Getting to Five Hundred
It was one of those days in which I had no time to get to the court, between my responsibilities at Wonderland and (more so) my new role as a private eye.
All afternoon, I’d kept my eye on the clock, hoping an hour would open up when I could bike over to the club and hit balls against the backboard—maybe Forrest would take the kids out to play mini golf with him, or one of their friends would call up to invite them over—but the hours crawled along without a break.
I could feel my body getting restless. I longed to move my feet, stretch my arm over my head for a serve, race to the net to return a shot, then back to the baseline to receive whatever Jonathan sent my way next.
The afternoon wore on. Then it was dinner. Jilly wanted me to read her a chapter of her book. Hayward had fixed himself a sandwich, leaving peanut butter and marshmallow fluff all over the counter for me to clean up.
Regina went to bed. Forrest turned on the game. Apart from the low sound of the Red Sox announcer, the house was quiet, finally. I stepped outside into the darkness—my racquet, borrowed from Jonathan, over my shoulder—and got on my bike.
This wasn’t the first time I’d headed to the club to hit against the backboard, but I’d never shown up there this late before—close to eleven o’clock.
I might have worried that the Emersons would say something when I headed out on my bicycle in the darkness that night (assisted by my headlight), but as usual, nobody noticed. I might have worried that the gate would be locked when I reached the club, but it wasn’t.
There was the backboard, illuminated by night-lights. I stepped into their glow, opened a can of fresh balls—loving the sound of the vacuum snap—and hit one hard toward the wood.
I had a good pair of sneakers now, handed down from Regina. “You should be hitting a hundred balls every day, returning every one when it comes back at you,” Jonathan had told me. I went for five hundred, and when I missed one at number four hundred seventy-nine, I started over again.
It was well past midnight when I got my five hundred in a row.
Pedaling home in the darkness, I knew I’d tell nobody about this.
After that one time I’d mentioned tennis to Forrest—who hadn’t picked up on it—I had decided to keep the secret for myself.
It was almost as if I was having an affair—the kind that didn’t break anyone’s heart.
The odd thing was, nobody ever seemed to notice when I took off on my bike for the court—a situation not so different from how things were back home with my parents.
Maybe this was how all adults were—too consumed with their own lives to pay attention to mine.
This did not apply to Hayward, of course. Hayward was always watching me.
There would have been a time when Forrest would have noted my absences, but he had absences enough of his own.
Many. As for Regina, she slept late in the mornings, and by the time Prudence or I had cleared away the breakfast dishes, and I was ready to bring the children to their lessons, she had taken so many pills I could have lit the house on fire and she wouldn’t have woken up—except for those times, sometime after midnight most likely, when she got up to type her endless lists.