Paul Harding - Enon

I tried to visit Kate at the tennis courts a couple times a week, when I had the chance to take a break from my job. There were two tennis courts, side by side, surrounded by a cyclone fence and a long bench outside the gate, made from two long planks nailed down to three evenly spaced sections of telephone pole that had been sunk into the ground. The planks had been painted a dark green, but much of the paint had worn off over the years, exposing the smooth, bare, purplish-gray wood. The courts radiated a kind of coolness that early in the morning, as if they absorbed the night’s cold and released it with the rising sun. Kate’s job was to give lessons to the littlest kids, and they showed up at the court bleary and mussed, dragging their rackets behind them. Before she started the lesson, she gave them a pep talk and made them run around the court twice and do ten jumping jacks, to get them going. They seemed like little animals that had just uncurled themselves from dens hidden in the woods. The lessons amounted pretty much to half a dozen kids chasing a bucketful of fluorescent green tennis balls around the courts, and usually Kate yelled encouraging things at them. I loved the sound of the tennis balls pocking off the rackets and the jangle of the chain-link fence every time a ball hit it. She taught six twenty-minute lessons every morning, from eight until ten-thirty, and I mostly made it to the courts by the fourth or fifth lesson. I sat on the bench, trying to be quiet because, although I thought Kate liked me being there, I knew she was self-conscious about being independent with her first job, too. She wanted to show me how hard she worked and how competent and dependable she was. I always brought her a bottle of orange juice and a corn-bread muffin, and, after she finished her last lesson, we’d sit together on the bench and she’d drink the juice and pinch little bits off the muffin and eat some of them and throw some of them on the ground in front of us, for the sparrows.

Sometimes Kate’s competitiveness overtook her and she became too intense with the kids. She barked once at a girl that she had a crummy backhand.

“Come on, Emma. You had that! Put some effort into it!” She turned away from the girl and shook her head and muttered, “ Je sus.” I had to stop myself from yelling at her to cool it. It was the first time I’d ever seen her turn her temper like that toward anyone but Susan or me. It was the first time I found myself angry with her in a way I might have been angry with an adult. My anger burned off immediately and transformed into shame, then into that sort of sorrow you feel when you see that time does pass and that you and your children really will perish. I stopped myself from telling Kate to knock it off because her emotions were new and raw and complicated and of course I had felt the same kind when I’d been her age. As much as I wanted to tell her to knock it off I also marveled at her seriousness and at what that seriousness might mature into, at what an intense, amazing woman my daughter might someday grow to be.

After the lesson I told her that she’d seemed harsh with her student and she replied that the kid had some talent and needed someone to push her to get better.

“But she’s like five years old.”

“Exactly. If she’s going to be any good, she needs to get rid of her bad habits now.”

“Okay, okay. I guess that’s a good point. Just try to go easy on the tykes, all right?” Kate picked at the muffin I’d brought her. She rubbed her fingertips together to get the crumbs off and wiped her hand on the side of her tennis skirt.

“Sure, Dad.”

“What’s up for the rest of the day? Want to go for a walk in the sanctuary or go over to Gull Harbor and look for sea glass?” I knew she wouldn’t want to do either of those things, but I hoped that she’d still like that I’d asked her.

“Carrie and I are going to the beach.”

“Who’s giving you a ride?”

“We’re going on our bikes.”

“Wait. Did you ask Mom about this or anything yet?”

“No. It’s okay. We’ll be safe.”

“Ah, no. Sorry, kid. But no. I don’t like the idea of you riding around the lake there and down Grapevine. It’s too winding.”

“But Dad. You did it! You used to do it when you were younger ! Come on. That’s not fair. Why not?”

I wanted to tell her that I didn’t care if it was fair, or if it was thoughtful or mean or capricious or bad parenting or anything. I wanted to tell her, Because I just don’t want you to, and I’m the parent and that’s why not . Instead, I closed my eyes and frowned and feigned an exhausted sigh and said okay, she could go.

“But be careful, especially around the lake and along the shore road,” I said.

“ Especially there, Dad,” she said. I stood up to go and she grabbed her racket and a bucket of balls.

“Home by six,” I said.

“Seven,” she said, and kissed me on the ear.

“Not a minute later. I’ll make you guys dinner.”

“Get corn.”

“Okay. Love you.”

“Love you, too, Dad.”

THERE WAS A HEAT wave in July. I had no working air conditioners, only two fans, one a large, dust-caked window fan and the other a small, plastic desk fan. I put the window fan on the floor near the couch and the desk fan on the coffee table by my head. Frankie had come through with all of the drugs I’d asked him for the week before, and I was set up for a while.

I drank a glass of grapefruit juice mixed with the extraction from four pills and lay on the couch in my boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, with a rolled-up washcloth soaked in cold water across my forehead. A book about Enon’s history lay on the floor near the couch, so I picked it up and leafed through it. There was a photograph of Main Street in July 1890, taken from the middle of the road, facing east, with the caption “Beating the heat with Conant’s grapes.” The elms on either side of the road look parched and papery. The photo is overexposed and light floods out much of the detail that would otherwise be visible. A single white house sits behind the trees, on the apparent verge of evaporating into pure light. Two children stand hand in hand across the street, on the right. One is a small boy wearing short pants and suspenders and a wide-brimmed straw hat. The other is an older girl in a plain white cotton dress, black socks, and ankle-high leather shoes. They are nearly swallowed in the light.

I closed my eyes and imagined what it must have been like standing in the center of the road, directly in the sunlight and heat, which was so intense that it seemed like liquid, difficult to breathe in and out, scalding, nearly asphyxiating. The boy and girl are both looking at me standing in the middle of the road, and the boy, young as he is, perhaps four or five, is wondering in a straightforward, practical way why I am standing out in the middle of the road, where it’s so hot. The girl wonders the same thing but with a twinge of suspicion about me that the young boy is too young to have. Her suspicion does not frighten her, but it makes her cautious and curious at the same time. The unpaved road is smooth and dusty in the heat. The dust seems nearly to hover just above the ground, in a sheer plane, and twists up into dervishes when a molten gust of air coils down the road, and spins off out of the frame, into the backyard behind the house, and dies somewhere among the hot red pines and oaks. I am aware that there’s a good chance that the children will disappear, that the photograph itself will dissolve if I try to approach them. Some kind of boundary exists, one familiar from dreams. The girl is Kate, but not quite Kate. She is obviously who I want to approach and have turn into Kate, but not deliberately, not by an act of my will, but by hers or some other, external accord, because whomever we most want to meet in our dreams always vanishes the moment we intentionally try to preserve her. I stand in the wide, open middle of the blazing road, suspended. If I take a step closer, the boy and the girl I want to be Kate will evaporate in the heat. If I turn away, the entire picture will give way. It seems that the best I can hope for is the preservation of my desire for the girl to be Kate, which is not quite but very nearly as painful as her not being there at all. Just as I feel a kind of prevenient, atomic ripple approaching the threshold of my awareness, which will scatter this fragile notion and replace it with, say, a coarse, literal thought about the washcloth on my forehead, the girl speaks.