by Lorraine Ray
An absurd sense of mission, of self-absorbed, busy-body employment on the part of the park worker who studied intently a piece of a broken sprinkler head and then swung into the seat of his oily mower, contrasted sharply with the deserted hard pack of a Hohokam village site and the nervous newness of the inductees into the summer tennis camp. The Hohokam village languished next to the tennis court in the corner of the park where Jack and I had arrived, too early as usual, on a summer morning with our new Pancho Gonzalez tennis rackets. A chorus of cicadas buzzed horridly in the early morning, in the Bermuda grass and trees. The crispy yellow wrappers, the exoskeleton of the larval cicadas, clung here and there as see-through horrors. Jack and I bounced our backs against the wire fence and tolerated placidly the strange lying saga our mother narrated which happened to relate Cowboy Princes to tennis rackets.
“Well, by cracky, I hope the two of you children recognize what is being offered and thank me later for arranging this fabulous opportunity for you to use those tennis rackets I bought you for Christmas at considerable expense and I hope you recognize that by learning tennis you will strengthen your body, especially the upper torso, and coordinate your eyes and hands, something the two of you really lack and which I would like to see improve before you leave home, and at the same time these rackets will allow you to associate yourself with the better people out in the countryside out at the big ranches which is always a good thing and my goodness several of the largest ranches in Southern Arizona also included tennis courts for the pleasure of the well-educated and intellectual class of people invited to the really large ranches, yes, I have seen them with these, my very own eyes. These ranches it would be hard for you to imagine because the scope and magnitude of them is simply unimaginable unless you’ve been invited out to one of them, out practically to the borders in all directions, all the way down to Mexico, unlimited potential, manifest destiny and all that, but with your attitudes I don’t imagine either of you will ever have that happen, an invitation I mean to a great Arizona Ranch Homestead, no, I can’t imagine either of you out at places like that with your betters. You are too sullen to associate with others, especially not your betters, you’re both too quick to criticize, not like your cousins in Indiana, mind you, for they associate with anybody better. But I’m giving you this opportunity because you two should be good at tennis. Both of you have those brand new rackets with Pancho Gonzalez’s signature on the handle and you know that he was very good at tennis, and, of course, you can claim to be a teensy part Hispanic, so one can imagine you have it in you to be good, too. You have been given a chance to rub elbows with a better class, if you choose to learn the tennis skills in this class which I have enrolled you in.”
Jack listened to Mother’s long tirade with mock patience and then drolly and deliberately misread the flyer taped to a pole, “Tennis clinic for people who do not want to learn tennis in five easy sessions. Heat stroke clinic free at nine a.m.”
“Heat stroke clinic at nine a.m.?” Mother repeated in a contained fury at Jack’s constant quips, “Very entertaining. Very humorous, indeed. A comic, huh? Heat stroke clinic. Stroke clinic, kid, that’s what it says and none of your lollygagging smiles. This is why you aren’t invited to any big ranches by your betters. Who wants to listen to that kind of sassy talk for a weekend? The kind of people who live on ranches don’t trade sassy, jokey talk with each other. They have elevated conversations that are positive about beef prices and land prices and the arts, music and books. They uplift each other. They provide other important people with what they can of happiness. They bestow opportunities on those who are wise enough to see where the benefits arise. They have wonderful conversations.”
“Sure they do, mom,” Jack replied, laughingly. “They actually carry on long intellectual discussions about what’s on Hee-Haw that Saturday night and the performers at the Grand Old Opry. And they’ve all read When a Man’s a Man.”
That was a dirty dig, an evil crack, at a crazy bestselling western written by a nut who had tuberculosis and built his mansion on a hill not too far from our home.
“I’ll have you know that the author of that book was a great American writer,” said our prickly mother.
“Harold (Ding-A-Ling) Bell Wright? Mom, he was a hack. A crazy best-selling hack. Nobody has even heard of him nowadays. Christian novels aren’t best sellers anymore,” I said.
“By cracky, you kids,” she said. “You have the most disturbed opinions. The lack of respect will not be helpful to you in the long run. I’ll be back at eleven. And don’t do anything stupid.”
“I’ll have had a heat stroke by nine so be sure and come back earlier,” responded Jack to the Oldsmobile Cutlass as it chugged away. Mother wore enormous sunglasses and looked every bit the part of a scowling bug.
A meaty blonde man with very tan skin and smelly cologne arrived to teach us tennis. He greeted us with a short speech about the immense pleasures of tennis awaiting us once we would only learn the sport of kings, and then led us onto the concrete court. Already the summer sun broiled all the surfaces. We sat in the shade with our backs pressed against a wire fence and two stiff young men demonstrated various serving techniques; Jack and I didn’t listen to anything they said nor did we glance at them much.
I whispered to Jack, “Gee, Jack, I just remembered something really interesting from a long time ago. Do you remember us telling people we owned some kind of dumb gigantic ranch? We used to tell people that, and I think I actually believed in it. It’s hard to remember what we said very well.”
“Shhh,” warned an intense young woman tennis enthusiast beside me.
“Oh, go blow, will ya?” I muttered at her flabbergasted face. She had bulgy black seed eyes like a deer mouse.
“What about it? Don’t you remember?” I asked.
Jack laughed at me. “Ah, no, silly. That came entirely out of Mother’s imagination. She was the big ranch kook. We were playing cowboys plenty. Maybe you have that in mind. We used to have that wagon in the alley? The one that we bought a covered wagon top for?”
I thought for a moment, ‘big ranch kook’ didn’t that mean something, too? What was the big ranch thing she used to say? But I had lost my train of thought and then decided to persist with my questions.
“I forgot covered wagons, but I mean, didn’t we tell someone or a bunch of people that we had an enormous ranch?”
“No, you’re nuts,” said Jack. “We never did.”
“But I’m sure we did. I’m sure of it. We told a bunch of people. At least I’m pretty sure we did,” I said.
“You might have,” said Jack wisely. “You did a lot of stupid goofy stuff. You were a nut.”
“No, Jack, you’re wrong; Meredith did,” I said.
Jack contemplated the past for a moment. “Well, she lied a lot and made up stuff. I don’t remember a ranch, though.”
When Jack said “she lied a lot.” Part of the scene came back to me. It had been so important years ago; we’d thought it was the most important thing that had happened to us, but now we’d completely forgotten it. “Jack! There was a ranch. We told a couple of weirdoes at the Saguaro Monument. Those people who tried to squeal against us to Mom and Dad for watching them take smutty pictures? They were very, very pale people.”
“Oh yeah,” said Jack slowly. “I do remember that. Were they making a smut film?” he said incredulously and excitedly. “Holy shit, I never knew it.”
“Well, that might not be really true. They were sort of taking dirty photos. Fifties style smutty photos, I think. Risqué photos, maybe, tasteless photos,” I said, pulling back steadily from my accusation. “Oh yeah, she pretended to mount the cactus and she was lifting and swirling her skirt around sticking her boobs out in an old squaw dress, wasn’t it? Remember those dreadful squaw dress things that scratched us up as kids? Old ladies wore them and wanted us to hug them?”
“Squaw dresses. Yeah,” said Jack, “Mom bought one of those. Once.”
Squaw dresses. They had
been significant, too. Clusters of old women with those things. Yes, some of them had vaguely wanted to….hug me… that was it! Someplace a long time ago ladies in squaw dresses had wanted to hug me and someone had…supported me in my shyness. That was it. I had short hair, too. A seal cut. And the supporter had been an old lady from the church. Sure, and Jack and I had once gone to a dress shop. The details of that visit were obscure, but there was a gun! The shop stood at the edge of town then and the lady that owned it had been one of Mom’s friends who had been a librarian until she had a nervous breakdown. Mom had bought one of those hideous squaw dresses for herself. Left with it in a box beside me. It still hung in the closet and Mother kept trying to interest me in wearing it.
“Yeah, Mom bought a squaw dress,” I said, remembering the shop.
“But I remember those people now. Jeez, I told them we had a chuckwagon. We thought they were coming after us and we had to climb that little mountain,” Jack said.
“Yeah!”
“I had a big asthma attack that night.”
“Sure you did. And we were opposed to the east.”
“Meredith was. We agreed to be opposed, too. She told us all about how bad the east was.”
“Isn’t it weird that she’s talking about moving there now?”
“No talking, please,” said the tennis instructor to Jack and I. No talking, keep it to yourself and write it kid, write it before you forget it.