I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but in the six months that I’ve been a client coordinator at my yoga studio, I haven’t exactly been keeping up my practice.
Then he shows me how. He says it wouldn’t be cost-efficient to print a whole new batch and draws careful lines on five flyers. I know this is just the way Dex is; he’s a perfectionist, which obviously has something to do with his being such a success. But when the landlord calls, as lately he does at least once a day, it’s me who tells him that Dex is in a meeting, at lunch, there’s no manager on duty, just me, sorry, I’m just the front-desk person–uh, excuse me, client coordinator–sorry, I’ll be happy to take a message. There is never a message. I figure it’s all part of the entrepreneurial challenge, which I’m pretty clueless about myself, so who am I to question Dex?
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But I don’t like to think bad thoughts. I don’t like to think bad thoughts about Dexter most of all because I believe his heart is open and pure at its center, and from it came this chakra spa, which by association must have a pure center, too. I stand at the front desk and tuck my tail and chin and feel the four corners of my feet root down through the earth, and I relax my jaw, and I think that here, here, I am cultivating that pure center. Pure and purifying, every day, every minute, every second.
I make it through half of the flyers before the rush for the 4:30 class. The teacher, Javier, is really into the breath of fire, which is all about short, quick exhalations–fnh! fnh! fnh! fnh! fnh! fnh!–and the navel should be moving toward the spine on each breath, like, visibly, and if you’re really good like Javier wants you to be, you can do this 180 times in a row without stopping. I’ve improved over the years, but eventually I always start gasping or my navel jerks out of sync with my exhales, which is so frustrating, and really I hate to admit this, but it’s gotten so I hate it when he asks us to do the fucking breath of fire.
Here’s Petra Rusiecki, whom I think of as our irregular regular. Today her orangey hair looks freshly dyed, and she’s wearing it in pigtails even though she’s got to be pushing 75. She carries her turquoise yoga mat in her hot pink tote bag, which features the Statue of Liberty against a fake night skyline and NEW YORK in bright yellow capital letters. A blond lady who’s been trying on tank tops gives this bag a troubled glance, like maybe she thinks there’s a bomb in there. Or more likely it just offends her aesthetic sensibilities. But Petra’s oblivious, counting out change for the bottled water she always buys before class.
She stares at me. “Vehena? I register since two months.”
“You’ll get full credit or–”
