Itch
On my way to the club, I passed the Barnetts’ rental house. Their car was out front with a couple of bicycles attached to the rack on the back and a row of suitcases lined up beside it, along with a cooler and some fishing equipment and a pet carrier. Though most summer people chose to stay through the Labor Day weekend, it appeared that the Barnetts were leaving Lake Catherine early.
I watched as the two of them stepped out the door, Brenda holding her husband’s hand as they made their way toward the car, Kyle with his golf clubs over his shoulder, Brenda carrying the dog. She no longer appeared beautiful, or anything close.
Her legs appeared red and swollen and covered with scratch marks, but the worst was her face—which looked puffy and covered with runny sores. One look and I understood what had caused this, though given how much time had passed since Brenda and Forrest’s rendezvous on the island, it seemed she must have an above-average sensitivity to poison ivy. She probably had more than a few sores on her butt too.
Brenda stood scratching herself as her husband lifted their suitcases into the trunk of their car. She set the dog in the carrier, put on her sunglasses, and settled into the front seat beside Kyle Barnett, whoreached over to her now and gave her a peck on the earlobe to avoid her swollen and oozing cheek.
I guessed this was how it went with peoples’ marriages. One day you might be lying on some moss with a man who wasn’t your husband, saying you couldn’t live without him. You might even think you wanted to have a baby with him. If you were a truly terrible person, determined to achieve your goal of nabbing him for your next partner, you might even come up with a plan to kill his wife.
But if it didn’t work out, you and your husband might just head back to Connecticut like nothing ever happened, with no more than a nasty case of poison ivy on your rear end (just my guess) to show for it all.
82
Just like inCarrie
Ididn’t want to get to the club too early, so I stopped at a point along the road where a large boulder known as Elephant Rock loomed over the lake. I sat there for a while, thinking over Jonathan’s advice to me—a whole summer’s worth of instruction reduced to a single thought.
It’s all about the ball. Put every other thought out of your mind.
The club was decked out for the festivities; brunch-goers were milling around outside near the pool with their Bloody Marys, golf carts whizzing off to the links. As I had done in gym class all the previous year, I changed in a bathroom stall and not—as the other girls were doing—in the locker room.
Through the door I heard the sound of their laughter. One of them was talking about a boy she liked, scheduled to compete in the sixteen-and-unders, who’d put his tongue in her mouth when they’d kissed out at the gazebo. Somebody mentioned Jonathan’s name. “He looks like Rob Lowe,” she said.
“I heard he’s gay.” This came from another of the girls. Apart from Olivia, I didn’t know any of their names.
There was a lot of high-pitched shrieking then. Somebody asked if you could get AIDS from touching a person’s tennis ball, if they had it.
“I hardly ever took any lessons with him anyway,” one of them said. “He spends all his time with that lame-o girl that wears drawstring shorts.”
That would be me.
I had changed into my new skirt by now, but I couldn’t leave the bathroom until they were gone. I sat on the toilet for a long time, waiting for them to leave. Finally I heard the locker room door slam, followed by quiet. I figured it was safe to come out.
Jonathan stood on the edge of the court, waiting for me. “Don’t lose your focus, Frannie,” he said to me. “You’re going to do great.”
The game began. I lost the first point, then came back for the next one. Five minutes in, I had found my rhythm. For the first time in my life, maybe, my body was doing everything I asked of it. My racquet felt like a part of me. All I had to do was see the ball and get to it, and I did this.
A medium-sized crowd of people had gathered—parents of the players, mostly, but also members of the club, though I knew without looking that there would be nobody on the sidelines rooting for me except Jonathan, though he couldn’t openly play favorites. Once or twice when I made a particularly good shot, I heard some voice calling out—a fan of my opponent, invariably—but my eyes never left the court. There might have been music playing somewhere, or the sound of a golf cart, a whistle coming from the pool when the lifeguard needed to let some kid know not to go out in the deep end, a whirring noise from over at the snack bar as the bartender fixed the first piña colada of the day in the blender. I tuned it all out.
It was the last set of three, and I was up, two and O. We were changing sides when one of the mothers from the country club, who’d been watching from the sidelines, approached me.
“I thought you might want to know, honey,” she whispered. “I think you had an accident.” Her eyes went to my skirt, those crisp white pleats. On the hem, and more than likely spreading across the back, Icould feel dampness. I knew what it meant. Plain as a target, probably. Bright red.
I hadn’t noticed. I couldn’t see the blood, but now I could feel it seeping through the crotch of the built-in underpants in my new skirt, a thin trickle making its way down my leg.
“It’s all over the back of your skirt,” the woman told me.
I could have asked for a time-out. But what then? I had no other clothes to change into—nothing but my blue jeans. If I’d had one of those Chris Evert tennis jackets the other girls wore when they came out onto the court that matched their skirt, I might have tied it around my waist to conceal the growing stain. But I had nothing.
An odd thing happened then. It came to me that I didn’t care. They all hated me already. I didn’t fit in. Everyone at the club—everyone but Jonathan—viewed me as a loser. What difference did it make if the whole country club saw that I had blood on my skirt?
“I’m OK,” I told the woman.
I took my place at the service line.
I did not look at my skirt again, but I knew the stain was probably growing as the match progressed—the evidence, at last, of the thing I’d been waiting and praying for all summer that had finally taken place at the worst possible moment. With nothing I could do about this, I willed my brain to put away the thought and concentrate on the ball.
