Manhattan, 199 Ne
on TV, and they made fun of her for not being able to hold it together. They were offended that she was unable to execute her job without showing signs of wear and effort, and this said all I ever needed to know about tennis. “This is oppressive,” I told the boyfriend there at the U.S. Open, but I said it in a whisper. We broke up soon after. Years passed, and I got a job thank you very much and my own apartment thank you very much and I became someone who regularly talked about money in a way that would have made my father’s friends in the Hamptons uncomfortable. I found that I missed racquetball, but I also found out the thing you find out when you leave NYU, which is that New York is very fucking expensive, and that nothing short of a major university there could luxuriously take up space with racquetball and tennis courts in a city like this unless you were very, very wealthy. I had this notion that I would take up tennis and make it of the people, but it was a tiny island, and even in Brooklyn, good old Brooklyn, at Prospect Park I couldn’t afford it. And even if I could, those courts were booked. And even if they weren’t, I’d need a partner. And all of this seemed so impossible to me that I formed a basketball league for other writers. And so we played each Wednesday, and each Wednesday I would fight for a place on the court. Word got out about the league, and some men’s magazine staffs joined, and suddenly I wasn’t skilled enough to play in the league anymore. I left, and I decided to take up running because it seemed to me the most democratic sport there could be.
I attended NYU and took up racquetball with a boyfriend who had been ranked as a tennis player in high school in California; he had suggested we play tennis together. He was the kind of guy who believed he had things to teach me, but by then I had assumed an incontrovertible humility display that would prevent me from becoming someone like my father—someone who desperately wanted to be accepted as rich, and would spend all his money and not even achieve it. I was disgusted by displays of wealth by now. I wore clothing from the Gap and nothing else, and that was the point. I had no tolerance for status. It was for these reasons that I told him we couldn’t play tennis. It was too wealthy a sport, and I didn’t have that kind of money. He offered to pay for me, and this enraged me more, so I instead asked that we play racquetball, which was free at the school gym. He took me to my only-ever U.S. Open, and it was there, watching a professional tennis game for the first time, that I understood how correct I’d been to avoid the sport. The players (I don’t remember who they were) wore white, just white, and the crowd was completely silent. There was no talking or cheering. There was no expression of joy or sadness at the turns the match was taking. I told the boyfriend that this reminded me of prep school—the forced polite silence, the dress code—and I grew contemptuous knowing that this is where he came from. Around then Monica Seles was playing, and she became famous for making a wail of exertion when she struck the ball. People talked about this sound on the radio, and
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