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.

John had his first swimming lesson yesterday. Needless to say he wouldn’t go in. His excuse was that it was in the medium pool, and he never went in the medium pool. He had gone to his lesson with his babysitter, who called to me tell me this. When I got to the pool later with Henry, I found John at the baby pool, where he showed me two toys other children had brought, but that he was playing with. I stepped into the baby pool and said, John, let’s go into the medium pool together, and he got out of the baby pool and ran around the baby pool saying, No I’m not going in the medium pool I don’t want to, no, no, no, no, no. Then when I stepped out of the baby pool he reentered the baby pool and took up playing with the toys that other children had brought to the pool. When he heard another child say, Torpedo, he quietly moved, with the torpedo, to the other side of the pool.

I went to the big pool with Henry, where he secretly—this is against the rules—dropped quarters on the bottom and dove for them. Then he handed me the quarters, which someone else had lost, for safekeeping and rolled around in the water and pretended, when it was time to leave, that he couldn’t hear me because he was underwater. Each time I called his name he dove under, but I was able, eventually, to time shouting his name with his surfacing, and to make it clear that he had to get out. To get out he swam and walked slowly across the whole distance of the pool to the stairs.

Later John went into the medium pool with Henry, and they wouldn’t leave, and we temporarily but convincingly lost one set of car keys, and John wanted to take a rock from the parking lot home with him and I said he couldn’t, and he cried bitterly and lost his ice cream by not listening, although he will almost certainly have it tonight. We had a wonderful time at the pool yesterday. It was not nearly as crowded as it normally is. It was all there only for us.

A bee flew into John’s shirt and stung him. He is now lying on the couch in Jennifer’s arms, watching Scooby. Henry is offering him treats that will make him feel better and that Henry would also enjoy, like ice cream at the ice cream and sports memorabilia store. Henry knows all about bees, having been recently stung twice (even though I said he wouldn’t be). He said to me, You don’t even know what a stinger looks like.

I was stung by a bee the summer between kindergarten and first grade. We were in New Hampshire, at my mother’s family’s vacation house, the backyard of which was filled with bees’ nests. (The inside was filled with bats and mice, and someday I may tell you about them.) My bee had stung me in the thigh. Out on the deck, my mother lay me on my stomach, spread a poultice on my leg and read me Little House on the Prairie while it set. That bee sting brought me happiness.

I’m going to give blood today, so I reread Updike’s “Giving Blood.” It begins, “The Maples had been married now nine years, which is almost too long.” I’ve been married almost ten. The Maples are in their thirties, living in the suburbs, with children, and guess what? So am I. I bought the book this story is in, Too Far to Go, when I was nineteen, for a class, and I marked passages faintly in pencil. What’s funny to me now is not that I didn’t understand my future when I was nineteen, but that I felt it so intensely. The cruel things he says to her, the part where she tells him, “Now you’ve said things that I’ll always remember,” struck at my heart when I was younger, unmarried, without any children or even a concept of myself as a wife and mother. Now I read the story for the funny parts, the technique, and the ideas behind it. If my younger self hadn’t marked the way faintly in pencil, I probably wouldn’t remember that I came to it emotionally, first.

I’ve given blood twice before, and both times I felt I had to. Everyone was doing it. Yesterday I sat in the ice cream shop as the kids ate in silent dedication and read a sign on the window, backwards, the letters reversed. Blood emergency, I read, and then when I saw the date for giving donations, I thought, Yes. Is this further proof of my new, old cold-bloodedness? That I no longer fear the needle and a dizzy spell? What won’t I be afraid of next?

The Ocean Wonders Aquarium has resurfaced. Johnny carries it around with him like a boom box, playing the music. Or I have to carry it, since it takes thirteen batteries and weighs a ton. It’s supposed to hang on the side of a crib.

There are three or four different songs. They are all formless and basically unsingable, but haunting. In the car the aquarium rides between the boys, set on continuous play, with the volume up. Johnny likes its mournful tone. On the way to ice cream tonight, he said to me, “This song is sad.” I said, “But you’re not sad,” and he said, “But the song is sad.”

And strangely enough, today I was sad. A friend of ours is ill, in the hospital, awaiting surgery, and last night I dreamed that I was with my Nana again. I was in her house, which after her death was sold to a developer who pretended he wasn’t a developer who was going to tear it down, who then tore it down and replaced it with two houses. No one in my family will drive by them, although they are more than willing for you to drive by them. They want you to drive by them, to tell them how bad it is. In the dream I was in her house and we were all going to her unveiling. I guess she was there and not there. I went to the bathroom and gave birth.

Yar yar yar life and death. And ice cream. And hide and seek. Real estate and parking lots and swimming pools and baseball camp. Hospitals. Apple sauce. That fucking aquarium. A few years ago, when a friend of mine had a son who was also under its spell, we used to call each other and try to sing the songs.

On Friday I went to the Museum of Modern Art to be ravished by the Richard Serra retrospective. I love the free Fridays at MoMA, when the place is packed with groups of students who have given over maybe their lives, and certainly their personal appearances, to Art. A staid matron in from the suburbs, I wander alone.

This Friday was better than many, also, in that it was cool and sunny out, and that I hadn’t been let out of my house in some time and so was happy to be free. David was supposed to meet me there and was late and I didn’t care, because I was by myself, looking at art, surrounded by strangers. If you ask me what I miss most about living in the city, I will tell you it is the strangers. When people are strangers they are perfect. When I am surrounded by strangers I am filled with love. As opposed to when I am at the playground.

I wonder if Richard Serra feels the same? Or does he hate everyone? Oh, it’s not all about whether an artist hates or likes people, I know that. But Serra kind of hates people, I think. Or we’re not important to him. That’s probably more accurate. I went into the Sculpture Garden to see his works, and it was like a party there. People were snapping pictures of themselves and of their friends, children were hanging out on the little bridges, a crowd of snackers (soon to include me) occupied the chairs in the snacking area and watched the parade. There was a creepy dude wandering “Intersection II” smiling and telling people they were taking beautiful pictures of the rust. When you entered “Torqued Ellipse IV”, it was like you entered a room in someone’s apartment. Everyone was lit up and facing you. Hey! You wanted to say to the people already there. How is everyone?

None of this had anything to do with the art. Well, the art was made of shapes that allowed people to wander through it and gather in it, but the art wasn’t there for that. The art didn’t like that. It didn’t like parties. It didn’t care about people’s bodies. It wasn’t there to create community, for God’s sake. The art was about something else. What else? It was hard to say, standing there in the late spring sunshine, staring at the leaning slabs of steel that were, according to the signs, not to be touched. Something about eternal shit that is going to fuck with you? And shapes?

On the one hand, I think that art that can’t stand up to a little joie de vivre is pretty shitty art. And yet, I do love the idea that art might have nothing to do with human concerns. It might not reference human form, it might not engage topics of human interest, it might not even be able to be seen by humans, until the Great Salt Lake dries up. Why not? Who says art has to be appreciated by people? It could be a message sent out to no one. Right?

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.