It probably sounds like a silly "Gen X vs Millennials/Zoomers/Alpha" thing, but I didn't really have a lot of scheduled time when I was a kid and have attempted to raise Millie that way, but ran into a bit of a buzzsaw on that: There aren't many years between my real age and Ray, but they appear to include the line between "mom and dad said to be back before midnight" and "mom and dad wanted to know where we were at all times". Plus, and as somebody who hates making generalizations as much you might expect from having been four different people, he's Korean-American, and so are his parents, and there is a lot more early focused pressure there. It's pragmatic, in a lot of senses; there's this real stew of having left your homeland to achieve, needing to be better to overcome prejudices, and imported focus on developing the ability to work one's way up a ladder that is more rigidly defined than we imagine it to be in America. Add on that Penelope Lincoln grew up being on three lacrosse teams and swimming competitively during the off-season, and I kind of didn't have a leg to stand on.
On top of that, to get back to what started this whole thing, Millie is Penelope Lincoln's kid, genetically. I may not have been in a lot of clubs as a kid or teenager and never made varsity in school sports - I had hobbies and collections and such, but was kind of low-key about it - but I'm not in a position to pass that on, at least on a biological level. She's competitive in a way I often find intimidating, quite frankly, and when she decides she wants to get good at something, she wants to spend time learning from experts. Plus, all her friends at school and in the neighborhood are kids with busy schedules, so that's how she's going to spend time with them.
Which means I spent the one-week anniversary of being Millie at a tennis lesson. But let's start with the week in between.
It was late Saturday when Ray and I got home, after an incredibly awkward train ride. We both dropped our things in the living room, maybe subconsciously not wanting to face putting them away in different rooms yet, then decided to go out to eat and see a movie rather than sit around. It was fun, and we mostly laughed away the comments we probably weren't supposed to hear about daddy-daughter dates because it's his weekend with custody, or the ones about what kind of parent brings his tween to a horror movie. That's what people are going to see, right?
Still, when I got home, I felt very strange picking up Millie's backpack and standing in front of her bedroom door. I was the sort of parent that respects their daughter's privacy, right? So I dithered a bit, putting the Penny clothes I'd worn in Maine in the hamper, seeing of there was a ballgame on TV, going into my home office and seeing of any ARCs that a publisher wanted me to blurb caught my eye. Not that night. Ray slipped into the bathroom to shower, brush his teeth, etc., then walked out shirtless. I bit my lip, because, well, turning into your daughter doesn't completely suppress all the memories and associations that he's still kind of hot. He read my face quickly enough and found the top that goes with those pajama pants.
I raided my own closet for a night shirt to wear, and grabbed at some of the supplies we'd bought at CVS and Marshall's earlier. A change at the Inn means you buy a new toothbrush, underpants, etc. It's been almost rent years since the last time, but it's just automatic from the second on.
Trying to fall asleep in Millie's room was beyond strange, because, on the one hand, I know it well: Millie isn't the sort of kid who keeps a Keep Out! sign on the door or objects to her parents ever coming in, even to collect laundry or find something she left behind. Lying on the bed looking up, I tried to think of it as just an Airbnb, but it's not a stranger's place, it's somewhere familiar, but in the absolute wrong context. On top of that, I could practically feel my husband in the next room, and I wanted to go there, but, no, we weren't going to give each other any chance to talk ourselves into anything.
Sunday was errand-running day, and while i don't really need to train Ray on what the family's grocery needs are or anything, we spent the day double-checking to make sure there wasn't anything that he didn't know about keeping the household going that would trip us up when a new Penny showed up. Happily, we're a good team; there wasn't anything that he didn't think he needed to know as the husband.
Then he went off to work for the week and I stayed going crazy.
It's not that I wasn't busy; there was a bunch to plan for the new school year where I got away with having some convenient Covid that took my voice, a book to write and another to edit, and about a million texts from Millie's friends per day. There's no boyfriend, thank God, but I'm still not sure what I'm going to tell them when I start school next week. I've been holding them off by claiming to be grounded for what I pulled last week and that is fill them in on that later, but Ray and I really haven't come up with a cover story yet.
The thing about saying you're grounded, of course, is that you're stuck inside, and the extra energy I have as Millie versus Penny is making the fiction of being grounded very hard to maintain! Was i like this as a teenager? I thought i would be able to concentrate on work, but that really isn't happening. I sleep in, try to have a coffee when I get up, spit it out because while it doesn't really taste different now, the taste buds that respond to it are clearly not connected to the pleasure center of my brain (yet), grab a Monster from the fridge and hate that I'm okay with it despite it making me too jittery to focus on writing or copy edits very well.
And then, last Saturday, I went to my first tennis lesson as Millie.
As Penny, I'm not really bad at tennis. My drivers license says I'm in my 40s but Penelope was an athlete and I inherited all the under-the-skin infrastructure to turn carbs into muscle that's suitable for lacrosse, and it's pretty transferable - lots of running and swinging a stick to create leverage that sends a ball flying, although the elbow is more involved. I've aged well enough that I don't get tired that quickly, and I honestly seldom lose to anyone consistently except Millie, and she's only gotten that good recently.
And now I see why. The coach spent the first lesson blowing her whistle at me a lot, pointing out that Billie Jean or Serena or Venus (obviously, not their real names) had left the opposite baseline wide open, or asking why I was trying to hit the ball as hard as I could when I could drop it just on the other side of the net since they were at the back. I was apparently bad enough at that to wind up doing drills, trying to build up the muscle memory to hit that spot, which Millie already has.
I wasn't really mad or frustrated about it, but it did remind me a bit that I kind of take all the ways I've done this for other things for granted, and how frustrated I was at being a woman the first time, and now it's second nature. But having this sort of intensive training is something else; I felt like I was thrown into the deep end when I woke up as Liz, but now I wonder what diving into the deep end would be like, with intensive training, and whether I'd be able to handle it. As I mentioned, I was a kind of laid-back kid, and kind of picked up on being Liz and then Penny because I had to, which means I did okay but you can still see I'm my old self in a lot of ways. Penelope probably wouldn't have become a novelist left to her own devices, but I bent her life hard in that direction to make it easier for myself, and as I found myself getting a little better at this game just after my first lesson, I kind of wondered how malleable I might be.
Still, it was uncomfortably intensive. I've spent most of my time since this last trip to the Inn with Ray, and we're both really reluctant to touch or do anything that might possibly look or feel inappropriate, which is not a problem my coach has - she'll get right in there, standing directly behind me and pushing and pulling at my joints and butt to get me into the right stance or demonstrate how to move. It was really unnerving, because although I've had people handle me like that at the gym on occasion - even male trainers, once in a while - knowing that she thinks I'm just a kid and doesn't expect any pushback from Millie makes it weird. I know it's just about training, and Ray and I vetted her before we signed Millie up, but it still felt really uncomfortable.
Though not as uncomfortable as "hit the showers" did. I went into the locker room just like after any other workout but as soon as I saw Billie Jean take her sport bra off I turned right around, grabbed Millie's gym backpack from her locker, and bolted straight for the T. It was honestly like I'd just been a man a month ago and was suddenly seeing things I was not supposed to, and I'd be headed for jail if I didn't get out of there right away. As soon as I was on the T, I was texting Jessica, asking how one manages to not feel like a creep 24/7 when reverted to this age, and she says that it took her three years to feel like she was okay, at which point she was going through puberty and just feeling like a regular tween, and since I wasn't going to be Millie that long, I was just going to have to live with it.
Great.
Still, once I'd broken that seal, I was able to meet up with "Serena" a couple times during the week to practice, and it was kind of fun to get out and play, even though I knew this is pretty serious for the girls, who have pro ambitions, including Millie, I'm kind of just enjoying getting into the flow state for a few seconds at a time. Not for long - these girls are destroying me - but I'm pretty sure I'm going to greatly appreciate any moment where I feel like I know what to do and don't have to think about my body a lot from now on.
The second lesson at least went a little better, and I was able to just sort of stare fixedly ahead in the shower and call upon how I sort of taught myself not to look around like I did in my first weeks of being Liz afterward. Not exactly something I want to be calling on again, but here we are.
-Arthur/Penny/Millie
