“Clay? The stuff you make pots and ashtrays out of?”
The smell of kitty litter permeated the room as CJ pulled a plastic Tupperware container from her purse and removed the lid. She grabbed a bottle of Pellegrino from the fridge and mixed the fizzy water with a brown-grey powder. She produced what looked like a baby spoon from a Ziploc bag and without hesitation began shoveling the dirty soup into her mouth.
“It’s better if you add some stevia,” she said, swallowing with intention. “Clay is high in iron and folic acid. Traditional tribes use it to cleanse the body of toxins. This one was harvested from a hundred-year-old termite mound in Ethiopia. Not only does it soak up all your toxins, but the clay swells up to twelve times its original size in your stomach so you always feel full. It’s magical.” CJ looked up, a mustache of grey liquid glossing her upper lip.
“It’s dirt!” Janey replied.
“Technically it’s volcanic ash.”
“What’s it cost?”
“I’m paying a thousand dollars for nine days.”
Before Janey had time to question spending a small fortune on edible kitty litter, CJ cracked open Janey’s laptop.
“I’m signing you up for SweatGood,” CJ said as she daintily blotted her lips with a baby wipe.
“Is that a diet?”
“No, it’s a class pass.”
“Like a gym membership?” Janey had a gym membership. Who didn’t? She’d been dutifully paying the monthly dues at FLEX! since about 2006 even though she couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone to the gym. She had the membership because her ex signed the two of them up on a family plan with her credit card and it kept renewing, even after her marriage ceased to do so.
CJ looked at her with a mixture of pity and perhaps jealousy.
“No one just goes to the gym anymore. How did this whole fit revolution just pass you by?”
Janey recognized the benefits of eating healthy and being active. But that wasn’t always so easy when you worked eighty-hour weeks. She’d noticed the younger girls in her office taking clients out for juice instead of cocktails, yoga classes instead of dinners. But she’d never been one to indulge in any of the latest health fads. “I’ve been a little busy.”
CJ sighed. “No, you’ve been a skinny bitch who had the metabolism of a high school cheerleader for too damn long and men threw themselves at your feet so you never had to think about cellulite. Sorry. Mean.”
“Yeah, mean,” Janey said indignantly.
Her friend rambled on. “So SweatGood is a pass that gets you into the very best workout classes all over the city. You pay one fee and you can sign up for everything. If you didn’t have the pass you could spend up to fifty dollars for a single class. This way you get a big discount everywhere. And you can manage it on an app right on your phone. It even has this geolocator so you can find out the soonest, closest workout to you anywhere in the city at any time of day. Haven’t you ever walked out of a big gross lunch and been like, ‘I need to take a spin class right now’?”
“No.”
“You’re in the minority.”
Janey leaned over her friend’s shoulder to look at the computer.
“Look at this schedule. You can take spin, underwater spin, spinoga—that’s spin and yoga together. There’s trapeze ballet, hula yoga, hot Pilates. I hear hot Pilates is all set to hard-core rap. It’s all ‘Yeah bitch mothafucka…I put my leg ovah my head. I put my leg ovah my head.’ Oooo yes. I’ve been scared to try this one…but I’ll do it if you go with me. It’s conscious pole dancing.”
“Did you just buy two SweatGood passes on my credit card? Why do I need two?”
“Well, I bought one for me too.”
“Don’t you already have your own?”
Her friend’s fleshy cheeks were the color of Chanel’s Rouge Allure Velvet lipstick.
“I had one and then Steven made me cancel it and if he sees another one on our credit card he’s going to get pissed and I don’t want to deal with it. Marriage is about finding ways to avoid conflict.”
Steven very rarely got pissed at CJ. Her friend’s husband thought she walked on the Hudson River, and while he poked fun at her off-the-wall dieting practices, he was shockingly supportive and sweet for a criminal defense attorney who spent all day every day dealing with the very worst Manhattan had to offer.
CJ continued. “I had my own SweatGood pass and I got so pumped about it I started signing up for everything. Everything! I wanted to make sure I got a spot in every new class. Most of them fill up a week ahead of time. But then my schedule got busy. Meetings with potential clients, hair appointments, Botox, waxing, sugaring, playdates, shitty mummy things, and I would have to cancel. But what I didn’t realize was that they charge you a ‘motivation tax.’?”
“What’s that?” Janey asked, with genuine interest about anything related to finance and not dieting.
“They charge you the full price of the class when you cancel and donate it to something awful. When Steven saw our credit card statement he lost his mind. There was a three-thousand-dollar donation to some group that wanted to speed up climate change and another thousand to the KKK.”
“Shut the front door.” Janey sank into the couch. “The Ku Klux Klan?”
CJ nodded. “Direct to David Duke.”
“I can’t do this. What happened to diet pills? What happened to fen-phen?”
“Honey, I think those made the flipper babies. Come over here. Come on.” CJ stretched her short arms out to pull Janey up to standing and then placed her hands on her shoulders.
“I need you to do something for me. I want you to close your eyes.”
“No.”
“Come on, close them. Close them. Please!”
“Fine.” Janey closed her eyes.
“Now I want you to hop up and down five times. Like a bunny rabbit.”
“What the hell are you trying to make me do?” Janey had only been awake for three hours, but somehow she was exhausted, and CJ was starting to get on her nerves.
“You need to learn this exercise. Sara Strong is telling everyone to do it. There was a story about it in Women’s Wear Daily.”
“Who’s Sara Strong?”
“Only the most important fitness instructor and health guru of right now. She’s the reason Madonna doesn’t look a hundred and seven. Sometimes she writes a column for the SweatGood newsletter. Come on. Hop. Hop. Like a bunny. Soften your shoulders and jaw. Relax your belly. Feel all of your tension just shake off your body.” Janey hopped, but not at all like a bunny. She barely came off the ground. Hopping was a funny thing to do when you were no longer five years old. She felt silly and tense, her body resisting the hop.
“Your feet have to leave the ground.”
She bent her knees a little deeper and pushed into her feet a little harder.
“Okay. Now I want you to stand very, very still. Suck in the biggest breath you can take, and I want you to scream.”
CJ demonstrated by opening her mouth as wide as a cantaloupe and stretching her tongue down toward her chin.
“PAHHHHH-HHHHH-HHHHH-HHHHH-HHHHH-HHHHH-!!!!!!!!!” The wail echoed off Janey’s high ceilings.