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.

I’ve been thinking a little about things that are perfect, as a category of things. The library I used to work in, and certain hotels, and Leonard Sciascia’s book To Each His Own. Train stations, and some pop songs: closed systems that achieve every goal that is set for them.

But then I think about Anna Karenina, which is imperfect, and better than most other things.

Which should I go for? Being perfect, or being great?

I gave blood on Friday and then went to see the Bourne Ultimatum. I should have something substantive to say about the movie, but I don’t; watching it by myself on a summer afternoon was like getting a shot of something: instantaneous, icy. I hadn’t thought about that aspect of pleasure, which is that it numbs. On Saturday David said I smelled like chlorine and gin, and I said, Isn’t the point of gin that it doesn’t smell? and he said, Then tonic. He meant it as a compliment. We drove into and out of the city with the windows down and the music up and I said, We are a Pleasuremobile.

Henry and I played Marco Polo at the town pool on Sunday. Last night I said to David, You know, it’s kind of dangerous, Marco Polo, because you can end up grabbing some kid’s dad’s balls, and David said, Oh, that’s who you’ve become, the mother who swims around with her eyes closed grabbing men’s balls.

We’re going to go to the pool today. I’m going to sit on the edge of the kiddy pool in my bathing suit and my eyes are going to tear from suntan lotion running into them and John and another boy or girl, to be selected from any number of boys and girls at the pool, are going to fight over his excavator, which John brings to the pool and leaves on the side of the pool, but which is not to be touched. An excavator is an extremely potent lure, it will call four-year-olds to it from the deep end, it will pull a stumbling one-year-old through the water holding her mother’s hand. But it is not to be touched!

At the pool everyone is more or less naked, and the veneer of civilization seems very thin. In fact the hold civilization has on us is nowhere better demonstrated than at the pool, where enjoyment is tempered and bent to the ever-present rules.