“Look, I don’t make the rules.”
“But you do make the rules. Remington says that it’s everyone slavishly obeying these capriciously concocted taboos that gives them teeth. He says rules that are roundly ignored are ‘just suggestions.’”
“You’re not listening! The point is, your name came up. And not in a nice way.”
“So what’s wrong with doing accents again? I’m not following this.”
“It’s—problematic.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means everything. It’s a great big giant word for absolutely everything that’s super bad. See, now they’re all saying that white readers pretending to talk like marginalized communities is ‘mimicry,’ and also it’s like, cultural appropriation.”
“It depresses the hell out of me that you can rattle off ‘marginalized communities’ and ‘cultural appropriation,’ whatever that is, when you don’t know the word ubiquitous.”
“I do now! It means everybody does it.”
“No. Omnipresent, everywhere. Now, why does my name come up?”
“Honest? Your accents, on the audiobooks. I think it’s because you’re so good at them. Like, you have a reputation. So when these guys reach for an example, it’s your name they think of.”
“Let me get this straight,” Serenata said. “I’m now supposed to deliver the dialogue of a coke dealer in Crown Heights as if he’s a professor of medieval literature at Oxford. ‘Yo, bro, dat bitch ain’t no better than a ho, true dat.’” She’d given the line an aristocratic English snootery, and Tommy laughed.
“Please let’s not tell Remington about this,” Serenata said. “Promise me. I’m deadly serious. He’d freak.”
“Shouldn’t tell Remington what?” Himself closed the side door behind him. It was November, and he’d made the usual mistake of bundling up to excess, when the biggest problem of running in cold weather was getting hot. Underneath all that winter sports gear he’d be drenched, and his face was red. The ruddy complexion was further enhanced by a glow of a more interior sort. Good grief, she prayed that she herself had never returned from some dumpy old run exuding this degree of self-congratulation.
Three
“Right, I’ve bled and treadmilled and wired up for you, and got the all clear,” Remington announced just inside the door. The checkup had not been his idea, and he was humoring her. “Doctor Eden located a minor cardiac irregularity, but he assured me it’s common, and nothing to worry about.”
“What irregularity?” He’d not have wanted to mention any negative findings at all, but luckily for Serenata her husband was a stickler for the truth.
“I don’t remember what it’s called.” He had chosen not to remember, to prevent her from googling for alarmism. “The point is, I’m fine. Eden sees no reason I can’t run a marathon, so long as I up the distance gradually and stick to the program.”
“What program?”
“I’m following an online schedule.” His tone was officious.
“You couldn’t figure out how to run a little bit farther every week by yourself?” she said to his back as he returned to the car.
“It’s not that simple,” he said, lugging two sagging bags from the backseat. “You have to set goals, do longer runs, and shorter ones in between. Vary the pace. There’s a science to it. You’ve never run a marathon yourself—”
“So now we’re pulling rank.”
“I don’t understand this disdain you have for any undertaking that involves anyone else.” He clanked the bags beside the dining table. “Why does my consulting the considerable literature on this subject seem to you a sign of weakness? Your declared hostility to the rest of the human race is what’s weak. It puts you at an evolutionary disadvantage. Humble yourself, and you can learn from other people’s mistakes.”
“What’s all this?”
“Free weights. I need to work on my core.”
Serenata battled a wave of mental nausea. “What’s wrong with the word torso? And I have free weights. You could have borrowed mine.”
“Your attitude from the get-go has hardly been share and share alike. It’s better for me to have my own equipment. I thought I’d use one of those empty bedrooms for my home gym.”
“You mean you’ll commandeer a bedroom,” she said.
“Haven’t you commandeered one for your own gyrations?”
“You also have your study. Though I’m not sure what it’s for.”
“You can’t possibly be goading me for being unemployed. Tell me that’s not what you meant.”
“No. Or maybe, but that was unkind. I disliked that word gyrations. I was getting a dig in back. Sorry.”
“A bigger dig. I retract ‘gyrations.’ Workouts. I’ll call them whatever you like.”
“Oh, go ahead then, take one of the extra bedrooms. This is a large house, and we’re hardly the European powers carving up the Middle East after World War One.”
She took Remington’s face in her hands and kissed his forehead, to bless their restored truce. It was past six thirty p.m., and in Serenataland, dinner had to be earned.
She slipped upstairs and changed into grubby shorts and a tattered T, anxious whether that “cardiac irregularity” was truly nothing to fret about; doctor-patient confidentiality precluded getting the real lowdown. Although she trusted that her husband wouldn’t lie about that “all clear,” he was so invested in running this Saratoga Springs event that he could have trivialized an anomaly that was cause for concern.
Of more immediate concern was the snippy tenor of their interchanges since October, which displayed little of the dry, Thin Man repartee polished early in their marriage. The past two-plus months had been punctuated by the cheap potshots of empty nesters who without the children underfoot had nothing in common, although years ago their own return to just the two of them had come as a relief. It rankled that she got no credit for restraint. As of earlier this December, after all the training, scores of hours online, and nearly two thousand bucks in gear (she’d kept track), he’d worked up to a respectable five-mile run. But his pace, if anything, had grown even slower! Having completed that landmark distance last Saturday in well over an hour, he had to be clocking a thirteen-minute mile. He didn’t faintly appreciate the self-control required to keep from making fun of him.
As ever, this segment of the day inspired nothing like eagerness, and if it weren’t getting so late she’d have found herself seized with a sudden determination to fold the laundry. She was always amused by sluggards who explained, you see, they “just didn’t enjoy exercise.” Granted, some sports were diverting enough to distract from the effort they demanded, but straight-up exercise was odious, and a sane person approached it with dread. This evening was scheduled for a raft of “gyrations” focused solely on her legs, which her orthopedist had stressed could not be too strong, a declaration that this patient took as a dare. Of her variety pack of masochisms, the legs routine was streets ahead of the rest in sheer tedium.