We eat dinner on the kitchen island. The three of us—my mother, my father, and I—are a revised unit now that my sister has moved upstate for college.
Dad burps a ketchup bottle. Mom nukes a roasted chicken in the microwave and tongs the steaming limbs of the bird onto our plates. She reminds my father, before he takes a bite of a leg, to chew with his mouth closed.
He waves her off and proceeds to chew any way he pleases. Behind my parents’ mutual agitation is a romance. They match each other in stubbornness, a trait stemming from their equally matched ambition and confidence. I used to think they were related. It was strange to discover they weren’t. Both were raised in Queens by immigrant parents who stowed away in boats to get here. Mom was middle class, Dad was poor, but neither knew any different. Public schools, state colleges, night school, studying, working, watching, always narrowing in on the goal of Manhattan, cracking the code of a certain privilege they’d seen only from a distance. Hardworking Jews, yes, but still white. The barriers were there, but not in the same way they are for others. The law firm my father had started with a near-empty bank account had flourished. My mother’s constant monitoring of the real estate market had paid off. And now we live here. Play to Win. If my mother could needlepoint this motto on a pillow, my father would rest his head against it.
“Did you get your science test back?” Mom asks me.
“Not yet.” That is a lie. I got a C−. My plan is to continue this lie until she forgets to ask again.
“So guess who just called?” she says, taking a chipmunk bite of meat off the bone.
“Who?” Dad and I harmonize.
She recoils at the holes in our faces stuffed with meat.
“You and your father, chew first, then talk . . . What was I saying?” She pushes back the thin curtain of bangs from her forehead. Her forehead glistens with sweat and Clinique bronzer. “Oh, Gary called.”
“Who’s Gary?” Dad asks. He’s eating corn on the cob now and has a constellation of kernels stuck to his mustache.
“Her tennis coach!” There are two things my dad does that exasperate my mother. One is the way he eats, the way we both eat, as if our entire faces were mouth holes. The other is when he can’t remember names—she’s an encyclopedia of who’s who, especially when it has to do with her girls. Right now he is pulling a double.
“Why were you talking to Gary?” I ask. I have been playing with him for only a few weeks, but I’ve never heard him call my mom before with progress reports.
“He called because he thinks you could benefit from playing a second day of the week,” she says, and then turns to my father. “Don’t make a face,” she scolds. “It’s not going to cost anything. He’s offering to coach her an extra day a week for free.”
“Why would he do that?” asks Dad.
“Why would he do . . . Because she’s good! She’s good! He called her a promising player—that’s what he said—and thinks she might be able to get on the tennis team in the spring.”
“Mom, there’s no way.” Tennis is the hardest team to get on at school. It’s a small group of juniors and seniors; only rarely does a freshman makes the cut.
“If you practice, you could. Gary said so. Listen, you’d still play with him during the week, but he’d also coach you on Saturdays—just you and Emma. And afterward, he’ll take you out to lunch. How does that sound?”
“He thinks I’m that good?”
“She’s good, huh?” says Dad, resting his chicken bone on his plate, to pump his fist and expel a pride-laugh.
I garble out a chicken-stuffed laugh, too.
“She’s good,” my mother says, reaching across the kitchen island to squeeze my arm. “She’s really good.”
Here I am, a winner.