They’d planned to drive up to Saratoga Springs late that Friday morning, but the children were fussy eaters. After the preparation and cleanup of multiple breakfasts, Valeria announced it was time for lunch.
Though Serenata had worried how on earth they’d fill the previous three days, this domestic entropy had been the norm every time they committed to an outing—a trip to the Museum of Firefighting (which she imagined Logan would like; he didn’t), a boat trip on the Hudson (they missed the last departure), or a tour of the Dr. Oliver Bronson House, with its famous elliptical staircase (restrictive viewing hours required getting out the door at an appointed time: forget it); sadly, the most enjoyable leisure activity in the area, a wine-tasting tour, was out of the question for a devout teetotaler, and even Remington now barely drank. Whenever the baby was changed and fed and bathed, the children were dressed for the weather, and the household’s intestines and bladders had been evacuated, it was time to fuel and hydrate once more, the better to shit and pee again. This awful life surely characterized Valeria’s days in her own home: frantic with a semblance of activity while running in place—the only kind of running Serenata herself could do now, in intervals, on carpet, bouncing on the balls of her feet, so she was all too familiar with the experience of applying so much onward effort only for the scenery to never change. The one benefit of the visit so far was greater sympathy for her daughter. With still two more of these engines of stasis who sucked the oxygen from their mother like extraction fans, the young woman could hardly be expected to make much progress even on her “super hard” and “super time-consuming” self-healing.
Naturally, when Remington had left for the shorter, easier runs prescribed for his final week’s training, he attracted nothing but exuberant Go get ’em, champ!, while his wife exercised upstairs in secret with the door closed, lest she trigger another burst of Valeria’s lifelong resentment. Serenata had foolishly imagined that while the family was here she might also devote a few hours to the Logitech infomercial. Yet folks who didn’t work—a cohort, dismayingly, that now included Remington—often found the notion of doing anything other than eat, clean, and shop completely foreign. The one time she’d tried to excuse herself to her studio, she might as well have announced that she was waltzing off for a pedicure. To Valeria, her mother’s work was a vanity.
She’d had the same problem writ large when Jacob’s birth coincided with recording a tetralogy of fantasy books last August. Typically for the genre, the novels were enormous. The Manhattan studio was booked, the six-week job paid well, and she’d made the commitment before learning that another “precious new life” was on the way. When Serenata explained that she simply could not spend those weeks in Rhode Island relieving the new mother of caring for her four other children, Valeria blew up. “Work,” whatever that was, didn’t count as a viable excuse, especially for the self-employed, who could presumably wedge this frivolous elective activity between loading the dishwasher and brushing their teeth. She accused her mother of being selfish. So on top of recording days long enough that by their end she was losing her voice, Serenata was consigned to feeling like a Bad Grandmother on the dark train rides home—returning, since the Good Grandfather played pinch hitter, to an empty house.
They didn’t pile into Valeria’s minivan until mid-afternoon, so what should have been a ninety-minute trip was bogged down by Friday commuter and weekender traffic on I-87. A longer drive wouldn’t have mattered if it weren’t for the consequently more extended torture of Bible songs—“This Little Light of Mine,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” and worst of all, “I’ve Got the Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy Down in My Heart,” which the kids sang three times. Touched to have been invited, Tommy was just entering into the spirit of the occasion, but her humming along felt like betrayal. For the relentless joy, joy, joy, joys pounded Serenata’s head like a sledgehammer. Surely it was perverse to use the redundancy of your incredible happiness as a bludgeon. Did anyone actually like these songs? She’d yet to discern whether Nancee and Logan had been genuinely indoctrinated or were doing a fiendishly well-crafted imitation of having been indoctrinated. She had the same problem parsing vox pops from North Korea.
Saratoga Springs was a wealthy town, lush with mature hardwoods and looming with stately, big-porched nineteenth-century homes, built when the affluent flocked to its spas for the waters. Still heavily dependent on tourism—she and Remington had sometimes celebrated anniversaries here—the town had accrued hefty cultural credentials, with an arts center that housed the New York City Ballet in the summer, theaters, a college prestigious enough that neither of their children would have been admitted had either improbably wanted to apply, and a writers’ colony whose implicit pretension made Serenata grateful to have changed careers in her twenties. Broadway, its main drag, was aptly named, with up-market chains housed in sedate red brick. Of course, for most people the place was synonymous with its storied horseracing track. Nancee craned through her open window toward the stables, petulant that the track wouldn’t open until July. “Where are the horses?”
Lavishing still more limited resources on a normal human activity that in the olden days was free, Serenata had eschewed the budget motels on the edge of town, which might have risked the appearance of an under-ardent attitude, instead booking three rooms at the Saratoga Hilton on Broadway. A private plus: it had a fitness suite.
The lobby was a sea of sportswear. The majority of contestants wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow, so this was just the beginning.
As Serenata waited to check in while the others circled for a place to park, the woman behind her in the unexpectedly long line asked, “You do have reservations, right?” Affirmative. “Because they’ve increased the number of runners admitted this year to five thousand. I think it’s cynical—more admission fees, and of course the town is greedy for all the extra tourists. Since so many entrants show up with a whole entourage, the pressure on hotel rooms is intense. Oh, I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I’m just assuming—you are one of the marathoners, aren’t you?”
“No,” Serenata said.
“Well, gosh—I hope you take it as a compliment, then—it’s just, you look like one. I mean, like a real runner. Not one of the plodders.”
Serenata was both flattered and depressed. “Plodders?” she asked blankly.
The woman lowered her voice. “The dregs at the back. Also known as the run-walk crowd. Emphasis on walk. The charity and novelty acts are bad enough. But nowadays, all these”—she lowered her voice further—“fat, out-of-shape bucket-list box-tickers take seven or eight hours to finish, and still claim afterward they’ve ‘run a marathon.’ We’re talking, like, a twenty-minute mile. Holy crap, in Honolulu, which has no time limit whatsoever, the plodders take a break for lunch. They cheapen what completing this distance means. Sorry, that’s just me. I guess my outlook isn’t very democratic. Maybe there’s a thin line between being in the elite and being an elitist.”
Indeed, the woman had a look that had grown recognizable. Clad in Lycra and an unzipped fleece, she was stringy and weathered with cropped hair. She had a small cave under the center of her rib cage, where even trim postmenopausal women usually gathered flesh. Much like Nancee, she couldn’t stand still, lifting one Adidas and then the other, shaking each leg out. At least fifty-five, she doubtless imagined that she didn’t look anywhere near that old, though her bony, sinuous frame advertised every year. Alas, you couldn’t think such a thing about another woman at Serenata’s age without its boomeranging back in your face. Serenata didn’t imagine she looked sixty, either.
“I’m surprised this race has grown so big,” Serenata said, pushing herself to be sociable. “This is a minor event. Nothing like New York or Boston.”
“It used to be if you wanted to pull in tourists you’d found a literary festival. Now every dot on the map sponsors a marathon. Draws much bigger crowds. Whatever limit Saratoga puts on registration, they’ll still be turning contestants away. The lesser races are popular with the wannabes, because they don’t require a qualifying time.”
“You do a lot of these?” The interest was feigned.
“Best thing about marathons popping up everywhere is I can pretty much go from race to race year-round. I hit the Florida, Arizona, and California ones over the winter. I always enter the lottery for London, but no luck so far. The odds are against you. Only forty thousand are allowed in, and two hundred fifty thousand apply.”
“Seriously?” Serenata said. “A quarter of a million people apply to run the London marathon.”
“Goes up every year,” the woman said glumly.
Serenata nodded at reception. “Doesn’t your circuit get expensive?”
“You sound like my kids. But I’m not about to lie in bed with cats, just so they can get an inheritance. They seem to forget it’s still my money. When I was first talking myself into this, I realized that I’d forgotten it was my money. What else is early retirement good for? I’m not into bingo.”
“But what about injuries?”
Her smile was tight and grim. “How long have you got? Hey, you’re up.”
Once the others arrived and got settled, Serenata slipped off to the fitness suite before dinner, but the place was mobbed. There were lines for all the machines, with a scrawled waiting list taped to every stationary bicycle. The scene was repulsive. Resigning herself to a few calisthenics in front of CNN, she took the stairs back up to their room, and even on the staircase, commonly deserted in hotels save for the odd cleaner, she had to thread between guests hurtling themselves up and down.
Serenata had outdone herself in the service of appearing to outdo herself. Dinner reservations tomorrow night were considerately early, that Remington might have no trouble hitting the hay by eight thirty, the better to arrive at the race in advance of a seven thirty a.m. starting gun. Their mattress was bigger than some hotel swimming pools, so she shouldn’t wake him creeping into bed later that evening. Tomorrow was a rest day, and he planned to drive Valeria’s minivan around the course that morning to familiarize himself with any “challenging topography” before the roads were closed to traffic. For the afternoon, she’d booked him into the Roosevelt Spa for a mineral bath and massage.
While Remington was being worked over, she’d also treat Valeria to a Detoxifying Algae Wrap and Arctic Berry Illuminating Facial at the same facility (the anti-cellulite option seemed impolitic). The spa treatments alone would come to over $700, though at least the fact that Serenata secretly considered all these pawings and unguents a load of hooey meant she wouldn’t further inflate the bill by steeping in seaweed herself. The real present to Valeria was volunteering to take care of the children while the young woman was being what passed for pampered for three solid hours. Were Valeria anything like her mother, she’d find the hands of strangers prodding all over her body not just a little strange but invasive. But she wouldn’t dare to say so. Women were programmed to regard facials, massages, and soaks as the acme of indulgence, and Valeria hadn’t the originality to trust her disappointment.
Prudently well in advance, given that apparently up to five thousand other parties could be prowling downtown for a festive venue, for the end of the Big Day she’d made reservations for a blowout at 15 Church, where she and Remington had dined for their thirtieth wedding anniversary; should her husband’s performance on Sunday prove ignominious, she could always cancel. The restaurant was pricey, and Buttermilk Crispy Oysters with ponzu and foie gras butter was bound to be wasted on the kids. But the trappings of jubilance routinely stood in for jubilance itself. Rare was the bash that better than gestured toward celebration, a sensation so taxing to inhabit in the present that most honorific occasions only truly happened after the fact, when the laureate gazed fondly at photographs. On the other hand, Serenata might be feeling jovial at that. This clubby bunkum would be over, and she and her husband could go home in every sense.
Yet for all her loyal wifery, Remington announced quietly while getting ready for bed on Friday night, “You’re not fooling anyone, you know.” He declined to explain, because he didn’t have to.
While Remington was driving a course that would take an hour even in a car, Serenata had a late, leisurely breakfast in the hotel dining room with Tommy, whom she’d put in a double with Nancee. The two seemed to have something in common—which proved the problem.
“Crunches,” Tommy despaired over toast. “Raises, planks, and lifts. Plus a lot of goofy twirling and leaping things I think she made up. It’s like sharing a room with Hurricane Sandy. I said I was heading out after dinner last night to rack up some steps, but I really hit the halls just to get away from her.”
“Isn’t ‘racking up some steps’ on the same continuum? What’s the difference?”
“You know how it works. Anyone who does less exercise than you is pathetic, and anyone who does more than you is a nut.”
“So Nancee’s a nut.”
“She’s an exercise bulimic.”
“Have you caught her throwing up?” Serenata asked sharply.
“I mean she pukes energy.”
“She looks ill to me.”
“She doesn’t eat enough to build any muscle. So all the jumping up and down doesn’t accomplish anything.”
“And what does all your Fitbitting accomplish?”
“Watch it. You’re the one who claims everyone’s copying you. What did being a fitness fanatic for fifty years ‘accomplish’?”
Serenata added a contemplative smear of butter to a miniature cranberry muffin. “When I was younger, I was testing myself. Setting goals and exceeding them. The trouble is, you can’t keep beating yourself indefinitely.”
“Like Fitbit,” Tommy said. “Once you’ve ever done thirty thousand steps in a day, any less steps—”
“Fewer,” Serenata said.
Tommy glared. “Any fewer seems kind of sad.”
“Personal bests are a tyranny. Run ten miles, and tomorrow you have to run eleven, or the ten even faster. The problem may apply to more than just athletics.”
“Obviously the answer is to stay really shit at everything.”
Serenata laughed. “Maybe. But trying to surpass yourself, you’ll always approach a limit. Of what your body is capable of, but also of how much you care.”
“Yeah, I’m running into that with the Fitbit, too,” Tommy said. “I mean, it’s just a game, in case you thought I actually take it seriously. I want to beat Marley Wilson. But I’m starting to, like, slightly not give a shit, ’cause of what you said. The limit thing. And once you start coming up against the limit, it stops being interesting.”
“And that’s assuming it ever was.”
“You know, I still don’t totally understand why you don’t want Remington to run. It seems kind of mean.”
“I don’t really care if he runs by himself. It’s this mass goat fuck I can’t stand.”
“Shut up,” Tommy whispered, gesturing at the other diners. “You’re being inappropriate. Pissing on marathons, and not being ‘supportive’ of anyone who wants to run one—I can’t hardly think of anything more uncool. It’s like, almost worse than being a racist or something.”
“Thanks for the tip.”
“You’ve no idea what it’s like online right now. People post how much weight they’re pressing, how many squats they do, how low their heart rate is. There’s all these Instagram glam shots of girls with six-packs all greased up and tensed in running bras. The standards keep going up, too, what counts as really ‘fit.’ What seemed awesome last year now gets dissed as totally lame. It’s one thing to get so you can’t beat yourself anymore, like you said. But it’s way worse to get beaten by everyone else.”
“A lot of those online posts must be exaggerated.”
“Maybe. But some of these guys really do spend all day, every day, in the gym. All I’ve got is our backyard. You and Griff will have to get a whole lot filthier if I’m going to spring for a hundred twenty-five dollars a month at BruteBody year-round.”
“Is that really the best use of your savings?”
“Without those machines, I can’t keep up. Last year, my friend Anastasia celebrated her eighteenth birthday at BruteBody. The ‘party’ was a bunch of unbelievably hard and complicated boot-camp routines to techno-rap. They all kept an eye out for anyone who couldn’t keep up so they could razz you later. There wasn’t even any cake. The main event was a contest: who could skip rope the longest without messing up. I did okay, but I didn’t win. You, though,” Tommy charged. “You feel superior to everybody.”
“I do not! I want to have nothing to do with most people. That doesn’t mean I feel superior to them.”
“Liar. It’s obvious, just in the way you stand. All tall and straight and a little pulled back, and then when people are around you don’t like, you don’t talk very much, and I can tell what you’re thinking.”
“Do you think I feel superior to you?”
“Well . . . I don’t like it when you correct my grammar and stuff.”
“I’m only trying to help you. Do you want me to stop?”
Tommy folded her arms and thought about it. “Nah. I mean, it’s irritating, but at least you care. Nobody else listens to me. When you go all schoolteacher, I know you’re paying attention.”
Pious yogurts on all sides drove Serenata to fetch a second muffin.
“You know, over time,” she said on return, examining the baked good critically, “the reasons I exercise have changed. At your age, sure, I wanted to be attractive—and strong, not just thin. But for years now . . . That daily routine has been mostly about maintaining a sense of order. Order and control. I do it because I’ve always done it. I’m completely convinced that if I ever stop exercising, everything else in my life will fall apart. Instantaneously. And disastrously.”
“What, like you’d become an alcoholic heroin addict—on welfare, who smokes?”
“And shoplifts. And steals from charity piggybanks at checkout.”
“Maybe you should try quitting, then,” Tommy said with a grin. “Sounds like you’d finally have some fun.”
They dined that evening at the barbaric hour of five thirty. Valeria made such a fuss over her father’s order for his “last supper”—“carb loading” being out of fashion—that her mother finally interrupted, “Sweetie—he’s not about to be executed.”
When she returned to the room after a mutinous nightcap—at the teetotal dinner, the confining rectitudes of Jesus and fitness freakery had overlapped—Remington was abed but restive. She recognized his frequent glances at the clock from the latter days at the DOT, when he worried about getting to work on time, but also about what would happen when he got there. Only when she smoothed against his back, kissed his neck, and wrapped an arm around his chest did he quiet. They’d always been a good fit. Although the cleaner lines of his leaner frame the last few months were pleasing to the eye, he’d been wiry to begin with, and his naked body at rest felt comfortingly unchanged. An alarm set for five a.m. seemed extreme, but this one time, she thought, dropping off, she wouldn’t mind getting up with him out of solidarity.
Wrong.
With psychic violence, the alarm rang during her deepest slumber. Until this moment, the weekend had exhibited the indolence of a getaway, so why was she stumbling for the bathroom light switch when it was pitch-dark? What shocked her fully awake was a burst of rage. This whole undertaking was stupid. She’d been pretending for months that it wasn’t stupid, and now that she had to keep pretending just one more day she wasn’t going to make it. Her pose of taking this circus seriously, or at least of tolerating it until her husband’s groupster infatuation went the way of the Hula-Hoop, had fatally, as they said in the marathon biz, hit a wall.
While Remington stuck moleskin to the parts of his feet that chafed, she found Tommy already stalking the hallway, dressed and ready to roll. Not to be outdone, Nancee was close on her heels, hopping behind her on one foot.
“Twenty-two hundred steps!” Tommy said, raising the hand with the aqua strap. “Now, that’s what I call getting a jump on the day.” Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the young woman seemed not the least irked by the savagery of the hour.
Yet despite all their daughter’s previous gung ho go-Papa, in the room down the hall Valeria responded neither to a decorous tap-tap nor, at first, to full-tilt pounding on the door. Slit-eyed and tousled, she finally appeared in a waffled hotel robe. “Jesus, Mom, it’s the fucking middle of the night!” She forgot that she never took the Lord’s name in vain. She forgot that she now said “Mama.” She forgot that she didn’t curse. If Valeria got up at the crack of dawn more often, they might get on.
Serenata borrowed the minivan keys and promised to drive back later to pick up the slugabeds. Given Remington’s pace, his daughter and grandkids wouldn’t miss his crossing the finish line if they slept in till eleven and ordered the eggs Benedict.
Other parties were gnawing energy bars in the lobby; the hotel dining room was closed. Kitted out in the green and purple nylon in which he had initiated this six-month fool’s errand, Remington was swinging his personalized goodie bag: bananas, energy gels the colors of plastic toys, Red Bull, and something called “chews.” But Serenata wanted coffee, thank you, and all the cafés down Broadway would be closed, too.
“You could be a little more cheerful,” Remington said on their way to the van.
“At this time of day? I’d settle for civil if I were you.”
The grounds of the Performing Arts Center in Spa Park were humming when they arrived at six. Peppy staff wore hot-pink T-shirts proclaiming saratoga springs gives you a run for your money! Remington reverently pinned his black-and-white race number, 3,788, to his shirt, and snapped on the chipped ankle bracelet that would record his time to the hundredth of a second when (and if) he finished. The spectators and contestants rapidly thickened.
Serenata reviled crowds. Furthermore, the world record for this distance was about two hours, and this event had a cutoff of eight hours. There was no earthly reason to begin the race at seven thirty a.m. They could have released the first group of men, eighteen to twenty-four, at noon, in which case she’d be well rested and fortified by cranberry muffins.
The up-and-at-’em start time was all for show. For humanity divided into mutually hostile camps: bounders out of bed and burners of the midnight oil. The distinction went way beyond schedule. The late nighter was synonymous with mischief, imagination, rebellion, transgression, anarchy, and excess, not to mention drugs, alcohol, and sex. The early riser evoked traditional Protestant values like obedience, industry, discipline, and thrift, but also, in this gladness to greet the day, a militant, even fascistic determination to look on the bright side. In short, rise-and-shiners were revolting, and being flapped by so many birds getting the worm felt like getting trapped in an Alfred Hitchcock remake. These bouncy, boisterous, bubbly people loved their seven thirty start, which shouted earnestness and asceticism, and any attempt to move the time to noon for next year would trigger a riot.
Mercifully, as the sky lightened refreshment stands were opening, so Serenata bought the two girls doughnuts and herself coffee. It was weak and tasted like dirt, but coffee in the morning was as much idea as beverage—an idea of normalcy and entitlement—so the cardboard cup settled her mood from fuming to surly. When a younger booster jostled the coffee onto Serenata’s shirt, instead of apologizing the woman shot her a smile of manic benevolence. “Isn’t this exciting?”
“Why,” Serenata said flatly. “Why is this exciting.”
“Wow, you’ve really got to work on your attitude,” she huffed, and flounced off.
As Serenata threaded with Remington toward the flag under which his age group was gathering, a distinctive subsection of the over-the-hill contestants began to exert a queasy fascination. All men in their seventies and eighties, they were lean to the point of desiccation, with limbs like beef jerky. They went shirtless, despite the morning’s chill. In April, they were tanned. Their eyes burned with mission. They did stretches with the self-conscious air of feeling observed. Their watches were flashy: erstwhile professionals or CEOs, then, climbing yet another ladder in retirement. She caught snippets of their conversation, which were all of a piece: “Under five, if there’s a God”; “Break the nine-minute mile, I’ll sleep sound tonight”; “Finished four twenty-two eighteen in New York, but that race has become such a free-for-all . . .” The wizened immortals cut only side-glances at each other, in that reluctance to quite take in the full person that marks the highly competitive. Should he really catch the bug, was this a snapshot of Remington’s future? Because the geriatric elite had one more trait in common: as company, they’d be unbearable.
Several hundred young men had now assembled behind the starting line. After a welcome speech from a town functionary, the gun went off at seven thirty precisely. The spectators roared, screaming and waving placards (we believe in leonard!). The men surged forward in a mass, filling the roadway from the Arts Center to its edges like corpuscles in a vein. If she didn’t find the spectacle uplifting, she had to concede, however sullenly, that at least these eager-beaver entrants weren’t hurting anybody.
More to the point, Remington wasn’t hurting anybody, including her. He’d worked hard for this, and in the context of a rough couple of years. This event mattered to him, and it wasn’t her business to decide for him what should and shouldn’t matter. Although he sure knew how to pick his spots, it wasn’t his fault that she’d ruined her knees. So when at 8:40 men sixty to sixty-four were summoned on the loudspeaker, she placed a hand on each cheek and looked him in the eye. The little wryness in her delivery would certify the sentiment was sincere: “Go get ’em, champ!”
This wasn’t mere going through the motions of “supportiveness,” and to show he knew the difference he embraced her for longer than he could afford, because the age-group starting times were strict. Good grief. When had she last been tender? He must have been starving.
Scanning for her charges, Serenata spotted Tommy dragging Nancee harshly by the wrist. “She keeps trying to join the pack,” Tommy said when they met up. “Then the other spectators think it’s so cute. I’ve told her and told her, she’s only here to watch.”
“Look at all those moldy oldies!” Nancee whined. “If they can make it, I could, too, no problem!”
“You have to pay an entry fee,” Serenata said. “And be over eighteen.”
“That’s not fair! I’m way faster than them fuddy-duddies. Let me go, and I’ll show you!”
“Nancee, sweetheart. I’m sure you’re one of the fastest in your neighborhood—”
“Not only fast! I can run a really, really long time! A lot longer than you.”
At this point, the girl’s claim was horribly true.
When Serenata drove the girls back to the hotel just after ten, Valeria, Logan, and the baby were breakfasting in the dining room.
“See, Mama,” Valeria said, “you can download this app, enter Papa’s registration number, and follow exactly where he is in the race!”
The course on the app cut a long straight diagonal on Ballston Avenue, whose scenery over eleven miles Remington had described as “abusively monotonous.” The return journey described two peaks—up Goode Street, right on Charlton, left onto Middleline, and right on Geyser for the final four miles back to Spa Park: a shocking length of public roadway to close to traffic for a self-regarding middle-class pastime.
“Oh, wow!” Valeria said. “They’ve just declared the winner!”
“Who gives a crap,” Logan muttered.
“Golly,” Valeria said. “Our number three-seven-eight-eight has twenty miles to go. Good news, actually. We’ve plenty of time to visit the house of the Lord, kiddoes.”
The reaction of the two older children was impassive. They didn’t squirm, or kick the table in frustration, or even glower. Fascinating.
“Papa is running for the glory of God, whether he realizes it or not,” she regaled her mother. “This is the perfect day for you to raise your face to the light. Why don’t you join us? You never know what might happen.”
“I have a pretty good idea,” Serenata said. “But after the service, you could use the app to find intersections where you can cheer your father on. He’d like that.”
“Won’t you want to cheer by the roadside, too?”
“I think I’ll save my enthusiasm for the finish line.”
“What enthusiasm?” Valeria said sourly.
“What about you?” Serenata asked Tommy, once the family had bustled off to some happy-clappy revivalist hootenanny. “Want to plant yourself along the course and yell ‘Go, Remy, baby!’?”
“Honest?” Tommy said. “Standing around watching other people exercise. Not my idea of a good time.”
“Let’s see . . .” Serenata tapped the calculator. “Even if he keeps averaging a twelve-minute mile, Remington won’t finish for another four hours. Since my husband is sacrificing himself for our sins, I don’t see why we shouldn’t enjoy ourselves.”
Surely she was intent on a rigorous workout, too, to prove she was still a contender? Au contraire. From a funny little belligerence arose an ease, a lightness, a liberation. She’d fit in calisthenics in front of Frasier the two days previous, and couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken an exercise day off. Today? She’d take a day off.
For her very awareness that Remington was at that moment thudding down Ballston—straining to slow his breathing, using the runner in front to maintain a pace with which he wasn’t quite comfortable, and panicking that the first right turn was still nowhere in sight—inspired his wife to extend across her chair, arms draped languidly to either side. She’d rarely so inhabited a state of repose. Why, she felt like a movie star. Everything seemed so terribly pleasant.
On Sundays, brunch lasted till one p.m. So many hotel guests were running or watching the race that the bountiful buffet was barely touched. Serenata floated to the long white table and assembled an alluring plate: brioche with a loll of smoked salmon. A wedge of honeydew topped with three fresh raspberries. A perfectly fried piece of bacon—not flabby, but with a droop to it. A miniature lemon tart with a garnish of fresh mint. She and Tommy ordered more coffee, which was fresh and strong and hot and didn’t taste like dirt. Every tidbit was delectable. They went back for seconds.
In the main, Serenata hewed to a sartorial formula: dark leggings or black jeans, scoop-necked tops in muted solids, black ankle boots, and a timeless leather jacket; Remington said she dressed like one of those thriller heroines who were experts at kickboxing. So she seldom shopped for clothes. Yet today the quotidian diversion presented itself as positively heady. Leading Tommy down Broadway, she assumed a long idle saunter that made simply walking feel as sumptuous and silky as that smoked salmon. The air on her cheeks was bracing, yet not so cold that she tightened against the chill. At the hoary old age of sixty-one, she passed a fellow arranging a sidewalk table of horseracing souvenirs and turned his head. The knees were taking one of their capricious timeouts from torture. Fingertips resting lightly on the navy leggings, she followed the undulation of her thigh muscles. Funny, she’d spent so much of her life working her body, pushing it, punishing it, but far too little just hanging out in it.
Tommy looked at her companion askance. “Why do you look so happy? I thought the marathon would put you in a bad mood. But you seem almost drunk.”
“Turn it off.”
“What?”
“The Fitbit. Turn it off.”
Consternated, Tommy came to a halt. “Why?”
“Do as I say. Then we’re headed for that boutique, and we’ll find you some killer gear.” She wouldn’t proceed until the aqua wristband went bee-beep.
At first anxious about accepting her neighbor’s largesse, Tommy soon plunged into the spirit of their spree. Together they found her a lined, sleeveless dress in white cotton; the draping at the dropped waist smoothed over the gawkiness of the girl’s frame. Serenata located a soft, flannelly floor-length garment in light blue denim with long sleeves and pearled snaps—the ideal weight for the midday breeze, and a stunning accompaniment for the dress. Short, blond leather boots completed the look. For herself, she found a long black rayon wrap with trench-coat styling and the same slither she looked for in shirts. “Lord,” she declared to the mirror. “All I need is a revolver.”
Instead, she bought a cocky black fedora. Tommy was more suited to a sun hat in straw with a thin ribbon that uncannily matched the denim. Blues, Serenata informed her charge with authority, were prone to clash.
There was lunch. Suffice it to say that the arugula salad with shaved Parmesan and a side of tomato bruschetta improved on Remington’s chews.
“What I want to know is . . .” The new outfit imparting a fresh sophistication, Tommy wielded her slender breadstick like a cigarette holder. “Are you faking?”
“Faking not being jealous and miserable? What do you think?”
Tommy poked the breadstick in the olive caponata as if extinguishing an ash. “If it’s an act, it’s darned well done.”
“I don’t see why I’d be jealous of my husband huffing the streets of Saratoga when we’re having such a charming time. How’s the intrepid doing, anyway?”
“Huh,” Tommy said, checking her phone. “He’s slowed down. He still has ten, eleven more miles to go. Don’t take this wrong, but his time kind of sucks.”
Serenata stretched. “Why don’t we go back to the hotel for a swim?”
“That seems like backsliding. More exercise. You’re taking the day off.”
“I don’t want to exercise. I just want to be in water.”
Once they met back up at the deserted indoor pool, Serenata descended its steps slowly, taking time to acclimatize. Ordinarily, she’d immediately start swimming laps. Why, in her adulthood, she couldn’t recall ever gliding serenely into water for the sake of the sensation alone. Floating on her back with her eyes closed. Slipping below the surface, touching the drain, and dolphining to air. Parting the water with a few expansive breaststrokes not to meet a stringent private requirement, but to feel the pressure against her cupped hands, the ripple across her neck.
Yet Tommy lingered at the shallow end. For pity’s sake, no one had ever taught her to swim. For their last twenty minutes, Serenata supported the girl’s torso in place so she could practice breathing for the crawl. Should the usual edict to complete a mile or two have prevailed, she’d never have made time for the lesson.
After a long hot shower upstairs, she hastily toweled her hair, slid into the flowing rayon trench coat, and bunched the damp hair under the fedora. She and Tommy would be the only spectators at the finish line who weren’t clad in sympathetic athletic apparel. At 3:20 p.m., she reconnoitered with Tommy in the lobby and called Valeria.
“You’re cutting it awful close,” her daughter snarled.
“Not especially. According to Tommy’s app, Remington won’t approach the finish line until after four. I thought you might pick us up, and we can watch together. Have you been able to cheer him on at various points?”
“It’s been a little trying, to be honest. Constantly finding a place to park. Changing and feeding Jacob in the backseat. And then Nancee keeps walking alongside Papa at the same speed, and I’m afraid she’s been demoralizing. Also, at our last vantage point, there was some woman . . .” Valeria trailed off.
“We’ll be at the back entrance, by the parking lot.”
When the harried young woman pulled up in the minivan, she shot a malignant glance at her mother, who looked svelte, stylish, and refreshed: the very picture of what three hours of spa treatments the day before had failed to do for Valeria. Logan announced grumpily from the back, “This is the boring-est day ever. When I grow up, I’m never gonna stand around clapping just ’cause a bunch a people went jogging. My hands hurt. When anybody claps for me, it’s gonna be ’cause I actually did something.”
“Grampa is totally slow,” Nancee said. “I coulda run that course three times by now. It’s embarrassing. Tons of the other oldies finished hours ago.”
“Now, honey,” Valeria said. “Remember ‘The Tortoise and the Hare.’”
“But ‘slow and steady’ doesn’t win the race,” Nancee said. “Some other guy won it, and Grampa’s practically last. Besides, that story is dumb. Everybody knows the rabbit is way faster, and no one really wants to be the crummy turtle.”
They’d no trouble parking at the Arts Center. Most runners and their retinues had cleared off by early afternoon. The crowd was so sparse that their party could stand right by the finish line. The grounds were littered with confetti, burst balloons, and discarded noisemakers. Committed to every finisher’s enjoying a salute, a small, dedicated group of staff in pink T-shirts was positioned beside the banner. Whenever a laggard approached, this volunteer cheering section punched the air screaming, “Way to go!” or “Only a few more feet, man!” or “Earned your brewskie tonight, bro!” The limited selection of encouragements was regularly recycled. Each time another marathoner crossed the line, running 26.2 miles seemed a little less amazing.
At this tail end of the field, many participants were running for charity in costumes. Amid the commercial Batman and Underdog outfits tottered homemade creations: a papier-mâché Eiffel Tower, a possum, a human calculator, and a giant slice of cheese. Between them wove the power walkers, chins high, elbows out.
At 4:10 p.m. Remington was advancing on the home stretch. A time of about 7:25 translated into an average mile of 19:30—which was appalling. Serenata mulled over what to say to buck him up, and to ensure he’d accept his role as guest of honor tonight at 15 Church. She’d hate to cancel the reservation. After six months of training, he deserved better than a room-service ham sandwich.
If she wished for his sake that his time were a little better, she was genuinely astonished that he was completing the course at any speed. Nevertheless, she relished the prospect of the months ahead, during which he’d grow gradually less touchy about the whole fandango, until they could laugh and roll around on the bed and remember this weird period of their marriage, and at last he’d ruefully admit that, as for endurance sport, well, okay, right—he wasn’t very good at it.
“There he is!” Valeria cried, spotting the wilted purple and green kit. “Go, Papa! You can do it! Jesus loves you, whether you know it or not! Glory be! You show ’em! Go for it! You’re almost home! Go, go, go! Yay! Yay, Papa! Rah, rah, rah!”
Her daughter carried the gene that Serenata lacked. Perhaps it skipped a generation: this mystifying capacity for getting swept up in the fervor of crowds. For once resisting the urge to disparage the girl as “a joiner,” instead she found Valeria’s rare display of filial loyalty rather sweet.
Not wishing to be ungracious, Serenata brought her hands together pat-pat-pat whenever another “plodder” completed the course. Yet as Remington began his last hundred yards, her bellowing of bolstering slogans would have seemed fake. So she dropped her hands and settled on a smile. It was a warm smile, a private smile—a smile of truce, of quiet apology for having been a bit of a dick, and women could be dicks; a smile of welcome and congratulation and restoration of whatever in the last six months had been put out of whack. It was the smile of a wife.
Yet Remington’s expression was neither haggard nor infused with desperate gratitude that the ordeal was almost over. He looked rapt. Rather than scan the straggle of spectators for his spouse, he gazed to the left, nodded, spoke quietly, and chuckled. Even when she shouted, “Remington!” he didn’t turn toward her voice.
Stung, Serenata dropped the smile. That competitor alongside was not overtaking as she’d first imagined, but conversing in conspiratorial tones with her husband. The fact that Remington’s running mate was matching his tortoise-like pace was odd, because this woman was a hare. Perhaps in her late thirties, she had the kind of figure used to sell gym memberships—the kind of figure that no one had really, that would have appeared in advertisements for CrossFit only after having been doctored. Banded with fine intersecting lines, her body recalled the diagrams of human musculature in anatomy textbooks. She looked flayed.
The shoulders were broad and cut. Her forearms were veined. Bandaged by a lavender sports bra, her breasts were tight and high. Her stomach was flat, and shadowed by the telltale ripple of a crunch fanatic. The shorts were skimpy enough that if she didn’t shave her bikini line everyone would have noticed. Narrow knees and ankles punctuated dense thighs and full calves. Dancing at Remington’s side on the balls of her feet, she made running three miles per hour appear balletic. Her cropped sandy hair gleamed with fashionable gray highlights, and its smart styling looked salon-fresh. Maybe her neck was a tad thick, and on the short side. Still, face it: she was pretty.
Serenata returned to pallid clapping. As Remington and his new little friend crossed the finish line, the two high-fived. Clutching him in a bear hug, the anatomy illustration rocked from shoe to shoe. Here Serenata had worried he’d be gutted by his poor showing. Instead he acted elated. He embraced Valeria, then Tommy. He accepted his grandson’s lackluster handshake. He lifted Nancee overhead. He kissed the baby. It was humiliating to have to stand in a receiving line at all, much less last.
“Congratulations,” she said formally, and pecked his cheek.
“Thanks,” he said airily. “Serenata, this is Bambi Buffer. I don’t think I’d have made the last five miles without her.”
“Bambi” biffed his shoulder. “Oh, sure you would have.” Her voice was throaty, deep with a rough edge, and Remington’s weakness was aural; Serenata should know. “I keep telling you, man, you got the stuff!” If she spared the wife so much as a nod, it was the sort you gave to ancillary characters who simply weren’t going to feature.
There was no question about keeping the restaurant reservation. They all piled into Valeria’s minivan—including “Bambi,” who was staying in the same hotel, and whom Remington had invited to join them for dinner.
With little ado upstairs, Remington showered and set an alarm.
“You’re not saying much,” Serenata noted. All her earlier grace and élan had fled.
“It’s not a day for talk,” he said on the bed with his eyes closed.
It was sure a “day for talk” with that “Bambi” woman.
He slept like a corpse until seven fifteen, awaking invigorated. He dressed in a dark suit and crisp white shirt with an open collar. She couldn’t remember ever before having rued the fact that her husband was still, at nearly sixty-five, an attractive man.
When a large party is getting seated for a meal, one enjoys a brief window in which to position one’s self next to the people one actually wishes to talk to, and Serenata missed it. She landed without design on a corner, a chair removed from Remington. The chair had Bambi in it.
In a clinging cherry-red sheath whose high neck disguised her only aesthetic shortcoming, the gate-crasher knew how to wear her body. Because that’s what she was wearing, her body. The dress was an afterthought. If anything, it was wearing her.
“I’m surprised you were pulling up the rear today,” Serenata said, trying furiously to avoid overt reference to the woman’s physique.
“Oh, that was my second time around,” Bambi said, perusing the appetizers. “I often do an extra lap, to spur on any newbies who seem to be struggling.”
Now a marathon was a “lap.” “That’s altruistic.”
“Mm, not totally. Hey, Rem. You been here before. How do you rate the oysters?”
Their guest ordered heavily—more than one first course and multiple sides. The contemporary female being famously fearful of food, hunger was seductive in a woman; if nothing else, the appetite hinted at other kinds. Bambi’s eyes proved the equal of her stomach, too. She inhaled every dish set before her, and single-handedly ravaged the breadbasket. Table manners weren’t her forte. She ate like a fucking animal.
“Tried to tell you, dude,” she held forth to Remington while stripping frogs’ legs. “Your big mistake was training for that race by yourself. I’ve seen it a million-bazillion times: harness the energy of other athletes believing in you, and rooting for you, and helping to bring out your best self, your true self, your über self—the God inside every damn one of us—and performance improves by, I ain’t kidding, a hundred percent.” Bambi’s folksy pronunciation—“hunerd percent”— didn’t seem to hail from a regional dialect, for which Serenata had an ear. Rootlessly eclectic, the vernacular conveyed a generically down-home, tell-it-like-it-is toughness.
“I really respond to that idea of everybody having a little kernel of God in them somewhere,” Valeria said. “That speck of the divine is what links us up with God Himself—like a sim card connecting with a satellite.”
“If people thrive athletically in social contexts,” Serenata said, “don’t you just mean they respond to competition?”
“That’s a poisonously negative way of putting it,” Bambi said. “I’m talking about the giganto power of the many over the pissy power of the one. Rem, you gotta try one a these. I’ll trade you for a scallop.”
“I didn’t think about it at the time, that I was training on my own.” Remington piled pancetta and truffle shavings onto the gifted sea scallop. “I may have been unwittingly influenced by Serenata. My wife doesn’t believe in group participation, do you, my dear? Marathons, for example,” he cited mischievously, “disgust her.”
“Your loss, honey.” Bambi forked the plump scallop in one bite. “See, Rem, you’ve shut yourself off from the community of other athletes, and that’s put you at a disadvantage. Place yourself in the middle of the whole movement, and you can feed off an awesome force, like, a whole collective consciousness. ’Sides which, like I told you after we eased you past that wall you hit, in the end this isn’t about the body. Has nothing to do with the body. I could take any guy’s body on earth and turn it into Michelangelo’s David, long as inside he has the stuff, man.”
“What about people in wheelchairs?” Logan said.
“Watch the Paralympics someday, kid, and you’ll see it’s all about heart. It’s about truth. About becoming what you were fated to be, about being reborn in a state of perfection. About the will to greatness.”
“The will to power?” Serenata said. “I think Nietzsche got there already.”
Bambi ignored her. “Hey, figure we can nab another couple bottles of this cab-sav?” she proposed, nodding at the empty that listed for seventy-six dollars. “I’m running dry.”
“I didn’t think fitness freaks were drinkers,” Serenata commented to Tommy at her right.
“Work hard, play hard!” Bambi said. “You guys who hung out on the sidelines can pick-pick and sippy-sippy, but us athletes got us some serious refueling to do.”
Serenata had ordered the first bottle at the risk of Valeria’s disapproval. Should the evening turn into a booze-up, the grandparents were bound to be chastised as immoral influences. But Bambi was such a force of nature that when a replacement bottle arrived, Valeria poured herself half a glass.
Meanwhile, Tommy looked miserable. The outfit from the afternoon’s shopping had subtly rearranged itself—the denim wrap had dropped down one shoulder; the dress was wrenched askew—so as to look like everything else she wore, in which she looked drowned and forlorn. The source of Tommy’s dejection was surely Bambi, who personified all those online paragons eternally upping their games whenever Tommy was close to catching up. By contrast, swooning from across the table and uncharacteristically shy, Nancee was in love.
“I should never have turned off my Fitbit,” Tommy mumbled, fiddling with the band. “Now I’ll never make my steps today.”
“So, Bambi, what do you do?” Serenata inquired.
“Personal trainer,” the woman said through her food.
Serenata said, deadpan, “What a shock.”
“You?” she asked tersely.
“I’m a voice-over artist. Audio—”
“Whoa, too passive for me. All that sitting.”
“Actually, recording video games is surprisingly physical—”
“It’s unorthodox”—she’d turned back to Remington—“but I don’t recommend much resting up after a marathon. Sure, take tomorrow off. But then get right back in the saddle. You gotta master the body, teach it who’s boss.”
Holding her emotional breath, Serenata had succeeded in making it through Remington’s infernal marathon. In kind, to enter the glorious rest of her life in which she’d never again lay eyes on this insufferable cunt, she only had to make it through this meal. Merely being conversational, she inquired, “So where do you live?”
“Well, that’s what made Rem and me decide we were destined to come in as a team. Since whadda ya know—we both live in Hudson!”
Officially, the point at which the couple returned to their hotel room marked the beginning of restored normal life that Serenata had been anticipating since October.
“So!” she said, closing the door on a great deal more than the hallway. “The marathon. After all that training. Was it worth it?”
“Sure,” Remington said coolly, removing his jacket. “It was interesting.”
“Funny. Interesting was exactly what I thought it wasn’t.”
“You were just watching. Only at the end, I might add. You make a lousy spectator.”
She tossed the fedora on a chair in disgust. “I can’t believe her name is actually Bambi Buffer.”
“It’s obviously a work handle.” Remington had been on a high all night. Only alone with his wife did he seem exhausted. “Like a stage name.”
“Which is worse. She can’t even blame her parents.”
“Her encouragement was a great help to me at the end of that race. So I was sure you wouldn’t mind that I asked her to join us.”
“Why should I mind? Just because she’s a fucking idiot?”
“That’s unworthy of you. I can’t recall her saying anything especially dumb.”
“All that find the God in yourself? I call that dumb.”
“Know what she told me on the way back to the van? ‘Your wife is pretty dark.’”
“And getting darker. You used to like it.” Serenata attempted to control herself. This wasn’t the night for a spat.
“Anyway, you’re going to have to get used to Bambi. I’m hiring her.”
Serenata turned sharply from her toiletry kit. “To do what? The race is over.”
“Because on one point, you were right.”
“This I have to hear.”
“You said from the start that finishing a marathon isn’t a claim to fame anymore, but a cliché. Even Bambi agrees that completing that distance has become old hat.”
“Well, it’s still an achievement—”
“Triathlons,” he said. “Triathlons are where it’s at.”