky.’?”
There was Seth, the co-founder of BRO-th, who had a serious doughnut addiction and was just sick of being the poster boy for soup. “We started it as a joke in B-school and now we’re the BRO-th guys. That’s all we are. I didn’t get an MBA at Harvard to be the soup dude.” There was a massage therapist who’d developed an aversion to touching people in her personal life. “Too much touching all day,” she complained. And then they had the CrossFit mogul who really just wanted to be an accountant and the artisanal paleo chef who was a secret vegan.
Ivy fit right in, the angry, angry spin instructor who just wanted to be nice again. This week, Ivy was delighted when Ron started off their session with her.
“Ivy, have you thought about quitting your job?”
“Have you thought about paying my rent?” Ivy snapped before guiltily backtracking. She exhaled and imagined her breath like little wisps of cotton candy. “Of course. I think about quitting my job every day. But I don’t have a backup plan. I’m not qualified to do anything but this. I was a ballerina. There aren’t many companies out there looking for classically trained ballerinas. I don’t even have a résumé.” Ivy rolled her eyes and sighed low and long. “And I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.”
Ron raised an eyebrow. “You don’t feel like a grown-up?”
“Come on, Ron. No one in New York is a grown-up.”
The other members of the group nodded in solidarity.
“You can stay a kid here forever,” Ivy continued. “I don’t hate all parts of my job. I like that they pay me a lot of money. I hate that I have to yell at people. I like that I get to work out for work. That’s nice. I wish we didn’t charge so much money for the classes. I feel guilty even though I know our clients are real rich. But I wish people didn’t think fitness needed to be so expensive. That’s not fair. It’s like only real rich people can be thin. Is that right?”
Summer chimed in. “And then thin isn’t even good enough. Thin is only the beginning.”
“Girls. No cross-talk,” Ron admonished. “What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about money, Ivy?”
Ivy picked at her cuticles. “Like Janey?”
“Your cousin Janey? You know we try not to use names in here.”
“Yeah, my cousin Janey. My cousin who doesn’t have to worry about money, like at all!” Ivy loved Janey. She really did. But sometimes it was hard not to resent the fact that her cousin was so nonchalant with her millions and millions of dollars. She acted all ashamed of the Sweet family’s chocolate money, acting like B was the only thing that mattered. But Janey could go home and work at Sweet and be the most important woman executive in South Carolina anytime she wanted. Where was the shame in that? People liked chocolate. Not people in New York, unless of course it was 95 percent dark, cultivated from fair trade cacao, and grown by a tribe that used clicks instead of words to communicate. But owning a whole chocolate company was nothing to be ashamed of. It wasn’t like the family business was porta-potties. “Janey acts like losing her job is the worst thing that’s ever happened to her when she could move home and run Sweet Chocolate, which happens to be a Fortune 500 company, but she’s too stuck up to do that.” Saying these things out loud made Ivy hate herself even more. But that’s how she felt, and you were supposed to be honest in therapy.
“What would you do if you had Janey’s money?” Ron prodded. Ivy didn’t have to think about it. She knew what she would do. She’d start her very own class—a ballet boot-camp fitness workout. It would have the stretching and elongation of the muscles from ballet and enough cardio to burn calories. It wouldn’t take much money. She wanted to teach outside and charge people ten dollars, which almost anyone could afford for a good workout. But that wasn’t going to pay her rent. Ultimately she needed this bonus from her bosses at SoarBarre. That might give her the kind of security she needed to do something on her own.
She shrugged at Ron’s question and began to doodle dancers in her pink notebook. “I want to start my own business. And I might have the chance. But I need Janey to cooperate with me, and I don’t think she will.”