Chapter 25
Standing up at the sleek, black Noir St. Laurent Marble slab countertop next to the never-used Bertazzoni range in her brass-fixtured New York City kitchen, Dee portioned out half of a poké bowl and allowed herself one small bite at a time with a pair of ceramic chopsticks engraved with her initials.
As she chewed each bite precisely 50 times, she checked her phone and saw she’d missed seven calls. This time, they weren’t from George Walhickey III. They were from her mother.
Dee had been determinedly estranged from Joanna Bradley since leaving Little Falls, Minnesota, for Sweet Briar College, a women’s school in Virginia. She attended with a fairly substantial financial aid package, supplemented by work shifts in the student cafeteria and the on-campus snack market, where she sold chocolate-covered espresso beans to judgmental girls in riding boots and jodhpurs.
It was at Sweet Briar that Dee began to concoct her idea for FitFams. The sign-up sheet for stair-steppers was always long at the student gym, so Dee would frequently have to sit to the side and wait her turn. She’d watch her underfed classmates plod on stairs to nowhere, their hands gripping the bars, their shoulders scrunched up to their ears. She knew there had to be a better way to use this machine.
So, before the late-night rush at the market — when the riding girls were drunk and would allow themselves to buy Doritos — Dee would read up on fitness trends, kinesiology, and the mechanics of the stair-stepper. During early-morning runs she’d plot out the ways she would tinker with the machine to make working out on it more dynamic and difficult. While her roommate went to parties with guys from Hampden Sydney at the boathouse on the lake, Dee completed her personal-training certification.
Dee didn’t tell her first girlfriend about the FitFams plan, already sensing the temporary nature of their relationship and the financial potential of the business idea. Dee started seeing Sarah after she’d stopped by the market to buy and immediately eat a half-pound of Swedish Fish, displaying an astounding free-spiritedness about food and its effect on her body. They dated for about two years, until Dee unceremoniously dismissed her on graduation day, preferring to be unfettered when she headed to New York City to train as a coach at a high-end cycling studio.
She’d made it through the first round of phone interviews with Cycle City, which drew stars like Kelly Ripa and Neil Patrick Harris to its studios in New York City and the Hamptons, and was invited to attend Coach Camp. This was an emotionally and physically grueling six-week program, during which 10 coach-trainees lived together in a small Dumbo apartment and trained — how to cycle, coach, look, and sell for Cycle City — 10 hours a day. The company’s leadership team set up cameras in the apartment and kept the kitchen stocked with tequila so they could see the true personalities of their trainees during “off hours.” Some of the footage would later be sold to Netflix for a series.
Their housing was paid for and they received a $25-per-day stipend for food. Jobs were not guaranteed at the conclusion of the program. Dee, though, was a stand-out from the start, using techniques she’d picked up from a book on cults to encourage clients to become unlimited members. Two other housemates were picked to coach too, and the three of them moved into a tiny, one-bedroom apartment, split up with partitions, in Chelsea.
Coaches for Cycle City were not permitted to coach anywhere else. The idea was to become a personality, a superstar, a fit-lebrity. Pay was $65,000 per year, which in New York was almost laughable, but Dee didn’t eat much and was accustomed to living like a pauper. She kept her eye on her plans for the future, absorbing everything she could about running a fitness business, taking surreptitious photographs of the training manual (you didn’t get to keep it if you left) and bills that came to her studio.
During this time, Dee never called her mother. That was a clean break.
So why was her mother calling now? Dee grimaced, tossing the other half of her poké bowl into the trash. Money. It had to be. Her mother hadn’t reached out at all during Dee’s rise through the ranks at Cycle City, and she hadn’t called when Dee was scraping together seed capital for FitFams from small VC firms. Joanna didn’t call when Dee was covered in sawdust, building a reception bench, or when her fingers were blackened with grease from working on her stair-stepping machine. Her mother still didn’t call when Dee started to get some press after the opening of her first two studios.
But in the last year, as Dee’s success grew astronomically, her mother had started calling. At first the messages were bland, just quick hellos and maybe an update on someone Dee had never given a shit about in Little Falls (“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Samantha Yates is pregnant again,” her mother would say, a slight slur in her voice.). Then the messages became confrontational, scolding Dee for not calling back.
Today, in the six new messages, Dee could hear her mother crying. This was alarming, not only because Dee had never heard her mother cry, but also because the sound stirred an uncomfortable feeling in Dee’s chest, spurring her to call back.
Dee could picture the beige telephone, hanging on the wall in the yellow daisy kitchen, ringing through the trailer-sized house. She imagined her mother, sitting in the beat-up recliner, its corduroy nearly worn off, drinking gin, her eyesight swimming. Dee imagined how her mother would likely groan as she stood, her joints aching from years of arthritis, and hobbling to the phone.
“Bradley residence,” her mother said.
“Hi, Mom. It’s Dee.”
The line was quiet. Then Joanna Bradley snipped: “What’s the special occasion?”
“I’m not going to do this if you’re going to talk to me like that.”
“Fine, fine,” her mother said. “I’m just happy to hear your voice.”
“OK. What do you need?”
“What do I need?” her mother snapped. “I don’t need anything. You called me, remember?”
Dee rolled her eyes. “I’m returning your calls.”
Joanna huffed. “I didn’t call you.”
Dee rubbed her eyelids with her thumb and middle finger. “Come off it. You left me six messages today alone.”
“Hmph,” Joanna said. “I don’t know about that.”
For fuck’s sake, Dee thought. I don’t have time for this nonsense.
Joanna started to sniffle, and then Dee heard a thunk, like her mother had let go of the receiver and let it hit the wall before it just dangled there from its curly cord.
“Hello?” Dee said. She hated that she suddenly felt worried. “Mom?”
The next voice was not her mother’s.
“Hi, Dee,” her stepfather said.
Dee felt an immediate pain in her stomach. “I didn’t call to talk to you.”
“Do you know how many times your mother has tried to get in touch with you? Do you know how many nights I’ve had to listen to her cry about you, wondering why you’re not in your room?”
Dee was confused. “What? I haven’t been in that room in more than a decade.”
“Well, she doesn’t know that,” he said. “She’s not right in the head.”
“What did you do to her?” Dee yelled.
“What did I do? I didn’t do anything. I mean, OK, we used to have our knock-down, drag-outs, but she was just as bad as I was,” he said. She could hear him dragging on a cigarette. “No, I think she’s demented.”
“That’s not the right word for it,” Dee said.
“Whatever. She’s not all there,” he said. “You need to help her.”
“Me? I’m supposed to help her?!” Dee said, gripping the countertop until her knuckles turned white. “What about you?”
“What about me?” he said. “I’m out on disability. You’re the one with millions. I heard you were on the cover of a magazine.”
“No, no money. Not if you’re there,” Dee said.
“Oh, come on,” he said, his voice suddenly sickly-sweet. “Things weren’t all bad, were they? We had a good time.”
The cold in her gut turned white-hot. Dee clicked off the call and hurled her phone at the wall.