Across the street from school, behind a Jaguar, is a weathered tan four-door sedan. Gary Wilensky leans against it.
“Congratulations. You made it onto Gary’s tennis team,” he says, his lips pursed as best they can around his massive rack of teeth. It’s his facial signal, I can already tell, for sarcasm.
He opens the front passenger-side door, and extends his hand, fancy chauffeur-style.
There is a Styrofoam Whopper box on the backseat or there isn’t, but it’s that kind of car. The smell inside reminds me of putting my nose up to a plastic Silly Putty egg, of twisting the handle of a quarter-slot machine outside the grocery store and waiting for a toy to land.
“So where’d you play before?” We are driving now, turning left onto Eighty-Sixth Street. I watch two seniors in their kilts walk toward the bus stop. Through the car window, I can imagine not knowing them so intimately—the brown-haired one who wears a braided anklet and dates a Collegiate boy and her best friend, head of the literary magazine, who always clips her hair in a barrette, because if she wore it down it would be too puffy. From the car window, it’s like watching them on TV. They are extras, just girls from a private school. Not even seniors, but simply teenagers. And I am a grown-up in the grown-up seat of the car.
“I was in the program at East River Tennis Club,” I say.
“How’d you like it?”
I like sitting shotgun talking this way—it reminds me of watching my parents from the backseat, their elbow points touching on the armrest between them.
“It was okay, but the buses took forever and I didn’t get home till super late.” I’m trying to sound normal about the whole bus situation.
“That’s the thing with that program—they overextend themselves,” he says.
“Totally,” I say, nodding to convince us both I understand what he’s talking about.
“They take on too many students because they want to make the money, but you lose the quality that way,” he continues.
More nodding. His words have already slipped from my short-term memory. I am preoccupied with the urge to tell him how trapped I felt on those bus rides, and the equally strong pull to keep my weird anxieties to myself. I bet he’d understand, or at least encourage my complaints. He has that gabby female quality that suggests he bonds through mutual disdain.
Gary reminds me of a Jewish aunt or one of my mother’s more ethnic, older gal-friends—that wild energy of a middle-aged single woman in a caftan with a Bloody Mary buzz. It’s that his voice isn’t very low, or that he’s knobby and thin, or it’s his jerky, fluttering hand movements, the recklessly openmouthed grin of someone who has settled into his own eccentricity as if it was a cushioned papasan chair.
“How many students do you have?” I ask.
“Not many. I coach the team over at Brearley, so I don’t need to take on too much. Just the people I like.”
He winks at me. Now he is a man again. Another relative—an uncle, tall and coarse-skinned, one who might lift me up when he greets me, and wink should he catch me sneaking a sip of my mother’s wine. It’s the kind of wink that makes you grateful. He knows your secret, but he won’t tell.
We are at a stoplight. I kick my bag under my feet and spot an unopened bag of Big League Chew.
“You want to open that?” he asks.
I do.
“That’s my favorite gum,” he says. “You know why? Nobody tells you how much of it to eat. I like to take a big handful and just—” He pretends to be a donkey chewing, or maybe he just looks like one.
We pull up in front of the next private school. Two girls climb in the backseat—a brunette and a rusty-haired one, both attractive but not intimidatingly so. They don’t have the breast-first swagger of a popular girl, and they smile, not in recognition of their own captivating beauty, but in the way that adults smile when they greet people. Like it’s how their faces have been trained to react. As they say goodbye to a group of girls standing outside their school, I note that they’re both normal in height—not too tall, not too short, like me.
I am shorter than most people my age, and am reminded of that fact often and by everyone. It is a characteristic that defines me. I am someone who didn’t reach the right height, and this strikes people as funny. People lower their elbows onto my head to pretend I’m an armrest. There is a rumor among certain private school boys that I give blow jobs standing up. The rumor had to be explained to me as a jab at my height, but still, I am flattered that there is a rumor about me at all.
I wonder if these girls have heard the rumor, though I doubt it. They don’t seem to be the kind of people who use the word blow job without whispering.
“Piper, this is Emma and Tara,” Gary says after they pile into the backseat. When I turn around to nod hello, I see them thigh to thigh, passing a bag of gummy worms back and forth, and I wish I was in the backseat with them—a kid again.
“How long have you been playing with Gary?” I ask. It’s an awkward question I immediately regret. I should have waited to ask it when Gary wasn’t present. The rusty-haired girl, Tara, whom I recognize from Fire Island, answers first.
“Well, I’ve been with Gary, what would you say, since the beginning of fall?” she says. I wonder if she recognizes me, too. Our houses are on the same wood-paneled block, though we’ve never spoken before.
“Yup, since September. And Emma, you’ve been with me even longer.” Gary eyes Emma through the rearview mirror.
“Yeah, I started when I was nine,” she says in a quiet voice.
“She’s one of my golden oldies,” says Gary.
“Gary, put on the radio,” Emma says, and he does.
“What channel do you want to hear?”
Z100, obviously. Mr. Big’s “To Be With You” comes on and we all start reciting the lyrics.
“You don’t like this song? I’ll change the channel.” He jokes. He wouldn’t dare.
This is the kind of car where you can roll down the windows and loudly sing along to an overplayed pop song you would never even admit to liking if other people were present. It’s a safe space where you don’t have to try to impress or act mature. You are mature because you are in a car with an adult who’s not really in charge. He likes candy, upper-body car-dance moves, rowdy sing-alongs, the breeze from a revved-up engine on Park Avenue, and the dare of a yellow light.
Red light. Gary taps on the case of a mixtape. “This is a good one,” he says, but he doesn’t play it. One of his older students made it for him. Her handwriting is small and bubbly, confident as any upperclassman.
I used to make mixtapes with my sister. We’d pretend to be DJs and introduce songs recorded off the radio. Then she stopped making them with me and started receiving them from boys. I memorized their track order and the names of who made each mix. I listened for secret messages in the lyrics. Love codes.
More music on the way to our lesson. Toad the Wet Sprocket. Guns N’ Roses. P.M. Dawn. Blind Melon’s “No Rain.” The opening notes bounce through the car, which bounces over the rails of the 59th Street Bridge. I chuck more Big League in my mouth and chew harder.
The tennis bubble beneath the bridge looks poppable, and I blow one so big I can see the sign for Queens Boulevard through the pink scrim.
When we get out of the car, nobody says anything about my height. Gary walks in front of me and casts a slanted, narrow shadow.
Now we are girls changing in a locker room. We know how to pull our sports bras over our heads and under our shirts. We know when to turn away from each other, and when to peek over and see the bones in each other’s backs. The arched bones of a miniature model dinosaur buried deep underneath cotton straps, underneath thin layers of skin dappled with pores that bleed teenage oil.
Inside the tennis bubble, Gary doesn’t make us do suicides. We jump right into a game. He sets up pickup baskets on either side of the court and stands on the service line pelting us a forehand, a backhand, urging us to knock each basket down, in exchange for points. Winner gets a Ring Pop.
Then we accelerate. The balls start spreading out, coming at us faster, farther away, closer to the net, farther left or farther right. He fakes us out, making it look like he’s going to hit the ball deep and then tapping it so lightly we have to dive to return it.
At the end of our lesson, we are giddy, sucking on Ring Pops as we exit the bubble. Gary rips open the Velcro flap of canvas, then unzips a plastic door. The court’s tiny clay particles make their way down the back of my throat. Clay clouds tuft around my sneakers. My ears pop from the change in pressure as we each shoulder through the revolving door and return to the club’s main lounge. The roar of fans that keep the tennis bubble puffed above our heads is replaced with low ceilings and the ooze of light jazz. Men in tennis wristbands and women in white skirts are folded into leather armchairs. Their happy-hour glasses of drowned cherries sweat through cardboard coasters. Behind two glass doors is an empty outdoor swimming pool—the color of Gary’s windbreaker.
“Who wants shotgun?” Gary asks, a little too loudly. He is walking backward through the whisper-filled taupe and brown lounge, its conceit of maturity. He is a cannonball splash of neon—a childish disruption. I’m almost embarrassed until I see the lady at the front desk smiling, raising her hand for a high five. He slaps it and leads us out the front doors into the throbbing purple evening, where the wind inflates Gary’s jacket like a wild turquoise balloon.