Isaac/Ainsley: Gen Z Boss and a Mini

She's actually a Millennial, but whatever.

I wanted to write about this sooner, but working Ainsley's job is one of the most draining experiences of my life; I've got nothing left by the time I get home. And this is a job people would kill for, especially in my situation! It's a laptop job that pays decently in a field that doesn't absolutely require years of training, and Ainsley's still young enough that I can defer to people with more experience and responsibility. All I have to do is learn how to talk the talk.

Ainsley, for her part, loves her job and made an admirable effort to coach me in between trying to keep her toddler from destroying the house. She can teach me the right buzzwords to use. She can teach me about her coworkers, matching names to faces, who to ask for help and who's not worth talking to. She can tell me what she usually wears to the office. (I haven't actually worn a miniskirt, by the way. The title's just for the meme.) She can teach me everything there is to know about how to market a hotel chain and why it requires great dexterity with arcane features of Microsoft PowerPoint. (Obviously as an accountant I'm an Excel person.) But she can't teach me how to talk like I'm someone who actually belongs there.

My first hands-on lesson with the marketing industry was that human beings can smell fear. I walked in on the first day after Heather pushed and laughed me out the door, giving me a 25-minute commute to do nothing but stew in my own desperation to somehow, in that moment, wake up back in Virginia. I triple-checked my makeup even though I'd practiced and it was easier than I thought it'd be. (Besides eyeliner, that one's really annoying.) But my makeup job didn't out me as a complete fraud; instead it was my gait. My habit of staring at the ground, reminding myself that Ainsley Thomas would absolutely not do that, looking up, seeing all the people around, and going back down. Going out of the way to be invisible, like I always do.

This place actively punishes invisibility, it backfires on me every time. Not only is it a relatively small office where everyone at least vaguely knows everyone else, marketing as an industry inherently attracts the most outgoing, hypersocial Type-A people imaginable. When I walk in and don't jump for joy after seeing "my" coworkers for the first time in months, when I describe my sabbatical as "fine" and only when pressed throw in half-assed details about the wonderful and fun-filled time I had in Maine. A perfectly photogenic guy walked in, passed out slices of pumpkin bread and told us his wife made it. He's younger than Ainsley, just a few years older than me. They're all excitable, upbeat, driven people, or at least they come across that way, because obviously you can't expect to market anything if you can't market yourself first. For nine hours a day I'm a sheep in wolves' clothing.

Really the worst part is how genuinely concerned they seem to be for me. One woman asked me if I had any new dog pics and looked like I'd grown a third arm when I told her I didn't. By the end of the first day, two of Ainsley's coworkers had already pulled me to the side and asked if something happened to me in Maine. They're certain of it now, I'm sure, thanks to my nonexistent poker face. It doesn't matter how much actual knowledge about Ainsley's job I can study if I can't bring myself to seem like I wholeheartedly enjoy using the word "craveable".

And I don't know how! I've never not been invisible, I liked it back there! Whatever attempts I make to seem more outgoing only make me feel like I come across as even weirder than if I just don't try. And I get a lot of chances to, with how I've got to be on some Zoom call with the other team in Jersey City half the time. I have to see Ainsley's face next to the others on the conference call, and even when I don't have to speak up I'm left thinking, God. I can't even smile in a way that doesn't look creepy.

I'm gonna need to get a hobby before I go completely insane. I need something I can actually talk about with these people, make me seem a little more like a human before Ainsley's manager (who has been very accommodating this far, by the way) outright tells me it's impacting my work instead of just shooting me concerned looks. I know "I'm" on thin ice already for having missed far more work than planned. Maybe I'll have to stop ditching the weekly after-work drinks a lot of the team goes on. But for now I can feel the team grow more distant every day as they adjust to the new Ainsley, and as much as I appreciate people reciprocating my untalkativeness I hate feeling like I'm ruining every part of her life I touch. And that happens to a lot of Inn guests, to some extent or another, but from what I've read a lot of people here have done a better job fitting in at their new lives' workplaces, not accounting for missing skills. Missing skills should be the hard part, I'm screwing up what's supposed to be the easy stuff.

All these people care about a person I can't even begin to understand how to be, how to embody. And that goes tenfold for her actual friends. I'd get more into that if it wouldn't derail the whole post.

Yeah. A hobby or just, anything that doesn't involve Ainsley's massive social network. I have got to find a way to make a blog post that isn't purely a vent session before the one about returning to my own body. I hope.

Toby/Dunia: A Much Longer Trip Than I Expected

So... Hi.  I'm afraid that I don't have any sort of introduction where I'm just me saying what I'm doing in Maine.  I kind of didn't even realize this place had a blog attached until after I became this girl. 

It's this sort of thing common, or is it all about the curse or whatever?  I've never really traveled much, or at least not to cities.  We used to go to some of the closer National Parks when I was a kid, but Ma had to sell the camper after the cancer took Dad, and even if there had been money we were never really sure there'd be a job to come back to if we took time off.  I didn't really think about it much, though, I guess because I never had it to miss and there weren't a whole lot of kids in my high school who were going on European vacations.

There were some folks with money around, though their kids went to private schools.  I guess Lambert was one of them.  I didn't know him before I answered the ad; he must've been a couple years ahead of me anyway.  He bought a car on eBay, and since he never liked to fly, he put something in a local Facebook group looking for someone to drive to Bangor and back with him.  Beat the hell out of my real job, especially since they were cutting hours due to the market for soybeans drying up or something.  He seemed all right and I guess he figured I could be trusted with his car on the drive back, so it was a done deal pretty quick.

We stopped at the Inn the night before driving up the coast - Lambert found it online and apparently the last two-week block of the year was an especially good deal for when you didn't necessarily know when you'd be in and out.  We got there on Monday, crashed for the night, and then started for Bangor in the morning.  We spent a couple hours after lunch inspecting and test-driving the Porsche - well, I kind of stood around for that - and then I was back in the BMW for the ride back.  We got dinner at a restaurant on a boat in Portland before stopping at the Inn for the night.

I was awoken by a high-pitched scream, bolting up in bed and looking on the other side of the room where there was a topless woman holding her breasts.  It was clearly the same room we'd been in last night - Lambert's stuff was on the end table - and I was a little fuzzier from the previous night's beers than I should have been, so I asked who she was.

"I'm Lambert Allen - who the fuck are you?"

"It's me, Toby!"  That when I noticed my voice didn't sound right in my ears and my hair was long enough for some  to be in my eyes.  "Uh, at least I think I am."  Hung over enough to go check, I stood from my bed and walked across the room to the bathroom and looked in the mirror.  "How in the heck?"

As you can tell from the subject line, there was a girl in the mirror, about my age, but I was shorter.  Not like super-short - I was six-foot-two and lost about six inches or so.  It made the t-shirt I'd been wearing really loose, although I could see a vague shape of breasts and nipples under it.  I was kind of surprised my boxers hadn't fallen down, but my butt was enough to hold it up.  I guess that may go with being Latina - my skin wasn't quite black but a pretty dark brown.  I pulled the neckline out to look down and then felt inside my boxers - I was all girl.

It woke me up and I ran back into the bedroom, where Lambert was pulling a suitcase out from under his bed and opening it.  He said "you have got to be shitting me" as he lifted the flight attendant's uniform that was on top out.

I did the same, only the top layer on mine was a letter "to the new Dunia Cortes".  It described the Inn's spell, and laid out a bit about the life I was inheriting.  Shes my age, 23, from the Miami area, Cuban-American although it was her grandparents that came from Cuba as children as opposed to someone more recent.  She had just been hired as a flight attendant and was expected to shadow veteran Alicia Polawski, but wound up following her to Maine when she wouldn't cut vacation short.  She lives with her father in "Little Havana" and has a boyfriend, but Hector is in the Army and stationed overseas.  She's become a retired truck driver in Phoenix, which feels as crazy as me being her.

Lambert's letter filled in some blanks; it turns out that Alicia Polawski used to be an college professor and a guy, but he got bored and decided to move on, saying the new Alicia could keep her life or not and he didn't care (she didn't care?).  He also seemed to have invited Dunia to join him specifically because it didn't look like there were going to be 13 people to trigger everything otherwise.  This Harmon guy sounds like a piece of work. 

If there were any people who has been through this before, I didn't meet them, aside from the hot dog vendor who said the thing that freaked me out the most, that there was nobody staying at the Inn after us until spring, so our lives and identities would be in a sort of limbo until then.  He said it's not so bad, because we'd have first dibs on our room and explaining not being around is easier than fixing a mess someone else makes of your life, but that's almost right months!  What's my Ma going to do without me, to start? 

Lambert seems to be more in a daze than I am.  He thought he might go home anyway, but apparently Alicia looks a lot like his last couple stepmothers and his dad is on the prowl again.  He also really doesn't like flying, and I almost wonder if it's bad enough for him to quit Alicia's job ahead of her next shift and try to live on his credit cards until then.  I'm not going to do that - this is apparently Dunia's dream job and she seems nice enough - although there's a pretty big handbook to study in the next week or so.

(It's a lot!  It looks simple enough on TV and in the movies, but I'm already afraid of screwing up the details or having to give someone CPR in midair!)

What he is sure of is that he's not leaving his new Porsche behind.  One of the coupons in the flyer that pointed us to Cary's hot dog truck and this blog is for a place that offers long term parking and storage, but he says there's no way he's leaving his new baby in some beach town that empties out for the winter.  He suggested we just do what we had been planning to do, me driving the BMW and him driving the Porsche, just south on Route One rather than west to North Dakota, but i said that I sure as heck wasn't going to get pulled over driving someone else's car as a Latina woman, so he reluctantly decided to park that one for the winter.  It's probably a good thing we initially packed pretty light, because it's not like the little sports car has  the trunk space to handle four people's luggage if Lambert and I had packed like Dunia and Harmon/Alicia.

It's weird as heck.  I'm sitting in the passenger seat of a really expensive car, and every time I look down rather than forward, I see how dark and slender my arms and legs are, and I've definitely got a figure even if my pink t-shirt doesn't show the boobage that Lambert's top does (we were not left a lot of clean clothes, and I really struggled to pull these shorts onto my big new butt this morning).  When we do get to Miami tomorrow, some guy is going to think I'm his daughter, and then I'm going to have to start working on airplanes starting next Wednesday despite having barely been out of North Dakota before.  I'm kind of tapping this out on my phone just so that I'm not staring at my body or Lambert (he's a little older, but pretty sexy) or talking in our new voices, something to do, and maybe find out if we're doing the right thing taking our stuff along to our new homes.  What I've seen of the entries here, folks usually just leave things there, but maybe not for months.

Maybe this will be my only post because I'll be too busy soon enough.  We'll see.

-Toby/Dunia

Arthur/Penny/Millie: Ms. Lincoln

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Isaac/Ainsley: Historical Texts

Does anyone else reread their old texts? And I don't only mean for especially emotionally charged nostalgia and/or regret about a couple moments. I mean for everything.

I do that, a lot. It's probably not healthy and it definitely fucks up how I perceive the past, but it's been a habit of mine since I was old enough to get a phone. In some ways conversations I've had over text feel more real in my memory than ones actually spoken in person. One lasts forever, the other fades away. I honestly kind of prefer having important conversations over text because of this, though I'm not so broken that talking in real life doesn't feel better in the moment. Charitably you can say this is what I do instead of keeping a journal. Sometimes I'll talk to someone and reference a conversation that happened a long time ago, and they'll go, what the hell are you talking about?

I gave that up when I surrendered my phone to the Inn. I'm now cut off from my past as well as my present. Ironically this makes me relate to my past more normally, but now I have a different past which I can reference.

So yes, I've been reading Ainsley's old texts. Call it an invasion of privacy unnecessary even by Inn standards, but I'm already doing enough to weird out The Girls without changing up Ainsley's texting style. Not really in any particular order besides scrolling up a bit in the most recent conversations, I'll just search a particular term that's come up in conversation or my own thoughts and see if I can get any insight out of it.

You searched: sugarbunny
MELISSA: hey idk
MELISSA: theyre both cute as heck!!
YOU: I was so set on sugar
YOU: Always wanted to name a dog that lol
YOU: But when I saw him at the rescue and fell in love like that he kept
YOU: Hopping around and barking
YOU: And it was the most adorable thing I've ever seen 😭😭
YOU: And bunny popped into my head it just works too perfectly haha
MELISSA: so i have an idea

Yeah, that's how.

Melissa comes up a lot in these. Ainsley was her maid of honor last year (and thank God I didn't come to the Inn a year earlier) and I've had to fend off a good amount of texts from her since I got here. I'm going to have to see her at some point, she's already wondering why I keep turning down her offers to get lunch. Actually it's kind of amazing I've managed to go this long without having to interact in person with someone who knows Ainsley.

You searched: sara
MELISSA: ssssssssshhhhshshhshshhsh
MELISSA: you can get through this ains
MELISSA: youre unstoppable
MELISSA: need me to come over?
YOU: No that won't work either!!
YOU: I can tell sara's happy that he won't be around constantly anymore
YOU: Might as well give her some more fucking peace and quiet
YOU: I'm already being a total disaster right now and she doesn't need to hear any more of it
YOU: Uuugh and she pisses me off every time I look at her lately
YOU: Even though she hasn't done anything wrong and I feel bad about it
YOU: Stupid weed smell distracting me from my crying

Apparently Ainsley and Sara aren't that close, despite having traveled cross-country together for a vacation. I started to get that impression once I saw how most of their texts are about household stuff. Eventually I dug up a mention that they went to high school together. It surprises me that out of the many girls in The Girls, Ainsley isn't rooming with any of them.

You searched: maine
YOU: Hey cmon I'm just sayin
YOU: Now or never!! Cancellation window for the tickets ends in a few hours
YOU: Come to Maine with me and have some real fun 🤪
SARA: okay. ill do it.
SARA: you have to answer something first though.
YOU: YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY I KNEW YOU COULD DO IT
SARA: be honest. did jaysen mess you up so bad that youd rather be stuck with me for two weeks than be alone?
YOU: I mean
YOU: It's obvious Sara
YOU: I know you could hear me sobbing
SARA: oh i knew the answer i just wanted to hear you say it.

Ainsley originally planned to go to the Inn with this Jaycen guy, but they had an acrimonious breakup a couple of months beforehand. I don't know all details since scrolling through endless texts of clearly overcompensating lovey-dovey talk that spiral into shouting matches is where I draw the line. Seeing "you" attached to all this is bad enough! Yet another reminder that my past is gone. I am the body I've slowly, barely become more comfortable looking at in the mirror. I'm Ainsley Thomas in every way that matters except to a very small number of people. Everything I do, is her.

Of course, by that standard I was only Isaac Strauss to a very small number of people before I went to the Inn, too. Nothing makes you reflect on your life more than having to live someone else's.

You searched: ainsley
YOU: hey can you do me a favor
YOU: i need you to let me know if anyone comes to our door while i'm out
SARA: Ok ❔❔❔
SARA: You gotta tell me why though
SARA: You expecting anyone? Ainsley's ex getting creepy?
YOU: god no
YOU: ainsley's girls are getting increasingly concerned for her well-being and i'm starting to think their talk about an intervention isn't just a joke
YOU: they might camp outside and wait until the dog forces me out and then they drag me to brunch or something where i have to explain why "i'm" being so weird
SARA: HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA XDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXDXD
SARA: 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
SARA: Lol
YOU: look can you help me out here
SARA: Tough shit kiddo!!
SARA: I know it's hard on you but you're gonna have to rip off the bandaid 🩹 if you ever wanna go to her job before you get her fired
YOU: ugh i KNEW you'd react like that
YOU: but it was worth a shot anyway
SARA: I've been chilling with Sara's friends and it's not that hard
YOU: sara's friends are too high half the time to notice anything's wrong
SARA: True XD
SARA: But the other half still counts
SARA: You gotta have some confidence, bub
SARA: I've never seen you be confident and I don't know if you know how
SARA: So prove me wrong
SARA: Being cool really isn't that hard
SARA: I was pretty cool back in the day 😎
SARA: I saw Nirvana live did I tell you that?
YOU: i am ending this conversation

Rusty/Monica: What should I call Dad's (potential) boyfriend?

I know that what I'll call this guy if things get serious won't matter for a while, but for some reason I can't stop thinking about it.  Nothing may wind up coming of this date they're on, because she's Dad and not really sure this is a good idea, but this feels a bit different than Katey & Omar, in part because she had to be talked into it. 

And also because the guy hit on me first, although that's mostly because Dad didn't want to come to Annette's little get-together.  There's not a standing thing where all the Inn People who have settled in New York get together like in Boston, but she tries to make sure there's one before the place opens for the season and one after the end, plus this one so that the folks who are coming here for school or the like know there's people who will have their back on a weird situation.  I'm always down to meet new folks like us, although Dad is really trying to focus on being Emilia rather than hanging onto her old life, and Katey and Omar had something else to do, so I went on my own, which meant I didn't really know anybody there.  There were a couple dozen of us, which seemed like a lot to be in one place, but New York City is huge, and I seldom remember how huge until something like this.  Most of them were cool, although the guy who just walked away when he found out I hadn't actually been to college can get bent.   The lady who owns a café in Brooklyn wanted to know why I never got around to selling her energy drinks, but I wound up spending most of my time hanging around with Ryan, who is 24, gay, and funny, especially when he does something dorky and jokes about it being a hangover from spending last summer as a suburban dad. 

I was saying something to him about how great it was to get to know people like this without there being any sort of pressure to pair up when someone tried to hook up.  A good-looking guy, tall, black, mid-twenties or so.  He said his name was "Jonah", or "Junah" if you wanted to get cute, on account of how he used to be a lady named "June".  He'd spent his first few years after visiting the Inn going to college in the city, thought the first girl he dated was The One, which was probably some sort of reaction to how his ex-husband had used the Inn to abandon her, and now she was coming back for grad school once that fell apart, because he really wanted to do something this time around rather than just being a housewife.

He asked about me, but as soon as I got to my age was like "Oh, you're young-young!", then apologized, though I said it wasn't a big deal.  I was in the middle of some story when I remembered I had pictures on my phone.  He had me stop at a beach one, like who's that?, and I snickered, saying it was my Dad.  He nodded and said Dad was hot, and was she seeing anyone?  Ryan jumped in and said I should totally set them up, because it would be a perfect yin-and-yang thing. 

I figured what the heck, had Jonah pose for a picture, and sent it to her, saying he'd like to meet her.  He texted that he wasn't ready to date, and for some reason I said that he might be a good place to start, since he used to be an older woman, so he'd understand when she was nervous and they wouldn't have to pretend. She didn't respond right away, so I had Jonah give me his number, and mostly hung out with Ryan for the rest of the evening. 

A couple days later, though, Dad asked if I still had his number.  Katey was spending Labor Day Weekend with Omar on Cape Cod, which was nice for her but has both of us like, holy shit, this is serious, and with a lot of guys hitting on her in the bar that night, I guess she figured she ought to take matters into her own hands rather than wait for someone to bowl her over like I am, especially since she figures matches that fit this well weren't going to come along that often. 

Katey and I kind of figured Dad would get cold feet by the time they were both free this afternoon, but it seems to be the opposite - they've apparently been texting all week, and while Dad is dressed pretty casual, it's the sort of casual where she spends an hour trying to figure out which pleated miniskirt and babydoll t-shirt look best together and trying every shade of lipstick the original Emilia left her to find one which wasn't too much. 

She apologized for all the fuss, because she still really didn't like doing all this girl stuff, and kind of hated that she was setting an example about being so worried about what some man thinks about your appearance, which is funny, because Katey and I are way ahead of her in girl stuff and haven't had problems with that.

Anyway, at some point Katey made a joke about whether Jonah is going to want us to call him "Mom", and it's really sticking with me.  Like, we appear to be about the same age, but Jonah isn't just Dad's real age, but old enough to be his mother, so our grandmother, and, I dunno, that feels like it deserves a Mister or Grandma or something, right?  Especially when it's just us and we don't have to pretend we were all born within a few years of each other.

I'm definitely overthinking this. I know.  But if Jonah winds up being around more, it's something to think about, right?

-Rusty/Monica

Arthur/Penny/Millie: Lessons

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