by Daniel Klein
With an oblong wooden racket, Stephanie Cyzinski is stroking hard felt-covered balls against the gymnasium wall. The balls feel leaden and so do her shoulders. Her hips are starting to ache too. That is good, she knows: No pain, no gain. Her father has identified her gluteus medius and hip adductors as her weak points; they are not muscles she needed to particularly develop for tennis, but for royal tennis, they are key for the ‘chase.’ And the chase is what royal tennis is all about.
She is weary, worn down as much by this grueling regime as by the pressure that drives her into the high school gymnasium every morning for an hour before classes, every afternoon from two-thirty to six, plus all day Saturday at the Boston Tennis and Racquet Club, the only royal tennis courts within a hundred miles. Her father’s argument is compelling, although more for its relentlessness than its logic. He has what he calls ‘inside poop’ that in one-and-a-half years Harvard will be in desperate need of a topnotch girl player of royal tennis, an antique form of indoor tennis that neither her father nor she heard of until one month ago. It is a weird game that seems more like pinball than tennis with balls bouncing off of jutting roofs and into narrow galleries. Apparently the sport persists at Harvard for the sole purpose of extending, unbroken, a two-century-old rivalry between Harvard and Yale, the last remaining American colleges where the game is still played. All Stephanie has to do is keep up her grades, push up her SATs fifty points, and most of all, become a first class royal tennis player, and she will leapfrog over thousands of other applicants to Harvard. And Harvard, Dad says, is a pipeline to any damn thing Stephanie could ever want.
The problem is, Stephanie is not sure what she wants. She is pretty sure she would like to travel—to Europe, maybe to Asia and Africa. If she goes to these places, she believes she will have a better chance at understanding where she fits in the world. That plan is pretty vague, she knows, so vague that she would not dare mention it to her father or mother. But she wonders if going on a journey—it feels more like a ‘journey’ than a ‘trip’—before even choosing a college might be the only way she will ever really find out what she wants to do with her life.
The only people she has talked to about this idea are Marta and Herb in the vigil group. As Stephanie expected, Marta said that it sounded like a good idea for something to do after college, when Stephanie would be more able to digest her experiences. Maybe Steph could learn Japanese or Urdu in college and then go to Asia. But Herb said it was a fabulous idea, that she would learn more about the world and herself in one year living in a foreign country than four years at any American college. Of course, that was typical of Herb; he calls himself an ‘anti-professor’ because he thinks most of what you learn in college is a load of crap. Weird how the people Stephanie felt she could be most honest with these days were Marta and Herb. Certainly more open than with her parents or teachers, but also more than with her school friends, including her boyfriend, Matt. She had told Matt about the Harvard business and he said she would be crazy not to take advantage of it.
But Stephanie does not see much of Marta and Herb anymore. Between her new workout program and her twice-aweek SAT prep tutorials, Stephanie had to cut back her vigil time to once a week, and often not even that. More than anything else, that is what makes her feel like a hypocrite—putting her personal ambition ahead of doing what little she can to stop the stupid war in Iraq. To stop kids her own age—kids like Bret Stephenson—from putting their lives at risk for no good reason. When she thinks about that, Stephanie is disgusted with herself.
At bottom, her dad’s scheme does not make any sense anyhow. In many ways, her experience at regular tennis is more of a handicap than a help; she has to unlearn as much as she has to learn. Did Dad actually believe she could become a champion at it in a single year?
But her father is consumed with this plan. He calls it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that could change her entire life. A couple of Saturdays ago, instead of taking the Mass Pike all the way to the downtown Boston tennis club, he had turned off at the Cambridge exit. “No workout today, Hon, we’re going to Harvard.”
She had never seen him as ecstatic as when they toured Harvard Yard with a group of other kids and their parents. It was as if he was going to apply there himself, start his life over as a Harvard man instead of a Canisius College man. And the truth is, Stephanie had a better time with her dad on that day than in years. They had held hands as they walked along Massachusetts Avenue back to their car. He did not mention royal tennis that entire day—he did not have to. The reason Stephanie Cyzinski works out twenty-plus hours every week is she cannot bear to break her father’s heart.
Starting as a knot in Stephanie’s right buttock, the cramp creeps down to her hamstrings where it puts her lumbar nerves into a brutal vice. Utter weakness precedes the pain. Her leg buckles and she falls hard onto the wood floor, bouncing on her left hip, then rolling half a turn onto her front where the floor takes another hit at her, this time to her jaw. She blanks out for a second, but the excruciating spasm in her thigh hauls her back to consciousness. She is sobbing hard—from the pain, of course, but when she hears the awful words gushing from her mouth, she knows her agony runs deeper than tissue and nerve.
“You’re . . . killing . . . me! Don’t you see? . . . You’re . . . killing . . . me!”
Lila deVries hears these words as she passes the gymnasium doors. She assumes that it is just sports talk—an outmaneuvered player giving her opponent a boisterous compliment— and continues on her regular, Friday after-school rounds, killing time before heading for the Nakota. But after a few steps, Lila stops. Nothing followed that burst—no scrambling feet or bouncing ball—and that silence is unsettling. She retraces her steps to the gym door, pushes it half-open, and peers inside. At first, she cannot see anyone in the gym, so she opens the door all the way and steps inside. Now she sees Stephanie Cyzinski in the nearest corner, rolling back and forth on her back, holding her left thigh in both hands. Stephanie’s face is flushed and wet, her eyes closed. She is whimpering.
“Hello?” Lila calls.
Stephanie does not answer.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeh. I just fell.”
“Sure?”
Again, no reply. Lila walks closer. She sees that some of the dampness on Stephanie Cyzinski’s face comes from tears sliding out of her unopened eyes.
“Should I try to find somebody?” Lila says. “You know, like the nurse?”
“I’m okay.”
Lila hesitates, then turns to leave. But at the door, she stops. “How about your father? Should I get your father?”
“No!” Stephanie cries vehemently.
“Whatever,” Lila replies, half to herself. She pushes open the door.
“Lila?”
Lila turns back again. Stephanie is sitting up. Her eyes are open and she is staring at Lila. Lila is surprised that Stephanie called her by name—surprised that Stephanie even knows her name—and she immediately chides herself for finding this gratifying. Lila does not move; she says nothing.
“I . . . I’m feeling kinda . . . I don’t know—crazy,” Stephanie says.
“You’re probably dizzy,” Lila answers.
“No. It doesn’t feel like that.”
Lila takes a couple of steps toward Stephanie. She studies her face. Stephanie’s pupils are dilated, her lips are trembling. She looks as if she is stoned, on a bad trip, but of course that could not be possible.
“Maybe some fresh air?” Lila asks.
“Yeh, some fresh air,” Stephanie says, but she does not get up.
Lila glances up at that the wall clock. It is past four o’clock, time to leave for work. Stephanie follows her eyes.
“I’ll be okay,” Stephanie says. “Thanks for stopping, though.”
Lila feels a rush of contempt for Stephanie and her brave face and good manners, but then she sees that Stephanie is weeping again.
“Need some help getting up?” Lila asks.
“Guess I do.”
Lila goes to her, reaches out both her hands. Stephanie grasps them and Lila pulls her to her feet.
“Thanks, Lila,” Stephanie whispers.
“Yeh.”
Side by side, they walk silently to the gym door, then down the corridor to the exit. Outside, Stephanie takes a deep breath. “I feel better,” she says.
“Do you still feel crazy?” Lila asks.
Stephanie manages a little laugh. “Just half,” she says. “Half crazy.”
“That’s the way I feel all the time,” Lila blurts out.
“Really?”
Lila shrugs. She certainly does not want to get into a discussion of her personal feelings with Stephanie Cyzinski and regrets that she seemed to open the door to one.
“Maybe half-crazy is normal,” Stephanie says.
Lila studies Stephanie’s eyes, trying to determine if the girl is making some kind of lame joke, but Stephanie looks dead earnest. She also looks shaky again.
“Actually, it’s the other way around for me,” Stephanie goes on. “Trying to be normal makes me crazy.”
“How do you mean?”
Stephanie starts to answer, but stops. Her face clenches. She takes a deep breath. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore.”
They are silent for a moment. Then Lila says, “I’m late for my job.”
“Hey, I’m fine now,” Stephanie says. Then, before Lila realizes what is happening, Stephanie abruptly hugs her and whispers, “You’re a good person.”
A moment later, Lila is trotting down the school driveway toward the highway, her long blonde hair fluttering behind her. She cannot get away fast enough.
* * *
As Ralph, the FedEx guy, always does when carrying a package into the shop, he informs Franny she looks like a million dollars. But clearly Ralph is not looking carefully today, possibly because the carton of greeting cards he is lugging in front of him comes up to his eyes. The real worth of Franny’s appearance today is way off the million dollar mark and she knows it. She looks this way on purpose, starting with the baggy jeans and frumpy, floral blouse she has been wearing for the last two days. Her hair is pulled back severely, fastened at the nape of her neck with an orange scrunchy, and there is not a spot of makeup on her face. Franny has decided to never again impersonate anybody, glamorous or otherwise, or to symbolize any cause or stance. Instead, she has resolved to present herself to the world as she really is: a regular townie of a certain age. Truth in advertising.
Franny watches Ralph hop back into the driver’s seat of his double-parked truck, check his rearview mirror, adjust his cap, and begin to back down Melville Street. She allows herself one quick glance up at the Phoenix—yesterday she spotted Babs and Gil Crespert striding into the theater, he with a sketchbook under his arm. Tweak, tweak. God knows what they had been doing in there—to the set or each other. Seeing no one there now, Franny heads for the shelf behind the counter where she keeps her carton cutter.
As promised, Gil had phoned a couple of times suggesting they get together before he returned to the city, but she had declined, politely the first time, sarcastically the next. “Come on, fella, it was just a one-nighter, a Halloween treat,” she said in their final conversation. “We’d both be disappointed if we tried for an encore.” She had been about to add an acknowledgement of what a sweet treat indeed it had been, but she desisted. The man already had enough vanity under his belt— and slightly below it—to carry him smugly back to New York. As for herself, she already had endured enough humiliation to keep her home and shop-bound for a month of Halloweens.
Franny presses the toggle on the cutter handle and slides out the blade. She cannot look at this instrument without thinking about the terrorists who crashed the plane into the Pentagon by threatening flight attendants with a box-cutter no bigger than this one. The idea that a tragedy of such massive proportions could be produced by something so small frightens her more than anything else about September 11th.
Franny kneels next to the carton and slices through the tape on top. Pulling up the carton flaps, she sighs. Inside, separated by strips of bubble wrap, are smart, paper-covered boxes containing greeting cards sorted by occasion—birthday, anniversary, Christmas, New Year, confirmation, bar mitzvah, sickness, bereavement. The elegant little boxes bespeak an earlier period of craftsmanship—classic proportions, sharp edges and corners, smooth, glossy paper casings in tasteful pastels. Years ago, after unpacking these boxes, she would bring them home to Lila who adored them. That was when Lila still took pleasure in meticulously organizing her possessions—her matchbook collection, pencils, pins, dried leaves, Christmas cards going back the length of her young life, and dozens of other treasures. She labeled each box in her neat handwriting and stacked them against the wall beside her bed. Whenever Franny brought home another bagful of them, Lila would shriek with delight and rush upstairs to start arranging her inventory all over again.
When had that stopped? Since then, nothing she gave her daughter pleased her as much; to be truthful, nothing she gave Lila after that pleased her at all.
Franny lifts out a birthday card box. Along with Christmas cards, these are her biggest sellers, but they have caused her the most exasperation, starting when she objected to the new, fixed-target cards: ‘From Grandmother to Granddaughter,’ ‘For My Uncle,’ ‘For My Mother-in-law,’ even, ‘For my Stepfather.’ It was obvious to Franny that by allegedly becoming more personal, these cards had crossed the line to utter impersonality. It was a cunning sales gimmick; a customer saw ‘From Grandmother to Granddaughter’ and she thought, ‘Well, isn’t that just the perfect one for me to give to little Nancy.’ It cut short the tedium of scanning them all, row by row, while simultaneously congratulating the buyer on the fine focus of her thoughtfulness. Never mind that she was turning the object of her good wishes into a cookie-cutter category. Franny had asked her card and stationery distributor to eliminate such cards from her shipments, but he—a dyspeptic man in his seventies who had serviced Berkshire County for more than forty years—countered that all greeting cards were guilty of the same charge. “If you want ’em personal, you don’t need a card—you write ’em yourself,” he told Franny. He had a point, she had to agree, but nonetheless she considered it a small victory for personhood when the next shipment arrived minus the offending cards.
But lately, more and more cards for all occasions have begun to disturb Franny with their callousness. Mean-spirited jokes replace expressions of affection, even if those tender expressions had been composed by a stranger in Kansas City who was paid by the word. Now there were birthday greetings that said, ‘10,000 sperm and you were the fastest?’ and ‘If your IQ was two points higher, you’d be a rock!’ For starters, they were not even funny, but beyond that, what was the significance of these sentiments on a day of personal celebration? Was civilization so far gone that words of fondness had evolved into insults?
Franny did not even bother to complain to the distributor about these cards. She let them pass in the name of free speech. She even accused herself of premature curmudgeonliness. Still, she detested those cards, hated selling them, judged harshly those customers who bought them, and filed them behind more genial cards in her display racks.
She picks up a box of bereavement cards, sets it on the floor beside her, and lifts off the cover. The topmost card pictures Jesus on the cross smiling beatifically. At least beatitude must have been the intent of the artist who rendered Him, but this artist was clearly of the same school of feel-good biblical imagery as the one who illustrated Lila’s children’s Bible, he who had inspired Franny’s ironic set design for How’s Never? In the card illustrator’s hands, beatitude came out looking like a barely-suppressed smirk. Franny smirks back at Him. And then she reads the message printed at the Son of God’s feet in Corsiva superscript:
‘Life is Short,
Death is Sure,
Time the Thief,
Love t
he Cure’
Jesus, what drivel! What simple-minded crap! Did they actually think their pathetic little rhyme would console some miserable, weeping widow who got this in the mail?
Franny’s lips suddenly begin to quiver. Tears fill her eyes and drop onto the card. She does not know what is coming over her. She does not recognize the dread that is ambushing her, nor can she grasp why it is attacking her now. She starts crying full out, bawling helplessly. Her arms are shaking, too. She stares at her trembling right hand. Beside it lies the carton cutter, blade extended. It takes all the control left in her to shove the cutter away, beyond her reach. And then she waits for the terror to release her.
CHARTER TWELVE
Herbert Blitzstein’s most popular course—indeed, the most highly enrolled course at Grandville Community College—is titled, ‘The Philosophy of Being Human.’ In large part this popularity is due to the fact that in the five years Herb has taught it, he has not given a single student a grade lower than a ‘C.’ But the students also like the course because Professor Blitzstein is funny; they say his lectures are like Seinfeld routines with some Chris John vocal impressions thrown in. And every once in a while—well, in truth, just twice in these past five years—there is a student who prizes the course because she actually understands what Herb is getting at.
There are only four books on the syllabus: Plato’s Republic; Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and The Analects of Confucius. And throughout the course only a single sentence remains written on the antique slate blackboard that was originally used for the shipping list of the building’s former occupant, Foster’s Printing Company. That sentence is from the Republic: ‘The state is the soul writ large.’
‘The Philosophy of Being Human’ is the course Herbert Blitzstein wishes he could have taken as an undergraduate at Brooklyn College or as a graduate student at the New School for Social Research, but even the latter school, acclaimed as it was for its creative curriculum, was stuck in the notion that philosophy was basically about arcane puzzles and not about what makes life worth living. Herb started designing the course when he was twenty-four and has been refining it ever since. He has no illusions as to why only two of the seventy colleges and universities he applied to for teaching positions responded; his ‘dream course’ did not fit in their curricula. More than that, it undoubtedly suggested to some department heads that the young man from Brooklyn had a few screws loose.