A Deeper Stretch 🪟
Life altering exercise class.
Bend wasn’t as much a yoga class as it was a habit. The class goers relied on it, some admitted they were addicted to it, that they religiously attended, but Bend students were also quite quiet about the fact that that’s what they were always doing behind closed doors.
The woman behind Bend was Louise — tall, tanned, long dark hair with an unidentifiable accent. She taught classes from her home in Amagansett, or maybe Holmby Hills. She pronounced it in a way where half the class heard one and half heard the other, but it was gauche to ask for clarification.
Students found out about Bend via word of mouth. The original mouth was to be determined. Bend didn’t have a site, a calendar, social media, a studio, or private trainings. And yet four mornings a week, 45 women plugged in their smartphones and computers, pulled on spandex in different shades of black, and sat in front of their cameras, ready to be instructed to move for an hour by Louise. After a good Bend class, one would feel like they were carrying around a glowing secret behind a smug grin all day. After a bad class, one debated emailing Louise an apology for a less than spectacular performance, the weight of the $70 price tag would slug behind each key stroke.
Sometimes Louise would ask the class to put a spoon in their freezers so that in their next class they could move it across their cheekbones and massage their jaw as a form of lymphatic drainage. Other mornings she instructed the class to imagine empty, white rooms surrounded by ocean waves, and then let out a blood curdling scream. She called the terrified reaction an “awakening exercise”. Some classes left students sweating so much that their tiny cameras would fog up, and other classes it was rumored that she’d put students into a meditation so deep that they’d wake up hours later, their husbands walking into closets and workout rooms asking who was on the camera staring at them sleeping. Louise would still be there; she’d smile and wave from her screen, then click out, ending their streaming connection.
Because students took classes from their own homes, Bend relied heavily on household props. Books were for balancing on heads. Bowls of hot water were for steaming one’s pores and opening one’s throat. Belts were for wrapping around extremities, stretching parts of the body that were usually only bent by accident. An ice cube was a lesson in patience. Windows were for light and periodically reminding students that there was a world outside of Bend.
Recently at a coffee shop, I met with a former Bend student. “If you missed a class, Louise would send you a handwritten letter about her disappointment,” she told me, adjusting her Ivy League baseball cap (“My son’s,” she whispered). She nervously looked around the Palisades cafe before continuing her story. “I remember the card stock smelled like jasmine. Seeing something as so personal, her handwriting, gutted me.” She oddly licked the rim of her coffee mug as I wrote down her experience of “stretching under Louise’s control.”
Several weeks later I found myself on the back porch of a Nantucket barn. “Everyone knew the city women were the most committed,” another former student told me, handing me a glass of iced tea. “If you thought that because the classes were online that you wouldn’t recognize other students on the street, you thought wrong.” She took a long drag of a cigarette and watched as I clicked my tape recorder off. “It’s nice to be able to get away from the city in the summer, isn’t it?” She asked me. I looked around the backyard and nodded.
Her clam-colored manicure grabbed my wrist as I stood up, and she said there was one thing I could use on the record; I sat back down. “Louise preyed on her student’s unknowns. I don’t know if she studied who we were married to, or where we worked, or went to school. But she knew too much about us, you could tell by the comments she made during class that she researched who she let in to those classes.” She speculated on about the credit card statements, and full names required at sign up, and emergency contacts. “She would’ve had access to a lot of information about all of us, right? It’s pretty scary, isn’t it?” she asked me, her voice begging for clarity on the situation. “It is,” I told her.
One of the last women I spoke to was based in Jackson. Her house looked like something designed by Marcel Breuer — long, windowed, transparent, stoic. I was finishing up my research and hoping for the last details to anchor my story in, when several roads led me to Wyoming. “You know,” she said, stiffly shaking a martini. “I don’t blame the injury on Louise or Bend.” She had a neck brace since an accident in class two months ago. “I blame it on not adding enough heat to the room during the class. You really need dry heat for your muscles to move the way the Bend method wants you to. It’s actually quite good for you.” I nodded, pulling an olive pit out of my mouth and wiping my wet fingers on my wool pants. I jotted down the description of the brace, the way the former student described Bend as a method, the stone covered room.
“She’s really quite powerful,” she convinced me of Louise, going on about what it takes to be a successful person, a successful businesswoman, in between bites of cheese and sips of martinis. “She weaponized the feeling of inadequacy, we bought what she sold us… a promise of Bend making us feel better. And for most of us it has.” I listened to the stories about showing up, pushing oneself. I listened to the stories about leaving class feeling like a better mom, a better wife, a better friend, a better boss. I listened to stories about accountability in the form of a subscription model. Showing up. Showing up. Showing up. The sun began to set, and the martinis started to make me feel sick. I called a car.
“I guess if I could say one thing about Louise for your story, it’s that I don’t think it’s her fault all those women died that morning.” She pointed to the sprawling horizon out the glass pane to the right. “For what it’s worth, every time I’ve done a backbend out my window, I really have gotten a deeper stretch.”
More fiction. I’m still working on a larger fiction project, but wanted to give you a scary summer read in the meantime.💌
If you haven’t yet, you can also read my scary story about a female founder, a dinner party gone wrong, and an influencer nightmare.