looking tanner and therefore more muscular by the minute.
We walk back to our respective baselines, and this surface underneath my feet … Abram calls it “green clay,” but it’s basically a bunch of tiny rocks that hop up into the backs of my shoes whenever I take a step. Abram’s already sliding around like he’s rediscovering his childhood sandbox, which is exactly what he should be doing.
“Ready?” he calls out, his voice echoing off the tall backstop behind him.
“Yes. No, sorry, hang on.…” My grip feels weird, slippery. Need to get in my ready position, which is the same as my other ramrod stance only with a light swaying back and forth like I’m about to produce some tennis. I signal for Abram to bring it on. The ball pops off his racquet, spinning, spinning, landing a few inches in front of me and bouncing three feet higher than expected. My racquet connects with the ball, but I’m not even sure where I hit it.
Abram apologizes in spite of it actually being my fault, then sends another try my way.
ABRAM
A BOUT THREE RALLIES into the warm-up, Juliette complains of cold-wrist problems, which is a cover story for her being embarrassed about nailing her last shot straight past the baseline, into the backstop. She removes a sweatshirt from her purse and puts it on. She looks good in it. There’s something about a girl like her in my hoodie: It doesn’t fit, but it just fits.
She puts her tennis scowl back on and jogs to the baseline. I hit the next ball to her, and I can tell she’s relieved when it brushes across her strings and bounces right back to me. She forgets to follow through, so I start exaggerating the correct path of the racquet after I make contact, thinking maybe she’ll pick up on my technicalities. She does—in a sarcastic way that actually ends up improving her stroke—so mission accomplished. We rally for a few minutes longer until she starts walking up to the net with her hands on her hips. She might be defaulting. I trot up to join her.
“Everything okay?”
She rests her racquet on her hip, looking down at mine. “Are you really left-handed?”
“Nope, I’m fake left-handed,” I say with a smile, using one of her favorite words to call people out with. “I write with my right hand, play sports with my left. Could’ve gone either way, but Dad thought I should be a lefty.”
“Because he wanted you to have the ad-court advantage?” she asks. Not sure why I’m surprised she knows the game that well, given her close friendship with Heidi and formidable online research skills.
“Pretty much, yeah,” I say, hitting the clay off the bottoms of my shoes with the edge of my racquet, just like he used to do.
“That was … awesome of him,” she says, surprising herself. “Smart.”
“Yeah … it was.” For a second, I think about all the additional hours my dad must’ve spent teaching me to be left-handed. It frees me up to appreciate him and not feel guilty about it, or retroactively protective of my mom. “Thank you for saying that,” I tell Juliette.
We hit for the next hour, during which she keeps telling me to stop making her look better than she really is by placing the ball in her strike zone every time. I can only do so much, as the uncoordinated ladies at the country club back home, where I taught a few summers ago, can attest. Unlike them, Juliette has athletic ability when she lets it come naturally, when she’s just hitting the ball, letting her string tension do the work instead of the tension in her shoulders, and not analyzing her shot as it heads over the net. This is why tennis can be therapeutic for people sometimes: It requires you to problem-solve but doesn’t leave enough time to overthink.
“I’d recognize that lefty forehand from a mile away!” a booming voice calls down to the court.
I look up to find a couple of ghosts from my tennis past, staring down at me from the stands.
27
Juliette
A BRAM WAVES UP at our
We walk back to our respective baselines, and this surface underneath my feet … Abram calls it “green clay,” but it’s basically a bunch of tiny rocks that hop up into the backs of my shoes whenever I take a step. Abram’s already sliding around like he’s rediscovering his childhood sandbox, which is exactly what he should be doing.
“Ready?” he calls out, his voice echoing off the tall backstop behind him.
“Yes. No, sorry, hang on.…” My grip feels weird, slippery. Need to get in my ready position, which is the same as my other ramrod stance only with a light swaying back and forth like I’m about to produce some tennis. I signal for Abram to bring it on. The ball pops off his racquet, spinning, spinning, landing a few inches in front of me and bouncing three feet higher than expected. My racquet connects with the ball, but I’m not even sure where I hit it.
Abram apologizes in spite of it actually being my fault, then sends another try my way.
ABRAM
A BOUT THREE RALLIES into the warm-up, Juliette complains of cold-wrist problems, which is a cover story for her being embarrassed about nailing her last shot straight past the baseline, into the backstop. She removes a sweatshirt from her purse and puts it on. She looks good in it. There’s something about a girl like her in my hoodie: It doesn’t fit, but it just fits.
She puts her tennis scowl back on and jogs to the baseline. I hit the next ball to her, and I can tell she’s relieved when it brushes across her strings and bounces right back to me. She forgets to follow through, so I start exaggerating the correct path of the racquet after I make contact, thinking maybe she’ll pick up on my technicalities. She does—in a sarcastic way that actually ends up improving her stroke—so mission accomplished. We rally for a few minutes longer until she starts walking up to the net with her hands on her hips. She might be defaulting. I trot up to join her.
“Everything okay?”
She rests her racquet on her hip, looking down at mine. “Are you really left-handed?”
“Nope, I’m fake left-handed,” I say with a smile, using one of her favorite words to call people out with. “I write with my right hand, play sports with my left. Could’ve gone either way, but Dad thought I should be a lefty.”
“Because he wanted you to have the ad-court advantage?” she asks. Not sure why I’m surprised she knows the game that well, given her close friendship with Heidi and formidable online research skills.
“Pretty much, yeah,” I say, hitting the clay off the bottoms of my shoes with the edge of my racquet, just like he used to do.
“That was … awesome of him,” she says, surprising herself. “Smart.”
“Yeah … it was.” For a second, I think about all the additional hours my dad must’ve spent teaching me to be left-handed. It frees me up to appreciate him and not feel guilty about it, or retroactively protective of my mom. “Thank you for saying that,” I tell Juliette.
We hit for the next hour, during which she keeps telling me to stop making her look better than she really is by placing the ball in her strike zone every time. I can only do so much, as the uncoordinated ladies at the country club back home, where I taught a few summers ago, can attest. Unlike them, Juliette has athletic ability when she lets it come naturally, when she’s just hitting the ball, letting her string tension do the work instead of the tension in her shoulders, and not analyzing her shot as it heads over the net. This is why tennis can be therapeutic for people sometimes: It requires you to problem-solve but doesn’t leave enough time to overthink.
“I’d recognize that lefty forehand from a mile away!” a booming voice calls down to the court.
I look up to find a couple of ghosts from my tennis past, staring down at me from the stands.
27
Juliette
A BRAM WAVES UP at our
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