Chapter 5
five
PHOEBE
I said yes on a Tuesday morning, in the driveway, with the car’s engine off.
I’d been sitting there working out how to phrase it. Then I got the woman’s voicemail and said, “Hi, it’s Phoebe Powers, I’m in. Tell Sartori he’s going to regret asking.” Then I hung up and put both hands flat on the steering wheel.
Then I laughed out loud in an empty car like a goddamn lunatic.
I didn’t tell Troy. I still don’t think I was wrong.
Every single time I’ve told anybody anything about tennis in the last two years, the conversation stopped being about tennis and became about how I must be feeling.
Are you sad? Are you sure? Isn’t that hard?
My mother-in-law would have cried. My father would’ve started a training block. Zoe would’ve posted about it.
And Troy would’ve been thrilled, and then he’d have wanted to talk about what it means, and I didn’t want it to mean anything yet.
I wanted eight days of hitting a ball before it turned into a subject.
That’s the whole reason and it lasted exactly as long as you’d expect.
Zoe found out in about six hours, because Zoe finds everything out.
did you or did you not leave a voicemail
I left a voicemail
PHOEBE
It’s one match
I’m going to need you to understand that I’ve already bought an outfit, woman
What no one told me about coming out of retirement was that the tennis ball is now enormous.
It comes over the net looking like a beach ball flying to an appointment with your face, and some ancient part of your brain that has nothing to do with your conscious mind goes, oh, that one, and your feet are already moving.
I hit with the club pro on the Tuesday. Somewhere in the first five minutes I stopped thinking about my feet entirely, and a few minutes after that I was laughing so hard I had to stop and put my hands on my knees.
It was still there. All of it. Not the speed.
The speed is a fitness problem and fitness is boring and buyable.
But the reading, the anticipation, knowing where the ball is going before it leaves their strings—all of that had been sitting in me the whole time doing nothing, sort of like a car under a sheet in a garage.
And my body, my ridiculous, competent, complaining body, said: oh good, we’re doing this again!
Then it said: not like that though.
The pro is twenty-six, spent three years on the challenger tour, and is far too polite with me.
He fed me a ball wide to the forehand in the second set of drills and I went for it the way I’d have gone for it three years ago, planted, and something across my middle said absolutely not in a voice I felt in my teeth.
I put the racquet down and stood there with my hands on my hips for about a minute.
“Do you want to stop?” he said.
“No. I want to not have done that.”
“Should I…”
“Feed the same ball again. Slower. I’m going to take it on the rise and not plant, and if it goes in the net that’s the right outcome and I don’t want to hear about it.”
It went in the net. Twice. The third one I hit clean, off the front foot, feet in the wrong place, hips out of it entirely. It was ugly. It went in. I made a noise like I’d won something.
He looked at me the way people look at me now.
“That was a bad shot,” I told him. “That was a bad shot I can play in eleven weeks. Feed it again.”
Here’s what training actually looks like at thirty-six with a four-month-old.
It looks like Marta.
It looks like me pumping in the car in a parking lot because the timing has to work backward from a feeding.
It looks like a cooler bag and Marta texting me a photo of my son asleep on her shoulder with the caption HE IS FINE.
GO. WE ARE BOTH FINE, because she worked out in about a week that I’d otherwise check my phone between every drill.
It looks like ninety minutes, not the whole afternoon.
It also looks like Marta putting her hand out for my keys on the second Wednesday.
“You are not driving.”
“I’m completely fine.”
“You slept maybe three hours. I heard the monitor and I heard you.” She kept her hand out. “I will drive. I will sit in the car with him. You will go and hit your ball.”
“Marta.”
“Phoebe.” Nobody says my name like that. My father says it like a starting gun. Troy says it like a joke. Marta says it the way you’d put down something heavy. “Keys.”
I gave her the keys.
Turns out stopping is the actual discipline, and it nearly killed me. I have a separation across my abs that’s closing, and it closes faster if I do the extremely boring rehab work and slower if I do what I want, which is plant hard and change direction and feel like myself.
The rehab is a handful of movements and it takes eleven minutes and it’s the single least interesting eleven minutes available to a human being. Breathe. Brace. Lift nothing. Repeat.
So I do the boring work. I do it every day. My father taught me how to be patient with an injury when I was eleven and I’ve hated it every single day since and I have never skipped it.
Dad came on the Thursday and didn’t say he was coming, which is his version of subtlety.
I looked up mid-rally and he was standing at the fence with a coffee, in a shirt I knew all too well, doing absolutely nothing.
He didn’t call out. He didn’t wave. He watched me hit for forty minutes and he didn’t say one single word, and I played about eleven percent better than I had on Tuesday, which is the most annoying fact of my entire life.
When I came off he handed me the coffee. It was the right coffee. He’s never asked me what I drink.
“Well?”
“Eh,” he said.
“Dad…”
“Your split step’s late.”
“I know.”
“It’s not late because you’re slow. It’s late because you’re thinking.” He looked out at the empty court. “You’ll stop thinking around week two.”
And that was the entire coaching session.
Then he said something else, without looking at me, in exactly the same voice. “I’m glad you’re doing it.”
“It’s one match, Dad.”
“I know what it is.” He drank his own coffee. “Still. Let me be glad.”
And that’s the most my father has ever said about it, including at any press conference, including the whole of the previous year.
I drank the coffee and looked out at the court with him and didn’t say anything either. We’re both like this. There’s nobody left alive to blame for it.
Lexi Spencer came over while I was packing my bag.
I knew who she was before she got to me. I’d seen her hitting on the back court and I’d watched her for about ninety seconds, building my professional assessment, for whatever it’s worth.
She’s good. She’s genuinely good. Beautiful hands, no fear, a forehand she can hit from anywhere on the court, and a second serve that’s going to get her killed at tour level until somebody sits her down about it.
“Oh my God,” she said. “I’m sorry. I told myself I wasn’t going to do this.”
“Do what?”
“This.” She gestured at herself. “I’m Lexi. I hit with Troy sometimes. I’ve been trying to be normal about you for six weeks.”
She was lovely. Funny and quick, and she said something about my backhand at the Australian that only somebody who’d actually watched it would know. She was properly, visibly delighted to be standing there.
So I don’t know what it was.
I’ve spent my whole life reading people across a net.
It’s the only real talent I’ve got—not the legs, the reading.
You watch the shoulders, you watch the eyes, you watch where somebody’s weight goes before they’ve decided to move.
And I stood there with my bag half packed, being charmed by a twenty-three-year-old who had done absolutely nothing wrong, and some very old part of me said: watch her.
Nothing happened. She was delightful. She asked about Colby and meant it. She asked whether I was hitting again, and when I said a little, she said God, I’d love to see that—completely straightforwardly, the way you’d say it to anybody.
And when she said, “Troy talks about you constantly, it’s honestly a little pathetic,” she laughed. I laughed. It was funny.
It was funny.