The Beautiful Anthology (7 page)

Like many American males, balls featured prominently in my childhood: footballs, handballs, paddle balls, baseballs. I was a casual athlete, though. We played football in the street, other forms of pickup games in the park. I dropped out of Little League baseball as soon as a boy could retreat with his self-respect intact, around the age of nine or ten.

In the sixth-grade schoolyard, I managed for a brief period to lead the charge in touch football and in softball. But that was an uncouth kind of accomplishment, based more on moxie than refined skill. My mother was dying at home. Perhaps, perversely, that gave me a sharp edge for a while.

In junior high, I had an abbreviated and useless stint on the JV soccer field as a scrub goalie. If I played a quality minute, I don’t remember it.

Basketball became my sport. I was tall and lanky and learned to jump shot from Rick Barry, the only player to hold seasonal scoring titles in the NCAA, ABA, and NBA. Barry played for the Nets, and a friend of our family was one of the team owners. I made frequent visits to the locker room and after one team practice Barry gave me a few pointers. We had a hoop in the backyard, where I spent hours a day working on my release. At the new county park, games came together spontaneously, often involving overweight older players. I learned how to use my hip and fight for position. I learned how to put my shoulder and elbow into drives to the hoop. I learned to head fake. But on the school team, I was a sixth man, contributing no more than a few baskets per game.

For most of my life, tennis followed a similar pattern. The lessons I received were catch-as-catch can and rarely within the context of an organized youth program. As a teenager, I hacked around with my father’s old aluminum Head racket, an implement with a tiny face and a thick red plastic neck. Although my father had become an avid tennis player – or maybe because of that fact, to differentiate myself – I confined my tennis to games at the park with friends who took the sport no more seriously than I did. My sneakers rarely brushed the green Har-Tru of Inwood Country Club, where we were members.

Flashes of semi-competence arose, however, and one of them came at that very club. There was a youth tennis tournament that I agreed to play at my father’s urging. As it turned out, only one other player had entered in my age group, so the only match we played became the final. My opponent was a character I didn’t know well, not a friend. The club had been founded – or, at least, brought to local prominence – by Jews of German descent, formal people who held themselves above those with more questionable pedigrees. This kid’s grandfather had been one of those club builders while our family had joined only a couple of years before. Never mind that my father ran his own successful accounting firm and earned every penny in his pocket. This kid wore polo shirts with the collar turned up and attended private school. I went to public school and looked the part. He took lessons every Saturday and worked on his tennis game. I was the scrapper perfecting his lay-up, never his serve. It shouldn’t have been any contest at all, which of course is what made things interesting. I won the first set and might have won the second if I’d wanted it half as much as my opponent. The third he took going away, but I’ve never seen anyone look so miserable in victory. After all, he should have creamed my ugly game from the outset.

Fifteen years later, I’d done nothing to add to the legend. When I lived in Manhattan, I kept in shape playing racquetball but rarely lifted a tennis racket, other than the occasional lesson or hackaround on vacation. In my late twenties, however, my wife and I moved to Bedford in Westchester County. The old house we bought had a rundown tennis court, which inspired me to pick up the stick more in earnest. At the suggestion of a friend, I joined a health facility in nearby Mt. Kisco called the Saw Mill Club and began to participate in an evening tennis league. One day, I was standing at the plate-glass window, looking down at a game, when a person on the court missed an easy shot and dropped his racket in frustration. An acquaintance, John, said next to me, “That guy’s been playing for twenty years and making the same mistakes over and over. How does he expect to get any better if he never works on his game?” He was right. I started taking lessons and I got better – but incrementally, not dramatically.

Then, a couple years later, I looked down from the same window and saw John having a lesson with a new pro across the net. This pro didn’t look like the other pros I’d used. His racket didn’t so much meet the ball as flow through it. He was a big guy – six-four – but he moved with balance and gracefulness. Not that he scrambled around much. From the moment he dropped a ball from his right hand and started the rally with a flick of the other wrist, every step had assurance behind it and every stroke came with fluidity and purpose.

I turned to someone standing beside me. “Who is that?”

He said the pro’s name was Rob. I pressed him for more details and he explained that Rob was taking a break from the professional tennis tour, teaching some lessons while he rehabilitated an injured shoulder.

I stood awestruck. “I need this guy.”

The man next to me shook his head. “He’s only teaching juniors.” But the fact that he was hitting with John, a grown man who’d set me on course to improve my game, provided hope. Within a few weeks, I had convinced Rob to take me on as a project. Before my first lesson, I asked after his shoulder.

“Getting better,” he said, reaching for it with his left hand.

“But that’s your right shoulder. You’re a lefty.”

“What gave you that idea?”

“When I first saw you, I’m sure you were hitting with your left hand.”

“Oh, that.” He shrugged. “I’d just had a procedure so I had to be really careful with it for a few weeks. I was hitting with the left for a while during lessons.”

This news astonished me. Rob had a stroke that most aspiring tennis players would kill for, and he’d been swinging with his opposite hand.

Later, I’d learn that Rob had been something of a local phenom. He’d played first singles for the high school team when he was just thirteen, destroying kids four or five years older. On tour, his serve approached a hundred and thirty miles an hour and he ranked in the world’s top three hundred. (But he would never crack the top one hundred players. He was finished as a competitor by the time I saw him, though neither of us knew that at the time.)

We commenced the lessons, twice a week, with intensive play in between. Before I knew it, I could really hit a tennis ball. Not as the pros hit one exactly, but with more force and spin than ever before.

Most of my time with Rob, he’d put me through drills with balls fed from a hopper. But once in a while we’d rally together at my limit. At such times, of course, for the most part I would be working my tail off while Rob looked like he was standing still. Now and then, if I made him run for a good shot, he’d turn on the jets and get there with (it seemed like) hours to spare. He might hit a winner off that or play it up, keeping me in the point. If the latter, that suddenly open court on his side disappeared by the time I initiated my swing, and the rally was on again.

His game, as always, was a thing of beauty. You struggled to keep yourself from pausing just to watch the sweet purity with which he contacted the ball, the whisk from which he generated power. On rare moments when I teased him into swinging away, there was no perceptible effort added to his stroke, just a kind of increased efficiency. On those occasions, the ball spun as if it had an engine inside. It bit the court and carried itself off before I could take two steps in the right direction.

Just seeing that ball inspired me to new heights. I began going through league opponents like a power sander taking the lumps out. They couldn’t handle the combination of pace and consistency, and I knew I’d made a huge leap when a guy who’d played me close the year before left the court muttering, “Too many weapons.”

This was a different feeling than I’d ever had on any field of play. I stepped out on the court and went into a zone, setting my opponents back on their heels. Even when I lost a point, I was dictating play. Guys weren’t merely failing to return some of my hits; they were late to the ball by a foot. One opponent showed up looking a little slow (frankly, possibly a little drunk), and my game sent him flopping to the ground twice in one hour. He left the hard court with blood dripping down his face.

Naturally, not soon after that, my game plateaued. Improvement couldn’t go on much longer – not at my age, and probably not with my level of talent. My body started to hurt. The novelty of my newly acquired strokes began to wear off. Most important, Rob was preparing to move on, to chase his dream on tour one last time.

Knowing our time together would soon end, I had a hankering to see some amazing ground strokes, not to mention the rocket serve that – if I could reach it at all – would sometimes tear the racket from my hand. I began razzing him playfully, stoking the competitive spirit, and that day he gave the trash talk right back to me, challenging me to hit him the best serve I could manage. By the look in his eye, I knew how he planned to respond: with a winner that would slap the curtain behind me like a ball launched from a cannon. I reared back anyway, pivoted my hips and shoulders, and made perfect contact. I let my follow-through carry me forward, and in the next fraction of a second, I watched the ball grab the T and accelerate past Rob’s outstretched racket. Ace!

We paused in mutual shock, contemplating this thing of unspeakable beauty made even more ineffable by the sheer surprise of it. For, though I’d hit the ball well and placed it perfectly, Rob’s failure to lay a racket on that serve was a complete fluke. If I had ten thousand more tries … a million … ten million, I’d never ace a pro on his level again. A conflicted look crossed his face, pride in his student tinged with embarrassment. Then Rob challenged me to try again, but I shook my head, walked off the court, and set my racket down.

You don’t top a shot as beautiful as that. You just let it linger.

ANGELA TUNG

BLEMISHED

when I was growing up, people told me

I was dark and I believed

my own darkness

in the mirror, in my soul, my own narrow vision

— Nellie Wong, “When I Was Growing Up”

When I was growing up, I had secret freckles. They remained hidden till I removed my glasses, then I heard, “You have freckles! How cute!” by white friends.

I stopped wearing glasses and my freckles turned into splotches.

Blobs.

Blemishes.

My white friends still thought they were cute. Asian women felt otherwise.

“I have the perfect whitening cream for you.”

“You should really wear more makeup.”

“Have you thought of a laser peel?”

Asian women were hell-bent on eradicating my darkness, as though it were their own.

When I was growing up, I was considered fat. At most, I was chubby, but in my mother’s eyes, I might as well have been obese.

My mother tried to “encourage” me to lose weight by saying:

“Your butt sticks out.”

“You’re getting a double chin.”

And in front of my skinny brother and skinny friend: “Two too skinny, one too fat.”

My mother always compared me to this skinny friend. She wanted me to have this friend’s straight As, her outgoingness, her easy politeness with adults. My mother wanted me to be this skinny friend, to be not-me.

When I was growing up, I was always on a diet, the first when I was eight. I ate three healthy meals and fruit for snacks and dessert. I didn’t eat cookies, cake, ice cream, or salty, crunchy snacks.

It was probably the smartest diet I’ve ever been on.

I also ran. I ran like crazy at recess and on the weekends playing running bases and tag with my friends. I ran by myself in our backyard, around and around, or else after a Frisbee I had thrown myself, catching it in midair. I ran so fast, I nearly ran over rabbits. I ran so fast, I beat the fastest kids in relay racing and on the soccer field (though I couldn’t kick a ball to save my life). I surprised everyone with my speed. I ran so fast, I thought I could fly.

I ran because I wanted long skinny legs, like the girls pirouetting in
The Sound of Music
, or Daisy Duke in her daisy dukes, or like in a picture I saw once of a girl starving, her legs all bones. I lost weight. I don’t know how much, but everyone commented on it. The doctor, my friend’s father who liked to throw us kids over his shoulder, even my mother.

“Doesn’t it feel good to be thin?” she asked me, helping me try on smaller pants.

But my mother doesn’t remember this. When I ask her, “Remember when I was little and I lost all that weight?” she shakes her head.

“You lost weight?” she asks back.

In my mother’s mind, I was always fat.

When I was growing up, I tried to starve myself. I was not successful. I’d skip breakfast, which was easy, and lunch, which was hard. By the time I got home from school, I was ravenous and ate everything in sight.