100 When You Learn the Game Young
When You Learn the Game Young
At the time I received Forrest Emerson’s letter, I had recently turned forty. My daughter, Jess, was three years old.
Maybe as a result of my experiences when I was young, I had never cared much for children.
Over the thirteen weeks that constituted my Wonderland summer, I viewed the job of caring for the Emersons’ kids as a necessary irritation I’d endure for the gift of getting to spend my days in the bright and shining presence of the person who represented for me everything I could hope to find in a man.
Lover or father. I barely knew what those words meant.
After my time with the Emersons ended—after I’d betrayed the man I loved best in the world—I let go of my fervent longings.
My hunger, as Jonathan had called it. I think I ceased to believe that love was possible for me.
I could no more realize my old dreams that I’d play at the US Open or write a novel.
Or have the money to rent a house on Lake Catherine.
Not that I wanted to return there, ever.
Jess was conceived—a calculated plan—through the unwitting sperm contribution of a man I had no interest in spending further time with, let alone marrying.
We went out together, if you can call it that, the year I turned thirty-six, for exactly as long as it took me to get pregnant, at which point I broke it off with him, feeling no need to divulge news of a baby on the way.
By the time Jess was born, both my parents were dead.
As was true about much of my life, this too—the raising of my one precious daughter—is something I’ve done on my own.
I decided it was better for a girl to have no father than to have a father who would end up disappointing her, as the two most important men in my own young life had done.
Not long before my forty-fifth birthday, an odd thing happened.
Walking past a tennis court—a public court, not some private club—I got the idea of signing up for lessons.
Though age had taken its toll on my knees, and no doubt my stamina, it turned out that I had not altogether lost the passion for the game I’d first discovered the summer Jonathan invited me onto the court.
What do you know? I had not lost my serve. I started playing regularly. I won a few doubles tournaments in our town, then made it to the regionals.
Not long ago, in the locker room, after a tournament in which my partner and I took second place—the New England women’s over-fifty division—a woman we’d competed against made a friendly observation that took me by surprise.
“I can tell from the way you hit that you learned the game young,” she said. “It’s different when you pick up tennis later in life. There’s always something about those players who started out at some country club.”
In her eyes, I must have seemed like one of those people who grew up in a place like Wonderland. Well, I did, in a manner of speaking, I might have told her. I grew up in a place called Wonderland. But it wasn’t how she imagined.