The off-season is the time to experiment, right? So here's something new, a piece of fiction that's at least nominally tennis-oriented. (Though the author does admit some overlap between his life and this story.)

When I was 11, in 1981, I traveled to Carlisle, Pa., to play my first junior tennis tournament. My parents drove me; it took an hour and a half from the town where we lived, down a two-lane road that cut through Central PA’s sagging, half-abandoned old coal towns. I didn’t notice much out the window, though. I was too busy spinning the handle of my orange-and-black Borg Donnay in my hand, thinking about my unknown opponent. Where was he right now? What did he look like? Had he played a thousand tournaments before? Would he snicker when he saw me, the blatant rookie? My forehead burned with anxiety. I didn’t feel any better when I walked in the front door of a small, three-court indoor club. Inside there were a dozen other juniors slouched over a couch, watching TV. All of their warm-up suits were shiny. Mine wasn’t.

I saw down quietly in the corner of the room and tried to read the book I had brought with me, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. I loved the book but couldn’t concentrate on it. Mixed with my nerves about the match—which of these cocky-looking kids would I have to play?—were thoughts of what had happened the day before, after school. Prodded by everyone in my sixth-grade class, I’d gotten up the nerve to ask Anna Banks—the Anna Banks—to “go with me,” as we called it. “Going with someone” generally entailed skating a slow skate together—the Snowball, preferably to “Sad Eyes” by Robert John—at the roller-skating rink downtown on Saturday night, and jabbering with that person on the phone in your parents’ bedroom upstairs each weeknight.

I’d always thought the tall, pretty, brown-haired, popular Anna was out of my league. And she was—it was assumed that she was reserved for older guys, 7th and 8th graders, and I was strictly on the nerd’s side of the social fence anyway. Still, I thought there was a connection between us that persisted against the iron laws of the peer group. I can vividly remember seeing her for the first time, in 3rd grade. She was a new girl at school that year, from a young rich family that was much hipper than the norm in our town. I’d looked up from my desk on the first day to see her sitting right across from me at her desk, already smiling back at me. Even then, I could dimly sense that, with her short hair and smart green eyes, she was more knowing—she had two older sisters—than the town’s other girls, the ones with wild braids who ran screaming all over the playground at recess. When I jabbed my pencil into my hand, the girl next to me teased, “You’re gonna get lead poisoning.” Somehow, Anna knew better. “They’re made of graphite, not lead,” she said.

Three years later, I looked up to see her smiling at me again, this time in the sixth grade classroom up the hall from where I had first seen her. Her brown hair was longer now, and filled with a rainbow of brightly colored barretts—she’d brought that particular trend to our elementary school, and she would be the first one to abandon it. “I like watching you read,” she said. “You can see what your thinking on your face.” I looked down as quickly as I could. Jesus, what was going on? Did Anna Banks just notice me?

Word got out in class about what she’d said. It took approximately 15 seconds. You could almost hear the gasps circle the room. As the bell to end the day sounded, everyone—all 25 kids—in class immediately surrounded me and walked out to the playground with me. Anna was up ahead of us. “You have to ask her!’ was the consensus among the Lee-jean-wearing youth of Mrs. Moore’s class. Suddenly I  got a push from behind and was walking right next to Anna. I mumbled the question. Before I could finish, she looked at me and said, brightly, “Sure!” The rest of the walk home, through the gravel alleys that led up to our various houses in the hills above the school, was a blur. At some point along the way, Anna disappeared, giggling, with her friends down a side alley.

I didn’t know it as I sat in the Carlisle racquet club waiting—feverish now—for my match to be called, but Anna’s friends must have gotten to her over that weekend. The next Monday, she avoided me until the end of the day, at which point she came up and said, “We aren’t going together, are we? I wasn't sure what you were asking on Friday.” In the eyes of the sixth-grade social world, we were an impossible couple.

And we would stay impossible. Anna was soon seeing an older basketball player, while I was finally solving the Rubik’s Cube in my bedroom. I was joined there on a couple of evenings by a friend; we liked to listen to records. Now he’d found a song that he really liked, and that he wouldn’t stop playing; the Beatles’ “Anna.”

Anna, girl, before you go now
I want you know now
That I still love you so
But if he loves you more
Go with him

Over and over he promised not to play it; over and over put it back on and sing along, loudly, while I groaned.

Anna Banks would go on to date who the world thought she would date at any given time. In middle school, it was scruffy, druggy, future drop outs. At the beginning of high school, it was a preppy college soccer player who asked her to marry him. In 10th grade, she succumbed and finally started seeing the dumb, beefy guy that everyone knew she should date, a baseball player who once labeled Montana as “Ohio” on a geography test. From what I could tell, sitting on the other side of basement parties with the Violent Femmes blaring between us, she did it without enthusiasm.

My connection with her remained, though. We seemed to end up sitting next to each other in English class each year. The Catcher in the Rye was a major touchstone. We came into class every afternoon with a new quote from it. Anna would lean over her desk, sigh dramatically, and say, “It’s corny, I realize, but it isn’t too corny.” Another day, in the middle of some terrible lesson on Chaucer, I’d say out of the side of my mouth, “I’m surrounded by jerks, I really am.”

That year, everyone in class was assigned to recite a soliloquy from Julius Caesar. In the days leading up to the great event, our teacher treated us to a mocking version of what we were going to sound like. He used the first soliloquy in the play, running the words, “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things” together like a nervous child. It turned out that I was assigned those lines. I got up in front of the class and began to recite. Everyone had their heads down, following along. Except Anna. She smiled at me from the back of the class, green eyes waiting for the fateful lines to come. Somehow I didn’t choke them.

Two years later, in 11th grade, our touchstones were Wallace Stevens and Hilda Doolittle. We couldn’t believe they were from Pennsylvania. How does anyone like that come from Bethlehem, Pa., we wondered. One night I ran into Anna in the back stacks at the town’s musty public library, where the old fiction is kept in its groovy original jackets—it’s still one of the best places in town. We were both looking for books by another writer, John O’Hara, whom we’d found out was from an even more unlikely place, the burned out town of Pottsville just down the road from us. I asked her if she thought a writer could ever come from our burg. We both scoffed, laughing. As far as I could tell, she never admitted her interest in books, or the ambition I suspected she had to write them, to anyone else. We walked out with separate copies of O’Hara and waved good-bye in the freezing cold and snow.

By our senior year, Anna was part of an older scene, a bar-going adult scene, and she was dating a guy named Sean, a car salesman with a reputation as a ladies’ man—he always drove a cool car, anyway. I saw them at a party at a friend’s one night. I was on the porch, flipping through an old book from the bookshelf in the house and listening to the uproarious beer-drinking game going on behind me—people were stumbling hysterically. Anna walked up to me, with Sean, and said, “You’re reading all that David Copperfield kind of crap, I see.”

“No, I said, immediately, it’s Henry Esmond,” and showed her the cover.

She looked disappointed. “Don’t you remember, Catcher in the . . .”

“Oh, God, how could I forget?” She’d been quoting the first paragraph of the book. How could I forget?

Sean said, “We gotta get going,” from behind her, twirling a keychain impatiently. He had straight brown hair in a bowl-cut and was savagely tan, so much so that his teeth gleamed, as did the gold chain around his neck. His teeth looked huge and fierce, like a wild animal’s. Anna walked toward him and they went down the front steps of the house to his Porsche. Before she got in, she turned around and looked at me with her familiar green eyes.

Or were they so familiar? There was something different about them, something accusing. Watching Sean spit on the street and get in the driver’s seat, it dawned on me. The connection between us had been there all along; I hadn’t just imagined it. I had always thought she’d ignored it because the world around us, of friends and peer pressure, or what was proper, of what girl belonged with what guy, of who was out of another person’s league, was just too strong. I hadn’t blamed her. Now I knew I’d been wrong. I was the one who hadn’t been strong enough to make that connection visible, to make it real, to claim her from the druggies and the soccer stars and the Seans of the world. I started to get up, but she turned around and got in the car.

Back in Carlisle, all those years earlier, I won one match and lost one, which was a cause for celebration. I rode home spinning my racquet handle, happy and relieved rather than flushed with nerves. I was going to see Anna Banks at school the next day and tell her all about it.

***

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Have a good weekend. I'll be back Monday to begin counting down the 10 best matches of the year, provided I can find enough of them.

Concrete Elbow by Steve Tignor

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