Chapter 52
“There’s been a troubling erosion of our aesthetic,” Dee said to start the weekly walk-and-talk, this time through a drizzly and gray Soho that gave her curls extra bounce but left the others on the leadership team looking peaked and unpleasantly moist.
The night before, she’d stood up her Tinder date — Dee just didn’t have the energy to go to a hipster bowling alley on a Tuesday with a 25-year-old bi-curious crochet artist who had an impressive dildo collection but also three cats — so spent the evening hate-scrolling Instagram and making note of the coaches who didn’t seem to be keeping up their end of the bargain.
Dee used her two fingers to zoom in on a posed-laughter photo posted by a senior coach in Philadelphia and spotted some midsection overhang above her leggings. A coach from the Miami studio, looking backward over her shoulder, clearly needed to do some extra squats. And the image posted by a senior coach from Atlanta, who had her arms around two sweaty men who had just completed 100 classes — where was the definition in her abs and shoulders? These were not good advertisements for FitFams, and something needed to be done.
“A lot of the coaches are not on-brand,” she relayed to the team as they moved like a cluster of gnats through the mist.
“What does that mean?” Jimmy asked, struggling to keep up. He’d fallen off the FitFams wagon again and packed on about 10 pounds, by Dee’s estimation.
“What do you mean, what does it mean?” Dee snapped.
Per usual, the rest of the team maintained a code of silence, allowing Jimmy to engineer his own death.
“I mean, what do you mean by ‘erosion of our aesthetic’ and ‘not on-brand?’” he said.
Dee stopped and turned to look at him. “You need me to spell it out?”
Jimmy looked at her, blankly.
“Fine,” Dee huffed. “They’re too heavy.”
Georgina cleared her throat self-consciously. Dee started walking again. Jimmy kept his fat mouth shut.
“So here’s what we’re going to do,” Dee said. “Tara, you’re going to visit these studios and host audition days for new coaches.”
“Yup,” Tara said. “I’ve already put out some feelers at modeling agencies in those markets.”
“Fitness models?” Jimmy asked.
“No. Model models,” Tara said, smiling at the thought.
“Great,” Dee said. “Then you’re going to evaluate the senior coaches who no longer fit in with our look. And you’re going to fail them.”
Before Jimmy could ask another stupid question, Tara piped in. “Hopefully that will demoralize them enough that they’ll leave. Or, at the very least, it will set the stage for their firing. Then we’ll replace them with new, lower-paid, on-brand coaches.”
“We limit the erosion of our aesthetic and we save money, all at the same time,” Ben added.
Shelly, keeping pace next to Dee, asked: “What will we say they’ve done wrong?”
Dee thought for a moment as the group abruptly turned onto Spring Street, nearly knocking into a stupid, squat, skyward-looking, 40-something mom and her two rainboot-clad kids.
“Jesus!” Dee barked, then muttered: “Fucking tourists.”
The woman stopped, startled. Then a look of recognition passed over her face. “You’re Dee Bradley, right?”
Dee gave a tight, charitable smile. “Yes.”
“Oh my goodness!” the woman squealed as her kids turned their attention to the rainbow of oil in a nearby puddle. “Can I get a selfie with you?”
Dee checked her watch — she was behind on her step count. But her curls and her abs were on point, so OK.
The woman fumbled in her big, ugly, quilted purse for her phone and handed it to Jimmy, then moved close to Dee, looking up at her with glowing admiration. The woman didn’t seem to know what to do with her arms, given that Dee’s stiff body language made it clear they were not going to snuggle up.
Jimmy took some shots with burst mode, then handed the phone back.
“Thank you!” the woman said. “Wait, there’s a thumb in this one, can we —”
But the team was already two short blocks away, on the move, resuming their meeting.
“OK,” Dee continued. “So I think we’ll go into the online version of the FitFams Instruction Manual and change the rule about music. We’ll say that explicit lyrics are prohibited.”
“And you won’t warn the coaches about that change,” Jimmy said.
“Now he’s getting it,” Shelly scoffed.
The group headed in the direction of the office. Sheldon, covering his phone screen with one hand to protect it from the growing rain, checked the meeting agenda.
“Anyone have anything else to discuss?” he asked.
“I do,” Ben said, moving to the front of the pack. “As you all know, I got an email from the Studio Manager in Atlanta, worried that a client has an eating disorder and that coming to FitFams could be worsening it. I handled it. But I’m wondering — is this a topic we should try to tackle more officially?”
Dee stopped walking and screwed up her face. “Why?”
“Maybe to protect us if something happens?” Ben said, carefully.
Dee laughed. “Man, the pendulum really has swung, hasn’t it? There’s so much backlash against skinny now. Everyone inspecting everyone else for signs that they are sick instead of putting in work themselves. Honestly, it’s probably just jealousy; Willa isn’t exactly … willowy.”
Cora nodded. “We should probably keep tabs, though, to make sure the pro-union assholes don’t latch onto it and turn ‘caring’ it into a platform of their campaign. I’ll monitor social.”
“Great,” Dee said. “Alright, you guys head back to the office. I’ll see you there. I have something to do first.”
She split off from the team and sped up her pace, quickly arriving at 184 Spring Street, a residential brownstone with a beautiful flower box outside the window at the sidewalk level. But she wasn’t here to visit the homeowners.
Her focus was on the business across the street, the famous Dominique Ansel Bakery. She took a deep inhale, her nose filling with the scents of the freshly baked mini madeleines, of buttery croissant-donut hybrids, of crunchy, caramelized crusts. Banana bread. Chocolate éclair. Raspberry pistachio pastry.
Her mouth filled with saliva as she breathed in Nutella-stuffed brioche and chocolate tart with caramel, peanut butter mousse, and cinnamon peanuts.
Then she spit, and hustled back to the office.