Kitabı oku: «The Motion of the Body Through Space»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for The Motion of the Body Through Space

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Afterword

About the Author

Also by Lionel Shriver

About the Publisher

ONE

“I’ve decided to run a marathon.”

In a second-rate sitcom, she’d have spewed coffee across her breakfast. Yet Serenata was an understated person, and between sips. “What?” Her tone was a little arch, but polite.

“You heard me.” Back to the stove, Remington studied her with a discomfiting level gaze. “I have my eye on the race in Saratoga Springs in April.”

She had the sense, rare in her marriage, that she should watch what she said. “This is serious. You’re not pulling my leg.”

“Do I often make statements of intent, and then pull the rug out: just foolin’? I’m not sure how to take your disbelief as anything but an insult.”

“My ‘disbelief’ might have something to do with the fact that I’ve never seen you run from here to the living room.”

“Why would I run to the living room?”

The literalism had precedent. They called each other out in this nitpicking manner as a matter of course. It was a game. “For the last thirty-two years, you’ve not once trotted out for a run around the block. And now you tell me with a straight face that you want to run a marathon. You must have assumed I’d be a bit surprised.”

“Go ahead, then. Be surprised.”

“It doesn’t bother you …” Serenata continued to feel careful. She didn’t care for the carefulness, not one bit. “… That your ambition is hopelessly trite?”

“Not in the least,” he said affably. “That’s the sort of thing that bothers you. Besides, if I decline to run a marathon because so many other people also want to run one, my actions would still be dictated by the multitude.”

“What is this, some ‘bucket list’ notion? You’ve been listening to your old Beatles records and suddenly realized that when I’m sixty-four refers to you? Bucket list,” she repeated, backing off. “Where did I get that?”

Indeed, incessant citation of the now commonplace idiom was exactly the sort of lemming-like behavior that drove her wild. (That allusion did a grave injustice to lemmings. In the documentary that propagated the mass-suicide myth, the filmmakers had flung the poor creatures over the cliff. Thus the popular but fallacious metaphor for mass conformity was itself an example of mass conformity.) Okay, there was nothing wrong with adopting a new expression. What galled was the way everyone suddenly started referring to their “bucket list” in a breezy, familiar spirit that conveyed they had always said it.

Serenata began to push up from her chair, having lost interest in the news from Albany on her tablet. It had only been four months since they’d moved to Hudson, and she wondered how much longer she’d keep up the pretense of a connection with their old hometown by reading the Times Union online.

She herself was only sixty, though hers was the first generation to append “only” to such a sobering milestone. Having remained in the same position for half an hour, her knees had stiffened, and extending the right one was tricky. Once it had seized, you had to straighten it very slowly. She never knew, either, when one of the knees would do something creepy and unexpected—suddenly go pong, seeming to slip slightly out of joint and then pop back in again. This was what old people thought about, and talked about. She wished she could issue a retroactive apology to her late grandparents, whose medical kvetching she’d found so trying as a child. Underestimating the pitiless self-involvement of their nearest and dearest, old folks detailed their ailments because they assumed that anyone who cared about them would necessarily care about their pain. But no one had cared about her grandparents’ pain, and now no one would care about the pain of the granddaughter who’d once been so unfeeling. Rough justice.

The segue to a stand was a success. My, what miserable achievements might pass for triumph in a few years’ time. Remembering the word blender. Taking a sip of water without breaking the glass. “Have you considered the timing of this announcement?” She plugged in the tablet—busywork; the battery was still at 64 percent.

“What about it?”

“It coincides with a certain incapacity. I only stopped running myself in July.”

“I knew you’d take this personally. That’s why I dreaded telling you. Would you really want me to deny myself something just because it makes you feel wistful?”

“Wistful. You think it makes me feel wistful.”

“Resentful,” Remington revised. “But if I bind myself to a chair for eternity, that won’t help your knees in the slightest.”

“Yes, that’s all very rational.”

“You say that as if it’s a criticism.”

“So in your view, it’s ‘irrational’ to take your wife’s feelings into consideration.”

“When making a sacrifice won’t make her feel any better—yes.”

“You’ve been thinking about this for a while?”

“A few weeks.”

“In your mind, does this uncharacteristic blossoming of an interest in fitness have anything to do with what happened at the DOT?”

“Only in the sense that what happened at the DOT has provided me a great deal of unanticipated leisure time.” Even this brush against the subject made Remington twitchy. He chewed at his cheek in that way he had, and his tone went icy and sour, with a few drops of bitterness, like a cocktail.

Serenata disdained women who broadcast their emotions by banging about the kitchen, though it took a ridiculous degree of concentration to keep from unloading the dishwasher. “If you’re looking to fill your dance card, don’t forget the main reason we moved here. It’s already been too long since you last visited your father, and his house is a riot of repair jobs.”

“I’m not spending the rest of my life under my father’s sink. Is this your version of talking me out of a marathon? You can do better.”

“No, I want you to do whatever you want. Obviously.”

“Not so obviously.”

The dishwasher had proved irresistible. Serenata hated herself.

“You ran for such a long time—”

“Forty-seven years.” Her tone was clipped. “Running, and a great deal else.”

“So—maybe you could give me some pointers.” Remington’s suggestion was halting. He did not want any pointers.

“Remember to tie your shoes. There’s no more to it.”

“Look … I’m sorry you’ve had to give up something you loved.”

Serenata straightened, and put down a bowl. “I did not love running. Here’s a pointer for you: no one does. They pretend to, but they’re lying. The only good part is having run. In the moment, it’s dull, and hard as in effortful but not as in difficult to master. It’s repetitive. It doesn’t open the floodgates of revelation, as I’m sure you’ve been led to expect. I’m probably grateful for an excuse to quit. Maybe that’s what I can’t forgive myself. Though at least I’ve finally escaped the great mass of morons chugging alongside who all think they’re so fucking special.”

“Morons like me.”

“Morons like you.”

“You can’t hold me in contempt for doing what you did for, I quote, forty-seven years.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said with a tight smile before pivoting toward the staircase. “Watch me.”

Remington Alabaster was a narrow, vertical man who seemed to have maintained his figure without a struggle. His limbs were born shapely. With slender ankles, firm calves, neat knees, and thighs that didn’t jiggle, given a quick shave those legs would have looked smashing on a woman. He had beautiful feet—also narrow, with high arches and elongated toes. Whenever Serenata massaged the insteps, they were dry. His hairless pectorals were delectably subtle, and should they ever bulge grossly from a sustained obsession with bench-pressing, she’d count the transformation a loss. True, in the last couple of years he’d developed a slight swell above the belt, whose mention she avoided. That was the unspoken contract, standard between couples, she would wager: unless he brought it up, such vacillations in his bodily person were his business. Which was why, though tempted, she hadn’t asked him squarely this morning whether freaking out about what had to be a weight gain of less than five pounds was what this marathon lark was all about.

The harmless bulge aside, Remington was aging well. His facial features had always been expressive. The mask of impassivity he’d worn the last few years of his employment was protective, a contrivance for which a certain Lucinda Okonkwo was wholly to blame. Once he hit his sixties, the coloration of those features ashed over somewhat; it was this homogenizing of hue that made Caucasian faces look vaguer, flatter, and somehow less extant as their age advanced, like curtains whose once bold print had bleached in the sun. Yet in her mind’s eye, Serenata routinely interposed the more decisive lines of his younger visage over the hoarier, more tentative present, sharpening the eyes and flushing the cheeks as if applying mental makeup.

She could see him. She could see him at a range of ages with a single glance, and could even, if unwillingly, glimpse in that still vital face the frail elder he’d grow into. Perceiving this man in full, what he was, had been, and would be, was her job. It was an important job, more so as he aged, because to others he would soon be just some old geezer. He was not just some old geezer. At twenty-seven, she’d fallen in love with a handsome civil engineer, and he was still here. It was the subject of some puzzlement: other people were themselves getting older by the day, themselves watching these mysterious transformations not all of which were their fault, and knew themselves to have once been younger. Yet the young and old alike perceived others in their surround as stationary constants, like parking signs. If you were fifty, then fifty was all you were, all you ever had been, and all you ever would be. Perhaps the exercise of informed imagination was simply too exhausting.

It was also her job to look upon her husband with kindness. To both see and not see. To screw up her eyes and blur the eruptions of uninvited skin conditions into a smooth surface—an Alabaster surface. To issue a blanket pardon for every blobbing mole, every deepening crag of erosion. To be the sole person in the entire world who did not regard the slight thickening under his jaw as a character flaw. The sole person who did not construe from the sparseness of the hair at his temples that he didn’t matter. In trade, Remington would forgive the crenulations atop her elbows and the sharp line beside her nose when she slept too hard on her right side—a harsh indentation that could last until mid-afternoon and would soon be scored there all the time. Were he to have registered, as he could not help but have done, that his wife’s physical form was no longer identical to the one he wed, Remington alone would not regard this as a sign that she had done something wrong, perhaps even morally wrong, and he would not hold her accountable for being a disappointment. That was also part of the contract. It was a good deal.

Yet Remington had no need to draw drastically on the bottomless reserves of his wife’s forgiveness for not having been dipped in preservative plastic when they met, like an ID card. He looked pretty damned good for sixty-four. How he’d remained so slim, vigorous, and nicely proportioned without any appreciable exercise was anyone’s guess. Oh, he walked places, and didn’t complain about taking the stairs if an elevator was out of order. But he’d never even experimented with one of those “seven minutes to a better body” routines, much less joined a gym. During lunch, he ate lunch.

More exercise would improve his circulation, build vascular resilience, and forestall cognitive decline. She should welcome the turned leaf. She should ply him with protein bars and proudly track his increasing mileage on a pad in the foyer.

The whole supportiveness shtick might actually have been doable had he introduced his resolution with suitable chagrin: “I realize I’ll never manage to cover nearly the distances you have. Still, I wonder if maybe it would be good for my heart to go out for a modest, you know, two-mile jog, say, two or three times a week.” But no. He had to run a marathon. For the rest of the day, then, Serenata indulged the pretense of intense professionalism the better to avoid her husband. She only went back downstairs to make tea once she heard him go out. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t “rational,” but this specific subset of human experience belonged to her, and his timing was cruel.

Presumably, she herself began by copying someone else—though that’s not how it felt at the time. Both her sedentary parents were on the heavy side, and, in the way of these things, they grew heavier. Their idea of exertion was pushing a manual lawn mower, to be replaced by a power mower as soon as possible. That wasn’t to criticize. Americans in the 1960s of her childhood were big on “labor-saving devices.” A sign of modernity, the reduction of personal energy output was highly prized.

A marketing analyst for Johnson & Johnson, her father had been relocated every two years or so. Born in Santa Ana, California, Serenata never knew the town before the family shifted to Jacksonville, Florida—and then they were off to West Chester, Pennsylvania; Omaha, Nebraska; Roanoke, Virginia; Monument, Colorado; Cincinnati, Ohio, and finally to the company headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As a consequence, she had no regional affiliations, and was one of those rare creatures whose sole geographical identifier was the big, baggy country itself. She was “an American,” with no qualifier or hyphenation—since calling herself a “Greek-American,” having grown up supping nary a bowl of avgolemono soup, would have struck her as desperate.

Being yanked from one school to the next as a girl had made her leery of forming attachments. She’d only inculcated the concept of friendship in adulthood, and then with difficulty—tending to mislay companions out of sheer absentmindedness, like gloves dropped in the street. For Serenata, friendship was a discipline. She was too content by herself, and had sometimes wondered if not getting lonely was a shortcoming.

Her mother had responded to ceaseless transplantation by fastening onto multiple church and volunteer groups the moment the family arrived in a new town, like an octopus on speed. The constant convenings of these memberships left an only child to her own devices, an arrangement that suited Serenata altogether. Once old enough to fix her own Fluffernutter sandwiches, she occupied her unsupervised after-school hours building strength and stamina.

She would lie palms down on the lawn and count the number of seconds—one one-thousand, two one-thousand—she could keep her straightened legs raised a foot above the ground (discouragingly few, but only to begin with). She was gripping a low-hanging tree branch and struggling to get her chin above the wood well before she learned that the exercise was called a pull-up. She invented her own calisthenics. To complete what she dubbed a “broken leg,” you hopped on one foot the circumference of the yard with the opposite leg thrust forward in a goose step, then repeated the circuit hopping backward. “Rolly-pollies” entailed lying on the grass, gripping your knees to the chest, and rocking on your back one-two-three! to throw your legs straight behind your head; later she added a shoulder stand at the end. As an adult, she would recall with wan incredulity that when she strung her creations together to stage her own backyard Olympics, it never occurred to her to invite the neighborhood children to join in.

Many of her contortions were silly, but repeated enough times they still wore her out. Pleasantly so, though even these fanciful routines—of which she kept an exacting secret record in crimped printing in a bound blank book stashed under her mattress—were not exactly fun. It was interesting to discover that it was possible to not especially want to do them and to do them anyway.

During the “physical education” of her school days, the meager athletic demands placed on girls were one of the few constants across Jacksonville, West Chester, Omaha, Roanoke, Monument, Cincinnati, and New Brunswick. The half-hour recess in primary school usually sponsored kickball—and if you managed to get up before your teammates lost the inning, you might run an entire ten yards to first base. Dodgeball was even more absurd: jumping one foot this way, one foot that. In middle schools’ formal gym classes, twenty of the forty-five minutes were consumed with changing in and out of gym clothes. The instructor would direct the girls in unison to do ten jumping jacks, do five squat thrusts, and run in place for thirty seconds. Given this limp gesturing toward strength training, it hadn’t really been fair to subject these same girls to a formal fitness assessment in eighth grade—during which, after Serenata sailed past the one hundred mark in the sit-ups test, the gym teacher intervened and insisted in a shrill panic that she stop. For the following decades, of course, she’d be doing sit-ups in sets of five hundred. They weren’t really efficient, abdominally, but she had a soft spot for the classics.

To correct any misimpressions: Serenata Terpsichore—which rhymed with hickory, though she grew inured to teachers stressing the first syllable and pronouncing the last as a tiresome task—had no designs on professional athletics. She didn’t want to earn a place on a national volleyball team. She didn’t want to become a ballerina. She didn’t aspire to take part in weight-lifting contests, or to attract an Adidas sponsorship. She’d never come near to breaking any records, and hadn’t tried. After all, the setting of records was all about placing your achievements in relation to the achievements of other people. She might have engaged in rigorous, self-contrived conniptions on a daily basis from childhood, but that had nothing to do with anyone else. Push-ups were private.

She’d never identified in an elaborate way with a particular sport. She ran, she cycled, she swam; she was not a runner or a swimmer or a cyclist, designations that would have allowed these mere forms of locomotion to place a claim on her. She was not, as they say, a team player, either. Her ideal running route was deserted. She gloried in the serenity of an empty swimming pool. Throughout her fifty-two years of biking for primary transportation, a single other cyclist in sight despoiled her solitude and ruined her mood.

Given that Serenata would have thrived on a desert island in the company of fish, it was disconcerting to have so frequently been coopted by, as Remington had said, the multitude. Sooner or later, any quirk, any curious habit or obsession, was eventually colonized by a throng.

Impulsively, when she was sixteen, she’d slipped into a shadowy establishment in downtown Cincinnati to have a tiny tattoo inscribed on the tender inside face of her right wrist. The design she requested was snatched, literally, from the air: a bumblebee in flight. With no other customers, the artisan took his time. He captured the diaphanous wings, the inquiring antennae, the delicate legs poised for landing. The image had nothing to do with her. Yet in crafting character from scratch, one reached for what lay to hand; we were all found artworks. Thus the arbitrary soon converted to the signal. The bumblebee became her emblem, doodled endlessly across the canvas covers of her three-ring binders.

Tattoos in the 1970s were largely confined to longshoremen, sailors, prison inmates, and biker gangs. For wayward children of the middle class, what were not yet called “tats” were a defilement. That winter, she concealed the inking from her parents with long sleeves. That spring, she switched her watch to her right wrist, with the face flipped down. She lived in constant fear of exposure, though secrecy also freighted the image with mighty powers. In retrospect, it would have been nobler to have declared the “mutilation” voluntarily and taken the consequences, but that was an adult perspective. Young people, for whom time moved so sedulously that every moment could seem an eternity of reprieve, put a great deal of store in delay.

Inevitably, one morning she overslept her alarm. Come to rouse the sleepyhead, her mother discovered the naked wrist thrown upright on a pillow. Once the teenager confessed that the image wasn’t felt-tip, her mother cried.

The point: Serenata would have been the sole student in her high school to brave a tattoo. Nowadays? Over a third of the eighteen-to-thirty-five demographic sported at least one, and the total acreage of American skin aswirl with hobbits, barbed wire, or barcodes, eyes, tigers, or tribals, and scorpions, skulls, or superheroes, was the size of Pennsylvania. Serenata’s adventure into the underworld had inverted from intrepid to trite.

In her twenties, frustrated that traditional ponytail ties snagged the strands of her thick black hair, Serenata set about stitching several tubes of colorful fabric, through which she threaded sturdy elastic. After tying the ends of the elastic together, she sewed the cloth tubes into gathered circles. The resultant binders kept the hair from her face without grabbing, while adding a flash of pizzazz to her crown. Some peers found the handicrafts kooky, but more than one coworker asked where to get one. Yet by the 1990s, most of her female compatriots owned a set of twenty-five in a rainbow of hues. She hacked her hair to just under her ears and tossed what were apparently called “scrunchies” in the wastebasket.

It would have been circa 1980, too, that she made one of her effortful bids for friendship, inviting a handful of coworkers at Lord & Taylor’s customer service to dinner. For the previous couple of years she had dabbled in Japanese cuisine, an enthusiasm rescued from a dead-end date who’d taken her to a hole-in-the-wall counter that served his countrymen’s expats. She had loved the smoothness, the coolness, the subtly. Later back home, she experimented with vinegared rice, green powdered horseradish, and a sharp knife. Eager to share her discoveries, she laid out multiple platters for her guests, aiming for what a later era would call the wow factor.

They were horrified. None of the girls could bear the prospect of raw fish.

Yet nowadays it was not unusual to find three different sushi bars along a single block of a midsize town in Iowa. The dreariest under-grad had a preference for fresh or saltwater eel. It wasn’t as if Serenata could take the slightest credit for the centuries-old traditions of a storied island nation in the East. Nevertheless, what was once an idiosyncrasy had been crowd funded.

The watch, which obscured her sin of self-defacement? It had made for an effective disguise because it had once been her father’s. Serenata had been wearing oversize men’s watches ever since. Lo, come the 2010s, every other woman in the country was wearing massive, masculine-style watches as well. Favorite books that made little or no splash on release—A Home at the End of the World or The City of Your Final Destination—invariably got turned into movies, and suddenly these private totems belonged to everybody. She’d no sooner revive the nearly lost art of quilting, stitching swatches of worn-out corduroys and old towels while watching Breaking Bad before anyone had ever heard of it, than quilting bees would sweep the country as a nationwide fad. If Serenata Terpsichore ever seized upon the music of an obscure band that only played pass-the-hat clubs and wedding gigs, that veritably guaranteed that these same nobodies would hit the top forty by the following year. If she happened to pick up the habit of wearing incredibly warm, soft sheepskin boots hitherto confined to the small Australian and California surfer sets, the better to weather an Albany winter, you could be damned sure that Oprah Winfrey would make the same discovery. Ugg.

The same thing must have happened to plenty of others as well. There were only so many things to wear, to love, to do. And there were too many people. So sooner or later whatever you claimed for yourself would be adopted by several million of your closest friends. At which point you either abandoned your own enthusiasms or submitted numbly to the appearance of slavish conformity. For the most part, Serenata had opted for the latter. Still, the experience was repeatedly one of being occupied, as if a horde of strangers had camped out on her lawn.

Which, steadily yet at an accelerating pace for the last twenty years, was what had been happening to fitness in any form. She could almost hear them, rumbling the inside of her skull like an oncoming migration of wildebeest, the dust catching in her nostrils, the beat of their hooves pounding from the horizon. This time the multitudes could be spotted not merely aping her tastes in music or fiction in the quiet isolation of their homes, but in aggregate, pounding in droves over the hills and dales of public parks, splashing in phalanxes across all six lanes of her regular pool, clamoring with crazed, head-down pumping in swarms of cyclists, every one of them feverishly desperate to overtake the bike ahead, only to come to a stop at the next light—where the pack would twitch, poised to get a jump on the others like hyenas straining toward a fresh kill. This time the incursion into her territory wasn’t metaphorical but could be measured in square feet. Now her beloved husband had joined the mindless look-alikes of the swollen herd.

TWO

Though the right knee rebuked her when it bore the load, Serenata refused to take the stairs one at a time, like a toddler. Hobbling down for tea the following afternoon, she found Remington in the living room. While she was still unaccustomed to his being home weekdays, it wasn’t fair to resent the presence of your husband when it was his house, too. Early retirement hadn’t been his idea, or, precisely, his fault.

Yet his getup was annoying by any measure: leggings, silky green shorts with undershorts of bright purple, and a shiny green shirt with purple netting for aeration—a set, its price tag dangling at the back of the neck. His wrist gleamed with a new sports watch. On a younger man the red bandanna around his forehead might have seemed rakish, but on Remington at sixty-four it looked like a costuming choice that cinemagoers were to read at a glance: this guy is a nut. In case the bandanna wasn’t enough, add the air-traffic-control orange shoes, with trim of more purple.

He only bent to clutch an ankle with both hands when she walked in. He’d been waiting for her.

So, fine, she watched. He held the ankle, raised his arms overhead, and dived for the opposite leg. As he teetered on one foot while tugging a knee to his chest, she left for her Earl Grey. On her return, he was bracing both hands against a wall and elongating a calf muscle. The whole ritual screamed of the internet.

“My dear,” she said. “There’s some evidence that stretching does a bit of good, but only after you’ve run. All it accomplishes beforehand is to put off the unpleasant.”

“You’re going to be a real bitch about this, aren’t you?”

“Probably,” she said lightly, and swept back upstairs. When the front door slammed, she ventured onto the second-story side porch to peer over the rail. After poking at the complicated watch for minutes, the intrepid began his inaugural run—trudging out the gate and down Union Street. She could have passed him at a stroll.

The impulse was wicked, but she checked the time. The door slammed again twelve minutes later. His shower would last longer. Is this how she’d get through this ordeal? With condescension? It was only October. It was going to be a long winter.

“How was your run?” she forced herself to inquire during a laconic dinner.

“Invigorating!” he declared. “I’m starting to see why you went at it, those forty-seven years.”

Uh-huh. Wait till it gets cold, and sleets, and blows a gale in your face. Wait till your intestines start to transit, with seven more miles to go, and you huddle in a cramped scuttle, praying you’ll make it before they explode all over your shiny green shorts. See how invigorated you get then. “And where did you get to?”

“I turned around at Highway Nine.”

Half a mile from their front door. Yet he was bursting with accomplishment. She looked at him with fascination. He was impossible to embarrass.

And why ever would she wish to embarrass him? Precisely what inflamed her about this stupid joiner impulse of his to run a marathon was the way such a mean-spirited desire had already arisen in her head, after her husband’s sole athletic achievement constituted running—if you could call it that—again, you see, this contaminating contempt—a single mile. She was not a combative harridan, nor had she been for their thirty-two years together. To the contrary, it was in the nature of wary isolates to give themselves completely and without stint once the formidable barriers they routinely erected before all and sundry had been breached. Most people regarded Serenata as standoffish, and she was fine with that; being seen as a woman who kept others at bay helped keep them at bay. But she was not aloof with Remington Alabaster, as of halfway through their first date. Largely keeping to yourself did not mean you lacked a normal human need for companionship. It did mean you tended to put eggs in one basket. Remington was her basket. She could not afford to resent the basket—to want to embarrass the basket, or to hope that when the basket set his sights on what had become a rather mundane status marker the basket would fail.

She owed him for the fact that what might otherwise have become an arid solitude was instead round, full, and rich. She’d relished being his sole confidante when the situation at the DOT went south; it was too dangerous for him to talk to anyone at work. She missed the camaraderie of shared indignation. Throughout the whole debacle, he’d have been unwavering in his confidence that she was staunchly in his corner. They’d had their differences, especially about the children, who had both, frankly, turned out a little strange. Nevertheless, the measure of a marriage was military: a good one was an alliance.

Furthermore, when they met she was floundering. She owed him for her career.

As a child, after a family vacation on Cape Hatteras, she’d declared her reigning ambition to become a lighthouse keeper—thrust on the prow of a spit, raised high with a view of an expanse that could make you feel either very small or very big, depending on your mood, with regal control of a great beacon. She would live in a small round room decorated with driftwood, heating up cans of soup on a hot plate, reading (well, she was only eight) Pippi Longstocking under a swinging bare bulb, and watching (ditto) reruns of I Dream of Jeannie on one of those miniature black-and-white televisions they had at the hotel on the Outer Banks. Later during the usual equine phase for girls, she imagined growing up to be a national park warden who toured vast public woodlands alone on horseback. Still later, inspired by a newspaper’s unusual job listing, she became enthralled by the idea of caretaking an estate on a tropical island owned by a very rich man, who’d only visit with an array of celebrity guests in his private jet once a year. The rest of the time she’d have a mansion to herself—with dinner seatings for a hundred, a chandeliered ballroom, a private menagerie, a golf course, and tennis courts, all without the bother of making a fortune and thus having to build a boring old business first. In the latter fantasy, it never occurred to her that infinite access to a golf course and tennis courts was of limited value with no one else to play with.

By her teens, the backyard frolicking of her childhood having given way to a covert if demanding fitness regime, Serenata entertained jobs that might put exertion to practical employ. She pictured herself as the only woman on a construction crew, pounding spikes, wielding big flats of Sheetrock, and manipulating heavy jackhammers—thus amazing her male coworkers, who would scoff at the upstart girlie at first, but would come to revere her and defend her honor in bars. Or she might become a great asset to a team of moving men (who would scoff, come to revere her, and defend her honor in bars …). She contemplated tree surgery. Alas, hard physical labor was apparently low-skilled and low-waged, and her middle-class parents dismissed all these backbreaking prospects as preposterous.

For years, the only child had amused her parents by performing original radio plays. She recorded all the parts on a portable cassette player, punctuating the dramas with sound effects—door slams, floor tromping, crumpling paper for fire. At once, her girlhood’s reigning ambition to pursue a solitary occupation seemed to display a gut self-knowledge. What fit the bill, then, was to become a writer.

Oh, her parents didn’t regard this aspiration as any more practical than becoming a construction worker. They expected she’d just get married. But at least a literary bent would argue for a college education, which would raise the quality and earning power of her suitors. So with their blessing she enrolled at Hunter, within shouting distance of New Brunswick, emerging like most liberal arts graduates as roundly unemployable.

Serenata’s twenties were aimless and hand-to-mouth. She couldn’t afford her own apartment, so (anathema) had to share digs with other girls whose twenties were aimless and hand-to-mouth. The menial jobs she procured hardly required a college degree. She tried to make time for “her work” without saying the pretentious expression aloud. Mortifyingly, every other peer she encountered in New York City also described themselves as writers, who were also making time for “their work.”

It was manning the phones at Lord & Taylor’s Customer Service that turned her tide. A young man called about needing to return a gift of a tasteless tie. He described the gaudy item in comical detail. He enticed her to explain what a customer should do both with and without a receipt, when surely he had the receipt or he didn’t. It dawned dimly on the store’s representative that he was keeping her on the line. Finally he implored her to repeat after him, “Please watch the closing doors.”

“What?”

“Just say it. As a favor. Please watch the closing doors.”

Well, it wasn’t as if he’d asked her to repeat “Please can I suck your dick.” She complied.

“Perfect,” he said.

“I’m not sure how one would say that badly.”

“Most people would say that badly,” he countered—and proceeded to explain that he was a civil servant with the city’s Department of Transportation. He’d been tasked with finding a new announcer for recorded public transit advisories, and begged her to try out for the job. She was leery, of course. As a precaution, she looked up the NYC Department of Transportation in the phone book, and the address he’d provided matched.

In the end, it was decided higher up that New Yorkers weren’t quite ready for female authority, and she didn’t get the job. As Remington shared with her later, one of the other men on the team had declared after replaying her audition tape that no male passenger listening to that sultry voice would ever hear the content of the announcements; he’d be fantasizing about fucking the loudspeaker.

Yet before the disappointing determination was made, she did agree to a dinner date—albeit only after Remington’s second invitation. She was obliged to turn down the spontaneous one on the heels of her audition because the bike trip between her East Village apartment and the DOT office downtown was officially too short to “count,” and it wouldn’t do to dine out when she hadn’t yet exercised. They agreed to meet at Café Fiorello on Broadway, a high-end Italian trattoria that longtime New York residents would generally consign to tourists. Despite the upscale venue, Serenata, as ever, insisted on cycling.

From a distance in the restaurant’s entryway, Remington had apparently watched her standard Cinderella transformation beside an alternate-side parking sign. She toed off a ratty sneaker, balanced on the other foot, and shimmied from one leg of her jeans—ensuring that the skirt fluttering over them continued to cover her person in a seemly fashion. It was still nippy in March, and ivory panty hose had doubled as insulation. From a pannier, she withdrew a pair of killer heels in red patent leather. Steadying herself on one high heel by holding the bike seat, she repeated the striptease with the opposite leg and stuffed her rolled jeans into the pannier. After giving the skirt a straightening tug, she applied a hasty touch-up of lipstick; the ride itself would provide the blush. She removed her helmet, shook out the thick black hair, and bound it with a homemade fabric binder not yet called a scrunchie. By then Remington had tucked back into the restaurant, enabling her to check her filthy jacket and the greasy saddlebags, their erstwhile hi-viz yellow now the queasy, sullen color of a spoiled olive.

Over a lobster pasta, her date responded to her hopes to become a writer with a neutrality that must have disguised an inner eye roll. After all, she was rolling her eyes at herself. “I’m afraid the aspiration has started to seem self-indulgent. And everyone I run into in this town wants to be a writer, too.”

“If it’s what you really want to do, it doesn’t matter that it’s a cliché.”

“But I wonder if it is what I want to do. I do thrive on isolation. But I don’t yearn to reveal myself. I want frantically to keep other people out of my business. I prefer to keep my secrets. Whenever I try my hand at fiction, I write about characters who have nothing to do with me.”

“Ha! Maybe you do have a future in literature.”

“No, there’s another problem. This isn’t going to sound good.”

“Now you’ve intrigued me.” He leaned back, leaving his fork in the fettuccini.

“You know how people on the news are always starving, or dying in an earthquake? I’m starting to realize that I don’t care about them.”

“Natural disasters are often far away. The victims seem abstract. Maybe it’s easier to feel for folks closer to home.”

“Suffering people don’t seem abstract. On television, they look real as sin. As for the people closer to home—I don’t care about them, either.”

Remington chuckled. “That’s either refreshing or appalling.”

“I’d opt for appalling.”

“If you don’t care about other people, what does that make me?”

“Possibly,” she said cautiously, “an exception. I make a few. But my default setting is obliviousness. That’s a lousy qualification for a writer, isn’t it? Besides. I’m not sure I’ve got the voice to stand out.”

“On the contrary,” he said, “you do have the voice. I’d gladly listen to you read the entire federal tax code.”

She enhanced the silky tone in her throat with a rough edge: “Really?” Remington admitted later that the adverb gave him an erection.

They moved on. Merely to be courteous, she asked why he’d ended up at the DOT. His response was unexpectedly impassioned.

“It may sound mechanical, but transport is massively emotional! There’s no other aspect of urban life that arouses such strong feelings. On some streets, if you take out a lane of traffic to build a bike lane, you’ll start a riot. Miscalibrate a pedestrian light to last a whole two minutes, and you can hear drivers pounding on the steering wheel with their windows shut. Buses that don’t come for an hour when it’s five below … Subways stuck indefinitely under the East River with no explanation on the loudspeaker … Terrifyingly designed freeway entrance ramps, where vision of oncoming traffic is occluded by a blind curve … Confusing signage that sends you plummeting south on the New Jersey Turnpike for twenty miles with no exit when you want to go north, and you were already running late … You may not give a hoot about other people, but transport?

Everybody cares about transport.”

“Maybe so. I think my bicycle is a horse. A beloved horse.”

He confessed to having watched her sidewalk burlesque. “So what if we went somewhere together?”

“I’d meet you there on my bike.”

“Even if I offered to pick you up?”

“I’d decline. Politely.”

“I question the ‘politely,’ when refusal would be obstinate and rude.”

“Insisting I alter a lifelong practice just to suit you or convention would also be rude.”

Like most rigid people, Serenata didn’t care whether inflexibility was an especially entrancing quality. You never coaxed the deeply obdurate into a more ingratiating give-and-take. You got with the program.

At the disarming civil engineer’s urging, Serenata did indeed audition for a voice-over job at an advertising firm, and was hired on the spot. Similar work came in with sufficient regularity that she was able to quit Lord & Taylor. She gained a reputation. In time, she would extend to audiobooks, and nowadays much of her work was infomercials and video games. If she cared little about other people, she did care about excellence, and was forever delighted to discover new timbres, or to extend her upper and lower registers to convey cranky children and grousing old men. It was one of the pleasures of human speech to be unconstrained by a limited number of notes in a scale, and she relished the infinite incremental tonalities in a glissando of disappointment.

Having moved so often as a kid had left her diction exotically nonspecific and usefully fluid. All variations in the pronunciation of aunt, syrup, or pecan were to her ear equally correct and equally arbitrary. She readily picked up accents because she wasn’t attached to her own—and even sly lingual detectives failed to pin the origins of her argot. As she explained to Remington, “I’m from nowhere. Sometimes people mis-hear my first name and write it ‘Sarah Nada’: Sarah Nothing.”

Yet their courtship was curiously chaste. Her guarded quality had tempted earlier suitors to try to overrun the ramparts—with fatal consequences. Perhaps Remington was thus cannily countering her withholding by withholding in return, but she began to worry that he kept his hands to himself because he just didn’t find her attractive. “I know you fell for my voice,” she noted at last. “But when the voice showed up in the flesh—were the three dimensions a turnoff?”

“You police your borders,” he said. “I’ve been waiting to be issued a visa.”

So she kissed him—taking his hand and placing it firmly on an inside thigh, with the formality of stamping his passport. These many years later, the question was: If she’d first been captivated by Remington Alabaster’s respect for her fierce sense of territory, why was he now invading it at the age of sixty-four?

“That’s it for the upstairs bathroom,” the young woman announced, tugging her rubber gloves from the wrist so that they came off disastrously inside out.

Serenata nodded at the gloves lying moist and smelly on the kitchen island. “You did it again.”

“Oh, bastard!”

“I’m not paying you by the hour to work those fingers one-by-one back through the other way.” Her tone, however, was teasing.

“Okay, off the clock.” With a glance at her wrist, Tomasina March—Tommy for short—began the arduous business of poking the inverted forefinger of the first glove and edging it down through the sticky yellow tube by the quarter inch.

Although her parents had hired a cleaner, before the move to Hudson Serenata had spurned domestic help. Oh, she didn’t suffer from liberal discomfort with servants. She simply didn’t want strangers—other people—in her house. Yet reaching sixty had put her over the hill in a panoramic sense. She had crested, and could see from here the decline that spread before her. She could choose to spend a measurable proportion of this surprisingly short and potentially precipitous decay scrubbing the soap buildup around the shower drain, or she could pay someone else to do it. No-brainer.

Besides, though she’d usually have been put off by the proximity of one more exercise fanatic, something about the nineteen-year-old next-door doing hundreds of squat thrusts in her busted-furniture-strewn backyard on the day they moved in had reminded Serenata of her own childhood’s “broken legs” and “rolly-pollies.” Glad for the pocket money (Serenata paid $10/hour—appallingly, in upstate New York a generous wage), Tommy was a stalky girl, long-limbed and awkward, thin but shapeless. Her honey hair was fine and lank. Her face was open and guileless. Its unwritten quality brought back in a rush how truly awful it was to have this whole stupid life looming before you, a life you never asked for in the first place, and to have not an inkling what to do with it. At Tommy’s age, most kids with half a wit would be visited by a sick feeling that by the time they finally cobbled together a plan it would prove too late, because there was something they should have done—at nineteen—to put the stratagem into action. It was a wonder that people grew nostalgic for youth. The wistfulness was pure amnesia.

“So where’s Remington?” Tommy asked.

“Out for a run, believe it or not. Which means we have a whole six more minutes to talk about him behind his back.”

“I didn’t know he was into running.”

“He wasn’t. Not until two weeks ago. Now he wants to run a marathon.”

“Well, good for him.”

“Is it good for him?”

“Sure.” Tommy was concentrating on the glove. She still hadn’t rescued its forefinger. “Everybody wants to run a marathon, so what could be wrong with it?”

“That fact that everybody wants to. I know he’s at loose ends, but I wish he’d latched on to something more original.”

“There’s not that much to do. Whatever you think of, somebody else’s done it already. Being original is a lost cause.”

“I’m being mean,” Serenata said, not referring to Remington—but of course, she was being mean about him, too. “Those gloves—I should just buy you a new pair. Though you’d make quicker work of them if you stopped pacing.”

Tommy continued to lunge back and forth across the kitchen while victoriously inverting the forefinger. “Can’t. Only at twelve thousand, and it’s already four o’clock.”

“Twelve thousand what?”

“Steps.” She gestured to the plastic band on her left hand. “I got a Fitbit. A knockoff, but same difference. Also, if I stop, this thing won’t count your first thirty steps for some dumb reason. In the instructions, it says, ‘in case you just shaking hands,’ as if anybody shakes hands thirty freaking times. Those instructions are all written by Chinese people who obviously don’t know anything about American customs. Not that I mean there’s anything wrong with Chinese people,” she added anxiously. “Is that what you’re supposed to call them? ‘Chinese people’? It sounds kind of insulting. Anyway, those lost thirty steps, over and over—they really add up.”

“And this matters why? That back-and-forth of yours is putting me into a trance.”

“Well, you post your steps. Every day. Online. Just about everybody clocks up, like, twenty K or more, and Marley Wilson, this total cunt from senior year, regularly posts thirty.”

“How many miles is that?”

“Just under fifteen,” Tommy said promptly.

“Unless she’s really hoofing it, walking that mileage could take five hours a day. Does she do anything else?”

“Whatever else she does isn’t the point.”

“Why do you care how many steps other people take?”

“You don’t get it. But you should. The main reason it bugs you that Remington’s started running is you stopped.”

“I didn’t say it bugged me.”

“Didn’t have to. He’s beating you. Even if he’s only gone six minutes, he’s beating you.”

“I still exercise by other means.”

“Not for long. You went on that whole rant last week about how impossible it is to do anything aerobic that doesn’t involve your knees. You can’t even swim, when they get too puffy.”

It was ridiculous to feel wounded when Tommy was only quoting Serenata back to herself.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Tommy added, waving a fully outside-out rubber glove in triumph, “most people who do marathons totally give up running pretty soon afterward. Like those World’s Biggest Losers who go right back to being fat. They check that box on the bucket list, and then move on.”

“Did you know the term ‘bucket list’ only goes back about ten years? I looked it up. A screenwriter wrote a list of things he wanted to do before he ‘kicked the bucket.’ So he called it ‘The Bucket List.’ Since at the very top was getting a screenplay produced, he wrote a movie with the same title. It must have done okay, because the term went viral.”

“Ten years ago, I was nine. Far as I’m concerned, we’ve said that forever.”

“That expression ‘going viral’ itself went viral only a few years earlier. I wonder if there’s a name for that—something that is what it describes.”

“You care more about the names of stuff than I do.”

“It’s called being educated. You should try it sometime.”

“Why? I told you, I want to be a voice-over artist, too. I can already read pretty good. Now I just have to get better at once more, with feeling, like you said.”

This peculiarly age-discrepant friendship had first taken off after the girl discovered that Serenata Terpsichore had recorded the audiobook of one of her favorite young adult novels. Tommy had never known anyone whose name had appeared on an Amazon download, so the credit made her next-door neighbor a superstar.

“I think what grates about these abruptly ubiquitous expressions—”

Tommy wasn’t going to ask.

“Meaning, suddenly everyone says it,” Serenata added. “It’s just, people throwing around fashionable lingo think they’re so hip and imaginative. But you can’t be hip and imaginative. You can be unhip and imaginative, or hip and conformist.”

“For a lady who doesn’t care about what other people think, and what other people do, you sure talk a lot about what other people think, and what other people do.”

“That’s because other people are constantly crowding me.”

“Do I crowd you?” Tommy asked shyly, actually coming to a stop.

Serenata pulled herself up—it was a Bad Knee Day—and put an arm around the girl. “Certainly not! It’s you and I against the world. Now that you’ve paused, the next thirty steps are a write-off. So let’s have tea.”

Tommy slid gratefully into a chair. “Did you know that within fifteen minutes of sitting down, your whole body, like, changes and everything? Your heart and stuff.”

“Yes, I’ve read that. But I can’t stand up twelve hours a day anymore. It hurts.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad, before. About the running and stuff. ’Cause anyway, for an old person—you still look pretty hot.”

“Thanks—I think. Strawberry-mango okay?” Serenata lit the burner under the kettle. “But being halfway well put together won’t last. Exercise has been my secret. A secret that’s out, I gather.”

“Not that out. Most people look terrible. Like my mother.”

“You said she has diabetes.” With bad timing, Serenata put out a plate of almond cookies. “Cut her some slack.”

Tommy March was not unloved, but under-loved, which was worse—just as full-tilt fasting had a strengthening absolutism, whereas a never-ending diet made you peevish and weak. Her father had cut and run long ago, and her mother rarely left the house. Presumably they were on public assistance. So even in a town with depressed property values—this vast brown clapboard had been a steal at $235K, with two baths, three porches, and six bedrooms, two of which they still hadn’t put to any use—naturally Tommy’s mother was still renting. She’d never encouraged her daughter to go to college. Which was a shame, because the girl had plenty of drive, but her urge to self-improvement was unmoored. She pinballed from fad to fad with little awareness of the larger social forces that worked the flippers. When she declared herself a vegan (before realizing two weeks in that she couldn’t live without pizza), she imagined that the idea just came to her out of the blue.

Typically for the time, then, Tommy was skittish about sugar. As if stealing the confection behind her own back, her hand darted at a cookie like a lizard’s tongue and snatched the snack to her lap. “You’re still being, like, all grumpy-out-of-it-old-lady about social media, right?”

“I have better things to do. In the real world.”

“Social media is the real world. It’s way more real than this one. It’s only ’cause you shut yourself out of it that you don’t know that.”

“I prefer to use you as my spy. I used Remington the same way for years. He went out into the American workplace and reported back. As for what he found there … A layer of insulation seems prudent.”

“I just think you should know … Well, on these YA platforms …” Tommy had stopped looking Serenata in the eye. “It’s got kinda not so great, for white readers of audiobooks to use accents. Especially of POCs.”

“People of color!” Serenata said. “Bet you thought I didn’t know that. Remington always thought it was hilarious that at work if he’d ever said ‘colored people’ instead, he’d have been fired. But then, he was fired anyway. So much for hoop jumping, if you’re not in pro basketball.”

“Look, I don’t make the rules.”

“But you do make the rules. Remington says that it’s everyone slavishly obeying these capriciously concocted taboos that gives them teeth. He says rules that are roundly ignored are ‘just suggestions.’”

“You’re not listening! The point is, your name came up. And not in a nice way.”

“So what’s wrong with doing accents again? I’m not following this.”

“It’s—problematic.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means everything. It’s a great big giant word for absolutely everything that’s super bad. See, now they’re all saying that white readers pretending to talk like marginalized communities is ‘mimicry,’ and also it’s like, cultural appropriation.”

“It depresses the hell out of me that you can rattle off ‘marginalized communities’ and ‘cultural appropriation,’ whatever that is, when you don’t know the word ubiquitous.”

“I do now! It means everybody does it.”

“No. Omnipresent, everywhere. Now, why does my name come up?”

“Honest? Your accents, on the audiobooks. I think it’s because you’re so good at them. Like, you have a reputation. So when these guys reach for an example, it’s your name they think of.”

“Let me get this straight,” Serenata said. “I’m now supposed to deliver the dialogue of a coke dealer in Crown Heights as if he’s a professor of medieval literature at Oxford. ‘Yo, bro, dat bitch ain’t no better than a ho, true dat.’” She’d given the line an aristocratic English snootery, and Tommy laughed.

“Please let’s not tell Remington about this,” Serenata said. “Promise me. I’m deadly serious. He’d freak.”

“Shouldn’t tell Remington what?” Himself closed the side door behind him. It was November, and he’d made the usual mistake of bundling up to excess, when the biggest problem of running in cold weather was getting hot. Underneath all that winter sports gear he’d be drenched, and his face was red. The ruddy complexion was further enhanced by a glow of a more interior sort. Good grief, she prayed that she herself had never returned from some dumpy old run exuding this degree of self-congratulation.