Eric himself. No whistles of admiration, racket twirling, or knocking the frame on her shoe. Instead, Willy marched woodenly from serve to serve without one stomped foot. Stifling her running monologue, today she straightened her mouth in a line so flat that were it an EKG the patient would be dead. When Eric asked if his serve was a let she would only nod.
“Are you upset about something?” he worried on the second changeover.
She shook her head rigidly, though whether or not she was upset had nothing to do with getting on with the job.
Whatever Eric seemed to want she denied him. He loved to dive for low, whistling passes, so each time he rushed the net she lobbed—exquisite topspin arcs cresting a few tantalizing inches from the tip of his racket. He’d streak to his baseline, plow back again, bloop … When he paced up his game, she dragged the points to a crawl.
And Willy had never been more coldly conniving. Her sidespins were given a happy assist when they landed on berries. She’d sweep her racket back as if for a doozy and at the very last second bring it to a shrieking halt; dink, the ball would cough over the tape and wheeze to Eric’s feet. Finally, when he’d been lulled into anticipating only junk, she’d let tear, jangling the ball into the fence. Composed and serenely mechanical, Willy dispatched the first set 6–2.
Receiving in the second at 5–1, Willy reflected that she’d aimed only to enrage him, to teach Eric that he could be fervid once he got out of bed. Yet her methods had begun to backfire. The score was sweet enough; she needed only to break him this game, or hold the next. But instead of at last revealing his wit’s end—by kicking another of her winning balls at the net, or at least shooting her a glare—Eric had started to laugh.
His serve went wiggly and folded into her service court, as if itself doubled over in hysterics. She flattened it. He didn’t even attempt to retrieve, and wiped away a tear. Willy narrowed her eyes to make them all the more steely, and disciplined her mouth to a bar. Meanwhile he had started to hoot, losing his balance and gasping for breath. At love–40, match point, he shoveled a fat, juicy floater to her midcourt. She squashed it. Barely able to get the words out through his guffaws, he said something.
The match over, it was now permissible to speak. “What was that?” asked Willy courteously.
This time he shouted unmistakably, “Marry me!”
Willy cartwheeled her racket fifteen feet in the air, and caught it neatly by the grip. Oberdorf had finally displayed a little passion on the tennis court.
If twenty-three was young to marry for 1992, Willy did not situate herself in modern history any more than she regarded herself as American. She owed allegiance to the tennis court, whose lines described a separate country, and to whose rigid and peculiar laws she adhered with the fervor of patriotism. Likewise Willy conceived of her lifespan in terms of the eighteenth century. As a tennis player, she would at best survive to forty; twenty-three was middle-aged.
That the institution of marriage had been thoroughly discredited by the time Willy was born didn’t delay her acceptance of Eric’s proposal by ten seconds. Granted, her own parents set a poor example; Willy envied neither her glumly patriarchal father nor his cheerfully submissive sidekick. But she might have envied her parents at their first meeting, in 1961: when her mother, Colleen, was a flighty modern dance student, leaping through recitals to the beat of bongos inside a helix of scarves, and her father, Charles, was an undiscouraged beatnik scribbler, whose pockets bulged from squiggled napkins and leaky ballpoint pens. Willy clung to the notion that nothing about marriage itself condemned her mother to dismiss an ambition to dance as vain folly, nor her father to turn on his own credulous literary aspirations with such a snarl. And surely had she wed in this more liberal era, the acquiescent Colleen might have told Charles to get a grip and stop moaning and sometimes gone her own way. Despite overwhelming evidence that both true love and domestic balance of power were myths, Willy still believed in the possibility of an ardent, lasting union between equals, much as many religious skeptics still kept faith in an afterlife because the alternative was too unbearable.
So all through a militantly independent young adulthood Willy had been waiting. At last along came Eric Oberdorf, who radiated the same clear-eyed courage that shone from pictures of her father in the early sixties—before Charles joined the opposition in celebrating his own defeat. Willy had inherited her mother’s grace, and given it structure and purpose. Together she and Eric could rewrite history, which may have been what children were for.
As for Eric, Willy’s primary concern was that he might regard marriage, like his so far useless degree in mathematics, as an end in itself. Eric had a modular mind. He might not conceive of pro tennis as death row, but he thought of his life in blocks, and therefore as a series of little deaths. But Willy knew enough about the altar to be sure that marriage demarcated not only the successful completion of a project, but the beginning of another, far more demanding endeavor.
“Daddy, it’s Willy.”
“Hola!”
Willy let the receiver list. Her father had never forgiven her for majoring in Spanish. “You’re going to interpret for the UN?” he’d inquired dryly when informed of her decision. “No, I’ll sell veggie burritos in Flushing Meadow,” she’d snipped back. “Which by the time I finish this BA is the closest I’m going to get to the U.S. Open.” Her father held nothing more against Spanish people than against anyone—meaning he held a great deal against them, indeed. But he knew that she’d chosen an easy major to have maximum free time for the tennis team.
“Qué tal?” asked Willy.
“Nothing ever changes here, Willow, you know that.”
“You could always get old and die,” she recommended. “At least that would get it over with.”
“It’s important to keep something to look forward to.”
“Listen, I have someone I want you to meet.”
“Another brain surgeon?”
“Yes, he’s a tennis player, Daddy,” she said impatiently. “But with a degree from Princeton.”
“A tennis player with a degree!” he exclaimed. “You told me that was impossible.”
Willy almost hung up. If she could barely make it through this phone call, how was she going to survive the whole evening she proposed? “How about Friday night? We’ll take the seven-twenty from Port Authority.”
“I’m sure I can squeeze you and your young man into my busy social calendar.”
“Listen, Daddy,” she added effortfully. “I really like this guy. Could you … be friendly?”
“Willow, I’m always—”
“I mean, don’t be quite such a gloomy Gus? Like, don’t rain on any parades for one night.”
“Gloomy! After an electrifying week of teaching budding car mechanics commonly confused words, I’m sure to be happy as a clam.”
“Oh, never mind,” said Willy, and hung up with a sigh.
“When
