Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  And so I came to own lots and lots of lululemon. I bought fitted lulu jackets and fitted lulu pants. I bought fitted cap-sleeved tops with plunging necklines and vibrant-hued, fitted tanks. I bought snug lululemon bras specially designed to fit under the tops and tanks. There were even special lululemon thongs and underwear designed of microfibers to be “invisible”—with edges that faded into nothing, so you wouldn’t have VPL. There was a fitter at lululemon, who put you up on a box in front of a three-way mirror like a regular tailor does, and talked to you seriously about which shoes you would be wearing and how long the pants should be and how large the hem should be, as if they were real trousers and you were a businessman at Brooks Brothers. Well, it was a business, I would soon learn, this “working” out, and a serious one at that.

  Thoroughly outfitted, I looked into fitness options, and quickly learned that there had been a sea change not only in exercise togs but also in exercise practices since the births of my two children. As I cluelessly did Pilates and yoga and sprinted in the park when I could, all around me, members of the tribe I studied had been splintering into subtribes, each pledging its allegiance to one of two tremendously popular cults: a ballet-barre class called Physique 57, or a spin class called SoulCycle. How ridiculous, I thought when my friend Amy sent me a Youtube video of women at SoulCycle sitting on their stationary bikes, their lower halves whipping round and round at lightning speed while their upper halves did various yoga poses. I imagined how perplexed archeologists of the future would be by such an artifact (“They move, yet they make no progress”). Give me a break, I sighed internally when another friend described her Physique 57 ballet-barre class as we sat at a café, earnestly intoning that it had changed her body in a mere six 57-minute sessions. She sounded like an infomercial. Then she lifted her shirt to show me her abs, and I nearly spat out my green tea. She was cut. After less than six hours. I was suddenly game.

  Reviewing the company’s website, I learned about their state-of-the-art studios, mirrored affairs in upscale locales tricked out with special props—ballet barres of different heights, balls for squeezing and toning, rubber strips for stretching and ab work, mats and pillows, carpeting that cushioned during floor work. I read the Physique 57 “story”: it was founded by two former Lotte Berk disciples after that wildly popular, ballet-style workout guru threw in the towel at her Hamptons studio. I watched the video testimonials by those who worshipped at the Physique 57 temple—women who ran the gamut from absolutely torn to zaftig/fit. Many became tearful describing their transformation. The promise was that I would see changes in my body within eight sessions, each of which was less than an hour, thus saving me 180 seconds every time I went.

  Attired in lululemon, I arrived at a studio not far from home one spring morning. The space was airy and clean, with high ceilings and white walls and wood floors in some rooms, blue carpeting in others. The pretty young woman at the front desk who checked me in noted it was my first class, and gave me a release to sign. Then she chirped, “Do you have your socks?” Huh? She meant grippy socks, I learned, black or gray anklets with a small 57 embroidered at the back, the bottom sprinkled with light blue rubberized dots intended to prevent me from slipping on the carpet. I bought a pair immediately and, pulling them on, thought of the cult members who had committed suicide in the 1990s while wearing identical Nike sneakers. “You’ll probably want a bottle of water,” the receptionist observed helpfully, handing it over and telling me she’d put the charge on my bill. As at a private club, I had a chit.

  I was relieved to see my friend Monica, an überfit, hard-driving hedge-fund manager and mother of three, stretching by a mirror. “I didn’t know you did Physique!” she enthused as we kissed each other hello. “Give me that.” She dropped my water bottle at a three-foot-wide “spot” at the ballet barre in front of the mirrored wall. Then she grabbed two five-pound weights for me, setting them next to hers on the carpeted floor. “You’ve got to stake out your real estate before everybody gets here,” she explained. Great; I had a guide. The room filled up all around us as we chatted, the women packed in tightly, all strangely serious and silent, stretching and staring into the mirror in front of them. Without exception, they wore black lululemon pants, either full or capri length, and racerback lulu tanks and black Physique 57 grippy socks. Most looked incredibly fit, with lean triceps and flat stomachs and tight bottoms that seemed to defy gravity. There were no men in the class, with the exception of a tall, dark vision, muscled and sleek, wearing a headset. “Good morning, ladies,” he purred. “Let’s get those heart rates up!” His voice blared through the strategically placed speakers in the corners of the room, and we snapped to attention.

  A Beyoncé track pounded forth, and we were exorted to step high, step high, lift opposite knee to opposite arm, twist, twist. Thus began a workout so rigorous, so difficult, so comprehensive, and so painful that at several points I feared I might vomit. We worked every imaginable muscle in our arms with our weights while simultaneously doing squats and lunges and dips with our legs. We did push-up after push-up. “When you get to that point of fatigue, I want you to overcome,” the instructor intoned, as if this were our own civil rights movement. That was just the ten-minute warm-up. We now returned our weights to their wire baskets on the shelves in the corner of the room. I was taken aback at the aggression with which the women, most in their thirties and forties, flung them, and the speed with which they then raced over to their spots at the barre. Somehow everyone knew which identical bottle of water and small white towel was hers. How? “Over here,” Monica whispered, and I took the spot next to her.

  To my bewilderment, the instructor requested that we “take a small upright V position at the barre and begin with a simple pulse.” I copied my friend, thinking I understood—we were doing mini pliés, ballet-style. No problem; I had done these my entire ballet-practicing girlhood. But after a hundred of them, I thought my legs would fall off. And we were just beginning. We lifted one leg off the floor, and then the other, in a precise sequence that worked every single leg muscle to the point of utter exhaustion and indescribable, burning pain. I looked around at the other women, trying to catch the eye of someone else, as one does in such dire but ultimately funny circumstances, when others typically raise an eyebrow or smile to communicate, “You’re not alone!”

  Nothing. Not a smile in the room. Not a word. The women averted their gazes, inhabiting their own split-off, atomized private zones of achievement and torment. What was this, the subway? I had never experienced a workout so grueling in a room so devoid of jokey, friendly camaraderie. Or one so silent. There were no whoops or groans or Oh my Gods or vocalizations of any kind. It was a lot like the halls of my son’s nursery school—you could be forgiven for suspecting you didn’t even exist, such was the unfriendly unrelatedness and sense of disconnection that prevailed in the tightly packed room. Occasionally the instructor would make a funny remark about one of us to break the ice, or say an encouraging word, or offer a correction. He communicated for everyone, it seemed, and had the only personality in the room.

  While I had to stop repeatedly, my friend went on and on, not missing a single beat or plié or squat. This was an overachiever’s workout. She was as focused on it, I realized, watching her out of the corner of my eye, as she was on her deals at work or the process of getting her kids into a good school. Like a machine, she was careful, precise, and steady. Meanwhile, everyone around us, dressed in identical uniforms, did all the identical moves in perfectly synchronized, identical harmony. Arms raised. Arms down. Punch. Pull. Then came stranger commands, in a language everyone around me understood.

  “Hover! You’re wearing kitten heels,” the teacher barked. Then: “Put on your highest stilettos!” and “Wear a pencil skirt and sit at your desk in a swivel chair”—meaning bend at the knees, pivot, and face the barre at an angle. Next came “waterski,” a command that apparently meant “Get close to the barre, lean back with your entire weight while holding on
with your spent, aching arms, and thrust your pelvis up to the ceiling.” We did this over and over, until our legs shook and we forgot that the movement couldn’t be more sexual, or more painful. Now that thigh work and seat work were over—They were? Thank God, because my ass had never burned like this before—it was time for abdominal work. This might have more aptly been called vaginal display. We sat with our backs to the wall, hefted our legs up above our heads, pushed our hands up into the barre above us, and pulled our legs, held in a diamond shape, into the barre again and again. I was glad there were no men in the class as I tried not to stare at the dozens of pudenda straining against lululemon spandex all around me. I figured everyone else must find this as odd as I did, but once again, there were no smiles, no eye contact, no interaction of any sort. We worked every conceivable muscle in our abdomens, slicing to the side, pulling to the sky, bicycling our knees to the opposite elbows, until I wanted to howl with pain.

  Afterward, we lay on our backs on our mats, panting, and thrust our pelvises upward to the strains of Mavin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” I thought I might faint—from the physical agony and the indescribable strangeness of this disconnected group-sex experience. When it was over, I gasped good-bye to my friend and hobbled home. I took a hot bath with Epsom salts, nursed the baby, and fell asleep with him in bed. For three days, I could not walk up and down stairs, or even walk, without considerable pain. But when I recovered, I went straight back to the class. I felt driven and compelled—to master the movements, to chase the perfect body for 57 minutes, to put everything else out of my mind, to block out the world. I was hooked. I would follow.

  For a while I went every other day. Then I bumped it up to every day, at which point I noticed that there were women who asked each other, “Are you staying for the next class?” They were doing this twice a day, some of them. The grueling pursuit of the perfect body was, it occurred to me, an endurance rite. Every class was a mini-initiation ceremony, a shortened, everyday version of the once-in-a-lifetime Sunrise Dance that Apache girls undertake to mark their transition to womanhood. For four entire days, nonstop, the menstruating girl dances a specific and meticulous choreography. She wears special garments and pigments to mark the sacredness and specificity of this moment in time. In so doing she demonstrates her commitment to her people, her tribe, and her gender. At the end she is exhausted—and initiated. She is utterly changed after the dance, a confirmed member of Apache womanhood. And the women of Physique? They proved, class after punishing class, that they had the strength, time, resources, and energy to commit to their transformations.

  And they were, in fact, a recognizable tribe. Most had an unmistakably hardened body type, an easily recognizable (to an insider) dancer-like posture, and a deliberate, precise gait and physical aspect that reminded me of ballerinas I had known. Indeed, in an “only in Manhattan” development, I often found myself standing next to ABT or New York City Ballet ballerinas and Rockettes during my Physique 57 workouts. They were tall and stunningly supple and sometimes, without even realizing it, I strove to do just as they did—to kick as high, to reach as far, to turn out as beautifully. The bar was so punishingly high at the barre. We expected ourselves to perform as well as professionals because our physical selves, like our motherhood, had become professionalized. Beyond an identity, it was a calling, a vocation, something to excel at.

  My body did, in fact, change quite quickly and remarkably. Sure, I still peed when I coughed. But from the outside, I was altered and, by Manhattan standards, “improved.” My arms were sinewy and defined—a gay male friend remarked at lunch, when I wore a sleeveless blouse, “Nice guns!” My tummy was not just flatter—it was taut, with muscular shadows and indentations. For once in my life, I wasn’t self-conscious about my thighs. And my bottom was, if I did say so myself, newly pert.

  My husband was surprised and pleased. I had always been relatively thin and blessed with a good metabolism, so I didn’t have to worry about my figure a lot. But now I had more energy during the day, and slept better at night. As a result I was in a better mood, and much better company than I had been in the immediate postbaby haze. Given all this, I became a proselytizer, trying to convert as many friends as I could, which was not hard to do when they saw and heard about all the benefits I had reaped. With a few smiling, happy girlfriends in the classroom with me to blot out all the unfriendly self-absorption, this exercise routine was, for my thirty-five dollars per session, perfect.

  We decided to rent a house out of the city for the summer, in the Hamptons. I would go out for the whole summer to be with the kids and write, courtesy of a sitter who would come daily to lend a hand, and my husband would spend weekends with us there, working during the week in the city. “The Hamptons” is a beachy area at the far eastern tip of Long Island—but it is a mythical place, too, and for many, a dream. While plenty of perfectly ordinary people live there year round or visit, there is enough superaffluence on the East End that the standards of wealth are utterly skewed. Twenty-million-dollar (and up) waterfront mansions with private screening rooms, five-thousand-bottle wine cellars, helipads, six-car garages, private Pilates studios, and even private synagogues are not so unusual. Not a few of my older son’s school chums’ families had such “weekend/summer” places. Our Hamptons rental was, in comparison, bare-bones modest: a three-bedroom affair with a pool and a shady backyard in a leafy suburban enclave with a community bay beach. I couldn’t have been happier that first day as my older son rode his bike along the quiet street while I followed behind with the baby, who craned his neck from his stroller, mouth agape. He was hearing birds for the first time. Adding to the idyllic aspect of this summer that unspooled before us, for me, was the knowledge that there was a Physique 57 studio within striking distance. Driving rather than walking to class would be a fun excursion every other day or so, I figured.

  The next morning I headed off to class—and an unexpected shock. I showed up a good fifteen minutes early, but the parking lot was already jammed. As I rolled along looking for a space on the gravelly hill leading up to the studio, a woman peeled around the corner in a black Maserati, swinging into my half of the road and nearly broadsiding me. We both slammed on the brakes and then she flipped me off, revved her engine, and roared by. A blonde in a black Range Rover behind me took umbrage at my shocked, split-second pause and leaned on her horn, yelling, “Come on. Move already!” A woman wearing a vivid purple tank top in a red Porsche 911 convertible raised her hands in exasperation, shaking them near her face, which was twisted into a rictus of rage, as I pulled into a spot—who knew what her beef was.

  Rattled and hustling to make my way into the studio, I found a space on the floor and was quickly surrounded—by the woman from the black Maserati, the woman from the black Range Rover, and the woman from the red Porsche. What on earth, I wondered, made them feel they could be so hostile toward the very people they knew were likely to exercise right next to them for an hour? Maybe, I hypothesized, it was the fact that once they arrived, they were so self-absorbed, so focused on perfecting their bodies, that others literally did not exist. Now, while we huffed and puffed and pretended no one else was there, I noticed that I was also surrounded by big, enhanced breasts. And supersculpted cheekbones. And big, round faces, taut with filler. The Hamptons, it seems, was ground zero for a hyperambitious, hypercompetitive culture of body display and forever-young faces. While women on the Upper East Side wanted to look buff, those who flocked to the Hamptons wanted to look buff in bikinis while surrounded by the twentysomething models and fitness instructors who came here every summer to party and find rich boyfriends. Now the bar was so high, I could no longer see it, let alone hope to reach it. But my peers were not giving up so easily. Aging, like a bad birthday, was unfortunate, a lousy break—and something to be overcome with effort, commitment, and zeal.

  Another thing that piqued my interest at the Hamptons Physique 57 outpost was that it shared physical space with SoulCycle. Both outfits had th
eir studios in a converted barn on Butter Lane in Bridgehampton. Now that I was fighting them for parking spots, I began to pay closer attention to this other subtribe. From what I could tell, they were just like us in their intensity, commitment, and strong identification with their clan. And, sure, we all wore the same tight exercise pants, sometimes with lines crisscrossing the derriere, drawing attention to our bottoms in a way that put me in mind of the bright pink estrus displays of nonhuman female primates. “Look at me! I’m in heat!” our spandex-encased, highlighted bottoms seemed to scream. But the similarities ended there. For one thing, the SoulCyclers were clubbier, if that was possible, because they were chummier—with one another. But not with anyone else. I learned this the hard way when I said hello to a group of SoulCycle moms I thought I recognized from home—and was roundly ignored.