Weather

by Jenny Offill

In the first class I ever took with Sylvia, she told us about assortative mating. Meaning like with like—depressive with depressive. The problem with assortative mating, she said, is that it feels perfectly correct when you do it. Like a key fitting into a lock and opening a door. The question being: Is this really the room you want to spend your life in?

Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters? Old person worry: What if everything I do does?

A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person. He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.

Lately, I’ve observed that I dress like the kids on campus or maybe they dress like me. I have dressed the same way a long time, but somehow it has cycled in again.

I’m trapped next to this young techno-optimist guy. He explains that current technology will no longer seem strange when the generation who didn’t grow up with it finally ages out of the conversation. Dies, I think he means. His point is that eventually all those who are unnerved by what is falling away will be gone, and after that, there won’t be any more talk of what has been lost, only of what has been gained. But wait, that sounds bad to me. Doesn’t that mean if we end up somewhere we don’t want to be, we can’t retrace our steps? He ignores this, blurs right past me to list all the ways he and his kind have changed the world and will change the world. He tells me that smart houses are coming, that soon everything in our lives will be hooked up to the internet of things, blah, blah, blah, and we will be connected through social media to every other person in the world.

Q: What is the philosophy of late capitalism? A: Two hikers see a hungry bear on the trail ahead of them. One of them takes out his running shoes and puts them on. “You can’t outrun a bear,” the other whispers. “I just have to outrun you,” he says.

This woman has just turned fifty. She tells me about her blurriness, the way she is hardly seen. She supposes she is not so pretty anymore—fattish, hair a bit gray. What she has noticed, what gives her a little chill, she tells me, is how if she meets a man out of the context of work, he finds her to not be worth much. He looks over her shoulder as he talks or pawns her off on a woman her own age. “I have to be so careful now,” she says.

When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments. Hahaha! (Except when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)

“Where did all these hipsters come from?” says my brother in his fleece-lined trucker’s jacket.

The critical question for our generation—and for every generation—is this: If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ was not there? Yup.

Later, he runs his hand along my leg in the dark then stops. “Are you wearing my long johns?” “I was cold,” I tell him. We make up a proverb (Married sex is like taking off your own pants), fool around, go to sleep happy.

Patiently, she nods her head. She used to sing in a club, someone told me. She has grown children and a husband who is dying of some slow, awful thing. I don’t get into people’s business, she told me once. The only piece of advice she’s ever given me was: Take care of your teeth. But later, I see her in the break room yelling at our coworker. “You are a child! You have acted like a child!” she tells the one who decided not to vote.

There is a period after every disaster in which people wander around trying to figure out if it is truly a disaster. Disaster psychologists use the term “milling” to describe most people’s default actions when they find themselves in a frightening new situation.

There is a theory that new hate has been unleashed. Another that the amount of hate is exactly the same as it’s always been. Lorraine subscribes to the latter one. The only difference is that more people are noticing it, she says.

I make him lie down on the couch, put a blanket on him. Thirty seconds of protest and he’s out. He’s not doing well with this sleep deprivation. There’s a reason it’s used as a tool of torture. But still, everyone I know is trying to sleep less. Insomnia as a badge of honor. Proof that you are paying attention.

It’s church. I remember now how it went. “I thought you wanted community,” Ben says afterward. But not so much. Not like that. All that eye contact. “Not my tribe,” I tell him.

“Can I ask you something?” Will says and I say “Sure, ask me something.” “How do you know all this?” “I’m a fucking librarian.”