Chapter 9
nine
PHOEBE
I got Colby down and stood in the hall outside his door with my hand still on the knob.
Downstairs Troy was doing the dishes and singing. He sings when he’s happy. He isn’t good at it and he has never cared, and normally that’s one of my favorite facts about my life.
Most people would have been eaten alive out here.
He meant it kindly. He absolutely meant it kindly. He was lying on the floor of our living room with our son on his chest and he looked up at me and handed me the nicest version of it he had, which is that I’d taken it well.
Taken it well. Like a diagnosis. Like a layoff.
I stood in that hall and ran the conversation start to finish, the way I used to run a match before I played it.
I say I read your chapter. He goes grey.
He apologizes, and Troy apologizes beautifully, because Troy is the most articulate man I’ve ever met and grief is his best register.
He says he only meant that he hated watching me stop.
He says he’d take it out. And then it’s out of the book and still true, and I’ve got a husband who’s careful around me for the rest of our lives.
There’s no version where I win that. There’s a better version where I make it disappear.
So I didn’t say it.
And that wasn’t the only reason. I have a match in eight weeks and a body that’s held together with rehab work and stubbornness, and if I open that door I’ll spend the next month crying in a parking lot instead of hitting. My abs don’t care about my marriage. They care about load.
I went downstairs and dried while he washed and he told me a long, extremely funny story about a stunt coordinator, and I laughed in the right places, and I meant most of it.
Then I went and hit a tennis ball very hard for a very long time.
By Wednesday the pro had stopped feeding me the polite ball.
I hit until the lights came on around the court and didn’t notice it going dark.
Thursday, the pro fed me the wide forehand, the one that put me on the ground the last time he tried it, and I took it early off the front foot and put it up the line and heard the sound a ball makes when it’s struck properly, which is a sound I hadn’t made since before I was pregnant.
He stopped. He put the hopper down.
“Okay,” he said. “What was that?”
“That was the shot.”
“Do it again.”
I did it again. Then I put one into the bottom of the net and swore in front of a child on the next court, and his mother gave me a look, and I mouthed sorry and absolutely didn’t mean it.
“You’re hitting angry,” the pro said.
“I’m hitting on time.”
“You’re hitting angry and it’s working, and I’m not going to be the one who tells you to stop.”
Anger is a legal performance-enhancing drug. Nobody tells you that. It doesn’t make you faster, it makes you decisive, and at my age decisive is the whole sport. I stopped waiting to see what the ball was going to do. I stopped taking the safe one.
Marta was at the fence with Colby on her hip in the shade, doing the walk that isn’t a walk, the small bounce every parent on earth develops without being taught.
She’d brought the cooler bag. She’d brought a second bottle of water for me because she has decided I’m somebody who needs looking after and I’ve lost that argument permanently.
“Good?” she said.
“Better than good.”
“You are red.”
“I’m radiant, Marta.”
“You are red,” she said again, and handed me my son, who took hold of my collar and pulled, and I stood in the sun holding him and my heart rate came down.
Nobody believes me when I say this. I don’t put him down to go be a tennis player and then pick him up again and go back to being his mother. It’s the same day. It’s the same woman.
It has never felt like two lives.
Zoe texted me on Thursday night.
you’ve gone quiet
I’m training
you go quiet when you’re training but this is a different quiet
it’s the same quiet
Phoebe Elaine
I’m FINE
I looked at that for a while before I sent it.
That’s the first untrue sentence I’ve ever sent my cousin. Not a lie exactly. A door closed politely in somebody’s face.
She’d have been in the car before I put the phone down and she’d have gotten it out of me on the driveway, and then it would exist, and two people would know, and one of them would be my cousin who can’t hold a secret in her body.
ok
but I’m watching you
Edwardo called on Friday while I was in the kitchen icing a shoulder that had certainly earned it.
“Powers.”
“Sartori. It’s the middle of the night where you are.”
“It is, and I am awake, and I have a problem.” Papers or a laptop moving. “I am sending you clips. Do not open them now. Open them when the child is asleep, because I want your actual attention.”
“Clips of what?”
“Of me. Losing.”
I put the ice pack down.
“You want me to scout you.”
“I want you to tell me what I am doing on the second serve, because my coach says I am rushing and my coach is wrong, and he is wrong in a way I cannot prove.” A pause. “You are the only person alive who has watched me lose and knows how. Everyone else watched the winner.”
Nobody has asked me a tennis question in two years.
I want to sit with that, because people will think I’m being dramatic.
Nobody has asked me anything. Not what I thought about a draw, not whether a kid coming up has a real backhand or a temporary one, not what I’d have done down break point against a lefty in a wind.
I spent half my life being one of the best readers of a tennis court on the planet and now people ask me if I’m getting enough rest.
“Send them,” I said.
I watched them after midnight on the couch with the sound off. He isn’t rushing. He’s landing short with his front foot on the deuce court and only on the deuce court, so his hips open before the ball’s gone, and the toss drifts, and he compensates with his arm and the serve sits up like a gift.
I typed it out. He called back immediately.
“Say that again about the foot.”
I said it again. There was a long silence, and then a noise I recognized, because I’ve made it, which is a professional discovering he has been losing points for a reason that can be fixed.
“All this time,” he said. “All this time I have been paying men to watch me.”
“You should have just called me sooner.”
“I did call sooner. You did not answer for most of a year.”
“That’s fair.”
“It is extremely fair, and I am not finished.” He was enjoying himself now, accent all the way home. “Now yours. The abdominal muscles. Where are you?”
And I told him. Not the version I give people.
The real one, with the numbers in it and the movements I can’t do yet and the exact day I expect to be able to plant and change direction, and he didn’t say be careful and he didn’t say don’t push it and he didn’t ask whether all this was too much with a baby in the house.
He said, “Then we do not play any points until that week. We rally. It is boring but it is the right thing to do.”
We. Like it was a project we were both on.
“I will now have no choice but to say the rude thing,” he said, near the end.
“Well, you’ve never asked permission before.”
“What can I say? I am a man of routine.” Something set down on his end.
“Everyone has told you that what you did was brave. It was not brave. Brave is a word for people who have lost something. You did not lose anything, Phoebe. You put it down, on purpose, while you were still the best, and it made a great many people uncomfortable, and they have been calling it courage ever since so they do not have to call it a choice.”
The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere upstairs the rain app went on doing its job.
“Goodnight, Sartori,” I said.
“Goodnight, Powers. Deuce court. Front foot.”
I put the phone down on the counter and didn’t move.
I wasn’t sneaking. Troy knows Edwardo called me. Troy knows about the match. Troy has offered, twice, to come and watch me train, and I said no both times, and the reason I said no had nothing to do with Edwardo Sartori.
I didn’t do anything.
What I did was stand there with my shoulder aching and feel the specific, disgraceful relief of being talked to like a person who’s currently good at something. That’s all. That’s the crime.
Then I went up and got into bed beside my husband, and he rolled over half asleep and put his arm across me the way he has for seventeen years, and I let him.
The iPad was still on the dresser, running the rain.
I didn’t open it again. I didn’t need to. I could have recited it.