It occurred to me that what passed for a bond between Regina and me was really nothing more than her using me to achieve her own objectives. If you’d asked her about me—Who is Frances anyway? What does she care about? What are her hopes and dreams?—Regina Emerson would have had exactly nothing to offer by way of a response. To Regina, I existed for one purpose: helping her accomplish whatever goal she had in mind at the time. Whatever this goal might be, it served one person only.Her.
Eighteen days remained of my Wonderland summer. Then I’d be going home. I wasn’t even sure if Forrest and Brenda were seeing each other anymore. He still left the house early every morning, but I was increasingly sure that the relationship with Brenda had cooled down, if not ended altogether, since she’d shown her true colors. I got the sense that Forrest was actually doing, now, the thing he’d claimed to be doing for most of the summer: training for the triathlon.
The weird part was, I didn’t even care anymore. I was tired of feeling like a minor character in the Forrest-and-Regina drama. I wanted to be the star of my own drama for a change.
That happened on the tennis court.
My secret tennis life was taking over. Every day now my game got stronger, as did my body. I hadn’t filled out in the womanly way I’d hoped I might over the summer, but something better had happened. There were these muscles in my legs that hadn’t ever been defined before. Same with my arms. I hadn’t gotten skinny. I’d gotten strong.
“Maybe nobody ever told you this before,” Jonathan told me, “but you’re a natural athlete.”
He was right about this. Nobody ever told me much of anything about myself.
“I haven’t ever coached a kid with more raw talent than you, Frannie,” he told me. Frannie was his name for me. Nobody had called me that before.
“Talent and drive,” he said. “Pure raw drive. For a player to become great, she’s got to have something beyond athleticism. She needs a certain kind of hunger. You’ve got that.”
We were sitting inside the clubhouse, sharing a bag of peanuts. From where we sat, I could see a group of girls around my age gathered around a table on the patio under a striped umbrella. They were drinking virgin piña coladas. Six dollars apiece.
“Those kids over there,” he said, looking into his drink, “their parents made it all so easy for them. They want to rack up trophies, but at the end of the day they can take tennis or leave it. That’s not you. I see it every time you step out on the court.”
He wasn’t wrong about my passion for the game. What I discovered in myself during my precious time with Jonathan—four times a week now, sometimes six, because he didn’t charge me for extra sessions—was a part of me I had never known to exist until then. With a racquet in my hand—the one Jonathan had lent to me—I felt strong for the first time in my life. Maybe my role in the Emerson drama had allowed me to feel powerful, but the power I felt hitting a tennis ball was different. It came from something real, not just possession of incriminating information about two people having an affair.
Every time I went after the ball, it happened: Words and thoughts and ideas that filled my brain every other waking minute—many of them having to do with other people’s lives, other people’s problems—disappeared completely. I became this animal girl with one objective: smashing that ball. Winning the point.
You could say I had a chip on my shoulder. You wouldn’t be wrong. My parents had handed this down to me as my big legacy: the idea that some people were the winners and some were the losers, the haves and the have-nots. If ever there was a place overrun with the haves, it was the Lake Catherine Country Club. If ever there was a bunch of have-not losers, it was my family.
In my mother’s view, and maybe my father’s, if you were one of those have-nots, there wasn’t much you could do about it. ForrestEmerson had felt differently about that, and you could say he’d succeeded in crossing the line into that glittering territory where places like Wonderland existed and those who inhabited them carried out their lives. I’d never pictured myself being one of them. But when I stepped out on the court, I’d show them who I was.
From all those hours I’d spent there that summer—many of them watching other people’s lessons—I had learned something about life as it was lived at the Lake Catherine Country Club. The kids whose lessons I studied might have good strokes. Many did. Every one of these kids had years more experience than I did—hundreds of hours of instruction, probably, and parents who drove them to tournaments and clinics, hired private coaches for them, bought box seats for the family at the US Open, opened charge accounts at the snack bar that allowed them to order a fancy drink after their lesson with a little paper umbrella on top every day of the week. If one of them had a temper tantrum during a match and threw her racquet, and it broke, her parents would buy her another.
Those girls knew how to hit the ball. They just didn’t care as much as I did. If returning a cross-court shot required them to hustle to the deepest, farthest corner of the tennis court, they might just let the ball sail by—where for me, it wouldn’t matter if the temperature was a hundred and ten and I had a blister on my heel dripping blood in my shoe, I’d run that ball down just the same. It wouldn’t matter that my parents back home were getting a divorce, or that a creepy twelve-year-old boy stared at my chest every morning, and his crazy mother rolled around on her bed, smearing green goop on the sheets because she thought her husband was trying to murder her. I put it all out of my mind to chase down that ball. That was my kind of hunger.
The place in my life once reserved for Forrest Emerson was occupied by tennis now. Only tennis was a healthier obsession.
We had just finished our lesson, my fifth that week. Jonathan reached for something now—a racquet case—and set it in my hand. “This is yours,” he said. “You’ve worked hard for it.”
“The racquet you’ve been lending me is fine,” I told him. “I’ll give it back at the end of the summer. It’s not like I’ll have a chance to play once I’m back in New Jersey.”
“You should be playing all the time now,” Jonathan told me. “By the time you go home, you’ll be ready to try out for a team. And you’ll get on one too.”
“My school doesn’t have a tennis team,” I said. “It’s not that kind of school. I don’t live in that kind of town.”
“A talented player like you can always find a game,” he told me. “But you need a good racquet.”
He knew my grip size, of course. “Björn Borg uses one like this,” Jonathan told me. “A Bancroft. It’s yours. To take home with you.”
Home.Given what was going on at Wonderland now, this should have been a comforting thought but wasn’t.
There were a whole lot of reasons why I dreaded going home—the end of tennis being only one of these. As complicated as things had become at the lake—a murder plot now brewing in the fantasies of Hurricane Brenda and the ruminations Regina was engaged in now, whatever they turned out to be, concerning revenge—the thought of going back to our apartment in New Jersey, my father gone, felt like exile to Siberia.
62
Almost like Being in Love
Where to begin, with the list of all the things I’d miss once I departed from Wonderland: Prudence’s great fried chicken, and lobster rolls, and fried clams, and cookouts by the water. I’d miss the club, with shrimp cocktail spilling over the edge of the bowl, and those wonderful little Parker House rolls slathered with real butter, not margarine, and the clubhouse bathroom with the little individual soaps that I’d put in my pocket if nobody else was around. Ice cream cones at the Caboose.
Those things were only the beginning, of course: There was my yellow bike with the basket on the front, and my bike rides to the tennis courts or the library—standing on the pedals, pumping hard to make it up the hill to the wonderful Lake Catherine Library, and coming home with my newest Stephen King novel, stretching out on the chaise lounge with a Diet Coke or a Snapple. If the kids were watching a video—as they usually were—I’d get to read my book until it was time to set the table for dinner.
