Double Fault

“Evert,” Willy corrected, twanging her racket strings with her fingernails.

“We’re just afraid you’ll get hurt.”

“You’re afraid, all right.” Willy had stood and zipped her case. “Afraid I might make it.”

She’d stomped out; but later her father had been adamant.

“I have nothing against tennis,” he said, which was a bald-faced lie. “But as for going pro, you could as well announce that instead of earning a degree you’re taking your Christmas check to Las Vegas.”

“Max thinks I’m playing with more than a Christmas check,” she returned hotly.

“A gamble is a gamble, and this is a poor bet that will only pain you when you’re older. In my day we wanted to join the circus—”

“Or write a book,” Willy spat.

His double take was steady. “Or write a book,” he repeated coolly. “And then we grew up.”

“Spare me your adulthood.”

“I would if I could, Willow.” For a moment he sounded dolorous. “But you are not throwing away a college education for a childhood hobby, and that’s final.”

“Do you think he had a point?” asked Eric.

“Now you, too?” Willy groaned. “My father didn’t have a problem with tennis when a sports scholarship covered my tuition, did he?”

“It’s just, I still don’t understand why after three years at UConn you dropped out.”

“My father didn’t want me to have credentials to rely on after I’d made a name for myself in tennis. He wanted me to have a degree for when I fell on my face. I had to drop out and turn pro. To finish college was to believe him.”

Eric smoothed her hand, uncomfortably like her mother.

“What I still can’t get over,” Willy gazed out the window at the darkening buildup of industrial New Jersey, “is he taught me to play. When I was little, we hit three times a week. We had a great time.”

“So why the hostility?”

“I could say he was mad that I’ve beaten him since I was ten. But I don’t think so. I found trouncing my father upsetting. He seemed to find it marvelous.”

The memory remained a queer color. They were playing at that lumpy macadam court nearest Willy’s house. She didn’t remember the game itself, only standing on the baseline after match point feeling dazed. Her father had come toward her in wonderment, climbing over the net instead of going around the post as if approaching an apparition that might vanish. He knelt at her feet, his voice hushed. “You have something special, Willow. I don’t know where you got it; not from me. But you be careful, and don’t let anybody take it away.”

Her mother bustling from the car broke the spell. “Chuck, whatever are you doing on the ground? Dinner’s been ready for an hour.”

Her father spread his hands. “She beat me.”

“That’s nice, dear. She’s a regular little whirlybird with that racket, isn’t she? Now, no dawdling, you two. The potatoes—”

“Colleen, you don’t understand,” he said irritably. “I didn’t let her. Ten years old, can you believe it? And I tried. I gave it my best shot.”

“Chuck,” her mother scolded. “You’ll give her a swelled head.”

Yet at the very point her father recognized that his second daughter was gifted he began to stand in her way. He found fewer afternoons after work to hit. He refused to cover her dues for the Montclair Country Club, and Willy was forced to collect balls for tips to pay her way. Half the players she fetched for didn’t really want a ballgirl, and she became something halfway between mascot and pest. Arguments over entering local junior tournaments that “interfered with her schoolwork” were incessant.

The antagonism came to a head on Willy’s sixteenth birthday. She sat before the usual sagging cake; her mother never quite went all the way in cooking, and had whipped the egg whites for the coconut icing to insufficient peak. As the whites subsided to raw slime, the icing slurped down the sides with a dispiritedness that encapsulated the Novinsky gestalt. Likewise each fallen layer was lined with a streak of dense, rubbery sad cake, as if nothing in this household was destined to rise from perpetual depression. Before her lay a single envelope, labeled Wilhemena.

She should have known better, but it was May; Willy leapt to the conclusion that inside was at last permission to attend the Vitas Gerulaitis tennis camp in Queens. When she ripped open the envelope, her face fell as noticeably as the cake.

“This way Gert gets her birthday present early,” her father blustered. “But you’re not quite old enough to go alone.”

The offer of three weeks in Europe with her dreary older sister could as well have been an all-expenses-paid to Newark. Willy mashed a bite of cake with her fork. “There are only three places I want to go in Europe,” she delivered levelly. “Roland Garros, the Foro Italico, and the All England Club—on tour. Other than that, I have no intention of spending three weeks of the best weather of the year shuffling through moldy museums with Gert.”

Conventionally her father used composure as a weapon. This time he turned crimson, knocking back his chair and barking that Willy was thankless, that at her age he’d have given his eyeteeth—

Willy had learned icy calm at his own knee. “If you can afford to send me to Europe,” she’d pushed away her uneaten cake, “you can afford to send me to tennis camp.”

Once at camp, Willy instinctively gravitated to the scholarship kids, and lied that she came from poor white trash. The fib came easily; Walnut Street constituted poverty of a kind. Yet there was something inevitable about her family’s low emotional income, and Willy didn’t know what besides bitterness she might expect from her father. His own hopes had been crushed. How could she insist that he be generous in defeat when she herself decried gracious losers as insincere?

Since having discovered her father’s secret body of work slowly rotting in the attic like a murdered corpse, Willy envisioned the young, determined Charles Novinsky as a different person altogether. She stood sentinel over the innocent predecessor, fending off ridicule from the mordant man he became. She cherished her picture of the stranger: a tirelessly ebullient aesthete, bursting with ideas, destined to become a great writer. This was her real father. The ornery Chuck Novinsky she grew up with was an impostor. In paging through those mildewed manuscripts, Willy could as well have unearthed documentation that she was adopted.

Maybe Chuck in adulthood was attempting to remedy his own parents’ optimism on his account, which he described as a kind of abuse. Willy’s grandparents had been hardworking Eastern European stock whose modest dry-cleaning business had grown prosperous by the fifties. Their unanticipated comfort, and the classically American structure of their lives whereby this year was always better than last, encouraged them to buy wholesale into the country’s claim that any boy could be president. They must have lauded little Charlie’s lucid first few words, taped his poems to the refrigerator door, and cooed to relatives about his editorship of the high school paper. Alfred A. Knopf anxiously awaited. Willy’s father blamed his parents for having sold him a bill of goods, a mistake he would not repeat with his own children, who were raised to glower squarely at the low, unremarkable horizon that humped outside the windows of their frumpy New Jersey house.

Her mother, however, had preserved a girlish purity, which Willy happened upon when she was twelve. Her tennis game rained out, Willy came home earlier than expected. Hot-blooded salsa music pounded from the living room. Willy peeked through the doorway to find her mother in bare feet and leggings; the ancient black leotard was a little tired, and falling off her shoulders. She was switching her hips in figure eights, and snaking her arms in S’s. Eyes shut, she slithered into a full split. Wow. She could still bring both thighs to the floor. Though the choreography was eclectic—Desi Arnaz meets Twyla Tharp—she was actually a pretty hot dancer.

When Willy whistled, her mother shrieked, then blushed and fumbled to turn off the stereo at once. Willy was immediately sorry that she’d given her presence away; she should have treated herself to a longer show, slunk off, then theatrically slammed the front door a second time. Willy wanted Mama to keep her secret. Colleen O’Hara’s dreams of being a dancer had been conceived in private, and in private they remained intact. No wonder she urged Willy to play tennis just for fun. Colleen herself preserved a few minutes a day as a première danseuse, and she wanted at least the same secluded limelight for her daughter. The afternoon’s improvisation had mimed urgently to her second child: keep within you the tiny court where you are queen; be a star in the night sky of your own eyes closed. If it weren’t for me, that box of In the Beginning Was the Word would have been carted long ago to the dump, or burned gleefully as fire starter. Your father bared his heart for an instant, to have it dashed against his sleeve. Shut anything dear to you safe from the catcalls of strangers; only dance when the house is empty.

Willy and Eric disembarked at the corner of Walnut, a leafy, stable street of Second Empires and Dutch Colonials. Nothing about the humble but attractive neighborhood was intrinsically dour. Clutching Eric’s hand, Willy dragged her feet. “I should warn you about the house,” she said. “It’s brown.”

The house was brown. It was brown outside, it was brown inside. When her parents first bought the two-story Queen Anne, they spoke of replacing the chocolate wall-to-wall carpet and ripping off the cheap umber paneling that made the rooms look cheerless and small. But the very oppression of the interior steeped its residents in lassitude, and their grand renovation schemes dwindled. Faced with objectionable decor that was bothersome to revamp, it was more expedient to revamp their tastes instead. Her parents now claimed they liked brown-everything, and had invested in matching mahogany furniture and beige drapes. That redecoration was all talk was hardly surprising: they were both given to vague propositions, but never suggested cleaning out the garage this Saturday. Her parents had mumbled for years about traveling to Japan, but the only trips her father could be troubled to take were those that actively conflicted with his daughter’s tennis matches.

Willy tromped up the brown steps, shuffled over the brown porch, and poked her head in the brown door. “Hola!”

Her father dwelt on the paper in his lap a beat before looking up; she supposed it took him a moment to ready himself. Willy always seemed to drain him, and before he rearranged his features into arch remove, he looked stressed.

Crinkled snapshots of Charles Novinsky at Willy’s age looked like portraits of some brave eldest later shot down in a war. The young man’s eyes were searing and his bearing was vertical; there was no presentiment in that face of the mortars to come. It took effort to see any relation to the jaded veteran she faced now. Her father’s rich curls had thinned to a dry frizzle, as if he’d been singed. Though his complexion was naturally ruddy, he had a psoriasis condition, and shedding skin flaked his cheeks gray.

Her father adjusted his spectacles down his nose. “Say, I’ve been reading a Chomsky book that pertains to your calling. According to Noam, in the secular era sports are the opiate of the people. Seems the masses are enervated by vicarious gladiatorial contests, much the way they were once mesmerized by mumbo-jumbo in church.”

“Eric,” said Willy, “this is my contentious, curmudgeonly father, who is trying his best to offend you before he even knows your name.”

“Princeton, I hear.” They shook hands. “What possessed you to join the yahoos after earning a degree from a place like that?”

“Willy and I plan to make millions in endorsements for deodorant,” Eric tossed easily back.

They each took a seat in brown chairs, and Eric nodded at the term papers in her father’s lap. “That doesn’t look like Chomsky. What are you reading?”

Don’t get him started, Willy almost intruded, but Eric liked to get people started.

“Reading may be too dignified a word. I play little games to keep myself amused, though. My charges divide into those who think commas are states of catatonia after a car accident, and others who regard them as decorative curlicues—in which case, the more the prettier. So I sponsor home contests. This is a prizewinner.” He held up an essay. Whisked with red deletes, from three feet away the paper was pink. “Thirty-five superfluous commas on one page. A record.”

“What are you trying to do, Daddy, impress us with your powers of punctuation, or get us to feel sorry for you?”