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.