Tales from the Yoga Studio

by Rain Mitchell

  Not long ago, Graciela could have counted on Stephanie to be her supporter in a situation like this, but since Imani is so excited about Stephanie’s screenplay, Graciela feels on the outside there, too.

  “Since Lee brought it up,” Imani says, “what pose makes you afraid you’re going to fart?”

  “Halasana,” Stephanie says. “Every time.”

  “Burrito-asana,” Becky says. “Especially with sour cream.”

  “Right,” Imani says. “You skinny thing, what do you know about sour cream?”

  “You gringas,” Graciela says. “What do you know about burritos, period?”

  To her huge relief, they all laugh. Her phone starts to ring, and she gets up from the table to answer it. It’s Katherine, her voice low and hesitant, as if she’s upset.

  “Are you still in Silver Lake?” she asks.

  “Still here at the Crème,” Graciela says. “What’s up?”

  There’s a long silence on the other end of the phone, and then Katherine says, “I hate to pull you away, but when you’re done there, would you mind driving me back up to my house?”

  It’s a relief to have an excuse to leave the café and her impressive friends, especially since she managed to say something before she left. “I’ll be right there,” she tells Katherine. She goes back to the table, picks up her pack and her yoga mat, and apologizes for leaving.

  “Katherine needs a ride home,” she says. She bolts down the last of her iced tea. “It was really great meeting you,” she says to Becky. “I know it’s nerdy to say so, but I’m a huge fan.”

  Becky gives one of her trademark pouts, an expression Graciela has seen dozens of times on TV and in movies. “We didn’t get a chance to talk,” she says, and she really seems to mean it.

  Graciela can feel herself blushing, as if she’s a kid being lavishly praised for a small, insignificant accomplishment.

  “Imani told me you’re in the new Beyoncé video,” Becky goes on. “I was dying to hear what she’s really like.”

  “Let her go,” Imani says. “She can tell you next time. Or you could just ask me.”

  As Graciela is going to get her car, she realizes that while she was feeling intimidated by Becky, Becky was dying to ask her about her experiences. Who would have guessed it? Maybe Becky was feeling a little intimidated by her.

  Katherine is sitting on a bench a few doors down from the studio. She has on her cheerful little yellow print sundress and she waves and smiles at Graciela, but when she gets in the car, Graciela can see right away that something’s wrong.

  “Everything okay?” Graciela asks.

  “Someone was supposed to give me a ride home and she bailed. I could walk, but I’m a little tired after class, and it would take almost an hour.”

  Graciela can tell this isn’t it at all, but she figures it’s best not to push. As upset as everyone is about the studio closing, Katherine has reason to be most worried. Her business is there, and she’s known Lee the longest by far.

  She drives up the hill slowly, silently watching as the neighborhood gets quieter and prettier as they go. Katherine once mentioned that she lived in a nice place, but Graciela didn’t imagine it as being this lush and exclusive. How much do massage therapists make, anyway?

  “It’s this one,” Katherine says, pointing to a beautiful little bungalow half hidden by purple bougainvillea.

  “Wow” is all Graciela can manage. There’s something unbelievably romantic about the house, and even more so knowing that Katherine lives here alone. Why is it, Graciela wonders, that being single looks so appealing to her these days? She knows very well that if she were solo she’d be miserably lonely and spend half her time looking for a boyfriend anyway.

  “No one can believe I live here. It makes more sense when you consider that I could be asked to leave any minute. The terms of my lease, so to speak. And with the way things are going, I probably will be.”

  “Bad day?” Graciela asks.

  “You could put it that way.”

  “It must be tough for you with the studio closing. Do you think Lee’s really making a wrong decision?”

  Katherine seems to be thinking this over, not as if she’s unsure of her opinion, but as if she’s not sure she wants to share it. “I think she’s making a decision for the wrong reasons.”

  “Alan? ” Graciela asks. She’s a little surprised she said this. The topic of Alan is one she hasn’t wanted to go near. But it just popped out.

  Katherine shakes her head and laughs in a sad way. “It’s always the quiet, shy folks who know everything. What do you think of Alan?”

  Graciela realizes, as soon as she hears Katherine’s question, that she’s been waiting to be asked this by someone for a while. She hasn’t spent much time around Alan, but when she has, she’s noticed something familiar in his attitude, a strutting kind of confidence that isn’t remotely convincing. She’s heard him throw in his own credentials when someone praises Lee’s teaching, even when they have nothing to do with the conversation. She’s seen this in Daryl and has always tried to make excuses for it. Watching Alan has made her realize just how desperate it seems and how hurtful to Lee. Still, she’s not yet ready to say everything she believes. “I guess it’s good they’re getting back together if it’s what Lee wants. If it were me, I wouldn’t trust him, that’s all.”

  Katherine looks at her and then says softly, “Don’t tell me he made a pass at you.”

  “It isn’t that. I mean, he makes little comments when I see him, but I just ignore them.”

  “Excuse me for saying so, but with that face and body, you must hear ‘little comments’ a lot,” Katherine says.

  “I never heard them from Conor,” Graciela says. Another remark that just popped out without her meaning to say it.

  Katherine glances through the windshield and then opens the passenger door.

  “Wait,” Graciela says. “What happened with Conor? He’s crazy about you. You know that.”

  Katherine leaves her door open, but falls back against the car seat. “Conor’s not ‘crazy’ about anything. He’s the most sane person I’ve ever met. He’s afraid of being hurt; I’m afraid of hurting him.”

  “Really? And it has nothing to do with you being afraid of getting hurt?”

  Katherine gives her a weary gaze. “I’d invite you in, but the place is a mess and I’m all out of Diet Coke.”

  I’m not the most together person in the world, Graciela thinks, and I’m not the brightest, and I’m not the most accomplished. But I’m not una animala and if I can tell Becky Antrim something she doesn’t know about the biggest celebrity in the world, I can tell Katherine that she’s acting like a fool. She starts to close up all the windows of her car. “I don’t care about the mess,” Graciela says. She unbuckles her seat belt. “And I don’t drink Diet Coke anyway. You and I need to talk. You’re inviting me in and you’re going to tell me the whole story.”

  That said, Graciela gets out of the car and strides down the walkway toward Katherine’s house. When she doesn’t hear footsteps behind her, she turns around and says, “Katherine, I said come on. I’m not taking no for an answer, and I don’t give up easily. How do you think I got in that video?”

  You don’t think Katherine has a point about YogaHappens, do you?”

  “What? That they’re the evil empire? Jesus, Lee. Look at the money they’re offering us.”

  “But maybe it’s a trap,” Lee says. “We close the studio and . . .”

  “Honey,” he says. “That’s paranoia. It’s hippie, druggie fantasy. Katherine would say anything to keep you here. You can’t believe her.”

  The phone in the studio rings, and he goes out to the reception desk to answer it. When he comes back into the yoga room, his face is flushed.

  “Something wrong?”

  “That was Zhannette and Frank’s private secretary. You’re not going to believe this.”

  They’re canceling our contract, Lee thinks, with more rel
ief than regret.

  “We’re invited up to their house in Laurel Canyon next week. For cocktails.”

  Lee knows better than to show her disappointment. “Oh. Well, that’s nice. It should be interesting.”

  “Nice? Interesting? Are you kidding me? These people are so reclusive and private, even Dave and Chuck haven’t met them. This is amazing. It’s huge.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t wear a T-shirt, huh?”

  Stephanie’s neighbor Billie has three daughters—Danni, Frankie, and Bobbie. The two oldest moved out of state, but Bobbie lives closest, up in San Francisco. Even so, she, like the others, never seems to visit. Earlier in the week, someone from the yoga studio where Billie practices called Stephanie (Billie had listed her as the emergency contact) to say that Billie has been passing out routinely in their superheated classes. There’s concern that she’s dehydrating in a severe way and is possibly at risk for a heart attack. Before they try legal intervention of some kind, the studio is hoping a family member can stop her from taking classes.

  Stephanie went to talk with Billie, but when that proved fruitless, she finagled Bobbie’s number and gave her a call. Bobbie was surprisingly nice on the phone (Stephanie had been imagining that the daughters all had a grudge against their mother; how else to explain the fact that they never visit?) and, more surprising still, she showed up in L.A. a couple of days later.

  When she knocked on Stephanie’s door to thank her for calling, for helping out, for being around to do chores for her mother, she was dressed in a pair of jeans and a man’s sleeveless T-shirt—a “wife-beater,” to use a term Stephanie has always found disturbing on about six different levels. Given the androgynous outfit, the lean, strong build, the flattop haircut, and the fact that Billie has told her her youngest daughter is a plumber, Stephanie was expecting someone fairly . . . aggressive? Instead, Bobbie—“If you don’t mind, I prefer Roberta”—is a soft-spoken woman in her late thirties with gorgeous blue eyes and a completely appealing manner. When Stephanie invited her in, she saw that she has about her some of the unexpected vulnerability that Stephanie has noticed in a lot of the more (why not say it?) butch women she’s known. Maybe everyone is always playing against type. Roberta (even though “Bobbie” suits her better) sat opposite Stephanie, her legs spread and her hands hanging between her knees, and poured out her concern for her mother, especially given her stubbornness. In case Stephanie was wondering why neither she nor her sisters ever shows up, it’s because Billie banned them from coming—she doesn’t want people to know she has such old daughters.

  “Let’s face it,” Roberta said, on the verge of tears, “she’s headed into some kind of dementia here. I’ve been trying to get her to move up to San Francisco with me. My girlfriend, the bitch, just moved out, so I’ve got the room. But you can imagine how that went over with Billie.”

  When Stephanie asked her if she wanted to grab a sandwich, Roberta said okay, but only if she let her pay. It’s the least she can do.

  They go to the self-consciously homey place on Melrose, walking distance from Stephanie’s apartment, where she wrote a lot of the screenplay for Above the Las Vegas Sands. The snippy little waiter who usually treats her like a tourist is civil to her. Maybe he’s intimidated by Roberta’s biceps, more nicely shaped than his own.

  “How are the burgers here?” Roberta asks Stephanie, studying the menu.

  “Well, to be honest,” Stephanie says, “I became a vegetarian about a year ago, and this place only opened eight months ago.”

  “Again: how are the burgers?”

  Oh, well. “Amazing,” Stephanie says. “Especially the one stuffed with onions.”

  It isn’t until Roberta orders the cheeseburger that Stephanie realizes she hasn’t used her anti-Preston mantra in weeks now. Hasn’t needed to. Not that she hasn’t thought of her ex, it’s just that since she stopped drinking, since she started writing the screenplay for Sybille, she hasn’t felt that same urgent desperation about him, the desire for revenge, all of it. Being happy in herself really is the best revenge, except she doesn’t even think of it as revenge. It’s just nice to be in control of her life again. None of it has anything to do with Preston.

  “It’s funny,” Stephanie says. “I used to chant the word ‘cheeseburger, ’ like a mantra, whenever I thought of my ex-boyfriend. It helped me get over him, in a way.”

  “Every time I think of my ex, I chant something, too, but it isn’t working. Maybe I need a new mantra.”

  “What is it now?”

  “ ‘Cunt.’ ” Roberta shrugs. “She left me for a twenty-year-old figure skater.”

  “I didn’t know there were any lesbian figure skaters,” Stephanie says and then worries that maybe that’s offensive somehow.

  “Eh, she’s not much of a lesbian, if you ask me. She’ll be with a man in six months. She’s not much of a skater, either, now that I think about it. What happened with Mr. Cheeseburger?”

  “I never really knew, which was a big part of what was so painful. We were together for three years. He said I was cold, I was distracted.”

  “I hate when they think they have to blame you for their leaving instead of owning up to the fact that they’re unreliable, promiscuous sluts.”

  When Stephanie’s garden salad is set down in front of her, it looks bland and unappetizing somehow. Not what she really wants to be eating. Roberta bites into her cheeseburger and gives a thumbs-up. When the waiter says, “Anything else I can get for you ladies right now?”

  Roberta mops at her mouth and says, “Bring her a side of the onion burger. With Swiss.”

  Stephanie is about to protest but has a sudden insight that she likes the idea of being a vegetarian more than the fact of it. (Why else did she sneak in here in her more looped moments and wolf down the burgers?) But it’s so clear that it doesn’t matter to Roberta one way or the other, she lets it go.

  “I had a thought about your mother,” she says. “Maybe if, instead of getting her to stop going to yoga altogether, I could try to take her to a different kind of class. I go to one up in Silver Lake that’s great, but not heated. And the teacher is incredibly sensitive to everyone’s particular body. She has some background in medicine. Billie met her.”

  Roberta puts down her food. “Something wrong?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “My mother would say it looks like someone just stepped on your grave.”

  “I realized the place I’ve been going to is about to close, that’s all. I’ll miss it. A lot.” There are also the circumstances under which Billie met Lee, but best not to revisit that unfortunate moment. She can’t know if Billie told her daughter about all that (probably not), though Stephanie is pretty sure Roberta wouldn’t condemn her for it. “But it should be open for another couple of weeks. Maybe you’d like to join us?”

  “I’m heading back to San Francisco in a day or so. On top of that, the idea of watching my mother put her foot behind her head is something I’d rather not discuss over lunch. Maybe next time I’m in town.”

  “You’re coming back?”

  “There’s no point in keeping up the charade about her age, and she’s getting too unreliable to come up and visit me. I’ll be around more often.”

  The snippy waiter delivers Stephanie’s burger. Stephanie holds it up. “Here’s a toast,” she says. “To cheeseburgers.”

  Roberta taps hers against Stephanie’s. “To cheeseburgers everywhere.”

  For days, Katherine has been mulling over her conversation with Graciela. As soon as they got into the house, Graciela started asking her questions about what had really happened with Conor, and why, and what she planned to do about it. It was funny, really, seeing her be so assertive and insistent about getting answers. It was almost as if she was playing a role, like a kid suddenly interrogating her parent. It wasn’t a role that suited her perfectly, but maybe that’s why Katherine found herself opening up completely, telling her all her fears about her past and what Conor
would make of that, and then forcing herself—though it was torture to do so—to describe what had happened with Phil, the whole stupid, awful, humiliating series of events.

  Graciela looked at her for a few silent, unnerving moments and then said, “I hate to tell you this, Kat, but you’re not nearly as bad and unreliable and nasty as you seem to want to believe. You’re one of the most solid, together people I know. Look around. Whoever is living in this house is not out of control, crazy, or currently self-destructive. Write him an e-mail. Tell him what happened. You don’t even need to apologize. And let me know as soon as you’ve got it done.”

  Katherine had tried to do just that a number of times but had always stumbled over apologies, lame excuses, the crazy details.

  She’s lying in bed, and it’s almost dawn, and she can see the strange, magical blossoming of light in the sky outside her windows. The blue seems to deepen and then start to bleach out into paler shades. She’d love to stop the day right here, when it’s silent and still, cool and full of possibilities. Graciela was right. Of course. She isn’t afraid of hurting Conor. Not entirely, anyway. She’s been terrified that he’s going to hurt her, reject her, leave her stranded. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. But it’s not so bad when you’re dating a creep and it’s a given from the outset that he’s going to wound you somehow or other.

  But how many possibilities can the day hold if you don’t stick your neck out? If you’re not willing to take a few risks, you have to settle for things as they are.

  She gets out of bed and goes into the dining room. She sits in front of her computer, an ancient Mac desktop thing that is so chunky and heavy, the screen so weirdly small, that it has the look of another era altogether and fits right in with all her vintage clothes and décor. She folds herself into a lotus position on the chair and starts to type.