When it was over—final score, 3–6, 6–2, 6–5, winner: me—my opponent approached the net to shake my hand. I’d been so focused on the match I never got her name. Afterward, the head of the juniors’ program presented me with my trophy: a girl holding a racquet aloft, reaching high for an impossibly high shot. Until that moment, I’d never won a prize for anything.
I just wanted to get off the court, stuff a wad of toilet paper in my underpants, get on my bike, and ride someplace far away, away from everyone.
I zipped my racquet into my case and walked back toward the locker room to retrieve my clothes. I didn’t even want to change in there. I could take my shower back at Wonderland. All I wanted was to disappear.
Then there was Jonathan, running toward me with a giant grin on his face and his arms open wide. He picked me up—never mind the blood on my leg—and spun me around a couple of times—me, still holding my trophy, with a stain the size of a giant Rorschach test covering my skirt.
“You were great out there,” he said.
He started talking about the match then, mentioning specific points, shots the other girl had made (her name turned out to be Kate) that had seemed to him un-gettable, only I’d gotten them. My second serve in the last point of the third set was amazing, he said.
“You were really in the groove by then.”
After a few minutes, he explained he needed to congratulate his other students, losers as well as winners.
“There are a couple of other kids with matches coming up,” he said. “But you know who my favorite is.”
83
A Place Little Girls Aren’t Supposed to Be
Imade my way down the hallway toward the locker room. I dreaded going back in to face those girls, but I had to pick up my clothes.
I faced two doors. On one side was the door to the women’s locker room. Beside it was the door for the men. On each door, a little stick-figure image announcing the gender of those who belonged there.
Something came over me then. You could call it an irresistible impulse, my body taking over for my brain. I placed my hand on the door to the men’s locker room. I turned the handle. I stepped in.
I heard the sound of showers running and the slamming of locker doors. The air smelled partly of sweat, partly deodorant. Steam filled the room.
A lone figure stood at the row of sinks with his back to me. There was enough steam to obscure but not completely obliterate him.
He wasn’t wearing a towel. He wasn’t wearing anything. I saw only the back of him, but I knew who this was. Those well-muscled calves. His strong back, every muscle defined. Naked buttocks. When I’d seen him making love with Brenda on the island that day, I’d looked away. This time I didn’t.
Forrest didn’t see me right away. He was shaving. There was a tattoo on his left buttock—a name, with a heart surrounding it.Regina.
I have no idea how long I stood there. Maybe as long as a minute. Possibly less.
I guess he must have spotted me in the mirror then. He set down the razor and turned around.
He stood there facing me. Naked.
“Oh, Frances,” he said. “You aren’t supposed to be here. This is a mistake.”
Only it wasn’t a mistake. Seeing my face, Forrest must have understood that. I’d chosen the door to this locker room.
Always in the past, lying in my bed, when I got to that big moment in the stories I constructed, this had been the problem. No picture came to me, of the man, and what he would look like. Now here stood a man in real life, a few feet away from me, facing me head-on with a real-life body.
“I had to drop out of the triathlon,” he said. “I guess I didn’t train hard enough.”
“I won a trophy today,” I told him. He was still standing there. There was a towel on the sink, but he had not wrapped it around himself. I had never seen a man’s penis in real life before. Not like this. I did not look away.
“Oh, sweetheart,” he said. Another man might have exhibited embarrassment at being discovered naked this way. Not Forrest. The look he gave me then was not unkind, but it crushed me. “Little girls don’t belong in here,” he said.
I wanted to tell him I wasn’t a little girl anymore.Look at my skirt,I could have told him. The blood was everywhere now.
I turned and ran.
84
