“What do you mean?” Rosie had asked that day on the river, her face knotted with anxiety, a feeling like a clenched fist in her stomach. “You’re late, but … wait … What do you mean, you hope you’re not pregnant? How could you be, when you said he didn’t put it in?”
Simone had not answered for a minute.
“I told you. He didn’t put it in all the way.”
Now, here in Modesto, with Simone’s period six weeks late and Simone already several pounds heavier, Rosie was trying to be supportive, listening to Simone go on and on about what if she was pregnant, and if she was, then maybe she’d keep the baby, and Rosie could be the second mother. It was like she was talking about getting a puppy. Rosie’s eyes were hooded in the dark. She would not really get to be the baby’s other mother; she would be the baby’s mother’s little thirteen-year-old friend. But she murmured to Simone yes, yes, discussing how great it would be. Simone would still get to play tournaments somehow—there were still a few details to work out. They yawned in the heat of the night, sweaty, dusty, tired. You could hear crickets, the river moving slowly through the town. Big moths sunned themselves on the dim porch light, a delta breeze wafted in through the screen, smelling of vineyards and almond orchards. The Modesto night was moonless, black, the stars at their brightest.
Rosie’s heart was pounding with fear and caffeine. She looked at her watch. It was after midnight. She looked at Simone. Simone’s eyes were closed and her mouth a little open.
“Simone?” she whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Are you falling asleep?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay. See you in the morning.” She had not brought anything to read. The porch light was still on; moths were still worshiping at it. She desperately wanted to hear her mother’s voice. She heard the whine of a mosquito and searched the walls and screens of the porch until she found it, a whiny black spot on the wall. She tiptoed to it, holding her slipper, and whacked it.
Simone opened her eyes. “Sorry,” Rosie whispered. “Mosquito.” Simone nodded, yawned, went back to sleep, and Rosie got back in bed. She had not been there but a minute when she heard another whine, started scanning the walls and air slowly until she found it on the ceiling above her. She picked up her slipper and tried to hit it, missed. It flew away, and she scanned until she found it again and killed it with her slipper. This time Simone did not wake up. Rosie lay back in bed for a second, until the next mosquito appeared, and she got out of bed to track it and kill it, stealthily, and then there was another, and Rosie bounded around feeling like a wired little rat on its hind legs.
Finally she thought she’d killed them all. Simone snored like an old pug. Rosie’s skin prickled and stung with heat and sweat, and she couldn’t get back in the sleeping bag, and she couldn’t turn off the porch light because she was too afraid, and she lay on top of the sleeping bag in her tiny baby-doll jammies. Her heart beat, frogs croaked from one of the nearby irrigation canals that crisscrossed the town, and she thought she heard footsteps; out on the sidewalk, she thought she saw spaces darker than night.
“Simone?” she whispered. No answer. It felt like a jungle inside the porch. One of her hot sweaty legs lay across the other like a boa. She imagined snakes slithering around the floor. She said the Lord’s Prayer and, on finishing it, said it again. “Mommy,” she whispered out loud. It scared her to have said it out loud. “Mommy,” she whispered again. She watched Simone sleep, and she cried for a minute out of loneliness. It was nearly one. They had to get up in six hours. She said the Lord’s Prayer again and had the sudden urge to jam her elbow into Simone’s eye socket. She saw herself sinking her slightly bucked front teeth into Simone’s pearly forehead. She cried because Simone might be pregnant and because she was afraid she might be crazy and because her mother was going to die someday. Finally she closed her eyes and began to count backward from six hundred by threes, like Lank had taught her to do, and a few minutes later a sleepy waking dream filled her head, and she drifted off.
eleven
AT eight o’clock the next morning, Rosie walked onto the last court in a row of six at the Modesto Swim and Racket Club, walking with her opponent Donna Brooks, a lovely young player who moved like a ballerina and hit as hard as one of the older boys. Dressed in a little skirt and tight white tank top, she streamed onto the court like sunshine, head held high, while Rosie, squinting against the few rays of morning light that broke through the dark foggy day, moved like an abused whippet.
She was wearing huge shorts, which weren’t really for tennis, and one of James’s big white T-shirts. She tried to calm herself as she walked to the baseline for warm-up. But she watched in disbelief as the first ball she tried to return sailed past Donna and hit the fence. She laughed nervously. Nice shot, she said to herself, and hit the remaining ball over the net. Donna pranced after the two balls like a little cartoon unicorn.
Donna hit hard, but if you kept getting the ball back, eventually she’d miss, and Rosie tapped one ball back after another, not breathing in between rallies. Never had she played so poorly, so tight and defensive. Nowhere were her trademark shots, long deep crosscourts, hard flat down-the-line backhands, and her serve was so constricted that she looked like Lank serving, or Rumpelstiltskin.
Her face felt enflamed. She was ahead now, three games each but her ad, one point away from a definite psychological advantage; this seventh game was the most important in any close set. All she had to do was win this one point, and she’d be halfway home. A fresh shot of adrenaline flooded her, and she balled up her fist, coaching herself: come on come on come on. She looked around for the extra ball. Instead her gaze was lifted to the top bleacher, where Luther sat alone, hunched over, his head barely raised high enough to see. He wore his raggedy black windbreaker, darker than the dark foggy day surrounding him. And he was smiling.
Rosie could have cried. There was Donna’s nice mother, in good clothes, and there was Donna’s nice coach, handsome and tan in tennis whites, talking quietly as they waited for play to resume, while her own mother was home acting spaced out and odd, and J. Peter Billings was three thousand miles away. And in their place was Luther.
She served as hard as she could, a beautiful hard spinning serve, but it missed by an inch, and she sent her second serve over as if it were an egg she didn’t want to break, and Donna smashed it down the line for a winner. Deuce. Rosie served hard again, out of control, and it somehow went in—it surprised Rosie as much as Donna—who muffed the return. Donna swung petulantly at the ground. Luther clapped. The hairs on the back of Rosie’s neck stood up.
She served another hard first serve, and they rallied for a while. Then Donna hit a drop shot, which Rosie got to, just barely, and Donna lobbed the ball over her head, and Rosie set off running toward her own baseline, chasing it down, but she couldn’t get to it. The ball landed on the very outside part of the baseline, mostly on the red but definitely catching a quarter inch or so of the white line. She knew instantly that her body was blocking Donna’s view, and looking up she saw Donna’s mother searching for something in her purse, and Donna’s coach was peering in too, as if it went down a very long way, like a well. Luther alone was watching. He smiled. She stared at him. She turned to Donna, who was up on her toes, trying to see around Rosie, as if the ball had left a spot on the court that she could see from the opposite side, and Rosie said, “Just out.” Donna hung her head and then looked up.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “It felt good.” Rosie, holding both balls now, walking toward the net to change sides, nodded.
“It missed,” she said. “By a speck.”
SHE was in the semis now. It was a good win, not an upset, because she was seeded higher, but a necessary win. Donna shook hands after her loss like the prima donna she was, and Rosie left the court without making eye contact with anyone.
After reporting the score and returning the balls at the tournament desk, Rosie went to the locker room and sat on the b
ench. She was alone, so tired she felt like crying, but happy about her win. And now when she thought about that one point, she could almost imagine that the ball really had landed out, that there really had been a tiny patch of red hard court between the ball and the baseline—past the white paint of the baseline, a thin red line, like the last thread of a sunset.
twelve
I’VE begun dating a twelve-year-old,” Rae announced over the phone the next morning. “But he’s very mature.”
“Well, then, that’s wonderful, darling.”
“Why shouldn’t I call Mike again?”
“Because if you call him, after going for all these months without calling, he’ll feel great, but you’ll feel like shit. If you don’t call, you’ll feel great, and he’ll feel like shit. You get to decide.”
Rae sighed. “You know what I hate, Elizabeth? I hate that men know, they learn, that if they just wait, the woman will almost always come after them.”
“That’s right.”
“But as soon as you appear available, their interest lags.”
“Unless they really want to develop something with you. And Mike made it clear over and over that he didn’t want to. Or wasn’t able to.”
“You know another thing I hate?”
“What’s that?”
“That any man who’s even fairly attractive has twenty women who want to fuck him.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t think I’ll call.”
“Good.”
“But stay by the phone all day anyway, in case I need you.”
“I will, Rae. What are you going to do today?”
“I’m going to drive the owner of this new gallery out to the airport. He’s flying to New York, and he’s taking slides of my stuff with him. Then I’ll be right back, unless I meet a bunch of fancy strangers at the airport—and then who knows when you’ll hear from me again.”
THIS woman is really something,” Lank told James and Elizabeth a few hours later, referring to the waifish art student he had found in the personals. James was on the phone in his office, Elizabeth listening in the kitchen, the phone cradled in the crook of her neck while she weeded the utility drawer. “We cooked together the other night, me braising some meat for the stew while she did the vegetables. The two of us chopping away, like a little salt-and-pepper set.”
“Have you gone to bed yet?” asked James.
“Oh, yeah.”
“And?”
“She comes like a flock of birds.”
“What does that mean, Lank? She had crows in her pussy?”
Elizabeth looked at the floor and smiled.
“I think you would both be happy for me if you could stop wishing for Rae and me to fall in love,” Lank retorted. “We’re not going to. It’s simply not going to happen.”
“We know that,” said Elizabeth. “We don’t care.”
“I care,” said James. “I want you to. I hate for both of you to be so lonely when a great, available person is right in front of you.”
“It’s the chemistry, James. Come on, man. And the God thing drives me crazy. I can’t believe someone so smart believes in Jesus. Once she told me how she feels his love in the tenderness of her friends, the beauty of the earth, the warmth inside her heart. I said yes, I feel all those things too, but why do you have to drag Jesus the friendly ghost into it?”
Elizabeth stared at a spiderweb on the ceiling. It was so strange to have a close friend who loved Jesus. Rae saw poor people, she thought of Jesus; she saw wildflowers, grapes on the vine, full moons, and she thought of Jesus. Rosie asked her recently why she used to see friendship and nature as just being friendship and nature and now she called it all Jesus. And Rae told her the story of a pastor asking his Sunday school first graders, “What’s gray and has a long bushy tail and collects nuts in the fall?” And a small boy answered, “I know the answer is probably Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me.”
Elizabeth studied the small brown spider who sat in the center of the web, and after a moment she said good-bye to Lank, hung up the phone, and went to get the broom.
ROSIE called not long after, and James listened patiently as she described yesterday’s win against Donna in great detail, including the lob at three games each, how it had landed one inch out.
“Good girl,” he said. “Way to go. Did Simone win too?”
“She hasn’t finished playing yet. Is Mommy there?”
“She’s in her room, cleaning our closets.”
There was silence on the other end. “Mommy’s cleaning the closets?”
“Yeah. She’s on a bit of a tear. When I came out of my study, I discovered she’d gone through that big catchall drawer in the kitchen and sorted out all the thumbtacks and paper clips and doodads. Now they live in little tiny baby-food jars, each labeled, all in a row. Like a little nursery.”
“James? Is she okay?”
“I think so. Do you want me to go get her? She’s going to be so proud of you.”
“No. Tell her I’ll call later. Simone just came off the court.”
SIMONE’S face was red and blotchy, and her tight, blue nylon dress clung to her. She had lost in straight sets to Mandy Lee, who was ranked way below her. Rosie felt anxiety radiating off her like sunbeams. Rings of sweat darkened the dress beneath her armpits, like a grown-up’s. Rosie longed for those womanly rings. “Didja play okay?” Rosie asked, her eyes opened wide with hopefulness. Simone answered in a voice at once quavery and petulant that Mandy Lee had just pushed every ball over the net, even serves, never hitting hard and low, dinking and lobbing and spinning and doing whatever it took to keep the ball in play.
“I hate that so much,” Rosie said. Simone stood staring at the ground, twirling a strand of hair like a little kid. Then she stalked off.
Rosie found her around the corner standing with a group of fourteen-year-old boys, watching the fathers of two sixteen-year-old girls push and shove each other in the parking lot. The father of a girl named Gail Smith, whose ranking had gone from number one in the fourteens to number eight in the sixteen and unders, was poking his finger into the chest of Jessica Paul’s father, who had his fists up. This was not an entirely unusual experience: two or three times a year the tennis dads went at it, usually the fathers of teenage girls who had been ranked one or two in the younger age divisions and who were maybe not going to go on to national rankings or tennis scholarships. One time Jessica Paul’s father had beaten up Mandy Lee’s father in the parking lot of a club where the state championships were being held, and another time Mandy Lee’s father had leapt out of a bush and nearly broken Deb Hall’s father’s nose, after Deb’s father accused Mandy of messing with Deb’s concentration during a semifinal match.
There were twenty or so kids standing around in clusters, just like at school when two kids squared off on the blacktop. Luther stood a little ways off, wearing his crummy black windbreaker and a visor, because it was nearly a hundred degrees. Rosie watched Luther watch the two men square off as if it were just another match. She felt both thrilled and stricken, smelling the blacktop on fire and oily with the heat of the long hot day; it smelled like grime, like cannons, like cars. Simone seemed enthralled, feeling the heat, the two angry men, and the cluster of boys, the sun pouring down on them all, and she glanced from one boy to another.
“Don’t make a mistake with me,” Gail’s father said to Jessica’s father.
“Yeah? Yeah? What does that mean?”
“I’m the wrong guy to fuck with.”
The time Mandy Lee’s father had beaten up Deb Hall’s father, he kept saying, “You got bad eyes, Herb, weird eyes—psycho eyes,” and for days afterward the kids who had witnessed the scene went around telling each other, “Hey, you got weird eyes—psycho eyes.”
Gail Smith’s father eventually yelled at Jessica Paul’s father that he was going to have to take things up with Deb Hall’s father, who was on the junior tennis association sportsmanship commit
tee. He walked off the parking lot with both arms raised in the air, giving Mr. Paul the finger, the double finger, and the children in their tennis finery and Luther in his ragged jacket stood in the parking lot spellbound and watched him go.
AFTER both men had left, the boys hung around Simone, who looked like someone who should be in a television commercial for Swiss chocolate milk, except that her hair was not in braids but hanging loose, framing that sulky milkmaid face. Rosie remembered last summer when Simone was going out with Andy Gold, how often they had just started necking like newlyweds on TV, even though Rosie would be standing right there on the curb beside them, shuffling her feet, trying to act nonchalant. It always made her feel like some dried-up old praying-mantis auntie. Now Simone was telling the gathering of boys about having lost to skinny awful Mandy Lee, whom they all secretly hated anyway for being Chinese and wearing glasses. Rosie didn’t hate her at all. What was to hate? Mandy Lee was shy and driven and had an awful father who coached her from the bushes. Rosie just felt very sorry for her, because she wasn’t all that good and her father wanted her to be great, but the boys’ faces were twisted with derision and sympathy as they listened, snatching occasional looks at Simone’s breasts. Rosie stood beside her, looking at her like a golden retriever, adoring and loyal. None of the boys said hello to Rosie, but she did not expect them to. She could smell them, eyes closed. They smelled of many things all at once, and then, slowly, the smells sorted themselves. There was Absorbine Jr. wafting up from their feet. There was the same deodorant that James wore when he went out—Old Spice stick. And there was a faint trace of ammonia, and of sweat, and rain. She felt like a boat at sea, out of control.
Simone no longer looked like she had lost. She swayed ever so slightly as she stood there, silky, sinewy, luring the boys in. Rosie felt a fluttering in her groin, that tightening—as if she might start swaying, too. All at once both girls noticed Luther watching them from twenty feet away, in his windbreaker and scuffed wing tips, leaning against the building, looking at them all, at Simone, who looked up at him as if across a crowded dance floor, slowly pushing her chest forward and then, slowly, incredibly, tracing her lips with the tip of her tongue, right at him, to him, to Luther.