“Gary, can we stop and get candy?” we ask on the way to the courts. Gary reaches into his pocket and hands us each five dollars to spend in the corner bodega.
We take his money and eat the candy. If he asks us to buy something for him in the store, we’ll do that. If he doesn’t, we won’t.
Now we are playing against him. Hitting a forehand and a backhand. We are working on control, so Gary offers up his body. “Hit me! Hit me!” he says after each ball he tosses. So I do, right between the legs. And he twists one leg around the other and spins in a circle, like he’s a human jackpot. “Good!”
Built into every lesson are pauses when you have to clean up the mess you’ve made. “Let’s get ’em up,” says Gary, and we break off to all sides of the court. Me at the back, Gary at the net, Emma on the other side of the court. Tara doesn’t play with us on Saturdays.
I squeeze a ball through the wire bars of the tennis basket. I crash a basket on the little yellow heads. At the net, Gary paddles more balls in my direction.
“Heads-up,” he calls out, lobbing one in the air. It flies over my head and thwacks the canvas wall, ricocheting back toward Gary.
“Thanks for all your help—it really makes all the difference,” I say, because sometimes I can’t control my sarcasm, but also because Gary doesn’t mind it. We’ve got a shorthand. I gently rib him, he returns the favor. He calls me Piper-ooni. He lets me sit shotgun whenever I beat Emma. I’m almost certain he prefers it when I do.
The basket of balls has become too heavy for me to lift. So I use my racket as a platter, loading it up with balls and then dropping them into the basket. Half of them don’t make it in. They bounce and roll back toward the net to where Gary has just cleaned up.
Emma’s side is almost spotless. She has fewer balls on her side, so it isn’t fair.
“Watch it,” says Gary. He comes up behind me and grabs the basket from my hand, easily lifting it.
“It’s not that heavy, see?” he says.
“I’m a whole lot smaller than you, Gary.”
“You’re not that small,” he says. I wait for a smile, some suggestion of his own sarcasm, but nothing. It might be the first time anyone has said that to me and meant it. I am grateful, flushed with embarrassment.
It was only two years ago that my mother took me to the bone doctor to see if I was going to eventually grow to make it to her height—five feet even. Since I was a toddler, she’s worried I wouldn’t pass the four-foot range. She made sure I had three glasses of milk every day for the last fourteen years to keep my bones strong and stretching. She had warned me of another possible measure that an unusually short boy, the brother of a girl in my class, endured: daily injections to keep his growth steady. We went to a specialist to see if such measures should be taken with me. I wore an apron lined with lead and laid my hand on a mat. Afterward, the doctor hung a photograph of a skeleton’s five fingers on the wall and said that it was me. “Not to worry,” the doctor told my mom. “She’s going to be just as tall as you.” Then we took an elevator down to the street and walked for blocks against the wind. My mom’s short black hair was blown back, and her cheekbones rode high. Inside her face was a skull, part of a skeleton, too.
Our Saturday lesson is halfway done. During the week, it’s all practice, practice, practice. Hit a forehand, a backhand; now run to the net, hit a volley, and get back in line. On Saturdays, we focus on technique and the game itself. Today we’re working on our slices—tricky maneuvers, cheap even, designed to fake out a player. Standing on either side of the half court, Gary lobs us rounds and we cut through the air with our rackets, grazing the ball, hammering down at an angle like we’re peeling the skin off an apple. Most of our balls go into the net, but a few bounce on Gary’s side, springing upward and then sideways. “Good!” he says. And sometimes, “Excellent!” I get one excellent and a good. Emma gets a good and two excellents.
When we are on opposite ends of the baseline, Gary looks much younger. He is wrapped in loose-fitting neon athletic gear. He holds his body in a gawky teenage shrug. His hair appears darker. His voice, nasal with traces of his Long Island upbringing, sounds as if it hasn’t fully dropped yet.
But standing closer to the net, I can see the deep indented waves in his forehead and the parentheses around his mouth. His eyebrows spring white, curly hairs. When he smiles, his teeth are the color of sawdust.
He is older than my parents, though this is hard to understand. They are the bosses, but Gary is somehow not.
“Ready to play a set?” he asks.
“I want you to focus on your backhand follow-through,” he tells Emma, miming a slow-motion stroke. His whole body twists, Gumby-like, limb over limb.
“And you . . .”—his chin points in my direction—“you don’t worry about hitting your serve so hard. Just focus on getting it in. Consistency—that’s what we’re going for, okay?” He claps his hands and jogs courtside.
I ignore Gary’s instruction and slam into the ball as hard as possible. It hits the net and drops dead.
“Consistency,” Gary shouts between two cupped hands.
So this time, I toss the ball and tap it gingerly.
“That’s in,” Gary confirms as Emma, with her long, skinny legs, lunges to return it. Soon we are running each other all over the court, screaming “Out!” and “Fifteen–forty!” and “What’s the score?” and “Ad in.” Sometimes, when a ball lobs over the baseline, we don’t even make a noise. We just hold up one finger in the air to signal it’s out—so very out, it isn’t worth announcing. This is one way of showing your opponent you barely have to lift a finger to win a point. It jostles their nerves and throws them off, but it’s a dick move to use on a competitor you like. And Emma and I do like each other.
Playing with her isn’t like playing with that racket-tossing girl from school. We congratulate each other on a nice shot and agree, when we switch sides, that one side of the court feels darker than the other, which was why each of us lost one game on that side. Emma hands me two balls and gives me a huge, gummy grin. Her whole face squints when she smiles. I find it endearing.
She is laughing about something, that kind of laugh that’s more physical than audible. It sounds like swallowed hiccups. Although I’m not sure exactly what the source is, I start laughing, too, because I think it’s related to Gary. He is squatting on the clay ground, riffling through his double-sized racket bag. Emma and I are having a fit now, finding each other’s eyes to make sure we were laughing about the same thing, and still unsure, laughing even harder because each of us wants the other to feel supported.
“What’s so funny?” Gary wants to know and we both respond with “Nothing,” which may actually be true.
“Are you girls laughing at me?” Gary gives us a toothy grin. He is in on the joke. And now we’re bent over holding our stomachs.
“It’s me, isn’t it?” He smiles, the hole in his front teeth wide as a doorway to Narnia.
Then he looks at his watch and claps his hands. “Okay, we’ve got five minutes. One more quick game. Who’s serving?”
The score is four games to three. “FOUR–THREE!” I yell so Gary can hear that I’m winning. I look at Emma on the other side of the court in her school gym shorts, her skinny legs pocked with bruises, her hair knotted in a lopsided bun, and I regret tainting what we just had with a reminder of competition.
I toss the ball overhead and tap it lightly so it goes in. She returns the serve harder than usual—a clean blow to the sweet spot of her racket. I watch the ball land inside the sidelines and hear Gary slow-clapping. “Gorgeous shot, Emma!”
Love–fifteen. Stalling, I tap the sides of my Nikes with my racket. Tufts of chalky green powder and clay pebbles fall off. Love–fifteen.
I’m about to toss a ball into the air when two middle-aged men wearing tennis wristbands and white shorts pull back the canvas flap behind Emma.
“We have this court,” the shorter of the two shouts in Gary’s direction.
Gary looks at his watch. “We have four minutes,” he shouts back.
But the men stand there, blocking Emma from drawing back her racket. I’m all ready to pack it in. Two confident, businesslike older men with wristwatches and tennis sweatbands have confirmed we’re all done here. That’s good enough for me. I start picking up balls and putting them on my racket when Gary raises his hand.
“Piper, wait, wait, wait,” he says. “I want you guys to play one more point.”
“We have this court,” one of the men repeats, growing frustrated.
I’m not sure whose side to take in this standoff, but I settle on the men I have never met, because they seem in charge. If this had been a movie, they would be the boardroom bosses and Gary would be the child trapped in an adult’s body who is forced to work for them.
Gary decides to give in, too. “Okay, girls, let’s clean it up,” he says, not looking at the men, who are already taking their places on the court as we gather our balls.
Through the revolving door glass, I see Gary clenching his jaw, the bone in his cheek moving up and down, like a parasite pumping iron under his skin. When we get back into the car, he is silent, so we are silent.
I hate those kinds of men. The ones who flick their silver wristwatches, who snap their money in Tiffany clips, who dismiss someone like Gary as hired help, who think anyone that works with children is lesser than they are on some masculinity pyramid. To such men, Gary is not a man at all.
I let Emma sit shotgun, even though I won. I’d rather sit in the backseat today. Gary puts the car key in the ignition. He is wearing a fluorescent pink hat, and from where I sit, it looks lopsided. I lean forward and squeeze his shoulder. He looks at me in the rearview mirror with a flat expression. It seems for a moment that he doesn’t recognize me. Then his eyes dart to the windshield. “So where should we eat?” he asks.
Wild-haired Barbies hang from the ceiling fan, a sign on the wall reads life’s a bitch. There are side-by-side signed head shots of celebrities. Billy Crystal. Joe Piscopo. Chips and salsa before we’ve even ordered. This is my kind of restaurant.
Gary is leaning against the wall with one foot on the seat beside him. He looks cool, like he’s a regular here.
“Get whatever you want,” he says. He’ll just have some chips. He’s watching his figure. Wink.
There is that wink. So intimate and fleeting, it almost feels imagined. It deserves to be accompanied by the ping of a triangle, or some other sitcom device that suggests magic is happening.
I used to believe in magic. I thought I possessed it. You’re special, my parents had told me, which was further confirmation. It seemed likely, considering how many fictional characters possessed supernatural powers in one form or another, always changing up time by snapping their fingers or rubbing an amulet, sticking a quarter in a fortune-telling machine, wishing on a shooting star and believing hard enough. I took wishes seriously, using birthday candles, loosened eyelashes, and fountain pennies to wish for the same thing—that nobody I love dies. When they hadn’t, I believed it was because of me.
That faith in magic dwindled over time, as competition heightened, parental compliments lost their value, and teachers introduced new scales of measurement, assessing my abilities as decidedly average, devoid of that special quality. I guess this is their job, to help kids grow up and stop believing in magic, anchoring them instead within the business of hard work.
Still, there are those rare teachers who do just the opposite. They are the ones who don’t judge you by a set of numbers, but by an emotional quality they see in you but not in others—a quality they recognize in themselves. They have a secret they want to tell you so badly, but they’re not allowed. Magic is real. They have it, and so do you.
It’s just a wink, an aside. A nudging reminder that someone who isn’t your parents still believes you are special. Not just special, but the most special.
My sister had a drama teacher who made her feel this way. Her teacher didn’t wink; instead, she asked my sister to feed her cats. She handed my sister her house keys. The invitation alone was flattering, but the keys, their brass puzzle-piece edges, were so intimate, so twinkling with promise. It meant the teacher trusted my sister over all the other students, to cross into her personal world. The framed photos, shelves of books, kitchen odors, drawers of secret histories, were all laid out for my sister to absorb, because she was the chosen. More than that, she was the best actress in the whole class—she had to be. She had the keys.
But when they were taken away and handed to another student, a younger one cast as the lead in their next play, my sister came home and cried on her side of the white wall. She pulled at her own hair. She went over again and again what she might have done wrong. She worked harder, focused more, asked for private guidance after class, and did anything she could to win her teacher back. Only she saw my sister’s magic, and only she could see it again. This is why, I learned, you have to choose who chooses you. It must be the right magical teacher. They must know that once they’ve made their choice, they can never change their minds.
After dinner, Gary drops Emma off at her building first and then pulls up to my awning. When he puts the car in park, it rocks back and forth. I don’t want to get out yet. “Gary,” I say, and then “Never mind.” Am I your favorite?