Chapter 14 · The Fourteen-Hour Window

Linh's yoga studio was a long, narrow room above a Vietnamese sandwich shop on Spring Street, with hardwood floors and ten skylights and the constant, faint background smell — drifting up the back stairwell — of star anise and beef bone broth. It was one of the most peaceful places Ellie had ever been.

It was also, on a Saturday morning at nine o'clock, full of women who could touch their toes.

"I cannot do this," Ellie whispered, in the doorway, to Linh.

"You can, Marin."

"I am wearing leggings I have had for six years."

"Everyone here is wearing leggings they have had for six years."

"Linh."

Linh took her by the shoulders. Linh was forty-one and small and steady, and she had been, for the last twenty years, the one person on earth other than Sophie who could make Ellie laugh while she was crying. "Eleanor Marin. There are eight people in this room. You know none of them. None of them is looking at you. They are all looking at themselves, in the mirror, and trying not to fall over. You are going to do the gentlest class I have ever taught. You are going to lie down on a mat. You are going to breathe. If you cannot do a pose, you do not do the pose. There are no medals. There is no leaderboard."

"Okay."

"Marin."

"Yes."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

She rolled out a green mat in the back row. She lay down on her back. The wood floor was warmer than she had expected. The skylights were full of October sky. Linh, at the front, lit a single small candle on a low table. Linh said, in her teaching voice — which was different from her ordinary voice; it was lower, rounder, slower — "Settle in. Notice where your body is. Notice where your body is not. No expectations. Just breath."

Ellie noticed where her body was.

Her body was on a green mat in a yoga studio above a Vietnamese sandwich shop. Her body had, that morning, completed a fourteen-hour fasting window — fourteen, she had stretched it from twelve to thirteen to fourteen over twelve days — and her body was, today, two hundred and one pounds and ninety-six minutes into a Saturday she had once promised to spend on the couch. Her body was uncomfortable in some places. Her body was, in others, quiet.

The class moved through gentle stretches. Linh was unhurried. She did not push. She walked between the mats and adjusted, with feather hands, a shoulder here and a hip there. When she reached Ellie, on the green mat in the back row, she put one warm palm between Ellie's shoulder blades, and she said, very quietly, "There you are."

"Don't make me cry, Pham."

"I'm not."

"You are."

"Breathe, Marin."

Ellie breathed.

Twenty minutes in, they came into Child's Pose. Knees wide. Big toes touching. Forehead on the mat. Arms long in front. The pose, Linh said, where the body folds itself, gently, around its own center.

In Child's Pose, with her forehead pressed against the mat and her arms out in front of her, in a room of strangers who were not looking at her, Ellie began, very quietly, to cry.

Not the wet, gasping cry of the bathroom mirror. Not the held, swallowed cry of the auditorium. The other thing. The cry of a body that has been carrying a heaviness for years and is allowed, briefly, to set it down. Tears ran sideways into her hair. Her shoulders shook, very slightly, and were still. Linh did not come over. Linh, from the front of the room, in her teaching voice, said only — to the whole room — "Sometimes the body knows things the mind doesn't. Let the body have them."

Ellie cried for the entire pose.

She came up, eventually, with red eyes and a wet face, and she met Linh's eyes across the room, and Linh did not say anything, and Linh did not look at her any longer than she looked at any of the other women in the room, and Linh moved them on into the next pose.

After class, in the small hallway outside the studio, while the other women rolled their mats and chatted, Linh handed Ellie a glass of water and a small towel.

"Marin."

"Yeah."

"You did it."

"I cried in front of strangers."

"They didn't notice."

"Linh, I cried for a whole pose."

"Marin." Linh smiled. "When I started teaching this class, I told myself that if I could give every woman who walks in here one minute of crying without anyone making a big deal of it — one minute, just one — I would consider it a successful career. You gave yourself, what, four minutes?"

"Four minutes."

"That's a career, Marin. Right there."

Ellie laughed. She laughed into the small towel. She laughed in a way she had not laughed since she was twenty-six. She drove home with the windows down, even though it was forty degrees outside, because she wanted, she discovered, the cold air on her wet face.

When she got home, she walked into the apartment and found Sophie at the kitchen table with a stack of cookbooks open in front of her.

"Mom."

"Yeah, peanut."

"I've been picking dinners."

"You have."

"For the whole next week."

"Show me."

Sophie did. She had, with her serious, careful hand, written out — in the back of a notebook with a whale on the cover — a menu for seven nights. Monday: rosemary chicken with spinach. Tuesday: lentil soup with bread. Wednesday: salmon. Thursday: pasta with tomato. Friday: tacos (corn tortillas, peanut!). Saturday: stir-fry. Sunday: pancakes (small ones).

"Sunday is pancakes," Sophie said firmly. "Because that is the deal."

"Sunday is pancakes," Ellie agreed.

She kissed her daughter on the head. She wrote, in her phone, that night:

Day Fifteen. Fasting window: 14:02. Yoga with Linh. Cried. Felt good. Sophie meal-planned the week. Slept eight hours.

She closed the phone. The ring, on the home screen, sat empty, waiting.