Crooked Little Heart (14 page)

She shrugged. “If you want,” she said.

“Hey, baby,” Elizabeth said sharply, “you are sitting on my
last
nerve now.” Rosie gave her a long sideways look. Why do you have to be such an insolent little shit? Elizabeth wondered, looking away: this guy’s willing to give up a whole Sunday to cheer you on. And you’re so lucky to be loved by him.

And he did love Rosie so. He loved her even when she was stomping around; he loved her even through the tears and hysteria, the grief caused by feeling left out at school or losing a match on the circuit, by unrequited love or raging hormones. He loved her even when he whispered to Elizabeth that she was the she-devil. He loved her tonight, when she squeezed all the lime on her own pad Thai, leaving none for anyone else.

And he even loved her the next morning when she didn’t return his greeting. She was sitting catatonic at the table and staring off unseeing, the posture and mood he called Tar Baby in Bayview. Coming upon her this way, James peered down, positioning himself in the path of her gaze, Brer Rabbit first laying eyes on the beautiful creation.

“And how,” he asked with panache, “is your disposition situated, O lovely lady?”

And when Rosie glowered and said nothing, James drew back and said with a strong Southern accent, “Your shyness stirs my heart.”

“W
HY
are you in such a good mood?” Elizabeth asked, watching him, feeling his happiness. After breakfast she had followed him upstairs into his office, where he had pushed around piles of paper and notecards until he found a small notebook. He tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans and sat down in front of his computer.

“I cannot work with you today,” he told it. “Rosie has a tournament.”
Elizabeth stood behind him smiling. She began to rub his neck, and he let his head drop onto his chest. “Me and my computer finally know how to start our new book,” he said.

“You do? Honestly?”

“Yep,” he said. “Me and my computer, we are ready for love.”

It had been months since he had gotten any decent work done, months since his first novel hit the stores, garnered some good reviews, and sold less than two thousand copies.

“When are you going to start?”

“Monday.” She stroked aside some of the soft brown hair that covered the collar of his shirt, rubbed the pale skin underneath, pushing her thumbs against the taut ropy muscles that betrayed the tension he carried, the tension of being a writer, a husband, a dad. “Oh, don’t stop,” he moaned.

“We need to go in a minute,” she said, but she rubbed his shoulders anyway, and he groaned. There were notecards taped to the wall by his desk, notecards on which he’d written little messages to himself, notecards he didn’t want to lose in the lovely chaos of his desk. She read them now as she stood behind him, rubbing his shoulders. Some she had read before, but there was a new one. “Fiber adds bulk to the stool,” read one piece of newsprint taped to an index card, “and among Finns stool tends to be three times larger than among New Yorkers.”

“Honey,” she asked, stopping her massage to point to the card. “How on earth will you use this?”

He raised his head slowly to see what she was reading.

“Writing,” he said rather primly, “is an extremely mysterious process.”

H
E
helped Rosie pack for her match that day, bringing her a washcloth, sunscreen, a waxed paper bag of cashews and raisins mixed together. And he brought along a tape to play in the car as they drove to the East Bay, an old Phoebe Snow tape he knew she liked.

T
WO
days later, the morning was socked in with fog. Children were milling around the Fremont Golf and Tennis Club, studying the draw, watching the matches, brooding, playing cards, playing Ping-Pong.
Simone had lost the day before; Rosie was in the quarterfinals. Rosie and her opponent had been sent to the junior college courts to play, and she had forbidden James or Elizabeth to come along. So they sat on the sidelines at the club with the other parents, watching the match on the nearest court, where a boys’ fourteen-and-under semifinal was in play. In the hour since they’d arrived, James had already called his answering machine twice. There were no messages.

Dane Williams, seeded number one in the boys’ fourteen-and-under draw, had been the unrequited object of Rosie’s affection the year before. He was playing a boy no one had ever heard of, a kid half his size, who stood on the baseline and returned everything that came over the net. Dane won the first set easily, but the smaller boy was holding his own in the second, and at three games apiece, he broke Dane’s serve. Two games later, Dane left the court hunched over, wiping at his eyes. He went and sat under a tree and cried.

“Oh, I can’t bear this,” said Elizabeth.

“But, honey. The little kid deserves to win,” said James. “He’s playing the top seed, someone forty pounds heavier, and he’s just playing his little heart out.”

“But there always has to be a loser, doesn’t there?” said Elizabeth. “Oh, well. I wonder how Rosie’s doing.”

R
OSIE
was seeded fourth, which meant she had been expected to get to the semifinals, and this was the round she was playing. Her opponent was an eleven-year-old named Marisa DeMay who’d won her quarterfinal round by default—the second seed had come down with leg cramps during the match. Rosie had been relieved just to get to the round she was expected to make, but now she was dismayed to discover that this unseeded girl, who’d gotten into the semis on a fluke, was actually very good. Rosie was so anxious about losing—even before they’d started keeping score—that it threw her game off. She and Marisa were playing long hard rallies, and Rosie had just barely won the first set, seven-five. Mrs. DeMay was doing needlepoint on the sidelines (an eyeglass case with a picture of teddy bears) and rarely looked up. Rosie was spooked. Her usual strategy and strength were consistency and infinite patience. Other players—Simone, for instance—lacked the patience for endless rallies and would try to put the ball
away out of sheer boredom, but Rosie could wait all day for an opening if she had to. She didn’t care. She just wouldn’t miss until, like a break in the weather, a corridor opened down which she could discharge a lethal ground stroke.

But today, against tiny little Marisa, she was in trouble. It was like playing Thumbelina, except that Thumbelina hit as hard as a boy. On top of it all, she bounced around a lot and made an annoying squeaky noise. Rosie, a foot taller, two years older, was unnerved. She wanted the trophy so badly she could taste it, the trophy she’d get for playing in the finals, and here was this runt on the other side, chasing down every shot like a crazy little Chihuahua. She thought of her mother in bed the other day, depressed and overwhelmed.

She began patting in her second serves, like the old people did at the club—“Hey, nice serve, Ruth Ann,” Peter would have said—and chanting to herself in an incantory way, “Head down, head down, one two three one two three.” Tiny Marisa flitted around the court making squeaky sounds of effort, a little cat toy that just wouldn’t miss.

Both of them held serve until four all, and fear beat inside Rosie. She could hardly manage a forehand, while little Squeak-jump on the other side batted the ball from side to side. Rosie served a puffball forehand at thirty all, and Marisa put it away down the line. Adrenaline flooded Rosie like a sudden fever. Her hands were shaking; one more point and Marisa would break serve, be ahead five to four, zipping along on a roll, with her irritating mother stitching away, maybe humming. Rosie began to fixate on Marisa’s mother and whether she was in fact humming or not. She was about to serve, but stopped and tilted her head toward Mrs. DeMay, straining to hear.

“What?” said Marisa.

“Nothing,” said Rosie.

It was hard to catch her breath. She served a deep loopy backhand that miraculously dropped in, and Squeak-jump lobbed it back, and Rosie pushed back a forehand that barely landed over the net, and Marisa tapped it back, and they rallied for this critical point like that—dinking, pushing, patting endlessly, until Marisa hit a ball near the baseline. And it was not solidly on the line, but it was definitely in, touching half an inch of white. It was the most basic rule of tennis sportsmanship that you always gave your opponent the benefit of any doubt. If her ball was so close you honestly couldn’t say for sure whether it was
in or out, you played it as in. This ball was definitely, though barely, in, and time became thick and vacuumy and so silent that it was almost noise, and Rosie turned as if to hit this backhand, saw that Mrs. DeMay was reaching for something she’d dropped, and without really thinking about it, Rosie caught the ball on her racket and called it out.

Nonchalantly, heart pounding, she whacked the ball over the net to a stunned Marisa and walked to the forehand court.

“That wasn’t out,” said Marisa. “That hit the line.”

“No,” said Rosie innocently. “It was just barely out.”

Marisa looked over at her mother. Her mother looked up kindly at Rosie.

“It was out,” Rosie explained.

“I saw it. I looked at it,” said Marisa. Rosie shrugged sympathetically.

“Why don’t we take it over?” she offered.

“But that was my game!”

“Look, I’m sorry.” Rosie walked to the alley and pointed with her racket to a spot just outside the line, a spot where a part of her was now convinced the ball had landed. “It was right here. But you can take two if you want.”

Marisa looked with despair at her mother, who shrugged and held up her hands.

“Sorry,” said Rosie. “Want to take two?”

After a moment of fidgeting, Marisa walked to the baseline to receive the serve. Rosie felt strangely calm, even cold, calculating: after she tossed the ball, she suddenly glanced away, as if distracted, and Marisa was thrown off by the sudden movement. She hit Rosie’s easy serve into the net, and began to fall apart. She was fighting back more tears, while Rosie stood there waiting nicely, almost encouragingly. Then she nonchalantly aced her. On the next point, at ad-in, she once again glanced away after the toss, which so startled and distracted Marisa that she hit the ball over the fence.

“Four-five,” said Rosie. A strange maturity filled her, and excitement. She felt terribly sorry for Marisa: when they changed over, Marisa was staring at the ground, so teary as to sound asthmatic. Rosie broke her serve for the match in four crisp points.

The mother made everything okay, gathering up her embroidery as she gushed over both of them: what a wonderful match, she said, and
they’d both played so well, and to Marisa, wouldn’t her father be proud that she had gotten so many games off a seeded player? She had cold cans of orange soda in an ice chest she kept in the trunk of her car, and Marisa began to cheer up, standing by the car, and Rosie looked at her proudly, for getting so many games off a seed, and then Mrs. DeMay leaned forward to tug at a loose button at the neck of Rosie’s shirt, and it came off in her hands, as if she had just produced a coin from behind Rosie’s ear.

“It was just about to drop off,” Mrs. DeMay said. Rosie reached for it apologetically. “You sit down,” she instructed Rosie. “I am going to sew that right back on.”

“Oh, no,” said Rosie, reaching again for the button, which Mrs. DeMay had already dropped into the pocket of her sundress. Rosie watched with disbelief as Mrs. DeMay began threading an embroidery needle with white thread. Give me the fucking button, Rosie wanted to cry. This could not be happening. Marisa was sitting in the dirt, taking off a shoe and sock to check for blisters, and Rosie looked around for help and, seeing none, saw herself smashing nice Mrs. DeMay over the head with her racket. As if in a dream, Mrs. DeMay led her to a chair beside the court and had her sit down, while she stood bending over Rosie, holding Rosie’s shirt out by the collar, with hands that smelled of soap and lotion, hands that moved close to her and then away, close and away, as Rosie sat there hardly breathing, her head level with Mrs. DeMay’s stomach, smelling a faint womanly underwear smell and connected by a long white thread to the mother of the girl she had cheated.

T
HE
cold clamminess of the fog soothed her. It covered everything, erased the world, the colors and shapes. Sitting in the back seat on the way back to the club, Mrs. DeMay and Marisa bubbling away in the front, Rosie saw in her mind the Walt Disney paintbrush that magically washes color into the world and felt now the relief of its opposite, the fog. In the fog, ships hit icebergs and sink. She liked the mystery, the shroud. It meant you got to wear jackets at night, blankets when you slept. It surrounded her now with silence, a silence she didn’t hear anywhere else, and she realized how profoundly, in this car with two other people, she was alone.

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