Walking to the bank, Margalo asked, “How were the calls this time?” Mikey’s answer was immediate, “Fine, of course.” All of the calls had been as good as they could be when you were calling balls for yourselves. The set had been tennis the way it’s supposed to be. Then Margalo asked, “What did Coach Sandy have to say about you winning the top spot?” and Mikey realized that the coach hadn’t said anything.
“Not that I want her to say anything,” Mikey said. “Not that I care. But you’d think—”
Margalo had a theory, of course. “Some coaches make it as hard as they can, like drill sergeants? They’re particularly hard on the most promising players.” They were crossing in front of her restaurant then, and she looked inside to see if there were any early diners, but the big room was empty, the tables set and waiting.
“That is Coach Sandy’s style,” Mikey said. “She really wants to win the regionals this year, and after that probably the state championships, too. She did pretty well last year with her team, and this year they’re probably better because they’ve had a year more of her coaching. And there’s me, too.”
“Unless she thinks if everybody on the team hates having a ninth grader at the top of the girls’ ladder, they’ll all try harder. Play better. If they all really want to bring you down,” Margalo suggested.
That made sense to Mikey. In fact, she kind of liked the possibility. She smiled, Let them try. In fact, she was feeling pretty good, walking downtown with Margalo on a spring afternoon with a lot of daylight left. “How did Aurora do on that paper you helped her with?” she asked Margalo, to spread some of her good feelings around.
The next Monday, which was the first Monday in April, twenty-six school weeks done and gone, Mikey felt for the first time as if ninth grade might not be so bad after all. She was the number one girl player on the tennis team, which impressed the few people who didn’t mind her, and annoyed the majority, who did. If she couldn’t be impressive, Mikey was satisfied to be annoying, and besides, she was playing a lot of tennis, six days a week, all spring long, how could she not feel good? Thinking of all spring long, she realized—and announced—“There are only ten weeks left. To the school year,” she specified, since most of the people at the lunch table greeted the news with blank faces.
Margalo, who had listened to more of Mikey’s counting down than the others, just nodded her head inattentively.
“That means today is day fifty. That means tomorrow will be forty-nine.”
When Mikey said that, Margalo could see for the first time how the numbers rolled relentlessly on, like a truck wheel clicking off each complete rotation, unstoppably counting backwards until they got to zero, year’s end, ninth grade over forever. When Margalo got that, she began to share Mikey’s pleasure. “And after that forty-eight,” she said.
“Well, dunhh,” said Cassie.
Mikey looked sternly at Margalo. “You’re jumping the gun. What’s gun in Latin?”
“There is no word for gun because there weren’t any guns then. I’m just counting my chickens.”
Casey looked up from her book. “You’re counting Mikey’s chickens.”
“Or burning my bridges? Am I burning my bridges before they’re hatched?”
“Counting your chickens before they’re burned?” Casey offered. “Before they’re fried?”
Mikey had a limited interest in this form of foolishness. “Today is fifty,” she repeated, “and I’m the number one girl on the tennis team.”
“Not bad,” Tim said, clapping his hands softly together.
Mikey looked around at all the people gathered there—Tim and Felix, Casey and Cassie and Jace, Hadrian, Margalo. Probably only Margalo would really get it, but she wanted to tell them all. “I tried to challenge Mark Jacobs to a match, but . . .” She hesitated.
“He wouldn’t do it, would he?” Cassie crowed. “Isn’t that just like those jocks?”
“No,” Mikey said. “It’s Coach Sandy who won’t let me.”
“You asked permission?” Jace demanded. “I thought you were smarter than that, Mikey.”
“You think Peter Paul’s the only adult in the world who makes sense,” Cassie told him. “You don’t even get it that the guy’s a windbag.”
“Just because he didn’t like your fruit sculpture. Or your textile montage.”
“Those were great pieces,” Cassie pointed out. “You think so too, you said so.”
Jace shrugged. “Maybe I was wrong.”
While Cassie struggled with her possible responses—crowing over Jace for admitting an error, or berating him for spinelessness—Margalo got back to the interesting subject. “Why won’t Coach Sandy let you challenge Mark?”
“She said, That’s not the way it’s done in tennis. She said, Mark Jacobs wouldn’t want to play me anyway.”
“Maybe he wouldn’t want to because he’d be afraid you’d beat him,” said Hadrian loyally.
“Maybe he wouldn’t because he’s a jerk,” Cassie suggested.
“Maybe he just doesn’t want to hurt her feelings,” Jace suggested, and Tim added, “Or have a bad effect on your self-confidence, because—if you think of it—he’s got to think about what’s good for the team. Because you’re supposed to be such a hot player, they need you feeling confident.”
“Maybe,” said Casey, closing The Stranger, which she had just finished, and laying her hand on top of the slim volume, “Maybe in the long run it doesn’t matter. If you play him or if you don’t. Why he wouldn’t or shouldn’t play you. Or even who wins, if you were to play. I mean, what difference will it really make, however it turns out?”
That was too difficult a question for Monday lunch, so except for Felix they pretended that Casey hadn’t spoken, since she usually didn’t. Felix glanced at her and said, “Deep.” Casey glanced at Margalo, but Margalo knew better than to try to discuss existentialism, or nihilism, or maybe just history, at that time of day, in that place. Although she didn’t want Casey to think she didn’t know just about exactly what the girl meant. “Do you think I should read that?” she asked, and Casey passed the book over to her, saying, “See what you think.”
Mikey tried to grab it away, but Margalo held on firmly.
“I can read too,” Mikey said, and she might read it, and if she did, probably she’d have some unexpected and interesting ideas, too. But Margalo elected to divert her. “Do you think Coach Sandy’s decision is against Title Nine?”
On the bus ride home that day Mikey was still carrying on about inequality in the sports programs. “For another example, the boys’ JV basketball got a lot more practice time than the girls’—Tan said the same thing. And their coach played on his college basketball team, at least. Ours is a Biology teacher and all she did was play high school basketball. I don’t think she was even on her varsity team. They’d never do that to a boys’ team. It’s entire inequality.”
“That’s the way sports are,” Margalo said. “Except tennis.”
“Absolutely,” Mikey agreed. “Another reason for me to get to challenge Mark Jacobs.”
The logic of this escaped Margalo.
Grandfather clock Mikey began to toll the days—forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven—until they expected the lunchtime announcement, and even anticipated hearing it. “Day forty-six,” she could say on Friday, and add to that good news, “End of week twenty-seven. We have a match against Woodrow Wilson on Monday.”
“Not Woodrow Wilson personally, I take it,” said Jace, grinning around the table.
Mikey was accustomed to being misunderstood. “It’s a school,” she explained, and even Margalo didn’t know if that was meant to be a joke. Mikey was on a roll, and Mikey on a roll might try just about anything.
Walking away from school that day, with the spring late-afternoon light cool and golden, just the two of them together heading down the sidewalk among ordinary people, people of all ages, not just kids and teachers, they didn’t say anything for a few minutes, just walked along
and looked and listened. Finally, “How much are you depositing today?” Mikey asked.
“Two hundred forty-eight dollars and twenty-five cents. I like getting a regular paycheck.”
“Maybe I’ll get a job too.”
“You’d like working.”
“Maybe I’ll get a job at your restaurant.”
“It’s not my restaurant,” Margalo said. “So? Did you ask Mark Jacobs what he thought about playing you?”
“I was told not to,” Mikey said. And smiled. Of course I did.
“What did he say?”
“He said, He wouldn’t mind it. He said, It looked like I might be fun to beat.” Mikey smiled again. “I said, I was thinking he’d be fun to beat, and he said—catch this—he said, It was too bad I was only in ninth grade, I was more entertaining than most girls and he didn’t have a date for the prom.” Mikey shook her head at the stupidity of some people. She’d cut her boyfriend teeth on Shawn Macavity last year, so she knew most of the flirty tricks boys liked to try on girls. “I said, I was looking for a tennis date, a game, and was he asking me to the prom or just putting out hot air?”
This time she and Margalo grinned at each other. Margalo was as pleased with Mikey as Mikey was with herself—and that was pretty pleased. “So, when will you play him?”
“Probably not for a while, if ever. Mark says he won’t sneak around behind Coach Sandy’s back, and he said I’d have to challenge my way up the boys’ ladder to earn the right to challenge him.”
“A cop-out.”
“Not really. But I told him, He was planning to graduate before I had a chance at him, and he said, That’s for sure.”
“That’s pretty funny,” Margalo said.
Mikey tried looking at it from Margalo’s angle. “I guess. Yeah, I guess it is.”
“Flattering, too,” Margalo observed.
“Coach Sandy will probably figure out a way to keep it from happening.”
“I thought you liked her.”
“It’s confusing,” Mikey admitted.
“I used to think I knew something about people,” Margalo admitted.
“I know,” Mikey said. “I used to think you did too.” Then she had a cheering thought. “I’m playing my first ever varsity match on Monday. Are you going to come watch me?”
– 15 –
Pretty Bad Stuff
The bright yellow tennis ball landed so close to the end line that Mikey could have called it out.
She wanted to call it out.
If she had called it out, it might have been the correct call.
But she had to call in it because she wasn’t sure it was out. “Nice shot,” she said, projecting her voice to the girl across the net. It was the tennis team’s first match of the year, she was the only underclassman on the Varsity team, and she was playing a singles match against the number one female player of Woodrow Wilson High School, a senior. The girl was also over five ten, which gave her at least six inches on Mikey, an advantage not only in serving but also in speed around the court.
Mikey didn’t mind being at a disadvantage. She enjoyed winning against the odds, and on paper she was the underdog in this contest. But her opponent was only big and fast. She had no strokes, she just ran and blasted.
Mikey had been blasting back. Her shots had fallen nice and deep, but too many of them had been called just long, and too many of those on key points. When her shots fell within the lines, Mikey was winning the points—her opponent just blasted wildly back.
This meant that Mikey had to play more cautiously, keep her shots safely in, and draw errors by moving her opponent around the court, from side to side, up and back. But she should have taken this set easily, 8-1 or 8-2. Instead the present score was seven games for Mikey, four for her opponent. Calling this last, doubtful ball in brought the score of the present game to 40-all.
The next point was one Mikey had to win, because not only did the sets in team matches get scored differently (the winner of the first to reach 8 games, with a 9-point tiebreaker at 7—all), but also the games. The games in team matches were played no-ad, which was like sudden death, since at 40-all whoever won the next point won the game. Mikey sent her first serve hard and into the T. “Out!” her opponent called, to Mikey’s surprise. The second serve Mikey curved wide to the girl’s forehand, and, “Out!” the girl called.
What? Mikey didn’t think it was. But you didn’t question calls.
That made it seven games for Mikey and five for the opponent. Mikey got ready to receive serve. She practiced the calm inner voice Coach Sandy had taught them. “I used it for years on the tour,” she’d told them, not mentioning that it was the Satellite Tour, “before I settled down and got over my ambitions.” Coach Sandy knew what she was talking about and she had improved Mikey’s game a lot. This made it sort of a pity that Mikey’s serve seemed to be off today. She had wanted to show her stuff with an easy win.
Now Mikey focused her attention and advised herself in a calm inner voice, “Return low, down the middle, hard.” That would either draw an error or get a ball up in the air that she could put away. She advised herself, “Don’t try for too much,” because she wasn’t having an accurate day. Apparently.
The sun was in her eyes, so she adjusted her cap and got ready to receive the first serve. Hard and down the middle, she reminded herself, whaling away with her best shot, the two-handed backhand.
Her return went hard, down the middle, and the girl backed up to get a racket on it, sending the tennis ball up into the air for Mikey to put away with an overhead smash that wasn’t all that powerful but was perfectly placed.
Love-15.
The next two points went exactly the same way, except one called for a backhand overhead; but Mikey got a good angle on it. Love-40, and three chances to win the set. Mikey was in charge, and that was the way she liked it. In fact, she’d felt in charge of the entire set, but those just-out shots had cost her points.
The next serve that came at her was a smart one for a change, out wide to the backhand, and Mikey—her attention divided between calling the ball (Had it touched the line? Exactly what was she seeing? Was she seeing green all around the ball or not?) and setting up for the return—didn’t get a good racket on the ball. Her shot floated up into the air and fell wide.
“Nice serve,” Mikey called.
So now the score was 15-40, and Mikey reminded herself, Hard, down the center. When the serve came in to her forehand, she hit it hard but a little late so that it went cross-court. That was a riskier shot, but the ball was in—inches of court showed all around. The set won, Mikey smiled, One for me. She shifted her racket to her left hand and approached the net to shake hands.
But her opponent was standing there looking at the line as if she wasn’t sure that she’d lost the point, as if she was about to call the ball out.
“That was in,” called a woman’s voice from the sidelines, beyond the high fence. Coach Sandy had stopped by to see how Mikey’s set was going.
“You’re sure about that?” the opponent asked.
“No question.”
“Well then, I guess you win.” The girl held her hand out as she approached the net. “You’re really a ninth grader?” They shook hands and the girl ran off, to cheer her teammates playing mixed doubles.
While Mikey was packing up her tennis bag, Coach Sandy came up behind her. “You should have had her eight-one, Elsinger. What went wrong?”
“I was hitting a little long mostly, although some of my shots did go just wide. I wasn’t accurate enough,” Mikey said.
“You sure about that?” Coach Sandy asked. She had little pale button eyes, and her face was almost always expressionless.
“I netted two, maybe three, but the bulk of my errors were over the lines.”
“You do remember that the team totals all of its won games to score the match,” Coach Sandy said.
Of course Mikey did.
“So winning your set isn’t your only objective
,” Coach Sandy said. “Keeping their scores low matters too.”
Mikey knew that. She had been told it many times since the start of the spring tennis season. The coach had taken them over the match scoring system once a day for the first two weeks of practice, which meant ten times. After time two Mikey understood all the differences in game and set scoring, and also about how a team won a match.
“We wanted to deny them those four extra games you let her take from you.”
“I get it,” Mikey said. “I get it. But it wasn’t as if I wasn’t trying.”
Coach Sandy gave her usual response to that. “Try harder.”
Mikey agreed with that way of looking at things, but she pointed out, “I won the set, didn’t I?”
Coach Sandy froze, and stared straight at Mikey. “It should have been a walkover and it wasn’t. You’re supposed to be such a hotshot. Think about how that happened, Elsinger. Because it’s not what we want to have happen again.”
When the opposing team had climbed onto their bus and driven away, the team gathered outside Coach Sandy’s office for her wrap-up speech, the twelve Varsity players waiting patiently for her to finish talking.
“The good news,” Coach Sandy said, “is that we won the match.” Before anyone could get too excited about that, she went on. “The bad news is—not one of you played anywhere near at the top of your game. You’re just lucky Woodrow Wilson wasn’t up to much. But you’re not that lucky with me so I give you fair warning: I want to see better scores in your sets. Singles and doubles. If I don’t see that, I can promise you, you won’t continue to play on my team.”
She stopped speaking and just looked over her tennis team, making eye contact with each one of them, letting the threat sink in.
Hal Weathersing raised his hand, which surprised the coach, but she said, “Yes?”
“Someone lifted my racket,” Hal reported.
“If you’ll wait a minute,” she snapped.
“It’s in your hand,” Mark Jacobs pointed out.
“I mean my backup racket, from my tennis bag. I think one of those guys took it home with him because it’s almost new.”