other side.
But that was Vicky at twelve. Thirteen was something else. She put her racquet down right on schedule and for the next four years hardly picked it up. It was all I could do to drag her out there. If not for visitors using it from time to time, the court would have gone to waste.
Now seventeen, Vicky had come home from a summer cycling trip with an appreciation for physical fitness. All that pedaling had done her good. She had decided to go out for her school tennis team. She would train in the afternoons and on weekends for as long as the fall weather would let her. Was I willing to help? Of course I was willing. If my legs weren’t what they had been, my eyes were still good.
It was a far-fetched plan. Tennis was serious business at her school; no one joined the team as a senior. Her real motive was for us to take up where we had left off five years earlier, to revive a broken home. But I was too enthusiastic to see it then. The plan was a portal to a fuller salvation—turn the clock back on one mischance and you turn it back on all the rest.
That evening we sat on the porch watching the last of the fireflies on the lawn, and drank to our future success. She would play on her school team in the spring, and next year in college. Had I been able to guess at the stray forehands and backhands to come, I’d have had her go out for baseball instead.
A check that I had left Vicky miraculously reconstituted itself on her return from the village as racquets, balls, shoes, and what had to be one of the skimpiest tennis dresses a father ever saw on his daughter. It was no more than a bikini, really, with a few beads for a bodice. After an arm-crossing, foot-stomping, teary melodrama, I prevailed on her to take it back.
That afternoon and the next, all through the week, we hit the court, though it’d be more accurate to say of Vicky that she hit everything but the court. She sprayed balls everywhere, upending the grooming tools, knocking roses from the vines and leaves from the trees.
She was bound to be rusty, I reminded myself. I might even have taken her wildness as an encouraging sign. But I couldn’t take it that way. Her once smooth strokes were now hurried; her hips and shoulders, whose motion had been instinctively coordinated with her racquet’s, now lurched on their own. None of this would in itself have doomed her chances, though. The damning fact wasn’t that she was missing her shots. It was that she smiled after she missed them. She hadn’t lost just her form. She had lost her drive.
The old Vicky had been intense and exacting. The new Vicky was a hit-and-giggler, as giddy at the sight of an errant ball as at a shooting star. She’d spin around, wave her arms, even laugh, and seeing my frown, cry “C’mon, lighten up, will ya, Dad?” Lighten up! I saw Vicky’s campaign as a second chance and myself as at an age where second chances are not to be taken lightly. My humorlessness seems foolish now, or worse.
We kept running low on tennis balls, though our hopper would be full to overflowing when we began. With Vicky swatting them like a sandlot slugger the shortage wasn’t surprising. We lost time collecting them, and lost them themselves in the undergrowth and in the salt pond. Then there was Frances. For such a hulking beast, she was avid for tennis balls. But she was no retriever. She’d pick them up, gallop away in triumph, and, slobbering them up, scatter them like giant seeds. We might have had tennis-ball trees everywhere.
Vicky was coming back from a recovery mission, the half-empty hopper swinging on her arm, when she announced that she’d just met our neighbor and invited him over for a game.
“Him?” I pointed Bud’s way with my racquet. “When?”
“Oh, sometime, I don’t know. I thought you’d be glad to have someone to spell you.”
“Gee, thanks. I didn’t know he played.”
“Maybe he doesn’t really. We’ll see.”
“Maybe he doesn’t really? Now Vick, you don’t want to waste your time out here. Didn’t you ask him how he plays?”
She straightened her racquet strings, which clicked like the tongues of a disapproving chorus. She could infuse our discussions with the feeling that I was interrogating her. Call it an instinct for sullenness. “Sure I asked him, but, you know, how much can you tell from that?”
“Exactly. And what did he say?”
“He said ‘un peu.’ You know, ‘a little.’”
“He answered you in French?”
She moved from her strings to her barrettes. Refastening her mane was an undertaking. She pulled back a tress and held an open barrette in her teeth. “Uh huh,” she said through the clip.
“Why’d he do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It was in context.”
“In context? In what context?”
“In the context of my telling him I’d been in France and him asking me whether I’d picked up any of the language and my saying ‘un peu’, which is what you’re supposed to say, and so him saying it when we got to talking about playing.”
“I see. He was answering in kind. But a little might really mean a little. He might have picked up a racquet once or twice in his life. You know, when you’re working on your game the way you are, honey, you really shouldn’t agree to play with just anyone. A weak partner can bring you down.”
“God, Daddy, I was only being friendly. He seemed nice.”
“He is nice. But it may be hard to get rid of him for just that reason. I’ve been in that kind of situation before. It can be awkward. And he does live right there.”
We’d planted a dogwood on the first anniversary of Peter’s death, put a bench beside it on the third, and planted a rose that turned out to be a climber on the fifth. The rose had clambered over the bench and was taking over the tree. I was looking at it a couple of evenings later, thinking it needed trimming, when the percussion of a tennis ball being steadily exchanged reached me from the court below.
Vicky and I had agreed to take a few days off from training. She needed to get ready to go back to school, she said. They were rainy days anyway—not the misty September rain that drips in slow tears from the leaves, but a gustier variety that shakes down those leaves and sets them hopping like birds in the grass. Though I’m sure that Vicky’s excuse for our layoff was honest, I couldn’t help suspecting that she was also making me pay for the way I’d spoken to her after she’d invited Bud for a game.
I marched down the overgrown avenue in what was supposedly our apple orchard but was really our apple graveyard. We never managed to harvest the fruit, and the worms gorged themselves on it. As I came over the rise at the top, I pushed an apple aside with my toe and exposed one that was as thick as a slug, with that band in the middle like a cummerbund put on for the meal.
“Daddy!”
The call seemed to come from behind me. I took a few seconds to line it up with the figure of my daughter below on the court, reluctant to believe that the thwack . . . thwack of shots and replies like the call of a bottle-throated bird had been coming from her racquet and Bud’s.
“Neil!” he called.
I waved and they started up again. There was some uncertainty in his motion, the mechanical exaggeration in something newly learned, but he had the knack. His shots were square, and even if he’d only recently taken up the game, he and Vicky played it in sympathy.
Darkness was falling on them, pink cloud trails consuming the daylight. They’d soon have to quit, unless they were so attuned that they could play by moonlight. They stopped rallying and approached the net, and I saw that someone was watching them from the bench beside the court—a hunched figure in a dark jacket with a briefcase on his lap. “What next?” I heard myself exclaim.
I turned back up the row of apple trees.
“Come down!” Bud cried.
“Catch up with you later!” I shouted back and continued over the hill.