Five tuesdays in winter, p.7
Five Tuesdays in Winter, page 7
I made sure we got court 8, the farthest one from the clubhouse. Ed picked up on it right away.
“You don’t want to be seen with a couple of slouches, do you?”
He was right. I could tell by the swings they’d taken in the yard that neither of them had any form. I probably told myself I was protecting them from ridicule, but I was protecting myself. I could already hear my tennis teacher telling me how bad it was for my game to play people like that. Fortunately the court next to us was empty and the wild lobs they hit at first did not bother anyone else’s game. I was disappointed by their lack of skill. After living with them for five days I had convinced myself they could do anything. They looked like buffoons, especially Ed in his black socks, who was clearly athletic and could reach everything, but once he got there he flung his body along with his racket at the ball with very little success. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t easily imitate my stroke, which I showed them again and again. After rallying for a while, Ed moved over to Grant’s side and they challenged me to a set. I suggested a little more practice was in order but they insisted. I spun my racket, they called up, it was down, and I served.
I decided to crush them. I lifted that first toss and decided to shred them to pieces. I had never had that feeling on the tennis court before, the raw desire to win. I was a competent player, but I had more runner-up trophies than anything else. I determined that I would not let them win one point off me. Because suddenly I found I resented my awe of them, my infatuation with them both, and the dread that had already lodged itself in my chest of their leaving in the middle of August. I wanted somehow to even the scales a bit, to show them that I was worth something, too, that I had something to teach them, something for them to be in awe of.
My first serve was low and fast. Ed returned it with a punch, as if it were a volley, and I expected it to die in the net but it went over and I couldn’t reach it in time. That was the only point, I coached myself, they were ever going to get off me.
I served to Grant. He spun around and whiffed it. Tossed a high one to Ed who backed up then rushed forward but reached it and knocked it over nicely, right to me. I smashed it back but Grant stuck his racket out, it came back at me, and I hit it crosscourt to Ed’s alley, but he was there and gave me a lob, which I smacked at his toes and watched it sail far up as he scrambled back, not backward as I had been taught, with little steps, but sprinting to the back of the court and reaching it and slicing it at just the right angle to my back corner. I hadn’t been ready to run and it flashed past me, ticking the tape. Ed let out a victorious bellow. I could feel the heads down the row of courts swivel toward us. We had all taken to grunts and groans and hollers. They got better and I got worse and I slowly relinquished all hopes of a shutout and just tried to scratch out a humble win.
In the end they beat me 6–4. I threw my racquet at the fence and stalked off. I knew what this looked like; it was the kind of behavior that was abhorrent to my parents. Any anger was dealt with swiftly and severely, quarantined immediately, allowed no audience. I expected Grant and Ed to react similarly, to urge me home that instant, remove me from this public place because people were watching. People on the clubhouse veranda, people walking to their cars, people on the courts, and even people on the putting green could hear me swearing and kicking tires in the parking lot. I was surprised by it myself, the anger that came pouring out all because a couple of hacks had beaten me at tennis. But they just sat on the little strip of grass beyond the court with the three racquets zipped back up in the cases and the balls back in the can. After a while I had nothing left in me and they came to where I was by a maple tree near the entrance to the club and we started walking home.
I was too ashamed to speak. They chatted away to each other, as if they weren’t angry with me, as if they weren’t embarrassed for me and humiliated by me. As if I were not, as my mother used to say as she whisked me up to my room, a little beast who needed to change back to a boy.
“Your family belong to a club like that?”
Grant laughed. “No.”
“Look at that guy burrowing into those bushes. What do you think he’s doing?”
“Look at the dog on the porch.”
“He’s waiting for him to fetch the ball!” Ed joked.
And when the man backed out of the bushes with the dog’s filthy ball, they burst into hysterics. They thought everything in our neighborhood was funny.
“Layton with the sheep,” Grant said.
Ed cracked up. “Sometimes I’m lying in bed and I think of that story and I can’t stop laughing.”
“I know. It might be the funniest thing I ever heard.”
“What do you think he’s up to right now? Do you think he made it to Alaska?”
“Yeah. Knowing him.”
“With the girl?”
“That I don’t know. I was never sure about that part of the story.”
“Me neither.”
After a pause, Ed said, “I hope he didn’t take that girl. God, they only fuck you up so bad.” Ed’s face was red and he was staring hard at a stoplight ahead of us while Grant was staring at him just as intently. “Still fucking kills,” Ed said.
I saw Grant’s arm lift slightly then fall back down at his side.
Then Ed nudged me. I thought they’d forgotten all about me. “Ground Round for dinner tonight?”
“Sure,” I said lightly, all the anger gone somehow.
We reached Elm Street, the main street of our town, with all its green canvas awnings and the store names written in white on their scalloped hems.
“Let’s get a Snickers at Healey’s,” Ed said, and we turned down Elm instead of going straight on Winthrop to the house.
Becca Salinero and her little brother were choosing sodas from the cooler, their backs to us. I spun around and tried to leave but Ed grabbed me and whispered, “It’s her, isn’t it?”
I didn’t answer but it didn’t matter. He went directly to the cooler. I meant to leave the store but my legs were stuck in place.
“Don’t worry,” Grant said. “He’s good at this.”
“Good at what?”
“Good at making friends.”
He waited for them to choose their drinks. Becca’s little brother had taken off his shirt and stuffed the collar and sleeves down the back of his shorts so the rest of it flapped behind him. He was so skinny you could see every rib in 3D.
Ed pointed to the soda her brother had chosen and said, “What, no diet drink for you, Fatty?” And Becca laughed her deep laugh.
I hid in the back aisle while they talked. Becca and her brother paid and left.
Ed had found out that she was a counselor at the summer camp at the community center. When we got home, he said, we’d call up the center for the camp’s hours. And then, he explained as we stepped back into the sun and the heat pouring up from the sidewalk cement, we’d make our plan of attack.
If I hadn’t glimpsed her in the store, hadn’t been physically reminded of her, I might have protested. But I was putty and he knew it.
“Interesting choice,” Grant said, and they both cracked up.
It was true that Becca was going through an awkward stage. She had recently shot up, but only in the legs, so that, especially in shorts, her squat torso looked like it was supported by stilts. She had gotten her braces off in the spring, though now she wore some sort of thick retainer whose fake kitten-tongue pink made her real gums look gray and sickly.
“A diamond in the rough, perhaps,” Ed said, forcing a straight face. “Seriously, it shows good taste. She’s not hiding anything. She’s like a clear stream. That’s exactly what you want. I went for the other kind and it’s ruined my life.”
“Ruined your spring,” Grant said.
“Ruined my spring, summer, winter. What did I miss? Fall. God, I can’t even think about fall. Anyway, not quite as adorable as Celia Washburn maybe, a little Animal Kingdom.” Ed stretched his neck and pretended to rip leaves off a tree. Grant snorted and Ed’s voice quavered then righted itself as he finished: “But very sweet.”
On the way home we passed the park. There was a pickup game out on the basketball court. Ed made a beeline for it. I cringed. When the ball went through the net, he stepped onto the court and talked to the tallest guy, pointing to me and Grant who had trailed behind.
“Get your asses over here,” he said. “It’s our ball.”
Basketball wasn’t my game. But after a frustrating set of tennis it felt good to hold a big ball in my hands. I had never played on this court. No one I knew had. It was for the public school kids. Between points, I looked around at my town: the gazebo, the swings and jungle gym, the baseball diamond, the stone library and its parking lot beyond. I’d never seen it from right here. I’d had my own swing set in the backyard, gone to the club for my summer sports. One kid on the court gave me a hard time, called me Richie Rich under his breath. But the others just played, slapped me on the back when I managed to do the right thing, were forgiving when I didn’t.
Ed got them all laughing because he really couldn’t do anything in this life without talking. He tried to derail the other team with his narration: “Okay, now Big Red’s got the ball. Big Red’s coming down. Does Big Red have boobs or pecs? We’re not sure but boy are they distracting. They draw your eye away from the ball.” He went on and on. Even as he was intercepting and fleeing in the other direction you could hear his voice trailing after him. Every now and then I’d remember we’d seen Becca and were going to call the community center when we got back and I’d get a fresh rush of energy.
Once we got her schedule, we arranged to run into her. Ed had an uncanny knack of being able to predict her movements so that each time, she appeared to be stumbling upon us and not vice versa. Ed did not let me hide in the aisles again. The first time was in the sub shop. We were already in line when she walked in. We had it all planned out. Grant, very naturally though completely scripted, asked me what time it was and I turned around to look at the clock on the back wall. I caught her spitting her retainer into her hand and shoving it into her shorts pocket.
She said hey and I said hey. Her hair was in a ponytail and she had on her light-blue camp T-shirt that was crusty with some kind of freshly dried paint or clay. She had the clearest eyes. I had no idea what the word was for the color they were. She asked me if I was having a good summer and I asked her the same. We told each other which books we’d chosen from the summer reading list. She promised me that The Brothers Karamazov got better sixty pages in. And then we placed our orders, which came quickly, wrapped up tight, and she left, saying she had to bring one back to the house for her brother.
“Only one sub for Fatty?” Ed said.
When she was gone he said, “She likes our boy.”
“What’s not to like?” Grant said.
* * *
The next time we saw her I was supposed to ask her out. But I chickened out. The time after that Ed did it for me.
“We’re going to the movies tonight. Want to come?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Um, yeah it is. We’ll pick you up at six forty-five sharp.”
“But you don’t know where I live.”
“You’re in the blue book, right?” I said, as if I didn’t know 67 Vine Road and the big beech tree out front and her mother’s Volkswagen Rabbit (LL3783) and her father’s Audi (KN9722) that sat in the garage they built last year.
“Oh, you’re in the blue blood book, right?” Ed mocked afterward, exactly in my accent, which had never seemed an accent to me before then.
* * *
At first, of course, I feared Becca would fall for Ed. “Une femme qui rit est une femme au lit,” he’d said once, and he was so much funnier than anyone I knew.
The third time she came out with us, we went miniature golfing and got through five holes before it started pouring and we went back to the house. Grant pulled out the big pot for popcorn and Ed went into the living room and flopped on the sofa. I said I needed to go upstairs and change my shirt, but I lingered on the stairs to see what she and Ed would do together alone.
“You’re kind of a ringer at the mini links,” he said. “You go there a lot?”
“My brother likes it.”
“But you not so much.”
“I just beat him so easily.”
Ed laughed and said, “Have a seat.” But Becca said she was going to go find me.
I made it to the top of the stairs before she saw me. She came up and we looked down over the railing into the empty hallway. It was warm on the second floor. We were damp from the rain and the heat felt good. For once my house felt cozy. I pretended to be looking all the way down but I was really looking at her sneakers and the little peds she had on with fuzzy balls sticking out the back. I looked up to tell her one was hanging on by a thread and she kissed me. Or maybe I kissed her, which is what she always said when we relived that moment afterward. I had always dreaded my first kiss, knew it was long overdue but had no idea how it would ever come about. I’d had intensely sexual dreams by then, but they never gave me any indication of how such things would begin, how I was to make even kissing happen. Although I had never said it in so many words to myself, I would have preferred to be a girl in those situations. But there was something about having Grant and Ed below—hearing their noises, the popcorn starting to bounce in the pan, Ed yelping to Grant about something—that gave me courage. You know what you’re doing, the noises below seemed to be saying. We know you’re up there with her and we’re hoping for the best for you. I felt my tongue go into her mouth, felt her tongue hesitate then meet mine, felt she had no more experience than I did, felt her neck and her hair, felt for the first time that I was feeling what I should be feeling, as if for once all the sharp awkward fragments of my life suddenly fell into their proper slots.
The TV went on. Ed and Grant started laughing, which made us laugh. A navy blue light was coming through the small high windows in the hallways. I’m not sure I was ever so happy.
“You smell like a wet dog,” she said.
“You smell like a wet mongoose.” And we laughed and kissed, feeling like we were doing something dirty by talking while we were kissing, talking of wet things.
And then we went downstairs and ate popcorn and her cheeks were flushed and her lips bright red and it was raining hard now outside and I knew Ed and Grant knew everything, and everything—everything—made me happy.
* * *
* * *
I imagined—more than once, more than a few times that summer—my parents killed in a car crash in France. I imagined Grant and Ed moving in permanently; I wondered if my parents had a will and in whose care they’d planned to leave me. I imagined long courtroom scenes with my mother’s brother or my father’s aunt, both of whom seemed likely candidates for guardian, versus me and Ed and Grant. I imagined us winning the lawsuit, taking a big road trip like the ones we were always talking about: to Louisiana, to Acapulco.
To wish your parents ill, to wish that they would never return, seems heavy from an adult perspective but it sat lightly on me that summer. A frivolous, whimsical wish that I knew would never come true.
And it didn’t. My parents returned on August 16 as they had said they would, at six in the evening as they had also predicted. My father seemed stronger, full of a loud bluster I remembered from years earlier. My mother hugged me several times, each time telling me, like a grandmother, how tall I’d gotten. And then she looked me directly in the eye—I saw it was true that I had grown; I had to look down at an even steeper angle to meet her eye—and told me she was so surprised by how terribly she had missed me. On the word “terribly,” her lips crumpled out of their usual fixed position and she could not seem to right them. I held her gaze and said I was surprised by how little I missed her. And then we laughed. What else could we do?
“Let’s get you boys settled up,” said my father, and he led Ed and Grant up the stairs swiftly, without the torpor of the past few years. He opened the door to his study and I followed them in. From the bottom drawer of the desk he pulled out a three-ring binder that held his checks. He wrote slowly, one check for Ed, another for Grant. Behind him the hole was gone. I raked my eyes over the white surface until I detected a small, slightly darker area where it had been patched up and painted. I tried to catch Ed’s eye, but my father was asking them which professors they’d had, to see if he knew any of them.
“How was the Dordogne?” Grant asked.
They were awkward and stiff, strangers in a house that was once their own.
My father slid the binder back inside his desk and shut the drawer. “The Dordogne was the Dordogne.”
I knew it was a line Ed would savor, that it would become part of his lexicon with Grant. My father shook both their hands firmly and thanked them for taking good care of the house.
I walked with Ed and Grant down the porch steps, across the lawn to the Pontiac.
“We never drove to Mexico,” Ed said.
“Or to New Orleans,” Grant said.
“Maybe they’ll go back to Europe next summer,” I said.
“Start leaving brochures around the house.” Ed spread out his palms, marquee-style. “Capri in July!”
Grant dropped his bag beside the car and hugged me hard.
“I love you.”
It was as if his big arms had squeezed the words out of me. I was embarrassed and I was also surprised, because I’d always thought I’d loved Ed more.
“Aw, we don’t like to leave our boy,” Ed said and came in on the hug. I breathed in his smell of cigarettes and hot asphalt.
I think we all felt certain we would see each other again, that this was not a real goodbye. In a week, after they’d gone home to see their families, they’d be back in their dorm a few miles from this road. They had pointed it out to me from the car, a big high-rise in the midst of squat brick buildings, and I imagined our life together would resume there in a few weeks. I could see the beanbag chairs, the box of pizza, the newspaper spread out with the movie listings. But when the school year began, I could never summon the confidence to step on campus, let alone go into a dorm and up to the eighth floor. Becca urged me to at least call or drop them a line but the summer closed up and there seemed no way back in.
