“Down the hallway on the left,” Kelly tells her.
“No, Brett,” Kelly says, quietly, as soon as the bathroom door shuts. She means Maureen. No, Brett, we aren’t hiring her. No, Brett, it’s not your call. I reach for Erin’s recorder and switch it off so Kelly isn’t caught fat/age/tan shaming on tape.
“Hey,” I hold up my phone to take an Instagram story of our surroundings, “the yoga studio is your baby.” I type NEW SPOKE SPACE COMING JUNE ’17. Click, done. Search for the location. Montauk End of the World doesn’t come up for a while. Service is wonky out here, which reminds me . . . “By the way,” I say to Kelly, “it’s out here.”
Kelly stares at me, blankly.
“You said thank you for coming all the way up here to see us. Montauk isn’t up. It’s east. You want people to think you’re an old pro at the Hamptons scene . . .” I pull my sweatshirt over my head and pet the static out of my famous hair.
This is, in fact, Kelly’s first time out here. A ticket to a comedy show, I realized, after mentioning it to the commercial designer I’ve hired to transform the abandoned hardware store on Montauk’s Main Street into a pop-up yoga studio. A pop-up yoga studio on Montauk’s Main Street. If you’re worried I’ve become more basic than the insult “basic,” you should be.
“Never been to Montauk before?” the designer had repeated back to us in slow disbelief, as if my sister had never seen avocado toast on a menu, or heard Justin Bieber’s music. He spread a palm over his throat, choking on Kelly’s quaintness.
And so earlier, as Kelly and I were setting up the space for the yoga instructor auditions, Kelly told me not to mention anything about it being her first time in Montauk to the New York magazine reporter who was on her way out here to document the first hiring call for the yoga studio.
I tried to parse her reasoning before asking about it. Kelly gets cranky when you ask her to explain things she thinks should be obvious, another fetching facet of her personality she got from our mother. “Why not?” I’d finally been forced to ask. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it would be a bad thing for people to know this was Kelly’s first time in Montauk. I’ve barely been to Montauk, and, if anything, it better serves our “brand”—yup, still the grossest word in the English language—that Kelly has never spent a summer mainlining rosé in a slutty one-piece at Gurney’s. We are the people’s fitness studio.
“Because I don’t want anything that makes us look inexperienced in the press,” she said, flicking open a yoga mat. “I’m worried how it looks to our investors, like we’re little girls playing with Monopoly money.”
Well, I thought but didn’t have the energy to say, they aren’t our investors. They’re my investors. So don’t lose any sleep over it. But I let it slide. I have enough headaches in my life right now. No need to get hung up on the delusional statements of a stay-at-home mom who still hasn’t accepted the fact that her tubby little sister is the overachiever now.
And overachiever I am. Since filming wrapped last season, I’ve raised $23.4 million to expand the location of my spin studio, WeSPOKE. Coming fall 2017, SPOKE will open on the Upper West Side and Soho, and, if this yoga thing does well for us, we have our eye on a space just down the block from our original SPOKE location in the Flatiron, the premier zip code for boutique studio fitness in Manhattan. Not bad for a twenty-seven-year-old community-college dropout who, up until three years ago, was living in her sister’s basement in New Jersey.
I should be proud, and I am, but . . . I don’t know. I can’t help but feel conflicted about the expansion. I loved our scrappy little studio when it was a self-governing affair: There was no board to answer to, no human resources department, no numbingly dull talk of the market. Our seed capital came from an entrepreneurial contest I won when I was twenty-three. I never needed angel investors or bootstrappers, I never had to answer to anyone but myself. The grant money gave me the freedom to focus on the mission of SPOKE, which is and always will be to protect and educate the female Imazighen population of Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains.
Imazighen women and girls—some as young as eight—walk, on average, four miles a day under a gruesome 14 UV Index sun just to bring home a single jerrican of water. It’s a woman’s duty to provide clean water for her family, and the task often prevents them from attending school and entering the workforce later in life. Then there is the issue of their safety. One in five Imazighen women have been sexually assaulted on their way to the well, sometimes by groups of men who hide in the bushes and wait for the youngest walkers. When I heard this, I had to act, and I knew other women would be compelled to as well if I made it easy for them. For every fifth ride at SPOKE, we provide a bike to an Imazighen family in need. The bikes reduce the time of the water-gathering task (from hours to minutes) so that young girls are home in time for school and their moms can go to work. The bikes mobilize girls who haven’t even gotten their periods yet to outpace a gang of rapists.
That was my pitch, and not a single investor bought it. They were all men, and they all thought New York City women were too self-absorbed to care. But these days, it’s cool to care. It’s mandatory to support the sisterhood. Women are spokes in the same wheel, trying their best to move each other forward. That’s SPOKE’s mission statement. Kelly came up with it. Beautiful, huh? Myself, I preferred Get off your privileged ass and think of someone else for a change, but Kelly made the point that we’d probably catch more flies with honey.
Of course, when we didn’t, Kelly lost interest. She laughed at me when I showed her the article I’d clipped from the Out magazine I found in the doctor’s waiting room, detailing the entrepreneurial contest for budding LGBTQ business owners. That’s a long shot, she said, but I’ve always had a strong arm.
I’d peeled apart a folding chair and said, “The Hamptons are absolutely lovely and they should stay that way, but they won’t, not with pop-up yoga studios opening where the hardware store is supposed to be.”
Kelly had sighed. “There’s a client base out here, though.”
I’d set the box of Grindstone doughnuts on the seat of the chair. I’d already eaten two—classic Boston crème and blueberry basil with lemon ricotta frosting. The sugar remained a burning ring in my throat, demanding more. Better than an orgasm, people say about good food, but that isn’t quite right. Food is what happens before the orgasm, the building of something great, the wonderfully excruciating plea to keep going, keep going. Too many women deny themselves this pleasure, and I decided long ago I would not be one of them. Almost one third of young women would trade a year of their lives to have the perfect body. This is not because women are shallow, or because they have their priorities out of whack. It is because society makes life miserable for women who are not thin. I am part of a small but growing minority determined to change that. SPOKE is the first exercise studio that mentions nothing about transforming your body, because study after study proves that your physical body has so little to do with health. Healthy people are people who feel connected to their communities, who are loved and supported by those around them, and who have a sense of purpose in their lives. Healthy women do not waste their precious energy separating egg whites from egg yolks.
“How about this,” I said to Kelly. “I won’t mention anything about this being your first time in Montauk if you consider the free memberships for the locals.”
“No, Brett,” Kelly said, her favorite refrain. “Someone in this family needs to graduate from college.”