“I’ll worry about it when it happens.”
But that’s the problem, Noelle thinks. Amram always worries about things when they happen; if he worried about them before they happened, maybe they wouldn’t happen in the first place. And the words come to her: You break it, you own it. Wasn’t that what Colin Powell said about Iraq? The Pottery Barn rule? Amram is drum-chested and strong—back in college his roommates used to call him Moose—and now, as he continues to hit the tennis ball against the garage door, Noelle can feel the strength in his swing and follow-through. “You’ll wake the neighbors.”
“What neighbors?”
“The ones right over the hedge. The Simmonses? They’ve lived here as long as my parents have.”
“From the looks of it,” Amram says, glancing over the bushes, “they’ve been awake for hours.” Mrs. Simmons is on her knees in her own garden patch, and when she catches sight of Noelle and Amram she waves.
Amram bounces the ball and catches it, then bounces it again. “This isn’t some apartment building, Noelle. It’s the country. If I want to play tennis, I’ll play tennis.”
A car passes on the road below them, the sounds of “You’re a Grand Old Flag” coming from the radio. Amram stops bouncing the ball. “It’s July fifth,” he says. “Haven’t they had enough?”
Noelle doesn’t answer him.
“You’ve got to love it,” he says. “The country that celebrates Memorial Day by going to the beach.”
“It’s July Fourth,” she tells him, “not Memorial Day.”
“Same difference.” He starts to hit the ball again, but Noelle presses the button inside the garage and the electric door rises and disappears.
“Fine,” he says. “I’ll play some real tennis.” He grabs the bucket of balls and heads straight for the tennis court, and Noelle follows him.
Standing on the baseline, he starts to serve while Noelle, outside the fence, watches him with revulsion. He puts a couple of serves into the net, but then he places his next two serves squarely in the service box. The serve after that he hits so hard it slams into the fence, just inches from where Noelle is standing. She feels the chain links vibrate against her face, and she flinches.
“You’re playing great,” she says. “You’re really socking it to your invisible opponent.”
Amram places his racquet at his feet. “I’m happy to sock it to whatever opponent wants to play me. Including you, Noelle.”
“Is that right?” Noelle hasn’t played tennis seriously in years, but then neither has Amram; in fact, Amram has never played tennis seriously. He has a weekly game of racquetball back in Jerusalem, a game that’s suited to him, Noelle thinks, since mostly it requires a modicum of coordination and a willingness to whack the hell out of the ball. She, on the other hand, used to play tennis with her mother when she was growing up, and with her sisters, too, at the club in Larchmont; she’s a natural athlete, besides. She’s still standing outside the fence with her nose pressed to it, watching Amram take his serves, but she’s thinking, Don’t challenge me, Amram. You’ll regret it.
“There’s another racquet right there.” Amram points to the chair across from the net, where one of Marilyn’s racquets lies.
Noelle knows what he’s thinking. Anything to shut you up. She knows it because she’s thinking it, too.
She has on a long skirt above her sneakers, which puts Amram at an advantage; he’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts. But she doesn’t care. The skirt is loose, and by now she’s used to maneuvering around in it. It’s what she wears when she goes running and she manages just fine.
“We better get this match in before it rains.” Amram licks his forefinger and raises it above him. He’s merely testing the wind, but it appears as if he’s saluting.
He measures the net, one length of the racquet plus the width of the head; he nods as if to say it looks right to him. On the baseline now, he sits on the clay, legs straight in front of him, leaning over to touch the soles of his sneakers. Presently, he stands up and stretches his calves and hamstrings; he grasps his left ankle and pulls it toward his back, then does the same with the other ankle.
Meanwhile, Noelle is just standing there.
Amram’s yarmulke is bobby-pinned to his head, but it escapes its clasps and hops up and down with him. His dungaree cutoffs strain beneath his thighs. “You think you’re going to beat me?”
She certainly plans to. Because what she wants from him, finally, is a simple apology. For disappearing for the last two days. For terrifying and humiliating her. For being how he’s been for the past few months, for even longer than that if she thinks about it. And because he won’t apologize, because he’s pigheaded and obtuse, because he’s Amram, she will wrangle that apology from him the only way she knows how to. She will humiliate him just as he’s humiliated her. She will beat him into submission. She’s slapping her racquet against her sneakers, hitting them so hard her feet start to sting.
Amram’s ground strokes are topspin-heavy, whereas Noelle hits a straighter, flatter ball, which skims over the top of the net, occasionally hitting the tape and popping up to land short of the service line. This gets Amram running. They’re not keeping score yet, but they’re taking the ball on a single bounce.
Amram is overweight, but he’s quick nonetheless, bearing down on the ball with a relentlessness that’s accompanied by heavy breathing; saliva goes flying as he exhales. When he’s up at net, he stands practically on top of it; Noelle, on the other hand, stays further back at net, and when Amram hits what appears to be a passing shot, she manages to return it to his court.
“Are you loosened up?” he says.
“I’m as loose as I’m ever going to be.” She grabs her ankle and pulls it up to her rear.
“In that case, up or down?” He spins the racquet at his feet.
“Up,” she says.
“Down it is. I’ll serve first.” He places his yarmulke in his dungarees pocket.
Just minutes ago, in their rallies, there was a methodical discipline to Amram’s game that impressed Noelle. In sports, she has found, there are few surprises: you play the way you are. With squash, and especially racquetball, she can always tell the batterers and smashers, the ones who wish to pulverize the ball. So she was surprised to discover that Amram was more self-contained than she expected. Except for a few exuberant overheads, he seemed happy to play between the lines.
Now, though, as they begin their set, she detects a shift in Amram. It happens with a lot of players; tennis is the most psychological of games. But the change is starker in Amram. He was landing his practice serves in the box, but now that they’re actually keeping score, his first serve rockets past her ear. His second serve sails long, too. He taps his racquet against his ankles and begins what will be an ongoing conversation with himself. “Calm down, my man. Concentrate. Put the ball where it’s supposed to go.”
His exhortations appear to work, because at love-fifteen he aces his first serve, then aces her again at fifteen-all. Then come two more double faults, accompanied by further rebuke—“Amram, you idiot, bear down!”—followed by another ace. Noelle is essentially an onlooker to this spectacle. When Amram aces her there’s nothing she can do, and when Amram double-faults there’s nothing she can do either, except get out of the way.
Noelle’s own serve is efficient and well placed, and Amram responds by chipping at it. He hits his backhand with underspin, and his forehand too, talking to himself as he does so, which distracts Noelle, and she considers asking him to quiet down, but she decides not to. A couple of times she hits what appears to be a winner, but Amram calls the shot out. Are you sure? she wants to say, but again she remains silent.
Sometimes Amram will lob the ball so high Noelle loses it in the shadows. Then—randomly, it seems—he will try to hit a winner, as if he’s decided it’s time to assert himself, and the ball will go sailing over the fence, which seems to give him a perverse pleasure. But then he’s back to chipping at the ball, fo
rcing her to rush the net for another in a series of drop shots, followed by another in a series of lobs. Then he’s back to trying to hit winners again.
There’s no rhythm to the set other than the score itself, which was tied at one and at two and again at three, and which is tied now once more at five. “We might have to go to a tiebreaker,” Amram says. They’re between games, and he’s banging his racquet against the tape, as if hoping to lower the net. “Too bad we’re not playing total points. It wouldn’t even be close.”
“That’s just how the game works,” Noelle says, growing impatient with his excuses.
The clouds have thickened. A thatch of cumulus obscures the sky. Amram kneels on the ground to tie his sneakers; he’s out of breath, Noelle can see his back moving up and down like a piston. “Do you need a break?” she says. Her own breath, she observes silently, is even.
“I’m fine,” Amram says. Soon, though, he reconsiders. It’s his BlackBerry he blames it on, which rests on the chair beside the court and which, he tells Noelle, has been beeping incessantly. He sits on the ground near the net, which, in the growing shadows, segments him. As he punches the keys on his BlackBerry, sweat trails down his face. His roommates in college may have called him Moose but Noelle recalls hearing that when he would come back from the gym after a game of pickup basketball, his shirt so drenched he would wring it out the window onto the heads of unsuspecting passersby, they would call him other things, such as Pig.
“I’ll be with you in a second,” he says. He punches more keys. A minute passes, then another. “Okay, that should do it.” He rises from the ground. Clay is caked to his shorts; it looks as if he sat in cookie dough.
Rejuvenated, he unleashes a serve that flies past Noelle’s ear and crashes into the fence. He hits his second serve, and as he does, it starts to rain. A shard of lightning pierces the cloud cover, followed immediately by thunder: the storm is close by. It has gotten dark as well. It’s as if night has ambushed them, though it’s only nine in the morning. “Let’s get out of here,” Noelle says. She wishes she hadn’t challenged Amram to a match; she doesn’t know what she was hoping for.
But Amram remains where he is, and Noelle recalls his rabbi back in yeshiva, who used to invite the students over for Friday night dinner, after which he would deliver a talk. One time, the lights went off while he was still speaking—it was the Sabbath, and the lamps must have been on timers—but he went on talking in the dark, not even acknowledging that anything had happened. That’s how Amram is with the rain. He’s the tennis-playing version of his rabbi: stupid, principled about things there’s no need to be principled about, always trying to make a point. Amram delivers his second serve, and Noelle barely gets a racquet on it, sending the ball flying over the fence.
It’s raining harder, and the clay, which when dry doesn’t provide much bounce, provides even less of it now; the ball simply stops when it hits the ground, as if it’s been dropped into a marsh. The rain comes at Noelle sideways, bludgeoning her like an assailant. She should just walk off the court. But Amram doesn’t even acknowledge the storm except to wipe the water from his face. He continues to chip away at the ball, delivering his underspin forehands, hitting drop shot after drop shot, all of which die when they hit the clay. It’s thirty-fifteen, then forty-fifteen, then game for Amram.
“You win,” Noelle says. “Good for you.”
“It’s six to five,” Amram says. “Win by two—I have to get to seven. We could end up in a tiebreaker.”
“There will be no tiebreaker,” Noelle says. “I withdraw.”
“You can’t withdraw.”
“Watch me.”
“How about this? If I take this game, the set’s over, I win, and if you take the game, we’re tied at six and we finish up tomorrow.”
“Not a chance.” Noelle is determined to lose as quickly as possible. What, she wonders, was she trying to prove? And what good will beating Amram do? It won’t make her feel any better.
But the prospect of losing to him makes her feel even worse. And she fears that if she doesn’t complete the set she’ll be treated to a plane ride home of postmortems, twelve hours of how Amram really would have won had it not been for the weather, the rehashing of a match she regrets having played in the first place.
The rain feels firmer—is it possible it’s hail?—and from behind her comes a rapping on the window: wiser souls than she is urging her inside. She can hear her father’s voice from years ago, telling the kids to come in. You silly geese. You don’t even know to get out of the rain. Akiva calls to her, but she can’t hear what he’s saying. She hits her first serve long, and as she picks up the ball for her second serve she gets a whiff of it, damp and mangy as a dog’s coat.
Her second serve sails long, too. Double fault: love-fifteen.
“Don’t throw the set!” Amram calls out.
On her next serve, Amram rushes the net. She lobs the ball over him, and though she can’t tell whether it’s in or out, Amram calls it out. Love-thirty: two more points and they can go inside.
Amram rushes the net on her next serve, too, and seeing him bear down on her, moving like a lunatic through the rain, she hits the ball straight at him and he volleys it back. It lands at her feet, and as she pivots to swing at it, as she keeps her racquet even, moving it across the plane of her body, extending herself on her follow-through, Amram’s sneakers catch in the clay. He’s sinking, she realizes, plunging into the mud, while she herself has lost sight of the ball. She sees nothing for a moment, until she hears it, the smack of rubber against his face, the taste of wool—she can practically taste it herself—the sense that something has gone through him, and his neck snaps forward and recoils.
He lies facedown in the mud, utterly silent; everything seems to have gone black. When he finally calls out, his voice is so piercing she doesn’t realize it’s coming from him. He screams like a wild boar.
She leaps over the net, her skirt nearly catching on it. She’s crouching next to him now. “Shit!” she says. “What happened?”
“What do you mean what happened? You hit me in the face, you sick fuck!” With one hand Amram is protecting his eye—it’s as if he’s expecting her to hit him again—and with the other he’s gently poking at his cheekbone, making sure it’s intact.
“Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not all right.”
“The rain,” she says. “I couldn’t see you.”
“Just get me inside!”
She tries to drape him over her back, but she can’t hoist him up. “I’ll go get help,” she says, but she simply stands there in the rain. Amram removes his shirt, which he holds above his head, and they walk slowly, side by side, Amram in nothing but his dungaree shorts and prayer fringes.
Clarissa gets to them first, followed by Lily and David. Soon Marilyn arrives with ice packs.
“Leave him alone,” Noelle says.
“What happened?” says Nathaniel.
“I hit him,” she admits.
“With a racquet?”
“With a ball,” she says impatiently.
“I just need to lie down,” Amram says. He climbs the stairs to their bedroom, and Noelle follows. When he slumps across the bed, he still has his sneakers on. She puts a cold compress to his face, but he winces. “Leave me alone, will you?”
She hands him an ice pack. “This should help stop the swelling.”
He’s sitting up now, drinking from a glass of water. The color has drained from his face.
“You’ve gotten yourself quite a shiner,” she says.
“I’ve gotten myself quite a shiner?”
“Okay,” she says. “I have.”
“You hit me on purpose, didn’t you, Noelle?”
She doesn’t even know. She hit the ball straight at him, hit it with purpose, with force, hit it the way she was hitting it all set, hit it to shut him up. But did she mean to hit him in the face? She isn’t sure. All she knows is that something has been taken from
her, and now, as she apologizes to Amram, she feels that everything she has endured these past three days, everything she has endured these last months with Amram, has been blotted out with one lousy black eye. “I’m sorry, Amram,” she says, and she kisses him on the forehead, and when she goes downstairs she makes a plate of their kosher food and brings it up to him, and seeing that he’s fallen asleep, she leaves it on the nightstand beside his bed. She is sorry. She wishes she hadn’t hit him in the face. But she’s sorrier still for what she’s lost, the feeling that she’s in the right and nothing can change what’s happened, sorry to see her parents and her sisters and her own children looking at her askance as she returns to the kitchen, as if she’s the bad guy here, and her husband, who has earned no praise from them, no love, is now, battered as he is, transporter of Gretchen, the family matriarch, back to their country house, somehow, perversely, the hero.
In the kitchen, surrounded by her family, Noelle remains wound up. She stands silently, still in her sneakers and long skirt, her nose smudged with dirt from a ball she dove after, while Lily sets the table for breakfast. Gretchen has taken her post by the oven, watching Marilyn prepare scrambled eggs.
“How are you, Grandma?” Clarissa asks.
“I’m fine. “As if to prove it, Gretchen removes the spatula from Marilyn’s hand and tends to the eggs herself. She looks at Marilyn with silent determination, her every gesture saying, I was making scrambled eggs before you were born. Watching this, Thisbe feels a small, secret pleasure: even Marilyn has a mother-in-law.
And Lily, watching as well, makes a mental note to tell Malcolm, who’s in the living room playing cards with the boys. Thank God he seems to have found a backer for his restaurant. If Gretchen were to contribute so much as a penny to the cause, she’d rename the place Gretchen’s Gourmet.
Gretchen, still at the stove, turns her attention to Noelle. “How’s your husband doing?”
“He’ll be okay, Grandma.”
“You certainly beat him up.”
“Grandma, he’ll be fine,” Noelle says, her voice clipped, her arms folded across her chest, making clear through her carriage as she walks to the fridge to remove some butter and milk that she doesn’t wish to discuss this further.
World Without You Page 32
