True
Life Stories: ON THE COURT
by
Joyce Maynard
Originally published in The New York Times
I first picked up a tennis racquet four years ago, at the age of thirty-seven.
At the time I was working briefly as a writer on a television show and
living in a furnished apartment complex in Los Angeles where there were
not only four lighted courts but a resident tennis pro with the improbable
name of Rod Dowell. I was making good money that summer. I sank a hefty
portion of it into private lessons with Rod.
Thinking back on this period now, it strikes me that there was more to my newfound longing to become a tennis player than the proximity of a good court and a pro. A couple of years earlier my husband and I had ended our twelve-year-long marriage. More recently I had emerged from a year-long love affair that left me with a severely bruised if not broken heart. I was in the midst of tortuous struggles with my former husband, and all the painful fallout a bitter divorce produces for children. Three of them, in our case -- each suffering the effects of our split in his or her particular way.
In the middle of so much complicated and painful interaction between me and the people who were, or had once been, closest in my life, there was something hugely appealing to me about the idea of relating to a person in the way one does on a tennis court. You hit the ball, your partner hits it back to you. It seemed so simple.
It wasn't, of course. For the first many lessons I spent with Rod, I had a hard time just getting the ball over the net. Still, from the first time I got out on the court I loved tennis, and I vowed this was a game I would play well some day. I never articulated the thought to myself at the time, but I think my dream of getting good at this game was all tied up with a larger dream of someday finding a partner with whom I could sustain a long and happy rally, off the court as well as on. No such partner existed for me, that summer. And so all the energy I might have put into a relationship with a man, if I'd had one, I put into tennis instead. Little wonder that my most intimate friend during that period was my tennis teacher, Rod.
I was clear from the start that Rod wasn't boyfriend material: He was married, also half a dozen years younger than I. We carried on an innocent flirtation that summer, but what it really was was a friendship -- and in a funny way, over the course of that brief period when I was taking four and sometimes even five tennis lessons a week, Rod knew me better than anybody. He could tell, from my swing, when I was distracted and when I was angry. One time, when he placed his arms around me to show me how to hold my raquet for a one-handed back hand, I started to cry. We just stood there for a moment. Then he showed me what was wrong with my stroke.
Sometimes as we played we'd talk about our marriages, talk about sex, talk about our kids. Some of the best shots I ever made came in the middle of those conversations. Other times, Rod confined his comments to the bend of my elbow, the grip of my wrist on the raquet.
When my children joined me in California I offered them tennis lessons with Rod. When the older two heard that Rod's only available time slot was six-thirty a.m. they cooled on the idea. Not my seven year old though. Neither his father nor I had any particular feeling about tennis when he was born, but we had named him Wilson. From the beginning, Willy loved it that his tennis balls could be personalized.
Of our three children, my youngest son was the one I worried about the most at the time. He had been just five when his father and I split up, and it seemed to me he had the most trouble accepting what had happened. Willy was frequently angry. Sometimes he simply shut me out.
The great thing about playing tennis with a person is, there's no way your partner can ignore you. Send a ball his way, he has to respond. If he's discouraged or weary, his strokes may show it. If he's really angry he may fire one back in the farthest opposite corner or lob one smartly over your head, and if you manage to return that one, he may follow with a dropshot over the net. One way or another, though, he has to deal with you.
For a totally different set of reasons from the ones inspiring me to play tennis that summer, it seemed that tennis was the perfect game for my younger son at that moment in his life, too. Within a matter of days after his first lesson, Willy was surpassing me on the court. "I wish I could work with your son seriously for a year or two," Rod told me. "He has that competetive drive. He'll do anything to get a ball."
Running for a ball during a group lesson, in fact, Willy came up against the swing of another player's racket on the sweet spot of his own face. At the emergency room the doctor told me his nose was broken. The hardest part of that, for Willy, was knowing it meant no more tennis for the rest of his stay in California.
The nose healed. My television job ended and I prepared to return to the East coast. For my last tennis lesson before going home, I brought my boom box to the courts and Rod and I played to a recording of Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, that I'd been introduced to by the man who had recently broken my heart. Always before, that music reminded me of him. Now it would remind me of tennis.
In my first fantasies about becoming a tennis player, I saw myself playing long, graceful matches with a lover I hadn't met yet. As the months passed, and he didn't materialize, it came to me that I had a tennis partner: my son. Back home in New Hampshire we no longer had our own tennis pro in residence, but Willy and I kept playing in our winter jackets even after they took the nets down from the public courts in our town. We only quit when snow fell.
Every spring and summer for the next couple of years my son and I played when we could, and whenever I'd be out in California I'd stop by the Oakwood tennis courts to say hello to Rod.
My divorce became final. I had a couple of serious romantic relationships, but while other partners came and went in my life, the one constant figure on the court was Willy. "No matter how great a tennis player you become," I would remind him periodically, "promise you'll always play with your mom." I couldn't really afford it, but the summer Willy was nine I sent him to tennis camp for two weeks. Surrounded by players from serious tennis families, who had year round memberships in tennis clubs, Willy started out near the bottom of the ladder, but he climbed almost twenty places over the course of his time at camp, and came home with topspin and a slice. The summer he was ten, he went back to tennis camp. Driving him home two weeks later, I asked if he ever got tired of playing so much tennis.
"Never," he said.
Willy and I have had some fierce struggles over the years. My younger son is stubborn and willful and fiercely competetive and complicated. But on the tennis court, things between us are nearly always good. Sometimes we bike over to our city courts before breakfast to play. One summer night we went to an outdoor James Taylor concert in a park an hour so from where we lived. Sitting high in the bleachers, we happened to look over the edge, into the park below, and both of us spotted night-lit tennis courts at the same instant, with the same thought in mind. We left the concert, ran four blocks to our car, where we retrieved our raquets, and returned to the park, where we played, barefoot, until the last strains of James Taylor's final encore, when the lights snapped off.
Last fall, as the season for outdoor tennis neared its end, I knew the time had come to find a place to play tennis in the winter. The nearest courts offering a program for kids were an hour's drive from where we live, but I signed up both my sons for tennis lessons and Friday night tournament play. Weilding the Wilson Hammer racket I gave him for Christmas this year, Willy finished in the top of his league.
There was a day this past winter when my older son Charlie and I were playing Willy in Canadian doubles, and my boys were treating each other so badly that ten minutes into the game I set down my racket and walked off the court.
"Please don't go mom," said Willy, the instigator. "I'll shape up." He did.
One time when he was having an off day, I told Willy I'd pay him twenty five cents for every successive volley that we kept the ball in play. My bill that day came to thirty two dollars.
One time I actually beat Willy in tennis. He mumbled something about how he hadn't really been trying. I froze in my tracks.
"I'm your mother, and I'll love you no matter what. But say something like that to anybody else and you'll be known as a poor sport and a whiney player," I said. It never happened again.
Out on the tennis court, it's mostly my son who is the teacher, and I the student. He is a stern and demanding coach, my boy. "Don't look so surprised every time you hit a good serve, Mom," he said the other day. "You hit a lot of good serves now."
My younger son plays in tournaments out of state now, where my chief function is to drive him, and maybe -- if there's no stronger player available -- to warm him up before a match. As for me, I'm a passable enough player, at last, that I can find partners whose shots I can actually return with reasonable consistency. But when I conjure up the dream of a perfect, endless rally -- two people keeping one ball sailing between their opposite corners, graceful as a dance -- the image that comes to me is of that midnight game I played with Willy under the lights at the James Taylor concert. Nobody said a word. Nobody had to. I hit the ball. My son hit it back to me. Simple as that.
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