Just before I left New York, I found myself in an unexpected position: clinging to the bars of the Jefferson Market Garden, looking in. A moment before, I'd been on the run as usual, intending to exploit two minutes of time I'd carved out of the forty-five-minute increments into which, back then, I divided my days. Each block of time packed tight and leveled off precisely, like a child prepping a sandcastle. Two "free" minutes meant a macchiato. (In an ideal, cashless world, if nobody spoke to me.) In those days, the sharp end of my spade was primed against chatty baristas, overly friendly mothers, needy students, curious readers-anyone I considered a threat to the program. Oh, I was very well defended. But this was a sneak attack...by horticulture. Tulips. Springing up in a little city garden, from a triangle of soil where three roads met. Not a very sophisticated flower-a child could draw it-and these were garish: pink with orange highlights. Even as I was peering in at them I wished they were peonies.

City born, city bred, I wasn't aware of having an especially keen interest in flowers-at least no interest strong enough to forgo coffee. But my fingers were curled around those iron bars. I wasn't letting go. Nor was I alone. Either side of Jefferson stood two other women, both around my age, staring through the bars. The day was cold, bright, blue. Not a cloud between the World Trade and the old seven-digit painted phone number for Bigelow's.

We all had somewhere to be. But some powerful instinct had drawn us here, and the predatory way we were ogling those tulips put me in mind of Nabokov, describing the supposed genesis of Lolita: "As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage." I've always been interested in that quote-without believing a word of it. (Something inspired Lolita. I'm certain no primates were involved.) The scientist offers the piece of charcoal expecting or hoping for a transcendent revelation about this ape, but the revelation turns out to be one of contingency, of a certain set of circumstances-of things as they happen to be.

The ape is caged in by its nature, by its instincts, and by its circumstance. (Which of these takes the primary role is for zoologists to debate.) So it goes. I didn't need a Freudian to tell me that three middle-aged women, teetering at the brink of peri-menopause, had been drawn to a gaudy symbol of fertility and renewal in the middle of a barren concrete metropolis . . . and, indeed, when we three spotted each other there were shamefaced smiles all round. But in my case the shame was not what it would have once been, back in the day-back when I first read Lolita, as a young woman. At that time, the cage of my circumstance, in my mind, was my gender.

Not its actuality — I liked my body well enough. What I didn't like was what I thought it signified: that I was tied to my "nature," to my animal body-to the whole simian realm of instinct-and far more elementally so than, say, my brothers. I had "cycles." They did not. I was to pay attention to "clocks." They needn't. There were special words for me, lurking on the horizon, prepackaged to mark the possible future stages of my existence. I might become a spinster. I might become a crone. I might be a babe or a MILF or "childless." My brothers, no matter what else might befall them, would remain men. And in the end of it all, if I was lucky, I would become that most piteous of things, an old lady, whom I already understood was a figure everybody felt free to patronize, even children.

From Intimations by Zadie Smith ©2020. Published Hamish Hamilton.