PART I
Pre-Production • May 2017
CHAPTER 1
Brett
Would-be yoga instructor number four has punk blond hair and a bodybuilder’s tan. Her name is Maureen and she’s an ex-housewife who has spent the last seven years working on a documentary about the exodus of the Anlo-Ewe tribe from Notsé to the southeastern corner of the Republic of Ghana. If it were up to me, I’d say look no further.
“Thank you for coming all the way up here to see us,” Kelly says with a pleasant smile she doesn’t intend Maureen to ever see again. I know she decided against her the moment she took off her coat to reveal her pink sports bra and mommy gut. Kelly never got mommy gut after she had a baby, and so she believes mommy gut is not a result of biology but a choice. Wrong choice.
I’ve stayed mostly silent during the interview—this is Kelly’s thing—though not in writing—but Maureen turns to me, wringing her hands, shyly.
“At the risk of sounding like a total brownnoser,” she says, “I can’t leave here without saying how lucky this generation of young girls is to have someone like you on their TV screens. Maybe I would have come into my own sooner if I had someone like you to show me how great life can be when you embrace your authentic self. Wouldhave saved my kids a lot of fucking grief.” She slaps a hand over her mouth. “Shit.” Her eyes go wide. “Shit!” Wider still. “Why can’t I stop? I’m so sorry.”
I glance at my twelve-year-old niece sitting in the corner, texting deafly. She wasn’t supposed to be here today, but the babysitter’s dog ate a grape. Toxic, apparently. I turn back to Maureen. “How. Dare. You.”
The silence stretches, uncomfortably. Only when it becomes unbearable do I flash her a grin and repeat, “Howfuckingdare you.”
“Oh, you’re kidding!” Maureen doubles over with relief, resting her hands on her knees. She releases a breath between her teeth; half whistle, half laugh.
“Easy,” my sister mutters, reminding me of our mother in two terrifying consonants. Our mother could silence a car alarm going off all night with the slow turn of her head.
“Your daughter is stunning, by the way,” Maureen addresses Kelly, changing tack in an attempt to placate my stern-lipped sister, but it is the exact worst thing she could have said about her daughter.Stunning. Striking. Exotic. That face That hair.All of it makes the green tendon in Kelly’s neck throb.My daughter is not some rarefied tropical fruit, she sometimes snaps at well-meaning strangers. She is a twelve-year-oldgirl. Just call her pretty.
Maureen sees the expression on Kelly’s face and laughs, nervously, turning to appeal to me one last time. “You should know that there’s already a wait list for your book at my local library. Only two people ahead of me, but still. You haven’t evenpublishedit yet.”
I offer her the plate of Grindstone artisanal doughnuts.What’s wrong with Dunkin’?I wanted to know. But Kelly had read about designer doughnuts onGrub Streetand insisted we stop in Sag Harbor on the way. “You get the bacon maple for that.” I wink at Maureen and she blushes like a much younger woman who married a man despite all those fantasies, starring her best friend.
“Do you get that a lot?” theNew Yorkmagazine reporter asks when Maureen is gone. Erin, I think she said her name was. “Women who credit their coming out to you?”
“All the time.”
“Why do you think that is?”
I lace my fingers behind my head and kick up my feet.Cocky, straight women often call me with a giggle. “Gay looks good on me, I guess.”
Kelly makes that face our mother warned would stick. I wish she were alive so that I could tell her she was right about something, at least.
“It’s working for you,” Erin agrees, blushing. “Whew!” She fans her cheeks. “Where’s the bathroom in here?”
“Down the hallway on the left,” Kelly tells her.
“No, Brett,” Kelly says, quietly, as soon as the bathroom door shuts. She means Maureen. No, Brett, we aren’t hiring her. No, Brett, it’s not your call. I reach for Erin’s recorder and switch it off so Kelly isn’t caught fat/age/tan shaming on tape.
“Hey,” I hold up my phone to take an Instagram story of our surroundings, “the yoga studio is your baby.” I typeNEW SPOKE SPACE COMING JUNE ’17. Click, done. Search for the location. Montauk End of the World doesn’t come up for a while. Service is wonky out here, which reminds me... “By the way,” I say to Kelly, “it’southere.”
Kelly stares at me, blankly.
“You said thank you for coming all the wayuphere to see us. Montauk isn’t up. It’s east. You want people to think you’re an old pro at the Hamptons scene...” I pull my sweatshirt over my head and pet the static out of my famous hair.
This is, in fact, Kelly’s first timeouthere. A ticket to a comedy show, I realized, after mentioning it to the commercial designer I’ve hired to transform the abandoned hardware store on Montauk’s Main Street into a pop-up yoga studio. A pop-up yoga studio on Montauk’s Main Street. If you’re worried I’ve become more basic than the insult “basic,” you should be.
“Never been to Montauk before?” the designer had repeated back to us in slow disbelief, as if my sister had never seen avocadotoast on a menu, or heard Justin Bieber’s music. He spread a palm over his throat, choking on Kelly’s quaintness.
And so earlier, as Kelly and I were setting up the space for the yoga instructor auditions, Kelly told me not to mention anything about it being her first time in Montauk to theNew Yorkmagazine reporter who was on her wayout hereto document the first hiring call for the yoga studio.
I tried to parse her reasoning before asking about it. Kelly gets cranky when you ask her to explain things she thinks should be obvious, another fetching facet of her personality she got from our mother. “Why not?” I’d finally been forced to ask. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why it would be a bad thing for people to know this was Kelly’s first time in Montauk. I’ve barely been to Montauk, and, if anything, it better serves our “brand”—yup, still the grossest word in the English language—that Kelly has never spent a summer mainlining rosé in a slutty one-piece at Gurney’s. We are thepeople’sfitness studio.