“Why should I be nice to him? He called me a seven-year-old.”
“People are going to call you a lot of things in your life,” he said. “People always call people like us all kinds of things.”
“Because we aren’t members here?” I asked as I put my things down.
My father stopped in place. “Because we are winners. Do not grow a chip on your shoulder, Carolina,” he said. “Do not let what anyone says about you determine how you feel about yourself.”
I looked at him.
“If I say your hair is purple, does that mean it’s purple?” he asked.
“No, it’s brown.”
“Does it mean you have to prove to me it’s brown?”
I shook my head. “No, you can see it is.”
“You are going to be one of the greatest tennis players in the world someday, cari?o. That is as true as your brown hair. You don’t need to show them. You just need to be.”
I considered.
“Next time you play a kid like Chris, I expect you to still play a beautiful game of tennis,” he said. “Do you understand?”
I nodded. “Está bien.”
“And we don’t cry when we lose, but we also don’t gloat when we win.”
“Bueno, entiendo.”
“You’re not playing your opponent, you understand that, yes?”
I stared at him, unsure. But I needed him to believe that I understood everything I was supposed to be—it seemed like an unbearable betrayal of our mission for me to be confused about any of it.
“Every time you get out on that court, you must play a better tennis game than you played the time before. Did you play your best game of tennis today?”
“No,” I said.
“Next time, I want you to beat yourself. Every day you must beat the day before.”
I sat down on the bench next to me and considered. What my father was proposing was a much, much harder endeavor. But once the thought had been put in my head, I had to rise to it. I could not expel it.
“Entiendo,” I said.
“Now go get your things. We are driving to the beach.”
“No, Dad,” I said. “Please, no. Can’t we just go home? Or what if we went out for ice cream? This girl in my class said there is a place that has great ice cream sandwiches. I thought we could go.”
He laughed. “We are not going to condition your legs sitting around eating ice cream sandwiches. We can only do that by…”
I frowned. “Running in the sand.”
“Sí, running in the sand, entonces vámonos.”
1968
After about two more years of beating every kid in town, we got a call from Lars Van de Berg, one of the biggest junior tennis coaches in the country.
He was coaching a fourteen-year-old named Mary-Louise Bryant down in Laguna Beach. Mary-Louise had already started winning junior championships. She’d gotten to the semifinals at Junior Wimbledon that year.
“Lars called because everyone in L.A. is talking about you,” my father said as we drove south on the freeway toward Laguna Beach. I was in a white tennis skirt and polo shirt, a cream-colored cardigan on top. I wore new socks and a brand-new blindingly white pair of tennis shoes on my feet.
My father had gone out and bought the whole outfit the week before. He’d washed it all and laid it out for me that morning. When I saw the ruffles on the butt of the tennis underpants for the skirt, I looked at him for a moment, hoping he was not serious. But from the look on his face, it was clear he was. So I put it on.
“He’s pretending it’s just a friendly match,” my father continued. “But he wants to see if you’re a threat to Mary-Louise.”
There were already whispers about my future. Competing was something I knew I would do soon, the way some kids know they will go to college. And just like college, I got the impression my father was silently working out how to pay for it.
I wriggled in my seat, trying to stop the sweater from chafing my neck. “Am I a threat to Mary-Louise?” I asked.
“Yes,” my father said.
I rolled down my window and watched the Pacific Ocean fly by.
“I want you thinking of your game plan,” my father said. “Mary-Louise is three years older, so you have to assume she’s taller, stronger, maybe more confident. How will that affect your strategy? You have five minutes.”
“Okay,” I said.
My father turned the radio up and focused on the road. Soon enough, traffic slowed considerably and we came to a full stop. I looked out the window, watching kids on the beach, playing in the sand. I saw two girls around my age building a sandcastle.
The gap between myself and girls like that—girls like the ones I went to school with—had always felt significant, but it seemed nearly insurmountable now.
A half second later, we started moving again and I wondered why anyone would want to build anything out of sand, when tomorrow it will be gone, and you’d have nothing to show for your day.
“Bueno, contame,” my dad said. “What’s your plan?”
“If she’s stronger than me, I need to get her up to the net as much as I can, use my angles. And she’s probably feeling pretty confident, so I need to shake her, right at the beginning. If I can get her worrying about whether an eleven-year-old is gonna beat her, then an eleven-year-old is gonna beat her.”
“Muy bien,” he said as he lifted his hand, to give me a high five. “My Achilles. Greatest of the Greeks.”
I held back a smile as we sped down the freeway.
* * *
—
Mary-Louise won the toss and elected to serve first.
I stood at the baseline and bounced the taut strings of my racket against my palm. I held the grip and turned it over in my hand.
I looked down at my brand-new shoes. I noticed there was a scuff on the toe. So I bent down and rubbed it off.
My father and Lars were on the bench. Lars was over six feet tall, with sandy hair and a smile that never made it to his eyes. He had introduced my father as “the Jaguar” to Mary-Louise in a tone that bothered me.
Mary-Louise was standing across the court, in a white tennis skirt and sweater with a matching headband in her hair. As she stood up, I could see just how tall and lanky she was, her face angular and delicate. Maybe it was the perfect creases in her skirt or the casual way she held her wooden Dunlop Maxply Fort racket, but I could tell that while she and I might both be at home on this court, we would not recognize the rest of each other’s worlds.
She smiled at me, and I wondered if she might be the prettiest girl I’d ever seen in my life.
I fostered no illusions that I was beautiful. I was stocky and broad-shouldered, my calves and forearms thicker than those of the other girls in my class. Some of the more popular girls—the ones who wore bows in their hair and cardigans over their dresses, the ones the boys chased at recess—had started calling me names when the teacher wasn’t listening.
As I’d walked into class one morning, Christina Williams whispered loudly to Diane Richards, “There she goes. Boom, boom, boom,” as if the weight of my steps was shaking the room when I walked to my desk.
The whole class laughed.
“At least I didn’t get a D on the math quiz, you loser,” I said as I sat down.
The class laughed at that too. But then Christina started crying. My teacher noticed and called us both to the front of the room.
When pressed, Christina cried even harder and denied she’d ever teased me. I kept my head up and admitted what I’d said.
And somehow, the coward went free, and I got sent to the principal’s office, who then called my father. He came and picked me up and took me home.
After hearing my side of the story, my father reprimanded me and then made me look in the mirror. He told me I was beautiful. “Pichona, sos hermosa.”
I scanned my face for a glimpse of what he was talking about. I had my mother’s olive skin and green eyes. I had my father’s hair color. But my body, my features…I could not tell where they came from. I wanted curls like my mother and father both had, I wanted my mother’s length, her thin wrists, her perfect nose. I had none of it.