Chapter 13
thirteen
PHOEBE
My father took the car seat out of my car on the second morning and put it in his, and didn’t say anything about it, and that was how I found out I was staying more than a night.
Leon Powers has lived in the same house my whole life. It’s a low, ugly, comfortable house at the end of a street with no view of anything, and behind it there’s a court he had put in when I was small, and the surface is bad now and the net sags and he refuses to have either of them dealt with.
He had Colby in the crook of his arm at the kitchen sink, running the tap so my son could look at it, because apparently that’s the greatest show on earth at his age.
“You want eggs?”
“No.”
“You’re having eggs.”
He made me eggs. I ate about a third of them and he took the plate away without a word about the rest. He’s been doing that since I was a junior and losing.
He didn’t ask me what happened… in fact he didn’t ask me anything at all.
He got up early with the baby so I could sleep, and he took him out to the driveway in the afternoons and walked him up and down explaining the neighbors’ cars to him, and in the evenings he watched matches with the sound off and made short unkind remarks about people’s second serves.
On the third day I came down and my mother’s photograph on the hall shelf had been turned to face out again, the way she liked it, instead of angled toward the wall the way it drifts when nobody’s touching it.
I quietly wondered to myself whether Mom thought it was ironic I was playing in this particular charity exhibition match, and whether she’d have come out in that god-awful platinum blonde wig she’d bought for herself toward the end, cheering for me.
I didn’t say anything about that either. We never do.
Zoe came on the Wednesday with a bag of pastries and sat down across from me and put her phone on the table face down.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s out.”
“What’s out?”
She turned the phone over.
The headline had my husband’s name first and mine second and the word in quotation marks, the way they do when they want you to know it’s not their word, it’s his.
Somebody at the publisher or somebody at Jeremy’s office or somebody in a room I’ll never identify had given The Goss Tea the chapter, or enough of the chapter, and there it was in a font.
I read it. Then I read the piece under it, which included the paragraph. All of it. My husband’s sentences about my footwork and my split step, printed alongside the other one, so that people could enjoy the contrast.
Zoe was watching my face not at all subtly. “Say something.”
“It’s accurate,” I said. “All true. They didn’t even have to twist it.”
And then I told her. All of it, from the beginning, the iPad and the rain app and the dark and my son on my chest, and the fact that I’d known for three weeks and let her sit in my kitchen and ask me why I wasn’t angry and told her nothing.
Zoe cried, and I didn’t. She sat there with pastry in front of her and cried in the way she has since she was small, which is furiously.
“You’ve been carrying that on your own for weeks?”
“Yes.”
“Phoebs.”
“Look, I’m not going to apologize for it.”
Hurt flashed across her face. “I’m not going to say anything. I’m sitting here being extremely angry on your behalf and it’s taking everything I have.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “Can I just say this one thing?”
“One.”
“The rest of it… it was beautiful,” she began. “I’ve been to more of your matches than anybody alive except your father and I watched the scoreboard like he did. But Troy watched you, and I think that’s the difference.”
“I know.”
“That’s why it’s this bad.”
“Zoe. I said one.”
I sat in my childhood bedroom that night with the phone bright in my face and read what the country thought of me.
I’d assumed it would be on my side. I’ve been a beloved figure in this country since I was seventeen, and I have a wholesome marriage and an adorable baby and a clean record, and I expected a wave of people saying how dare he.
There was some of that.
And then, underneath it, in numbers I couldn’t stop scrolling through, there were all the people who agreed with him.
He’s right though.
Sorry but she DID waste it.
imagine being that good at something and just stopping
This is what happens when women peak and panic
Her dad must be devastated
Thousands of them. Reasonable ones, cruel ones, long ones with paragraph breaks.
Men explaining my career to me. Women explaining my choices to me.
A former player I’d been friendly with for a decade went on a podcast to say, carefully, that a lot of us in the locker room felt the same and nobody wanted to be the one to say it.
My husband didn’t invent that opinion. He just wrote it down where I could find it.
Jeremy Waller called me, which he has never done in seven years.
He was decent about it. He said the words no pressure at all several separate times and then explained, in the manner of a man laying out cutlery, that a short joint statement would put a floor under it, and that if I preferred, they’d write it and I could simply approve it.
“No,” I said.
“Phoebe—”
“I’m not going to help anybody explain it.”
Francis rang after him and was so warm about it that I nearly went under, and asked me to think about Troy’s position, and I said I would, but I didn’t.
I didn’t give them anything. Not a statement, not a quote, not a photograph of me looking serene in a hat. There’s nothing I could say that isn’t either a lie or the truth, and one of those makes it worse and the other one makes it his.
So the story ran and ran with a hole in the middle of it where my voice was supposed to be, and everybody filled the hole with whatever they already believed about women who stop their careers to have families.
Troy called every morning and again at night and never in between, which is a discipline I recognized, because it’s what you do when you’ve been told you get one and you’ve decided to take two.
I didn’t answer. On the Thursday I sent him a photograph of Colby asleep on my father’s chest, because he’s his father and he was going to lose his mind about it, and he wrote back immediately.
Thank you
I’m not going to ask you anything
Thank you
That was our whole conversation through the week.
I put the phone face down some time after three in the morning and went and stood over the travel crib in the corner of my old bedroom.
Colby had worked himself sideways the way he does, one arm up over his head like a man hailing a cab in his sleep. I put my hand flat on his belly and felt it go up and down, and I stood there in the dark in the room where I used to tape my posters to the closet door.
It wasn’t a consolation. He isn’t second place. I chose him while I was still the best in the world at tennis, and there’s nobody alive qualified to grade me on that.
On the Friday my father came into the kitchen with two racquets and my shoes.
“Marta’s got him,” he said. “Come out.”
“Dad.”
“I didn’t ask you a question.”
Because I’m my father’s daughter, I went out onto the bad surface behind my father’s ugly house in the last of the light, and we hit. He’s seventy-one and he doesn’t move. You have to put the ball within a step of him and he will absolutely tell you when you don’t.
We hit for a long time and neither of us said one word, and then I mishit one into the fence and stood there with my hands on my knees, and it came up out of me all at once with no warning at all, and I cried on my father’s tennis court like I was fourteen.
He didn’t come over. He didn’t hug me. He waited until it had mostly stopped, and then he walked to the net and put his hand on the tape.
“I’ve been sitting in there all week working out whether he’s right,” he said.
That straightened me right the hell up.
“Because if he’s right,” my father said, “then so am I, and I’ve been that man since you were a child, and I’d like to know.”
The light was fading behind the house.
“He’s not right, Dad.”
“No,” Leon said. “He isn’t.” He picked a ball off the tape and turned it over in his fingers. “But I understand him. And you should know that, because everybody’s going to lie to you this month and I’m not going to be one of them.”
Then he fed the ball to my forehand, low and short and slightly wide, which is the ball I’ve hated my entire life.
“Deuce court,” he said. “You’re still drifting.”