The Motion of the Body Through Space. Lionel Shriver
of his younger visage over the hoarier, more tentative present, sharpening the eyes and flushing the cheeks as if applying mental makeup.
She could see him. She could see him at a range of ages with a single glance, and could even, if unwillingly, glimpse in that still vital face the frail elder he’d grow into. Perceiving this man in full, what he was, had been, and would be, was her job. It was an important job, more so as he aged, because to others he would soon be just some old geezer. He was not just some old geezer. At twenty-seven, she’d fallen in love with a handsome civil engineer, and he was still here. It was the subject of some puzzlement: other people were themselves getting older by the day, themselves watching these mysterious transformations not all of which were their fault, and knew themselves to have once been younger. Yet the young and old alike perceived others in their surround as stationary constants, like parking signs. If you were fifty, then fifty was all you were, all you ever had been, and all you ever would be. Perhaps the exercise of informed imagination was simply too exhausting.
It was also her job to look upon her husband with kindness. To both see and not see. To screw up her eyes and blur the eruptions of uninvited skin conditions into a smooth surface—an Alabaster surface. To issue a blanket pardon for every blobbing mole, every deepening crag of erosion. To be the sole person in the entire world who did not regard the slight thickening under his jaw as a character flaw. The sole person who did not construe from the sparseness of the hair at his temples that he didn’t matter. In trade, Remington would forgive the crenulations atop her elbows and the sharp line beside her nose when she slept too hard on her right side—a harsh indentation that could last until mid-afternoon and would soon be scored there all the time. Were he to have registered, as he could not help but have done, that his wife’s physical form was no longer identical to the one he wed, Remington alone would not regard this as a sign that she had done something wrong, perhaps even morally wrong, and he would not hold her accountable for being a disappointment. That was also part of the contract. It was a good deal.
Yet Remington had no need to draw drastically on the bottomless reserves of his wife’s forgiveness for not having been dipped in preservative plastic when they met, like an ID card. He looked pretty damned good for sixty-four. How he’d remained so slim, vigorous, and nicely proportioned without any appreciable exercise was anyone’s guess. Oh, he walked places, and didn’t complain about taking the stairs if an elevator was out of order. But he’d never even experimented with one of those “seven minutes to a better body” routines, much less joined a gym. During lunch, he ate lunch.
More exercise would improve his circulation, build vascular resilience, and forestall cognitive decline. She should welcome the turned leaf. She should ply him with protein bars and proudly track his increasing mileage on a pad in the foyer.
The whole supportiveness shtick might actually have been doable had he introduced his resolution with suitable chagrin: “I realize I’ll never manage to cover nearly the distances you have. Still, I wonder if maybe it would be good for my heart to go out for a modest, you know, two-mile jog, say, two or three times a week.” But no. He had to run a marathon. For the rest of the day, then, Serenata indulged the pretense of intense professionalism the better to avoid her husband. She only went back downstairs to make tea once she heard him go out. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t “rational,” but this specific subset of human experience belonged to her, and his timing was cruel.
Presumably, she herself began by copying someone else—though that’s not how it felt at the time. Both her sedentary parents were on the heavy side, and, in the way of these things, they grew heavier. Their idea of exertion was pushing a manual lawn mower, to be replaced by a power mower as soon as possible. That wasn’t to criticize. Americans in the 1960s of her childhood were big on “labor-saving devices.” A sign of modernity, the reduction of personal energy output was highly prized.
A marketing analyst for Johnson & Johnson, her father had been relocated every two years or so. Born in Santa Ana, California, Serenata never knew the town before the family shifted to Jacksonville, Florida—and then they were off to West Chester, Pennsylvania; Omaha, Nebraska; Roanoke, Virginia; Monument, Colorado; Cincinnati, Ohio, and finally to the company headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey. As a consequence, she had no regional affiliations, and was one of those rare creatures whose sole geographical identifier was the big, baggy country itself. She was “an American,” with no qualifier or hyphenation—since calling herself a “Greek-American,” having grown up supping nary a bowl of avgolemono soup, would have struck her as desperate.
Being yanked from one school to the next as a girl had made her leery of forming attachments. She’d only inculcated the concept of friendship in adulthood, and then with difficulty—tending to mislay companions out of sheer absentmindedness, like gloves dropped in the street. For Serenata, friendship was a discipline. She was too content by herself, and had sometimes wondered if not getting lonely was a shortcoming.
Her mother had responded to ceaseless transplantation by fastening onto multiple church and volunteer groups the moment the family arrived in a new town, like an octopus on speed. The constant convenings of these memberships left an only child to her own devices, an arrangement that suited Serenata altogether. Once old enough to fix her own Fluffernutter sandwiches, she occupied her unsupervised after-school hours building strength and stamina.
She would lie palms down on the lawn and count the number of seconds—one one-thousand, two one-thousand—she could keep her straightened legs raised a foot above the ground (discouragingly few, but only to begin with). She was gripping a low-hanging tree branch and struggling to get her chin above the wood well before she learned that the exercise was called a pull-up. She invented her own calisthenics. To complete what she dubbed a “broken leg,” you hopped on one foot the circumference of the yard with the opposite leg thrust forward in a goose step, then repeated the circuit hopping backward. “Rolly-pollies” entailed lying on the grass, gripping your knees to the chest, and rocking on your back one-two-three! to throw your legs straight behind your head; later she added a shoulder stand at the end. As an adult, she would recall with wan incredulity that when she strung her creations together to stage her own backyard Olympics, it never occurred to her to invite the neighborhood children to join in.
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