SHE DRAGS HER HEART with her onto the tennis court, the UCSB courts, which it is her privilege as faculty to use when she’s so inclined—her daughter, too, when the little tart-tongued sprite can be bothered. And there, if you’ve nothing better to do on a Sunday morning, you might observe her taking her romantic frustrations out on her own flesh and blood, whipping forehands and two-fisted backhands from corner to corner, dropping Wimbledonian touch shots just over the net, wristing ungettable topspin lobs over the head of the strong-willed but vertically challenged juvenile whenever the impulse strikes. Honestly, where is Child Services? Are there no protections for the young? She should be hauled in and booked, fitted with one of those white-collar security anklets.
Ali watches another lob arc over her head, land fair, and, torqued with spin, rocket beyond reach. Her feet never move.
Game, set, match.
Congratulations, Professor Jacobs! You’ve just demolished your adolescent child, whose proper idea of sport is throwing herself into the Columbus Day sale at Abercrombie & Fitch.
Mother and daughter stand on the court regarding each other. Mother already beginning to look a bit sheepish.
Let’s go to the videotape, shall we: mother mumbles generic apology for deranged on-court behavior, which said apology daughter chooses to ignore; daughter walks to sideline, takes paperback of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy out of backpack, sits down on the hard ground, and begins to read.
Take that, Mom, you bitch.
Mom stands wiping perspiration from face with towel, watching daughter immediately sucked into better, fuller alternative universe, to which Mom herself wouldn’t mind being transported, though she knows she wouldn’t deserve the pleasure. Which leads her to the sadly inevitable conclusion that, despite the impressive plaque on her office door, she is an authority on precisely nothing. Leads her to consider possible means of escape. Leads her to say aloud to daughter, “Will you be okay alone for fifteen minutes? I need to check my office for something.” Though this is quite baldly a fiction; there is no something awaiting her, only silence, that simulacrum of peace. Daughter, in any case, doesn’t bother to respond.
Mom hesitates, then begins walking away from maternal crime scene, thinking, in clichéd aphoristic fashion that ultimately depresses her further for its lack of originality: Another day, another disaster.
Thinking: I hate you, Mr. Pullman. Thank you, Mr. Pullman.
Thinking: My heart is sore and frightened because of a man who is a man who is a man.