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illustration: Lisa Kirkpatrickhe heat reflects off the tennis court making me sweat but I do not drink except for at the allotted breaks because it is 1982 and not every one is knowledgeable about the importance of water replacement and stretching after instead of before you warm up. We think we are made tougher by not drinking water. (Never mind the occasional kid that collapses from the exhaustion or hyperventilates when we run lines at the end of the workout.) We also think we are made tougher because our drill slot on courts 8 and 9 is between and noon and 2:00pm and it's June or July or August and we exist in a humid suburb of Houston. The courts at our club are separated from the grounds of NASA only by a tall fence that we often purposefully hit balls over for no reason whatsoever.
Maybe we are made tougher because most of us win most of our matches when we venture out to play tournaments in the other suburbs of Houston. I am 15 but I have my own car and a hardship license because my mom is dead and my older brother is playing drugstore cowboy and fucking older women and becoming very good at math at a private high school in Baltimore. The car I drive is a fancy Pontiac, all electric everything. My mom had been very excited about its purchase but never really got a chance to enjoy it because days after we got it her permanent bedroom was on the cancer floor of Methodist hospital. (Early detection and odds in her favor and this treatment that made her hair thin and that treatment that burned her breastless chest red even outside the thick black guide lines marked on her had not worked their magic. Neither had God even encouraged by me and Presbyterian minister at the late dress-down service who prayed for her by name.)
The craziness on the Gulf freeway and the others that connect the suburbs in Houston does not scare me. I handle them with grace, the same grace I'll handle them with when I am in my twenties and I drive from a concert on the east side of town where I have spent one of those oh-so-profound days tripping and drinking four dollar tallboy cans of beer, to a pub downtown somewhere inside the loop, where I spend the evening drinking four dollar pints of pale ale and playing the Feelies on the jukebox, knowledgeable that somewhere just before puking drunk lies the truth; forgetful that it's always gone the next day.
After our midday workout us defense and petrochemical industry and NASA kids venture into the air-conditioned clubhouse where we drink cokes with ice and eat nachos made with canned cheese. I charge my part to the account that my dad pays every month. Next, as a group, we go to the arcade/putt-putt course, and take turns scoring over 100,000 on Galaga. I am lucky in how I spend my days, and I am not unaware. We don't play putt-putt because it is too hot to do anything outside that is not advancing of our collective chances to do well in the next tournament. At the arcade I think of the long distance runner boyfriend I had in the eighth grade -- about how when I was beating him in putt-putt he teed his yellow ball off into the parking lot to prematurely end the game. I think about lying on the couch with him, me shirtless, him hard inside his velcroed up birdwells, his wild brown hair and sweet brown eyes swearing to his innocence. I think about how I broke up with him only because it was too confusing to be fooling around with him while my mom was upstairs losing weight and her interest in George Jones and Cosmopolitan magazine and sliced tomatoes with salt and pepper. A wallet full of drug money at an adult party years later will tell me of his years in a second. It is his quick drunken justification for being the party's speed connection. He shows it to me like I'm his mom. He reminds me that his parents didn't go to college like mine. He is sad to disappoint me.
Sometimes, if we are lazy or blessed with afternoon thunderstorms that have moved in from the coast, we go home after the arcade. Most days we go back to the club and play matches against one another. The boys always get the good courts (though I can't remember what made the good courts the good courts). All of us become very tan, but this summer my tan does not make me sick inside because my mom is dead and so I will not go visit her at the hospital and hold her hand, ashamed that my arm is tan and hers is yellow.
Once my dad comes home from the plant we cook dinner together, steamed shrimp or venison backstrap from the deepfreeze of whatever kind of fish he caught 50 or so of the weekend prior. I may get a 20 dollar bill to go to the store to buy two artichokes or an avocado for the salad or vanilla ice cream for dessert, but he will not ask for the change. During dinner I'll ask him questions like how plastics are developed and how calls overseas work and how the stock market works and whether or not a felled tree would derail a train and he will supply thorough and lucid answers which I will promptly but not purposefully forget.
If my father has a fishing trip coming up he will make a very neat list of what to bring and will set out in piles what he can ahead of time: the neatly folded pairs of white underwear and T-shirts, the packets of slide film, the rubber fishing boots and the knives with leather sheaths, the overnight kit containing all the things that make him smell the way he smells when he's clean. He will sort his tackle box and adjust his rod and reel by casting it off the balcony of his upstairs bedroom into our front yard. I will sit Indian style on the rocking porch chair on the balcony, underneath my mom's hanging ferns, and we will laugh nervously about the fact that I've drawn the number one seed in the sectional tournament coming up in two weeks. We are happy together.
After he leaves for his trip I will bring my stereo downstairs and let the sound of the first Police record fill my suburban house. I will eat too many navel oranges and nachos made with real cheese. I will have the tennis players over and we will drink cheap beer purchased by the older players home from college for the summer. The 13-year-olds will ride their bikes over with brownies and cookies that their moms made. Some of us will puke, and if my friend Sara has enough beers she will wander with me into one of the empty bedrooms and she will touch my stomach lightly and all over and the heat that is inside my body will rise to meet the heat the sun I've gotten that day is pushing in.
A friend of an older brother of a friend will come later. He will wear cutoffs with holes in them over Union Jack running shorts. He will have no shirt or shoes on and will wear earrings and be too skinny because of drugs. He will venture into my bedroom where he will inspect my records and spend the night sweetly with me and even more sweetly he will not leave in the morning. He will take me to play basketball and we will listen to the Jam on the way there. I will admire his sharp wit and how he smells of sex and sweat and beer, and he will be impressed by my athletic sensibility and understanding of defense. I will not play tennis on this day because he is too learned in the ways of oral sex.
On Sunday night my dad will return home with coolers full of headless and gutted fish that have to be washed and put into Ziploc bags in servings for two. I'll sit on the kitchen counter and listen to him, suntanned practically black and unshaven and with blood and fish guts on his jeans and white T-shirt and a head full of stories about killing snakes and seeing javelinas and turkeys and especially the bucks that promise a good deer season. He will smell of cigarettes even though he is, at least to me, a non-smoker. I will suggest that we go to Kemah to eat seafood at Johnny Walker's Monday night and he will agree and I will be glad inside that I will view the bay and shrimp boats and a plate of fried oysters tomorrow night instead of the fucking Medical Center inside and out.
