Willy tromped up the brown steps, shuffled over the brown porch, and poked her head in the brown door. “Hola!”
Her father dwelt on the paper in his lap a beat before looking up; she supposed it took him a moment to ready himself. Willy always seemed to drain him, and before he rearranged his features into arch remove, he looked stressed.
Crinkled snapshots of Charles Novinsky at Willy’s age looked like portraits of some brave eldest later shot down in a war. The young man’s eyes were searing and his bearing was vertical; there was no presentiment in that face of the mortars to come. It took effort to see any relation to the jaded veteran she faced now. Her father’s rich curls had thinned to a dry frizzle, as if he’d been singed. Though his complexion was naturally ruddy, he had a psoriasis condition, and shedding skin flaked his cheeks gray.
Her father adjusted his spectacles down his nose. “Say, I’ve been reading a Chomsky book that pertains to your calling. According to Noam, in the secular era sports are the opiate of the people. Seems the masses are enervated by vicarious gladiatorial contests, much the way they were once mesmerized by mumbo-jumbo in church.”
“Eric,” said Willy, “this is my contentious, curmudgeonly father, who is trying his best to offend you before he even knows your name.”
“Princeton, I hear.” They shook hands. “What possessed you to join the yahoos after earning a degree from a place like that?”
“Willy and I plan to make millions in endorsements for deodorant,” Eric tossed easily back.
They each took a seat in brown chairs, and Eric nodded at the term papers in her father’s lap. “That doesn’t look like Chomsky. What are you reading?”
Don’t get him started, Willy almost intruded, but Eric liked to get people started.
“Reading may be too dignified a word. I play little games to keep myself amused, though. My charges divide into those who think commas are states of catatonia after a car accident, and others who regard them as decorative curlicues—in which case, the more the prettier. So I sponsor home contests. This is a prizewinner.” He held up an essay. Whisked with red deletes, from three feet away the paper was pink. “Thirty-five superfluous commas on one page. A record.”
“What are you trying to do, Daddy, impress us with your powers of punctuation, or get us to feel sorry for you?”
Frankly, his keen of condescension was so familiar that she turned it off. Willy had grown up with the vague impression that their family was superior, although not in a worldly way. Theirs was a loftiness that left them outside of things. Her father had the aura of an Old Testament prophet who had tried preaching a time or two, was paid no mind, and now, spitefully, would deliver no more tidings. If that meant leaving the hordes to floods and locusts, very well.
The cornerstone of her father’s supremacy was his valiant realism. He recognized that the planet was teeming with acned adolescents all planning to be film directors, industrial magnates, and Pulitzer prize-winning foreign correspondents, and he set his students straight on the odds. Only the frail and simpleminded clung to their delusions. Chuck had insisted that his offspring grow up in the world the way it was.
Willy’s mother scuttled from the kitchen, wiping her hand on her apron before extending it to Eric. Colleen Novinsky carried herself at a forward angle, stooping with her whole body so that you always worried she was about to fall over. She clasped her hands at her waist in an attitude of perpetual supplicant. After accepting Eric’s bottle of wine with a gasp about how he shouldn’t have, she saw to their drinks with an attentiveness bordering on hysteria.
As Eric lengthened across the central recliner her parents shrank from him, edging their chairs and glancing askance. It was that freshness. Eric wasn’t brown. He floated above his seat with a faint white outline, as if snipped from a glossy magazine and pasted on Novinsky newsprint. Eric straightened his long legs and crossed his ankles, locking hands behind his head; his articulated Adam’s apple caught the lamplight. This household managed, congenitally, to be both phlegmatic and agitated, and they regarded her boyfriend’s graceful, interweaving banter with mistrustful awe.
“You must be pretty pleased with your daughter, Mr. Novinsky,” Eric purred. “Last week 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
