Double Fault. Lionel Shriver
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she got to the semis in Des Moines. Her performance was stupendous. It isn’t easy to yank your ranking from 612 to 394 in one year.”
Her father waved his hand. “I can’t make heads or tails of all those sports numbers.”
“It’s simple arithmetic, Mr. Novinsky,” Eric reproached him. “Rankings are comprehensible if you can count.”
“We’re just worried how she’s going to keep body and soul together.”
“Body, maybe,” Willy grumbled. “You’ve never seemed too bothered about my soul.”
“I am concerned about how you will make a self-respecting living,” he shot back.
“Is that what your work is? Self-respecting?”
“It is a living,” he countered. “I don’t see why you can’t get a proper job to have something to fall back on.”
“You can’t play pro tennis part-time,” Eric intervened. “You’re always on the road, and it takes unequivocal devotion.” Exactly what Willy had said for years, but when Eric said it her parents listened. “And Willy’s doing well for herself, Mr. Novinsky. I shouldn’t have to remind you, but she’s got something—something special.”
“But she’s in debt to this Upchurch fellow up to her eyeballs,” her father objected. “And what if she breaks a leg?” On Walnut Street, “break a leg” really entailed breaking a leg.
“Everyone lives with uncertainty,” Eric returned smoothly. “In the meantime, imagine being able to support yourself playing tennis! It’s almost as outrageous as being paid to write stories.”
Her father assessed Eric gamely, then tapped some paperback novels on the table beside him. “What’s outrageous is being paid to write these stories.”
“And you, Mrs. Novinsky? What do you do?” Put to women of her mother’s generation, the question was a risk. Forced to admit they were housewives, they were embarrassed, for the very question implied that vacuuming wasn’t enough. If instead you neglected the inquiry and they had jobs, they were insulted as well. But Eric didn’t take gambles he didn’t think he could win. He knew Mrs. Novinsky worked in a nursing home.
“The way the age structure is shifting,” Willy’s father chimed in cheerfully, “pretty soon we’ll all be working in nursing homes, if we’re not committed to one already. Colleen’s ahead of her time.”
“Mother originally studied modern dance,” Willy volunteered.
“That was years ago,” her mother scoffed. “I didn’t have the talent to join a company. And I’d never have refrained from all those cookies.”
Willy rolled her eyes. This tried routine had hoodwinked both daughters for years into insisting that no, no, she had a lovely figure she might have kept, and come on, she moved like an artist. “Sure, Mama. That’s just what your instructor said when he gave you the lead in ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ your senior year: this klutz belongs munching Oreos with old people in diapers.” That her mother always made other people stick up for her was a kind of laziness. “Now, can we eat?”
“We’re waiting for Gert.”
Oh, great.
If Willy didn’t detest her sister she might have felt sorry for the woman. Born around the time that those typescripts would have been shoved in the attic for Roach Motels, Willy’s older sister had suffered the initial brunt of her father’s barbaric practicality. He could just as well have kept a foot on her head. From the start, Gert had been overly grown-up, with that restrained, well-spoken modesty that in a child is a little disturbing. In the early days when the girls still played together, Gert would never agree to rambunctious reenactments of Kojak chase scenes, but insisted on playing Mary Tyler Moore. In junior high, she never wanted to be a rock star, but a school-teacher. Her tennis game was safe and soft, and as soon as Willy got good Gert quit the sport without a fight. In high school, she dressed with a matronly mutedness all through the era of wacky New Wave clothes. Her garb in her twenties was still sensible, like her marriage—her husband and shoes alike would wear well, so much better than heels that were flashy and precarious. Willy’s father had succeeded: Gert was a bore. Her single pretension was to claim that she hadn’t one.
When Gert efficiently whisked in the door (her suit was brown) she asked Willy while fussing keys into her pocketbook, “How’s tennis?”
“Fine,” said Willy.
That was that.
At dinner, so assured and fluid was her fiancé’s patter that Willy wasn’t needed. Inspecting him, she had the irrational impression that she’d brought not a prospective son-in-law but a surrogate—rather than their surly, guarded, too-private second child who always made life so prickly, here was a self-possessed, engaging young adult in whose presence her parents, incredibly, laughed. At previous family mealtimes, whenever Willy launched into insider tennis scuttlebutt Gert would ask for more potatoes and her father went back to harping on how deconstructionism was blessedly kaput. But when Eric gossiped about Agassi, they all three leaned forward and asked questions (“Who’s Agassi?”). Presently her father was exploring with convincing curiosity how Eric tamed his nerves before a game, a question he had never bothered to ask his own daughter.
Having sucked up to her mother by eating three helpings of inedibly undercooked chicken cacciatore, Eric expanded back from the table. In the pool of light at his open collar, shadows swam in his clavicle like the darting of small fish. Willy grew alarmed. Eric’s extreme features could be regarded as either striking or overdrawn. In the past she had bestowed him with a provisional handsomeness, which she was thereby free to rescind. Yet tonight, like it or not, the branched veins over his broad forearms made Willy’s mouth water as surely as an open candy dish of licorice strings. If his beauty was a present, it was one he would keep.
“At the January ’89 Buenos Aires Davis Cup match with Argentina?” Eric opined. “Agassi was playing Martin Jaite, a heartthrob local talent. Andre was whitewashing the poor bastard, 6–2, 6–2. At 4–0 in the third set Jaite had a chance to win a game. Down 40–love, Agassi shouted to his coach, ‘Hey, Nick, watch this!’ Jaite served, and Agassi caught the ball with his left hand.”
“Why would he do that?” Gert frowned, fascinated.
“Twisted charity. To humiliate Jaite and offend the crowd. It worked. Then he’d the nerve to claim to journalists that the trick was ‘just something he always wanted to do.’”
Willy’s brow creased as well. She’d tried to tell this exact same story at Thanksgiving last year. Her mother had continued clearing the table, Gert had rifled through sample questions for her next accountancy exam, and her father, far from readjusting his chair at a rapt angle, had turned absently to The New York Times. Willy had abandoned the anecdote well before she got to the punchline.
If only to get a little attention, Willy pinged and raised her glass. “Hey. A toast. We’re getting married.”
They were thrilled.
When everyone went to bed, her mother pointedly directed the engaged couple to separate rooms. Willy might have staged a scene, but the chummier her fiancé became with her father (“Eric, please call me Chuck”) the more she was inclined to tolerate the arrangement.
“Well, you charmed the bejesus out of my family,” Willy growled in the hallway.
“They’re not so bad,” he whispered.
“Maybe to you they’re not,” she muttered. “Good God, I’m engaged to Eddie Haskell.”
“Willy—?”
She didn’t kiss him good night. Willy had been nervous whether her family would like Eric. She hadn’t thought to worry that they’d like him too much.