by Alex Pugsley
~
But in the years before her flux of circumstance, long before the advent of Karin Friday, I was just another kid with vertical hold control issues. And when my parents split a second time I became something of a motherless child. Over these schism years, I lived with my father and two older sisters in the house on Dunvegan. In the interests of getting me off the streets and socially adjusted, I was enrolled in a number of pithy pursuits—Scouts Canada, Pee-Wee football, speech therapy, highland dancing, and, abandoned after twelve weeks, weekly guitar lessons where a bearded, hungover hippie in a leather fringe vest frowned his way through the chords of “More Than a Feeling” and “Dust in the Wind.” It was because of a Wilson Pro Staff tennis racquet left behind by my uncle—and the televised dramatics of Jimmy, Björn, and John—that I became interested in the idea of tennis. To tennis I applied myself with the sort of early-morning fervour normally only associated in Halifax with junior hockey. In summer, I packed two lunches and stayed at the courts, playing anyone and everyone. In winter, I dressed in ski-jacket and gloves and kicked away the frozen puddles so I could use the school parking lot and highest wall as a private backboard facility. I was coordinated, I had aptitude, I had desire, and before long I was one of those wiener kids in a bandana who takes huge cuts at any ball that comes up short. In tournaments I became known as a roaring boy, someone who might hit a hot streak and demolish any opponent or, just as likely and just as often, explode with unforced errors and emotional torment. I wanted to win, or, if this makes sense, I wanted desperately to not-lose. Losing did terrible things to my equilibrium and sense of self. At thirteen I was ranked in both Fourteen-and-Under and Sixteen-and-Under and saw my name in the newspaper for a first time. I played the regionals, provincials, captained a Junior Davis Cup team. By fourteen there were only a few kids my age who were legitimate rivals. There was a band of brothers named Burr who lurked in the bigger tournaments, a Cape Breton cruncher named Shane McBain, and a kid from Dartmouth with whippy strokes named Monaj Ponambulam. Arriving on the South Shore for the summer’s first tournament, I checked out the matches-in-progress and my possible opponents. On the farthest court, Shane was playing some skimpy-looking kid, a sniffly blond boy so little he looked like a kid from Twelve-and-Under. The kid wore a long-sleeved red turtleneck shirt, cricket trousers, and plimsoll sneakers—the kind you’d see on an elderly widow as she tottered amid rhododendrons. He was playing with a heavy-looking Dunlop Maxply and, in the thick fog of the Lunenburg morning, the way the sleeve of his turtleneck drooped past his fingers and along the grip, the racquet seemed a sort of prosthetic wooden extension of the turtleneck itself. We played no-ad scoring in these junior days, an expedient, get-it-over-with scenario, and I was astonished to see, after a flubbed half-volley at Deuce, this blond kid violently thrash at his right calf three times in some controlled, personalized fury. On the next changeover, he produced from his racquet bag a Pippin apple. He ate this very methodically, with a fullness of concentration more appropriate to a seminary student, closing his eyes in don’t-distract-me meditation. Now Shane McBain was a crash-and-burn bruiser who played a game of pounding serve and volley. But this skimpy-looking kid began getting everything back, playing a game of absurd defensive retrieval—he was maybe the greatest ball chaser I’d ever seen. In the course of one rally, I saw him dig out a dying drop shot at the net, chase down a monster forehand two hits later to just barely float back a flimsy lob, and then, on the resulting overhead, run and climb up the chain-link fencing at the back of the court—a manoeuver I’d not seen before and wasn’t sure was entirely legal—and then, hanging off a corner-post, fluke a knuckleball backhand past Shane McBain, who was standing at the net very much dumbfounded, very much what-the-fuck-just-happened, very much who-is-this-kid. The momentum turned on that point and on the next changeover the skimpy-looking kid draped a scarf around his neck and played the last three games wrapped up like a consumptive, quivering, sneezing, and coughing up bits of sputum as he willed himself through a fever and to the end of the contest. He won that match and later that tournament, playing the final in hearing protection headphones, the kind you’d see on an aircraft worker, and this skimpy-looking kid was, I realized, a child seen by me some years before. This kid, of course, was Cyrus Mair.
~
We sallied through the summers, Cyrus Mair and I, playing tournaments all over the province, billeted with strangers, sleeping on church floors, hitching rides with event organizers. We played on carpet courts improvised inside curling rinks, asphalt courts cracked with spring swelling, weedy clay courts with doubles alleys four feet from a community hall. Our opponents in these boonies showed up on dirt-bikes, competed in mirror sunglasses, trucker caps, sleeveless football jerseys, and with frying pan grips smacked serves off hideously low ball tosses, beasted forehands off their back foot, and went for running smashes from the baseline. These kids were dinkers and slicers, hackers and moonballers, often with only one real offensive weapon—a big serve or a slugging two-handed backhand—and mostly unable to keep a rally going beyond six hits. Cyrus and I travelled through our teen years as the Big Two in our cohort, opponents and doubles partners, both of us deciding as juniors to enter the Men’s Singles draw at the Nova Scotia Open. This was the biggest deal in the province, a multi-category tournament held every August on ten courts at Halifax’s Waegwoltic Club, and on the middle Thursday of the tournament, on an extended weather-delay, I was sitting on a park bench with a teenage Cyrus Mair, watching the grey Har-Tru courts darken with drizzle, troubled by his seeming indifference to me. A moment before, I’d asked a question to which he’d remained formidably impassive. With an orange garbage bag arranged around his head as a rain cover, he sat cross-legged reading a book—my book actually—cocooned in his orange garbage bag and impermeable mid-puberty weirdness. He was smart—I knew by now he’d skipped two grades—but Cyrus Mair was a weird kid. He was a tennis junkie, a constant reader and, compared to most fifteen-year-olds, decidedly strange. The bright little boy I’d met as a kid had become a quirky, aloof kind of teenager. I’d witnessed such transformations before, from chatty child to pensive adolescent, most notably with my Uncle Lorne, and I wondered if, like my Uncle Lorne, Cyrus was choosing to hoard his thoughts now only to punk them out later. Although we were advancing in years, Cyrus was still very much a stripling. In the summers we played tennis, he was slim and elfin and preoccupied—often sideways to the room—as if he were mainly engaged in some personalized form of solitaire. At his most haploid, when he was wearing his hearing protection headphones or soaking his wrists in ice water before a match or, as he was now, shivering and reading in the drizzle under an orange garbage bag, the kid seemed bizarrely unfinished and self-involved. There was a sort of invisible force field around him—he shimmered with an aura of touch-me-not—and right away you sensed he was the sort of person who did not like to be disturbed. I can tell you he was modest about toileting generally, he ran the tap, and squeamish specifically about strangers and their goopy emulsions. He was mostly content to be overlooked and left to his books, even if, in this instance, it was my book. What was my book?
There is a mythology of jokes when one is younger that seems to thicken and saturate between the ages of eight and thirteen, perhaps the peak years for Joke Receptivity. I must have absorbed hundreds of them, and during that time I’d had a compulsion to record and categorize all the jokes I’d ever heard—Change A Light Bulb Jokes, Snail Jokes, Elephant Jokes, Dead Baby Jokes, Newfie Jokes, Silly Sally Jokes, Dirty Ernie Jokes, Dumb Blonde Jokes, Helen Keller Jokes, Knock Knock Jokes, Mommy Mommy Jokes, Guy Goes To The Doctor Jokes, Why Did The Whatever Cross The Road Jokes, Book Titles By This Funny Name Jokes, Dirty Limericks, Shaggy Dog Stories, My Car Broke Down Can I Stay With You For The Night Tall Tales, Guy Walks Into A Bar One-Liners, Funny Handshake Gags, Scary Your Husband’s Hanging In The Tree Swish-Swish Friend-Of-A-Friend Urban Myths, Snappy Comebacks and Put-Downs, and a few Unclassifiable Item
s besides. All of these I studiously inscribed into the endpapers of my hardcover copy of Watership Down, many of my entries spilling into the internal pages proper. Intrigued to learn of such an artifact, Cyrus had asked to see it for a casual examination, I thought, but he was now some minutes into a diligent reading of what seemed to be the book’s actual text. When I realized he was reading beyond my own annotations, I asked what the hell he was doing. But, as described, Cyrus had entered a sort of fugue state and I saw from his rapt dweebiness that he would not reply. I was trying not to care, really, what he thought of the book because I’d learned, from previous you-should-read-this-book and have-you-heard-this-song instances, that Cyrus was almost impossible to impress and very resistant to foreign enthusiasms. In fact, beyond a freak interest in Kid Flash and the keyboard solo of “Follow You, Follow Me,” I’d never successfully inspired Cyrus Mair’s curiosity in anything. I didn’t know what the guy was thinking or wanted or wished for. Who did?
Just at that point, Cyrus looked up, rainwater dripping from a central, overhead crease in the orange garbage bag. He scanned the purple thunderclouds with closed lips, uneasy, as if searching for an opening he couldn’t identify. Then he better arranged the orange garbage bag around his head and opened a package of Cherry Nibs. With most candy, Cyrus was very generous. He gave away whole fingers of Kit Kats, freely distributed Fruit Stripe Gum, but with Cherry Nibs he had a fastidious, no-sharesy policy. So we both knew, from long-established practice, he would be consuming every last one. Cyrus had a sort of occult contrariness—even in his stillness he seemed to imply what we could and couldn’t do—and so I turned my attention elsewhere.
At my feet was a rusting can of Wilson tennis balls as well as my tennis racquets in their green racquet covers. The covers sheltered a variety of particulars—tricolour wristbands, a coverless issue of Mad magazine, a baggie of three joints, a digital watch with a Velcro strap—and I busied myself with putting on and firmly tightening my digital watch, not wanting Cyrus to offer me any Nibs, not caring what he thought of the book, not wanting any interaction at all. But there was something about the soft licorice candy and the mustiness of the weather that drew the fragrance from the Cherry Nibs, making the misty air keenly redolent of cherry flavouring—leaving traces in my hair and on my skin—and generally evoking the foreboding aura before a migraine. All afternoon, some mental congestion had been growing within me because of the low-pressure system, the constant drizzle, Cyrus’s geeky autism, as well as the rising influence of a pop ballad, “If You Leave Me Now,” which I was hearing for the sixth time in my life as it played on the Samsung radio in the opened window of the pro shop and sign-up booth. I’d never really had anyone leave me, not anyone my own age anyway, but this song seemed to speak to some poignant part of me and I guessed that this was probably exactly how I would feel if someone were to leave me. I’d never told anyone what I thought of this song, nor how uncanny my connection with it was—on this sixth listen the song was, if anything, even more pronounced in its emotional power—and for the life of me I couldn’t understand, in fact I sort of resented, how this song knew something about my secret heart that I myself hadn’t yet guessed. As the acoustic guitar solo wormed deeper into my vulnerable brain, I got up from the bench and left Cyrus Mair and his Cherry Nibs and wandered the grounds of the Waegwoltic Club as obscurely saddened and perplexed as only a fifteen-year-old boy can be.
I had not walked more than sixty paces toward the open sea when I saw a girl on the lower courts practising her serve in the rain. She was alone, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. There was a sense of precise movement and vibrant colour—yellow-and-white Slazenger tennis dress, pleated blonde hair held back on either side by symmetrically-placed and matching white barrettes. When one of her serves hit the net tape and bounced back into the air, she let the ball drop into the court, skipped up to it, and blasted a two-handed backhand with a sudden wrist-twist of top-spin and a rotating motion of her upper body. It was a moment of supreme integrity embodied in athleticism—a sort of convergent moment of instinct and decisiveness and girlhood—and this moment was Karin Catherine Friday, a kid visiting from Oakville, Ontario, and staying that summer in Halifax with her grandmother. But I didn’t know any of this then. All I knew—as I watched her ball jangle off the fence in front of me, still full of spin, jinking this way and that—was there was a mysterious rightness about everything she did. On the near side of the court now, she glanced at me, snapping her fingers and thumb together in a quick sort of greeting. It was a gesture of real friendliness, actually, as if seeing me was the one meeting she was hoping for—as if she were happy, finally, to encounter someone who saw the world as she did.
“Hey there,” she said. “Are you with the tournament?”
I said I was in the tournament but not exactly with it.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re not exactly with it?” She bent toward an opened Adidas bag. Within the bag was a surfeit of effects—I had an impression quickly of Trident gum, Bonne Bell Lip Smacker, a People magazine, a Slazenger warmup jacket—but my gaze went first to a space-age device that seemed from the future, a small stereo cassette player I would later understand to be a Sony Walkman. There was also the matter, beside the Adidas bag, of three immaculate-looking Chris Evert Autograph tennis racquets still in factory plastic as well as the three shoe-tags on her yellow Tretorn sneakers. I’d played every club for five hundred miles and didn’t recognize any of the tags. All of these details meant she was out-of-province and probably rich or sponsored by Wilson—which would mean she was very talented and possibly nationally-ranked.
She stuffed the racquets in her bag and stepped out of the fenced-in courts, clanging the door shut behind her. “Do you know someone named Kelly Gallagher?” she asked, slinging the bag over her shoulder. “She’s my third round. But I’m supposed to play three different matches today if you can believe it. Singles, doubles, mixed. Plus there’s some lobster barbecue. It’s enough to make you barf up some puke.” She touched at the white barrettes to confirm they were still in place. “And here it is raining on the longest day of the year. The vernal equinox or endoplasmic reticulum or whatever it is. Do you know what it is, Mr. Tudball? I always get those mixed up.” Though she was looking up and down the vacant courts, there was a strong sense she was quite peripherally aware of me. “I actually like that no one’s here. It’s like nothing’s ever going to happen. Of course the sun could come out and this place could fill up with billions of people. With Kelly Gallagher and all her whatnots. Who knows? Who knows what awaits? Perhaps there are French fries.” She respectfully extended her hand. “I’m Karin, by the way.”
“Hello, Karin By The Way,” I said—and perhaps a word or two should be jammed in here about Aubrey at Fifteen. At fifteen, I was your standard-issue Pothead Tennis Bum: hair untidy and sunbaked, shirt untucked, Stan Smith sneakers very scuffed. In my younger years, as man and boy, I had in motion so many murky ideas, of varying purposes, that I wasn’t really equal to explaining what I felt or thought and tended to withdraw instead into drugs and playacting and sarcasm—I had some idea these procedures would be taken to be interesting. I hadn’t really settled on a coherent social identity and around new people, especially girls, I was sometimes conscious of my below-average height and a recurring white pimple that lurked problematically within one of my nostrils. Of course I was also at the age when I was becoming very responsive to tennis dresses and I wondered at the mysterious hiddenness within such clothing and how, for example, without too much ado, a tennis ball might magically materialize from under the skirt. But in the main, especially on days of oppressive congestion, I tended to ignore girls and other people—they were occupied with a world of details beyond me—and I acted as if I was so into tennis I didn’t really care about anything else.
“Want a fry?” Karin bent into the canteen window and paid for her order on tiptoe, the back hem of her tennis dress rising up sharply. “I suppose
I could give you a French fry and then you could like me.” Taking the cardboard dish of fries, she soaked them all with ketchup.
“I like people whether they feed me or not.”
“You do?” She squinted at me as if she were completely disgusted. “Who are you?”
I told her my name
“No,” said Karin, shaking her head, as if in response to an absurd fabrication. “I think it’s Tudball.” She picked out a French fry. “But here’s a French fry, Tudball. Does it have gookies on it? Whoopsy. Let me wipe it off. It’s actually wilting. But it’s good enough for the likes of you.” She passed me the French fry and took a step forward, experimentally smelling my shoulder. “Aubrey Tudball!” She drew back. “You smell like a wet dog. You smell like a ten-year-old sleeping bag. You smell like a champignon. Why is that? Are you a champignon?”
I said it might be my new cologne.
“No, I think it’s because you’re a newt. And you like to smell newty.” Returning her attention to her purchase, she was startled to see in midair a foreign body, something slim and green and larval, in front of her face, suspended on a free-blowing silken thread. “Ew! What the flip? Get this paramecium off my flipping fries.” She stabbed at it with a French fry. When, for whatever reason, the larva swung directly into her face, Karin dropped the fry in fright and made a sudden giggle. Now Karin Catherine Friday was a daring girl with a variety of communicable laughs, especially this high-pitched giggle, which began with an involuntary sniff of voiced breath—sounding more in her nose than her mouth—and which signaled unexpected delight. It was very contagious, this half-giggle of hers, and for months afterwards, when I was far into my winter term of high school, I would hear my own version of Karin Friday’s careless giggle issuing from my nose in the middle, say, of a math unit on cotangents.