She kept the radiator valve closed, so it was freezing in here—leaving exertion as the only route to warming up. As for the TV, it was large, loud, smart, and replete with hundreds of cable channels, as well as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. As emergency backup, the hard drive was bursting with recorded films and box sets. With no television, she’d have skipped this whole ninety-minute folderol of holds and lunges and raises and pulls, and shot herself in the head.
Yet the range of optimal on-screen fare was narrow. It shouldn’t be too serious, because she couldn’t spare the energy to be moved. It shouldn’t be too funny, because she couldn’t spare the energy to laugh. Subtitles were out. Documentaries were okay, so long as they weren’t too arty. What you wanted was good crap. Unfortunately, she’d finished the last season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which had hit the sweet spot.
Opting lazily for network news, she looped a nylon strap around an ankle and closed the door on its anchor. Tugging through the four stations of the hip-tightening raises—stretching the black rubber TheraBand by pulling the straightened leg (theoretically straightened; suffering “loss of extension,” the right one was permanently crooked) forward, to the right, backward, and from the left, twenty times each direction—she considered what proportion of her life so far had been devoted to this sort of monotony. Ninety minutes of a sixteen-hour waking day was . . . It was impossible to make mathematical calculations while tracking repetitions (one, two, three, four . . . ). Suffice it to say that the percentage was high: a source of pride, or horror? Drawing a last breath, would she echo Jackie Kennedy’s apocryphal deathbed keen, “Why on earth did I do all those sit-ups?” Serenata had already spent a massive whack of her discretionary time on this earth deliberately boring herself to death. (Left leg, second set.) One, two, three, four . . . She’d also spent a staggering amount of her short finite life counting. Like a kindergartner.
In the pharmaceutical ads on-screen, square-faced older men with full heads of salt-and-pepper hair joined comely wives in bright leggings and matching jackets, a colorist’s gray streak at the women’s hairline a sole gesture toward the geriatric. Despite the debilitations of whatever ailment the actors were aping, in every single advertisement the sufferers were running along a riverside, cycling country roads, or hiking woodsy trails. They were always laughing, which made you wonder what about this ceaseless bustle was so hilarious.
Oldsters in drug commercials used to stare sweetly out the window at the setting sun while pinching china teacups. Something had happened, and Serenata had made a study of it. The transformation had been gradual at first, insidious even, and then, in its perfect universality, abrupt.
The change had been most striking in relation to women, who throughout her girlhood might have yearned to be slender, but regarded discernable muscles on the female form as unsightly, unseemly, and butch. Her own enthusiasm for well-defined biceps was peculiar if not suspect for the time, and in short sleeves she’d more than once been catcalled as a “dyke.”
Fast-forward to the present. Models marketing even classically feminine products like fragrances wore running bras. Silhouettes in magazines were still photoshopped to a narrowness that wouldn’t allow for kidneys, but the ripples like windblown sand across bare midriffs were new. On the sides of buses, women’s blown-up shoulders were cut, their thighs chiseled. On billboards, even lovelies languishing in nightwear slipped calves from the slits of their negligees that were full and taut. With so much money on the line, advertising held a well-researched mirror to the modern ideal, and in the commercial representation of today’s daily life, beguiling young ladies were consistently pictured kayaking, mountain climbing, swimming laps, taking spinning classes, overdoing it on rowing machines, and pummeling punching bags. Keen awareness that Serenata of all people should have found her sex’s contemporary aspiration to strength culturally auspicious and altogether marvelous made the frenzied female hard bodies bannered across the marketing landscape only the more grating.
Placing her right foot on the seat of a wooden chair, she pushed the left foot off the floor, stood on the right foot, and brought the left knee chest-high. A hundred on the right, a hundred on the left, exhaling on every rise. The hard part was keeping your balance.
Mind, she regarded this ninety-minute tune-up as no nobler than a tune-up for a car. Conscientious motorists maintained their automobiles, but didn’t expect a medal for changing the oil. She, too, was trying to be the responsible custodian of a mechanism. This was a devotion, but not in a sacred sense. She was devoted to the upkeep of the vehicle out of sheer self-interest: it got her from place to place.
Pulling the Velcro taut on the two ten-pound ankle weights, Serenata was reminded by a sharp twinge that were she ever to have considered a daily athletic ordeal as exhibiting moral properties—as raising her high on a ladder of enlightenment or hoisting her to a superior position in the social hierarchy—these ritual efforts at redemption had backfired. She was being punished. Dr. Churchwell’s diagnosis had been insultingly prosaic, grandmotherly, and out-to-pasture: osteoarthritis, in both knees, in all three sectors bone-on-bone. Absent a familial history of the disease, he’d pronounced dismissively that the condition had clearly resulted from “overuse.” The expectation that, if not virtue, then at least good practice would necessarily be rewarded was naive, but that didn’t alter the ferocity of the feeling—that it wasn’t fair.
At dinner, Remington had an agenda.
“It hasn’t escaped me,” he began, “that you experience my discovery of endurance sport as something being taken away from you. So I would like us to examine what I can only call your sense of ownership of physical fitness.”
“I suppose I do own it,” she said coolly.
“You invented it?”
“I invented it for myself.”
“So the Greeks who ran the original twenty-six point two miles from the town of Marathon to Athens—they sent a time traveler to steal the idea from you.”
“That would be unlikely. Since, as you observed so pointedly earlier this evening, I’ve never run a marathon, have I? Though I have run sixteen, seventeen miles in one go—that time I got lost in Australia, and had to keep going until I located civilization again—so I could probably have managed another ten, if I were determined to.”
“You’ve always said that if you ever ran a marathon you’d do it by yourself.”
“That’s right.”
“Except that now you never will.”
“Well, this isn’t exactly Make Serenata Feel Better Day, is it?”
“The only way you’d ever have gotten around to running twenty-six point two miles on any given day is by participating in a group event, the way everyone else does it.”
“I find large numbers of people doing the same thing in one place a little repulsive.”
“No, you find it a lot repulsive. But for normal people, the company of many others engaged in a common pursuit is uplifting.”
“I’m incapable of losing myself in a crowd. I have no desire to melt into some giant pulsating amoeba.”
“Does it ever occur to you that maybe you’re missing out on something?”