She served three aces in a row. Game point. Finally I was able to return her serve. Forty–fifteen.
On the next point, I hit her a short ball. She missed it. After a long rally that left us both gasping for breath, I won the next point. Forty all.
The game went to me. I knew Jonathan wasn’t supposed to play favorites, but I could tell how happy he was.
Next set. My serve this time. I made it to thirty–love. Then something happened.
A thought came into my brain. In my lessons over that summer, Jonathan could always spot this when it happened. “You’rethinking,” he called out to me. “You need to stop doing that. There’s only one thing to do. Keep your eye on the ball. Nothing else exists.”
Now it was happening again. Ideas, pictures, words, memories, skittering over my brain like static on a broken TV set. I’d be standing at the service line, ready to make my toss—racquet raised, feet firmly planted. Then this thought would make its way into my head.What if Forrest changes his mind about Brenda and calls her up again? What if Hayward tells his mother about seeing me readingThe Joy of Sex? And the other part he witnessed through the hole in the boathouse wall that day. Regina’s dead sister. Regina herself, writhing around on her bed, getting green goop all over the linen sheets. Forrest in his tube socks, down on his knees on the moss.
Reset. I readied myself at the service line again for the next point. Then the static was back.
What if Regina finds out I tried on her dress and snuck into the bedroom with her dead twin’s things in it? What if Forrest finds out I took pictures of him with Brenda?
What if I never get my period and I spend my whole life having people treat me like I’m fourteen years old?
And nobody ever loves me. And I’m alone for the rest of my life. And when I go back to New Jersey, my father comes over to our apartment and starts throwing furniture?
That’s all it took to screw up my serve.
Olivia won the match. We had time for a sudden-death round. She won that too.
I didn’t know about shaking your opponent’s hand after a match, but Olivia did, naturally. Seeing her standing there in her little pink skirt with her hand outstretched, I realized what I was supposed to do.
All I wanted was to be out of there.
After Olivia left, I told Jonathan I didn’t want to play in the tournament that weekend. “I’m not ready,” I said. “It would be too embarrassing.”
“Every player has days like this,” he told me. “I just wanted you to have yours before the big event. You’ll be ready on Saturday.”
I didn’t want to do it. But they’d already scheduled my match. My name was up on the board. There was no way to pull out now.
“Don’t lose sight of who you are, Frannie,” Jonathan said. “I’ve seen what you can do. You’re stronger than any of them.”
78
Big Day
Saturday morning, Labor Day weekend. The sun was just coming up.
I stayed in bed longer than usual. I was thinking about my first-ever tennis tournament—psyching myself up, but more so, I was thinking about this being my last weekend at Wonderland. My father was driving up from New Jersey that night. We’d have dinner with the family on Sunday. Monday morning he’d bring me home.
Forrest’s affair with Brenda was over. Knowing this gave me a certain sense of relief. But I also knew that everything was different now too. The girl I was ninety-one days earlier, when I climbed up the stairs to my little room at Wonderland that first night, no longer existed.
That morning I lay in my little bed, memorizing every single thing about my room, starting with the sheets, which were nothing like the sheets I slept on back home. “There’s something called a thread count, Frances,” Regina had explained to me. “The first thing you need to do when you buy bedding is check the number. Eight hundred, minimum. Preferably a thousand.”
I took in everything that morning: the floor where I did my nightly one hundred sit-ups, the robin’s-egg-blue desk where I’d written in my journal every night—until the story got ruined; I hardly ever wroteanything anymore—the mirror where I studied my reflection, checking for some sign of womanhood that never showed up.
And more: The hooked rug next to my bed with a border of bluebirds around the edge. The milkmaid wallpaper and the lace curtains with a pattern woven into the lace (also birds), and the way they fluttered over my bed when the wind came up over the lake. The sound of the loons calling out to each other at night, and sometimes in the morning too. The chest of drawers that now held—alongside the unopened box of tampons—the stash of back-to-school clothes Regina had bought for me, which I didn’t want to look at because what they signaled was the end of summer and my return to the Hubbard apartment, a place I would be sharing with only my mother now.
I thought about my journal, lying directly under my mattress, and the row of BBs still untouched, which assured me the words I’d written on those cream-colored pages would remain secret. I couldn’t even bear reading them myself anymore.
As awful as it had been seeing my parents go at it with each other (that, or go silent), I also knew that when I was back home, I would miss the sound of my father’s fingers on the typewriter keys. I would miss the sound of the scratched-up John Coltrane record he played, late in the night, when he’d finished his last bottle. I’d miss the hope I kept holding out all those years that things might still get better. One thing about my parents splitting up: Now it was clear, this wasn’t going to happen, ever.
I looked up at the skylight over my bed. On clear nights—lying here with my book, or just lying here—I could see the stars. No stars in New Jersey, that was for sure, not that you could see, and anyway my dark little bedroom back home had no window.
This was what I thought about as I lay in bed at Wonderland for the last weekend of the summer. It felt, that morning, as if everything I loved most was about to disappear.
