Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

My father and I stopped using “McAllister” as a code word, and so far as I know he never played with Frank again. They lost touch, and anyway it wasn't as if they were ever really friends; they just played tennis together for three years. My father played with a rotating succession of partners and, when I was home in the summers, with me. We slipped into long, lazy matches in which we focused as much on maintaining long rallies as we did on hitting good shots; there was a harmony between us, on and off the court, that only increased the older I got. Though I'd been playing tennis all my life, it was in those later years, after I graduated from school, that I really fell in love with the game, its easy back and forth, the thud and twang of racket strings, the shadows of trees over an asphalt court on an otherwise sunny day. There was no more graceful moment, I came to see, than the finite silence of the ball before it hit and bounced, no more satisfying equation than a strong serve meeting a stronger return. It was like my father always said: it was a game of finesse.

Of course we saw the McAllisters from time to time, in the store or on the street, and news of them reached us now and then. What happened was that Frank, to no one's great surprise, left Beth Ann for Eleanor MacElvoy. Beth Ann kept the house and was given custody of Melissa. Frank had two more kids with Eleanor, strapping, poorly behaved blond children, according to my mother, who thought Beth Ann had gotten the short end of the marital stick. I couldn't help wondering if he would've gone through with leaving Beth Ann if it hadn't been for Ivy dying. But of course there was no telling. The world would have been different in a million ways if she hadn't died, and that was only one of them.

As I got older I came home less often — saddled by job commitments and, eventually, family ones as well — but always visited at least once in the summer, and my father and I always played tennis when I did. The game grew into a staged ritual for us, less sport than ceremony, a language each of us spoke best with the other. My father stood practically glued to the baseline with stiff knees, his old man's legs seeming too thin to support the rest of his body. He'd stretch his arms out far, then farther, to return my shots, with his feet unmoving, and if one made it past him, which happened all the time, he'd only shrug. He'd grown philosophical to an intense degree. Then, in his seventy-fifth year, he was diagnosed with cancer and soon became too sick from the treatments to play. Over a period of months he grew thinner, older, sicker, and a year later, philosophical even then, he said good-bye to us and died.

My mother and I shared the work that followed his death: arranging the funeral, settling the estate, selling the house. She was going to live with her sister out West, and I wasn't going to be coming home anymore, not to this home, anyway.

On a windless, quiet Sunday I went to hit a few last balls at the club with Anil Chaudury, who still lived in town. It was a cool July afternoon; a front had blown through the night before, and the air still held the wetness of it. We served a few balls, slowly, no hurry. On the next court over, a father was yelling instructions to his teenaged son, and I stared at them for a second, awash in memory, before realizing that the father was Frank McAllister. He'd grown stout in his middle years, his face rounder and redder, and his hair was almost gone; but he still ran back and forth to the net like a bounding Labrador, and was trying to teach his son to do the same. The boy was thin and freckled and had very blond hair. He looked around fifteen.

Does it make any sense to say that although I was grieving for my father — whom I had the joy of loving and of knowing well, as a friend and as a parent — it was at that moment, thinking about Ivy, that I thought my heart would break? All of a sudden I was fighting back tears. It seemed crazy to me that I had gone on living without her all these years, that the world had somehow kept functioning, that anyone had grown reconciled to the death of a seventeen-year-old girl. From the other side of the net, Anil asked if I was okay. I lifted my palm to him, asking for a pause, then walked over to Frank McAllister and said hello.

“Hey there!” he said right away, holding out his hand. “How are you ?” He seemed so happy to see me that I didn't realize at first he had no idea who I was. He was just that kind of guy — a meeter and greeter — and he never turned it off.

“Kyle Hoffman,” I said. “You used to play tennis with my dad.”

“Is that a fact.” He stood there nodding and grinning.

“Dean Hoffman,” I said. “You were his nemesis.”

“Nemesis!” Frank McAllister said, shaking his head in hearty amusement. He didn't have a clue what I was talking about.

“I was a friend of Ivy's,” I said.

The smile never left his face. It had been false to begin with, and it stayed false. “Well, nice to see you,” he said, and shook my hand again.

I saw that he didn't want to hear that I'd known Ivy or— which I'd almost said — that I'd loved her. He didn't want to talk about her any more than I wanted to talk about her with the people she and I had gone to high school with. He wanted her to belong to him, too.

“Dad,” his son called from the other side of the net, “can I get a drink?”

“Sure thing, kiddo,” Frank said.

“You want to hit a few balls?” I said.

“Hey, that sounds great !” Frank said. “I'm in the book. Give me a call.”

“I meant right now,” I said. “Unless you're too tired.”

He watched his kid, who was talking to another teenager over by the Coke machine, and nodded. He looked winded from all his bounding, but I could tell he didn't want to admit it. “Sure thing,” he said. “Why the hell not?”

I ran over and explained to Anil that I was going to play with my father's old partner for a few minutes. He hadn't kept up his game and looked relieved, wandering over to the sidelines.

I took my place at the baseline. Frank McAllister was bouncing the ball against his racket, getting ready to serve. As I crouched there, I began trembling with anger. I wanted to beat the shit out of Frank McAllister, humiliate him in front of his kid, make him feel tired and pathetic. I knew I could do it, too; he looked out of breath and old. I wanted to beat him not because he wouldn't talk about Ivy but because he didn't remember my father. We had mythologized the McAllisters, had loved them, and he didn't even know who we were, just as Ivy had never known who I was, not really, never cared to find out before she'd gone off and died. To the McAllisters we were nothing. The world, I thought then, is divided into sides just like a tennis court is: into winners and losers, into forgetters and forgotten.

I realized that my father had always known which side he was on, and he didn't care. He was even, I thought, proud. All around me was the sound of his game, of rubber soles and asphalt and the hiccup of a ball crashing into the net; and, beyond that, the sound of the suburbs on a summer afternoon, the lawn mowers and radios and family conversations. Across the court, Frank McAllister asked me if I was ready.

“Sure thing,” I said, and prepared myself to lose.

ABSTRACT

This paper will address the root causes and consequences of some troublesome recent behavior by Hank Higginbottom, Ph.D. Professor Higginbottom studies sexual selection in Poecilia reticulata, aka the Trinidadian guppy. In his office, on the sixth floor of a concrete building in the southwest corner of the university campus, his main enjoyment comes from the blue burble of the tanks and the swishing, distinctively orange-spotted bodies of Poecilia reticulata within them. It's a precarious enjoyment, a calm easily disturbed. It's most easily — and frequently — disturbed by Joseph Purdy, who studies sexual selection in the human male, whose office is located next door, whose research is more provocative and better funded than Hank's, and who therefore has a much nicer and larger lab, with windows, even though said research seems to take place mainly through the observation of pickup lines in bars and therefore does not even require much office space, and whose seemingly favorite activity during the day is to stroll into Hank's office wearing his cowboy boots and offer Hank some deer jerky from an animal he has personally shot himself. On the day in question Hank responded to this offer with a right hook to Joseph Purdy's angular jaw, landing Purdy in the hospital.