Serenata’s father-in-law couldn’t bear the notion of a home as opposed to his own, but maintaining the viability of his independence was in Remington’s and her interest as well. A nursing facility would necessitate selling this house, whose proceeds would evaporate from monthly fees. Her own parents had died in debt, like good Americans. Griff’s expiring in situ was their only chance at a modest inheritance—which, what with Remington’s punitively reduced pension, the unreliability of her freelance work, a real estate downturn that had shrunk the equity in the Albany house, and a steady drain from two grown children who never seemed to quite get their adult acts together, they might need.
“In my day,” her father-in-law called, “you got paid to tucker yourself out!”
“Exhaustion has become an industry,” she said, back from the kitchen. “Just think! These days, you could allow people to carry all that lumber you lugged around, and hoist your steel beams for you, and you could charge them for the privilege. Just don’t call it a ‘building site,’ but a ‘sports center.’ Oh, and we’d have to come up with a snappy name—so instead of Pilates, or CrossFit, you could call your regimen . . . Erection.”
Griff emitted a wheezy laugh as he sank into his saggy brown recliner. “You have a mind like a cesspit, kiddo.”
“I think Erection is inspired. You could trademark the term—just change the C to a K—and start a franchise. Your membership, being gluttons for exercise, could dig foundations, and frame buildings, and hand-plow access roads with miserable little shovels—all the while paying a stiff monthly fee. You’d make a fortune. The income from selling off the actual structures they built would be incidental chump change.”
“Folks used to look down on a body for working with his hands,” Griff said as she settled in the wing chair once reserved for his wife. “Earning your crust by breaking your back not only landed you in an early grave, but got no respect. Including from my sons, I’m sorry to say.”
“You’re hardly landing in an early grave, Griff, at eighty-eight. Still, I don’t think manual labor gets any more respect now than it ever did. Maybe that’s why ‘Erektion’ would never work: lately you only get credit for running yourself ragged to the point of collapse if by doing so you accomplish absolutely nothing.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“I am one to talk. And I have the knees to prove it.”
“Never forget your nipping upstairs to put on them skimpy red shorts, first time you crossed this threshold,” he reminisced (again). “Rushed out the door without a word, leaving poor Remy to explain—with the chicken steaming on the table. Margaret was livid.” His wife hadn’t been the only one who was livid—Griff had lit into quite a tirade when the new girlfriend returned from her ten-mile run—but over the years the anecdote had softened.
Much like Griff himself. His forearms broad and scarred, Remington’s father had been a burly man prone to rages. A drinker (who still put away more stout than his doctors advised), he’d doled out a fair share of corporal punishment as a father, and by the time they met, the man still wielded a brutal frankness like the retired tool belt with which he’d beaten his sons. She’d found him intimidating. The ease with which they could speak now was hard won.
But then, his figure had grown far less imposing. After forty-some years of physical toil, ill health had forced him to retire; his joints were gravel, and he was suffering from chronic back pain. In the last decade, Griff had shrunk like a parade float with a slow leak—an impression only heightened by his insistence on wearing his old forest-green Hudson Valley Construction work clothes, which dwarfed him now. His default expression of belligerence had over the years been replaced by one of wariness—the same emotion, inverted. It was not in his interest to alienate his caretakers, and to a degree his more amiable latter-day bearing was calculated.
She missed being afraid of him. Griffith Alabaster had been a formidable man, and though he’d never gone to college—the minimal importance of which was only apparent to those who had—he was smart. Even now, he had his lapses, but was nowhere near senile.
“What bee’s got under Remy’s bonnet? Years of urban planning and mass transit and traffic flow, and suddenly all I hear about is jogging. That silly business at the DOT must have something to do with it.”
“Oh, it’s in the mix. He needs distraction. As hobbies go, running is probably better than taxidermy, or becoming a drunk. Though come to think of it, taxidermy might interest me more. Foxes poised with bared teeth in the basement? I’d be enchanted.”
“Only thing worse than working,” Griff declared, “is not working.”
“But he’s not going to get another job at sixty-four. And Remington could be looking at another thirty years. I hate to think of those three decades as time to kill.”
“Tell me about it,” Griff said.
“He’s taken an indignant line. But on some level, he’s ashamed. No one wants to leave a job of such long standing with his tail between his legs. I’m sure he feels self-conscious about how it turned out, and worries he’s let me down. Let you down, too.”
“Truth be told, I was relieved to learn that boy has a temper to lose.”
“He didn’t used to be like this, you know. So imperturbable, so steady-state.”
Indeed, Remington’s most taxing professional achievement was learning to keep his mouth shut. But self-control was one of those virulent capacities that, ironically, was hard to control. The last few years in Albany, he’d grown laconic even at home, as if to speak his mind would encourage bad habits. When he did talk, he cloaked all his remarks in a disguising mildness, so that listening from the next room you could never tell if he was noting the loss of a sock in the last load of laundry or saying goodbye before blowing his brains out.
“He acted like a man for five seconds, and paid the price,” Griff said. “I turn on the TV lately, and there’s all these men got their willies chopped off, ’cause they feel like girls. I don’t doubt it. They act like girls. Real men’ve got rare as hen’s teeth.”
“Mm,” Serenata said noncommittally. “Possibly some men don’t always feel up to being the responsible one, the expert, the authority. The one who has to be strong and confident. Always the protector, never the protected. That’s a tall order. Women nowadays get to choose. We squeal and make the men kill the water bug in the kitchen, and then when anyone questions our courage in the face of threat, we can get on our high horse and act insulted. Pretty good deal, when you think about it. We can be world-beaters, and run whole companies, and then claim to be traumatized by a hand on our knee when helplessness is politically useful. Men aren’t really given that option. And they’re continually set up to look like disappointments. Because masculinity as an ideal is pretty ridiculous. Then if they do improbably succeed in being fierce, and fearless, and emotionally impassive no matter what horrors befall them—pillars of might and right and agency, slaying the dragons every which way, well—that’s only to be expected, isn’t it? Lose-lose. Maybe it’s no wonder that so many of them want to wear a dress.”