by Leigh Stein
Tonight, here in the country, I was on my third mason jar.
There would come a time when I would be able to go on sabbatical from alcohol—it just never seemed like the right time to try. First I’d had to survive 2016, then New Year’s Eve (who wanted a sober NYE?), then the inauguration. Then I thought, Let’s be realistic, there’s no way I can quit until Richual is acquired and I know I have a financial cushion, so I held out for that future, a moving target.
I’d done my Google research. I knew that if I wanted to modify my drinking habit, I needed to make sobriety easier to accomplish, and drinking harder. I should not have kept wine in the apartment (I bought it by the case). I should have declined offers to “join in on a bottle” over lunch meetings, but it was too easy to say yes, to perform the role of the fun cofounder, whenever Devin’s food issues were most excruciatingly apparent. Could I just get a hot water with lemon? How is the asparagus prepared?
Access to drinking was my problem; not drinking. When I finished this bottle, there was another bottle to open, right in the door of the fridge, and if I knew the wifi password, I wouldn’t be able to resist adding the Richual app back on my phone, thumbing down to refresh, refresh, refresh.
“Access,” I said out loud in the bright kitchen. “Excess. Access excess access excess.” I hardly had access to anything at the moment, but it was usually everything—newspapers, magazines, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Street View images of the little white house I lived in as a child, the local weather forecast for Wausau, my high school crush’s LinkedIn profile, Harvard Business Review articles on leadership qualities, a YouTube clip of Amy Poehler as the cool mom in Mean Girls, a trove of Beyoncé gifs. There were few barriers to accessing the tremendous amount of material I could entertain myself with while I avoided facing my life.
Maybe that was the problem. What if there were a better way to control access to Richual itself, to cut down on all the drama, and provide a better user experience? What if all of our assumptions were wrong? Rather than scale as fast as possible, what if we limited our users? Wouldn’t people be willing to pay for a more heavily moderated internet? Wasn’t that what sucked most about the internet—the lack of any accountability or oversight?
If millennials were willing to pay for Blue Apron, for campsites with wifi and prebuilt tents, for wine-of-the-month clubs that catered to whether they preferred the taste of bitter herbs to blackberries, wouldn’t they pay for a social media platform where they could share all the things they couldn’t say on Facebook because that was where their parents were?
We didn’t need premium video content to turn our current users into paid subscribers. We needed a whole new model.
I found a piece of paper and started scribbling:
More users = better (NOT NECESSARILY)
Subscriptions are free = advertising pays vs. paid subscriptions
People value what they pay for
Self-care is worth paying for . . . We are self-care nation . . . something about putting on your oxygen mask before helping others . . . We are the oxygen in the oxygen mask . . . Do you want free oxygen or do you want . . . Devin could come up with the tagline. She could contribute something.
I had to reach her. We could announce our pivot at the Foundress Summit, where Devin was moderating the keynote! I was hardly ever in such a party hat/balloon emoji mood. I uncorked a new bottle and refilled my jar. A toast to myself. Then I picked up my phone, only to be cruelly assaulted by the home screen: “No service.”
If I were a wifi password, I thought, where would I be?
Evan wouldn’t want to live in a world without high-speed internet access. To find the password, I only needed to figure out which room was his.
Past the master at the top of the stairs, there were a few more bedrooms along a narrow hallway, plus another door at the end that led to an annexed wing (or so Devin told me), where the boys’ nannies had stayed when they were little.
The first door on the left led to a guest room, with two four-poster twin beds from the last century, where Devin had slept, leaving an unmade bed behind her for someone else to clean up. I tried the room next to it, which had bunk beds and a wooden chest painted to look like a parrot cage.
As soon as I opened the door across the hall, I knew this was Evan’s room. The bedding was striped dark gray, more modern than the lace and florals in the other bedrooms. The bedside lamp had built-in USB chargers. Above the headboard, there was a framed black-and-white photograph of a woman’s legs dangling off a fire escape. A desk against the windows had a keyboard but no monitor, a Moleskine notebook, a wireless Bose speaker, and a coffee mug of pens. I started rifling through the desk drawers to see if I could find anything that looked like a password. Paper clips, rubber bands, a cell phone charger that plugged into a car’s cigarette lighter, a movie ticket stub so old I couldn’t even read the name of the movie, just a bunch of random useless garbage. But he obviously spent time here on a regular basis, or else why go to the effort to decorate this room?
When I opened the Moleskine notebook, a single brass key slid out of a pocket attached to the inside cover. Holy shit! I’d almost forgotten my bird. She’d been trapped in that room for hours. What if the bird was thirsty? I ran downstairs, my steps making a racket in the empty house, and filled a little teacup with water.
Already, I was mentally rehearsing the story of how I came up with the idea to transform my company’s revenue model, on the same night I rescued a trapped animal that represented the flickering hope of Americans who wondered if we would ever escape this darkness. That was the night I realized everything was going to be okay. It would make a great anecdote for a podcast interview. Gently moving the bird trap out of the way with a foot so I wouldn’t accidentally activate the trigger, I closed my eyes and fit the key into the lock. With a satisfying click, I was in.
All I could hear was the squeak of my own feet on the floorboards. There was no sound of wings. I squinted in the near-dark until I found a lamp switch.
The ceiling was so low, this must have been former servants’ quarters. It was now a junk room, barely big enough to hold a black futon covered in piles of plastic packages and cardboard boxes and sheets folded in sloppy stacks and rubber-banded envelopes of photographs. “Here, honey,” I said, whistling. Assuming the bird was still scared, hiding, I started to lift and move the boxes and piles and what I found myself holding were cords of rope, a black silk sleep mask that said “Fuck” on one side and “Sleep” on the other, a copy of The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss, and a few plastic bags of wigs. There was a “MISOGYNY KILLS” black tank top that I’d seen Evan play Frisbee in once. There were a few vibrators, still in their packaging, that I recognized from the pile of products we were sent to review at Richual. Of course Evan wouldn’t spend his own money furnishing his sex dungeon. He’d practice pleasuring women with whatever gadgets were marketed for women to pleasure themselves with.
I had seen too much already. I was inside the lair. I was buzzed enough to open one of the envelopes of photographs without wondering whether I’d crossed a line.
A woman with very pale skin wearing a red wig, eyes closed, lying flat on her back in the bed with striped sheets upstairs, the sheets pulled up to her collarbone, like a corpse. A younger woman with a pixie cut, sleeping on her side with her hands sweetly folded under her cheek, a praying Precious Moments doll. There were more of the woman in the wig but with the sheets pulled down and her round breasts exposed, her stiff nipples pointing right at the photograph above of the headless woman on the fire escape. The Precious Moments figurine, her eyes still closed, with a penis in the O of her mouth. The women looked like dolls—was that his fetish? Evan turned women into his sex dolls?
Before I could finish my own thought, I heard the burglary alarm go off. My heart raced against the cage of my chest—the room was rigged. I’d been caught. I ran out of the dungeon t
oward the sound: the ringing phone mounted on the wall next to the refrigerator.
“It’s me,” a voice said. “It’s John.”
“I didn’t even know there was a landline here. You scared the shit out of me.” I reached for my wine jar.
“The Secret Service is here.”
“The what?”
“About your tweet.”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” I said. I was having a nightmare. That’s all. I was falling from a building. My teeth were crumbling in my head.
“They’re asking me when you’ll be home.”
Devin
In the locker room, I changed out of my dusty pink Alice + Olivia button-up shift dress with burgundy piping and velvet pussy bow into a porcelain Heart Opener Bodysuit from Lululemon and cropped Earl Gray Awakening tights with a comfortable high-waisted fit. Using a Groupon to get my pubes laser-removed back when it was still socially acceptable to use Groupon was an act of self-love. Our trend forecasting firm said pubic hair was making a comeback but tell that to anyone working in the boutique fitness industry.
At Pheel, the walls were covered in shadow-box frames filled with gemstone pendant necklaces. A curtain made of fawn-colored feathers hung by jute string from a piece of driftwood next to the reception desk, where Elecktra always greeted me by name and handed me a glass of filtered water, no ice. I’d been coming to Pheel since before they had bottles of Chanel Hydra Beauty Serum and baskets of organic cotton tampons in all the bathrooms. It used to be just six or eight of us on Tuesday nights in one room of a yoga studio. Then Pheel became so popular that they took over the yoga studio. And when the Weight Watchers across the hall closed, they rented that space, too, and doubled the size. Now there was a merch shop where they sold Palo Santo smudge sticks (“burn what’s haunting you or just burn up your Insta feed”), a $495 meditation mat in “bisque,” and natural crystal Chakrub dildos in amethyst and jade, designed to “remove blocks caused by sexual trauma.”
What was once Weight Watchers, that sad arithmetic of self-denial (and what if you’re not a math person?), was now a sanctuary, with light mauve walls and a floor lacquered with a subtle lavender sparkle. After kneeling at the altar at the front of the room, where there were white pots of white orchids, white pillar candles, and a collection of clear quartz for healing, we put our mats down in alignment with little pale purple hearts on the floor that organized the sanctuary into twelve rows of disciples.
My favorite teacher was Tressa, self-identified Scorpio. It was always hard to tell if she was twenty-seven or more like thirty-seven, but sometimes she told the class stories about being a backup dancer for Destiny’s Child, which made me think she was even older than I thought. Her lips and cheeks were incredibly full yet realistic, thanks to Juvéderm. The sad part was that her dance career was halted when she got a double hip replacement and she credited the Pheel method with helping her rewrite her own corporeal story, which so inspired me because of how much of our bodily experience is actually articulated in the mind, and if we can alter our bodies, we can alter our potential, and I really believed that.
I saw some familiar faces in the row ahead of me—the blonde with the tight traps who always wore a braided ponytail and a strappy racerback crop top; the older woman with thin hair and loose skin around her triceps even though she tried so hard, she really did, but aging is bodily terrorism; the pretty brunette with the bubble butt in white hot pants that showed off her olive skin.
A woman in black yoga pants covered in cat hair and a gray T-shirt that read “Purdue” put her mat down right next to mine and looked genuinely relieved to see me. She must have been one of my Richual followers, but whether or not we’d met before, I couldn’t remember. Her face was already red and damp from having to climb three flights of stairs to the studio and I felt a surge of empathy for this person who was brave enough to come up so close to someone she only knew online, without worrying about her appearance.
“Have you taken this class before?” she asked.
“I’ve been coming since it was Weight Watchers.”
“I’ve tried that, too,” she said, sitting with her legs straight out and reaching for her toes in an imitation of Muscle Back in the row ahead. “But you don’t need to lose any weight.”
“All those years of having an eating disorder have paid off,” I joked, but she didn’t laugh. I could understand why she was nervous. She’d heard stories about Pheel. There was a little flutter in my heart center when I realized I could be her IRL inspiration.
Tressa dimmed the lights and the candles glowed brighter. Class started with “The Chain” by Fleetwood Mac, and for the length of the song, we alternated between pounding our heels on our mats, squats, and curtsy lunges. My calves felt caffeinated as they began to blaze with energy. Tressa cranked the volume on “If you don’t love me now, you will never love me again,” and when it got to the driving guitar solo, we all started running in place and grunting “Huh” on every fourth beat.
RUN RUN RUN HUH RUN RUN RUN HUH
RUN RUN RUN HUH RUN RUN RUN HUH
RUN RUN RUN HUH RUN RUN RUN HUH
“This is your container!” Tressa screamed. “Make the container yours!” I closed my eyes and felt the blood pounding in my ears and all the anxieties of the world beyond my mat floated away, like dandelion fluff.
After the warm-up, the music softened and Tressa told us to put one hand on our heart and one on our belly and feel the pulse of our unique life force. “If you don’t love yourself now,” Tressa said, “you will never love yourself again. Love yourself now. Use this container, this space, for love.”
Purdue might have been crying next to me, but I didn’t open my eyes to look because I wanted to give her privacy.
“For those of you who don’t know me, I had an injury,” Tressa said, her words amplified by headset throughout the sanctuary. “They told me I would have to relearn how to walk. This was a wound to my livelihood.” This was a story I knew already, but I never got tired of hearing it, like Goodnight Moon.
“They told me there would be pain,” Tressa said. Her voice was scratchy sexy like Emma Stone’s. “They said, here, take a pill for your pain. And I said—” I opened my eyes to see her go up into a one-armed handstand against the wall, her legs splayed like a starfish.
Next up was Florence and the Machine and four minutes of alternating side plank and thirty seconds of down dog and four minutes of down dog burpees and three minutes of quadruped hip extensions (single-time and double-time) and then back to repeating the burpees, which was usually the point in the sequence where I had to summon all my remaining willpower to not throw up, but the harder the burpees got, the louder the music got, and Tressa was telling us to scream and I was, and Tressa said, “No, really, I mean scream,” and everyone around me was moaning like a primal layer of pain on the soundtrack, like we were giving birth to ourselves, and when it was so loud and so dark in the room that I was absolutely positive my anguish was anonymous, I cried out, “I MISS MY DAD,” and then I sort of blacked out until I recognized the sex voice of Kings of Leon and I was on my back doing a modified bridge pose hip thrust with butterflies and my glutes were sobbing, but I wouldn’t stop until Tressa gave us permission to go into child pose.
“Whatever story you are telling yourself about your own body, about your own capability . . . change the story.”
In child pose, I sensed Tressa right behind me. She sat and draped herself across my back, spine kissing spine. My knees wide, I surrendered to the deepening of the stretch in my inner thighs and low back. If I turned my cheek to one side, I could smell her, sweet and familiar like cardamom and fig. She chose me. I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had really touched me, with such weight and pressure and intention, and that made me literally start crying, face down into the bumpy pillow of my hands, my lips slicked with salt.
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At home, I rolled out my yoga mat, lit a row of tea candles on my windowsill, and made a quick video of going into a headstand from a straddle—a piece of cake once I was totally wrung out from Tressa’s class, nearly light-headed with the pleasure of emptiness. There was some under-boob sweat on my bodysuit, but from upside down it just looked like a shadow.
Here’s looking at you, kid, I posted in the caption. My dad used to always say that to me. But then I remembered Maren’s rule about how many times you were allowed to mention a dead parent. I deleted it.
Shout-out to the special friend I met tonight, I wrote.
No, that made me sound desperate. I never even asked Purdue for her username.
Inversions great for bedtime, I posted. After a long day of attending to the needs of others and agendas you never signed up for and eating on THEIR schedule and having to make tough decisions, the universe has a message for us and it’s: go upside down. See the world from another point of view. Tomorrow is waiting.
Then it was time for a shower. I had a mold-resistant and antimicrobial chrome showerhead so I wouldn’t get cancer. First I washed my hair with Christophe Robin purifying shampoo with jujube bark extract and then while my hair mask was soaking, I double cleansed with Kiehl’s Midnight Recovery Botanical Cleansing Oil, followed by a glycolic acid face wash by Kate Somerville. On my body, I used exfoliating yoga soap, made with shea butter and marine nutrients, with an aquatic bouquet of sea kelp and coconut. On my vulva, I used Drop of Hope from Lush, made with rapeseed oil and tofu.
After toweling off and slathering my body in Mojave Ghost body lotion by Byredo, I slipped on a lightweight bamboo jersey racerback nightie. There were 512 hearts so far on my post and thirty-six comments. @PaleOhHellNo said, You glow girl! She had twice as many followers as I did and was friends IRL with Kendall Jenner. @SurvivorGirl96 asked for the brand of my yoga mat and I told her. @YOLOFlow said, Aren’t headstands recommended for morning, not bedtime? and I replied with a shrug emoji, and then @Youre1WildAndPreciousLife wanted to know if headstands are good for people with eczema, but I could not handle even thinking about eczema so I didn’t respond.