But that would have taken more words than he had to spare, so he hung up and told Joy, who had a lot of words to spare about Hien, and Hien’s mother, who’d never played tennis as far as Joy knew but did have an athletic way about her, so Joy bet that was where the grandson had inherited his talent, and she hoped the boy wasn’t naughty, because Hien had been very naughty as a child.
Eventually Joy ran out of words, and they went out on the court and began to warm up, and Stan’s crook knee felt good. They moved to the baselines, got into a rhythm as easy and familiar as sex, and Stan found himself thinking of his own father and their secret Friday-afternoon matches, which had gone on for years, like the secret assignations of a double agent.
Of course, they couldn’t play on the backyard court his dad had built with his own hands. After he left, his dad had never crossed the threshold of his own home ever again.
They met instead at a crummy local court surrounded by scrubby bushland near a seedy scout hall. The surface was cracked, the net sagged, but the tennis was beautiful.
Stan’s father said that one day he’d see his son play at Wimbledon. He said it as if he’d been given inside information.
When Stan was sixteen his father died on a train platform waiting for the 6:45 a.m. to Central. Instantly dead. Just like old mate Dennis Christos. “No great loss,” said his mother, who believed that Stan had not seen his father for years and would not have comforted her son for his loss even if she’d known the truth. She was not a mother who gave comfort. When his boys were children and got fevers and Joy tended to them, her hand stroking their hair, Stan sometimes felt a deplorable ache of envy. His sons accepted their mother’s love in such a cavalier fashion, as if it was their birthright, and maybe sometimes he was tougher on them, Troy especially, because of his envy.
For many decades he rarely thought of his father and he never spoke of him, not until the day he and Joy went to Wimbledon and he heard his father’s voice, so clear and deep in his ear, as if he were sitting right next to him, “Well, isn’t this something for a boy from the bush.”
That was the first time in Stan’s life that he could remember his body overreacting to a feeling, to a mere thought in his bloody head. He never told Joy what he felt that day. They both pretended it was some strange, unspecified illness that had struck him down. How could he tell her that being at Wimbledon didn’t just cause him to grieve his own lost career, and his children’s lost careers, but the long-ago loss of the kind, loving man who so notoriously assaulted his mother?
It was his father who taught him to be on guard for the ghastly apparition of a man’s temper.
“This is what you do,” he told him, more than once, as they sat sweating companionably in the shade after each Friday-afternoon match. “If you ever lose your temper with a woman or child, you must leave. Walk out the door. Don’t stop to think. Don’t say a word. Don’t come back until you’re calm again. Just walk away. Like I should have done.”
Stan took that advice literally, precisely, with deathlike seriousness. He believed a man’s temper to be his most hideous flaw. When Troy jumped the net and attacked Harry Haddad all those years ago, Stan knew he’d failed, and when Troy made stupid decision after stupid decision, Stan wiped his hands of him. He had done what he told his children and students to never do: he’d given up. You never give up. You fight to the last ball. The match isn’t over until the last point is played. But he gave up on his son.
Recently, he’d begun listening to one of Joy’s podcasts about trading. Joy said it was boring and she was right, but Stan persevered and yesterday he’d called Troy and said, “How’s work?”
“Work is good, Dad,” said Troy tersely.
Stan took a breath, took courage, and said, “I guess the market is like your opponent. Is that it? You’re competing against the market? Trying to predict what it does next?”
There had been such a long silence that Stan felt the color rise on his face. Had he said something so unbelievably stupid that Troy was rolling about laughing? Because his old man was as thick as a brick?
But then Troy said slowly, “Yeah, Dad, it’s exactly like that.”
“Right,” said Stan. “So—”
Troy interrupted him. He said, “You know when I got really good at this, Dad?” and he didn’t wait for Stan to answer. He said it all in a rush. “When I stopped being a show pony. When I put my ego away. When I got consistent and strategic.”
He said, and it was hard to understand him because his voice went a bit wonky for a moment, “Every single thing you taught me on the court, Dad, I use every single day of my life.”
He’d never taught the boy to get fucking pedicures, but still, it was nice to hear that.
It had been bloody nice to hear that.
A plane flew above, and Stan tipped back his head and watched it streak across the sky. It was possible he might never step on board a plane again, which was fine with him, he was happy down here.
Joy came to the net. She wore her hair in a young girl’s ponytail when she played. She still had the best legs he’d ever seen. Her volley still needed work, but she wouldn’t listen. Her cheeks were flushed from exertion and the cold air. She loved the sport as much as he did, as much as he loved her, which was more than she would ever know. He’d had no interest in playing doubles until he met her. They were better players together than apart.
Each time she fell out of love with him, he saw it happen and waited it out. He never stopped loving her, even those times when he felt deeply hurt and betrayed by her, even in that bad year when they talked about separating, he’d just gone along with it, waiting for her to come back to him, thanking God and his dad up above each time she did.
Joy shielded her eyes to watch the plane disappear on the horizon. She dropped her hand and looked back at Stan.
She said, “Let’s play.”
Chapter 71
“If you hear the cabin crew say, ‘Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate,’” said the flight attendant, “first check that the area outside the aircraft is safe.”
She said “Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate,” in such a bored, bureaucratic monotone, it was funny. You couldn’t find the horror in the words.
The girl in 12F stopped listening to her exit-row responsibilities. No plane would crash during a pandemic. That would be too many disasters for the nightly news. Anyway, in the unlikely event of an emergency the muscly guy seated next to her would shove her aside and fling the exit door free.
She tugged at her mask. It itched.
Everyone fiddled incessantly with their masks, trying to adjust to this strange new world, only their frazzled eyes visible. Glasses fogged up. Some people kept pulling their masks down under their noses for refreshing sniffs of germ-scented air. Two women across the aisle scrubbed at their tray tables and armrests with disinfectant wipes as if they were cleaning up a crime scene.
The girl looked like a member of a nineties girl grunge band. Her hair was dyed inky black and shaved on one side. She wore ripped black jeans, chunky buckled motorcycle boots, and a lot of clanking jewelry that had set off the metal detectors at the airport: a bangle coiled with snakes, a skull necklace.
The girl was flying to Adelaide to visit her mother.
Her flight had been delayed multiple times so as to ensure bad moods for all. By the time she picked up her car rental and drove out to her childhood home, it would be past nine. She assumed her mother would be tucked up in bed, warm and cozy, don’t let those bed bugs bite, just as she’d left her in the gold-tinged light of dawn many months before.
“Bye, Mum!” she’d called. “Love you!” There had been no answer.
The night before that morning, she’d cooked dinner for her mother, as she always did when she visited. A tiny, exquisite, calorie-controlled meal on a big white plate. Two herb-encrusted lamb cutlets (all fat excised with surgical precision). Eight green beans. One small, perfectly shaped scoop of mashed potato. Her mother still watched what she ate.
You must never stop watching! Insidious calories can creep onto your plate and onto your body. Sometimes calories can find you in your dreams.
Her mother, dressed as though for church, although she’d never been to church, polished off everything on that big white plate. Afterward, she picked at the pieces of meat between her teeth with a toothpick while proclaiming the meal to be “quite good.”
Then her mother showered for a long time, cleaned her teeth, and changed into her nightie and dressing gown, after which she sat on the couch to watch television with a small glass of vodka (the lowest calorie alcohol, no carbs, fat, or sugar) and two yellow sleeping tablets. The doctor had said she should take only one tablet thirty minutes before bed, but what did he know? The girl’s mother said, “You should make your own decisions when it comes to your health.” She took two tablets every night and slept like the dead.
The girl stood in the kitchen for a long time staring at her mother’s plate before she scraped the gnawed bones into the bin.
Then she went out to the living room and spoke to the back of her mother’s head. “Didn’t you teach me to never eat everything on my plate?”
Her mother said, “You’ve got that topsy-turvy! You teach your children to eat everything on their plates.”
The girl said, “Your rule was the opposite. Never, ever finish everything on your plate.”
She looked at the shelves where all her ribbons and medals and trophies were displayed. She picked up a trophy. It was one of her least prestigious—just second place in a “tiny dancer” regional competition—but it was one of the largest and most impressive-looking. A gold-plated pirouetting ballerina on a chunky white marble base.
The girl remembered dancing for that trophy because she remembered everything. She remembered her mother’s tiny smile for her tiny ballerina. The tiny smile was the girl’s tiny reward for the blistered toes and bruised toenails, the shin pain, the ankle pain, the back pain, but above all, the pain of unrelenting hunger.
She said to her mother, “Don’t you remember? If I forgot to leave something on my plate you locked me in my room. Good dancers must learn to control their calories.”
Her mother continued to watch the flickering television. “I don’t know why we’re talking about this now.”
The girl didn’t know why she was talking about it now either. It had not been her plan. She was here to say goodbye. She was moving interstate with her new boyfriend. He was Irish, a painter. He thought she was normal. He thought it was sweet that she’d been a ballerina. His sister had been a ballerina too. The girl knew his sister’s ballet experience had been entirely different from her own.
The girl said, “Sometimes you locked me in my room with only water. I had to ration the water. That was a terrible thing to do to a little girl. I thought I would be there forever. I thought I would die. I think I might have come close to dying. A few times.”
Nothing.
“I have an eating disorder,” said the girl. “I’ve got issues with my thyroid, my iron levels, my teeth, my digestion, my brain, my personality. I’m not … right.” She paused. “You wrecked me.”
Canned laughter rose and fell from the television.
Finally her mother spoke. She sounded a little impatient, a little amused. “You always were such a liar, Savannah. You had a television in your room. Like a little princess in a castle! Just look at all those trophies! Don’t you think I had better things to do than drive you around to ballet recitals across the country? I had a life of my own, you know!”
So that’s how she lived with it. She did it the way so many people lived with their regrets and mistakes. They simply rewrote their stories. Her mother had re-created herself as a devoted mother: as if ballet had been her daughter’s favorite extracurricular activity, not her own obsession.
“You were only moderately talented,” said her mother after a long pause. Her words were beginning to slacken as the two sleeping tablets did their job. “You weren’t a protégé like your brother. I knew that from the beginning.”
Your father got the protégé.
The girl folded herself up. Neatly. Geometrically. Like origami.
She went back into the kitchen and cleaned with swift, hard, tiny, graceful movements. She scrubbed at a congealed spot of grease on the stove with a dishcloth, pulled tight over her thumb, until it was gone. She swept the floor. She cleaned the sink until it shone.
She went back out to her loving mother and found her sound asleep on the couch, head tipped back, her mouth open in a perfect oval shape, like one of those fairground attractions.
Her mother had said earlier that day that sometimes the sleeping tablets worked too fast and she fell asleep on the couch and woke with an aching lower back. She said this as if it were somehow the girl’s fault.
So the girl took charge. She picked up the remote and turned off the television. “Let’s get you to bed, sleepyhead! No sore back for you!”
She had to drag her under her armpits, but her mother was as light as air, as light as a tiny ballerina. She dragged her to the closest bedroom, which happened to be the one that had once belonged to the girl, the one with the old-fashioned lock on the door.
These days it was illegal to have bedroom doors that could be locked from the outside. A safety issue.
There seemed to be no safety issues when the girl was growing up.
The girl heaved her mother onto her old bed. She pulled the sheets up tight and smooth over her chest and under her mother’s chin.
Once she was done she found she was breathing fast yet with a controlled kind of exhilaration, as if she had performed something extraordinary yet ordinary, remarkable yet required, like thirty-two fouetté turns en pointe.
“Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.” She kissed her mother on her forehead. She felt her breath warm on her cheek. At the doorway she said, “Now, you know I do need to lock this door. That’s the rule. You gnawed on those bones like a disgusting little pig!”
The girl found the key to the bedroom door where her mother had always kept it, in the little trinket dish an ex-husband had given her as a gift. It had a cartoon of a man and a woman hugging on it. Hearts floated above their heads. It said: Love is … being loved back.
He’d been one of the nicer husbands, he’d taught the girl to cook, and then he was gone, taking his surname along with his cooking utensils. If he’d stayed, he would not have let what happened to her happen.
There were many people who would have stopped it, if only they’d known, if only they’d looked a little harder or bothered to ask a question or listen.
There were teachers and other ballet parents and doctors who could have noticed. Like the plastic surgeon who had seen her when she was a child. Dr. Henry Edgeworth. Her mother took her for an appointment to see how much it would cost to pin back her “unfortunate ears.” (It cost too much.) “I’m hungry,” the girl whispered to the doctor as he studied her unfortunate earlobes, and he chuckled as if it were funny that he was examining a malnourished child.
He’d recently paid an expensive price for that kindly chuckle, although he thought he’d paid a bargain price for an affair with a trashy young girl he met at a nightclub. Either way was fair.
While her mother slumbered that night, the girl went to the supermarket. She bought six boxes of Optimum Nutrition Protein Crunch Bars. They looked delicious! She bought a shrink-wrapped pallet of bottles of water. She carried the supplies into the bedroom and left them on the floor near the bed. Her mother breathed peacefully through her mouth.
She wrote her mother a friendly note. This looks like a lot but you will need to ration carefully. Remember: self-discipline!
She relocked the door.
The girl left that night for Sydney. It was back when there were no border closures, when you could move across the country with your new Irish boyfriend and not think about it.
She hadn’t expected to be gone as long as she was. She got busy! Life! Her relationship d
idn’t work out, but she met new people and visited old friends and acquaintances. She tied up some loose ends. She had a few cash windfalls. She even did some charity work. She “reached out,” as the Americans said, to her famously successful brother, and he was kind, and they agreed they would get together once this crazy world returned to normal. He said he never wanted to see either of their psychotic, fucked-up parents again, and she understood. Neither did she, really, but she was a devoted daughter just like her mother had been a devoted mother.
She kept the key on a chain around her neck. It seemed important, essential even, to keep it close. It demonstrated her love.
“Going back home?” asked her muscle-bound seatmate as the plane began to taxi toward the runway. It was a time when people everywhere were going back home. The man had gentle doglike eyes over the top of his mask.
The flight attendant demonstrated what to do if an oxygen mask fell from the ceiling. First remove your mask. The virus will no longer be your main concern!
“I’m visiting my mother,” said the girl.
There were many ways a resourceful senior citizen could have, should have, may have, probably had freed herself from a locked bedroom. Kicked down a door. Banged on the window. Called out to a neighbor. Shouted to a neighbor—the bedroom was on the second floor and faced a brick wall, but still, it was possible. A child could study a window made of thick glass effectively locked by layers of ancient, impenetrable paint between the sash and the frame and find no way to break or open it, but a grown-up could find a clever solution. If I was a grown-up I could get myself out of here: that’s what the little girl had once thought. She had longed to be a grown-up, with money and food and agency, but she was a kid, just a kid who dreamed of a beanstalk she could climb to get out of that room and into the sky. She didn’t want the giant’s gold. She wanted the giant’s dinner.
Apples Never Fall Page 45