friends had all continued to play without me, though they’d pretended they were gathering up their stuff, same as me, when the lesson was over. They told me they had just realized they had another set in them, would I like to rotate in? The next week one of them made reference to the other’s house. And I’ll tell you, it is one thing to be different from others, and it is another thing to be excluded. At the end of the first six weeks I considered membership in the club. This wasn’t sixth grade; I didn’t need social inclusion. I just needed the wordlessness, and access to it on a daily basis. It was expensive, but then you get a discount on the tennis camp for your kids. “It’s a game for life,” our instructor had told me. And I thought of my kids and their lives, and them being at the private school. I was better than my parents. I was going to give them everything everyone else had, if I could. I enrolled them in another tennis camp, one closer to me. Back at my club—my club—I signed up for the next round of the beginners’ program. My instructor said I needed one more round before I could qualify for the women’s clinics, and this baffled me because I was so good. On the first day of my second session, I wore a skirt I had bought off the Internet, having decided I had earned it. For 18 more weeks I stayed in the beginners’ program, and for 18 more weeks I wore that skirt. Just a moment on the skirt: It’s black, with a white hem, and I associate it with a word I don’t associate with myself very often: adorable. Over the 24 weeks during which I finally, finally was a tennis player, I would put the skirt on early each Wednesday, long before my noon lesson, and I wouldn’t take it off until evening, running my errands and taking phone calls and doing my stories and even once doing a live interview in it— “I’m just coming from my tennis lesson,” I said to that person in my most casual voice.
able to in any form of sport or exercise in maybe ever. Absent my thinking of the politics of playing tennis, I found relief in the incredible wordlessness of it. Of all the things I’m incapable of achieving on my own, it’s the wordlessness that evades my every meditation session, my every run, my every yoga class. The focus required to get from one swing to the next left me utterly empty of words, and in that emptiness I found a peace that had nothing to do with comfort. I drove home and thought that yes, this is what money was for. Here I had turned around and I had some money, not a lot, but I was successful at what I did and well compensated for it. I thought of the other women there, how comfortable I was with being different from them. This was for me now. I had arrived at a place where it could be mine, and the only feelings I would have about that were ones of relief that I’d found something I loved. I came each Wednesday. I was sloppy and inconsistent. But I was filled with such a euphoria and eagerness for the sport that I was constantly surprised that the coach didn’t whisper to me that he didn’t know what I was doing in the ultra-beginners’ section: Was this really my first go-round with tennis? It couldn’t be! On the fourth Wednesday, I ended up in edits for a story, having to leave the court proper whenever my phone made a sound to answer questions from editors and fact- checkers about details of my story. I’d return to the women talking to one another, and the thing they were talking about was the horses they owned—to be clear, these women owned horses—and I saw myself as valuable. In prep school I had been the poor kid. Now I was someone contributing to the culture; I didn’t need a horse. I was a scrappy creative type, and I thought that that was a better position to be in than to be someone with glossy hair and an array of tennis skirts. One day I left the court and then came back because I’d forgotten my sunglasses in the bubble, and I saw that my beginners’-league
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