Tales from the Yoga Studio

by Rain Mitchell

  Maybe he’s mulling over the next step. Or maybe his silence means he’s already decided his next step, and it’s away from her.

  She spots Stephanie sitting at a sidewalk table at Café Crème across the street, working on her computer and waiting for Lee’s afternoon class to begin. She waves, and Stephanie beckons to her. Katherine sprints across the street and joins her at her table.

  “I like the shoes,” Stephanie says.

  Katherine looks down and realizes that she’s barefoot. She likes to work without shoes sometimes; everyone is so used to seeing people barefoot in the studio, no one even notices.

  “Glad you approve,” Katherine says. “They were reasonable. How’s the work coming?”

  “It’s coming. I won’t know if it’s any good until I’m done.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Soon. I give it to the producer . . . we’ll see.”

  She’s scrutinizing Katherine in a way that makes Katherine feel she has something she wants to ask her. “Is everything all right? ”

  “Look,” Stephanie says, “I know you and Lee are good friends, and I don’t want to get in the middle of that, but how serious is she about this YogaHappens thing?”

  It’s always best to mind your own business and let people make their own decisions, even if you think they’re mistakes. She doesn’t really believe the move will make Lee happy, but on the other hand, she’s not in a position to judge. Maybe she feels Lee is abandoning her and doesn’t want her to be happy.

  “I’d guess she’s pretty serious.”

  “It’s a big mistake. We have to talk her out of it.”

  “I don’t know, Stephanie. I’m trying to focus on avoiding my own mistakes.”

  “Me, too. But don’t you wish you had a little help sometimes? ”

  When she has had help, it’s usually come from Lee. “When you say ‘we have to talk her out of it,’ I assume you mean I do.”

  “I think you have to try.”

  Graciela is scrubbing out the storage space beneath her mother’s kitchen sink when she gets the call. Heberto, her mother’s late husband, was a do-it-yourself kind of guy and, like most do-it-yourselfers, he had lots of ambition and limited skills. Graciela’s discovered that there are half-finished electrical and plumbing repairs all over the house. Almost every room contains some evidence of good intentions gone astray—a little box of building materials, half-filled tubes of caulking, pieces of tile, sections of drywall. At some point, he obviously tried to do something about a leak in the drain of the kitchen sink, but he either lost patience or faith in his abilities to complete the job. When she opened the cabinet, she was greeted by the sight and smell of mildewed sponges, damp rags, and boxes of Brillo pads and dishwasher detergent that had partly disintegrated.

  One thing she’s learned from helping her mother out is that the bigger the mess she tackles, the greater the satisfaction in getting the job done.

  She replaced a washer, tightened a few loose nuts (Heberto had, of course, left the wrenches under the sink), and began throwing things out. Boxes of unusable cleaning supplies, containers of ammonia and floor wax covered with slime or rust or both. She stripped down to one of Daryl’s tight T-shirts she’d thrown on that morning. When she hears her phone ringing on the kitchen table, she’s covered in sweat and soap scum, and she decides to let it go to voice mail. A few minutes later, she slides out from under the sink and surveys the job. Spotless. One of the lesser accomplishments of her life, but still one that offers her a great deal of pleasure. She can’t fix her mother’s life; she can’t change her attitude; she can’t make her happy. But she can clean her house up so that when she’s ready to make some of the other changes herself, everything will be in place.

  She can hear the shrill voices of the Telemundo soap opera coming from the TV in the room out back and her mother’s laughter and curses at the characters. No matter what she says, no matter how dismissive her mother is to her, somewhere inside, surely she appreciates what Graciela has been doing for her.

  The message on her phone starts out slow and solemn. It’s Mickey Michaelson, the little woman with her face tucked up into her beret. It turns out she is the assistant to the choreographer and an indispensable part of the team assembled for the video shoot.

  “Graciela,” she says and then pauses. She has one of those peculiar accents that have a little Britain, a little France, a bit of the South, and a whole lot of affectation. A common accent in the sovereign country of the Entertainment Industry. “I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but someone has to do it, right? Starting next week, you’re going to be working your ass off, young lady. You’re Dancer Number Five, baby. Call me.”

  Graciela catches sight of her reflection in the window above the kitchen sink. If Mickey could see her now, she’d probably retract the offer. Her hair is matted, and her T-shirt is filthy. Well, nothing like a little reality check to bring her down to earth, just in case she was at risk of getting a swollen ego.

  She goes out to the glassed-in room where her mother is ensconced in front of the TV. There’s a loud commercial on, some kind of antacid represented by a cartoon character routing out the digestive system of a poor overindulgent soul.

  “Mama,” she says. “¿Puedo bajar el volumen, Mama?”

  Her mother frowns, but mutes the TV.

  “I fixed the leak under the sink, and I threw out all the mess down there.”

  “¿Sacaste el moho?”

  “I got rid of as much mildew as I could. I think it’s all gone.”

  “Buena chica,” her mother says.

  It’s not that it’s such a great compliment, really. It’s the kind of thing you might say to someone you hired to clean for you. Probably something her mother heard from her employers when she was cleaning houses. Good girl. But it’s something. And at the moment, Graciela is so happy for even this small bit of praise, she feels her cheeks getting warm with happiness.

  “I just got a call, Mama. You won’t believe it. I’m going to be in a new video. With Beyoncé, Mama. The one from Dreamgirls, you remember?”

  “¿La gorda?”

  “No, the one who looks like Diana Ross. She’s gorgeous. It’s a really big break for me, Mama. There were about a thousand girls who auditioned.”

  Her mother smiles and nods her head, although not with any particular happiness. The commercial finishes up and she turns on the sound again.

  “Make sure you wash your hair before your ‘big break.’ You look like a witch. And wear a different shirt. I can see your nipples. Big. Como una animala.”

  Graciela feels as if the wind has been knocked out of her. A witch? An animal? Did her mother just say that? She walks out of the glassed-in room, goes back into the kitchen, ties up the trash bags she’s filled with junk, and puts them in a barrel outside the kitchen door. She’s about to put her blouse back on, when she spots her phone on the table. She should call Daryl; she probably should have called him first. But what if she hears that little catch in his voice, that tone that she knows means he feels threatened and worried that any success of hers will threaten their relationship somehow or make her love him less? What she needs right now is some unqualified enthusiasm. She picks up the phone and dials.

  “Lee,” she says, “it’s Graciela. I wanted to tell you. . . . I got the job. I just got a message and—”

  Lee screams so loudly and with so much excitement, Graciela thinks for a minute that her mother might hear, TV or not. “I am so happy for you, sweetheart! I’m so proud of you! We have to celebrate.”

  “Honestly, it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t—”

  “It’s you. It’s your talent. Your hard work. You did it. You earned it. You deserve it.”

  A few minutes later, she drapes her shirt over her arm and goes out into the glassed-in room. The sun has come out again, and the room is stifling. There’s an air conditioner, but her mother never uses it while Graciela is there, claiming she doesn’t
want to use the electricity. But more than once, Graciela has heard her switch it on as she’s walking out of the house.

  “I’m leaving, Mama,” she says.

  “What about the kitchen closet?”

  “What about it, Mama?”

  “You said you were doing that today, too.”

  “The next time . . . ,” she begins. But no, she can’t keep coming back like this and putting her whole self on the line. “You can do it yourself, Mama. You can do it yourself or you can hire someone to do it or you can call your sons. Call Manuel or Eddie. Tell them to come clean your closets.”

  “Too good to help me out now? Eso es todo? ”

  “I’ve never once disrespected you. I’ve never done anything but love you and try to help. I won’t let you insult me anymore. I can’t. Okay, Mama? When you want to call and apologize, you have my number. Until then, don’t bother.”

  Outside, Graciela puts on her blouse, but her hands are shaking too badly to do up the buttons. She looks back at her mother’s house and half expects to see her mother racing out the front door, chasing her in anger. But of course, the house is quiet, except for the sudden clatter of the air conditioner being turned on and the sunlight glinting off the windows. She takes a deep breath and starts down the walk, realizing that her hands have stopped shaking. She buttons up her blouse partway. She feels a little buzzing in the back of her head that isn’t anger or anxiety or nervousness or guilt: it’s the thrill of excitement. She did it. She made it happen. She got her dream job. It doesn’t matter if her mother calls her and apologizes or not. She’ll always be there for her mother, but she doesn’t need her. Her mother’s opinion of her own daughter doesn’t alter the fact that Graciela’s life is in a very different place than it was an hour ago.

  When Lee met Alan, he’d recently graduated from NYU with a degree in American studies, one of those vague majors that incorporates literature and pop culture, a bit of politics, and a whole lot of personal opinion. “Me studies,” as some of their friends called it. He’d wanted to study music, but he’d been forbidden by his parents in Chicago. After school, he’d had an entry-level job at Fidelity and an internship at a law firm, but nothing really suited him professionally. He was not, he explained to Lee, the kind of guy who could work under other people. “I’m too rebellious,” he’d explained. “Too independent. I’m too creative to be tied down to an office.” She admired his spirit.

  He was living in Brooklyn and working as an assistant to a handyman, a job that paid pretty well and left him plenty of time to pursue his real love.

  The first time Lee heard Alan play and sing was at his place in Brooklyn. They’d had dinner together, had several glasses of wine, had made love, and then he’d pulled out his guitar and sang to her. “If I Had You,” a song from the 1920s with a sweet, simple melody that he sang in a soft voice, accompanied by plucking a few basic chords on the guitar. There is nothing I couldn’t do, if I had you.

  It was a warm night; the peeling paint on Alan’s bedroom walls was hidden by the flickering candlelight. He was naked, and his summer-colored skin was glowing. A single lock of dark hair hung down over his forehead as he sang to her. If I had you. He was smiling, sweetly, the whole time.

  By the end of the song, he had her. Body and soul.

  That performance was what convinced her he had genius. So clear, so pure, so effortless.

  It was a shock when she saw him perform in front of an audience at a small restaurant in the East Village. The effortlessness was gone, replaced by a hard-edged drive that made his voice sound raw and his playing a little too assertive. But she was crazy in love with him then, and any doubts she felt were quickly banished by her infatuation. The stakes were so different when they were in their twenties. Everyone she knew was casting about for something, chasing a dream, and it was understood, even if unexpressed, that eventually they’d put aside their unrealistic, unrealizable fantasies and find a career that would at least pay the bills.

  A lot of her early relationship with Alan was assuring him that he had the talent and only needed the right opportunities. That’s what you did when you loved someone. You believed in them and you supported them. Right? And when Alan said that the opportunities for his kind of music and his kind of songwriting were better in L.A., she’d believed him and supported him and packed up and moved. She never regretted that part of it.

  When they first met in New York, she’d billed herself as a waitress, which was true at the time. She only revealed that she was learning about yoga when she was sure he wouldn’t laugh at her or think she was a flake.

  Lee started seriously studying (versus practicing) yoga with Rosa Gianelli, an older woman who’d moved to Paris in the sixties to study with B. K. S. Iyengar. Iyengar had been brought to Europe by Yehudi Menuhin to spread the gospel of yoga. And Rosa had uprooted herself and left her family for months to train with him. Lee had been sent to Rosa by one of her earliest teachers, and Rosa had seen something in Lee that she felt Iyengar would approve of—her compassion, her sincerity, and her eye for detail. She took it upon herself to train her, free of charge, as she’d been taught, step by step. Rosa instructed Lee in the asanas with a meticulousness that was at times maddening. They’d work for hours, sometimes days, on one pose, just as Iyengar had done with her. Rosa taught by positioning Lee’s body, but also through language, beautiful, precise metaphors to describe every movement that made each gesture come alive—the “dome” at the arch of her foot, the “head of the cobra” when she pulled back her shoulders. Rosa’s language and intensity made Lee forget that she was in the most ordinary of ordinary suburban houses on Long Island. She’d take the train from the city and walk to Rosa’s house each morning, have a cup of Folgers instant coffee and a Stella D’oro anisette toast with her, and then allow herself to be transported to a different world. Rosa made Lee study the yoga sutras, too, so thoroughly that at times Lee thought it might have been easier to finish medical school. Sometimes they fought. Rosa pushed too hard, could be mean, and was stingy with praise. Still . . .

  Lee has a great deal of respect for the training that a lot of the teachers she knows have received, but she can’t help thinking at times that their workshops and crowded seminars are like skimmed milk compared with the heavy cream of the days she spent with Rosa.

  Alan was skeptical of yoga at first. He was a gym fanatic. Lee knows he would never admit it to anyone, but what really got him hooked on yoga was mula bandha. That much-discussed little “lock” that’s supposed to control the flow of energy between the upper and lower halves of the body and, ultimately, the energy between earth and sky. Alan certainly wasn’t the first man in history to discover that if you could truly master the mysteries of that subtle inner lifting of the pelvic floor, there were a whole lot of energy flows you could control in your body. The benefits sure outweighed those of free weights. Indeed.

  She wasn’t complaining. She’d never really wanted to go on birth control anyway, and once Alan had his bandhas disciplined, they didn’t need to worry about pills or condoms. And back before the twins and before the studio became so demanding, back when they had what seemed like unlimited time . . . well, there are worse ways to spend one, two, sometimes three hours than exploring the limits of Alan’s self-control. Indeed.

  Back then, when everything in their lives seemed to be going so well, the performative aspects of Alan’s lovemaking didn’t bother Lee so much. “Watch this,” he’d say. “Look at me, Lee,” he’d say, and she’d happily oblige. Mula bandha, baby. Go for it. Because they felt so connected, because she felt as if he was hers and she was his, it was all part of their intimate connection. It wasn’t about her and him, it was about them.

  But now, Alan’s little stunts and impeccable timing seem different somehow, and on the afternoons he comes by the house, as he’s started to do again, she feels less as if it’s about them than about him having an audience. Any innocent bystander would do.

  Lee is actually mul
ling all this over as they’re having sex, and if that’s what’s on her mind, it can’t be a particularly good sign.

  “Watch this,” he says as he pulls out. “On the count of ten. Watch me.”

  But really, when you come down to it, it’s all self-appreciation more than anything else, at least this part of it.

  A few minutes later, she comes back to bed, and he’s checking messages on his iPhone. She hates this contraption. Alan seems completely oblivious to the fact that half the time he’s talking with her, he’s playing with it—texting or looking at e-mails or whatever it is he does. It’s created holes in their conversations that he fills with meaningless interjections of “ummms” and “yeah yeah yeahs” that tell her, even when they’re not face-to-face, that he’s peering into it.

  “Have you noticed a difference in the boys?” she asks.

  “Yeah, ummm . . . I don’t know. How?”

  “Can you put that down for a minute, Alan? At least while we discuss this?”

  “You know it’s really insulting to me when you say that. Like you think I can’t do both things at once?”

  “I’m just asking you if you wouldn’t, that’s all.”

  He sighs in an operatic way, but puts the phone on the bedside table. “Happy?”

  It chirps. Text message, probably.

  “Well, have you?” she asks again.

  “Have I what?”

  “The boys. Noticed a change.”

  “They’re getting older; I mean, I don’t know. They’re taller. Kids hit puberty sooner these days, but they’re only eight. I doubt it’s that.”

  “I mean their personalities. There’s less fighting. At first I thought it was because Michael was getting less aggressive, but now I think Marcus is different, too. It’s like they’re balancing out finally, hitting some peaceful mean. And it began when they started practicing.”

  Alan puts his hands behind his neck and leans against the headboard. “They’re bound to change as they get older. I don’t go in for the whole yoga-equals-magic-fix thing. If it’s doing something for them, great, but no point in pretending it’s going to completely change their personalities. I keep trying to teach Marcus that song I wrote on the ukulele and . . . nothing. Not interested.”