by Anne Lamott
HE went with her to the pro shop for her meeting with Peter, and he waited while she went inside. He sat on the weather-beaten wooden bench outside Peter’s office, underneath a little Japanese maple, its foliage now the color of flames. She gave him one last look before going in, as if she were about to step onto the gangplank of a slave ship.
PETER stared at her, so personally hurt and disappointed that you’d have thought she had scratched his van with a nail. She tried to meet his eyes but couldn’t.
“Do you have anything to say?” he asked, and she cringed.
“I don’t do it anymore is all,” she said.
She thought she might faint. Something inside her was uncoiling, spinning out with a bad burned smell. She thought of those little disks she used to light on the Fourth of July, when she was still a kid, where long cinder snakes spiral out at you.
She listened to him talk about the disgrace that her cheating brought on him, the disgrace Simone’s getting knocked up brought on the whole club. Sentences poured out of his mouth like black ash snakes. “You did not resist temptation,” he said. “Each of us must resist it every day,” and she imagined that he was going to shout, Bad dog! at her in the next breath. He would have to rethink their whole arrangement, he said. Only a couple of kids could have the kind of cheap junior membership she and Simone had enjoyed, had taken advantage of, had stained with their respective behavior. Rosie slowly lifted her head. He was red in the face, and a fat blue vein stood out on his forehead. Why, he asked, should someone like himself, who had worked so hard and so honestly to get to where he was today, teach a person with so little respect for the rules? Huh? She raised her shoulders and let them fall, shrugging to show she had no answer. He was so disappointed in her that he was shouting, and spit collected in the corners of his lips. She thought he was acting a little nuts, like one of those angry preachers on TV, and she had to look away. She scanned the rows of tennis balls; the rackets hung on hooks in the Peg-Board, waiting to be sold or strung; the beautiful clothes on the rack, white as snow, unsoiled.
Then she thought of Simone.
She saw Simone’s face up close, her wide gray eyes, the little white flecks of peel on her nose. And thinking of Simone gave her strength. Without looking at him, she got up, and he shouted at her to sit down; serene as a sleepwalker, she left the pro shop.
“Hey!” he shouted at her back. “Get back in here.”
“Hi, James,” she said. “Let’s go.” They walked to the car in silence and drove home.
SHE had not played tennis since. Almost a month had passed. She had not decided what she was going to do in general, over the long haul, but for now, she was not playing. She had not yet been kicked out of the club, although she probably would be. Simone had been and said she did not care; neither did Veronica, Rosie reported. Veronica in fact was glad to save the monthly membership dues. James was secretly looking forward to doing the same.
SIMONE was wearing a baby blue smock in mid-October at the Fergusons’ kitchen table, eating a blackberry yogurt. Her face was full, brimming with health, her complexion still glowed, sweet and ripe and creamy. She had already added twenty pounds to her frame. But this day her eyes were slitted and fierce. The preliminary rankings had just come out, and she and Rosie were ranked second. Deb Hall and her partner Sue Atterbury were ranked number one.
Rosie was furious. She thought back to the meeting with the committee, saw Mr. Macete and Mr. Hall sitting there.
“You got taken,” said James.
Elizabeth squinted at him, one eye closed, and then turned to Rosie. “I have to say, Rosie, though, by the same token, you cheated. I couldn’t love and admire you more, but the fact remains—you cheated a bunch of kids out of wins that were theirs. You stole from them. You stole something. So maybe this is the right way for things to have turned out.”
There was a guilty, thoughtful silence in the kitchen. Everyone stared at the floor, darted glances at one another, clenched their jaws.
“Nah,” said James finally. “You should protest. Herb Hall can’t lower your ranking because you cheated, right? It’s all done by computers—wins and losses.”
“Yeah,” said Simone. “But if it’s too close, someone has to decide.”
“I want you two to play Palo Alto next month so badly,” said James. “I’ll drive you to the tournament every day.”
“You don’t even get it, James. You don’t get that I feel like I’ll have to pay for this my whole life.”
“For cheating?”
Rosie was breathing strangely, like a bull getting ready to charge, and Elizabeth felt a force like weather building inside her daughter.
Rosie wanted to scream, What do you fucking think?
But instead, still breathing strangely, she crawled onto her mother’s lap and cried for a while. Simone came and sat next to them and took Rosie’s hand.
James and Elizabeth exchanged glances.
“Rosie?” said her mother. “I don’t know what’s going on in you, but whatever it is, you have paid. Okay? You are free and clear.”
Rosie sat very still. I am not a cheater, she thought. I cheated … After a while, she asked in a small high voice, “I am?” And her mother nodded.
Free and clear, Rosie thought, and could have stood on the table to bellow, I have paid! I am free and clear.
ROSIE and Simone disappeared into the upstairs bathroom just before dinner. Simone sat on the toilet while Rosie studied herself in the mirror. She looked at her reflection, the laser blue eyes, the hateful long straight nose. She gathered her thick black hair into two handfuls, pigtails collected just above her ears, like a child of five, and she practiced smiling the way children do when asked to smile for a photograph, close-mouthed and strained, and she stared at herself this way until her lips began to hurt.
Sometime later, thick with intent, Rosie came downstairs looking for the big pair of scissors. When Elizabeth asked what she needed them for, she would not say.
“Will you tell me later?”
“You’ll just have to wait and see.”
When Rosie returned with the shears, Simone locked the bathroom door behind her and had Rosie sit down on the toilet.
“You sure about this?”
Rosie did not answer. She appeared to be in a trance. She saw herself as she was tonight, with a towel wrapped around her shoulders, and she saw herself listen to Herb Hall, cringing because of course he was right, cringing again as she listened spellbound to J. Peter Billings—of course they were right, she had cheated—and she saw herself holding a trophy, about to strike her face just below the eye, like someone trying to kill her.
“Well?” said Simone.
Rosie stared at her own reflection. “Okay,” she said.
Simone cut off all those shiny black curls. They dropped to the floor, lay in a pile like leaves. Rosie watched in the mirror as Simone hacked, snipped, trimmed, first to the length of a sixties pixie cut, then shorter and shorter until it was cropped and spiky, unevenly so, sheared to nearly a crew cut in places, with one Dr. Seuss sprout near the crown.
It looked pretty terrible in one way, and this made her feel afraid. Without all that extra hair hanging down, she was exposed, all eyes—focused on, like in a mug shot. Like she was guilty, which maybe was true. But at the same time, this face now looking back at her was new, like something that had emerged from an eggshell already looking as if it might be ferocious someday—like a baby dinosaur, instead of a chick. And this made her feel much less afraid.
Rosie stepped into the kitchen. Elizabeth gasped loudly, frightened at first. Rosie smiled proudly, shyly, staring down at her feet in their big untied black high-top sneakers. She looked as strange and spare as someone recently sprung from a concentration camp. Scalp showed in one or two places. Elizabeth could hardly catch her breath. “Good Lord,” she said.
“Wow,” said James, looking back and forth between Simone, who stood there still holding the scissors, and Rosie, who was
meeting her mother’s stare.
“God, Rosie. It’s so—what’s the word, James?”
“Stark.”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth. “Stark, and beautiful.” Rosie smiled rather gently and ran her hand through the feathery bristles. She felt scared to death that she looked like a freak, that she would be ridiculed; what would the popular girls say, let alone the boys? Look, there goes the Shavehead, with slutty old Simone. But it was the right thing to do. She was different now, she was free and clear. The plates of the earth had shifted and settled inside her, and the world should know.
JAMES took them all out for dinner that night, everyone but Simone, who wanted to go home and read her baby books. Veronica had bought her a book called What to Expect the First Year, and Simone was studying it every night, as if for a final exam.
He took them to a ramshackle seafood place two towns away that he had always wanted to try. Elizabeth and Rae walked on ahead in silence, James and Lank followed behind, and Rosie took up the rear. In most ways her hair really looked quite awful, all tufts and spikes and patches of near baldness, but Elizabeth was struck by another kind of beauty she was seeing in Rosie for the first time. She shone with the same kind of loveliness so many women develop who have been sick with cancer, when so much excess has been stripped away, and their eyes are radiant. Rosie’s eyes gleamed blue as sapphires.
Something Charles had said came to Elizabeth now: that all that fear she’d felt all those years that Rosie would die was really the fear she’d felt as a child that she would die; that there was no one she could count on as a child, no one knew how to help her be safe inside her parents’ crumbling marriage; and so death must have seemed a relaxing alternative to the tremendous anxiety she felt all the time. Yet curiously, finally seeing her child resemble all those children Elizabeth had noticed with dismay over the years, whose hair was growing back after chemotherapy, somehow lessened the fear.
INSIDE the restaurant were big empty cable spools for tables; the wood was so heavily shellacked that Elizabeth knew it would be greasy. Nets hung from the walls, trapping crabs, a lobster, starfish, floaters, all as if to proclaim to the diner that all the fish served here was fresh: Look! Freshly caught fish! Here are the nets! See for yourself! Above the bar was a stuffed rabbit with antlers, a moose mounted nearby, and hideously, a stuffed giraffe’s head.
They were seated, and right away Rosie began doing origami with an empty sugar packet she’d found in the abalone-shell ashtray.
“How you doing, girl?” asked James. “What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” she said sullenly. “I’m thinking about, how could Peter always be such a great pro and teach me so much, and then—fire me? How could he stop liking me?”
“He didn’t stop liking you,” said James. “He just felt you didn’t reflect well on him anymore. He needs the surface to be perfect, to have all these perfectly successful kids. But we don’t need that. We think you’re great. I mean—you know—mostly. Okay?”
Rosie nodded. “Okay. But I’m going to totally show him.”
“Yeah?”
Rosie emptied a new sugar packet into the ashtray and carefully folded it into an accordion.
“Because you shouldn’t ditch someone the first time they have problems, right? I mean, I never did anything before that was wrong.”
The waitress appeared at their table with their sodas.
“Any questions?” she asked.
“How big is the large crab Louie?” asked James.
“Big.”
“Big as a bale of hay?”
“No. But pretty big.”
Rosie looked around the room, at the statue of a lighthouse, the giraffe, a wooden lobster. The life jackets on the wall made her think of drowning, of all the nights she’d lain in bed as a child and imagined her own death at sea, her mother suffocating underwater. She felt a chill blow through her mind, like a breeze of fear, and she ran her hand over her bristly head. “You’re gonna be sorry,” she said, whispering to her lap, seeing Peter in her mind, hardly moving her lips, hardly making any sound at all.
“What did you say?” her mother asked.
“I said, ‘You’re going to be sorry.’ To Deb and Sue.” She glowered. Elizabeth nodded. Rosie looked at a ratty deer’s head mounted on a plaque, hanging above the bar. “James James Morrison Morrison,” she said under her breath, whispering into her chest, “commonly known as Jim, told his other relations not to go blaming him.” She noticed out of the corner of her eye that her mother was staring at her mouth, as if lipreading or straining to hear the murmur of the poem.
“Rosie?” said her mother. “What are you whispering now?”
Rosie pursed her lips. “Nothing,” she said, exasperated. “God.” But she noticed her mother was smiling with a pleasure that looked like incredulity. This seemed a bit odd. She looked off at the giraffe’s head on the wall by the entrance and shook her head. “I don’t know,” Rosie said forlornly. “But, Mom? Why would anyone shoot a giraffe?”
ten
BY the day the year’s last tournament began, in Palo Alto in November, autumn was revealing itself, in the sudden cold and darkness, in the snap, the smokiness. The leaves on the trees bordering the courts and clubhouse had changed to yellow and red, Halloween orange, and brown, and some had fallen to the ground in drifts. Elizabeth couldn’t help but think of endings, of curtains being drawn. And then Simone stepped out onto the court, her belly so round now that she looked about to deliver. Her colors were changing, too. Her face was fair once more after a month of cool weather; her roots were growing out darker again, after the natural streaking of the summer sun. Her eyes, ringed in black eyeliner, were grayer, less blue—the gray of whales, of slate. She was dressed in maternity-paneled white shorts, covered by a huge plain white T-shirt. Rosie wore long baggy white shorts, a tiny white tank top, scuffed-up black high-top Keds, and lots of liquid liner. The bald patches had begun to grow in, although she still looked like she was out of the stream of life and into the stream of something else. She kept the extra ball in her pocket and watched her first opponents, whom she’d never seen before, extract theirs from their tennis panties. They wore tiny tennis dresses, their long shiny hair in pigtails tied with matching colored ribbons. Elizabeth was struck, studying the two younger girls, by how much hair describes personality and charm, while Rosie, running her hand over her wispy head, looked recently sprung from some terrible army camp, all of that curly shiny charm gone, pared down to the stuff of which she was really made. A number of people had come to watch them play their first match, Rosie the cheater with the weird punk haircut and her pregnant fourteen-year-old partner. The daddy was at San Jose State, people said, and it was true. He played second singles on the tennis team. One of the older boys had heard from Jason and now passed it along that Jason had not spoken to Simone since early summer. People also came to watch Rosie and Simone play their second- and third-round matches, which they won easily, and they came in droves to watch their semifinals, which they won in three sets. Peter never showed at all, not even to watch his other students. Through all four matches, Simone moved about the court awkwardly, and Rosie automatically began to cover for her, poaching more shots at the net, running back to chase down any lobs that came to either of them. It was her mission now to cover for Simone and the baby, to run interference for them, be their bodyguard, their legs. And at the same time she was aware, or at least imagined, that people were watching her line calls, watching to see if she’d cheat.
She was playing practically anything that didn’t actually hit the back fence. She played shots that her opponents hit out, that were clearly out, refusing to risk the appearance of cheating, and in their semifinal match, played one ball that landed at least a foot past the baseline. Rosie stared at where it landed on the red asphalt, at the twelve inches between the ball and the white baseline, and without even exactly meaning to, in some sort of trance, she called out, “Good shot.”
&nbs
p; Simone studied her for a moment. Rosie winced. Simone closed her eyes.
People arrived for their championship match the next day at noon. Elizabeth, James, Rae, and Lank sat together in the stands. Veronica tottered into sight midway through the warm-up rallies, wearing wedgies and one of Simone’s old tennis dresses. She looked worn. She sat on the bottom row of the bleachers, flanked by her salon’s manicurist and masseuse, who stretched out their legs in the sun.
Sue and Deb were younger than Rosie and Simone, both much smaller, too, and in their prim little-girl dresses and ponytails got to assume the role of underdogs, even though they were now the number one ranked team. Rosie tramped around during the warm-up rally, killing time, shorn head high; Simone lumbered. Sue and Deb tore around the court like kids inside a pinball machine; Rosie and Simone, with their black liquid liner, plodded about like bored Europeans. Deb, bouncing about while waiting for each shot, darted to each ball with feverish concern. In between shots, she grabbed and tucked extra balls under her bloomers with such industry that it was something like playing against a wired little chipmunk who loved tennis but was, at the same time, preparing for winter.
“Who’s the dad?” Elizabeth heard someone call out from the stands, but when she whipped around to see who might have said it, all eyes were on the court, swiveling back and forth. Veronica slowly, slowly turned her head to peer up at Elizabeth. Elizabeth waved and Veronica smiled, then turned to watch her daughter. Simone’s T-shirt, wet with sweat after five minutes of rallying, clung to her huge stomach so tightly that even from the stands you could see her big knot of a belly button.
Finally the match began. The girls had been given a referee, a middle-aged woman named Mrs. London, who sat on the lifeguard chair and kept score out loud, leaving the line calls to the girls. Rosie and Simone got off to a bad start. Rosie, serving first, tried to serve like Luther had taught her, but double-faulted twice and missed an easy backhand. Everyone else held serve, and Rosie served again at one-three. She was unable to concentrate. She kept looking around for Peter, who wasn’t there, and Luther, who wasn’t either. You could hear the crowd gasp when Deb or Sue chased down a tough volley or got to the net for a drop shot; they were yipping encouragement to each other, high-fiving, clenching their fists in victory. The crowd loved it. It was very American. Rosie and Simone, however, in eyeliner that was already beginning to smear, looked dark and ethnic, like gypsies. Rosie was flushed with shame at being rooted against, at playing poorly, but she held serve, sending the second serve over in a little puffball that the opponents had trouble returning. Three games later, there was thunderous applause, as the younger girls took the first set.