Stiltsville: A Novel (22 page)

She trudged off and Jack walked over to me. “You need more of a challenge,” he said. “Jane might be out of your league, but she’ll bring out your best.”

“I’m not sure about all this,” I said.

Jack smiled. There was a tiny chip in his front tooth, and it looked like he hadn’t shaved that morning. The hair on his arms was thick and dark. “You have a lot of power but not a lot of control,” he said. “Let’s see your serve.”

I stepped to the baseline and pointed my feet the way I remembered I should, then tossed the ball and slammed it into the net.

“Don’t chase your toss,” he said, then came up behind me and positioned my arm. I tossed several times without swinging, and then when I served the ball went long. He said, “We’re just taking stock here, don’t worry.”

Jane—this was the woman I knew from somewhere—jogged over in white shorts and a pink polo. She tapped the net with her racket and moved into position. “Ready?” she said, and before I could respond, she jackhammered a serve over the net. It flew past me.

“Good luck,” said Jack as he moved off the court.

I did my best to return Jane’s shots but they were streamlined and swift. After hitting against her for fifteen minutes, I was demoralized, but then we ran drills as a group and I managed well enough. By the end of the practice I was sweating through my shirt. Still, there was something calming about the tennis center itself, about simply passing a couple of hours on the groomed clay courts, leaving marks in the clay with each lunge and turn. Over the mesh-lined fences rose the tops of wide banyan trees along the golf course, like gentle monsters keeping watch. I simply wasn’t used to spending time outside other than at Stiltsville. I had missed it.

When I got home, Dennis and Margo were on the front steps, drinking orange juice out of the carton. They looked windblown and relaxed. “How was it?” said Margo.

“Like riding a bike,” I said as I went up the steps past them.

Margo’s things took up the trunk and half the backseat, and she wanted to drive, so I spent the trip wedged in back beside a portable television and a box of framed photos. Margo turned the air conditioner on high, but it was a tiny trickle in the heat. The turnpike offered a bleached, changeless journey unbroken into parts. Almost every billboard we passed advertised a men’s club called Caf
é
Risqué. I’d heard somewhere of girls stripping to put themselves through college and wondered how many university students worked there. “Margo,” I said. I tapped her shoulder until she turned to face me. “If you need money, just ask us. We’ll give it to you. Don’t strip for it.”

This was very amusing to both Dennis and Margo, and once they started laughing they couldn’t stop, so I settled back in my seat, thinking: they don’t realize what can happen. I had the feeling that very soon there would be a tear in the fabric of my life, an enormous divide. On one side would be the time I moved through and things I did and the people I saw, and on the other side would be a great expanse of black time where Margo lived her life, and she and I would move parallel to each other like cars in different lanes, allowing only passing glimpses. I had to remind myself that, strangely enough, this was the way it was meant to go. They grow up, they move away.

I
t was still hot but the sun had waned as we navigated through campus to the dated, boxy Rawlings Hall, where Margo would live for the summer semester with a roommate assigned by the university. We parked and Dennis and Margo headed toward an entrance, but I stayed behind. There were two other cars in the drive, both open with boxes and bags inside. When Dennis and Margo came out of the building, blinking in the sunlight, Dennis handed me paperwork. “Room 105,” he said. “First floor—only one flight of stairs.”

“No elevator?” I said.

“No elevator, no air-conditioning.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. My blouse stuck to my back.

Dennis and Margo exchanged a look. “We will not melt,” said Margo.

Her room was divided symmetrically, and the two sides looked like before-and-after photos: one side was bare, with a thin mattress on a metal bed frame and an empty desk and gaping dark closet. The other side looked as if it had been staged for a photo shoot: the bed was covered with a pink plaid duvet and white dust ruffle—it hadn’t occurred to me to buy Margo a dust ruffle—and there was a neat stack of glossy textbooks on the desk. I opened a box and started to unpack, and Dennis and Margo shuffled out to get another batch of things from the car. Margo’s new twin-size comforter, a gift from Gloria, was sky blue with white clouds on it. I made the bed with great precision, thinking it might be a long time before Margo had neatly pressed sheets again. If this is all I do, I’ll do it right, I thought. Dennis and Margo came back and left again, and I dug through the boxes until I found a bright red-and-pink tapestry Margo had packed; I spread it over the desk and placed a notebook on top of it. I put a handful of pens in a ceramic mug with the logo of Margo’s old camp on it. I unrolled Margo’s SAVE THE MANATEES poster and when she came back upstairs asked her where she wanted it.

She gestured toward the bare wall above the desk and looked around, at the neatly made bed and the colorful desk. “I like that,” she said quietly.

I taped the corners of the poster to the wall. “Does this look straight?” I said, but when I looked over my shoulder she was looking away, at the other side of the room, the anonymous side, and she didn’t answer.

Dennis lay on the bed while we futzed. Margo lined up her shoes—sneakers and flip-flops, primarily—at the bottom of her closet. There was a knock at Margo’s door, and when I turned around, there stood a boy about Margo’s height, completely bald, with large blue eyes and a wide, expressive mouth. He wore a T-shirt covered with streaks of paint. “Margo, is it?” he said, reaching out to shake her hand. He introduced himself as Joshua, her resident adviser. He explained where his room was located and invited Margo to call on him if she needed anything.

“Alopecia,” said Dennis after Joshua had left.

“I think that’s just the style,” I said.

“No, that’s alopecia, I can tell,” said Dennis, and Margo shushed us.

Dennis had gotten the name of a fish place just outside town, so we got back into the car to go for dinner. This was something he did—he tracked down hole-in-the-wall restaurants and planned ahead to visit them when traveling, and sometimes he bought their T-shirts. Afterward, when we dropped Margo off at her dorm, the light was on in her room, and the next day at breakfast, she told us about her roommate, Diana. Diana was from Chipley, a town in the Panhandle that I’d never heard of. Since Diana hadn’t brought a stereo and Margo hadn’t brought a hair dryer, they’d agreed to share. I could tell by Margo’s description that they wouldn’t be friends but they would get along. After breakfast we crossed a main quad dotted with date palms and bicycle racks and half-clothed girls tanning on blankets, and we toured the gym, which was humid and busy with kids who seemed, for the most part, very serious about the business of getting fit. Outside, there was an empty track. I mentioned that I hoped Margo would run in this bright, public spot instead of along back streets.

“Mother, you worry too much,” she said.

“That’s true, babe,” said Dennis.

We continued on to the student union, a clean, chilly place peppered with egglike orange chairs and recycling bins. We were stalled by an enthusiastic young man at the summer orientation table; he gave Margo a packet and led her through it piece by piece. When she told him she was a transfer student, he rushed her away to get a student ID, and Dennis and I sat down in the orange chairs. Lack of enthusiasm for sports was not, I gathered, common at the University of Florida. Everywhere I turned I saw a cartoonish orange alligator emblazoned on a T-shirt, a sign, a duffel bag. Dennis read from a brochure, then looked at me. “This is the ninth-largest school in the country,” he said.

“She’ll be swallowed whole,” I said.

Margo returned and we left the air-conditioning to wander through campus. Gainesville, I realized with difficulty, would become Margo’s home, filled with places she liked to go hiking and neighborhoods she preferred over other neighborhoods. We walked her up to her room and lingered at the door. Diana was out. Dennis kept it light. “You can still hightail it home with us, pronto,” he said. “We’ll flatten that bald boy if he tries to stop us.” Margo laughed and remained, for that moment, clear-eyed.

“Wait here,” I said, and slipped past them into the room. I fished in my purse for the freezer bag of confetti and sprinkled a bit on Margo’s bedspread, and a little more on her desk. Then I stepped out and told her I was proud of her and hugged her good-bye. I kept my tears in the back of my throat, and on the long drive home Dennis and I tried to make conversation, but it didn’t come. The car felt so empty that when we spoke I almost expected to hear an echo.

A
fter we returned from Gainesville, I fell into a routine of driving over to the Biltmore most evenings after supper to hit against the backboard. This was in addition to twice-weekly practices and a match every other weekend. To my surprise, I did not find reasons not to go to practice—in fact, I stayed late more often than not to hit with other members of the team. Also to my surprise, I quickly became a better player. The games I played took on an air of serious competition—I was truly heartened when I won, truly disheartened when I was defeated. I lost ten pounds. My legs took on a firmer shape, and all that time outdoors gave me a deep tan, with sock lines. Every so often when I missed a shot that I should have made, I cursed under my breath. “Easy,” Jack would say. “Next time, Frances.”

Another player who took the team seriously was Jane. After only a few practices in, as I watched her lunge for a shot near the net and grimace when she didn’t make it, I realized how I knew her. She had aged, and her hair was shorter with more prominent streaks of gray, but Jane was Bette’s ex-girlfriend—her first girlfriend, the one with whom she had gone diving all those years before. Jane had been married then, but now she wore no wedding ring. She wore almost no jewelry at all, only small gold posts in her ears. There was something distinguished about her features, something noble. I could see, vaguely, what had attracted Bette.

“You’ll never guess who plays tennis with me,” I said to Dennis one evening when we were getting ready for bed. But when I told him, he didn’t remember Jane. At that time, Suzanne was living in Bette’s house in Coconut Grove. They’d found an abandoned black lab puppy and were devoted to him; every night they took him for a three-mile walk. Bette had sold her dive shop to a franchise and spent her days sailing or tending her backyard. When Dennis and I visited, they served curry and good wine. They listened to folk music I knew I’d like if only I knew more about it. They had season tickets to the opera. Suzanne was a real estate agent and drove a Porsche and wore fine, draping tunics and wide-legged pants. They spoke German together—Suzanne’s father had been in the service and her family had lived briefly in Hamburg—and Bette had taught Suzanne to scuba-dive.

Jane tended to outplay the rest of the team, along with Rodrigo. His wife, Twyla, was one of three women on the team who knew each other socially, all of whom were a little on the bawdy side and very pretty in the blond, well-coiffed way of many Coral Gables women. They wore tennis skirts with grosgrain ribbon waistbands and matching tops. One morning they passed me on the stairs as I went up to the lounge for an iced tea—I knew they liked to congregate there after practice, usually with mimosas—and Twyla said, “Oops, it’s the teacher’s pet,” and sidestepped to let me pass.

“Ha,” I said. “Hardly.”

Jack was sitting in a leather club chair by the windows; I sat next to him with my iced tea. “You’re hustling out there,” he said. He clicked his glass against mine. It wasn’t the first time he’d let me know I was doing well. That morning, in fact, I’d gotten several points off Jane, though she’d mentioned afterward that she’d been up late with her sick cat. Jack gestured toward my racket. “You need an upgrade,” he said. “It’s time, Frances.”

I’d mentioned to Dennis that I needed a new racket, and he’d told me to go ahead and buy one, for goodness’ sake—he didn’t like it when I pinched pennies—but I’d been holding off. Jack took my racket and pressed his palm against the strings. Physically, there was much about him that reminded me of Dennis: the scattered gray in his hair, the freckles on his arms, the light-colored eyes. But Jack was larger in size, broader and taller, and his hair was black. His eyes were a little close-set. He crossed his legs when he sat down, which was a move with just enough femininity to enhance his masculinity. When he did this—as when he put his hand flat against my back while I was serving, or when he stood at the sidelines with his sunglasses on and his clipboard against his chest, watching me and interjecting a coaching point every so often—I felt a distinct longing.

“I know,” I said to Jack, and took my racket back.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you try out a few? See what you like, and I’ll buy it here with my discount.”

My face got hot. “I can’t let you do that.”

“Don’t be so sensitive, Frances.”

I was caught off guard. It was an intimate thing to say, and his tone was disarming. I thought of my clothes—there was nothing wrong with them, nothing shoddy. In fact, my clean white tennis skirts were both new, and I’d been wearing the diamond earrings Dennis had given me on our fifteenth anniversary, because they stayed out of the way and looked sporty when I had my hair pulled back. I thought also of my car, which was in good shape, the better of our two. “Of course you’re right,” I said, gathering my things to leave. Jack stood, too, and we walked out together.