Tales from the Yoga Studio (2 page)

Stephanie's friend, still on her back on the floor, stretching out her spine like a cat, is a young, dark-haired beauty with the long legs, perfect muscle tone, and unmistakable signs of injuries past and present that Lee knows all too well from observing students. A dancer, there's no question about it.

“You're embarrassing me, Stephanie,” Lee says.

“Give me a break,” Stephanie says. “You love it.”

“You're right, I do. But for my sake, try to be a little more subtle about it?”

“Subtlety is so overrated. You're fantastic.”

Lee stacks the purple Styrofoam blocks neatly on the shelves. Alan has held a couple of kirtan workshops at the studio, and in addition to the inexplicable injury of moving out two weeks ago, he's added the insult of complaining to her about petty housekeeping chores. The mats aren't neatly stacked; the blankets haven't been properly folded; the straps are tangled. “I'm trying to create a sacred space with the music,” he said the other day, “and it doesn't help to have everything look so disorganized.”

“Are you
kidding
me? ” she felt like screaming. “You think I'm worried about messy
blankets
right now? How about telling me what's going on? How about talking about the mess you're making of our marriage?”

Instead, she's been breathing, tidying, and trying to give him some sacred space so he can get his fucking head together.

“I mean, Chloe and Gianpaolo are great teachers, too,” Stephanie says. “But you've got the magic, Lee. If I could convince Matthew to come out here one of these days, he'd get hooked, I guarantee it.”

Last week it was “Zac” and the week before it was “Jen” or some other single name that's supposed to convey the impression that Stephanie is on a first-name basis—and carries clout—with the Hollywood A-list. Maybe she does.

Lee has no idea if Stephanie or any of the other regulars have heard whispers of what's going on in her life. Alan practices at the studio, and he does a lot of fix-it projects around the place—he's a good carpenter when he puts his mind to it, and pretty skilled at dealing with small plumbing problems—so with all that and his music workshops, everyone knows him. Lee's asked Alan to keep their personal life between them (and anyway, the relocation is just temporary!) but ever since he read
Eat, Pray, Love
, he's had this annoying new need to “process” and “discuss” his feelings, which might mean complaining about her to total strangers. She shouldn't have suggested he read the book. It was like giving a loaded gun to a kid. She wanted him to understand
her
a little better, not to use it as an excuse to dodge the responsibilities of the studio and the twins and revisit the same old regrets about his songwriting and performing disappointments.

Stephanie, like a lot of the women who come to the studio, has idealized Lee's marriage. Lee and Alan, perfect couple, perfectly coordinated schedules, perfect bodies, perfect kids. This was somewhat less embarrassing to Lee back when Alan and the marriage seemed more ideal. She's pretty sure Stephanie comes to Edendale Yoga partly to soak up the aura of happiness and stability (in short supply in Stephanie's own life, Lee would guess) that hovered over the studio until recently. Lee is doing her best to maintain some of that uplifting aura while making sure the classes don't suffer at all. No more subtle references to her marriage in class! How did
that
happen?

Lee watches Stephanie walk out to the reception area. Before the door has closed behind her, she's checking her BlackBerry. Lee worries about Stephanie. She gives off the air of someone who is working twenty-four/seven, making calls, arranging meetings, trying to set up something on a film project she frequently refers to, dropping way too many names. She often comes to class looking as if she needs a good night's sleep, and it wouldn't shock Lee if it turned out Stephanie does more than yoga to help her relax at the end of the workday, and maybe in the middle of it, too. She claims twenty-eight, but Lee has a feeling it's more like thirty-three, that tricky in-between age. At least she hasn't gone “freeze-frame,” Lee's expression for the faces in class that remain surprisingly immobile when Lee has them do lion pose and asks them to stick out their tongues and scrunch their eyes. Or try to, anyway.

It's L.A. She's not judging. The last time she went to a yoga conference, half the teachers over thirty were complaining that their gyms and studios were encouraging them to keep up appearances “at any cost,” since students like to think yoga is going to keep them looking young from the outside in—and if it's just the outside, that's okay, too, at least for some.

In class, Stephanie pushes too hard. She's fit but not naturally flexible, and one of these days, she's going to hurt herself. She's short, with a cropped haircut that seems to be more about getting out of the house quickly in the morning than flattering her face. When Lee looks at Stephanie struggling through class, she sees a body that would look more natural and comfortable draped in another five or ten pounds. She's been coming for six months or so, and Lee has formulated a plan—not that she'd tell Stephanie. Her goal is to slow her down, calm the inner voices telling her she needs to push harder, talk louder, all in an effort to outrun age and whatever demons are hunting her down.

Lee has a plan for a lot of her students. Occupational hazard.
Way
easier than trying to formulate one for yourself.

W
hen the dancer friend is up and rolling her mat, Lee introduces herself. The dark-haired girl is even more striking close up—emerald green eyes, a (naturally) lush mouth, silky brown skin, and an effortless grace in her every movement. Except when she winces.

“When did you injure your Achilles tendon?” Lee asks her.

The girl—Graciela—does a surprised double take. It always amazes Lee what people think they can get away with.

“How did you know?”

“I got suspicious during your first down dog. The right and left sides of your body are in two different universes. You're not big on backing off from pain, are you?” Lee says it with a smile. She's learned how to make comments like this without having them sound like judgment or criticism.

“Not my forte. I'm sure you know how it is; Stephanie told me you have a lot of dancers practicing here. We don't exactly get points for backing off.”

“Modern?” Lee asks.

Graciela tips her hand side to side. “Contemporary. Hip-hop, mostly.” This is what Lee suspected—the muscular arms, the strong shoulders—but because Graciela is obviously a Latina, she didn't want to seem as if she was making assumptions. “I've got an audition for an important video shoot in three weeks. A Very Big Deal. I'm not even allowed to mention whose video.”

She pauses, a wicked grin on her face, obviously waiting for Lee to venture a guess.

“Beyoncé?” Lee asks.

Graciela squeals. “Oh, my God. Can you believe it? Do you know what a break this is for me?” She does a little leap and winces again. “I have to either heal or . . . well, there is no ‘or.' ”

Graciela's trying for a light touch, but the false optimism in her voice is something Lee knows well and is yet another thing she's happy to have left back at Columbia med school, along with the snow, the self-starvation, and the antidepressants.

“Promise me you're not doing anything crazy to ‘heal'?” Lee says.

“Yeah, well, I think you're going to have to define ‘crazy.' I go to a psychic in Venice Beach who told me I'm going to be fine, so I'm running with that. My doctor's an alarmist, anyway. I was doing some yoga at the gym, and I was about to try one of those superheated classes. That's when Stephanie insisted I come up here. I sometimes work shifts at a coffee shop she goes to.”

“Welcome aboard,” Lee says.

Graciela slings her bag over her shoulder. She has truly gorgeous dark hair, all ringlets, bounce, and shine. As she's gathering it back behind her head, she looks up at Lee and says, “Do you really think I'll be ready for the audition? I'm not kidding myself, am I?” The sparkle is gone from her voice, the cheery bravado. It's been replaced by that dancer despair Lee knows so well from listening to some of her students.

She studies Graciela for a minute. Part of the hell of being a dancer is that all that strength and beauty Graciela has, all the hours of training and practice, can be rendered insignificant by a little tendon problem or something else equally small, painful, and vital.

“Go out and make an appointment with Katherine,” she says. “She's our masseuse, and she's got a million little tricks. And then I want to see you here at least four times a week. We'll start you out in restorative poses. But I warn you, I'm going to keep my eye on you. I'm going to rein you in, and if I catch you pushing too hard, I'm calling you
out
.”

Lee gives Graciela a hug and holds it for longer than she meant to. When she pulls away, she sees a look of such intense anxiety and sadness on Graciela's face, she wonders what else is going on that she's not saying. There's so much she never learns about her students' lives outside the studio. “Oh, honey,” Lee says. “I know. But trust me, you just have to slow down and stay focused and have a little faith. We'll do our best, okay?”

“My budget's tight right now,” Graciela says. “I'll try to come as often as I can.”

Lee thinks about Alan, about his lectures on Lee's soft spot, how the studio is not a nonprofit organization. But what's one more person in class? And if Graciela can't afford it, she just won't come, and then, somehow or other, Lee loses out, too. She likes this girl. To hell with Alan. She founded the studio; she's the owner.

“Pay me what you can. And if that means nothing, that's fine, too.” Lee walks out to the reception area, then, having second thoughts, sticks her head back into the yoga room. “Just don't tell anyone. Especially a handsome guy with long hair you'll see around sometimes carrying either a tool chest or a harmonium. My husband.”

Among the improvements Alan has made at the studio is creating a lounge area, complete with room for retail, out of what had been a storage closet back when the studio was the showroom of a rug dealer. There are a couple of comfortable sofas and chairs where students hang out between classes and shelves that Tina keeps stocked with a growing collection of yoga-related products. The lounge is one of the best improvements they've ever made, as far as Lee is concerned. A little funky, admittedly (where would she be without the Furniture for Sale page on Craigslist?), but it's gone a long way toward helping build the community feeling Lee always dreamed about creating at the studio. In addition to the friendships, people have used the space and spirit of the practice to organize fund-raisers for a handful of local causes and a couple of international disaster relief efforts.

The retail area is another matter. Lee hadn't wanted to take on the responsibility of ordering and keeping track of the finances of what has become a small (very!) store, but Tina talked her into going ahead with it, claiming students need a convenient place to buy mats and headbands and a few other practical items. She would handle everything for Lee, split the profits with the studio, and get a free monthly pass for classes. The problem is that every product, no matter how mundane and seemingly straightforward, creates a controversy.

Tina is standing behind the counter when Lee walks into the lounge area, and she beckons Lee over.

“I need to talk with you about something,” Tina says.

“I'm a little pressed for time. . . .”

“It will only take a minute.”

Here we go,
Lee thinks. Tina is one of those young, super-fit yoginis with too much nervous energy and a tendency to get anxious if Lee asks the class to go into child's pose or to modify a handstand or back off on one of the more extreme twists. She's definitely competitive—mostly with herself. She was a platform diver in high school, and Lee is always reminding her that she's not going to have her poses scored. “I'm not a judge,” she keeps telling her. “I want you to work on enjoying it.” So far, she's seen lots of work and not much joy.

“It's about the tea,” Tina says and maneuvers her body so that no one in the lounge can hear. “I ordered this new organic brand that everyone is raving about, and without thinking, I ordered five boxes of
this
along with the herbal.”

She holds up a package of Earl Grey.

“Okay,” Lee says, waiting to hear what kind of debate was inspired by a box of tea. Tina recently graduated from UCLA and is back living with her parents, so Lee suspects it's a matter of too much time on her hands.