Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

by Wednesday Martin

  Their tribal allegiance also extended to their uniforms, which bonded them together while setting them apart from us. While we were wannabe ballerinas, they were wannabe biker chicks, rich mommies who, improbably and astonishingly enough, dressed like gangsters. The first time I saw a woman sporting a red handkerchief folded and tied LA-gangland-style around her head and a pair of tight exercise pants that said POSSE down the leg, I wanted to sidle up to her and whisper, “I saw you at Margie Levine’s daughter’s bat mitzvah at Temple Emanu-El last month. You are so not a Blood or a Crip!”

  It wasn’t just what they wore or how they acted that set the SoulCyclers apart from us Physiquers. It was what they did. They bought bikes in the studio or studios of their choice, at up to $8,000 per year for one in the front row. In class, they yelled and groaned and shouted with abandon as they spun to deafening, pounding music. They sweated. They swore. For all I knew, they farted. They let it all go, getting in touch with their ecstatic inner fabulous gangster stationary bike rider. One woman who did both classes explained to me that while SoulCycle was a sweaty nightclub/hot-yoga-class mash-up (they turned the lights out in the room and spun by the light of a candle), Physique 57 was an uptight girls’ school.

  The sense that they are wilder and more fun and cooler, the Birkin to our Kelly, is clear in one of the most widely told stories about SoulCycle. Legend has it that a mother at my son’s exclusive nursery school, married to a billionaire financier and notorious womanizer, discovered her true self at SoulCycle. Miserable in her marriage, it was said, she took up the spin, fell for her female instructor, left her husband, and lived with and cycled next to her Soul Mate at the front of the class at the East Side studio happily ever after. That story says it all. They were wild and brash and experimental, and we were straitlaced and risk averse. They took chances, and let their freak flags fly, while we took careful sips from our BPA-free water bottles. They were lesbians and we were straight. Or, they were butches on stationary Harleys, and we were femmes in kitten heels.

  I won’t lie—I thought the SoulCyclers were a little too too. The Queen of the Queen Bees was a SoulCycler, and that alone would have clinched it for me. But, having lived downtown for years, I must admit I also snickered internally at my sense (which could have been entirely wrong) that many of the SoulCycle mommies seemed to believe exercise could make them not just fitter but also cooler and edgier. Give me a break, I thought when they hooted like wannabe subversive rappers and called one another “thug.” They reminded me of teenaged suburban girls piling on the black leather and taking Metro-North or the Long Island Rail Road or the PATH into the city for the evening, in a bid to be tougher and more countercultural than they were. I’d rather be mistaken for a prissy matron, I thought when I saw them fist-bumping outside class, than try too hard. So go ahead and misunderstand and underestimate me. It’s true: in my Physique 57 loyalty, I had kind of gone around the bend.

  But however you look at Physique 57 and SoulCycle—two very different versions of exercise and “female-ness” available to the tribe I studied—both are a lot of work. And both confer an identity, a fantasy that being there doesn’t just elevate your heart rate and make you fitter but actually changes who you are. I could not stop thinking, that summer, of the girls who apprenticed as geishas in pre-WWII Japan. Isolated, rigidly hierarchical, and punitively demanding, the okiya where they were trained by older geishas was an entirely separate world, one with its own rules, beliefs, and codes of beauty and conduct. It took years of hard work and assiduous, dedicated study to master the effortless-seeming, highly choreographed rites and rituals of geisha-dom, to learn to be beautiful in “the geisha way.” But after this process, each girl was transformed from an ordinary person into a “flower.” She was the most desirable of all things to men, a flawless hostess and ideal companion, an incarnation of the most lauded cultural ideal of womanhood. And so she earned the admiration of an entire society.

  All this working out, all this zealous, dedicated striving to be a particular kind of fabulous, fit, and chic Manhattan Geisha with children, all this identity and ambition tied up in your exercise practice, would have been unfathomable to my mother and her generation. She and her peers dieted. After having babies, they survived on black coffee and Special K with skim milk, cantaloupe, melba toast, and low-fat cottage cheese for a period of weeks or months. Later in life they did fast walking, or perhaps they tried jogging. But mostly, they watched their weight by watching what they ate. For them, it was hard to be hip over age thirty. They were given, and gave themselves, permission to let themselves go a little bit at a certain point. Sure, they went out and had fun. But they were tired, and they usually didn’t have full-time or even part-time nannies, owing to economics and ideology, and many of them looked like it. By the time they were in their midthirties, they might even have let their hair go gray.

  Nothing could be more foreign to the tribe I studied and lived among. Not for them the giving up. Ever. Not for them the languid, passive not-eating of the past. Theirs was an active and engaged quest for thinness, one predicated on always doing. Like geishas learning the arduous tea ceremony or the rules of sophisticated conversation, the women all around me were willing to practically kill themselves in their quests to look as though they had the effortlessly perfect, graceful bodies of twentysomething nulliparas. As for food, fat free and low cal was pathetically passé. It had to be organic, biodynamic, detoxifying, and antioxidant-rich. It had to work as hard for them as they worked on their bodies, or they would just skip it. No one knows repeated rejection more intimately than a server proffering canapés at an Upper East Side or East End cocktail party. His life is No. No thank you. Not for me. No. No thanks. Nope.

  Why? What was the point of all this effort, this endless fighting and trying and depriving and especially all this working on and working at our selves? After all, the men on the Upper East Side and in the East End didn’t really bother to flirt, or hold doors open, or look at you the way men did in Rome or Paris or anywhere else in the world. In fact, the extremely successful men of the Upper East Side and the Hamptons always seemed a little distracted and bored, because they were—by the endless smorgasbord of stunning women all around them, all the time, preening and primping for their benefit. More than one European girlfriend remarked to me that men here seemed always to be looking beyond you, to see if there was a woman who was better or prettier or more important than you at the party or in the room. That was part of the reason we tried so hard, I suspected. The mixed-up numbers, the glut of beautiful young and young-looking-for-their-age women everywhere you looked, had changed everything about how men and women related in my world. Ratcheting up the display of their bodies, recourting their husbands and attracting the glances of other men was, conceivably, an attempt to cut through all the noise and make an impression on men who were utterly habituated to physical beauty.

  And yet, this explanation failed to account for one of the most remarkable social realities of summer life on the East End. Like the Physique 57 and SoulCycle classes themselves, the whole place was astonishingly and comprehensively sex-segregated. Women came out in June, the second school let out, to set up house with the kids and the nannies. Husbands went back and forth on the weekends, but wives ran the show during the week. Everywhere you looked in the Hamptons, as far as the eye could see, there were women, women, women. Even when the men were there, the women of the tribe I studied often eschewed their company in favor of a girls’ night out or an all-women’s evening trunk show or a nighttime charity purse auction to benefit a school or battered-women’s shelter. At dinner parties I went to, it was not unusual for men and women to sit at separate tables, even tables in different rooms. In spite of all the hot bodies artfully displayed, there was not a lot of sexiness in the air. In fact, there was a remarkable absence of it. “Somebody had better flirt with me,” I used to say to my husband before we headed out for the night in Manhattan or the Hamptons. I was stunned by the lack of playful i
nteractions between men and women. What, I wondered, was the point of life and having a body you worked on like crazy, if you didn’t have fun flirting? Utterly unlike geishas, the women I studied gave the impression that they were somehow above things like flirting. Like geishas, however, they were above sex. Sure, they had babies, so we knew they had had sex. But their bodies, put through such rigorous paces, tended to so meticulously, turned out so carefully, were purified and not for earthly pursuits.

  In fact, the exercise and careful attention to dress seemed to take the place of sex in fundamental ways. Women were too tired, too stressed, too irritated for sex in Manhattan, they all seemed to agree when we talked about it over dinner or drinks. And once out here, removed from the stressors of the city, buffered by the beach and lovely weather, their kids in camp all day or even at sleepaway camp for weeks, rested and relatively happy, they were removed from men. The whole place put me in mind of a menstrual hut, and in fact we women all spent so much time together all summer long that our periods frequently synchronized. My identification with the tribe deepened with every exercise class and trip to the juice bar after, with every ladies’ luncheon and evening “event.” Compared with our girlfriends, our husbands were unfamiliar to us at summer’s end.

  This, I learned, was their code. They strove equally to be beautiful for the men who were not there and for the women who were. They did it to bond with their fellow tribe members, but also to measure up to, and to take the measure of, others, day by day, evening by evening, event by event, class by class. They were like stunning red male cardinals, or breathtaking male peacocks, feathers spread, ready, always, to be seen. A beautiful, fat-free body and a forever-young face were prestigious “gets,” to be sure. But they were also requisite uniforms, a corporeal version of the grippy socks or handkerchief headbands women wore to class or the paddleboards they carted in the back of their Range Rovers. My body wasn’t exactly my own, it seemed to me at summer’s end. It belonged to the tribe, too. It was for working on and working at and improving, tirelessly, ceaselessly, endlessly, as hard as I could, for as long as I could stand it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Girls’ Night In

  Fieldnotes

  The natives seem to have accepted me. After many months of my observing their tribal ways, countless attempts to mimic and participate in their rites and rituals, and numerous overtures of friendship on my part, the hazing process may have ended. I have been invited to a gathering of high-ranking females at the dwelling hut of a wealthy and powerful chieftain and his wife.

  Most tribal events are comprehensively sex-segregated. Events inside and outside one’s personal dwelling appear to be opportunities for females to bond; build coalitions via social inclusion, social exclusion, and gossip; and reaffirm their places and the places of others within the dominance hierarchy. In these contexts, self-presentation—including adornment of the body with particular textiles and of the face with specific pigments and enhancements—is of utmost importance.

  THE INVITATION came by email. “I don’t know if you got my voice mail on your cell,” the mom from my son’s class wrote, “but I haven’t heard from you. I’d love to have you join for dinner next Thursday night at my place. Some fun girlfriends. LMK, Rebecca.”

  Oops. No, I hadn’t heard her message; all my friends knew I rarely used my cell for anything but texting and email. But I still felt anxious and remiss, like a bad guest already, as I puzzled over what “LMK” might mean (“Let me know!” a friend explained later, surprised I didn’t already K) and dialed Rebecca’s number. After leaving a message apologizing for not responding sooner and saying I’d love to attend, I sent her an email, too. How should I sign off? I wondered. “Xx”? No, Rebecca hadn’t, so I wouldn’t presume to.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d sent an email to Rebecca, a beautiful, dark-haired mother of four whose husband was one of the most successful financiers in the city. But it was the first time I’d received one. Previously, my email correspondence with her had been notably one-sided; obliging my little son’s requests, I sent friendly suggestions that our sons might play and had never gotten a response. Sometimes I was able to flag her down in the hallway to set something up for our kids, particularly after she saw me chatting with Alpha Dad, who had lifted my status and my son’s with his attentions. And, as I ran into Rebecca around the city at exercise class and at Michael’s—a midtown restaurant I thought of as the campfire of the tribe I studied—and in other clubby contexts that suggested we might have something in common (both of us shopping for clutches at Bergdorf Goodman for the same event one day; encounters at a few fund-raisers), she became friendlier.

  When word of my book project got out (“I’m studying what it’s like to be a mother on the Upper East Side,” I explained to anyone who asked), Rebecca and a number of other mothers had become decidedly more open and interested in saying hello and chatting. Some even suggested we have lunch or coffee to discuss their take on how one lived and mothered here and what it all meant. They weren’t all warm or friendly—perhaps some didn’t trust me, in spite of my assurances that I wasn’t writing a tell-all or a satire but a memoir of my own experience, inflected by sociology and anthropology and a sense of humor, too—but many were. They wanted to talk about more than what we usually chatted about in the hallways—what we were wearing and where we were going on vacation. Some of them told me stories about rough patches in their marriages, or about growing up poor, or about feeling on the outside (“I’m from San Francisco. To a lot of these people, that’s sort of like I’m from Mars. They’ll never really accept me”). I had more in common with them than I expected. Away from the school hallways and the luncheons and the galas, they were approachable and comfortable. As one told me, “I think the issue is that a lot of these high-achieving, hard-driving, highly competitive mommies and daddies can be perfectly nice one-on-one. But something about the group dynamic makes some of them awful.”

  It was nice to see a new friendly face or two at drop-off; in spite of the bump in rank Alpha Dad had given me and my son, those school hallways, jammed with steely-eyed alpha mommies in heels, could still feel daunting. My downtown life and connections continued to ebb as I poured more energy into caring for our children and my work, so having friendly relationships with the women at my older son’s school and my younger son’s playgroup, a social life that paralleled my children’s, felt at once efficient and utterly necessary. Moreover, in the status- and hierarchy-obsessed tribe I was studying, having Rebecca invite me to her apartment was something like an endorsement, a grown-up version of being asked to sit at the lunch table with the cool kids. Part of me knew it was ridiculous to care, but another part of me—the one that had worked hard to understand this group of women, get some playdates for my little boys, and make a friend or two myself—was gratified to be invited in by a gatekeeper as influential as Rebecca. And if these women wanted to explain their world to me, as I was hoping they might at Rebecca’s, all the better. I just prayed the Queen of the Queen Bees would not be there. I had my limits.

  “What are you going to wear?” Candace asked me over lunch a few days later. She was a fluent interpreter of our town’s cultural codes. “I have a doctor’s appointment on the East Side later; that’s why I bumped it up,” she had explained as we sat down and she noticed me noticing her Chanel jacket and bouncy blowout.

  “No idea,” I admitted, explaining that I couldn’t ask any moms at school or playgroup, since I didn’t know who was invited to Rebecca’s and who wasn’t. Candace agreed, nodding as she sipped her iced tea, taking in the scope and delicate nature of the task at hand. “Dress to fit in, not to stand out,” she suggested. “You want to let the hostess shine, right? Like at a wedding.”

  “Actually, it’s sort of a moms’ night in,” I mused. “No husbands. So it will probably be a little more casual.”

  Candace looked dubious. She had listened dutifully and sympathetically for months now to my stories about the incre
dible over-the-topness of my new tribe’s outfits and attitudes. Something of a socialite herself—“but in quotation marks,” as she always said—she knew these women and their ways firsthand, too, from nights out at charity events and restaurants, and from luncheons for causes. Having grown up in California and married a native New Yorker whose parents were fixtures on the social circuit a generation earlier, Candace viewed the world I studied with irony and humor, and was an outsider/insider after my own heart, a natural anthropologist. “It’s not going to be casual,” she pronounced flatly.

  She was right, I realized, about “low-key” being a foreign concept in this world. The perfect bodies honed from hours at Physique 57 or Soul Cycle would be complemented by high-caliber wardrobes and airbrushed-looking faces and perfect but never fussy hair, whether men were present or not. Everyone, it seemed, was forever ready for the close-up, prepared for the photo op, with never a wrinkle or a wisp out of place. This “always beautiful”-ness wasn’t the same as natural beauty—it was natural, effortless beauty’s polar opposite. The Upper East Side women I knew worked as hard at looking perfect on the playground as they did at the Playground Partners Luncheon, and made no secret of it. This commitment, this unwavering determination to leave nothing to chance when it came to their faces and wardrobes, this studied-ness, was as much a part of their daily uniforms as were their expensive flats and cross-body bags. Indeed, they were so prepped and primed that some days I expected there to be a “step and repeat”—an area where one stood, like an actual celebrity, to be photographed—outside the playgroups, the schools, the coffee shops around them, the $5,000 birthday parties for five-year-olds, and anywhere else the tribe gathered.