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camp, and we’d watch Wimbledon on TV and I’d try on the lazy-talking Long Island persona of a person who doesn’t concern herself with survival. I watched with awe the way the women comported themselves, how getting their hair blown dry made things better, how they fought one another over lunches to get the check. I went to live with my father for a year. Our pediatrician and his family lived down our block on Long Island. They had a tennis court behind their house, and when I was 13, the doctor’s son asked me if I wanted to play after school, and one day I said yes, and we played, and I became some other version of myself. I loved it so much. But then the next week, when he asked me to play again, I said no. It was knowing that this was here, all this space and this game and all the civilized things that went along with it, but that they weren’t for me. Every time I’d play I wouldn’t know when I could next play again. I wouldn’t be able to get better. It would remain out of my reach, and I would forever be reminded that I am not the person I wanted to be, which is a rich person, a person who can have what she wants. And I knew then that no matter what happened in my life, I would never be rich enough to play a sport that required an actual bubble to surround you in it. Or, rather, maybe I would be, maybe I would have gobs of money, but I knew then that I would never, ever feel like I had enough to be casual about the money. I would never pick up the bill without wondering about the enormous implications of that money leaving my bank account. I would never blow my hair dry unless I could do an extended calculus of how that dried hair could reap, in return, and immediately, twice of what it cost in the first place. And I would never play a sport that I couldn’t dominate that cost this much money. There was no future in which I spent this much money on recreation. I returned to Brooklyn after a year to live with my mother again, and I didn’t play tennis again.
one each day of the week, and he’d whisper during the tennis rotation that you should try his lessons nearby, and even maybe think about attending his camp. “But why can’t you go?” asked one of my friends about the lessons, and then about the camp, and I didn’t understand it myself—we appeared to have money in my family, and yet we didn’t have any money—so I couldn’t answer, except to say that I didn’t want to, or that I hadn’t thought to ask, or that tennis wasn’t my thing, though I desperately wished it could be. My father was from a wealthy section of Long Island, where he was not as wealthy as his friends, and so he adapted by becoming someone who badly wished he was rich, and lived as though he were. We drove the Porsche out to the Hamptons, where we’d stay with his friends. We ate out at nice restaurants. We shopped at Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers. We looked rich. We acted rich. We must have been rich, right? At school, after the Trevor incident, I slowly became anathema to my friends for reasons that were only slightly related to my inability to afford tennis. I’d always been hyperbolic and prone to enthusiastic bloviations, but in the face of so many people having so many things that I couldn’t have, and in the face of being those people’s peer, I became a liar. I told them about my pool club, which was not a fancy pool club, but I made it sound like it was. I told them about my father’s boats, which he’d had once and no longer did. I told them about my ski vacations at fancy resorts in Quebec, and they were real; the lie was more insidious than a mere untruth. It was the casualness with which I talked about it, as if it were mine, as if in a small apartment in Brooklyn my mother wasn’t trying to figure out how we were going to eat. I turned my disgust on my mother and on her desperation, and I asked if I could go live with my father. I got older, and in the summer, in the Hamptons, my schoolmates (they were no longer my friends) again went away to tennis
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