Really Good, Actually(32)
I could not sell Lauren on Israeli martial arts, but I did convince her to join a singles bowling league on the grounds that there might be a few hot guys in attendance. This was a deception. I knew there would be maybe one eligible man among the bunch, even in a best-case scenario. Every class I signed up for—every group workout, creative writing seminar, or weekend workshop on making your own essential oil blends—was wall to wall with the recently dumped, most of them women, all of them much older than me.
Once, at an extremely ambitious “introduction to bouldering” evening I’d found on Groupon, I saw two women near my age and got excited, thinking, this is it, this is how you make friends in your thirties. But it transpired that they were not amateur rock-climbing enthusiasts hoping to make connections; they were sisters, there to support their mom, who was—you guessed it—deep in the middle of her second divorce.
“It’s hard,” one of them said, putting chalk all over her hands in a way I found inscrutable and weirdly alluring. “She keeps saying, ‘We must admit that the heterosexual experiment has failed.’ And like, I agree with her, but she’s not a lesbian, so . . . I don’t know what she thinks the plan is.”
Later, when I was sitting on the floor of the rock-climbing gym, watching the supportive-if-cynical daughter clamber up the simulated cliff face, her mother sat down nearby, offered me a Capri Sun, and sighed so long and loudly that I dusted myself off and left.
Outside of bouldering, I tried a macrame class, a “stitch and bitch” evening, and a pottery night where everyone around me frantically shaped clay into little breasts for plant pots; there was a tie-dyeing workshop, a pan-Asian cooking weekend, and a group fitness class where we were encouraged to scream throughout, releasing our rage and whatever was holding us back from our undefined, individual goals. This I left after the instructor hollered, “There are more important things than MONEY!” and the entire class cheered, even though it had cost them all forty-seven dollars to be there.
It had cost me nothing, and a big reason I was so into my new hobby of “having hobbies” was that most activities allowed you to attend a first class for free. The city was teeming with opportunities to try crafts and athletic hybrid activities at no charge. If you had enough time on your hands and weren’t fussy about things like studio cleanliness or instructor expertise, you could take multiple free yoga classes any day of the week.
I continued attending my local studio’s restorative class (Calvin never reappeared), but otherwise shopped around, taking hot yoga, yoga for runners, and something called “Rihanna yoga” in different but nearly identical storefronts across the city. I would zip to Mixed Level Movement before my 10:30 seminar (Enter Wet: Weather on the Elizabethan Stage), then walk into the gloomy, windowless room where I taught, my head held conspicuously high. After class I’d disengage my core and slump over my desk for seven hours before stopping in for another round of subsidized chaturangas on the way home.
Most of my non-yoga efforts were centered around unlocking some untapped but prolifically talented creative side that various leaflets and online class descriptions assured me lay dormant within us all. My apartment slowly filled with tangled yarn “plant hangers,” lopsided clay sculptures, and a miniature Zen garden resembling a litter box with a small takeout fork attached.
I did the majority of this alone. My friends were anti-activities on principle, and I could no longer invoke their sympathy in the same way I had earlier in the summer. They were used to it by now—I was going through a breakup and would be for the foreseeable. They couldn’t be expected to drop everything and come to my side whenever I felt bad. I felt bad all the time! Occasionally, as I struggled with glue and yarn or cut up little bits of fabric to sew onto a bigger bit of fabric, I would imagine my contented friends: Emotional Lauren snuggled up with her laid-back boyfriend, Nour, watching nature documentaries and crying about baby animals; Lauren coming home from an F45 class to her perfectly appointed apartment for one, ready to order fancy delivery; Amirah and Tom finding their light over tapas; Clive watching a movie with the handsome older dudes with whom he was in a kind of throuple situation. And there I was, tie-dyeing a towel.
Eventually even my single friends were not single enough for the path I was on. Clive ducked out after the fitness class I had brought him to turned out to include a jazz dance component. Lauren broke at paint night as we stood side by side, drinking wine with twelve other women all outlining the same image of a city skyline at sunset. She added a few swipes of pink to the corner of a fading sky and said, “This is self-harm. This is worse than when my boss made us go axe throwing.”
I could not sell anyone from the group chat on axe throwing, and Amy had spent the last two weeks holed up in a loft with some finance guy, alternating between texting this is IT!!!! and ignoring me for days. Instead, I took Nathan, a bearded, muscular man I’d met several years ago at a house party, who had recently responded to one of my Instagram Stories at three a.m. with lol.
Nathan was the kind of man who would have been considered vaguely alternative ten or even five years ago, but whose signifiers now combined to make clear that he was a former suburbanite who had moved to the city, gone vegan, and taken a job in music PR.
“People think it’s all grain bowls and acai,” he said, taking a wide stance and eyeing the axe in his tattooed hand. His flannel shirt and ripped jeans seemed fused to his body, like someone had vacuum-packed Kurt Cobain to store over winter. “But I’m living proof that you can eat like crap and still live a plant-based life. Ask me which Doritos are vegan,” he said, winding up. “It’s not all of them, but it’s more than you’d think.”