Open Court

by Carol Clippinger

  “But you're good at math?” I asked.

  “Duh.”

  “You don't like being smarter than everyone else?”

  “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  “Yours.”

  “How many hours a day do you spend playing tennis?”

  “Five. Three hours with Coach. A couple hours on my own, practicing serves.”

  “Five,” she said smugly. “Including math camp, I spend four hours a day doing math problems.”

  I shrugged. “What's your point?”

  “We're twins. We're slaves to sports and numbers.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said uneasily.

  “So be on my side. I don't want to be a chemist. I hate math.”

  * * *

  Before I knew Polly, I thought she was nerdy. Back in April the seventh grade held their annual science fair. Most of the projects looked like they'd been thrown together the night before. Battery demonstrations, erupting volcanoes, and models of the solar system packed the room.

  Polly's was different. She performed an experiment charting the growth rate of bacteria at different temperatures. Her booth contained petri dishes, a microscope, and an array of drawings of bacteria. Teachers hovered over her like she was the next Jonas Salk.

  At the end of the day the principal announced that even though “learning was its own reward,” he had plaques for the best projects.

  When Polly's name was called, she hauled ass to the front of the room and collected her grand prize, her face beet red from embarrassment. Her mom cheered loudly; it was clear she took the achievement personally. Talk about embarrassing. The more I knew about Polly, the more I appreciated my mom's lack of involvement.

  Polly's mother seemed to be an exact replica of Janie's bewildering father. I'd go mad if I had parents like that. My mom asking about Janie was bad enough.

  I was lost in my thoughts when Polly pointed her bony finger in my face. “Are you gonna let Luke Kimber-lin stick his tongue in your mouth?”

  “Funny, Polly,” I wryly said. “Do you think he should've called by now?”

  “Don't know,” she said.

  “I'm not a country club girl. I wonder why he likes me, if he does.”

  She elbowed my arm. “Why wouldn't he? You're likable.”

  We sat for a few seconds.

  “So, are you?” she asked.

  “Am I what?”

  “Luke's tongue.”

  “Heck, yeah,” I said.

  Polly laughed hysterically.

  The air was cooler than usual. I'd forgotten to pack a warm-up jacket in my tennis bag, so I froze in my T-shirt, bouncing up and down on court, trying to get warm. I corralled the balls out of my way so I wouldn't trip. Checked my watch—I'd only been here an hour. Still had an hour to try to wrestle Coach's voice back into me.

  Rise, Coach, rise. Please.

  Step to the baseline. Bounce ball. Separate hands. Racquet back. Extend racquet. Make contact. Follow through. Out. By a fourth of an inch. Barely out. Hmmm.

  Breathe. In and out. Keep warm. Ignore the breeze. Ignore chattering teeth. The ball matters. A fourth of an inch matters. Let everything else fall away. Let Trent's voice rise.

  Rise, Coach, rise.

  Bounce ball. Separate hands. Racquet back—

  “Hey, Hall!”

  I whipped my head around. Polly was crouched down, looking at me through a patch of the torn windscreen. Thank God I wasn't hallucinating now, too. “What are you doing?”

  “Came to watch you practice. How do I get in?”

  I pointed. “You gotta go through that hole.” I jogged over and held back the jagged wire fence. “Careful, it'll rip your shirt.”

  “Whew,” she said, standing upright again, holding a paper bag, dismayed. “This is where you practice? Yuk.”

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “Melissa told me. I want to watch you play. So here I am.”

  “What's in that bag?”

  She bit her lip. Scrunched up her nose. “You'll find out in a minute, nosy.” She looked back. “Melissa?”

  “How do I get in?” Melissa wailed.

  “Melissa is here, too?” I said, astonished.

  “Sure, why not? I wanted Eve to come, but she said she had something else to do.”

  Melissa struggled, getting in. “Hey, Hall,” she said.

  “Are those weeds growing out of the court?” Polly asked.

  “Yeah, this court … sucks. I usually practice alone, you know, so I can concentrate.” I felt my face burn. I was thrown. Aside from Melissa's occasional questions, my friends and my tennis never mixed. Eve would never … I laughed at the sight of them, my two separate worlds blending like this.

  Polly freed a homemade sign from the paper bag and began hitching it to the metal court fence. Melissa dropped her jacket and helped. I stood back, watching, revived.

  Melissa tipped it this way and that, getting it right, while Polly joined me, slugging my arm. “Look,” she said. “You're in a parade. This tennis court is your float. Wave to the nice children!” She pretended she was a float queen and began waving to imaginary people.

  The sign read GO, HALL!

  Not wanting to be left out, Melissa waved, too, to no one.

  I studied the sign. Plastic pink flowers were glued onto it, around the lettering. It wasn't haphazard; that sign took planning. “Who did those flowers?”

  “Me,” Polly said. “I'm artsy. Just because I've got a brain for numbers doesn't mean I'm not artsy.”

  Polly seemed able to stir herself easily into any situation—Eve's house, my tennis life—yet at the same time she seemed to belong nowhere and to nothing. The girl boggled my mind. She reminded me so much of Janie. Though I felt terrible when Coach or my mom tried talking to me about Janie, I was fine with Polly's resemblance to her—remembering the fun Janie and I had before she lost her mind.

  Despite the cold my face continued burning. I was embarrassed, delighted. “How come you did this?”

  Polly slung her arm around me in her eager way. “Because you don't hate tennis, right? So here we are. Play.”

  “I can't play, I don't have an opponent; I just come here to serve.”

  “So serve. We don't mind, right, Melissa?”

  “No, we don't care,” Melissa said.

  They aligned themselves against the fence. Waiting.

  Bounce, bounce, bounce. Separate hands. Racquet back. Toss the ball—

  “Should I cheer yet?” Polly blurted out.

  The ball fell limply to the court. My concentration faltered. What concentration? It was gone. “You don't cheer in tennis. You clap politely for a good shot. You say nothing during a serve.”

  “Yeah,” Melissa said, as if she knew.

  “Oh,” Polly said, uninterested in those confining regulations. “Maybe I could find a place to cheer if you would hurry up and serve.”

  Enough of this. I stuffed my pockets with Penn balls for easy access and shot them at her and Melissa, one, two, three, four …

  “Hey! Quit! No fair!” Polly squealed.

  Grabbing the flimsy paper sack, she spread it across them, as if it offered protection. Ha!

  Five, six, seven, eight more balls …

  “Where's my cheering?” I asked, laughing so hard my gut ached. “I don't hear any cheering! These are excellent shots. Go ahead and cheer. I'm waiting.”

  “Agg!” Polly said, laughing too.

  Piles of tennis academy brochures are infiltrating my world with no letup in sight. Thick, glossy brochures, pamphlets, and catalogs from every warm state in America are basically breeding in my parents’ mailbox. I can barely keep up with them.

  The postman has a streak of wickedness. When I politely asked him to stop delivering the brochures—to simply chuck them in the trash—he sighed at me, mumbled something about a “federal offense,” and then unmercifully shoved a bunch more into the box, out of spite, probably.

  I've mana
ged to intercept a few thick packets. Unfortunately, one from Bickford Academy in Florida slipped by me and is now in the clutches of my parents. The brochures I've taken—from California and Florida—are loaded with bright pictures of teens gripping racquets and holding trophies. The captions say things like “Make a Winner for a Lifetime” and “Our Teaching Pros Make the Difference.”

  They don't fool me. I know the statistics. Only three or four elite kids out of the two hundred kids from an academy will have a chance to make it on the professional circuit. Those aren't good odds. Even the exceptionally gifted won't become top-ten players as professionals. They'll be ranked in the fifties or sixties for their entire careers. A champion—what a joke.

  Recently, my parents have been going over the stack of brochures that managed to get through. A few times a week they sit at the kitchen table and discuss them. Often now, my face has the imprint of the heating vent on it as I eavesdrop, listening to them talk about me in regard to tennis.

  Mom: “They're children, Frank.”

  Dad: “They're playing sports in the fresh air.”

  Mom: “It's a boot camp.”

  Dad: “They have to have rules. Would you rather have a hundred kids running amok, doing as they pleased?”

  Mom: “Their childhoods are consumed by rankings and tournament titles. It's not healthy, Frank. It's not normal.”

  Dad: “Normal is watching five hours of TV a day. Normalcy breeds mediocrity.”

  Mom: “Running for president with that slogan?”

  Dad: “This guy today—he might be exactly what Hall needs. Vivian, with this extra money we've got now—”

  Mom: “We can't use all that money on Hall. What about the boys? What about college funds? It's not fair to—”

  Dad: “We could—”

  Mom: “We can't send her to an academy for a single year, then make her come home. If we make the commitment, it's got to be for the duration.”

  Dad: “I know, I know …”

  I didn't know what guy they were talking about, but regardless, my mom is definitely the Weak Link. When she says things like “They're children, Frank” and “It's a boot camp,” I feel she's on my side. And I plan to play off her doubts as much as I'm able.

  Lately they've acquired calculators and have been adding up mortgage payments, food, and car expenses. Then they subtract bits of money from specific columns, hoping an extra four thousand dollars a month for tennis academy tuition will emerge.

  They're acting like insane accountants now because my grandpa is dead. He died three years ago, but his house in Chicago recently sold. They got a big check last week. My parents want to use my dead grandpa's money to help banish me to a tennis academy. They refer to this money as the Dead Grandpa Bonus Fund. My grandpa Floyd was a chef, not a sports fan.

  “Ready, Hall?” my mom called.

  “Yeah, just a sec.”

  “Hurry up, we're already late.”

  I grabbed my Prince stick. My mom had the engine running by the time I reached the garage. Her lips were glazed with lipstick, her good lipstick, the kind reserved for dinner reservations and anniversaries. Looked like she was going someplace special. My dad was perched in the front seat as if on his way to a celebration. The jig was up.

  “How come you're both driving me?”

  “We thought we'd watch you practice,” my dad said.

  Most of the time I felt lucky to get a ride at all. The club was clear across town on Broadmoor Valley Road, a forty-minute drive to and fro. They never watched my lessons, not even when I was eight. “Both of you? Both of you are watching me practice?”

  “Sure,” my dad said. “It's a splendid day, why not?”

  A splendid day? I would have jumped out of the car right then, but we were already a block from home and traveling at roughly thirty-five miles per hour. Words like “splendid” weren't part of my dad's vocabulary.

  My parents weren't club members—they needed guest passes or they'd be tossed out. Since technically I wasn't a member, either, I couldn't provide passes.

  “Can't get in without a pass,” I told them, gloating.

  “Trent gave us passes,” my mom said.

  “Gave you … Why did he do that?”

  My mom turned in her seat, glaring. “Well, excuse us for taking an interest in your life.”

  An interest, ha! We drove in silence the rest of the way.

  The air roasted me from the inside out. It was Africa hot. Heat swelled from the sky and ground at equal intensities; the fiery court surface threatened to swallow my legs in flames. My parents and I fell through the gate of court 3. Trent bounded over. Trent never bounds.

  “Glad you could make it,” he said, using an elegant tone of voice. “Hot one today. Can I get you something to drink? Snack bar is just over yonder.”

  “No, we're fine. Thanks,” my mom said.

  “Been a while,” my dad said. “Please tell me you're bald by choice and not from the stress of coaching the enigma.”

  Coach chuckled. “No. Wouldn't put it past her, though. Girl keeps me on my toes.”

  Something was askew. Trent was famous for his dislike of tennis parents. Normally he didn't even like encouraging but semi-removed parents like mine (until lately, that is), and here he was bounding over to greet them, being polite. Cracking jokes, no less.

  As my parents moseyed to the bleachers, Trent grabbed my arm. “Face north,” he said, “and play hard.”

  “But, Coach, I—”

  “Face north. Play hard.”

  Coach knows I prefer facing south on court 3. Facing south, I can view sailboats that drift in the lake. Occasionally they mesmerize me and I get clobbered by a ball. Trent sighs like I've committed a huge sin, then makes me face north, so my view is the club's ugly brown fitness center building. Says if I keep goofing off in practice he's gonna make me hit on condemned court 15, which doesn't even have a net, and then I'll be sorry.

  “Did you hear me, Hall? North.”

  “I heard you. I'm going. Jeez.”

  “Hall.” Coach looked at me, jaw set, nostrils flared, brown eyes fierce. Urgency stabbed his words. “Play hard.”

  I nodded and shut up.

  Skittish Helper Guy materialized on the court and practice began. Trent joined my parents at the set of small bleachers—the very same bleachers that Luke Kimberlin, the Greek God, had occupied two weeks prior.

  … thump… thump… thump…

  “Hustle, hustle … hit a passing shot, go, go!”

  … thump…

  “Nice! Do it again.”

  It was only when I couldn't find Trent's voice that fear set in. Now, with Trent screaming at me, all was well again. Immediately I was in the zone. It's a place where everything is blank: crowds, umpires, opponents— they don't exist. I see only the fuzzy yellow Penn ball. Flying.

  The ball is mine. I own it. Dominate it. It travels to me, it's mine. I slam it, punish it. Threaten it, throttle it. Smacking it as hard as I can … thump… Goes where I tell it to go. Obeys me. Eager to please. See only the ball, nothing else. Hear the twang I cherish. My head is wonderfully blank. Perfection rests in my blank head. It's beautiful. I'm beautiful. It's only after I win a point that I realize I'm playing at all. It's automatic and it's the sweetest thing ever, the zone.

  When a Penn ball hits the racquet, my fingers feel it first. My grip tightens slightly at impact. Pressure enters my wrist, travels into my shoulder, and vibrates through the rest of my body. I hit each ball with every cell of my body. In the zone I don't have to try, it just happens. On impact I exhale, shudder as I hear the twang, and fill with joy.

  … thump… thump… thump…

  Skittish Helper Guy ran down my passing shots, heaving.

  … thump…

  “Placement,” Coach screamed, “get it, get there …”

  “Agg!”

  … thump…

  “Good. Again.”

  … thump… thump… thump…

  I
stole a glance at the bleachers. Thomas Fountain had joined Coach and my parents—he was “the guy.” Coach ceased yelling. Instead, he told my “warrior story.”

  “… so she's at this tournament in Vegas—the Great Pumpkin Sectional Championship. It's the semifinals of the toughest draw she's ever faced. Hall's dominating. Destroying the opposition. Going to win, no question.”

  “Win, definitely,” my dad said.

  “Out of desperation her opponent rushes the net and tries to volley. Hall shoots from the baseline—I'm stunned she even got to the damn ball. Brings her racquet back, back, back, the whole court is silent, and then … Boom! Slams the ball at this girl, hard.”

  “Hit her with the ball,” my dad clarified.

  “Yeah,” Trent said, “slams the ball into her and breaks the girl's arm)?

  “It was an accident, of course,” my mom said, worried. “Hall wasn't aiming for the girl.”

  “Wanted to win,” Trent said. “That's the intensity of her concentration. Hall doesn't allow girls to hit winning volley shots. Broke her arm and wasn't sorry.”

  “I'm sure she was sorry,” my mom said.

  “No, she wasn't,” Trent protested. “Didn't do it on purpose, but trust me, she wasn't sorry.”

  “Hell,” Thomas said.

  “No shit,” Trent said, laughing.

  “Did she win the tournament?” Thomas asked.

  “Aren't you listening? Of course she won.”

  “I'm sure she was sorry,” my mom said again.

  Trent told the story often, to whoever would listen. I was sure in a few years he'd be telling it in a way that had me killing the girl by slamming a ball into her face. Aside from being bossy and impatient, Trent was fond of violence.

  The four of them spontaneously clapped at my effort at a lob, removing my focus.

  “Hall, come over. Take a break,” Trent called.

  Skittish Helper Guy picked up velvety balls from the court. Thomas Fountain gawked at me as I approached. He was a former pro who taught tennis at a posh resort hotel, the Broadmoor. He'd watched me practice twice before, at Coach's invitation.

  “Hello, Hall. Do you remember me?” Thomas said, offering his hand.

  I wiped the sweat from my hand to shake his. Both Trent and my dad looked at me like I'd better be polite or I'd have hell to pay later on, so I said, “Yes, I do. Nice to see you again, Mr. Fountain.”