Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

My father played up his own game in much the same way. He claimed that tennis was a game of finesse, just like chess; that he could minimize, through strategy, the number of calories expended versus the number of points won; that a smart man with a solid return could beat all the fancy footwork in the world. Frank McAllister was his exact opposite, with a game like his personality: messy, overfriendly, bombastic. My father said it was like playing tennis with a Labrador retriever. Frank was always chasing the ball, fixated on it, always bounding up to the net, smashing his racket down like he was killing a fly. Sometimes he managed it and sometimes the maneuver failed him, but he never changed his style. He was a risk-taker, a hand-pumper, a winker at me as I watched on the sidelines. At the end of the match he'd jog up to the net and shake my father's hand. He won every time.

Whenever my father and Frank were playing, I'd hang out at the club, sometimes playing Anil Chaudury, who was around my age and skill level, sometimes practicing my serve against a back wall of the building. I was fifteen and had a part-time job that summer, bagging groceries, which I hated, and I had friends to hang out with — skateboarding or playing basketball, both of which were much cooler sports than tennis — but my secret focus, the real target of my day, was spending time at the club, hoping Ivy would come by. Sometimes she did. Even now, without the slightest difficulty, I can summon up in my mind a complete, five-sensed portrait of Ivy McAllister at the age of fourteen. She had long red curly hair she never tied back and that she tossed around in a manner that would've seemed affected in another girl her age. But Ivy had no self-consciousness; she was like her father in that one respect. She knew she was pretty and saw no reason to hide it. When she played tennis, with a girlfriend or sometimes, under duress or the promise of shopping money, with her mother, she wore short white tennis skirts and tiny white socks and filling the space between them was all creamy, freckle-dusted leg. The tennis court was the best chance I had of seeing her, now that school was out, although I occasionally caught a glimpse of her in the park, at night, drinking peppermint schnapps with a bunch of eighteen-year-old guys who, I could tell, were also in love with her.

What I couldn't tell was whether Ivy really liked them or not. It didn't seem to matter to her what anybody thought, not her friends, not the eighteen-year-olds, and certainly not me, and in this respect she was unlike the other girls I knew. No other girl could match her ease, her self-confidence, or how calmly she inhabited herself, so completely comfortable inside her own skin. It's hard to explain what I mean by this. I've tried talking about it once or twice to friends and wound up clamming up after seeing their stares. Years later, a girl I knew at school said, in an angry blurt, “Jesus, Kyle, you love her because you never got to sleep with her and you know you never will. If she weren't gone you wouldn't think she was so great.” I denied it, but maybe the girl was right. I really don't know.

A typical conversation with Ivy involved me stammering, trying to say her name, and her laughing, waving, and walking on. I'm not sure either of us ever got to the stage of actual words. And to be honest, I didn't even mind her laughing at me. Her laughter wasn't mean; it was more like a basic acknowledgment of the gulf between her world and mine, a gulf that I did not dispute. I knew I didn't have a chance with her, and she knew it, so what else was there to say?

Meanwhile my father played tennis with Frank all that summer, and the next, and the next. He lost constantly, endlessly, cheerfully. Some matches were closer than others, but the final outcome was never really in question.

“Get you next time,” he'd say to Frank at the end of every match.

“Sure thing, buddy!” Frank would say, and shake my father's hand. I think he liked knowing he could always win, and it wasn't so easy that he didn't have to try. As for my father, he'd been trying for years to put together a jigsaw puzzle he'd bought at a stoop sale in New York City: a 10,000-piece picture of a Jackson Pollock painting, each piece an identical dribble of red and brown and black. He'd never been deterred by lost causes.

Over the years and matches, my father and I transformed Frank McAllister, and my father's inability to beat him, into a legend. He never mentioned Frank without referring to him as his nemesis. One time, at Christmas, when we ran into him and his other daughter, Melissa, at the mall, my father greeted him by extending his arm, as if about to strike his killer forehand, and exclaiming loudly, “If it isn't my tennis nemesis, Frank McAllister!” Melissa, who was thirteen and by some accident of chin length or nose placement nowhere near as pretty as Ivy, scowled at me and snapped her gum. Her father laughed heartily — he was always laughing heartily — but I'm not sure he knew what a nemesis was, or if my father was joking, or whether the whole thing was good or bad. My father didn't care. He worked in advertising and was a coiner of words, an inventor of slogans, a singer of jingles, and once he'd decided that Frank was his nemesis, his nemesis he stayed. We came to use “McAllister” as a code at home, a term referring to some long-desired but impossible goal. A McAllister was like a Pyrrhic victory or a Sisyphean task. It was a mythological situation.

“Going to get an A on that history paper, Kyle?” my father would say, only asking so I could answer him with the code.

“I'm hoping so, Dad, but I think it's a McAllister. Mr. Martin's a tough grader.”

“Don't give up,” he'd say, clapping me on the back. “Even McAllister will fall one day!”

Yet however large a place Frank McAllister assumed in our conversations, however grand a figure he became, however tightly he was wound into our family lore, he and my father never socialized off the court. It wasn't that they didn't get along, only that tennis was the single thing they had in common. Frank and his wife, Beth Ann, were younger than my parents and ran with a different crowd. Beth Ann was a professional caterer whose contributions to bake sales and potlucks were intimidatingly accomplished, while my mother brought Pepperidge Farm cookies to everything. She was an archivist, and at school functions, while other mothers congregated around the food to gossip, she would corner the librarian and discuss acid-free paper.

I was an only child, and both my parents treated family life as an enjoyable, if time-consuming, hobby. I knew them as relaxed, imperturbable, and lazy, and both liked and loved them. I also loved that because my mother was sick of driving me around she encouraged me to get my driver's license as soon as possible and practically forced the car keys into my hand. I used to spend hours on the weekends cruising around the neat suburban streets in my mother's Toyota, passing parks and pools and tennis courts and strip malls while pretending I wasn't just making a big loop around Ivy McAllister's house.

One day when I was seventeen, I finally parked the car. Ivy came to the door wearing a pink tank top whose straps seemed almost to blend into the pale freckles on her shoulders. My courage failed me, and I didn't ask her out; I couldn't. Instead, I asked her to play tennis, which seemed less wildly implausible than asking her out on a date. She shrugged and said, “Sure.” We were sort of friends by then, I guess — or at least we knew each other well in the way kids do who grow up in the same neighborhood, know the same people, see each other all the time without ever really talking to each other that much. At seventeen, Ivy still wore her hair long, but now she gathered it in a high ponytail that shook when she laughed, which was often, and that showed off her pretty, freckled cheeks. She agreed to play tennis with me, I found out, because she was on some kick involving exercise. She told me she had a new dream, of joining the youth tour in tennis, a dream I would've taken more seriously if she hadn't also taken up smoking.