On the Saturday it is to snow – the air, conspicuously heavy, and the limned sky presage snow, this stuff whose rarity in recent years has me repeatedly unmoored, unsure of what exactly winter is, what winter activities are, where the hell do we live, anyhow, scotland? –  I sit down to write at 130 or so, having read half a profile on the prolific screenwriter and much more prolific punch up jobber Frank Scott, having glommed to his obsession with openings. But there is no specific thing I want passionately to write about. Only many things I have roving or petering interest in writing about.

One of those things is a story about an executive coming to the realization, over the course of a single meeting, that he has lost the room. This is how it starts: 

So, that is one opening. The problem is – I keep going back and forth on who (what?) the woman is, on what the story is. Is it an inverted “Lottery?” A tedious if genuine rant over the reproliferation of congenial Jamies amongst the executive tiers of large and mid-sized corporations? There is a concurrent global financial meltdown, a likely large-scale cyber attack – but it’s unclear whether these are mostly there to push Jamie over the edge or have a more meaningful, anti-capitalist purpose. Is this caution or fantasy? 

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One of the Christmasy things we did in December was go to a performance of The Nutcracker at the local ballet school – in fact, not The Nutcracker, but a ballet about a group of young dancers vying for and then performing in The Nutcracker. A meta-nutcracker. Throughout, I was distracted by the simpering over-enunciations of the piped narration, and by the exaggerated pink ears worn by the protagonist; it was only later, looking through the program, that I realized the character was a pig.  So, really not The Nutcracker, but enough of the dances were there, foreshortened, to capture Ottelie’s attention. A few weeks later, she and the boys practiced The Battle with their visiting cousins. The boys were in it for the sword play, the Mouse King with his scyllic heads, but Ottelie absorbed the older girls’ practiced gravity, the scampering to stage left, the initial blast of cannon. Boom. 

The month of January is one ongoing rehearsal of the Battle, until the mere thought of the alarming horns provokes the Boom, and I can’t open the pantry door without a wooden dowel sabre falling on me. By February, the boys move on to other sword and stick and sabre games. Zorro! En guarde! Not Ottelie. While the boys are at wrestling, we hole up by the lockers and watch The Royal Ballet’s rendition, the New York City Ballet’s, the Bolshoi’s (this one the eeriest, danced entirely by adults, with outsized, shadowy furniture). Once, we watch the Pas de Deux in Swan Lake; the music doesn’t hit like The Battle, but Ottelie picks up Odette’s reedy, melancholic sway. During the andantes, she sits, legs extended, and slowly flutters one leg, then the other. Her toes are pointed. The horns and piccolos rise; the violins recede, and she is on her feet, doing her gamest prisiadka. Over and over I’m asked to draw Clara – “she wears a nightgown,” Ottelie repeats, helpfully, and the nutcracker, about whom no helpful notes are offered. 

Anyway. It’s a thrill to observe, small obsession. Unclear whether it might widen to ballet writ large, or whether – though she twirls and scarpers and ronde de jambes – it is not ballet she loves at all, but Clara, in her nightgown, saving her beloved doll come to life with a clutch right slipper. 

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The kitchen table and any previously unoccupied inch of shelf and counterspace has been given over to dioramas, cardboard robots, popsicle stick figurines, and odd little bundles of foam and shoelace and washi tape. Adhesives – masking tape and cello-tape and elmer’s glue and, until I remove it, krazy glue keep turning up in places they ought not to, like the bath tub and the clothes’ dryer and one of the inner tubes. I am perplexed by all this crafting; I ask Brady where he thinks it originated. It’s not crafting; it’s constructing, he says, surprised. Perry decides he wants to make something, and then he figures out how to make it. That bundle of foam and string and shoelace is a camera. The dome of paper plates, robin’s egg blue, is a parasol. The intricate pinioned popsicle sticks are grabbers, pitchforks, unlit torches like the ones the death eaters carried as they wreaked havoc at the Quidditch World Cup. 

Constructing. I soften, somewhat, towards the creations; aesthetic polish isn’t the point, isn’t even a point. I soften; I respect and am impressed by this shift in verbiage, by this marriage of vision and mechanical engineering. At the same time, it is: not relatable. It is not that aesthetics are the only thing –

{In New York, I spend a day in new boots purchased with little consideration for differences in Italian versus French sizing. The left boot fits, even though the left foot is the one with the ghost bunion. I am convinced cardboard sheeting remains in the toebox of the right boot. It is like iron, this toebox. Because I spend much of the day on a sofa, the pain in my right foot is muted. It is not muted at nightfall, when I stumblingly lead my coworker hither and yon in search of the one street that will deliver us unto the High Street station, rather than dead-ending in a culvert under the Manhattan Bridge, or onto the Brooklyn bridge car ramp, or at the security blockade before the court house. 

After, I walk slowly, mincingly to the hotel. My feet are ravaged but the boots themselves don’t give any indication of their role in this; more likely, I am another stumbling drunk in a mini skirt.}

If Perry made the boots, they would probably be shellacked foam and look like sleighs – what an upgrade. 

Fascination, passion, obsession: where are the dividing lines? 

My mind goes to a for hire post I spotted on Nextdoor. “I am very compassionate about computers.”

Irving is more of an enthusiast; he is generous and uncritical in these enthusiasms, most of which have been grafted in parts from his older brother’s. It is my mother who points out his gift for coloring within the lines. She means this literally – he fills in shapes meticulously; the end result is invariably technicolor and pin-neat. I would not say he has a passion for coloring this way – though how he rages when I set him coloring a pajama shirt with special fabric markers. The shirt slips; the markers skid. Perry, meanwhile, lays happily on the floorboards, coloring messily but efficiently. 

Just this morning, Irving calls me into the playroom, where he has assembled a tower from jenga blocks, and a pathway leading to it. A warty blob of cement hulked at the walkway’s end. 

“This is Hagrid opening the Chamber of Secrets,” he says, pointing to the tower. “This is the basilisk.” 

The tower and blocks really are very neatly arranged, even if the cement looks nothing like a basilisk. 

“Hagrid didn’t open the Chamber of Secrets. Lord Voldemort did.” Perry calls out from the other room.

But Irving holds firm. 

“He did open it. And then basilisk ate Lord Voldemort.”

Boom.

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I reread Very Cold People over two afternoons. I picture the author whittling each sentence to the vertebrae, to its meanest core. The sentences are beautiful in the way the snow on the frozen marsh is beautiful on the morning when it is cloudless and nine degrees: glittering and still, close to bloodless. 

In writing classes, we are taught to write what we know, but we learn, from wedding speeches if nothing else, to leave out the inside jokes. There is an abundance of stratified and specific class fixation in this book, its author dreaming of Cabots and Lowells, clocking circa signs, cataloguing backpacks, coffee table art, wedding announcements. The tyrannies of cold, old houses. It is too close, at points – yet who outside of a small and dwindling audience, old and cold, would know these references? 

January is a winter month. The days are cold and grey, and the night falls early. True, but we’re climbing out. There are the weeks when I run with a headlamp at dusk, at night, after the kids are down – disorienting at first, then exhilarating, to be impervious to time. Each week, I chart the minutes of daylight gained. On the last day of the month, sunset is pushing five, and the light lasts for almost another hour. At the sharp bend at the top of the wooded road, the tropicalia sun slipping behind the stone walls and bare trees is something to behold. 

In An Anthropology of Turquoise, Ellen Meloy writes: Intoxication with color, sometimes subliminal, often fierce, may express itself as a profound attachment to landscape.

Perry, meanwhile, is reading. Painstakingly, he sounds out the letters; the sounding runs upwards of a minute for longer words, words with fraternal lowercases, like p and b, f and t. But he remembers the trail: at the end, the sounds compress neatly. October. School. Bicycle. For his birthday, he was given a clever prompting diary. The thing I like best about school: nachos. (Only he’s written “nochos.”) Something I was afraid of but now enjoy: parsel tung. 

He writes in a mix of left to right and up and down, like a multi-tasking crossworder. 

At the museum of science, he finds the case with the black rat snake, coiled high in its lone branch and commences many minutes of sybillant hisses. A father with his young daughter glances at him, alarmed and I am about to dart in when it clicks. “Oh, you’re speaking parseltongue!.”

“What were you telling the snake,” I ask, curious, but he won’t say. 

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For book club, we read People Collide. I’d added it to the list based on the most summarized understanding of the premise: a husband and wife swap bodies. Initially, I’m disappointed in the body swappers’ particulars: they are young, childless, only a few years into marriage. The husband doesn’t have a job. Both partners want to be writers. They are Americans living, temporarily, in Bulgaria, geographically estranged from family and friends. How different can the swapped situations be?

A few chapters in, I realize I’m looking at it all wrong. This story is mainly concerned with something more elementary and kinetic: the experience of inhabiting – and delighting in – a body of the opposite sex. There are changes in scale – shelves now out of reach, stairs now boundable three at a go, and in metabolism (Eli is a bull in Elizabeth’s much more fragile, sensitive body; Elizabeth, in Eli’s, is blissfully impervious to gluten, hangovers, migraines). Eli is beautiful (Elizabeth never thought she was beautiful). Elizabeth is powerful (Eli never considered his body at all). Changes in perception, in awareness, in fear, or the dawning lack of it. In desire. Eli is as sexually alive, desirable and desiring, in Elizabeth’s body as he was tentative and apathetic in his own. This rebalancing leads to one of the great, inventive sex scenes of our / all time; an electric recollision in the bathroom of the Pompidou.

So, I am briefly disappointed, then wholly absorbed by the physical metamorpheses. How often do I make sly, rueful remarks about Great American White Male Privilege? Even excluding the beginning of this very post, not infrequently. So how is it that I’ve never before wondered what inhabiting a male body would be like? 

At Master’s, which I’ve been going to on Saturdays for the past few months, I swim in the last lane, with three men and one woman. The men range in age from mine to two decades older; the other woman is much younger, barely out of college. One of the men keeps, as I do, a reflexive tally of yardage; he wants to know not just the interval but the pace. When we are told to descend one to four, he descends each hundred by five seconds exactly. 

In swimming, like cross country and skiing, you practice mixed, race split. There were always girls in the fastest lanes at practice; in distance sets in particular, there were a few girls who were more likely to lead. But in races, these very fast girls were slower than the fastest boys; with the exception of the longest races, the 1000 and the mile, they were slower than the fast boys, too. 

My brother liked to spend as much of swim practice as he could adjusting his goggles, refilling his water bottle, bobbing shamelessly off the bottom of the tiled floor – that is, not swimming. By the time he was a freshman, he was pushing six feet, and his wingspan was enviably elongated, like an orangutang’s, or Michael Phelps’. He was four seconds faster than I was in the hundred free – and he wasn’t even trying! Oh, I did envy that: so much potential, when I’d already burned through all of my advantages.   

The man who leads the lane for freestyle and pull and warm-up and sometimes I.M. is so much the fastest in freestyle that it is impossible for me to say whether he descends or not; no interval that challenges the rest of us is much effort for him. His arms in paddles move vast amounts of water with powerful, whorled economy. 

I lead I.M. sets, uneasily, because I am only faster than this man in breaststroke – though it is true that somehow, the 25% of lengths in my favor allow just enough daylight to justify the position. The only time I happily lead is on kick sets. Armless, I am the fastest; legless, I barely hang on. 

When the man leads, he calls out encouragement – just one more, last one, you got this. When I lead, I am silent, out of breath, preoccupied with making the interval. “One more,” I gasp, to myself. This is not a man or woman thing (coaching) – but a me thing (silence, self-preoccupation). 

In New York, I go with some coworkers to have drinks at a small bar with high, vaulted ceilings. We are on our second round when a man, middle-aged, unassumingly dressed, comes to stand just past our table and, without much pre-amble, begins to sing  what someone’s shazam tells us is “E lucevan le stelle,” from Tosca. His voice vibrates and swells, until it has taken up every square inch of airspace. 

“Opera Tuesday at the Five and Dime!” the bartender exclaims. He has an encouraging, Serbian accent – of course we like opera! 

I think of a line from Leslie Jamison’s essay on motherhood and divorce. “Our three bodies composed a single hydraulic system.”

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The snow does fall. On Sunday night I snowshoe in passionfruit light through the silent town and up to the top of the orchard. It’s close to six when I leave – achingly, I’d watched the thin daylight fade from the kitchen window; I’m supervising Irving and Ottelie, the revolving doors in terms of snow play, and slowly making risotto with orange and shrimp. It is closing on six and dark and cloistered through town and up the forested hill but when I reach the ridge line, the light shifts; I can see all the way across the orchard.