And that was fine, but I was really showing off that I played tennis, that it was a part of my Wednesday and of my life. And my love for the skirt and for whom I had finally allowed myself to become was so great that I ignored a pain in my left knee and a pain in my right ankle from an old injury, until one day I was on a business trip and I woke up in a hotel room and couldn’t walk on my left leg. I told the urgent-care doctor how wordless tennis was, and how I had just come to it after a life of resisting it. He told me I had a Baker’s cyst and sent me back to New Jersey, and an orthopedist there sent me to physical therapy. The therapist asked what my goals were, and I told him I wanted to play tennis again, and he said, “We can make that happen.” So I did leg lifts, and knee curls. I balanced on a stability disc. I listened to men with nylon polo shirts embroidered with baseball-team insignias talk about sports figures as they counted me off. I did it three times a week for three months, my whole summer flushed away in an attempt to build up muscles that felt like they had nothing to do with tennis, and at the end the men in the nylon polos hugged me and told me I was ready. I registered for tennis again, and on my first day, I limped off the court. I went back to the physical therapist, who told me he’d been afraid of something like this. He said he hadn’t wanted to undermine me, and that he’s very often wrong. I should swim, he said. Everyone always said I should swim. Have you ever swum? And I returned, have you ever had your head full of more words than when you swim? “But tennis is a sport for life!” I told the therapist. And I sat on his padded table and cried on his shoulder. I had resisted this sport my whole life and had finally found a way into it, found a way to be my own scrappy self among its inherent elitism, learned to participate just exactly as I was reminded that people like me still exist, and now I was ejected. And maybe that was for the best. I didn’t belong. I was never going to sit quietly
through a match. I was never not going to celebrate when I won, or curse when I lost. I was never not going to exist as a reaction to all of them, with their horses, and their fields; this was never not going to be on my mind. They had real estate and I had a skirt, and that’s all I had. I contacted the head of adult tennis at the club. I told him the situation and I asked for a refund. Every interaction with him was impossible. He replied to every fourth or fifth of my emails, as I furnished him with a doctor’s note, a physical therapist’s note, a receipt—everything he asked for I gave him, and still there were days between replies, and “get tennis refund” sat on my to-do list (right after “sell tennis shoes,” which had only been worn once). And as the weeks went by, and I wondered what to do with my tennis skirt, I turned all my rage on this man who wouldn’t give me a refund. What could he want with my $210? How could he not understand that that kind of money—yes, less than half of what it takes for 5-year-olds to go to their camp for just a week—could mean something to people? But the workers at a tennis club become of the tennis club; they are never quite of the people again once they allow themselves to gleam in all white. I continued my letter- writing campaign. I wrote long emails, day after day: Why won’t you write me back? I’m owed my money, you said I could have it. And I looked over those emails and I was so angry that I hit send, and realized I would forever look at other people through the prism not of what they had but of what they felt they were entitled to. I would always stain a white shirt, or white shorts, or a white skirt. I would be someone who couldn’t play tennis. But tennis was never the problem; I was. Tennis was accessible to everyone who wanted it badly enough—it was accessible to me—but I instead took a sport and its shortcomings and made them the story of my life and the symbol for all that the world had done to me. I turned 40, and it seemed like tennis was not a sport for my life; it seemed
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