Proper Tennis

Proper Tennis

by

Andrew Wetmore

all rights reserved

I met Henry at a summer-cottage colony on a lake where his parents had a place and my parents used to rent. “John, this is Henry,” my dad had said, giving me a little shove toward him. “Why don’t you lads go explore the beach together?”

I was eight or nine and already tall for my years. Henry was older, shorter, paler, thicker, and peered at me dubiously through amazing glasses. We edged off together because our fathers were watching; but when we were out of sight of them, at the top of the beach road, we stopped.

“It’s my beach,” Henry said. “I was here first and you just rent.”

“Did you find those glasses washed up on your beach?” I asked.

After we fought for a while in a wild, inefficient, exhausting tangle, we broke apart and panted for breath. My arms ached from blocking his punches, and the corner of his mouth was bleeding. “Okay. It’s your beach,” I said.

“My beach,” he agreed a little thickly. “But you can skip stones off it, if you want.”

We skipped every stone that had any surface that could be termed “flat”. We had wranglous disputes about who had the most skips, the most skips with a not-flat rock, the most skips with something man-made, like a beer can or a hat. Henry wanted the record and I just wanted to throw stones.

We discovered pretty quickly that we didn’t read the same kind of books or watch the same things on TV. But we both could hit a ball with a racquet. So we played tennis, or our early version of it.

“You have to serve into that box over there,” Henry said, pointing.

“Why?”

“Because you do. I read it in a book.”

As soon as we had figured out how to get the ball back and forth over the net with some consistency, Henry insisted that we play proper tennis, by the rules. We had to play inside the lines, with the right number of bounces, which is one or none before you hit the ball, and the right number of hits, which is just one at a time. So if you hit the ball off the frame and it popped straight up in the air, you couldn’t take another swing at it when it finally came down. No. You had to catch the ball and whoever’s turn it was had to go back to the service line and start again.

The court worked against Henry. It had not had proper maintenance for years, and real tennis players drove elsewhere to play. The net was torn, and the chicken-wire fence would not have stopped the most timid chicken. The white lines were faded and had in some places disappeared. Cracks like scars from some desperate surgery ran slantwise across the court: the edges of the cracks were tilted up so sometimes the ball you hit would catch the facing side of a crack and come right back at you without the participation of the other player. Henry worked out an elegant set of rules to govern these bounces and determine who benefited from them.

Me, I loved just hitting the tennis ball. I could hit pretty well from either side, and I just wanted to keep the ball moving, sending it back across the net again and again for Henry to attack. If I could do that long enough, Henry would over-reach and try to end the point with a smash that would sail into the woods or a drop that would sag into the net.

I could hit for hours. But Henry needed to play games, sets, and matches. He would rally for just a few minutes, and then he would gather up the balls and stuff all but one of them into the pockets of his baggy shorts. He would dribble that last ball on the court with his racquet a few times: that was his drumroll. Then he would fix me with as fierce a glare as his thick glasses would allow. “Proper tennis,” he would say. “Ready to go? First ball in.”

And we would play three sets, five sets, best out of 17. Henry kept score because I never had a clue what the score was. I couldn’t bring myself to care. To me, keeping score in tennis is like counting kisses: it takes some of the laughing sweetness out of the activity.

We played game, set, match; game, set, match in the steamy, high summer and the crisp autumn and sometimes so late in the year you had to watch out for the ice on the court. Game, set, match year after year, whenever our paths crossed.

After college Henry started hosting complex house-party weekends at his cottage, his now that his parents had gone to Florida or died, or both. There would be girls, of course, and we would play silly games of double-doubles, with three or four players on each side of the net, or a secret-agent player who could change sides whenever she wanted. Henry tolerated those games solely because of the complexities of scoring they presented.

I never brought a girl to one of those weekends; but I took one away once, Greta. And eventually I married her.

Henry didn’t come to the wedding, and the tennis invitations dwindled off. I didn’t think about it much, as of course I had more immediate things to occupy me.

But years later, after the accident and Greta's funeral, and while I was still hobbling, Henry called and invited me to come up to the lake. “I’m sorry about Greta,” he said. “Now she’s gone from both of us.”

“I didn’t realize you were interested in her.”

“A lot of good it did me,” he said. “Come play some tennis.”

The court had a new fence, a new surface, and blinding white lines. “I paid for that,” Henry said. “A little gift to the community. They just have to let me play whenever I want to.”

“I haven’t played in a while,” I said.

“All the better,” he said. “Proper tennis. Ready to go?”

I was terrible. My bum leg kept me from running much; and when I hit hard, hitting at my grief, I didn’t hit well.

Henry played with grim efficiency. “It’ll just take five sets,” he said early on; and when he had taken game, set, and match five times over, he turned and skimmed his tennis racquet up, over the fence, and into the pine trees.

“That’s done,” he said. “I won’t play you again. Let’s go get drunk.”

But years later, after Henry’s death, I received from his attorneys some old notebooks. Henry had kept score. Every day we had played was in there: every game, set, and match of our forty intermittent years together. There was a running balance of sets won, year by year—page after page of dates and scores. And with those last five sets, after all that time, he had closed the gap. The tally ended with Henry ahead by one set.

Under the entry for our last games, Henry had written, “It’s still my beach, and now it’s my tennis court. You can’t take everything, you know.”

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