First I called Lily, who had just had a baby herself, a beautiful little girl named Flora, who stopped fussing whenever she lay on my husband’s chest. Lily and I considered whether my latest round of contractions was some kind of false alarm false labor, as so often happens before the big day and had been happening to me for about a week. Lily guessed it wasn’t. But, as a mother of four, she was her usual calm self about timing. “It’s not the third baby or anything. We know you always have those into your pant leg, or in the taxi. But this is the second one. Maybe go for a walk and see what happens.”
I walked right to the salon where they washed and dried my hair. I figured I could squeeze in a manicure and pedicure. After these, I considered tending to things below the belt, but my contractions were now a minute apart, so I called my husband instead.
“What?! We have to go!” he cried. As we cruised down the East Side to the hospital, the driver of the oversized, overpriced SUV my husband had arranged to take us there intoned, “Please miss, you are not having baby in this car! Wait!” Minutes later, with my feet up in the stirrups, I apologized to my OB for the unkempt state of things down there. He observed, while my son’s head crowned, that many of his patients had Brazilian bikini waxes right before delivering, something he just couldn’t understand. He mentioned that the requests for elective C-sections “so things don’t get stretched out down there” had skyrocketed. And that many of his patients had plastic surgeons on call so they could get a tummy tuck immediately after delivering the baby. That’s nuts, I thought as I gave a final push. But even as they put my newborn on my chest—He was so blonde, and so big! He was so beautiful!—I wished my thighs had been hairless as I delivered him. And in spite of almost giving birth in an Escalade, I am not above admitting, when I look at the pictures of me holding my son immediately post-birth, that I am glad I got the blowout.
Nearly without exception, affluent new mothers in the West subject themselves to the physical and emotional rigors of “getting their pre-baby body back.” The phrase, so vernacular and upbeat, is also disingenuous and cruel, suggesting that such a fantasy is even technically possible. Primas and multiparas (those who have had one or more kids) are not nulliparas (those who haven’t), after all. You don’t get your pre-baby body back, ever, because you cannot go back to being a person who hasn’t had a baby. Because you had a baby. The corollary to the compulsion to conduct yourself as if pregnancy doesn’t slow you down one bit is the wish, afterward, to pretend that it—the whole messy matter of your abdomen and vagina and breasts and ribs having been strained to extremes you don’t even want to consider— never happened. No saggy breasts or tummy rolls for us. As if this weren’t unrealistic enough, we are expected and expect to be able to “get back to normal” within an absurdly accelerated time frame.
After the birth of my kids, I thought with longing of a Chinese custom that keeps a woman in bed for an entire month after she gives birth, and out of the fields or the workforce for another several months thereafter. She is attended by female relatives, and forbidden to exert herself in any way, so that she can focus entirely on nursing and recovery. Here, in contrast, hospitals can eject us twenty-four to forty-eight hours after we give birth (my mother’s generation got a week). To parents in the nonindustrialized, non-Western world, this custom seems utterly barbaric.
True to our social script, I was quickly home with a new baby. Unlike some of my conspecifics, who opted for formula because, they told me, they didn’t want droopy breasts and mashed nipples, I committed to breast-feeding, as I had with my first son, and quickly got into a routine with our newborn. I was lucky that nursing was easy for me, as well as for my sons. I knew it conferred long-lasting benefits to the baby, but like most Manhattan moms, I was keen on breast-feeding because I had heard it helped you “get back your pre-pregnancy body” more quickly. It burned something like 600 or 700 calories a day, my girlfriends told me. In the end, my morning sickness had relented a bit and I had managed to pack on the recommended number of pounds. So now I stuck with nursing not only for my sons’ sakes, but for my waistline. And then, when the baby was around five months old, I decided it was time to get back to working out.
For although my OB had wisely counseled that childbirth and recovery were “nine months up and ninth months down,” like most of my peers I did not feel I had nine months. I was in a hurry, impatient to be the old, taut me, apprehensive and preoccupied beyond reason that it would never happen. Mothers all across the country feel a version of this fear; women’s magazines like Fit Pregnancy and New Mommy Workout and stringent post-pregnancy exercise DVDs and online classes attest to our collective terror. But here on the Upper East Side, the anxieties and pressures are greater. Whereas women in Nebraska and Michigan might hop on the treadmill in the basement when they can, and skip Dunkin’ Donuts, and take their time with the last ten pounds, perhaps resigning themselves to all or a portion of it remaining, my tribe of mommies was another matter. Just as we had to excel at being beautifully pregnant, so we had to be the most gorgeous mothers of infants, babies, toddlers, and young children that it was possible to be.
As this was the Upper East Side, the first order of business, once I had decided to exercise, was to shop. Lululemon was the brand of choice. It had eclipsed Athleta and was an intrinsic and ubiquitous part of the Upper East Side mommy uniform by the time I was ready to rumble. Skintight yet thicker than regular spandex, shockingly comfortable, with whimsical details (fun prints abounded) and smart concessions to women’s actual lives, needs, and desires (pockets in places that didn’t create bulk, for one), lululemon was an inescapable part of life in my neighborhood. It telegraphed, “I have time to exercise, and here’s the payoff.” Part of lululemon’s appeal, I realized the first time I tried on their pants and a fitted jacket, was that these items weren’t merely unforgivingly tight and form-fitting. And they weren’t merely clothing—they also functioned as a kind of girdle or exoskeleton, smoothing out bumps, holding everything up and in while they appeared to bare all. For the first year or two after lululemon hit the streets, women wore their lulu pants with longer lulu tops or jackets to cover the derriere and loin areas. Or tied a long-sleeved lulu shirt around their waists. And then came a moment when women collectively declared, “I have a crotch. And a bottom. Deal with it.” Habituation was swift. What had at first looked outrageously exhibitionistic—exposing the ventral and dorsal sides of a female Homo sapiens between her waist and pubis—quickly became no big deal. What choice did men have but to become desensitized by the barrage of lululemon-clad nether regions, the nearly constant, inescapable exposure?
And so I came to own lots and lots of lululemon. I bought fitted lulu jackets and fitted lulu pants. I bought fitted cap-sleeve 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 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, pledging their allegiance to one of a few tremendously popular cults: a ballet barre class called Physique 57, and a spin class called Soul Cycle. How ridiculous, I thought when my friend Amy sent me a Youtube video of women at Soul Cycle sitting on their stationar
y 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 120 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 while wearing identical Nike sneakers in the 1990s. “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 über-fit, 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 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,” my friend 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 zone 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 elbow, 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 goodbye 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 transformation.
Primates of Park Avenue Page 11
