antisummers

Sigrid needs money. 
​
She tries different things: Standing on a street corner with a clipboard: Hello, what do you know about the plight of deaf children? Starts off swimmingly. After two weeks of training she learns to smile warmly, look at strangers like she’s known and loved them her whole life, and tap into that old, weather-worn skill of disabling own you safe-person navigational system and creating illusion of warmth and intimacy to get agreeable results: Four sign-ups on her first day in Margate. The newsletter they circulate dubs her their ‘charity fundraising femme fatale’. 
Things go downhill from there: Only one sign up outside a bet shop in Surbiton that doesn’t clear. 
So she tries writing, translations. Another game, some overlapping rules. The rich boyfriend of her friend needs his posh travel website translated. Sophistication is so easy to fake, just like warmth. It comes down to word choice: So many expensive things are ‘marvelous’, aren’t they? Or, if you’re 19 and pandering to the bougie and tasteless, ‘breathe-taking’. 
You’d have no idea she was the granddaughter of a felon from the Hungarian slums, would you? In the game of upward-mobility, rule number one is: erase all traces of the past. What about that boxer, Attila, with your family name? No idea who that is. Anyone here with family friends who smuggle cars? Nope.
Hungarians are famously masters of illusion. Forged documents of nobility were all the rage in the 19th century. Nowadays it’s all around delusions of lost grandeur. Who robbed us of our own fantasies that had us lose every war we ever got involved in? The answer changes everyday. Sometimes it helps to shake your fist at a stone that’s looking at you funny. 
Jo, the cold-blooded Norwegian in the family, was prudent: She knew that art was a game played between rich people, chucked her flute out, and followed in her father’s bootstrapping journalistic footsteps. They used to test each other on long drives in the car. What was the capital of Nigeria? When did the Tiananmen Massacre take place? Who was Gorby? Rapid-fire velocity, just like when they’d play whist and rumi together. First rule of journo club: Just know more. No one can erase the facts you have in your head.
After a shaky start, she learns to write the chutz-pat of a middle-aged man, and is respected for it. Everyday at the keyboard is a performance of punchy and clipped copy. She draws people to her that see the play, not the performer.
Play: Jo knew her judge of character was shaky at best and thought it prudent to take up self-defense classes. Performer: Jo hated violence. Jo had always felt a strange pull to the world of flying fists.
She discovered, quickly, that, on the mat, people saw her.
The performer. Saw how she moved and what this said about her mental state. The mistakes she made, the risks she took. Her compulsion to protect, to disarm, to grapple with those algorithms in this specific context. Here might have been the first place she’d been to in a long time where a forced smile and a fancy word was not a prerequisite for being included. 
Watch people. Her coach said. Everyone has patterns. The trick is to find the flaw in the pattern and exploit it. One day, he stood in the centre of the ring and instructed her to put on a helmet, and must have instructed her friend and sparring partner to go all out, particularly blows to the head. She was certain she’d outsmart him, but as fists rained down on her she found herself immobilized by her own rage and feelings of betrayal. A few moments later she stormed out of the gym, knowing full well that this was exactly the training she’d signed up for. That maybe she needed.

Her sparring style changed. At first she was all about the charge. Get ahead of their first move and make them dizzy with offensive maneuvers. Like a news story. Who.What.Where.When:Why. KO.
It’s very rare that you’d win by gassing out your opponent. Her coach said. I like to trap mine. The clinch against the cage. First. you have to goad them into position.
There are two types of fighters: Movers, and blungeoners. Movers read you like a book. Blungeoners have raw strength and unending persistence. 
Her fighting style changed when she started to see sparring partners as fellow performers in little plays they were acting out in real time, that felt, thoroughly real. Two people speaking about things they don’t really know how to talk about but can somehow explain to each other now, some kind of connection coming out of that makes fake smiles and fancy words completely unnecessary.
And that, despite whatever has been seen or shared in that little play of real, unspoken things, they’ll be an end-of-class amicable head nod and a 
 
See you next time. 

Research