She should have been able to predict it. He was a serious, methodical person, and not long ago accustomed to shouldering significant responsibility for the physical functionality of a medium-sized American capital. She couldn’t even call the gravity with which he attacked the project disproportionate, when thanks to having responsibility for the physical functionality of a medium-sized American capital yanked out from under him, this ever-loving marathon was the biggest thing in his life.
Still, she’d been surprised by his slavish adherence to an online schedule that some ignorant chump could have just made up. Previous to that sadly seminal evening in July when her knees swelled big as grapefruits, she’d usually slipped off for her regular ten miles with so little ceremony that Remington wouldn’t even have noticed she was gone by her return. The trot alongside Normans Kill was a routine to be wedged into her day, after a recording session, scheduled with an eye to the weather, and the solitude it provided was primarily precious for the opportunity to think about other things (like, if she’d been a very different kind of mother, would matters with Valeria have turned out otherwise?). For her husband since October, whatever run or strength-building arose on the chart was his day, into which distractions like grocery shopping and visiting his father were required to fit—and strangely enough, so terribly often there wasn’t time. To her amazement, when she asked him once what he thought about when hitting the pavement, he’d responded without hesitation, “Well, running, of course.”
“But what’s there to think about running?” she asked, genuinely baffled.
“Pace, foot strike, breathing,” he said impatiently. The condescension now worked both ways.
Naturally, there were smoothies. Self-deservingly large portions of meat. Cases of high-end sparkling water spiked with electrolytes. And the supplements! Rapidly multiplying hard plastic bottles crowded the toaster from the counter to the top of the microwave. Upstairs, he had gathered a collection of liniments. After showering, he smoothed oily concoctions into his muscles to such excess that the sheets on his side of the bed turned a shade darker. He’d taken to wearing five-pound ankle weights around the house, his thudding tread vibrating the worn, uneven floorboards and amplifying the creaks. Extra poundage swung each foot forward in a pendulum lunge, pa-foom, pa-foom, imparting an emphatic character even to a trip to the refrigerator.
She could have warned him that running outdoors during a New York State winter was sometimes unpleasant, and at first she’d hoped that he might come to appreciate the array of disagreeable conditions his wife had endured for decades with so little complaint. But Remington’s focus on his personal beatification was sufficiently fierce that her own vicissitudes of times past never entered his head. When he returned once that January and closed the door behind him, he pressed his palms to the wood as if to prevent some fiend from following him inside.
“Wind,” he announced after a dramatic pause. Apparently the motions of the atmosphere were her husband’s personal discovery. If so, the genie would go back in the bottle: he ordered a treadmill.
Not just any treadmill. This was a brushed-steel, state-of-the-art monstrosity with surround sound and a thirty-two-inch touch screen that virtual-realitied your progress over pastured hill and dale, replete with bleating sheep. Or you could choose a display of conifer fronds brushing on either side as you snaked its woodsy mountain trails; she’d not be surprised if it also exuded a resinous scent of pine needles, with a biting singe of forest fires drifting from the distance. With another poke at the menu, you could switch to a watery horizon as you padded the lapping waters of a beach at sunset. During the coastal program, breakers rolled and crashed in the background, while in the audio foreground a bare foot slapped and splashed every time your shoe landed; for all she knew, it smacked your cheeks with a bracing breeze and stung your mouth with salt.
She hated it. The thing was enormous and loud. The thumping sound was far worse than the ankle weights, and vibrated the whole house. When Remington opted for music over sound effects, he tended to prefer either bombastic symphonic selections or dated disco playlists of a trashy sort he’d not even listened to in the 1980s. The acquisition racked up yet another substantial expense, for Remington had fallen prey to the very American impulse to lavish money on what could not be bought.
The worst was the long runs, which at least he executed outside. The night before, he’d go to bed primly at nine, which necessitated dinner at five. Breakfast would be ecclesiastical, a starchy white napkin laid out like altar linen. Lost in priestly reverie, Remington would take each bite of his eggs gravely, chewing for a long time. He drank his orange juice in reverent sips, like communion wine. He spent forty-five minutes in the bathroom. After donning his vestments, he tugged each lace of the orange shoes from the bottom up, tested the tightness with a pensive pace, pulled the bow, and adjusted the tension again. His wife’s dismissal of the rite had inspired him to elaborate stretches of half an hour or more. When he finally headed for the door, he departed with such solemnity that you’d have thought they’d never see each other again. “Wish me luck,” he’d command mournfully, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Good luck,” she’d say obediently—whatever that meant.
Finally, with two weeks to go, Remington tackled the truly demanding distance of twenty miles. He was gone for five and a half hours—during which it crossed his wife’s mind that perhaps this whole training regime was a charade, and he was really up the road at their local coffee shop, doing crosswords over refills of decaf. In truth, she was dumbfounded that her husband could run that far, at any pace—since twenty miles was a fair distance even to walk.
When he returned that afternoon, he spread himself on the living room’s Oriental carpet, arms extended, long legs straight and crossed at the ankle, head dropped sorrowfully to the side, maintaining this pose of horizontal crucifixion for a solid hour.
Oh, she’d have willingly pampered him on days like this, if he weren’t already pampering himself. His glorification of these great feats of locomotion drove her to a blitheness that read as callous. Their contrary perspectives on his grand project were opening up a fissure between them that at their age shouldn’t have been possible. This sense of separation hadn’t visited since their divisions over what to do about Deacon during his shattering adolescence. (Remington’s solutions were ever more authoritarian, while Serenata thought coming down hard on the boy only backfired; Remington would accuse her of proposing to do nothing, and then she’d admit, yeah, probably: impasse.) Long happily married with a complacence that was underrated, she’d forgotten what it was like to not know what was going on in his mind and to be a little paranoid that if she did she wouldn’t like it.
There was no disguising it, at least from herself: she couldn’t wait for this race to be over.
“I worry there’s something wrong with me, to be dreading the arrival of my own daughter.” The fact that all the preparations for their guests—making up beds, designing menus, laying in groceries—were now Serenata’s problem made her only more cross.
“The sorry truth is,” Remington said, “she probably dreads coming to our Godless household, too.”
One week of his training remained. Closing on the marathon itself, the program slackened, the better to preserve energy for the big day. Today’s distance had been his wife’s squalid old standard of ten miles. Thus Remington was actually upright, albeit draped over two chairs at the dining table, hands dripping from his wrists in entitled fatigue. Early in his involuntary retirement he’d offered to take over the cooking. Since October, he’d dropped the kitchen duty cold, and Serenata was back at the stove.
“Valeria claims she doesn’t proselytize,” she said, stirring a roux. “But she does, and relentlessly. By pushing all that why-don’t-you-give-yourself-over-to-Jesus crap, she forces us to reject her. Over and over.”
“Which confirms her version of events,” he said. “Cold, meanie parents; loving, long-suffering child. But you can’t be nostalgic for the days she made herself scarce.”
“Not days. Years. And disappearing altogether is a great deal worse than ‘making yourself scarce.’ She has a lot of gall to refer to our ‘abuse.’ A child going completely AWOL, from the age of twenty-five to twenty-nine, without so much as a postcard—now, that’s abuse.”
“Don’t get worked up all over again. Not with their arriving tomorrow.”
“Oh, I guess I shouldn’t stir up old grievances. After all. That’s Valeria’s department.” Actually, Serenata was shamelessly using their difficult daughter to excite a sense of camaraderie. They’d both felt mistreated, they’d both been flummoxed by whatever it was the girl held against them, and they’d both despaired of her membership in the Shining Path Ministry, whose founders were surely ignorant of the fact that they’d named their church after a Peruvian terrorist organization. United in dismay was still united, and she didn’t even feel bad about brazenly deploying Valeria’s thoughtless history to generate solidarity. Heartache should be good for something.
“She’s made such a song and dance about ‘forgiving’ us—” Remington said.
“Me. It’s sweet of you to include yourself, but we both know that her problem is with me.”
“It’s just, the forgiveness needs to work both ways.”
“I have no desire to be forgiven. I didn’t do anything. That girl lays forgiveness as a bear trap. Thank her for her clemency? Gotcha. Guilty as charged.”
“Maybe you’ve asked for it. All that guff about how you ‘don’t care about other people’—”
“But I don’t.”
“It’s a pose, and it’s a lie. You’re often very tender. Look at the way you take care of my father. Look at the way Tommy adores you. You’ve even been pretty nice to me,” he added with a touch too much effort, then qualified, “most of the time. And you were a much more doting mother than you remember. But Valeria, since it dovetails with the story she tells herself—”
“The narrative she tells herself,” Serenata corrected. Narrative had replaced story, as core had replaced torso, as the coyly understated troubling in an otherwise febrile political landscape had replaced catastrophically fucking horrible. These substitutions were strict. Equally strict, as with the abrupt ubiquity of bucket list, was the moratorium on acknowledging that you had ever said anything else.
“Of course—the narrative. She gladly takes your description of yourself as a cold, solipsistic misanthrope at face value. So you should stop playing to that silly self-caricature.” Despite his theatrical weariness, Remington had roused himself to plant a kiss on her nape at the stove. “Time to face the awful truth: Serenata Terpsichore is a nice person.”
She was not a nice person, and had no desire to be one. Her unalloyed hostility to his 26.2-mile holy grail certainly wasn’t nice. True, on the surface she’d stopped fighting his vainglorious training. But she was only looking forward to his crossing the finish line as a stepping-stone to the day after that, when they could go back to being a team. She could even brownie-bake that gentle bulge back into his waistline, because they were getting old, and one of the only good things about getting old was mutual permission to be imperfect.
The plan was for Valeria and the two oldest grandchildren to drive over from Rhode Island to visit for a few days, and then on Friday they’d all head up to Saratoga Springs. (Fortunately, Valeria’s witless husband, Brian, was staying behind with their younger kids; he was a prim, judgmental man whose reaction to social discomfort was to sit in the corner sanctimoniously paging the New Testament.) The marathon was on Sunday, but Remington wanted to arrive two nights before to “settle” and check out the course. An extra overnight for their whole party would cost hundreds of dollars, another day’s worth of eating out hundreds more. But the once-in-a-lifetime occasion would leave many years thereafter to economize. Maybe they could sell the newfangled treadmill. Though if she didn’t miss her guess, the American market for secondhand treadmills—and StairMasters, and elliptical trainers, and rowing machines—was flooded.
Valeria had been a fearful child, somewhat overweight, as she was still, which generated some tension with her rail-thin mother. It was of little importance to Serenata whether her daughter was a bit chubby, though she wasn’t about to lay on forty pounds just to make the girl feel better—which it wouldn’t. At thirty-one, Valeria had a pretty face, round and dimpled, and regular coloring had revived the golden curls of preschool. Mother and daughter bore some resemblance to each other, but you had to look closely. Perhaps detecting the genetic relationship was visually impaired by their weak resemblance in other respects.
Hauled to yet another city with dreamlike frequency, from an early age Serenata was a self-contained unit, like a portable washing machine on castors whose hoses tuck neatly into the undercarriage. By her teens, she had already become a loner by choice—whereas Valeria’s difficulty making friends as a girl had been (or so her mother came to grasp only much later) a source of torment. Serenata had always been a good student, if a particular sort. American public schools simply weren’t very demanding, and clearing their preposterously low bars had been effortless; only by college did she develop any idea of what was meant by the expression “studying.” Although pedagogical standards for the next generation did nothing but sink further, Valeria had struggled. She was loath to make it known when she didn’t understand something, and readily fell behind. But she was quiet, not a troublemaker, thus the kind of educational casualty whom teachers could overlook.
As a girl, Serenata was grateful to her parents for their light touch. If anything, she wished they’d allowed her even longer sessions by herself in her room, where she would experiment with sound effects for her radio plays and try to break her record time for maintaining a headstand. So when raising her own daughter, she tried to be the kind of mother she’d have wanted herself.
Which was a mistake. In the interim, parenting fashion had become hands-on. No one released children into the wild anymore “to play.” Parents were expected to get even more upset than their offspring that Marigold Battersby had spurned their kid in Saturday playgroup. So rather than having her mother regard her figure as her own business, perhaps Valeria would have preferred weigh-ins and targets and charts. Treated to a vengeful four-year vanishing act to contemplate her sins, Serenata had finally concluded that what, to her, was freedom, to Valeria was sheer neglect.
It was Valeria’s younger brother who grabbed the lion’s share of parental attention, for all the wrong reasons. Deacon would have liked to be ignored, the better to get up to no good. Contemporary developmental psychology asserted that lying in children was a sign of intelligence, in which case Deacon was a genius. In contrast to his sister’s weak sense of self, Deacon knew who he was, all right; he was simply hell-bent on disguising that nature from everyone else. He stole—and once he was caught, it would turn out that he had swiped objects for which he’d have no earthly use: a girl’s compact, a CD by a band he disdained, or a teddy bear he was too old for. He preferred the purloining of articles important to people he knew to impersonal shoplifting—which culprits imagined, however errantly, to be victimless—because material covetousness had nothing to do with it. He stole to steal. He liked the sensation. In adolescence he moved on to vandalism, more damage for its own sake. Yet meanwhile he exhibited a glossy politeness that teachers and administrators amazingly bought wholesale. Unable to snow Serenata, he delivered his and how are you today, Mother dear? with a tongue-in-cheek sneer. And she learned early on that you did not leave Deacon unattended in a room or yard, or you’d pay the price; worse, someone else might. Not that it ended up mattering, but she had watched him fiercely. When one of your children was obedient, subdued, and unassuming, while the other was repeatedly sent to the principal’s, expelled, and later arrested, the agent of mayhem would suck up all your time. It was said that life wasn’t fair; well, neither were families.
Valeria and Deacon had nothing in common, and as children they weren’t close. Upending the conventional birth-order dynamic, their daughter had long seemed afraid of her little brother. Whenever she’d plied him with presents as a girl, these gestures came across as appeasement. More peculiarly, Deacon didn’t appear to have much in common with either parent. Oh, he inherited Remington’s lanky good looks, but none of the contemplativeness or self-control. And she didn’t recognize herself in the boy, either. Where she was solitary, Deacon was secretive, and there was a big difference. Where she was uninterested in the abundance of other people, Deacon seemed to wish humanity at large actively ill, and that was an even bigger difference. By and large, it was genetically baffling how these two people had emerged from such seemingly unrelated parents, and Serenata would never have credited such a family as possible before perplexedly waking up in one.
As for their daughter’s recent born-again Christianity, she could solve it like a math problem, but not with any gut comprehension. These now-we-gather-at-the-river movements came with ready-made social sets, and their members weren’t choosy. You didn’t have to be smart, lively, likable, attractive, or funny; you merely had to “accept Jesus as your Savior.” Presumably this cheap fealty was a modest price of admission for a girl who’d felt so ostracized in her school days. Left too much to her own devices, or so it turned out, Valeria had always seemed wobbly. She was given to sudden fancies—salsa dancing, Hello Kitty—which she would rapidly drop, and she always caught an enthusiasm from someone else, like the flu. Later she ducked going to college, if only because she had no idea what she might major in, and by nineteen—oh, how lovely it would be if one’s children were to come up with truly novel turns of the wheel, which entertained and astonished—got pregnant instead. As a follow-up to the first mistake, she made the same mistake three years later. People were always harping on parental responsibility; too little was made of parental impotence. You could give your children opportunity, but you could not give them form—which meant that you could not give them what most children craved above all else. Were it possible to purchase for a daughter passion, intention, direction, and specificity—or whatever you called being-somebody-in-particular-ness—Serenata would have rushed off to the Identity Store before Valeria turned ten.
Thus the evangelicals offered what a mother could not: a mold for Valeria’s Jell-O. Overnight, lo, a shaky young woman had firm guiding principles and practical rules to live by. Best of all for someone who’d underperformed as a student, had never found a career calling, and had always felt more than a little hard done by, the Jesus brigade bestowed on the convert an arch superiority to all the other benighted heathens who hadn’t seen the light—like her parents.
That said, Serenata didn’t understand the attraction at all, not really. Signing up to be told what to do, what to think, what to say? What a waste of adulthood.
Exactly what triggered the filial absenteeism was never clear. Some six years ago, she and Remington had been parents in good standing, or so they imagined, when it occurred to them that they hadn’t heard from Valeria for a couple of months. A call to her cell established that the number had been recycled, connecting to one Lee Fong, who sounded friendly, but did not speak English. Serenata tried the last landline number they had for her in Buffalo, where their daughter had been part-timing at a nail salon. Out of service. Emails bounced back no such user. A newsy postal note to Buffalo boomeranged to their mailbox, and the scrawled “Return to Sender” didn’t resemble their daughter’s loopy handwriting. The assumption that Valeria would contact them in due course at least to apprise them of her new whereabouts proved mistaken. More months went by. They were on the cusp of reporting her missing when Deacon allowed on yet another visit asking for money that he had heard from her, and that she didn’t wish to be found, or not by her parents. He said airily that his sister seemed to have “a bone to pick,” and declined to elaborate. He enjoyed the power of the go-between a bit too much. They didn’t press him unduly for her contact details. At least Valeria was alive.
Cutting off communication without explanation and whisking away their only two grandchildren struck Serenata as cruel and, if she didn’t say so herself, unchristian. But as punishment, the stratagem was savvy. Valeria’s disappearance exacted a subtle daily toll even when they weren’t thinking about her desertion per se, and before she resurfaced the parental boycott had threatened to be indefinite. Savvier still was devising punishment for an unnamed crime, which cast a Kafkaesque suspicion over the whole of the girl’s upbringing. No one had branded the child with a hot iron. So what had they done that was so terrible? Aside from that ambiguous impression of having been insufficiently hovering, Serenata still had no idea. Yet she had put together this much: Valeria wanted them to have done something terrible, and powerfully enough that by now she could well have reverse-engineered her entire familial history.
On a seemingly arbitrary date about two years ago, their daughter called her parents in Albany. Serenata picked up the phone, and though she’d every reason to be angry, the feeling was akin to those arcade games when a treasure teetered on the tip of a hook. She remembered moving superstitiously with no sudden jerks. A stiffness hinting at rehearsal, Valeria explained that she had been in therapy and had found Jesus. After consultation with her doctors and extensive prayer for divine guidance, she had decided to forgive her parents for everything they had done to her. She was strong enough now. Adhering to the tenets of her faith, she planned to turn the other cheek, and to embrace a largeness of heart only made possible by direct communion with Our Lord, because moving on from the past was now in the interest of her “recovery.” Valeria could have been speaking Urdu for all the sense this made to her mother, but Serenata was patient and let her talk. It must have been twenty minutes before Valeria mentioned in passing that oh, by the way, she had also married and borne two more children.
Serenata hadn’t shared the observation about how curious it was that couples with the largest families were so frequently the very people least capable of supporting them, and she continued to keep the thought to herself—even when the girl got pregnant again eight months later. Ever since Valeria restored herself to them, visits had been permeated by the same poisonous caution that had seized Serenata when Remington announced he was running this dratted marathon. She and her husband seemed to be on probation. Given the provisional texture of renewed relations, she hadn’t pushed Valeria to spell out what on earth her parents were meant to have done wrong.
Given these fragile circumstances, when their daughter expressed such startling enthusiasm for the trip to Saratoga Springs, Serenata had encouraged her to come and cheer her father on. Yet Valeria’s presence was bound to put further pressure on her mother to be unimpeachably well behaved. Artifice, performance, dissociation, a forced gesturing toward the cardboard cutouts of Wife, Mother, and Grandmother: the whole package was why she’d had reservations about having a family in the first place.
That Monday, Valeria’s minivan pulled to the curb at that awkward time of day, about four p.m., which was too late for an excursion or even lunch, but too early to start on dinner. It left only time to visit, not a skill at which Serenata excelled with the most companionable of guests, much less with a churchy child who had a chip on her shoulder. Scuttling down the yard to meet them, she had no idea how they’d get through the next few hours, much less the next week’s worth of all that visiting. These days politics were out. Inquiries about how the eldest was taking to seventh grade were pointless, since Valeria’s children were homeschooled. Once they ran through the weather and the second-to-youngest’s psoriasis problem, all that would remain were subjects that would get them into trouble.
She stood back and waved as Valeria took her time messing with seat belts, shouting orders to the children, and unbuckling her baby from the booster in back. Serenata hadn’t realized that her daughter was bringing the youngest of her brood, too.
But then, why would she leave behind such effective self-protection? Valeria hefted the seven-month-old onto her substantial hip in the spirit of buckling on a holster and six-shooter. You couldn’t criticize a mother with a baby, you couldn’t say anything disagreeable around a mother with a baby, and you couldn’t ask a mother with a baby any uncomfortable, prying, or challenging questions—for the Madonna beside the Dodge Grand Caravan radiated wholesomeness, sanctity, and self-sacrifice, placing the possessor of the baby above reproach.
Everybody should have one.
“Hey, Mama,” Valeria said, avoiding eye contact as her mother, confused about the cheek-or-lips protocol, settled for a poorly landed peck near the girl’s left ear. Before her four-year game of hide-and-seek, her parents had been “Mom” and “Dad.” The reconciliation onward they’d morphed mysteriously into “Mama” and “Papa,” like the rock band. Whatever lay behind the rechristening, it felt as if Valeria had forgotten their names.
“Hey, Gramma.” The twelve-year-old flicked her grandmother an anxious glance, hands folded piously over her crotch. From either a private ritual or nervous tic, she repeatedly rose onto the balls of her feet, then brought her heels to ground. It was balmy for springtime in upstate New York, but she looked cold.
“Hi, there, Nancee,” Serenata said. “Hi, Logan. It’s so nice to see you again!” Nancee was a victim of a nomenclatural fad that celebrated an inability to spell as a manifestation of originality. “So, sweetie, did you have a good trip?”
“Oh, sure.” Valeria began fussing out diaper bags, totes, and crackling sacks of road food. Three nearly back-to-back pregnancies had taken their toll; she looked closer to forty-five than thirty-one. “We sang the whole way. Show Gramma how we pass the time, Nancee. Sing Gramma ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ That’s one of your favorites!”
Staring straight ahead, Nancee launched into a tuneless, double-quick rendition absent an ounce of fondness. “. . . LittleonestoHimbelong, theyareweakbutHeisstrong . . .”
To her grandmother’s horror, Nancee churned through all five verses, including the refrains—rising on her toes in time to a monotonous, pseudo-Soviet Christian ditty whose melodic line had always seemed slightly menacing in its sheer idiocy, and whose lyrics taught children not only to be indoctrinated automatons, but also to have no self-respect. At least the grisly performance gave Serenata a good look at the girl. Even more so than last time, she looked malnourished. Her coloring was ashen. Her shoulders were narrow and sharp. Her arms and legs were sticks, and at the neck of her clinging polyester muscle-T her breastplate striated like the grille of a Cadillac Coup DeVille. Just like her mother, who hadn’t a sporty bone in her body, the girl was clad in below-the-knee nylon leggings logoed with a Nike swoosh, an open zip-up pastel sweatshirt, and souped-up running shoes—in sum, “athleisure wear,” which seemed something of an oxymoron. Her body language was fretful—all Valeria’s children had developed a darting hypervigilance—but her eyes shone with a steeliness that Serenata recognized.
By contrast, at nine her brother was soft, with his mother’s fleshiness. Logan alone didn’t look en route to the gym. He wore shapeless jeans and a corduroy jacket—one of the only coats that Serenata had seen on a child in years that didn’t look like you’d conquer Everest in it. Given that modern American kids wore nothing but athletic shoes, he must have looked hard for those leather loafers. Buried in his phone, the boy hunched with a truculence of which she could only approve. One of the inscrutable aspects of these born-again families was why the children so rarely told the parents to shove their Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior right up the ass.
Remington loped down to help with the luggage as Nancee wrapped up her last the Bible tells me so-o-o.
“Papa!” Valeria exclaimed with gusto. “My gracious, you look so strong and slim! I’d hardly know you on the street! Saints be praised, you must have trained like the dickens!”
“Oh, just followed an online program,” he said modestly.
“I’m so proud of you! I’m just—so impressed! The kind of inner strength you must have to summon, I can’t imagine! I hope you don’t take this wrong, Papa, but Lord have mercy, I had no idea you had it in you!”
Clearly, Valeria had not always talked like this. Perky evangelical positivism jumped up her speech with implied exclamation marks and lifted the ends of her sentences with wonder. She had to have been aware that programmatic jubilation drove her parents up the wall.
By the time they schlepped the chattel into the house, coats, shoes, plastic bags, and packs of disposable diapers cluttered every surface, and Serenata wondered why she and Tommy had bothered to tidy up. Valeria made a great show of authority in hectoring the kids to take their luggage upstairs and wash their hands and put their empty glasses in the dishwasher and be sure to thank Gramma for the apple juice and Logan, would you please sit up straight with your shoulders back, now that’s better. Don’t you dare play with that darned phone when you’re a guest in someone else’s home, it’s impolite. The ceaseless instructions established her total dominion over a fiefdom of three, the stay-at-home parent’s standard compensation for commanding so little elsewhere.
“So, Mama, how’s the knees?” Valeria asked offhandedly, settling at the dining table with the baby.
“Better some days than others.”
“Papa said you had to quit running. Isn’t that a shame.”
“I can still do high-knees running in place on a swatch of carpet.”
“But that’s not the same. Not real running, is it?”
“No, not exactly.”
“I guess you’re best off being philosophical. Like, you’re starting a whole new chapter—the last chapter. And you kind of brought it on yourself, in a way.”
“You mean I deserve it?”
“I mean that God gives us what we need.”
“I thought that was Mick Jagger.”
Valeria glared. “When you get old, you have to draw on the biblical concept of grace. You have to bow out and make room for more energetic people to take your place, right?”
“You’re quite the expert on the elderly, for thirty-one.”
“Maybe you should think of becoming, you know, impaired as an opportunity. To become a better person. You might find out that not being all perfect anymore makes you more sympathetic with other people’s foibles, too. My pastor says that when we require forgiveness ourselves, we’re more inclined to be forgiving of others.”
“Sweetie, I think you should save your forgiveness for someone who really needs it. The best treatment for osteoarthritis isn’t clemency, but joint replacement.”
“You never ran a marathon, did you? Seems like I’d remember that.”
“No, but honestly, my darling?” She patted her daughter’s hand. “I don’t find never having run twenty-six point two miles at one go especially devastating.” Serenata excused herself to look up the router password for Logan in the upstairs study, grateful to escape. Wasn’t it children who were supposed to squirm at family get-togethers, to beg to be allowed to go play? As she rounded from the ground-floor hall, Nancee was descending the staircase, only to reach the bottom, pivot, and run back up. “Did you forget something?” her grandmother solicited. Nancee froze on the top landing. “Not really.”
To her husband’s disgruntlement, Serenata had put their grandson in Remington’s workout room, which had a foldout futon; Marathon Man was supposed to be taking it easy in the lead-up to Sunday’s race anyway. But hunting the boy down to give him the password, she discovered Logan sitting on the floor in the underfurnished spare room she’d given to Nancee.
“You like this room better? Not that I care.”
“Nancee wanted the one with the weights and stuff,” he said, entering the password. “Of course.”
“Your sister doesn’t look as if she lifts a lot of weights.”
“Well, she does. And whatever. Toe touches. You name it. Her and Cynthia, the girl next-door, they have this contest, with lists and everything. I think it’s dopey. I don’t even know how she keeps track of who’s winning, ’cause she can’t add for beans.”
“The fitness shtick—it’s not your thing.”
“It’s boring. You do all this stuff, and after—you haven’t earned any money, or learned anything you didn’t know before. I don’t understand what she gets out of it.”
“You’d rather read, or watch TV or something?”
“We’re not allowed to watch TV,” he said glumly.
“You can’t watch TV, but your mom will let you go online?”
He finally looked up, taking her measure. “She thinks my phone has parental controls.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell.”
“It’s a cinch to crack. Sometimes it’s lucky when people think you’re stupid.”
“Our secret. I won’t tell your mom how smart you are, either.”
“Thanks.”
Heading heavily back to the visiting—damn, it was still only five fifteen—she encountered Nancee again, trotting to the bottom of the stairs, pivoting, and powering back up. Spotting her grandmother on the upper landing, she froze again midflight, as if caught at something naughty.
“You’re running stairs,” Serenata determined. The girl nodded reluctantly. “I used to run stairs. I invented running stairs. When I was in college, my dorm was on the twelfth floor. I never took the elevator. Going back and forth to classes, sometimes I’d run those flights ten times a day. Like climbing the Empire State Building. Later in my twenties, I’d use the emergency exit in my apartment building when it was snowing or something. I worked up to two hundred flights at a time.”
“Two hundred?” Nancee repeated with a skeptical squint. Perhaps stair running wasn’t very grandmotherly. More likely, even an underfed twelve-year-old detested anyone else trumping her personal best.
Downstairs, Remington had joined Valeria at the table—an unfortunate place to convene, because it created an expectation that anytime now they’d be having dinner, which they wouldn’t be. There was little enough to look forward to anyway, since Valeria wouldn’t allow her parents to drink wine in her children’s presence—and it was a testament to the delicacy of their relations that her parents let their daughter order them around in their own home. Later everyone would be grateful that they hadn’t used up the dither of dinner too early in the evening, thereby leaving a vast desert of visiting before bedtime.
“We’re a little curious how he makes a living,” Remington was saying.
“It floors me, how naive you and Mama can be about Deacon,” Valeria said.
“Oh?” Remington said. “I think Deacon has knocked the naivete right out of us.”
“Let’s put it this way.” She checked over her shoulder for kids within earshot, and lowered her voice. “With so many opioid addicts in this country, somebody must be selling them the stuff.”
“That’s what you presume he does, or what he’s told you he does?” Serenata asked, resuming her seat.
“It’s obvious,” Valeria said. “But I don’t expect you to believe me.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you,” Serenata said. “It hardly strains credulity, after all.”
“No, it doesn’t. Because Deacon is damaged. Just like I’m damaged.”
Serenata flicked a warning glance at her husband: don’t take the bait.
“My question is why he’s still coming to us for handouts, then,” Remington told his wife dryly. “If he has the job Valeria claims—reputedly well remunerated but landing one in a surprisingly low tax bracket.”
“I suppose he’d be considered a participant in the ‘gig economy,’” Serenata said. “Unpredictable hours, a notoriously erratic revenue stream, and no health insurance. And we have to consider his high capitalization costs.”
“You think what Deacon’s up to is funny?” Valeria exclaimed. “He’s in league with Satan!”
As Valeria drew herself up in offense, shielding the baby, it dawned on Serenata that the urbane back-and-forth that endeared the girl’s parents to each other was a prime source of their daughter’s antipathy. All this time, she and Remington imagined that their dinner table repartee had charmed their children. Now, that was naive.
“I don’t find it funny,” Serenata said. “But Deacon’s default setting is contempt. Selling soul-destroying drugs is just the sort of work that would appeal to someone with disdain for his own customers. I have a horrible feeling he’s good at it.”
“I’ve poured out my heart to him on the phone, trying to convince him that God loves all sinners, but only if they repent. He’s living in darkness. So are you and Papa. If you’d only humble yourselves before the Lord, and open your hearts, and stop being so smarty-pants, you could know the same boundless joy that I do.”
Serenata had learned numbly to ignore the Bible thumping like the dull thud of a drum track leaking through the floorboards from someone else’s apartment. If what their daughter was exuding was boundless joy, she’d take despondency, thank you.
“You know, I thought I’d mention,” Serenata said, changing course, “though I don’t mean to interfere—”
“You just mean to interfere,” Valeria said.
“No, but. Don’t you worry that Nancee is a little thin?”
“Oh, she’s just a picky eater. And she’s a real Energizer Bunny. Can’t sit still.” Valeria bounced the baby on her knee, though the infant didn’t seem to be enjoying it. The aggressive nurturing felt pointed: this is what good mothering looks like, Mama.
“Have you tried protein shakes?” Remington said. “They come in flavors kids would like—strawberry, chocolate, banana.”
“Nancee wouldn’t come near that. Not if it’s marketed for weight gain.”
Valeria’s responses were inconsistent. But Serenata wasn’t going to press the issue. “Jacob is quite a handful, with four other kids to keep track of,” she observed politely of the baby. “Do you and Brian imagine that you’ll stop at five?”
Valeria examined her mother’s face, perhaps for signs of criticism, though Serenata had asked the question as neutrally as she knew how. “If God sees fit to bless us with more precious new lives, the least we can do is welcome His little ones into the world. The size of our family isn’t in our hands.”
A few packets of contraceptive pills in those hands might do wonders for her daughter’s sense of agency, but Serenata held her tongue.
“Isn’t it getting a little . . . difficult?” Remington said. “I mean financially.”
“Don’t you worry, the Lord will provide. He always has.”
All five kids were on Medicaid. Brian’s parents were “helping,” and had bought the Dodge Grand Caravan. Remington had slipped them substantial checks on the previous three visits, claiming jocularly that she’d “missed a lot of Christmases and birthdays” during her family vacation. Privately, Serenata had wondered whether what really tipped the scales when their daughter decided to resume contact wasn’t so much prayer or therapy as money. So far the Lord had provided precious little.
“You mentioned Brian has been getting some work . . . ?” Remington said.
“He’s got a part-time shift at Wal-Mart, but he can’t take on any more hours because he needs time for his studies.”
“Oh!” Remington said. “I hadn’t realized Brian had gone back to school. That’s good news! What kind of degree?”
“I mean Bible studies, of course. And then there’s our mission. Spreading the gospel. I haven’t been able to so much, ’cause of the kids, of course, but also due to my own emotional journey. Which has been super time-consuming and super hard work. Both my therapist and my pastor say I should consider self-healing my full-time job. But that means Brian has to ring twice as many doorbells to pull our weight for the church.”
Serenata and Remington locked eyes: our son-in-law is the guy on the porch from whom we hide in the kitchen, careful not to turn on a light or run the coffee grinder.
“So! Papa!” Valeria said, shifting gears. “You’ve got to tell me about all this training! I’m so excited about Sunday I could bust! You have to explain how you’ve worked yourself up to the point where you can run a whole marathon. You may not realize it, but I bet you’re drawing strength from a higher power. Learn to channel that power, like plugging an extension cord into the sky, and it could be like having motors on your shoes! I swear you look ten years younger! Like, how did you start out?”
Remington enthusiastically detailed the progression of distances, the bursts of speed training, the working on his core. Serenata sneaked a peak at her watch.
“Sorry,” she said quietly, standing. “Lest this conversation wear me out first, I’ve got to get a little exercise myself.”
Valeria’s expression curdled. “Typical. Right when we’re all getting hungry, and my kids are running on fumes. After a long drive with bad traffic. But never mind, we’ll all wait while you hop around. I’ve already spent enough of my childhood starving and bored to death, waiting for you to finish exercising, so what’s another two hours.”
For once, there was no procrastination, and no dread. Serenata had never been happier to do five hundred sit-ups, and would gladly have done a thousand more.
Getting ready for bed that night, she asked, “So what’s on the docket tomorrow?” She’d vowed to act more interested during his last week of training.
Naturally Remington didn’t misinterpret the question as regarding what on earth they were going to do with Valeria and the grandkids all day. But his answer—“Forty minutes easy, with four one-minute speed intervals”—was distracted.
“You hail from a pretty prosperous family,” he began a minute later as he undressed. “Your father earned the corporate stripes of a successful American man of his generation. Your mother did volunteer work, but that was standard for the 1960s, too. On your own steam, you established yourself, after a mis-start or two, as a recognized voice-over artist, with steady work, producing quality recordings you should be proud of. My father may have hit us, but he was old-school, parents did that back then, and he was always a solid guy who kept up his end of things. Never having taken a dime from the state is a badge of nobility for him, as he must have regaled you more than once; Social Security being his money, he says it doesn’t count. Plenty of the buildings he constructed are still standing. My mother typed invoices, and later cleaned fish, coming home reeking every night just to afford clothes for her kids that were clean and new. I was the first in my family to go to college, and bootstrapped myself a full class up, with a career in civil service that should qualify as distinguished, however it ended.
“But our children”—he paused before stepping out of his boxers—“are white trash.”