Crooked Little Heart (44 page)

L
ANK
was calling her name softly, but she was in a basement where Andrew had lain all these years like a mummy. And his body was no longer there. The absence shimmered; it caused her to catch her breath. After a while she entered that empty space and tried it on like a garment. The shock of its cool emptiness caused her to open her mouth, as if to sing. “What is it?” Lank asked softly, but she turned slowly to him in amazement, unable to answer. She practiced bearing the emptiness. It was like riding a bike for the first time, coasting along suspended in space, your feet not touching the ground, scared and thrilled. And for a moment she felt like she had taken out earplugs she’d been wearing all these years, and just for a moment nothing separated her from the sounds and smells and movement of the semen-smelling sea.

O
NE
early afternoon the following week she sat by the window in her bedroom, waiting for it to be time to pick up Rosie at school. They had arranged to meet with two men from the sportsmanship committee that day, just to bring things out in the open. She glanced at the clock: ten minutes until she had to leave. She stared off into the branches of the tree. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the poem began to play:
King John put up a notice, “lost or stolen or strayed! James James Morrison’s mother seems to have been mislaid. Last seen wandering vaguely: quite of her own accord, she tried to get down to the end of the town—forty shillings reward!”
She could not get the poem to stop playing in her head, and she stopped trying to, stopped fighting it. And after a while, as she sat there, she heard outside the window a tiny house finch, singing from what sounded like the highest point around—a long complex Charlie Parker song, rapidly moving, highly melodic, hitting lots of notes. Elizabeth closed her eyes to listen, heard the clear sharp insolent song: Hi! she heard him crying to the other males, I’m exactly this particular bird, and I’m
alive
.

That cheeky aliveness rang in her ears with a piercing intensity; it felt too bright and crisp for a moment, like in the old days when the psychedelics first came on and she felt like she might tip over. Threatened and frightened and overwhelmed, she missed the comforts of her illness. She thought maybe she had preferred being grief-calloused to this new raw immediacy.

E
LIZABETH
and Rosie drove to their meeting with the sportsmanship committee that afternoon. Indian summer had arrived, just as the leaves were beginning to turn. The rains would be here soon. They
drove to the junior tennis headquarters in Oakland, listening all the way to oldies on the radio. From time to time, Rosie wondered out loud: should she offer to quit the circuit; would they kick her out; would this affect her doubles ranking? It was close but she and Simone should be number one. And Elizabeth said, “We’re just going to show up and tell the truth. Okay?” Rosie nodded. They were driving past the Berkeley marina, past the pristine sailboats in the harbor, the bay speckled with windsurfers, buoys, a hot yellow sun beaming down on the water. Rosie covered her eyes with one hand.

“Oh, Mommy,” she said, exhaling loudly, and Elizabeth took one hand off the steering wheel, ran her hand over Rosie’s hair.

“Okay?” she said, and Rosie tried to smile, dipping her head for a moment, like a bird, and then raising her head imperiously, looking from side to side like a jowly empress.

T
HINGS
went pretty well, except for one detail, and it was a big one: one of the two tanned middle-aged men at the huge oak table in the office into which Elizabeth and Rosie were shown was Deb Hall’s father. They did not realize this at first. He introduced himself only as Herb, and the other man as Mr. Macete. Herb was the handsomer of the two, big and burly with lots of dark hair and thick black lashes framing his hazel eyes; Rosie’s first impression was that his lashes were actually too thick, like he wore mascara. He indicated chairs in which they should sit down, and without a moment’s pause asked Rosie how she felt about their letter to her.

Elizabeth watched her closely as Rosie tried to begin.

“Well,” she said finally, hanging her head and squirming with embarrassment. “I did cheat.” Hunched over, she buried her face in her hands, the penitent waiting for the whip to fall; not feeling one, she glanced up with regret and a strange, almost rapturous look of shame. Her eyes widened blankly, and she looked truly abashed. “A few times this summer, I cheated. I called some balls out that were in on important points. I won some games I might not have. And I did get good rankings, so I thought maybe those matches shouldn’t be counted.”

“This is all done on computer,” said Mr. Macete. “The computer cannot log in cheating.” The two men looked at each other. Herb looked grim; his flashing eyes seemed false and expensive.

“Deb told me,” he said. “Deb and her mother said she might have won that match except for your calls.”

“Deb?” said Elizabeth.

Rosie began to pant; she felt like a little pug who had been running to catch up with its owner. Now it all came back, and she sat nodding at Deb Hall’s father, the awful father of awful Deb Hall, and he did have bad eyes, weird eyes, psycho eyes, like Mandy Lee’s father kept saying that day when he almost had a fight with him. She turned to her mother. “Deb Hall.”

“Ah,” said Elizabeth. The room grew quiet. “But surely,” Elizabeth continued, “this is not the first time someone has been called in for cheating.”

“Actually,” said Mr. Hall, “it is the first time anyone has ever wanted to talk to us about it. Certainly we’ve made the notification before. And how ironic that this time the cheating involved my daughter. Who did mention it to me at the time.” Rosie was listening in a daze. Mr. Hall continued. “The usual situation is that someone else mentions this problem to us, and we summon them to us. But because it was my daughter, and I am cochair of the sportsmanship committee, we did not know exactly how to proceed and so chose to take a wait-and-see position.”

“So in that case,” said Elizabeth, “I would think that it would count for something that my daughter has come to talk about it.”

“Of course it does,” said Mr. Hall. “It’s quite brave of her. On the other hand, of course, it’s a deeply dishonorable thing to do, to cheat, to disregard the rules of fair play—to betray the trust of another child. It’s the worst thing a child can do on the circuit, the worst thing an athlete can do
period
.”

“Oh, for Chrissakes,” said Elizabeth. Rosie looked at her as if she’d suddenly belched, as if she were ruining everything. “I’m sorry, darling. But this is nuts, Mr. Hall. Here she is, with no one making her do this …”

“Mom.”

“Now, don’t get me wrong, Mrs. Ferguson. I think it’s quite courageous for Rosie to be here today. It’s just that I’m not sure how to proceed. We cannot simply disregard the matches that she won by cheating. Is that what you expected? My daughter would be ranked one position higher if she’d won that match. And then, what if she’d
gone on to win the next match, too, and the next? And what about doubles?”

“I never cheated in doubles,” said Rosie. “Ask Simone.” Mr. Hall gave Mr. Macete a look full of condescending mirth; Mr. Macete looked back at him with absolute neutrality, and Rosie wanted to smile. She imagined getting together with him later to talk about Herb Hall; oh, she would say, he’s got
bad
eyes, weird eyes—

Psycho
eyes, Mr. Macete would say.

“I just wanted to tell someone,” said Rosie. “I just had to do that. I decided that my mom and I would come today and just tell the truth. And you should just do what you have to do.” Elizabeth’s mouth dropped open.

“Herb,” said Mr. Macete, “what if we just start from where we are? Clean slate and all that?”

“Because it wasn’t your kid she cheated against, Francis.”

“Look,” said Elizabeth, standing up. “Like Rosie said—why don’t you guys do whatever it is you need to, and let us know. The season is over, except for those late fall tournaments. We’ll wait to hear from you. But we have said all we needed to.”

“Mom?” said Rosie, getting to her feet.

“What do you want them to do?” Elizabeth asked, ignoring the two men. “You want them to tell you you’re a very naughty girl, and you must promise to do better?”

“No.”

“You want them to tell you you’re expelled from tournaments, that you need to confess publicly at a press conference? Maybe put you in stocks?”

“No.”

“Well, look, honey. You wanted to do the right thing. And you have. Okay? So let’s let them do what’s right for them, and in the meantime, well, let’s—”

“We may not do anything,” said Mr. Macete. “We often don’t.” He stuck out his hand and Rosie shook it.

“I may not even play any more tournaments,” she said. He nodded.

“I understand,” Mr. Macete said. “But don’t not play because of us.”

Rosie stood considering this. After a moment, finally looking up, she asked, “Do you need to tell my pro?”

The two men looked at each other and shook their heads.

“No,” said Mr. Macete. “We don’t need to tell him.”

Three evenings later J. Peter Billings called Rosie at home.

“I need to see you in my office tomorrow,” he said, and blood pumped loudly through Rosie’s head. When she got off the phone, films filled her head of groveling, pawing the ground, begging forgiveness on her knees—films of killing him, sloshing gasoline on his pro shop, burning it to the ground, filling the club with the smell of barbecued tennis balls. She called Simone and asked her to come over. And she got a terrible headache. Her mother put her to bed and gave her some aspirin. James was mad, stamping around Rosie’s bedroom in his most Napoleonic way, until Elizabeth said gently that they needed him to settle himself. He curled up at the end of Rosie’s bed and held on to her shins. Simone came over, round and soft, and sat on the floor with her back against the bed so she could lean her head all the way back and smile at Rosie and Elizabeth. “I just got kicked out of the club,” she said.

“You mean for being pregnant?” Rosie asked. “I bet you Jason doesn’t get kicked out.”

“Of course he won’t,” said James. “They’ve got a family membership. It’s too much money for the club to lose.”

“I wonder if I’m going to get kicked out for cheating or for you being pregnant.”

“For keeping bad company,” said James, and smiled at Simone. He and Elizabeth looked gently at each other, Elizabeth with her head on the pillow beside her child’s, James holding onto Rosie’s ankles.

R
OSIE
hardly slept at all that night. She turned the light back on at midnight, tried to read, and finally went to her parents’ room. They were sleeping back to back, her mother snoring softly, James silent until he opened his eyes and bolted into a sitting position.

“It’s me,” she whispered.

She lay in their bed in between them, held by her mother, who dozed. James stayed awake with her in the dark. “Peter had to kick Simone out,” he explained. He talked to her like she was a grown-up, trying to help her understand. Peter saw Simone in flower, he said, and felt wild with mixed feelings—betrayal, disgust, a need to protect her, a longing to own her. The prize, said James, from Menelaus on has always
been the teenage girl. Rosie did not know who Menelaus was, but she listened to James and was grateful that he was staying awake with her. The last time she looked at the digital clock, it was 2:45. She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, imagining the meeting with Peter, imagining how disgusting she must seem to him. James gave off a smell of flannel, of coffee beans—a roasty smell. He was lying on his side next to her, yawning, telling her things, trying to stay awake, and she listened to the murmur of his keeping her company.

H
E
went with her to the pro shop for her meeting with Peter, and he waited while she went inside. He sat on the weather-beaten wooden bench outside Peter’s office, underneath a little Japanese maple, its foliage now the color of flames. She gave him one last look before going in, as if she were about to step onto the gangplank of a slave ship.

P
ETER
stared at her, so personally hurt and disappointed that you’d have thought she had scratched his van with a nail. She tried to meet his eyes but couldn’t.

“Do you have anything to say?” he asked, and she cringed.

“I don’t do it anymore is all,” she said.

She thought she might faint. Something inside her was uncoiling, spinning out with a bad burned smell. She thought of those little disks she used to light on the Fourth of July, when she was still a kid, where long cinder snakes spiral out at you.

She listened to him talk about the disgrace that her cheating brought on him, the disgrace Simone’s getting knocked up brought on the whole club. Sentences poured out of his mouth like black ash snakes. “You did not resist temptation,” he said. “Each of us must resist it every day,” and she imagined that he was going to shout, Bad dog! at her in the next breath. He would have to rethink their whole arrangement, he said. Only a couple of kids could have the kind of cheap junior membership she and Simone had enjoyed, had taken advantage of, had stained with their respective behavior. Rosie slowly lifted her head. He was red in the face, and a fat blue vein stood out on his forehead. Why, he asked, should someone like himself, who had worked so hard and so honestly to get to where he was today, teach a person with so little respect for the rules? Huh? She raised her shoulders
and let them fall, shrugging to show she had no answer. He was so disappointed in her that he was shouting, and spit collected in the corners of his lips. She thought he was acting a little nuts, like one of those angry preachers on TV, and she had to look away. She scanned the rows of tennis balls; the rackets hung on hooks in the Peg-Board, waiting to be sold or strung; the beautiful clothes on the rack, white as snow, unsoiled.