Crooked Little Heart (24 page)

“Good girl,” he said. “Way to go. Did Simone win too?”

“She hasn’t finished playing yet. Is Mommy there?”

“She’s in her room, cleaning our closets.”

There was silence on the other end. “Mommy’s cleaning the
clos
ets?”

“Yeah. She’s on a bit of a tear. When I came out of my study, I discovered she’d gone through that big catchall drawer in the kitchen and sorted out all the thumbtacks and paper clips and doodads. Now they live in little tiny baby-food jars, each labeled, all in a row. Like a little nursery.”

“James? Is she okay?”

“I think so. Do you want me to go get her? She’s going to be so proud of you.”

“No. Tell her I’ll call later. Simone just came off the court.”

S
IMONE
’
S
face was red and blotchy, and her tight, blue nylon dress clung to her. She had lost in straight sets to Mandy Lee, who was ranked way below her. Rosie felt anxiety radiating off her like sunbeams. Rings of sweat darkened the dress beneath her armpits, like a grown-up’s. Rosie longed for those womanly rings. “Didja play okay?” Rosie asked, her eyes opened wide with hopefulness. Simone answered in a voice at once quavery and petulant that Mandy Lee had just pushed every ball over the net, even serves, never hitting hard and low, dinking and lobbing and spinning and doing whatever it took to keep the ball in play.

“I hate that so much,” Rosie said. Simone stood staring at the ground, twirling a strand of hair like a little kid. Then she stalked off.

Rosie found her around the corner standing with a group of fourteen-year-old boys, watching the fathers of two sixteen-year-old girls push and shove each other in the parking lot. The father of a girl
named Gail Smith, whose ranking had gone from number one in the fourteens to number eight in the sixteen and unders, was poking his finger into the chest of Jessica Paul’s father, who had his fists up. This was not an entirely unusual experience: two or three times a year the tennis dads went at it, usually the fathers of teenage girls who had been ranked one or two in the younger age divisions and who were maybe not going to go on to national rankings or tennis scholarships. One time Jessica Paul’s father had beaten up Mandy Lee’s father in the parking lot of a club where the state championships were being held, and another time Mandy Lee’s father had leapt out of a bush and nearly broken Deb Hall’s father’s nose, after Deb’s father accused Mandy of messing with Deb’s concentration during a semifinal match.

There were twenty or so kids standing around in clusters, just like at school when two kids squared off on the blacktop. Luther stood a little ways off, wearing his crummy black windbreaker and a visor, because it was nearly a hundred degrees. Rosie watched Luther watch the two men square off as if it were just another match. She felt both thrilled and stricken, smelling the blacktop on fire and oily with the heat of the long hot day; it smelled like grime, like cannons, like cars. Simone seemed enthralled, feeling the heat, the two angry men, and the cluster of boys, the sun pouring down on them all, and she glanced from one boy to another.

“Don’t make a mistake with me,” Gail’s father said to Jessica’s father.

“Yeah? Yeah? What does that mean?”

“I’m the wrong guy to fuck with.”

The time Mandy Lee’s father had beaten up Deb Hall’s father, he kept saying, “You got bad eyes, Herb, weird eyes—psycho eyes,” and for days afterward the kids who had witnessed the scene went around telling each other, “Hey, you got weird eyes—psycho eyes.”

Gail Smith’s father eventually yelled at Jessica Paul’s father that he was going to have to take things up with Deb Hall’s father, who was on the junior tennis association sportsmanship committee. He walked off the parking lot with both arms raised in the air, giving Mr. Paul the finger, the
double
finger, and the children in their tennis finery and Luther in his ragged jacket stood in the parking lot spellbound and watched him go.

A
FTER
both men had left, the boys hung around Simone, who looked like someone who should be in a television commercial for Swiss chocolate milk, except that her hair was not in braids but hanging loose, framing that sulky milkmaid face. Rosie remembered last summer when Simone was going out with Andy Gold, how often they had just started necking like newlyweds on TV, even though Rosie would be standing right there on the curb beside them, shuffling her feet, trying to act nonchalant. It always made her feel like some dried-up old praying-mantis auntie. Now Simone was telling the gathering of boys about having lost to skinny awful Mandy Lee, whom they all secretly hated anyway for being Chinese and wearing glasses. Rosie didn’t hate her at all. What was to hate? Mandy Lee was shy and driven and had an awful father who coached her from the bushes. Rosie just felt very sorry for her, because she wasn’t all that good and her father wanted her to be great, but the boys’ faces were twisted with derision and sympathy as they listened, snatching occasional looks at Simone’s breasts. Rosie stood beside her, looking at her like a golden retriever, adoring and loyal. None of the boys said hello to Rosie, but she did not expect them to. She could smell them, eyes closed. They smelled of many things all at once, and then, slowly, the smells sorted themselves. There was Absorbine Jr. wafting up from their feet. There was the same deodorant that James wore when he went out—Old Spice stick. And there was a faint trace of ammonia, and of sweat, and rain. She felt like a boat at sea, out of control.

Simone no longer looked like she had lost. She swayed ever so slightly as she stood there, silky, sinewy, luring the boys in. Rosie felt a fluttering in her groin, that tightening—as if she might start swaying, too. All at once both girls noticed Luther watching them from twenty feet away, in his windbreaker and scuffed wing tips, leaning against the building, looking at them all, at Simone, who looked up at him as if across a crowded dance floor, slowly pushing her chest forward and then, slowly, incredibly, tracing her lips with the tip of her tongue, right at him, to him, to Luther.

The boys, wired and hot, turned as one to see whom she was being so seductive with. Everyone but Rosie began to laugh at Luther standing there staring back. Rosie felt a warm flush of sorrow at his being the object of their ridicule and at their not being able to see the tiny
piece of light in his face, the pathetic part that wasn’t scary—the yearning. And she was so glad the mockery wasn’t directed at her that she finally joined in the laughter. But she could not take her eyes off Luther as he walked away, across the black asphalt, through shimmering waves of heat.

dusk

R
OSIE
studied the sunlight streaming onto Natalie’s long blonde hair. She usually wore it in a ponytail for matches, or clipped to the back of her head, and even sometimes in a ballerina’s bun, but today it fell loose down her back like drapes. Flaxen was the word, like someone’s hair in a fairy tale, thick and straight, four or five colors of yellow, from yellow white like early morning sun to the yellow of a parakeet or a lemon’s deep yellow. It was the most beautiful hair Rosie had ever seen, multicolored like those skeins of yarn going from white through each shade along the way to the darkest hue. The sun sparkled in all of those strands of yellow, like it was dancing with its own family.

Rosie was sitting in the back seat of Natalie’s car, an old powder-blue Mustang. They were listening to oldies on the radio, although Natalie kept pushing the buttons, trying to find better songs.

In the passenger seat next to Natalie, Simone sat staring straight ahead, so teary and grave and full of herself and her hardship that it was almost like bragging. It was like they were taking her in to find out if she had cancer, instead of for a pregnancy test.

They had told their mothers that Natalie was taking them down to Menlo Park for the day to practice with her and her doubles partner at the convent, which was so lovely you could hardly concentrate at first for the beauty of the trees and the old buildings. Of course the mothers had said yes. Veronica always just needed for Simone to have somewhere to be so she could work at her salon, and Elizabeth had gone back to bed that morning, claiming to have a headache. But a lot of mornings lately she had gone back to bed with one excuse or another.

Natalie had a wonderful father, a tennis pro of great renown who loved his daughter so much; they always stood together at tournaments,
watching his students, like Natalie was his wife, so tall and well developed, so tan, so accomplished, so pretty.

“Trust me,” said Natalie. “You’re not going to be pregnant.”

They drove the ten miles to San Rafael to the local Planned Parenthood office. Natalie had had an abortion here a few years ago when she was fifteen, and her boyfriend, who had been ranked number one in northern California, had been with her. They had gone steady for three years. He was as handsome as a Greek statue, but tan, really tan, beautiful as Natalie. They always were the first to dance slow dances, and you could see they were really in love and that you would never be in the arms of such a handsome guy who loved you so much. His name was Bill Shephard, and she called him Billy, in this way that sounded like she had a slight Southern accent. But he went back east to college on a tennis scholarship and had stayed there for the summer.

She had been on the pill ever since her abortion.

“We’re going to get you taken care of,” she said to Simone after she’d picked the two girls up this morning. “If you’re pregnant, I can help you get the money together. Don’t even worry about it now. Jason will contribute, I give you my word on
that
.”

Simone had gotten it into her head that Jason would come today, be there with her, be there with her next week if she needed an abortion. But he was heading up to the Pacific Northwest in a few days for the circuit there, which was for the kids who were not quite good enough for the eastern nationals but too good to hang around playing the lesser tournaments here. And he couldn’t take time off from practice.

So Rosie had been dragged along, like a pet hunchback, in the back seat behind these blonde girls—not really girls but not women yet either—who sat in the front seat of the Mustang, talking about birth control pills and abortions like Rosie and Simone used to sit in back seats and talk about their lessons and the dogs they would have one day.

T
HERE
was no one outside the clinic when the three girls went in, Simone with an artichoke-hearts jar of the morning’s first urine hidden in her purse. Rosie and Natalie sat in the waiting room with three black girls and dozens of old magazines. Natalie was reading an old
Mademoiselle
with such poise you could picture her waiting for her hair
to dry at a beauty salon. Rosie’s stomach was racing, like it was filled with lightning bugs, like she was about to get diarrhea. Mostly she was praying for Natalie to be right, for Simone not to be pregnant. But there was a part of her, too—the mean narrow-eyed part, the demon-field part—that hoped she was, that said she deserved to be, that said she was bad and deserved an abortion, deserved to have sharp cutting things inside her. And Rosie squinted back guilty tears, tears of hating herself, of being sorry, so when Simone came out, white as a ghost and weak like after people give blood, holding some papers, Rosie’s heart both sank and soared in guilty flight. A middle-aged woman walking with Simone touched her shoulder gently, pointed to something on one of the pieces of paper, and reached into the pocket of her white jacket for Kleenex. She handed the tissue to Simone and disappeared.

Rosie and Natalie stared at Simone, who wouldn’t look at them, and walked out the door of the clinic without saying anything. Rosie and Natalie looked at each other.

“God,” Rosie whispered.

There were protesters shouting outside the clinic when they left, protesters with enormous signs, one woman holding a huge photograph of a tiny fetus, the size of your thumb, attached to the umbilical cord, so perfectly humanly formed that it might have just been born. Natalie took Rosie’s hand like she was her big sister and pulled Rosie past the crowd to the car.