She smiled down at Sally, who was still smiling up at her. “Confession is good for the soul,” she advised, turning away before they could say anything else.
Why should they think they had gotten clean away with it?
At one point in Act III Richard’s character, George, was offstage for two long scenes, while Sally’s character, Emily, joined the other dead people in the cemetery and then revisited a day in her life until it made her too unhappy, the way people kept not-seeing everything that life held for them, every minute, and she couldn’t stand it, the way people wasted the little time they had to be alive in.
As far as Margalo was concerned, this was the best scene in the play, the scene that people would remember and think about after, and when someone sat down in the seat right next to hers, she barely looked over. Her attention was on all the production details—lighting, props, costumes. In fact, she only gave an annoyed glance at this person, to be sure whoever it was wouldn’t start talking to her.
When she did that, she saw that it was Richard, for once on his own. And he wasn’t watching Sally, he was looking instead at his knees, on which his two hands rested, each one balled up into a fist, as if he was about to start a round of one-potato, two-potato.
The only thing Margalo could think of to say was, “Richard?”
“It wasn’t my idea,” he told her, speaking so softly that she had to lean closer to hear him. “I didn’t want to, but Sally . . . Well, you know how it is once Sally gets an idea in her head.”
Margalo, who didn’t, didn’t respond. She just stared at his profile.
“It wasn’t anything personal. It was—The idea was that after graduation Sally and me would go and spend a week at the beach, in a motel, just the two of us. We’re old enough, we’re over eighteen, and the idea was that if we paid for it ourselves, the parents couldn’t stop us. So . . . And since everybody knows you go to the bank on Fridays, we thought . . . We thought, why not start with you? So we did, and we got lucky. But then we couldn’t do any more. Because—We didn’t think you’d say anything because . . . Things get taken all the time. Everybody knows that, but it’s way not cool to whine about it.”
“I guess I’m not cool,” Margalo said.
“We already knew that,” Richard assured her. “But we thought—Anyway, everybody’s been super careful ever since. You know? And two hundred nineteen dollars isn’t nearly enough for a week at the beach, in June, so we got some other stuff instead, and now I don’t think we’ll get to go anywhere for graduation. Not by ourselves, anyway.”
Richard unfisted his hands and flexed the fingers. He sat up straighter in his seat. “You know? You were right. I do feel better. Not that I was feeling bad, just . . . It was sort of like I was waiting to get caught. Sally’s the one with guts. She says you can’t prove anything, so what can happen to us?” He turned in the seat to look right at her. “You won’t try to tell anybody what I said to you, will you? Because what good would that do? Since we already spent the money and you already got it back. And besides, if you do, I’ll deny it.”
Margalo nodded. “I get that,” she said.
“Everything’s all right then,” Richard said, and he slipped away.
Margalo returned to her job. She would think about all of this later, when she could talk about it to Mikey.
They were bouncing along home on the bus when Margalo acknowledged, “You were absolutely right about Richard and Sally.”
“I know,” Mikey said, without interest.
“What night are you coming to the play? Saturday will probably be the best performance.”
“We can’t Saturday, because it’s Saturday,” and that was, in fact, enough explanation for Margalo. “But what about your dishwashing on Saturdays?” Mikey realized.
“They finally agreed to shift the schedule and give me a night off. Angie didn’t want to do it. I almost had to ask you to fill in for me so I wouldn’t get fired.”
“Not on Saturday,” Mikey repeated.
“It’s actually going to be good,” Margalo said. “The play,” she added, since Mikey seemed to be unable to keep track of the conversation. What was wrong with Mikey?
She didn’t have to wait long to find out. As soon as nobody had said anything for about half a minute, Mikey announced, “Tan’s going out for Track, not Tennis.” She looked out the window at the houses they were rumbling past. “She wouldn’t listen to me. She might listen to you.”
“Nobody would listen to my opinion about what sport they should take.”
“I guess not. I guess, some people, you can’t tell them anything. Anyway, at least spring starts next week.”
“Spring doesn’t start until the twenty-first. That’s the week after next, Mikey. I thought you were keeping such careful count.”
Reminded, Mikey told her, “This week is number twenty-three.” She worked it out further. “That means only thirteen to go, which is not a lucky number. What if your play bombs?”
“Not with Hadrian in the lead it won’t.”
“Yes, but what if it does? I’m definitely going to see it Friday,” Mikey said. Then she told Margalo some really good news. “Monday’s the start of the spring tennis season.” Then she realized, “That makes it spring, so I’m right. Again.”
III
Mikey Springs
– 14 –
Getting to the Top
When Mikey arrived on that mid-March Monday, Coach Sandy was posting the tennis ladders on the bulletin board outside her office. They were both a few minutes early for the first practice of the spring season. They were both dressed for tennis, the coach in a short pleated shirt and a Windbreaker, Mikey in shorts and a warm-up jacket. Mikey had her tennis bag, the coach had her clipboard.
Coach Sandy had put all the slips of paper for the girls’ ladder into their slots and now she was working on the boys’, starting at the top, with Mark Jacobs. Fiona Timmerley was at the top of the girls’ ladder, a strong all-court player, a match Mikey was looking forward to. She herself occupied slot six.
Mikey studied the ladder, thinking about when she could schedule her first challenge match. No sooner than Wednesday, that was her guess. Probably there would be some intensive drilling to bring people back to their fall level of play, since as far as she knew she was the only person who had kept on over the winter. So probably people wouldn’t accept a challenge before Wednesday or maybe even Thursday. There was time before the team’s first match, plenty of time to play her way into the number one position. But she should challenge Deborah today for Thursday. “Exactly when is the team’s first match?” she asked.
“Aren’t you the eager beaver,” the coach answered.
Mikey didn’t disagree. “But when?”
“April twelfth, it’s a Monday.”
Mikey was trying to remember the strengths of Deborah’s game; she thought it was at the net, and she didn’t remember Deborah being all that effective at net. After Deborah there was Bev, who wore you down with moon balls; but Mikey could run around a court forever—or practically forever—and sooner or later there would be a chance at an overhead. Given a chance at an overhead, Mikey had the point.
“Daydreaming?” the coach asked.
“I’m already on the team.” She pointed to her name in position six.
“My guess,” said the coach as she slotted Hal Weathersing into his number six position, “is that you have your eye on number one.”
Mikey shrugged and bent to pick up her tennis bag.
“That would be a first, a ninth grader and number one girl player,” the coach said.
Mikey straightened her out. “It’s nothing to do with what grade I’m in. It’s about being the best, because I am.”
Coach Sandy looked at her, measuring. “You have a lot to learn, Elsinger.”
“Except for you, but you’re the coach,” Mikey said.
Other people were coming up by then to remind themselves where they were on the ladders. About forty p
eople had signed up for tennis, and the squad Coach Sandy would play in matches would be sixteen of them, twelve on the team itself and four alternates. Those who wanted to see if they had a chance to be on the squad jostled in close to the bulletin board. The others, who had no chance, hung back, continuing their conversations.
“Do you think Kellie would ever go to the prom with me? Or does she already have a date?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t get an A. Mine was the longest report of anybody’s.”
“Chet Parker’s getting a car for graduation, did you hear? And he’s letting Ronnie go with him to pick it out.”
“It’s just the usual—my parents are so convinced the other one is letting me get away with stuff, and my dad can’t stand my mom’s boyfriend, so yeah, life’s not too much fun for me these days.”
“Don’t let them get you down.”
“They never want me to leave the house. I wish they’d just trust me a little.”
“Don’t let them get you down.”
“Did you hear about Rhonda? She’s been born again. Check out her hair—and her shoes.”
“Are Richard and Sally breaking up? Because what I heard is, he hasn’t asked her to the prom yet.”
“Maybe I’ll go out for Drama next year. I don’t have a chance for the tennis team anyway.”
“But when else will you get to have a professional—I mean a real professional—for a coach? I mean, you know how we did last year, and there’s Mikey now. How good is she really?”
“She can’t be as good as she thinks.”
Ha! Mikey thought. But maybe she was, and what if she was? She was miles better than any other girl, except for Fiona—and she expected she could beat Fiona without too much trouble. First, however, she had to get herself into the number two position. She figured that wouldn’t take more than a week.
Coach Sandy tossed a spanner into that plan right away. “Before we head out to the courts,” she said to her assembled players, “I want to announce that there will be no ladder challenges played until next Wednesday. That is, a week from Wednesday. The twenty-fourth. Everybody got that?” She looked right at Mikey, and smiled, to explain, “Nobody would want to have an unfair advantage just because they happened to play all winter, would they?”
Mikey wasn’t so sure about that. If you worked and got ahead, did that constitute an unfair advantage? She went up to the coach as they all left the gym to go down to the tennis courts, but Coach Sandy didn’t give her the chance to say anything. “Don’t get yourself in a dander, Elsinger. I want you playing on my team. You’re not the only one who really wants to win.”
So Mikey challenged Deborah for the twenty-fourth, or the twenty-fifth if they couldn’t be scheduled onto a court first thing. Deborah was a junior, too old, you’d think, to have any illusions about the level of her tennis skills. But her blue eyes teared over when she was challenged, and she said, “I knew it. I’ve never been on a varsity team, and now—if I’m number six, anyone could challenge me. And I can’t re-challenge you for a week.” She said this as if she hoped that hearing it would make Mikey not ask for the match.
But if it wasn’t Mikey knocking Deborah down the ladder, it would be somebody else, so Mikey offered the only consolation she could think of. “There’s next year. Fiona and Chrissie and Bev are all seniors. If you work, you should have a shot at it next year.”
“Thanks a lot,” Deborah said, and walked away, whipping at the air with her racket, going up to a couple of other juniors to say something that caused them all to look over at Mikey.
Well, she didn’t care. She’d never been popular, and it wasn’t as if she thought playing good tennis was going to change that.
“But I don’t get it,” she told Margalo that weekend. “Everybody wanted Martina Hingis to get to be number one, and that was in the whole world. We’re just a high school tennis team.”
“She was cute,” Margalo explained. “She was perky. When she won the Australian, she went running over to the stands to jump up and kiss her mother.”
“Can you imagine my mother if I tried something like that on her?” Mikey asked. “They can’t stop me,” she said.
“Do you think they want to?”
“I think they’d like to.”
“You could pretend to be perky and cute. I could help, we’d buy you some clothes, we’d cut your hair and—Have you ever used a curling iron? I could loan you some mascara, too, and what about lipstick? Do you even own a lipstick?”
“Ha, ha,” Mikey said. “They can’t turn me cute, and they can’t stop me either.”
Certainly, on the Wednesday, Deborah couldn’t stop her; she couldn’t even hold serve. The next day Mikey played Bev, who got the ball back, high and soft. Bev did manage to take one game off of Mikey, and it was one of Mikey’s service games too, a long deuce game, with Mikey running all over the court trying to get a good shot. Then Mikey netted a backhand overhead and then—this was weird—double-faulted, on a first serve so neatly tucked into the corner that Mikey would have sworn it was in, and then a second serve that went just wide. Since Mikey was still up 5-1 in games, she just won the next one to take the set.
Anne Crehan, on Friday, did hold serve once, when a couple of Mikey’s shots went long—“Just barely,” Anne called, calls Mikey agreed with—and then a couple of Anne’s drop shots took Mikey by surprise before she learned to look out for them. But Anne was the kind of player that as soon as she thinks she’s going to lose starts playing badly. Trying too hard for a winner, thinking too much, caring too much. So by the last weekend in March, Mikey was the number three girl player and had challenged Chrissie for Monday, Fiona the day after. Chrissie would be no trouble, Mikey was sure of it.
But she was wrong, as she realized at 3-all on Monday afternoon when time ran out on them. She had broken Chrissie once, and Chrissie had broken back right away, although . . . Mikey wasn’t sure. How could she be sure without a camera on the ball? There was that unwritten rule that if you weren’t sure the ball was out, you called it in. It was a fair-play rule, and it meant that you could play a match without someone there to make the line calls for you. If you couldn’t play without an umpire, you wouldn’t be able to play at all, most of the time, unless you were a professional. So this was the kind of rule that actually worked to everybody’s advantage. But with Chrissie, if there was any chance that a ball of Mikey’s might be out, it was called out. Sometimes, Mikey thought, a ball was called out even when there was no chance at all.
“It’s no fun playing like that,” she told Margalo on the bus going home. Margalo was already working on her next production, Oklahoma! It was a musical, and Mikey had let Margalo know pretty clearly how she felt about musicals. It was a mild end-of-March day, practically warm. “How can she feel like she’s won if she’s cheated?”
“Are you sure about it?” Margalo wondered, although she thought, Mikey being Mikey, she would be sure, and she was probably right, too.
“How can I be sure? I’m on the other side of the net. I’m watching her, I’m getting set to return whatever her next shot is. I can barely make good calls on my own side of the net, which is why there’s this unwritten rule. I’m going to have to figure out how to keep her from doing that,” she announced. “Any ideas?”
“Easy—don’t give her the chance. I mean, she wouldn’t cheat openly, would she?”
“That she’d never get away with.”
“So are you good enough to keep everything well inside the lines?”
“Of course. But you’re right—Maybe I’ll just fire everything right down the center, right at her. That’ll teach her.”
That was what Mikey did when they finished their match on Tuesday. She whipped her ground strokes as hard as she could—and that was pretty hard—either right down the middle or right at Chrissie, and sometimes both. That finished off the set and put her in second place. She challenged Fiona for the next afternoon’s practice before she went to report to Coach Sa
ndy’s office about the results of that day’s match.
“I saw some pretty aggressive play from you,” Coach Sandy remarked.
Was this praise or criticism? Mikey couldn’t tell.
“I wonder how you’ll do against Fiona,” the coach said, not as if she cared very much. “Fiona’s got some good shots, a nice variety, and she plays a smart game. She’s going to give you a match,” the coach predicted.
The coach was correct. The match between Mikey Elsinger and Fiona Timmerley took three days to complete. There were deuce games that lasted for eight or ten ad points. There were points that took ten or more shots to complete. Fiona kept Mikey deep in the court with hard, flat shots and low-arcing lobs that she couldn’t run down; Mikey followed her serve into the net to draw a put-away or force a low-percentage passing shot. They left the court on Wednesday and Thursday, the set incomplete, both of them tired, exhilarated, and resolute. Mikey was ahead four games to two, with one service break. On Friday she took both games, both of them hard fought, the deuce advantage veering back and forth between the two players, both playing error-free tennis. Mikey won the set, but it had never been a sure thing. “That was good,” she said, shaking hands at the net. “I wouldn’t mind doing that again.”
“Don’t I get a week to recover?” Fiona grinned.
A few other team members had stopped to watch them play: Roy Garo, Mark Jacobs, and Hal Weathersing; Tammy Evans, whom Mikey hadn’t played with, or noticed, since the fall, hand in hand with another ninth-grade tennis player, Ralph, who was reminding everyone, “I was her doubles partner last year.” Mark approached the two girls to say, “Good game.”
“Yeah,” Mikey agreed.
“Not quite good enough,” was Fiona’s opinion.