Kate Christie (3 page)

“Shy?” Laura echoed. Reserve was a foreign concept to her, as was tact, most of her friends agreed. “What does she have to be shy about? That girl can play tennis like no one I’ve ever seen.

I don’t know why she didn’t go D-one.”

I had wondered that myself. In college sports, playing at a good Division II school wasn’t nearly as notable as playing for even a mediocre Division I program. I was at SDU because they were the only school that had offered me a decent chunk of money. I couldn’t imagine the same was true for Jess.

“Some people are just naturally shy, Laura,” Holly said.

I could hear the slight annoyance in her voice and elbowed her, glad I was sitting in the middle. Holly had a lower tolerance for Laura than I did.

“I guess so,” Laura conceded, but it was obvious she didn’t understand why anyone might be anything but bordering on obnoxious.

“Great day for tennis,” I put in, changing the subject.

Holly rolled her eyes at me, and I knew what she was thinking: 20 Kate Christie

Cam the Peacemaker
. She seemed to think the nickname was an insult.

Directly below us, Jess was practicing her serves, but she seemed distracted. She kept glancing toward the opposite corner of the court. Curious, I followed her gaze and spotted an older woman sporting a wide white hat, small sunglasses and a tan suit. Her gold jewelry glinted in the sunlight. She was standing just inside the passageway that connected the stadium’s handful of courts, almost as if she were trying not to be seen.

“Do you think Jess’ll make All-American?” Holly asked, watching her serve.

“I hope so,” I said. “She totally deserves it.”

Later, I thought we might have jinxed her. Jess was on a twenty-two match winning streak, but she lost the first set 2-6.

The girl she was playing, a tanned brunette with short hair and big quad muscles, wasn’t even that skilled. Jess double-faulted two games away in the opening set. This time she didn’t throw her racquet.

At the end of the first set, when the players took a break before switching sides, Holly leaned into my shoulder and murmured,

“Dude, what’s her problem? She’s playing like crap.”

“No kidding.”

Sitting on a bench at the edge of the court during the switchover, Jess looked exhausted. It had to be mental, I knew, because she was in top physical condition. She just wasn’t her usual zippy self. She wiped her face on a small towel, then looked again toward the opposite corner. I followed her gaze.

The woman in the suit had disappeared. Jess sat motionless for another minute, towel draped over her face. Then she flung it aside and headed onto the court.

The second set was like an entirely different match. From the first point, Jess was all over the place, rippling muscles and extra effort and long-limbed reach. She finished the match 2-6, 6-1, 6-2. Afterward, she shook hands with her vanquished opponent and the umpire, exchanged a few words with Adrienne Porter, the head coach, and almost ran off court to the field house. I watched her leave, her head down, long legs eating up the distance.

Beautiful Game 21

“She’s not shy,” Laura said, watching Jess leave. “She’s totally got attitude. What a snob.”

“Shut up,” I said, and it was Holly’s turn to elbow me in the ribs. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Laura was staring at me. “Okay, I’m sorry. Take a chill.”

As we watched the top-seeded doubles match, I pondered my outburst. Usually Laura’s comments rolled right off me. But when she called Jess a snob, it pissed me off even though I’d once thought nearly the same thing myself. Now that I’d met her, I knew my initial assessment was off. There was something about the way she held herself apart from other people that made me want to defend her. Which was ridiculous, I told myself as I sat in the tennis stadium that afternoon. Jess was probably the last person on campus who needed defending.

As expected, SDU won the match easily. In women’s sports, tennis was our strongest program. Then came soccer, volleyball, and swimming. The rest were mostly club teams still, even after two decades of Title IX. When the match ended, we headed back to the gym lot where Laura had parked her brand-new Isuzu Trooper.

“I’m going to pee,” I said as we reached the car. “I’ll be right back.”

“Can’t you even wait five minutes?” Holly complained.

“We’re starving here, man.”

“I’ve been holding it the whole time,” I said over my shoulder, jogging toward the building. My small bladder was a source of contention among my teammates and friends. I had peed in more shrubbery in my life than I cared to remember.

I flashed my ID at the booth and took the stairs two at a time up to the main floor. I burst through the women’s locker room door and headed directly into the nearest stall, glimpsing out of the corner of my eye someone at the sinks. Intent on peeing, I closed the stall door and relieved myself.
Whew
.

When I emerged a moment later, I realized it was Jess Maxwell at the sinks, her back to me as she splashed her face with water. I recognized her socks first, her blue and aqua cross trainers, those fabulous legs. Her hair was wet, dark strands leaving streaks on the shoulders of her white T-shirt. She looked up as I neared.

22 Kate Christie

“Nice job today,” I said, and started to wash my hands, trying to ignore the fact that Jess Maxwell had just heard me pee.

“Thanks. I didn’t know you’d be there.” She seemed embarrassed too and brushed the gym towel with its blue and gold SDU logo across her face quickly.

“I came with a couple of soccer players, Holly Bishop and Laura Grant. They’re our year, too.” I dried my hands on a paper towel. “We all thought you were great in the last two sets.”“The first one sucked, huh.”

I leaned against a sink and watched her brush her hair. “I wouldn’t say
sucked
. You just seemed off balance. Was everything okay?” I thought of the woman in the suit.

Her eyes darkened for a moment. Then she shrugged. “Just a slow start, that’s all.”

“The rest of the team did really well, too. You guys are awesome this year.”

She looked a little guilty as she tucked her brush and a pair of dirty socks into her athletic bag. “Did you see if Julie Seaver won her match?”

“I think so.”

“Good.”

I wanted to ask her why she’d been so nervous today, what had made her fall off her game so dramatically, but it wasn’t really any of my business. Besides, Holly and Laura were waiting.

Still, I didn’t move and neither did Jess. We stood in the locker room facing each other, the scent of soap and shampoo mixed with women’s sweat hanging in the air. For a moment, she looked as if she might say something more. Then the outer door opened and the rest of the tennis team began to pour in, muffled words and laughter echoing off the metal lockers.

“Good luck with the rest of the season,” I said, backing away.“Thanks, Cam.”

As I left the locker room, I couldn’t shake the sense that, crazy as it seemed, maybe she’d wanted me to ask all the questions knocking about my head.

Outside, Laura blasted the car horn when she saw me.

Beautiful Game 23

“Took you long enough,” she said as I slid into the backseat of the Trooper.

“Sorry, dudes. Let’s roll.”

As Laura slammed the Trooper into reverse and caromed out of the lot, Holly flicked the volume up on the stereo. Van Morrison, Laura’s favorite. We headed off campus for a late lunch, and I trailed my arm out the open window, watching people and trees and buildings flash past. I forgot about Jess Maxwell as the sun warmed my skin and Holly grinned at me over her shoulder and we sped along the hilly streets of La Jolla, the seaside resort community in northern San Diego where SDU was located.

In the back of Laura’s Trooper, I was acutely aware of the passage of time, present receding into the recent past as I sang along to the music and felt my words falling away to nothing. I wanted to hold on to the moment, to the feeling of sun and car and friends and possibilities, the immediate future stretching comfortably, known, ahead, even as the moment slipped past and got lost in a thousand others.

A few weeks later, the tennis team made it to nationals where Jess performed like the stud she was and captured All-American honors. But I didn’t see her again before I headed home to Oregon for the summer.

Back in Portland, May soon blended into June and school seemed a million miles away. Monday through Friday, I drove my parents’ old Toyota Tercel from our bungalow just off Hawthorne near Mt. Tabor to work in downtown Portland. I was the only woman on the Parks crew. There was one black man, John Bakough, a Nigerian who had come to the States for university and never left. He and I figured we were the city’s concession to affirmative action, since the rest of our co-workers were whitey-whites, as John called us.

Every other week it was my job to groom the lawn bowling Beautiful Game 25

field at Westmoreland Park, but most days I rode mowers, trimmed bushes with weed whackers, and painted signs and fences at any of a number of city parks. Occasionally we acted as security at special events like arts and crafts fairs or outdoor concerts. Then we would trade in our coveralls to wear walkie-talkies in the belt loops of our dark green shorts and call each other things like “Big John” and “Little Joe” and “Daddy Cam” over the airwaves.

This was my second summer at the Parks. The guys were fun to work with, most of the time, but I never seemed to quite fit in. Whether that was because I was a woman, a lesbian—

though the guys pretended not to know and I pretended not to be flagrant—or a college student, I was never sure. Maybe all of the above. I only got the job because my mother knew a woman in the city Garden Club who was married to a high-up in the Parks Department. Except for me and a couple of other seasonal student workers, the other Parks employees were permanent and owned homes on the outskirts of the city, the only place they could afford. Several were married with kids.

Not my buddy Joe, though. Joe Bulanski, ninth of eleven children in a Polish Catholic farm family from Wisconsin, was my best friend at the Parks. A natural comedian, he never seemed to run out of funny stories about his ten brothers and sisters. He was also the only guy at work who acknowledged that my being a lesbian was cool with him. I didn’t tell him, he just figured it out.

He had a sister who was gay, he told me the one time we talked about it at the end of my first summer on the crew. He had lived with her for a month in San Francisco when he first moved to the West Coast.

That conversation was one of the few occasions I could remember Joe being serious. The other instance took place the summer after my sophomore year, on a July afternoon when the air was hot and still. He and I were trimming the grass close to the west fence of Forest Park, one of the largest urban forests in the country, under the wire and around the posts where the mower couldn’t reach. At afternoon break time, we left our weed whackers to cool and sat in the shade on the tailgate of our green Parks truck, drinking from our water bottles and gazing out over the Willamette River.

26 Kate Christie

“Do you ever go to church?” Joe asked out of the blue.

“Sometimes. My mom likes the Unitarian church downtown,”

I said, looking over at him.

He had shaggy, dark brown hair bordering on a mullet and wore a faded Emerson, Lake and Palmer T-shirt beneath his uniform. I had never seen him in shorts. Even during special events in the middle of the summer, he opted for the dark green Parks pants. At the end of my first summer on the crew, I’d asked him if he had some kind of scar or birthmark that disfigured his legs. He’d laughed, lean frame shaking with the force. Then he told me it was a farm habit he had never quite shaken; his legs were merely ghostly white beneath the uniform. Men on farms didn’t wear shorts, he explained, because you had to be careful around the chemicals and the equipment and the crops. Flannel and denim were a farmer’s favorites for good reason.

Now he squinted up at the sky and took a gulp of water.

“My parents are what you would call devout. They used to drag all of us to the Catholic church in town every week in our Sunday best. Me in my Peter Pan collars and this wide, goofy tie with pink and blue stripes. And brown corduroy pants in the winter, of course.”

I had no trouble picturing Joe in the outfit he described. He had told me before that members of his family dressed as if they were refugees from the ’70s.

“Wide-ribbed corduroy?” I teased.

“You know it.” He nodded, smiling.

His teeth were even, thanks to that great twentieth century wonder, braces. He used to play a lot of baseball, so we had traded ball-in-the-braces stories the first summer we worked together.

Now, leaning back on his hands, he looked out over the park, dark blue eyes tracing the evergreen tree line against the clear, sun-shot sky.

“But you know, kid”—he was ten years older, and liked to call me kid—“I decided a long time ago that I didn’t believe in their God. I couldn’t. Not when their God said that if you judged your neighbors then He would turn around and judge you. It’s so hypocritical. The church fathers interpret scripture the way they want to, not necessarily the way they should.

Beautiful Game 27

“Once when I was seventeen or eighteen, I was in my canoe on the creek way back in the woods, and this doe brought her fawns down to the water to drink. I got closer and the little ones, they just kept drinking, not more than ten feet away. The doe and I stared at each other as I drifted past, and looking in her eyes, I had this amazing feeling of peace. As I paddled away, I remember thinking that God is something within every one of us, every living being. Animals, people, trees. And this,” he spread his arms wide open, encompassing the forested park, the sky, the sun, “this is my place of worship. You know?”