They kept staring at me. I didn’t recognize them but wondered if they recognized me. Finally one said, “OMG.”
The other said, “Later!” in an unnecessarily loud voice and they forced their way toward the swinging doors behind me. I thought I heard laughter from the corridor. The cheerleaders had been standing in front of a door to the room for all the swim team equipment and training tables. I heard muted voices from inside. Fearing what was on the other side but not giving any conscious thought to what the source of fear might be, I turned the knob and pushed the door open wide.
Two heads turned to me in alarmed synchronization. One was Liz Betterton, still in her cheerleader uniform, but with her skirt raised over her lower back while she bent forward and rested her elbows on the training table. Behind and inside her was a football player, also still in uniform. Number eleven. No helmet but eye black, shoulder pads and jersey, his football pants in a puddle around his cleated feet.
Liz’s face went from surprise to fear and I knew at once that it was fear for herself and reputation, not fear for damage to me. The football player’s face went from surprise to amusement. He said, “Hey, buddy, what the hell? Beat it.” He showed no recognition of who I was or even that there could be another competing for Liz.
Number eleven. It occurred to me in that moment that this was the punter, a fact I confirmed in the obsessive and depressive months that followed, using a team program. The damn punter.
I stepped back, leaving the pool, the gym and the school, the equipment room door still open so they’d have to untangle first if they wanted privacy again.
I walked to my car which was parked on a street off campus and realized then that I had never been the boyfriend. Not the primary. I had never parked in her driveway but down the street. I didn’t speak with her parents because they thought she was dating someone else. She wasn’t interested in meeting mine. Our routine wasn’t a rebellion. It was a fraud.
I had been unpracticed in the art of socialization. I didn’t know enough honest people and dishonest people so I had never learned to tell the difference. I knew one girl and she turned out to be dishonest. Brutally so.
I drove from campus knowing I’d never return. My window away from tennis that had been full of light was bricked over. So I returned to tennis the way a bulimic returns to the bathroom having been called fat. Dad won another round.
The woman I thought of as a kind of salvation, who had gotten a closer look at me than anyone else, found me interesting only as a toy on the side while she dated the punter. I was an oddity, a dropout, an Elephant Man.
CHAPTER
10
Mom and Dad knew Liz only from what they saw through the living room window as we would drive off. They didn’t ask after her much and so I spent two days numb and feeling more alone, surrounded by people I couldn’t reach and who couldn’t reach me. On the third morning Mom stood alone in the kitchen when I walked in. Dad was out for a breakfast meeting with an investment advisor. There was a big difference between Dad being out of the room and out of the house altogether. A feeling of the military at-ease command when you knew he wouldn’t drop in at any moment.
Mom was still so beautiful. She could have been a soap opera star. I didn’t want to talk about Liz. Didn’t know how to. “Do you think I should play tennis?” I said. I still hadn’t given Gabe the official answer.
“Oh, that’s your decision, honey.”
“I know that.” I didn’t know that at all. “But what do you think?”
“I think you have tremendous gifts. You can be a beautiful player. You are already, and it can open up a world of experiences to you.”
I nodded.
“I got to have an Olympic experience, travel to incredible places, compete, meet new people, all at a young age. I’d like for you to have experiences like that.”
“What do I have to give up?”
She made a sweet, sad smile. I’d say it was in response to my question but she always seemed to have a sweet, sad smile. She did take a very long time to answer, though. “A casual life.”
I knew what she meant. “Yeah,” I said.
“One year with Gabe sounds very reasonable.”
I nodded.
“Anton, if you stop fighting your father, if you support him, most of the difficulties will go away. It will be so much easier if you go along with it.”
“If I surrender to it.”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” Her voice didn’t get louder but it got harder. I didn’t know how much she loved Dad. It wasn’t the kind of love affair teen girls dream about but I guessed she loved him and was loyal to him and wouldn’t criticize him. “I mean work alongside him. Work together.”
“Together,” I repeated to my shoes.
“Anton, he wants what’s best for you. There’s nothing wrong with that. Don’t you want that also?”
“Who gets to determine what’s best for me?”
I think she had wanted not to tell me what to do, to let it be all my decision, but she was struggling with that and I had given her an out. “You asked my opinion. I think a year of dedicating yourself to tennis is what you should do.”
We heard steps in the hallway. Panos was slapping his shoes on the hardwood extra loud as a courtesy to let us know he was coming. We waited the few seconds in silence to let him come.
Panos and Mom were closer than me and Mom. They got to spend a lot of time together since Dad was always with me pushing tennis. Panos was great at breaking tension and he knew how to make Mom happy. He pressed his hands over her ears and pulled her forehead in for a kiss, then he smacked her bottom on the way to the refrigerator.
“What’s doin’, mama-san?” he said.
I laughed. He had a great older-brother style.
“Your brother and I are talking about Gabe’s proposal.”
“Yes, the decent proposal.” He drank milk from the carton directly.
I hated when he did that. No one else in the family did that. “Christ, Panos. Get a glass. Disgusting.”
He had more from the carton and made sure some dripped down his chin. “Pretty boy,” he said to me.
Mom took the opportunity. “Why don’t you boys talk for a while.” She left the room.
Panos waited until we couldn’t hear her steps. “What did she tell you?”
“Take the deal.” If I really wanted to talk about Liz, Panos was the only choice, but I didn’t want to put into words the details of what I had seen. The humiliation and the actual hurt were worse than silent suffering. She was just another thing I couldn’t talk about with anyone.
“Yeah.” He put the milk away. “She has to. You know that, right?”
I wasn’t ready to concede that. “Aren’t you ever pissed at Mom? Disappointed?” Better just to talk about tennis, Mom and Dad. What used to cause choking claustrophobia now felt like a safe place compared to the acute crisis of Liz.
Panos sat at the breakfast table across from me. He had no idea that anything else was consuming my thoughts. He couldn’t have. Tennis was plenty to explain any upset I showed. He loved Mom and he loved me. He reached over the table and put his hand on my upper arm. “Mom tries. She does things, things behind the scenes, more than you know. It’s not easy. It puts some of the heat on her but it takes some off you. Nobody can change Dad. All anyone can do is try to soften things a little.”
I nodded.
“I’ll tell you a little secret.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll find out soon enough anyway. She enrolled in classes to get a degree in child psychology.”
“That’s good. That’ll give her some independence, something outside the house,” I said.
“It’s a way for her to take some power back. With you.”
I knew what he meant. It wasn’t power back from me. It was power back from Dad regarding me. “You think it’s about my childhood or her own?” I was still struggling to parallel-process my flash fire with Liz and the slow bu
rn of tennis.
“Both. You’re definitely a lot of it. She loves you, she cares. She’s trying to figure out a way. She used to be more of a match for Dad but when one person in a relationship takes charge more often that becomes a pattern, then the pattern creates roles for the people in the relationship and over years people move deeper into their roles. It’s not that she’s been beaten down, really. But she allowed this to be her role.” Panos shrugged. “Beneath all that, she’s in your corner. She wants what’s best for you. Right now she thinks that’s tennis.”
“I guess so.” I looked at Panos then out the kitchen window. “So of course I’m going to take the deal.”
“Of course,” he said. “And it was never a deal anyway. Maybe Gabe thought so, but I bet he’s too smart for that. It was always an ultimatum. A softened ultimatum.”
“One year.”
“Right.”
“Do you think I can stop after one year if I want?”
“You’d have to put up a major stink.”
“I might.” Although the one-year bargain was less important to me than it was before the Saturday football game. I might want to bury my head even longer than that.
“You might.” He nodded. “Anton, taking it one year at a time is a good approach. It’s a good way to think about it.” He was deciding whether or not to tell me his next thought. He decided yes. “There’s something you should also get used to. I used to think you’d have to play until you lost. Until your ranking got so low and hopeless, but that won’t be the end. Dad knows what a great player you are, he’s seen it. We all have. You’ll play until you play your best, then your best will win and you can’t stop until your best can’t win anymore. You’re going to be playing tennis for a long time.”
“Unless I go nuclear.”
Panos nodded. “You could. And you’d still have a brother in your life. But that’s all.”
I filled my lungs and exhaled all of it through my teeth. “One year at a time,” I said.
“Can you do it?”
“I just might be able to trick myself into doing it.”
Two hours later Dad got home. He announced he had hired a sports psychologist and I had an appointment the next morning.
CHAPTER
11
The next morning I woke to my mother sitting on the side of my bed, staring into my blinking eyes as I focused and tried to distinguish dream from day. “Mom?”
Her hand was resting on my chest over my heart. “Good morning.”
I pushed myself up so that I was leaning back on my elbows. “What’s up?”
“I wanted to apologize to you for what I said yesterday. I didn’t handle that well. I shouldn’t have told you what to do.”
“I asked you what you thought. It’s fine, Mom. Don’t worry about it.”
“The truth is I don’t know what you should do. Which is more reason that I shouldn’t have answered.” She cleared her throat and started in on what she wanted to tell me and I could tell she had rehearsed the first line of it. “The clearest memories I have from when I was less than ten years old have nothing to do with birthday parties or vacations or barreling down a ski slope. The clearest memories I have are the times I would go to my mother on a rainy day in Minnesota and complain that I was bored. Do you know what she’d say? She’d say ‘Good.’”
“That’s not very helpful.”
“It was, though. She’d say, ‘Good, I’m looking forward to seeing what you do about that.’”
“What’s so memorable about that?”
“It’s memorable because even then I recognized what a gift that was. The gift to learn how to do it myself. To grow, imagine. It’s a gift I’ve never been able to give to you.”
It felt as though she was unloading her regrets on me which was doubly unfair. “I’m doing fine, Mom.”
“Are you? How can a person be aware of his absence of imagination?”
“It’s unimaginable.”
She was too busy lamenting her parenting to laugh. “There’s great value in spare time, in boredom. Early in life, it’s instructive. If it only ever comes late in life, it will be hard because you won’t have the tools for it.”
She was giving her work and me, her work product, a failing grade. It was a judgment, resigned and sad. I wanted to scream, “And so what now, Mom!,” but I knew she had no solution. This was not to be a constructive moment. It was only self-loathing, which I disliked witnessing, and pity for me, which I disliked even more. “Thanks, Mom. Very uplifting.”
* * *
The whole way to the psychiatrist’s office I wondered if there would be a sofa. Instead, there was a wide and very deep stuffed leather chair with fat armrests and I sat all the way back so my legs couldn’t bend to ninety degrees. Sitting that way naturally made me feel like a kid in a grown-up chair. I wondered if it was a deliberate tool to get patients in the frame of mind for regressing to childhood memories.
Dad had dropped me in the parking lot in Bryn Mawr and driven off to get coffee, just one town over and about ten minutes from our house. I was buzzed into a small, shared sitting area that fed into a maze of hallways and doctors’ offices. Every six feet or so in the halls was a round, white noise dampener about the size of a smoke alarm, except these were on the floor and made the constant static noise of an old-time TV that’s turned to no channel at all.
Dr. Ford sat facing me in an office chair on casters and his back to a small desk with only a phone and a pad of paper on it. The room was eight feet by eight feet with one window, no personal photos anywhere and almost nothing on the walls, just a large photo of the ocean. The sea, horizon and sky, not the waves breaking on a beach.
“How are you, Anton?”
“Good.”
“In our first session I’ll take a lot of notes if that’s okay?”
“Of course.”
“After that we’ll mostly talk and I won’t take notes but today we may cover a lot of information.”
“Sure.”
We covered all my significant relationships, who the characters in my life were. Grandparents, all deceased, parents, Panos, coach, tutor, a couple boys from school I was friends with but hadn’t spoken with on the phone in more than a year, a girl from school I thought was good looking but spoke to only a few times and never asked out and hadn’t spoken to in more than two years. I mentioned Ben Archer as a tennis rival though I didn’t know why I included him as a name for Dr. Ford. I’d never spoken to Ben off a tennis court. I mentioned Liz as an ex-girlfriend and moved right on.
It didn’t take long and I wondered if Dr. Ford found the list as short and disturbing as I did but he had a good poker face and I couldn’t tell.
He had me start with some of my earliest memories at home, at school, when I first felt love for tennis, first felt hate. I’m so bad at remembering stuff like that, especially on the spot, but I picked some examples. My first school memory was running out of the kindergarten schoolhouse to Mom, who picked me up, and we drove to a field where she had rented a garden plot to grow vegetables. My first memory at home was helping Mom do a load of laundry and spilling the cup of liquid detergent across the top of the washing machine and we made a game of Zamboni to push the soap into the machine on top of the clothes. The first I felt love for tennis was acing Dad for the first time a few years ago. For hate, I joked I’d have to narrow it down and get back to him. He laughed and let it go at that.
“Do you want to win at tennis?”
I had just downloaded Bull Durham and I paraphrased Tim Robbins. “Winning’s better than losing.”
He smiled. “I think I can help you win. Like many sports, and especially tennis, winning is a mental exercise. If we’re honest with each other in here, if the real you shows up each time you’re here, I can give you tools to help you win.”
“Okay, great,” I said. I didn’t realize it at the time but this doctor was wrong for me. What he had asked was wrong and I would realize it soon, but I didn’t know
it then. Asking if I wanted to win at tennis should have been the second question, only if I had already answered yes to the question of whether I wanted to play tennis.
Dr. Ford skipped that part because he worked for Dad, not for me. He made no distinction between the goals of making me a great person and a great tennis player, but that lack of distinction was my whole problem in the first place. Anyway, I didn’t understand this yet, and it also felt good just to have a safe place to talk. I talked so little about anything during the usual days. Maybe I could release some of the Liz toxins here. It still made my stomach cramp to conjure the memory.
“How do you feel about your new coach?”
“I like Gabe a lot.”
“Do you think you can win with Gabe?”
“I do.”
“Why is that? What’s different?”
“He really knows the game. Dad knows a lot but he was never a pro, never had formal training. Gabe has already taught me some small things. Subtle things that help. He makes practice a little more fun.”
“Good. And is your dad still involved?”
“Sort of. Gabe and I practice at the house so Dad’s always there. He’s aware of everything but he stays out of it while Gabe’s there and sometimes we’ll talk after Gabe leaves. He seems to want to give Gabe some room. Dad was an athlete so he respects the player-coach relationship.”
“Good. That’s good. So would you say you feel supported?”
I hadn’t thought about it that way before but I considered that I had a tennis court in our backyard, an expensive coach, plenty of rackets and balls, transportation to any tournament, a dad who was newly giving me some space. “Yes, I think so,” I said.
“Will you practice today?”
“At two o’clock.”
“What will you be thinking when you step on the court today?”
Gabe had played against Federer, Nadal, Murray when he was younger. He got his ass kicked by all of them but he’d seen them up close. “I want to impress Gabe.”
“You want to be a great player,” said Dr. Ford.
“I do.”
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