For me, February is the cruellest month of the year. To combat the cold and the fact that the days are still short enough to kill any hope of spring, you have to add more wood to the fire and get a little closer to the flames, even at the risk of getting burned, to feel the blood circulating through your veins. This is how C and I have signed up for Lindy Hop classes. Once a week, on Sunday afternoons, to be exact, we call the nanny and put on our Converse to dance to the rhythm of an 8-beat, sometimes a 6-beat. The teachers put us in a circle and separate the leaders from the followers (so that we understand each other; the leaders are usually the men, the women the followers). Every time they shout “high five”, we have to change partners and thus practice with people who dance differently, better, worse or disastrously. C says he loves that the classes are on Sundays because it gives him the illusion that the weekend is longer. If we didn't go dancing, the weekend would end after Sunday's after-lunch chat, which we drag out until we have no choice but to get up from the table and start preparing for the week. I love the classes for this and other reasons, the main one being that it gives us the opportunity to force ourselves to seduce each other after 13 years, three children and quite a few events. Dancing has the quality of transforming the confines of our bodies and making them a little more fluid. And then there's the music; anyone who hasn't fallen in love to the rhythm of swing is beyond help: abandon ship; there's no hope left here.
I have to say that neither C nor I am particularly good at two-stepping, but there we are, giving it our all, and finishing every class sweating and smiling. As we walk home from the school gym where the classes are held, our steps are coordinated to the rhythm of the music we hear even when it has stopped: Step, step, triple step. Step, step, triple step.
Falling in love once is easy; falling in love when you share a bathroom requires attention to detail. Observation of the minute.
I observe my husband every day. I observe how he has surrendered his habit of leaving his socks on the bedroom floor after multiple seismic conflicts on the subject (the millionth time is the charm, girls, don't give up). I observe how he keeps making up stories from the Swedish children's books we have, which leads to the inevitable “Mum, that's not how the story goes”1. I observe how his tastes in music are among the most eclectic and how he sacrifices his time at the altar of Italian cuisine, a religion for him.
This summer, he discovered Xavier DJ on Spotify, and for three weeks, he subjected me to a most diverse mixed-tape2. Julio Iglesias was followed by REM, and then he treated us to a bit of Kanye West. This very heterogeneous musical flow has me intrigued and I wonder about the intricacies of his brain. I observe how he practices the ukulele until the intro and outro of “Losing My Religion” invade all my thoughts. I observe how he moves among his pots and pans and hums songs, and if one in particular is playing on the radio, he turns up the volume to unneighbourly levels and then jumps up and down, raising his left arm to the beat (C dances to all kinds of music like this). The children look at him for three seconds and then join him in the same convulsive movements. “C, turn down the volume,” I say, exasperated. “Mum doesn't understand that certain songs can only be listened to at full volume,” he explains to the children.
I observe that if I get up on a Saturday morning and ask him for a cappuccino, he abandons whatever he is doing to fulfil my wish, and I suspect that he does so only because it gives him yet another opportunity to use his new semi-professional coffee machine, aptly named as if it were an Italian diva. La Ferilli, la Belucci, la Lolobrigida, la Loren, la Marzocco, la Arancilio, la Pavoni (in the last three names, I've gone from Italian actresses to coffee machines, and you haven't even noticed).
When we got our very own “la Pavoni”3, he looked at me suspiciously whenever I tried to manipulate it. He was adamant: “You need to do the coffee like she likes to do it.” At first, I observed that this humanisation of a machine was borderline worrisome. Still, since then, I have also observed that I have stopped caring so much about this fetish of his because espressos and cappuccinos in my house now taste a little bit like good sex. You immerse your lips in the foam and run your tongue through your upper lip, and you start thinking that your husband might be cheating on you with kitchen appliances, but that isn’t so bad, right? It feels like a threesome where someone else does the work, and you only reap the rewards. This sounds very JD Vance and his couch4, but I guess politics have ruined literature for some of us these days.
I read my notes back to him and he raises his right brow in that sexy way of his. “What do you think? Can I publish these thoughts?”
“Babe, people will rightly think I am not getting enough, so I am finding other outlets.” He replies.
“Babe, people know we have three small children; of course they will assume we are not getting enough.”
“Fair point, babe, fair point.”
And so, if I observe carefully, I know that I could not give up this man.
C neither speaks nor understands Swedish, so he picks up the books, looks at the pictures and makes up a more or less plausible story. I read the book as the author intended it to be read, and if C has been there before, my children look at me with a “why are you making up the story?” expression. When I explain that I don't make it up, they usually reply, “Dad's was cooler”.
For Generation X-ers, remember when recording a cassette of the songs we liked was the epitome of cool? I used to put the cassette in the tape deck and try to catch the songs on the radio on the fly. I should put that on my CV; it's a skill that few of us in the job market have developed.
For those of you who don't know about US politics, during the campaign, there were many memes about JD Vance and his couch.
This was just a delight to read. Thank you for sharing this, Ana!
This is the only thing I want to read on a Sunday morning. God, I fucking love love.