My mother rolled her eyes at him as she began to put dinner on the table. “I would rather she was kind and happy.”
“Alicia,” my father said as he stood behind my mother and wrapped his arms around her. “No one ever tells stories about that.”
* * *
—
I do not remember being told my mother had died. Nor do I remember her funeral, though my father says I was there. As he tells it, my mother was making soup and realized we were out of tomato paste, so she put her shoes on and left me with him in the garage while he was changing the oil in the car.
When she didn’t come home, he knocked on our neighbors’ door and asked them to watch me while he searched through the streets.
He saw the ambulance a few blocks away and his stomach sank. My mother had been hit by a car when she was crossing the street on her way home.
After my mother’s body was buried, my father refused to go into their bedroom. He started sleeping in the living room; he kept his clothes in a hamper by the TV. It went on for months. Whenever I had a bad dream, I’d leave my own bed and walk right to the couch. He was always there, with the TV on, static hissing as he slept.
And then, one day, light flooded into the hallway. Their bedroom door was open, the dust that had long accumulated was off the handle, and everything of my mother’s was packed into cardboard boxes. Her dresses, her high heels, her necklaces, her rings. Even her bobby pins. Somebody came to the house and took them all out. And that was it.
There wasn’t much left of her. Barely any proof she’d ever lived. Just a few pictures I’d found in my father’s top drawer. I took my favorite one and stashed it under my pillow. I was afraid that if I didn’t, it would soon be gone too.
For a while after that, my dad would tell me stories about my mother. He’d talk about how she wanted me to be happy. That she was good and fair. But he cried when he told them, and pretty soon, he stopped telling them altogether.
To this day, the only significant memory I have of my mother is hazy. I can’t tell what is real and what are the gaps that I’ve filled in over time.
In my head, I can see her standing in the kitchen over the stove. She is in a maroon dress with a pattern on it, something like polka dots or tiny flowers. I know that her hair is curly and full. My father calls from across the house to me, using the name he had for me then, “Guerrerita.” But then my mother shakes her head and says, “Don’t let him call you a warrior––you are a queen.”
Most of the time, I’m absolutely positive that all of this actually happened. But sometimes, it feels so obvious that the entire thing must have been a dream.
What I actually remember most about her is the emptiness she left behind. There was this sense, within the house, that there used to be someone else here.
But now it was just my father and me.
* * *
—
In my first concrete memories, I am young but already annoyed. I am annoyed at all of the other girls’ questions: “Where is your mom?” “Why isn’t your hair ever brushed?” Annoyed at the teacher’s insistence that I speak English without any traces of my father’s accent. Annoyed at being told to play nicer during recess, when all I wanted to do was race the other kids across the field or see who could swing highest on the swing set.
I suspected the problem was that I was always the winner. But I could not for the life of me understand why that made people want to play with me less instead of more.
Those early memories of trying to make friends are all accompanied by the same twinge of confusion: I’m doing something wrong, and I don’t know what it is.
When school let out, I used to watch all the other students greet their mothers at pickup. My classmates told their moms about their days, bristled at the squeezes their moms gave them by the car, wiped their mothers’ kisses off their cheeks.
I could have watched them for hours. What else did they do with their moms after school? Did they go out for ice cream? Did they go shopping together for those pretty pencil cases some of them had? Where were they all getting those hair bows?
As they drove away, I would dutifully begin my walk two blocks over, to meet my father on the public tennis courts.
I grew up on the court. The public courts after school, the country club courts during the summers and on weekends. I grew up in tennis skirts and ponytails. I grew up sitting in the shade by the sidelines, waiting while my father finished a lesson.
He loomed over the net. His serves were always fluid, his groundstrokes smooth. His opponent, or whomever he was teaching, always looked so chaotic in comparison. My father was unfailingly in control of the court.
In hindsight, I can see that he must have been tense and lonely most days of my young life. He was a widowed single father in a country that was not his home, with no one else to rely on. It seems obvious to me now that my dad was likely stretched so tight he could nearly have snapped.
But if his days were hard, his nights restless, he grew very good at hiding it from me. The time I got to spend with him felt like a gift that other kids didn’t get. Unlike them, my time had purpose; my father and I were working toward something of meaning. I was going to be the best.
Every day after school, when my father was finally done with his paid lessons, he would turn and look at me. “Vamos,” he would say. “Los fundamentos.” At which point, I would pick up my racket and join him at the baseline.
“Game, set, match: Why do we say this?” my father would ask me.
“Because each time you play, it is a game. You must win the most games to win the set. And then you must win the most sets to win the match,” I’d recite.
“In a game, the first point is…”
“Fifteen. Then 30. Then 40. Then you win. But you have to win by two.”
“When the score is 40–all, what do we call that?”
“Deuce. And if you’re at deuce and win a point, that brings you to either advantage-in or advantage-out, depending on whether you’re serving or not.”
“So how do you win?”
“If you are serving at ad-in, you have to win the next point to win the game. You have to win six games to win the set, but, again, you have to win by two. You can’t just win a set 6–5.”
“And a match?”
“Women play three sets, men often play five.”
“And love? What does it mean?”
“It means nothing.”
“Well, it means zero.”
“Right, you have no points. Love means nothing.”
Having gotten all the answers right, I would get a pat on the shoulder. And then we would practice.
There are many coaches out there who innovate, but that was never my father’s style. He believed in the beauty and simplicity of doing something the way it has always been done but better than anyone else has ever done it. “If I had been as committed to proper form as you will be, hijita,” he would say, “I would still be playing professional tennis.” That was one of the only times he told me something that I suspected wasn’t true. I knew even then that not many people ever played tennis professionally past age thirty.
“Bueno, papá,” I would say as we began our drills.
My entire childhood was drills. Drill after drill after drill. Serves, groundstrokes, footwork, volleys. Serves, groundstrokes, footwork, volleys. Again and again. All summer long, after school, every weekend. My dad and I. Always together. Our little team of two. Proud coach and star student.
I loved that each element of the game had a wrong way and a right way to execute it. There was always something concrete to strive for.
“De nuevo,” my dad would say, as I tried for the fiftieth time that day to perfect my flat serve. “I want both arms coming up at the same speed at the same time.”
“De nuevo,” he’d say, a grown man crouching down low to get eye-to-eye with me when I was no taller than his hip. “In a pinpoint stance, you must bring your back foot in before you connect.”