Jack noticed my new racket as soon as I stepped onto the court. I was late, and he was already running a volley drill. He paused only a second when I arrived, time enough to nod at me as I pulled my new racket out of its cover. I got in the back of the line, behind Jane.
“New racket?” she said. “It’s about time.”
I felt bold. Maybe it was the bright day, the breeze that had returned after going missing, or the image I’d caught of myself that morning in the hall mirror, my strong tanned arms and legs, my pretty face. How had I forgotten, for so long, that I was attractive? “You know, Jane,” I said as we shuffled forward in line, “I know you.”
She frowned. “How is Bette?”
This threw me. “She’s wonderful.”
“She always worshipped you.”
“We worship each other.” She was next in line, and started to bounce a little on the balls of her feet, shifting her weight from side to side. You certainly take yourself seriously, I thought. “How’s your husband?” I said.
“I’m divorced,” she said. “How’s yours?”
I didn’t have time to answer. It was her turn to hit, but instead of rushing up for the volley as the exercise required, she hit high and long, and then it was my turn. After practice, Jack and I headed toward the parking lot together, and as we walked he reached over and took my new racket from my hand and in the same motion handed me his racket. The back of his arm brushed briefly against my stomach, but he didn’t apologize or smile awkwardly like a person without a certain level of intimacy would, and when we reached my car he handed my racket back. “Good choice,” he said.
It was a week later that Jack and I had lunch together. He’d been frustrated that day—several players had not shown up, and the heat was stifling, making us sluggish—and afterward I’d offered to buy him a soda, and he’d said, “I’m hungry. Are you hungry?” It was Wednesday and Dennis was at work. We went in his car to a Cuban restaurant in Little Havana and ate beans and rice and eggs with hot sauce and drank café con leche. On the court, I was easy and even flirtatious with him, but when we were alone together, I was self-conscious. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Coaching teenagers is a lot easier.”
“Whose idea was it?” I said. “The team, I mean.”
He pointed to himself and rolled his eyes. “I’d had a few clients who’d asked about it, so I thought it might get a good response.”
“It did.”
“Sure, but it’s waning now. Their hearts aren’t in it.”
“Mine is.”
“I know.”
I blushed a little and looked away, out the window toward the midday traffic, the pedestrians with their grocery bags and trailing toddlers. We talked about our spouses. He’d met his through a friend; she didn’t play tennis. I told him that I’d met Dennis on a visit to Miami, that I’d never before thought of moving here. He told me he’d grown up in the Keys, on Islamorada, and had moved to Miami after a run on the pro tour.
“Did you go to one of those schools where the bus drives on the beach?” I said.
“I walked to school,” he said. “And you’re not the first person to ask me that.”
He picked up the check, and when we were back in the hot car, he said, “I’m free the rest of the day. I was thinking of going to the beach.”
“It’s a perfect day for it,” I said.
“Come with me?” he said.
Of course my first instinct was to decline, but at that moment I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do. I directed him to my house and he waited in the car while I ran inside. Dennis had shut the curtains to keep out the heat during the day, and the house was still and shrouded. I put on my bathing suit and a cotton skirt and flip-flops, then put some sodas in a small cooler. I grabbed a magazine and sunscreen and towels and threw it all into a bag.
“Nice house,” said Jack when I stepped back into the car. It was nice enough, certainly—a good-size ranch with creamy yellow stucco and a terra-cotta roof, not the nicest on the block but holding its own. We drove to Key Biscayne with the windows down. Along Virginia Key, windsurfers dipped and meandered just offshore. “I used to know how to windsurf,” I said. “Once upon a time.” Years before, after Marse taught me, I’d windsurfed every so often, to jog between stilt houses or take a quick run down the channel, but it had never become second nature and eventually I’d given it up.
“You should get back to it,” he said. “You have good balance.”
This was something Jack did—he made pronouncements about a person, like he’d been studying up. “Maybe I will,” I said.
The beach was not crowded. I looked away while Jack wrapped a towel around his waist and changed into his swim trunks, then we headed toward the sand. There was a Cuban family having a picnic and some surfers doing very little with the meager waves. We laid our towels on the sand and Jack took off his shirt. He went straight to the water while I applied sunscreen, but then after a few minutes the heat found my lungs and hair, and I went to join him. When I was waist-deep my nipples hardened from the chill of the water, and out of embarrassment I dove under, and came up near Jack.
“I love Miami,” he said. “Paradise.”
“You sound like my husband.”
“Smart man.”
We swam out another twenty yards, to a shoal where we could sit in the low water and look back at the beach. The Cuban family started packing up, and the surfers paddled south, away from the point. “It’s amazing how rarely I actually come to the beach,” I said. It had been a year, maybe more. When Margo had been a little girl, once a week we’d bring sandwiches and sit on an old blanket and maybe Dennis would go for a swim or we’d all wade around in the surf, then head back home at sunset.
“Do you work?” he said.
“Part-time.” I was still considering increasing my hours. The fact that I was at the beach on a Wednesday afternoon seemed a good argument for it. I asked Jack what his wife did for a living, and he said she was the creative director at the science museum. “I haven’t been there in ages,” I said. I’d chaperoned a field trip when Margo was in second grade, then again when she was in seventh. I remembered Margo’s silhouette fading from the shadow wall. I remembered a cyclone-shaped drain where she had sent a penny spinning and spinning until it dropped. “You don’t have kids?” I said.
“Never did,” he said.
“My daughter will be a junior at UF in the fall. She transferred there. It’s her first time away from home.”
“Big adjustment,” he said.
We were reclining in the shallow water, propped up on our elbows. The exposed part of my bathing suit dried quickly in the sunlight; the mix of cool and hot was delicious. I felt magnetic and aroused—not by Jack exactly, or by Jack only, but by the heat on my suit and the smell of the air and sand, by Jack’s strong legs and the dark hair that covered them, and by my own body, even. There was no question I was attracted to Jack, and I knew in that moment that he was equally attracted to me—there was a pull between us. But all at once it was too much. I knew that if I waited another long moment he would touch me. Alarms in my head sounded distantly, then grew louder. Without thinking, I scooted to the deeper water. “I’m going in,” I said. He moved forward as if to reach for me, but I turned away and started to swim, then dove through the water until the beach rose up and I could stand.
In the Biltmore parking lot, Jack kept the car running while I gathered my things. “Next time we’ll try windsurfing,” he said, and I said, “Sure.” As I climbed into my car, my hands trembled, and I had the thought that there was a great doorway opening to me, with all kinds of pleasure waiting on the far side. I wondered if I had either the necessary courage or the necessary foolishness to pass through.
That weekend Dennis and I drove down south and picked blueberries and blackberries, but it was late in the season and they were good only for preserves. We shared a milk shake in the car on the way back and stopped at a nursery owned by Dennis’s ol
d friend Paul, but Paul wasn’t there and we didn’t buy anything. I rolled down my window even though Dennis had turned on the air conditioner. He followed my lead and rolled his down, too. We passed fields dotted with migrant workers, and roadside stands advertising key limes and tomatoes. “You’re not here,” he said to me. “Where are you?” At home, he watched football while I jarred preserves, and when I was done I put five tightly sealed containers in the cupboard. That night I led him to the bedroom and had sex with him, my eyes closed.
One Friday night in early August we went to Bette’s for dinner. She and Suzanne served seared tuna and sake, and after dinner we lay on lounge chairs in the backyard, watching the kidney-shaped swimming pool. Bette had bought the house when she’d sold her business. It was a one-story bungalow nestled in a wooded part of the Grove, with a carport and heavily textured stucco walls painted earthy colors—taupe in the kitchen, butterscotch in the living room—and the rugs were all kilim. “Bette,” I said to her when Dennis and Suzanne were engaged in conversation. “You’ll never guess who’s on my tennis team.”
She smirked. “I can’t believe you’re playing tennis,” she said. “You’re so suburban.”
“I know, but guess.”
“You said I’d never guess it.”
“You won’t.”
“I’ll just take one guess, then.” The pool bubbled quietly. Dennis and Suzanne were discussing real estate, and Suzanne was saying that South Beach was exploding. “Jane Brevard,” said Bette.
I looked at her. She wore an ankle-length batik sundress and gold chain earrings. “How did you know?”
“I’m clairvoyant.”
“Seriously.”
“I ran into her the other day at the dry cleaner. I see her every so often, around.”
I lowered my voice. “You see her?”
“Oh, Frances. For a while there she was dating my friend Tina. You know Tina, with the art.”
“I can’t stand her,” I said.
“Tina?”
“No.”
“Jane? Really? She was saying what a good player you’ve become.”
This surprised me. “She’s the best on the team.”
“She said that, too.”
Dennis and Suzanne were arguing lightly about property taxes, whether the cap was good for Miami in the long run. I felt a little sleepy from the sake and the food. Bette said, “Jane said you’re pretty tight with the instructor.”
Bette’s face was a mask. “I wouldn’t say we’re tight, no,” I said. “He’s a good coach.”
“And handsome, Jane says.”
I didn’t answer. She got up to refill our drinks. Suzanne was speaking intently to Dennis—“There’s more money in Florida real estate right now than in tourism and citrus combined,” she was saying—and over her shoulder Dennis looked at me. His eyes lingered for a moment and I felt a small stirring inside, and then thought of that day at the beach with Jack. I lay back on the lounge chair and thought again of what might have happened if I had not swum away. This was my new private pastime. Dennis and I had been having the best sex we’d had in a decade. This alone, if not something else, would give me away, I thought. And then I felt a rush of gratitude for myself, for the me who’d backed away at the beach, for the me who’d made the right choice.
Bette returned and handed me a glass. “You know what I’ve always liked about you and Dennis?”
“We bring dessert,” I said.
“You stay up late. All these couples we know, they’re in bed by nine.”
It was after midnight. A car alarm was going off nearby. Bette and Suzanne’s dog had come outside and was standing in the water on the top step of the swimming pool, looking around warily like a self-conscious woman in a bathing suit.
Before we left, Bette handed me a poinsettia in a copper pot. “Someone gave it to me,” she said. “I thought of you.”
It was compact, its flowers immature but bright. “I’m not sure I have a place for it.”
“You’ll find one. Be strong, woman.”
In the car, Dennis said, “What was that about? Being strong?”
“Your sister is strange,” I said. “Drive carefully. You’ve been drinking.”
I balanced the plant between my knees. I didn’t want it, and I knew I would eventually let it die. Bette knew it, too—I realized this in a rush—and that’s why she’d given it to me. She’d seen the flow of plants through my household over the past two decades. It was easier for her to give it to me, which she knew meant certain death, than to keep it and watch it die on her own. If she’d kept it, she would have rescued it from near-death out of guilt, then let it subside, then rescued it again. This could go on for years. “Stop the car for a second,” I said to Dennis.
He pulled over. We were at the corner of LeJeune and Barbarossa, in front of Merrie Christmas park, which I knew had once been a rock quarry. It now was a grassy basin filled with craggy banyans and a jungle gym. As a little girl Margo had swung from the vines. I took the plant, walked into the dark park, and placed it in the middle of a picnic table. I wanted to write a note—TAKE ME—but I didn’t have a pen or paper.
“That seems ungracious,” said Dennis when I got back into the car.
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s exactly what she would do if she were me.”
Margo came home for a week before the start of the fall semester. She was settled into her apartment by this time—she’d been assigned a roommate, Janelle, whose boyfriend more or less lived with them, which concerned me—and we’d planned to spend some time shopping for kitchen necessities. As soon as she got off the bus, she said she needed to find a pay phone. She’d left the oven on, she told me, or thought she might have. Janelle’s boyfriend answered and she asked him to check. We waited. It was a muggy night, starry and bright with moonlight. She’d gained some weight since July Fourth weekend; her face was rounder, her jeans tight against her stomach. She caught me staring. “Stop looking at me, Mom,” she said. “So I put on a few pounds, so what?”
“So what, indeed?” I tried to sound breezy.
Margo spoke into the phone. “God, I thought so. Why do I always do that?”
“You really left it on?” I said. My breath caught. Would my daughter burn down her building?
She hung up. “I made toast this morning,” she said to me. “I left the broiler on.”
I hadn’t known Margo to use the word broiler. “Sweetheart, you have to be careful,” I said.
She threw up her hands and walked off toward the car. We’d been together ten minutes and already we were bouncing off each other like we did sometimes. “Are you hungry?” I said, and she said, “Starving.”
We went to a Mexican restaurant in downtown Coconut Grove, an area that at this hour was busy and frenetic. I paid to park and took her arm as we walked down Grand Avenue, past a pair of unwashed teenagers playing guitars on the sidewalk, then past a man wearing a JESUS SAVES sandwich board. At the restaurant, we slid into a corner booth and Margo dove into the tortilla chips and salsa. I ordered a margarita on the rocks and Margo said, “The same” and the waitress wrote it down without even looking at her.
“Well!” I said when we were alone.
“It’s OK, right?” she said. “I mean, I can drink.”
“I guess I don’t see why not.”
I avoided the chips and ordered my enchilada with no sour cream. “Are you on a diet?” said Margo.
“Sort of.”
“I mean, you look good.”
“It’s the tennis.”
“I’ll come watch tomorrow,” she said.
It hadn’t occurred to me to bring Margo to practice—would she even enjoy it? “That would be wonderful,” I said.
That night I checked the oven before going to bed, then in the middle of the night woke with the thought of Margo burning down her apartment, and couldn’t get back to sleep. In the morning I found her and Dennis in the kitchen, drinking coffee. The newspaper covered the br
eakfast table. “We were talking about heading down south,” said Dennis, “maybe taking a ride on an airboat.”
I felt a rush of relief that Margo wouldn’t be coming to practice with me. “Sure,” I said. “When will you be home? Should I make dinner?”
Dennis looked at me strangely. “You don’t want to come?”
“Of course I do. But I have practice.”
“You can miss one, can’t you?”
I felt my jaw clench. It wasn’t an unreasonable request, I told myself. I was probably the only one who had never missed. “I’d rather not.”
“We’ll come with you to practice, then we’ll all go,” said Margo.
“Sounds good,” I said. I asked Margo where this idea—the Everglades, the airboat ride—had come from.
“I was thinking about it the other day,” she said. “I remembered that place down Tamiami Trail, with the frogs’ legs.”
“You wouldn’t eat them last time we went,” I said.
“I’ll eat them now.”
At the club, Margo and Dennis followed me to the gazebo between the courts. Jane and Rodrigo were hitting and Jack was sitting in the shade with a cup of coffee, his visor pulled low on his forehead. He stood up as we approached. “Visitors!” he said. He put out his hand to Dennis, and I introduced them.
“Is my mom going pro?” said Margo.
“She’s on her way. The new racket helps.”
Margo had admired my racket in the car. She’d commented on the scratches and dings it had accumulated—I’d noticed this, too, and felt the pride of ownership that comes with using something hard.
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