Fear and Yoga in New Jersey (Thorndike Large Print Laugh Lines) - Hardcover

Debra Galant is the author of Rattled and the creator of the popular blog Baristanet.com. She lives in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

Nina was in the middle of yoga nidra with her nine o’clock intermediate class when Debby Jacobs from the ten-thirty beginners ran in. Interrupting yoga nidra, as everyone knew, was a major breach of yoga etiquette. Even a beginner should know better. Nina closed her eyes and allowed herself a deep, long exhalation before deciding how to handle the intrusion. Ginseng candles were lit, Gaelic flute music floated up from the speakers of a portable CD player, and all seven members of the class lay flat on their backs as they imitated corpses. If there was one thing that distinguished Nina’s classes from the dozens of other yoga classes available locally, it was the hard-wrought serenity achieved during yoga nidra—the practice of complete relaxation—which took up the last five minutes of each class. Nina was strict about no giggling or whispering—even in the classes filled with writers, who never wanted to shut up, ever. It was a time of rest and regeneration. But there she was, Debby Jacobs, bringing all her Russell terrier energy into the studio and positively gyrating with excitement.
Nina placed a silencing finger on her lips. Already Anita Banschek had popped open a curious eye.
In an exaggerated pretense of civility, or else her interpretation of Marcel Marceau imitating a burglar, Debby tiptoed over. “I really didn’t want to interrupt,” she said. “I knew you’d be mad. But”—she lowered her voice and made the universal gesture for waves, or a snake, maybe—“there’s a flood in the waiting room.” 
It had been barely three weeks since Nina moved into her new yoga studio, in the swankest part of town, where brick crosswalks set in a herringbone pattern provided safe pedestrian passage for the blond wives and children of the rich men who took off for New York every morning on the 5:58, the 6:27, and the 7:03 to move massive amounts of other people’s money around.
The shopping district was in one of the older Essex County towns, where, with the exception of a few gaucheries like Dunkin’ Donuts, things looked pretty much as they had for decades: parking meters, alleyways between Tudoresque buildings, a movie theater whose old-fashioned marquee was protected by a historic preservation commission, and street planters carefully tended by a committee of shopkeepers. The timeless effect was reinforced by a towering verdigris-edged public clock, the old-fashioned analog kind with hands that swept around in a circle as they counted off the dull suburban hours, paid for by a local jeweler in business for three generations and now part of the township’s official logo.
The commerce, in this part of town anyway, tended toward goods and services that pampered and cosseted. Except for the contents of one hardware store (specializing in brass house numbers and Ralph Lauren paints) and one deli, there was nothing for sale that anyone could possibly consider a necessity. If, on the other hand, you were looking for candlesticks in the shape of fez-wearing monkeys and were willing to pay $183, you’d come to the right place. But for the occasional thirtyish male with shaved head and tiny glasses tapping away on a screenplay in Starbucks, the district might be a sorority composed of women twenty-five and up. The younger ones jogged after infants perched in special aerodynamically designed chariots. Women a bit older held the tiny peanut butter–smeared hands of toddlers who had known only toys made of wood and natural fibers. Women in their thirties or forties, wearing impossibly small jeans and talking on cell phones, darted into hair salons and therapist offices, running hard to accomplish whatever they could before three o’clock, when they turned into taxi services for lacrosse-playing, karate-chopping, Irish step-dancing, back-talking offspring. Women old enough to have grown children emerged from expensive German cars, bearing shopping bags almost always destined for return.
This wasn’t Nina’s milieu, not exactly, though it was comfortable enough. It did make her a bit self-conscious of her peasant ancestry, of the fact that her hair was black and coarse and puffed up at the slightest hint of humidity and that, no matter how much yoga she did, her body tended toward the zaftig. In fact, the neighborhood was kind of a WASP version of the Long Island town where she’d grown up—although she liked to think she’d outgrown all that and arrived at a more enlightened place. She’d been raised in Princess territory, bred to marry a dentist like her father, and had been bestowed with a Bloomingdale’s card, her very own name embossed and capitalized across the bottom, at her sweet sixteen party—equipment for honing the shopping skills critical to the Long Island Jewish matriarchy to which she was supposed to aspire.
Alas, those aspirations were dashed in twelve short weeks during her sophomore year at Brandeis, when she took a life-altering women’s studies class. It all started with Anna Mae Babcock, a pioneer woman who’d lost two children to whooping cough in the summer of 1817, whose diary was assigned as an example of the rare primary source that recorded “herstory” rather than “history.” Nina had known, of course, about the tragically high rate of child mortality, but she’d assumed that there hadn’t been too much grief, because such deaths were so common. Anna Mae’s diary put an end to that misconception. Then she read stories of Chilean women whose husbands had been taken in the middle of the night by the henchmen of Augusto Pinochet. As Nina read of their terror and their bravery, their fearless demands for answers as they sought their husbands’ remains, Nina began to see her own life for the silly two-dimensional cartoon that it was.
When she came home that year for winter break, Nina was determined to interview her bubbe about the pogroms in Russia. But Nina’s mother dismissed the idea with a wave of the hand. “Who wants to remember all that?” she said. “Please, she gets agitated.” Later, when Nina saw her mother’s cleaning woman, a Guatemalan named Feliz, down on her knees scrubbing the kitchen floor, she tried to liberate her on the spot. “You don’t have to clean rich people’s houses just because you’re of color!” Nina said. “You should go back to school, get a degree.” But Feliz’s command of English was marginal. “You want colors done? Laundry?” she asked, running upstairs to Nina’s hamper to put in a dark wash.
Nina shopped for new clothes during that break, haunting thrift shops and adopting a new uniform of long skirts, gauze blouses, man-style work boots. She stopped wearing gold, which broke her mother’s heart, preferring instead chunky jewelry made of silver and turquoise. After college, she moved to a Brooklyn neighborhood her parents found menacing, worked at jobs they considered dead-end, and decorated her rooms with a series of parental castoffs that otherwise would have gone to Feliz.
The migration from Brooklyn to New Jersey, a few years after marrying Michael, wasn’t so unusual. It was a well-established route, trod by many earlier pioneers, so she was reassured that there would be organic food co-ops and used book stores when she got there. It helped that the town was a shade-dappled place with fine wraparound porches and old-fashioned rose-covered trellises, much sought after by filmmakers and people who made TV commercials, and unlike the suburb she grew up in, her adopted town had black people. The integration of the public schools was almost as much a matter of civic pride as the fact that there were six Thai restaurants in town. True, she wasn’t the renegade she’d been in her twenties, but she prided herself on being a good citizen of Mother Earth. She drove a Prius, recycled religiously, eschewed synthetics, shopped organic, drank bottled water, and bought all her stationery from third-world countries.
And she taught yoga. What could be more vital in today’s stressed-out world? She’d started when Adam went to full-day kindergarten, and had made a lovely studio in the attic of her house. But it was cramped; she could have only three students at a time; heating and air-conditioning were problematic. Nina had decided last spring, after a consultation with a highly regarded tarot reader, to expand her business and she’d been looking for space on the grittier end of town, or what her bubbe would have called the schvatze neighborhood, where the hair-braiding joints and check-cashing establishments were, but which had recently attracted an upscale French restaurant that had gotten a good review in the Jersey section of the New York Times.
But this space, her new studio in the posh end of town, had opened up quite unexpectedly and was just too good to pass up. It had last been occupied by a ballet teacher, now facing child-endangerment charges, who’d had to vacate rather suddenly after it came out that she’d slapped some of her young students. The landlord, wanting to put the scandal quickly behind him, let Nina pick up the lease at a bargain price. It was a lovely space, with tall floor-to-ceiling north-facing windows, which infused the second-story room with a serene light. As a former ballet studio, the space had floors that were already gleaming, a polyurethaned light oak, and the wall opposite the windows was fully mirrored, adding to the sense of openness and light, and allowing her students to see how their poses actually looked.
It took almost nothing for Nina to convert the space, just a small outlay for yoga mats, pillows, and blankets. She’d also put a nice sisal rug over the ugly linoleum floor in the waiting room to add some warmth, picked up...