(for Katie Arnold)
When I cannot sleep I relate the old story in my head—tennis, my first taste of no mind, living on the edge of instinct. I include Jane Makowski, who did not play tennis but beat me every summer in the freestyle swim. I was repeatedly second. I accepted this and went to the courts.
Jane from Queens—short, dark skinned, white smile, curly brown hair, with a bracelet on your left wrist—where are you now? If you hadn’t beat me, I wouldn’t remember you. I hope you are well. I hope you never smoked, never got breast cancer, had as many children as you wanted, and married a good person who loved you.
It is 3:00 A.M. in a hotel in the Dordogne Valley, where at 5:00 P.M. the evening before, against all reason and instead of dinner, I had ordered a glace liégeois avec glace café. The French, when they make coffee ice cream, are serious. The rich, tawny dessert is full of caffeine. I had cursed myself to another sleepless night. Mostly I can’t get over the feel in my hand of the dark tape wound around and the heft of the handle, how the grip went down and rooted to my very feet, through the soles of my sneakers, through the asphalt of the court, down to the earth itself.
At twelve I went to summer camp and walked on a court for the first time. All first times after that didn’t matter. I held the racquet at an old-fashioned angle—straight arm, muscle bulge hardening below my unbent elbow, open swing, chest undone. Step into it, step back away, come to me, come away, unfurl the white Spalding ball, thumb and four fingers, steady wrist, my age, a dozen years. Camp Algonquin, the only camp I ever went to. My wood Slazenger, bought for twenty-five dollars at the hardware store on Hempstead Turnpike. So long ago, so young.
I loved tennis with every cell, and the amazing thing was I couldn’t do it alone. I had to have a partner. I tried the squash walls: the ball answered wrong, came back too fast, too low, too artificial, too alone. I needed others before I knew or could pronounce loneliness.
Alone on the court, I’d play with anyone who arrived—bunk 6, the nine-year-olds; the waiters at sixteen; it didn’t matter. Just play with me, hit the ball and I’ll hit it back—high fly, low slam, curve, slice, skidding, pop—pouring the life out of me.
Did I play with Melvyn Greenspan or Freddie Kornbluth or Irwin Berger at camp? I don’t think so. I kissed them through my thirteenth and fourteenth years. Irwin with the long straight nose and red freckles covering his whole body; Freddie, who is probably in jail now; and Melvyn, probably in the gambling racket. But Irwin I bet is a dentist, like his uncle Ira.
In the middle of the night I remember how I visited my grandmother in Miami Beach in December and walked away from the ocean four blocks to where a tournament was being held at Flamingo Park, sat on a green bench between the high iron fences separating the eight courts. I closed my eyes, feeling the paaa paaa paaa around me in all four directions from the felted yellow balls hitting in the magnificent center of the strings. I could tell from the sound who could play and who was faking it, who drank too much, who had wrong sex the night before, and whose wife didn’t love him. It was all men playing that afternoon, and soon my grandmother would be looking to serve me her boiled plain chicken. To return to family, I tore myself away from the hum in my body, the central hunger in my breath.
At home I grew wan in front of the television. Too easy to use the word depression. I was disappearing. At home I didn’t care about winning; I gave that up at birth—out of my mother’s belly in 1948. At home I surrendered to sadness: my mother shopping at Loehmann’s to ameliorate whispers of Auschwitz, my father split open with rage by the taste and excitement of war, and my grandparents with their immigrant dream of American success. But come each green of July and August at Summit Lake in the Adirondacks, electricity bolted through my right hand, all the way down my legs. Against Camp Ticonderoga, Camp Iroquois—the little white savages from the suburbs—I could beat them all.
Whoever invented tennis, thank you.
Who put this aspirin on my tongue? Uncle Venty, who went into partnership with Bob Shurr and a woman from Canada, who insisted on Shabbat, taught us the McGill marching song that I can still whisper some nights when all else fails. The G stands for grace and gallantry, sons and daughters of the world to be. My relative owned Camp Algonquin—the only reason I could go.
I found an opening there, not to fame and fortune but to a clarity outside the weight of history and my mother’s aggravation. The only thing playing on the field of thought was the swing, the lob, the eye narrowed on the net, the follow-through, the bounce, the splash on the other side. Far away the other campers were playing volleyball, softball. I wore my navy-blue shorts and white T-shirt.
I did not play at home, ever, until my junior year of high school, when I was dying inside. After dragging myself through the unforgiving halls of ninth and tenth grades and into the spring of my junior year, I finally tried out for third singles. The short gym teacher, Miss . . . Miss . . . Miss . . . ; I thought I’d never forget her name. Late in the season she turned in the green seat of the school bus, headed for another game: “And you, Natalie, have never missed a practice.” How could I? I had nothing else to do. I’d never go to the junior prom, never have a boyfriend, only two friends—Phyllis Di Giovanni, whose father was a garbage man, and Denise Hodges, whose mother cracked her gum while frying hamburgers over the stove.
I’d come home from games late, everyone at the table eating. I stood at the entrance of the kitchen, green linoleum spread out like an ocean between us. My father paused for a moment, a pickle in his right hand, noticing for the first time that I wasn’t there. “Where were you?”
“Tennis.”
Head nod. “Eat.”
And I joined the onrush of food.
But when Miss What’s-Her-Name had turned in the seat of that bus, even more important than tennis, she recognized me. Someone else considered me. The lost girl had a place. She held her own on the court.
I had played Massapequa that afternoon. I won the first match six-love and the second, six-one.
Going home, flushed with victory in the last seat on the bus, I sat quietly looking out the window, seeing my reflection in glass.
Two days later, Farmingdale High played Bethpage. The girl across the court with two long braided pigtails and a cracked front tooth could not return my serve, which seemed as sharp as a broken mirror. Even I was surprised by its speed. My opponent never had a chance. This time I sat behind the gym teacher in the bus going home and noticed the part in my teacher’s black hair and how the strands dangled above her shoulders.
In my freshman year in college in Washington, DC, Mark Plotkin, a future boyfriend, saw me on the courts. It was my smile, he said, when I made a good shot, swung hard, the swirl below the right toe of my rubber sneaker deepening.
How did I dare leave tennis behind, drop that true poetry for the one of words? What other things have I left? Minnesota, Ann Arbor, college, graduate school, two literary agents, a dozen houses and apartments, sex with men (though that too was a fine thing), believing Norfolk, Nebraska, was the center of America.
Not so many years from now I’ll leave the body behind. Hover unencumbered the way I did in puberty. Only then I had a fine body to reenter when I put the racquet in its wood frame, twisted the screws tight so it wouldn’t warp, tucked the two balls into my back pocket, and walked off the court into the scream of summer.