Brooklyn, 1985
a few years before and had found something appalling there when she did. Knowing my mother, it could have been anything from a pregnant teenager to children who smelled like pot, but also it could have been young girls with too much blue eyeliner and teased hair, things that she believes lead to pregnancy and drug use. Well, she marched my sister right out of there, went home, and called the prep school, which had a campus like a college—a tall clock tower, fields for different kinds of sports, and even different fields for different kinds of people playing those sports. Varsity soccer field, junior varsity football field, all manner of sports, all ranges of varsity accommodated. A duck pond. A larger duck pond. And then there were the tennis courts, indulgently spread out, meticulously spaced, clean and standing alert, all six of them at least, maybe 12; I don’t know, they weren’t for me. They were green and gleaming and perfect, and in the spring, we’d have a phys-ed rotation through them, like we did through field hockey in the fall, and swimming in the winter. But there were special tennis lessons you could take after school—not at the school, but at a place nearby—hosted by the school’s tennis coach. My friends went on Thursdays, and they suggested I come, too, but when I got home, I learned that my father hadn’t paid the rent yet, and that he certainly hadn’t paid the tuition yet, and so probably I should not even think about tennis lessons. At school, the tennis coach was a short man with luxurious Robert Kardashian hair who wore Fila warm-up suits, a different
The summer after sixth grade, all my friends at the prep school I attended went to sleepaway tennis camp. One night they called me and told me that one of them had a boyfriend and his name was Trevor, from somewhere in the Midwest, and would I like to talk to him, and Trevor got on the phone with me and I was happy they were including me—I didn’t go to any camp that summer— and excited to enter an age where the boys we liked could become our boyfriends. Later, during the school year, I was eating ice cream on the steps in front of the tennis courts and I heard Trevor’s voice; I’d remembered his voice because it was so deep and grown-up, and it had made me feel grown- up, too. But he wasn’t Trevor, and he wasn’t from the Midwest. He was John something from our dumb school. He had been helping my friends in some prank wherein I am somehow tricked into thinking one of them has a boyfriend. As far as pranks go, it was not the most clever; I still don’t quite know what the goal of it was—how tricking me into thinking my friend had a boyfriend was supposed to somehow humiliate me or be hilarious. Whatever the desired effect of it was, whatever its goal, I thought only of how they must have laughed over my excitement and my gullibility. I confronted my friends that day, and they said that you’d have to have been there, you’d have to have been at tennis camp in order to understand why it was so funny. I had been sent to this prep school, which was elite by Brooklyn-at-the-time standards, because my mother had taken my older sister to the local public high school to register her
76
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker