I always figured that when I got pregnant we'd move to the countryside - where the whole family might blossom among the sunny neighbors and wild daisies. Instead, we are staying in Manhattan, because, as Richard said in one infamous argument, "it's the power center in seventeenth-century Dutch studies." I let out my breath and reach down to the floor. I move one foot back, then the other, allowing my belly to hang suspended like a wrecking ball between splayed hands and feet. To either side of me, a dozen very large women are posed identically, hands on the floor, rear ends pointing skyward.
"Move into Viparita Karani," orders Gaia. The Legs Up the Wall pose. I roll my body close to the wall and raise my legs. The effects of reverse gravity make me giddy. From this angle, I spot a few dark hairs sprouting from the knuckle of my big toe. I glance at the line of raised feet to either side of me. The pedicures are impeccable. By comparison, my unvarnished toes look bestial. The regulars at Hasharama are women who live in Soho's two-million-dollar loft apartments. They eat twenty-dollar gourmet sandwiches and can afford to spend two hours every day in the middle of the day at yoga class. They sport perfect blowouts and heavy rocks - diamond solitaires the size of cocktail nuts, or dazzling, multicolored rings from Cartier and Reinstein/Ross. They look like the silky extras from a Jaguar commercial, whereas I am more the Rent-a-Wreck type. I live on the northern side of Houston Street in a forlorn stack of concrete blocks that houses university staff. The rents are insultingly low compared to the local market, which puts them in the "barely affordable" category for Richard and me. My participation in Hasharama's exclusive yoga program comes courtesy of the university's enlightened insurance policies; my presence in the middle of every working day is one of the perks of being an unmotivated freelancer.
"Inhale. Escort your breath out of your body. Now open into Warrior One!" Gaia narrows her eyes into an appropriately martial expression as we all spread our feet wide, right knees bent, and hold invisible swords over our heads, trying to lower our bodies close to the ground without tumbling. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Susan. As always, she moves reverently from one perfectly executed posture into another. She has long, honey-blond hair and a lean body, on which her enormous belly bobs like a balloon on a stick. Her eyes seem distant, ethereal, perhaps a little fragile. A silver chain with a pair of small seashells hangs from her neck. Everybody knows she is Gaia's favorite pupil. I think of her as the girl with the vitamin fetish. Before class she downs several different pills of various sizes and colors. One day I asked her about it. "I have this amazing nutritional therapist," she replied. "She knows exactly how to balance my chi." To my other side, I can see a petite, businesslike woman with green eyes, a shock of carrot-red hair, and a large, teardrop-shaped beauty mark riding her upper lip. Her belly is so big it seems she's renting it from someone else. Next to her is a designer blond, the kind of woman who won't wear anything that doesn't have a label prominently displayed. When she finds one of the positions uncomfortable, which happens frequently, she sighs dramatically and wilts into a tangled lump on her Marc Jacobs yoga mat.
Dominating the center of the room is an olive-toned six-footer. She is unmistakably Spanish. From her supernatural bone structure, I've decided she is a model. I have to consciously avert my gaze from her so as not to be caught staring.
Truth be told, I find the Hasharama ladies a little scary. I do look forward to seeing them, if only to compare bellies silently. But I can't picture any of them eating cold take-out from the carton night after night. They aren't people like me. Richard thinks it's all a big joke. "Maybe you have more in common than you think," he says, when I told him about the Hasharama regulars. "Even the rich get pregnant."
Suddenly one of the women lets out an exasperated snort. "Eeaaooouu!" It is the New Girl. She is an immense, gangly woman and she wears her pregnancy like a basketball strapped to her waist. She has big, brown, because-I'm-worth-it hair and a permanently startled expression on her face, as though surprised to find herself alive, pregnant, and in a prenatal yoga class. "Oh my god, that bagel is sitting right in the middle of my stomach like a log," she says to no one in particular, her voice screeching in from the wrong side of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Gaia inhales noisily, implicitly chastising the New Girl for her outburst. |
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