by Jenna Blum
He waited a polite interval and tried again, then, wincing, pressed all the bells. Finally the door buzzed and he pushed it open. “Is that you, Sven?” said a man waspishly from the front hall. “You’d better have some Alka-Seltzer and a damned good explanation.”
“I’m sorry, Michael, it’s only me,” said Peter. He held up his carnations in a salute and Michael, in a kimono and green face mask, looked him over and sniffed.
“Bring roses next time, lover,” he said and slammed his door.
Peter climbed the spiral staircase to the top floor and knocked. “Hold on,” a woman’s voice said—not June’s. Peter gazed out the rear window at the garden as he waited: a little pocket hideaway with brick walls, soda-fountain table and chairs, slender willow weeping into a pond presided over by a stone Lorelei and presumably containing koi—or doomed sailors lured by her voice. Over the Village rooftops the sun was still fighting the mist.
The door opened and June’s roommate Dawn squinted at him with some irritation. She was a tiny woman with shoulder-length chestnut hair, now bound up in curlers, her eyes the same bright blue as her robe. She was from Minneapolis, June had told him—the Minnesota connection—and was studying at Juilliard; she’s very good, June had said, although Peter had doubts about a big voice emerging from such a diminutive body; he had always thought sopranos were meant to look more Wagnerian.
“She’s not here,” Dawn said. “But nice flowers. Tea?”
“Please,” said Peter.
He followed Dawn in and stood in the center of the room as Dawn, yawning, lifted the carnations from him to put them in the sink, then lit the kettle and opened cupboards to assemble mugs, sugar, honey. Peter had been here only twice before, both times at night; because June shared the apartment, it had always made more sense for them to stay at Peter’s. During his last visit Sven and Michael had been having people, which translated into a night-long carnival that spilled into the street. Now Peter admired the peaceful light pouring through the skylights, the purple-painted brick fireplace and the slanted honey-colored floors. The bathtub was beneath the skylights, towels slung over the saddle of a carousel horse standing next to it. On the walls were framed playbills of Dawn’s plays, covers of June’s magazines.
“Do you take milk?” Dawn asked. “Lemon, sugar?”
“Just sugar, please,” said Peter.
She gestured to the purple velvet couch, salvaged, June had said, from an off-Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. Peter sat. Dawn curled against the arm, tucking her bare feet beneath her like a cat.
“Forgive my speaking quietly,” she said, “I have to conserve my voice.”
“Understood,” said Peter and accepted his tea. But he couldn’t drink.
“Is she on a shoot?” he asked. “Please tell me she’s on a shoot.”
Dawn surveyed him over the lip of her mug as she blew and sipped.
“Do you know,” Peter began.
“I know about the baby.”
“Do you know if she . . . ”
“She hasn’t decided yet,” said Dawn.
“Thank God,” said Peter. He set his mug on the floor.
“She’ll have to do it soon, though,” said Dawn. “Otherwise it’ll be too late. She said she’d take this trip to think about it, and if she decided not to have it, she’d go straight to Mexico.”
Peter stood up. “Where is she now?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you,” Dawn said. “You hurt her pretty badly.”
“Please,” said Peter.
Dawn examined him, her blue eyes frank and suspicious. “Hawaii. Honolulu. The shoot’s for Cosmo. They’ll be there two more days.”
“Thank you,” said Peter. “Thank you very much.” He started for the door. Dawn remained on the couch, watching him like a cat, amused and disdainful.
“Good luck,” she called.
Peter was relieved to see the cab was still at the curb. “Thought you fell asleep up there, man,” said the driver. He was a long-haired college-age kid, maybe a dropout, wearing little glasses and a newsboy’s cap; he looked like he might have been having a nap himself.
Peter got in. “Idlewild Airport, please,” he said.
“JFK, you mean.”
“Yes, right, JFK,” Peter said. He had forgotten about the new name.
“Welcome to the future,” the driver said and pulled away from the curb.
Peter watched as they made their way through the warren of streets that comprised the Village, passing Washington Square again, then turning onto West Fourth, Bowery, Broadway. He had expected the driver to take the Midtown Tunnel, but they were heading east instead of north. Peter tapped the plastic divider. “Excuse me, why are we going this way?”
“It’s faster, man,” said the driver. “There’s an accident in the tunnel. But I’ll go whatever way you want.”
“No,” said Peter, “the faster the better,” and he sat back. The driver turned on the radio, 1010 WINS. It was the top of the hour, nine o’clock: You give us twenty-two minutes; we’ll give you the world. Peter ran through what lay ahead of him: at the airport he would purchase a ticket for the first flight to Honolulu. Thank goodness June’s shoot was in Hawaii rather than Europe; that would have tested Peter’s resolve, but he thought he would have gone nonetheless. He must also call Lena and inform her of the trip, ask her to cover for him; he would buy travel clothes and toiletries. Peter patted his pockets and swore: he didn’t have the ring. Of course—he was in his checks, and the ring was in his suit trousers back at Masha’s. Well, then, he would get another one. Surely they had jewelry stores in Honolulu. The cab circled up the ramp onto the Williamsburg Bridge, passing garbage, graffiti, dark water, the colossal cement columns and rusty girders that held up all the bridges in Peter’s adopted city, and as the tires thumped onto the bridge, the sun finally broke through the clouds. Peter watched Manhattan slide away on his left, the other cars and buses and taxis and trucks schooling about them, going about their errands, as he was on his. He might have no business trying to be a husband again, and he certainly had been a failure as a father. The past had proven that. But here Peter was, and whether it was the name of an airport, the trends in cuisine, a decade on a calendar or one’s nationality, things kept on changing. Peter knew only that once upon a time, he had let go. He would not let go again.
II
June, 1975
The thoughtful wife has a simple beverage (cold in summer, hot in winter) ready for her weary husband when he comes home at night. The simplest are fruit and vegetable juices served in small fruit juice glasses.
—Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cook Book
7
Tennis Lessons
The Glenwood Bath and Tennis Club was atop the first and lowest mountain in the Watchung Range in New Jersey, overlooking the Eagle Ridge reservation, the town of Glenwood, and, in the distance, New York. It wasn’t as ritzy as Glenwood’s most exclusive club, the Briars, which didn’t allow Jews, but Glenwood Bath and Tennis was fancy enough. To reach it, June Rashkin turned into an unmarked wooded road—if a person didn’t know where the entrance was, she might drive right past it, as June had done when the Rashkins were first accepted. The road wound through stands of birch, pine, and oak growing diagonally from the rock that comprised the mountain and eventually reached the top, as announced by a brass sign reading, beneath a crossed-tennis-racquet insignia: Glenwood Bath & Tennis Club, Est. 1924. The parking lot, cleared from the forest, opened to the sky and was bordered on one side by wooden courts caged by chicken wire for paddleball, where June and Peter’s five-year-old daughter, Elsbeth, who had tough soles, could be let loose to run even on the hottest days.
The clubhouse was unremarkable, a one-story stucco structure whose timbers and mullioned windows gave it, at least from a distance, the air of an English cottage. Just inside the door, where members and visitors signed in, the check-in desk boasted the club’s wares: polo shirts, tennis visors, sweatbands, an
d wristbands with the club’s logo; books of the perforated cardboard tickets used instead of currency. The floors were tile, to handle the water the children tracked in from the pools—the whole place reeked of chlorine. The main eating area beyond the snack bar was a screened-in rotunda with picnic tables. At the very top of the mountain peak, at the end of a gravel path marked with another brass sign that read Over 18 Only! was the adult pool with its terrace and, on clear nights, a spectacular view of the skyline of Manhattan, where the male members worked during the day. By night the adult pool was a place where there were many parties, which invariably ended in shrieking nudity, drunken cannonballs, and regret.
This morning June wasn’t anywhere near the adult pool inferno; she was on the other side of the club, standing with two other women in front of Glenwood’s clay courts, awaiting the tennis pro. June’s husband, Peter, had given her the lessons for her birthday this past week, on June 10—June’s thirty-fifth. June had blinked at the certificate, lying next to her cake—angel food, which Peter always made for her because it was low-fat. “Mrs. Peter Rashkin,” it read on Glenwood Bath and Tennis stationery; “6 group lessons. Good until August 30th.” The handwriting was big and careless, not Peter’s spiky bird-track script. “Surprise,” Peter had said, smiling at June over the melting wax of her many candles. “Surprise!” Elsbeth had echoed, clambering around the booth; they were in their traditional corner banquette at Peter’s restaurant, the Claremont. Peter frowned over his bifocals. “Oh dear, you’re not happy,” he said. “I thought you might like a change from jewelry.”
“No, this is really very original,” said June. “Thank you.”
“You said you wanted to do something about your feedbags.”
June couldn’t help laughing. “My saddlebags.”
“Yes, those—although I think you are imagining them,” said Peter, and then he was summoned to the kitchen because the New Jersey state health inspector had paid a surprise visit. June had waited, feeding her cake to Elsbeth, and waited and waited, and eventually she had slipped the certificate into her purse and taken Elsbeth home alone.
It wasn’t that June objected to the lessons, although she’d never had the slightest interest in tennis beyond whacking a couple of balls around on the cracked courts of her hometown in New Heidelberg, long ago in high school, and usually after a couple of boilermakers. It wasn’t even that, unlike in Minnesota, here on the East Coast tennis was serious business. June had had to purchase a whole new wardrobe at one of the two establishments Glenwood Bath and Tennis approved: its own pro shop or It’s a Racquet!, the sporting goods store downtown in Glenwood Plaza. It was a racket, all right, June thought; $47 later, she owned two dresses, three pairs of bloomers, Tretorns, and seven pairs of socks with colored balls on the ankles—each a different pastel, June supposed for the days of the week. Glenwood Bath and Tennis did not permit women to wear shorts on the court; tennis, like much else in Glenwood, New Jersey, was geared toward the pleasure of the male animal—chauvinistic and ball-heavy. But June didn’t mind even that, beyond the principle. It was that the lessons, and Peter’s attempt to do something different, reminded June of how much in her life was indeed stagnant. So much left undone, so much more she had wanted to do. Thirty-five: June was officially middle-aged.
The morning was hot and damp, the dew evaporating into mist that steamed around the women’s bare legs and beaded in the velvety grass, the hawthorn hedges separating the courts from the pool area, and June’s regulation tennis bra—no nipple display permitted on the Glenwood courts, either. Sweat trickled from beneath the fringed edges of June’s new shag cut. She’d grown her hair long when she stopped working, but she’d had it all chopped off last week, and she was getting reacquainted with the feeling of sun and wind on her neck. She wiped it with a wristband, then took her pack of Marlboros from her bloomers, where the balls were supposed to go, and lit one.
“Oooooh, smoking near the courts? You’re so bad,” said Helen Lawatsch, next to June. “Give me a drag.”
June passed her the cigarette. She and Helen weren’t close friends, exactly, if by friends one meant spending the majority of one’s time together and exchanging deep, dark secrets; June hadn’t had such a friend since she left New York. But she liked Helen, whom she’d met at Mr. Hatrack’s HappyTime Preschool, which both their daughters attended. June and Helen had passed many pleasant hours trading cigarettes and mild complaints while their children urinated in the sandbox and twanged the banjo. The third woman with them, little Liesel Lambert, June barely knew at all, beyond being introduced to her at the club’s opening Memorial Day party, where Liesel’s husband, Steve Lambert, a bigwig at Ogilvy & Mather, had shamed her by sticking his face into the bosom of one of the waitresses and making an outboard motor sound.
June took her cigarette back from Helen and dragged, although the Marlboro was now ringed with Helen’s bright pink lipstick. “Where’s the pro?” she asked. “I’m broiling like a pork chop out here.”
Helen was staring at the pro shack, from which a man was emerging.
“There he is,” she said.
“That can’t be the new pro,” squeaked Liesel.
All three women stared. Glenwood Bath and Tennis had recently had to hire a new pro to replace their old one, Kevin, when he failed to report for work one day; the official story in the club newsletter was that Kevin had relocated to Florida to help his ailing mother, although his reputation and activity at the club pointed to his caring for much older women in an entirely different way.
“Maybe this guy’s ground crew,” said June.
“He’s huge!” squealed Liesel.
“He’s gigantic,” said Helen. “Maybe he’s Russian?”
June thought of Lena, Peter’s former sous-chef—she had been a brute. “I am Igor, tennis giant,” said June in a deep Frankenstein voice.
“Shhh, he’s coming!” said Liesel.
Igor the tennis giant lumbered up the hill from the shack toward them, twirling a racquet in one hand. He really was freakishly tall, six-six or six-seven, reminding June of the supersize farm boys she’d grown up with. And indeed he was still a boy—from his long hair, held off his forehead by a Björn Borg–type sweatband and the peace sign stickers on his racquet cover, June guessed he was in his early twenties. He also had five-o’clock shadow at eight in the morning, big teardrop-shaped glasses, and a dent above his brow, as if somebody had at one time thrown a soup can at his head.
He stopped in front of the women, legs bulging out of white shorts.
“I could climb that,” muttered Helen to June. June swatted Helen’s behind with her racquet.
“Morning, ladies,” said the giant and smiled. He had very white teeth. “I’m Gregg with two G’s, Gregg Santorelli. I’m the new pro.”
Liesel adjusted her visor to peer up at him. “I thought tennis players were supposed to be . . .”
They all waited for her to finish her sentence. On a lower court, somebody called, “Forty-love!”
“Supposed to be what?” Gregg the giant said finally.
“Um, smaller,” said Liesel, and all the women snickered. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded; I’m sure you’re perfectly proportioned,” Liesel squeaked and covered her face with her hands. “Oh Lord. Just shoot me.”
“No, I dig what you’re saying,” said Gregg. “A lot of the pros are smaller, more wiry. So as to get around the court more quickly, is that what you meant?”
“Uh-huh, yes,” said Liesel, recovering.
Gregg shrugged. “You’re right. I’m built more for football than for tennis, but I have one advantage those guys don’t. Do you want to guess what it is?”
“I do!” said Helen.
“Control yourself,” June told her.
“I have longer arms,” said Gregg, and he startled them all by dropping his racquet and pounding on his chest like a gorilla, making Ooo ooo ooo ahh ahh ahh! noises.
“I,” he said to his stunned audience, �
��have stupendous reach.” He retrieved his racquet from the grass. “My arms are almost twice as long as a regular guy’s. You ladies won’t be able to put a single ball past me, I guarantee it. Who wants to try me?”
“I do!” said Helen.
“You’re hopeless,” said June.
“Okay,” said Gregg, pointing his racquet at Helen. “You, Mrs. Eager Beaver, get the ball hopper from the pro shack. You two other ladies, please join me on the court.”
Helen, pouting, slunk off down the hill. Liesel and June obediently filed past the pro; June thought she saw him smirking, just the slightest purse of the lips, but when she looked back it was gone.
For the next hour, as the sun climbed higher, the giant evaluated their grips—“Shake hands with the racquet!”; demonstrated swing—“Low to high! No, Mrs. Lambert, not a loop. Just straight back—niiiiice and easy,” and circled them, analyzing their form. “When you swing,” he called, “put your weight on your leading foot. Let me see it! Good, Mrs. Rashkin—you got it,” he said to June, who said, “I’m a Ms.”
“Sorry, Ms. Rashkin.” He reached around her and joggled June’s right arm—she wanted to yank it away, conscious of how the skin on its underside must be wobbling. “Relax, Ms. R,” he said in her ear, and June felt startled by a weird déjà vu. As he tapped her hip to position her leg, then demonstrated the stance himself, June realized what it was: tennis was like modeling. The physical guidance; how the pro was assessing June’s body as a tool, a means to an end; how he called out what he wanted her to do and she did it, easily. A little to the left! Give me more, lift your body. That’s it, beautiful, terrific, good girl. Physical movement was a language June’s body had learned very young, forgotten, and was only now, for the first time since she’d had Elsbeth and stopped working, remembering. It was blissful.
She stretched, pivoted, aimed, and ran. They stood at half-court as Gregg lobbed easy shots to them—June hitting them back, the other women into the net. That’s it, Ms. R! Everyone watch her—she’s got a natural swing! When the wire baskets Gregg referred to as the hoppers were empty, they circled the court with them, picking up the balls. June squashed the fuzzy fat orbs up through the mesh without much thought beyond how hot the sun was, like a hot studio lamp, Gregg’s deep voice joking with the other girls like a photographer’s.
