Many of her contortions were silly, but repeated enough times they still wore her out. Pleasantly so, though even these fanciful routines—of which she kept an exacting secret record in crimped printing in a bound blank book stashed under her mattress—were not exactly fun. It was interesting to discover that it was possible to not especially want to do them and to do them anyway.
During the “physical education” of her school days, the meager athletic demands placed on girls were one of the few constants across Jacksonville, West Chester, Omaha, Roanoke, Monument, Cincinnati, and New Brunswick. The half-hour recess in primary school usually sponsored kickball—and if you managed to get up before your teammates lost the inning, you might run an entire ten yards to first base. Dodgeball was even more absurd: jumping one foot this way, one foot that. In middle schools’ formal gym classes, twenty of the forty-five minutes were consumed with changing in and out of gym clothes. The instructor would direct the girls in unison to do ten jumping jacks, do five squat thrusts, and run in place for thirty seconds. Given this limp gesturing toward strength training, it hadn’t really been fair to subject these same girls to a formal fitness assessment in eighth grade—during which, after Serenata sailed past the one hundred mark in the sit-ups test, the gym teacher intervened and insisted in a shrill panic that she stop. For the following decades, of course, she’d be doing sit-ups in sets of five hundred. They weren’t really efficient, abdominally, but she had a soft spot for the classics.
To correct any misimpressions: Serenata Terpsichore—which rhymed with hickory, though she grew inured to teachers stressing the first syllable and pronouncing the last as a tiresome task—had no designs on professional athletics. She didn’t want to earn a place on a national volleyball team. She didn’t want to become a ballerina. She didn’t aspire to take part in weight-lifting contests, or to attract an Adidas sponsorship. She’d never come near to breaking any records, and hadn’t tried. After all, the setting of records was all about placing your achievements in relation to the achievements of other people. She might have engaged in rigorous, self-contrived conniptions on a daily basis from childhood, but that had nothing to do with anyone else. Push-ups were private.
She’d never identified in an elaborate way with a particular sport. She ran, she cycled, she swam; she was not a runner or a swimmer or a cyclist, designations that would have allowed these mere forms of locomotion to place a claim on her. She was not, as they say, a team player, either. Her ideal running route was deserted. She gloried in the serenity of an empty swimming pool. Throughout her fifty-two years of biking for primary transportation, a single other cyclist in sight despoiled her solitude and ruined her mood.
Given that Serenata would have thrived on a desert island in the company of fish, it was disconcerting to have so frequently been co-opted by, as Remington had said, the multitude. Sooner or later, any quirk, any curious habit or obsession, was eventually colonized by a throng.
Impulsively, when she was sixteen, she’d slipped into a shadowy establishment in downtown Cincinnati to have a tiny tattoo inscribed on the tender inside face of her right wrist. The design she requested was snatched, literally, from the air: a bumblebee in flight. With no other customers, the artisan took his time. He captured the diaphanous wings, the inquiring antennae, the delicate legs poised for landing. The image had nothing to do with her. Yet in crafting character from scratch, one reached for what lay to hand; we were all found artworks. Thus the arbitrary soon converted to the signal. The bumblebee became her emblem, doodled endlessly across the canvas covers of her three-ring binders.
Tattoos in the 1970s were largely confined to longshoremen, sailors, prison inmates, and biker gangs. For wayward children of the middle class, what were not yet called “tats” were a defilement. That winter, she concealed the inking from her parents with long sleeves. That spring, she switched her watch to her right wrist, with the face flipped down. She lived in constant fear of exposure, though secrecy also freighted the image with mighty powers. In retrospect, it would have been nobler to have declared the “mutilation” voluntarily and taken the consequences, but that was an adult perspective. Young people, for whom time moved so sedulously that every moment could seem an eternity of reprieve, put a great deal of store in delay.
Inevitably, one morning she overslept her alarm. Come to rouse the sleepyhead, her mother discovered the naked wrist thrown upright on a pillow. Once the teenager confessed that the image wasn’t felt-tip, her mother cried.
The point: Serenata would have been the sole student in her high school to brave a tattoo. Nowadays? Over a third of the eighteen-to-thirty-five demographic sported at least one, and the total acreage of American skin aswirl with hobbits, barbed wire, or barcodes, eyes, tigers, or tribals, and scorpions, skulls, or superheroes, was the size of Pennsylvania. Serenata’s adventure into the underworld had inverted from intrepid to trite.
In her twenties, frustrated that traditional ponytail ties snagged the strands of her thick black hair, Serenata set about stitching several tubes of colorful fabric, through which she threaded sturdy elastic. After tying the ends of the elastic together, she sewed the cloth tubes into gathered circles. The resultant binders kept the hair from her face without grabbing, while adding a flash of pizzazz to her crown. Some peers found the handicrafts kooky, but more than one coworker asked where to get one. Yet by the 1990s, most of her female compatriots owned a set of twenty-five in a rainbow of hues. She hacked her hair to just under her ears and tossed what were apparently called “scrunchies” in the wastebasket.
It would have been circa 1980, too, that she made one of her effortful bids for friendship, inviting a handful of coworkers at Lord & Taylor’s customer service to dinner. For the previous couple of years she had dabbled in Japanese cuisine, an enthusiasm rescued from a dead-end date who’d taken her to a hole-in-the-wall counter that served his countrymen’s expats. She had loved the smoothness, the coolness, the subtly. Later back home, she experimented with vinegared rice, green powdered horseradish, and a sharp knife. Eager to share her discoveries, she laid out multiple platters for her guests, aiming for what a later era would call the wow factor.
They were horrified. None of the girls could bear the prospect of raw fish.
Yet nowadays it was not unusual to find three different sushi bars along a single block of a midsize town in Iowa. The dreariest undergrad had a preference for fresh or saltwater eel. It wasn’t as if Serenata could take the slightest credit for the centuries-old traditions of a storied island nation in the East. Nevertheless, what was once an idiosyncrasy had been crowd funded.
The watch, which obscured her sin of self-defacement? It had made for an effective disguise because it had once been her father’s. Serenata had been wearing oversize men’s watches ever since. Lo, come the 2010s, every other woman in the country was wearing massive, masculine-style watches as well. Favorite books that made little or no splash on release—A Home at the End of the World or The City of Your Final Destination—invariably got turned into movies, and suddenly these private totems belonged to everybody. She’d no sooner revive the nearly lost art of quilting, stitching swatches of worn-out corduroys and old towels while watching Breaking Bad before anyone had ever heard of it, than quilting bees would sweep the country as a nationwide fad. If Serenata Terpsichore ever seized upon the music of an obscure band that only played pass-the-hat clubs and wedding gigs, that veritably guaranteed that these same nobodies would hit the top forty by the following year. If she happened to pick up the habit of wearing incredibly warm, soft sheepskin boots hitherto confined to the small Australian and California surfer sets, the better to weather an Albany winter, you could be damned sure that Oprah Winfrey would make the same discovery. Ugg.