I remember the day my parents told me I would take tennis lessons. I was six or seven. They had been smoothing the way with a hot fudge sundae at the corner table in the back of the Old Fudge Shoppe or whatever it was called. Sun streamed through the windows into our booth, a mocking sun, for all was black. I cried. They looked to each other, some private exchange of information.

Tennis took time from reading and doing nothing on the couch. One day on the way to tennis I thought, I really don’t want to go to tennis, I really really really don’t want to go to tennis, I wish please God that I didn’t have to go to tennis—without believing, of course, in God—when suddenly, we had a flat tire and I couldn’t go! This was miraculous. I imagined that many things in life would take care of themselves with this kind of dispatch, and without me having to whine about them and fight with my mother.

I wasn’t a bad tennis player, in some ways. I hit the balls hard and in the court, often enough. I could win points. But I didn’t really care to. This meant either I lost or, if I were playing other people with similarly lackluster wills, that we played forever, into the twilight and then the dark, because no one could ever win two games in a row. That happened once, on an away game, in high school. The whole bus waited for us. I eventually lost.

My family belonged to a pool and tennis club at the end of our road with courts seemingly carved from stone croppings—they were set in the hills, with high walls around them, isolated. There we came on the weekend to play family doubles and fight and cry. So that my father could throw his racquet down in anger on the court.

After high school I took a hiatus from tennis. For a while I did no almost no athletic activity. I read and had boyfriends, instead. Once I ran through the bird sanctuary. That hurt. Then, in D.C. for a year, David and I played racquetball against each other. Do you know what David wanted to do? Crush me. Do you know what I wanted to do? Have close, fun games where it didn’t matter who won or lost. I lost, sometimes very badly, and was a poor sport about it.

The hiatus continued. I ran. I went to the gym, which was boring and made me fat. I swam. Swimming was interesting, in the sense that it was incredibly boring but after a long time you lost all sense of time and entered an altered state. And the pool had all kinds of rigmarole associated with it that I liked, including books of tickets and cabanas that you entered on one side in street clothes and exited on the other in a bathing suit. On the weekends they took out the lane dividers and as you began your lap it looked as if you and the people swimming beside you were alone in the pool. As you reached the halfway mark, however, an army of people swimming the other way emerged from the murk, and then you knew that there would be a great battle, and that only some of you would survive.

After Henry was born, I signed up for a season’s worth of hour-long lessons with Philippe. Philippe didn’t teach me how to love again, as this was not necessary, but he did teach me other things, like to reste cool and to remember, Eet’s posseebl, as I scrambled up the court after a ball. And he praised me and petted me. After that I played in the courts at Central Park, where the helicopters droned overhead and my sister threw tosses as long and meandering as Russian novels, before trying to serve off of them. Now we live in the suburbs, in a hotbed of tennis activity. This year maybe a hundred women tried out for the town teams, way too many for the teams to handle. Many, after several days of play, were cut. The first day I tried out the sky was very blue, the fields were very green, and children from the middle school ran over them in waves. At one point a white cloud moved over the sun and everything became dim. It was kind of beautiful, I thought, that all of these women, safe from want, no longer young, outwardly satisfied, were willing to risk embarrassment and rejection to play what is, after all, a game. Tennis is a silly game, played on a court, apart from the real, yet, in its own way, as real as anything else I’m likely to do.

Le Gaudron is closed. Well, it’s opened again, but it’s not the same. It’s better, which is worse. I don’t care. It’s nothing to me. I live 3,638 miles away from it. I didn’t even like it there. Flies circled lazily, the bread wasn’t very good, and one of the women who worked there, an enormous lady with a piggy face and blue eye shadow, hated me. But the case was filled with strange and beautiful pastries, miracles of sugar, and the banquette faced the case. I had a plan to eat one of each of the pastries before we left Brussels—I knew, always, my time was limited—as an experiment or task, but instead I just ate the éclairs. I think, in retrospect, that was wise of me.

One night I was the only person in the café, close to closing, and I heard one of the women working there say to the fat woman, So why don’t you close up? The fat woman inclined her bouffant head towards me and said, venomously, Elle est là. One of the first times, by the way, I understood someone else’s conversation in French. After that night the sign on the door advertising the hours was amended to note that table service ended a half an hour before the café closed. They meant me.

One day soon after we moved to Brussels, I couldn’t leave the apartment. I couldn’t work and I lay in the bed with the covers pulled up. David couldn’t get out of work yet, wouldn’t for a while. Eventually, I went to the Gaudron.

One evening everyone who came into the Gaudron had crutches, a cane, or a wheelchair, except me.

There were a lot of dogs at the Gaudron. I don’t know why, but once, watching the little white dog belonging to the table next to me scrounge around at the base of the table for pastry scraps, I was inspired. I thought, All you have to do is be that dog. Nothing came from this except for something I can't explain to anyone else, but that I find occasionally useful.

You would not believe how much a juice cost. Sometimes, but not from the fat lady, I would get a free cookie with my coffee. The ham sandwiches were passable. The chocolate, from a mix. Everyone smoked. I should find my notes from then, I should find what I wrote. I may have written that I was homesick, but that was a lie.

Once David almost died. He had appendicitis but it went undiagnosed, and his appendix had burst by the time we got him to a doctor. When they operated on him to remove the appendix they didn’t clean him out well enough and he remained very ill and they had to operate again, and then he had to stay in the hospital until his temperature went down and they could be sure there was no risk of infection. We were in Brussels, I was eight months pregnant, and the whole period was very horrible, but we remember it fondly now that it’s over. We talk about it all the time. We never want to forget it. If you want I’ll tell you the story again.

At temple on Friday, I was worried that my father would misbehave. Scoff and get restless and telegraph his contempt for the proceedings to the other people there. Mom and Dad raised us antireligious, and inconsistent. Otherwise I couldn’t have this situation, I couldn’t be worried that Dad would misbehave at the temple I joined so that my children will be able to understand what Judaism is, before they reject it.

There was a period in my 20s when I had just married David and my parents and I fought bitterly, and I thought that I would never have the relationship that I wanted with them. David and I moved to Brussels and had a baby, and for this reason and others, things improved. I used to wish that I hadn’t had that period with my parents, first because it was painful for me, and then, more recently, because I hated having hurt my parents. But now, strangely, I realize I’m glad that we had a period of acrimony and grief. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to see my parents as clearly as I do, and love them as much as I do.

At the temple I was worried about Dad. The night before he’d started laughing when Mom said the word bima and at the temple he’d been making jokes as we settled down. I guess Phil Spector got out for this, was one, on seeing a man with enormous head of hair. Also, I had no idea what the service was going to be like, and I wanted everyone to like it and not, if they were my father, think it was stupid and a waste of time. This isn’t a story about God, this is a story about my family, and how, as I listened to the music and read, in the prayer book, about repentance, which is the act of being sorry for what you’ve done and changing yourself, making yourself better than you had been, I stopped worrying about my Dad, because I knew that down the row he was reading the same thing, and that he would feel the same way I did about it.

We were in Brussels, and I was at the pâtisserie. I was in the apartment, with our new babysitter, watching the BBC. I was walking to buy something, something else, and our downstairs neighbor pulled her car across the street in front of me, to see if I was okay. At that point in time David and I shared a cell phone, we knew where the other was, we didn’t worry about each other, or had only just started to worry about each other a few months earlier, when I was pregnant. I remember at the end of the pregnancy I used to root through my purse to check the cell phone to see if I had missed a call, before realizing, again, that no one would be calling me, I would be calling them.

I want to go back further, more, to see how it was then, when everything was wonderful except for loneliness and, in the winter, dodgy heat. When I went to the salle de kinésthérapie and took my turn on the massage bed and watched the snow fall outside. When the man from the next building over stopped us on the street to explain that he and his wife practiced naturisme, and he hoped we wouldn’t mind. When the car was towed, and we found it.

It was as real as anything else. I can see that now. I wonder if the point of thinking and writing about past things is that by doing this you make them real, and by making them real you promise that someday this will all seem real, as well.

It’s rainy, the back of our house is roped off with Caution tape, and I wish I were somewhere else, writing about my travels. If you’re stuck in Istanbul with nothing to do, make your way to the covered bazaar, where you will find, in the third row of stalls, a man whose family has been making paper airplanes for three centuries. He will sell you one for five to ten cents (don’t forget to haggle) and invite you to his home, which is on an island and only accessible by boat. By the time you are halfway there you will wish you hadn’t accepted his invitation.

In Brussels one must not miss the Mannekin Pis.

Few visitors to Goa know the legend of Mary Mary, who led sailors to their deaths.

In Venice, actually, David and I lunched next to a couple who invited us back to their palazzo, an invitation we, our eyes meeting, accepted. I don’t know if I had already read Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, in which a young couple visiting a city just like Venice is stalked and killed by a friendly older couple. Once we got to the palace, or really the half-palace (subdivided), we were separated, and I was shown their bedroom. One of them wrote poetry, and I remember there was some kind of evidence of this around, although what could it have been? We admired their house, and went out again into the street. This was the kind of thing we thought you should do while traveling, meet people and have little adventures.

I’ve been trying to imagine how a writer could make her work performative in the same way that a visual artist can and often does. I mean, why is no one interested in writers performing? And why aren’t writers interested in being somewhere and writing at some particular point and seeing what comes from that? For four nights I undertook a performative exercise in which I went upstairs to my office at 10 p.m. and wrote one hundred words in ten minutes, but after four nights this made me really tired, and it conflicted with the surprisingly long list of things I also often need to do at 10 p.m. (eat dinner out, sleep, have sex, stretch and strengthen muscles so I can play tennis without injuring my back). This was supposed to be the point of the whole thing, of course, that I would write then instead of doing those things, but those things won out. I am a shitty artist. Still, I wonder why better, crazier people than I am haven’t managed to do anything interesting with the idea of writing as performing. I’m not talking about one-off contests and stunts, I’m talking about some kind of rigorous attempt to make writing as much about the writer, about the physical self of the writer, even, as painting, drawing, film, and performance art have been.

I kind of like the story I started. It was about a couple with an infant son, in Brussels. Each night at 10 p.m., because the baby wouldn’t sleep, they walked to get ice cream. In Brussels in the summer, if it isn’t raining, it’s still light at 10 p.m., and not only light, but bright. People are out walking and eating dinner and skate-boarding, illuminated. The couple liked to choose different ways to walk to ice cream, and back. One way was the way that went by the cat that would follow them.

Then something happened, but then I stopped writing.

The point of all of this is that of course the blog is performative.