The tennis meadow, as we called it, was on my mind, too, as something to salvage — but for what? Sedge and porcupine grass had cracked open the blacktop; vetch and vetchling, pennycress and loosestrife moved in along the edges; all manner of nightshade, turkeyfoot, and gumweed had grabbed its opportunity. The court had disintegrated to dry dirt in some spots and was edged in rusty, crumbly mold in others. Remnants of the service lines were now indistinguishable from lichen that had etched the broken edges of the concrete piece by piece. Sedimented macadam. “Macadamia nuts!” my father used to joke. He had no use for tennis: it reminded him of his own childhood, which he had left behind, a childhood where, as in England, the countryside meant tennis. What else might it mean? He had been determined to discover what else.
I decided to make a little project out of the meadow. First I took my father’s clippers and cut the daisies and pink clusters of milkweed: I thought I would put them in some vases around the house but quickly saw they were crawling with ants. Then I took the mower and rake and took the thistle and pigweed and every other blooming thing down. With my father’s blowtorch I completely burned and cleared the space between the two wood posts, where the net would be. The net posts were now cracked and swollen from years of weather. Creeping Charlie wound round them like Christmas ribbon on a gift bottle of wine. I raked out the crumbled court in between, making about a two-foot cleared, charred path. Then I placed along it a twenty-foot runner of indoor-outdoor carpeting I’d found in the barn. I strung a thick old rope between the poles, and I took my collection of Rumi poems and carefully flattened and unstrung it so I could hang folded pages along the crease, tacking them into the rope with pushpins, and I lay underneath and read. It had always been my desire to have a device that might hang from the ceiling with a lit book — why had no one invented this yet? — and this was the closest I’d come to experiencing it.
I found time every day to go there, and it was a sanctuary from the bobcats and graders that were still at work in gazebo-land. If it was buggy I would bring some repellent and spray the air, then step through the cloud of it as if it were a spritz of cologne. I lay down and stared up: the shade of these words made a magical tent. Because of the field’s sheltering from the breezes, the pages didn’t flap around much in the air, and if I wanted to rearrange or reposition them in any way I could do so. While I read, butterflies occasionally landed, as if to check out these new cousins, and then took off again. I would read Rumi and ponder love and its ecstasies as well as the extinction of the self in divine essence until I found myself fumbling in the pockets of my shorts for a stick of gum. Which I would unwrap, blowing off any pocket dirt, and chew, while still reading. When I grew weary of Rumi, I put up Plath, whose brisk, elegant screams I never grew tired of, until I did, and then desiring something different yet again I began to hang recipes of things, carefully dismantled from old cookbooks my mother no longer wanted. I would study their notation, their confident sorcery, their useful busyness. They were the opposite of poetry, except if, like me, you seldom cooked, and then they were the same. I would take the pages in when done, in case of rain.
I did go swimming — once, at the Dellacrosse Village municipal pool. In normal attire I rode my Suzuki there on the hottest day of August, and then, stripping down to one of my mother’s old one-piece bathing suits, the padded foam bodice of which helped keep me afloat, I swam lengths up and down in the turquoise water until I was exhausted.
I didn’t see anyone there I knew, except a girl I’d gone to high school with, Valerie Bochman, who already had a roly pink baby who was dashing, diapered, through the sprinklers of the adjacent wading pool while Valerie watched from a towel. Oddly, the baby was not that cute. He looked pale and fat and empty-eyed. I knew Valerie had gotten married but I’d forgotten to whom and didn’t know what her last name was now. She’d buried her old name and acquired a new one, like a witness in a federal protection program. How would we girls find each other again when we got to be middle-aged and came back and tried to look one another up in the phone book? We would all be missing. There was a protection program for you. Before I headed back to the pine-slatted changing room to shower off the chlorine and stare bleakly at the lime-scaled showerhead, which with its raisiny rubber nozzles had the look of a blueberry Stilton, I gave a weak wave across the pool at Valerie. But she didn’t wave back. She just looked at me vaguely, smiling in a noncommittal way that showed no recognition whatsoever. So I left. Perhaps she would suddenly remember me on her way home.
Every night I lay in my bed, staying up past ten, reading. The light from my lamp attracted insects through the holes in one of the screens, and by eleven I would look up at the ceiling and it would be crawling with bugs, small, medium, and large, light and dark, all collecting up there in ominous flocks as if awaiting Tippi Hedren. Once, a leggy winged albino thing landed on my book, and its oddness fascinated me, though I soon slammed it between the pages. Once I awoke in the middle of the night and could see that through the crack between my door and the badly settled frame there was a long sliver of light from the hallway, and fireflies could enter the room; they sparkled in and out like fairies, as if the door were nothing at all, as if there were no separating this room from any other space. They were like visions, really, but ones I’d not had as a child, when I’d slept through the night with a depth and stillness that was no longer possible.
——
Whenever I put my bird costume on I felt once again like Icarus — take that, Professor Keyser-Lowe of Classics 251!—though I realized this wasn’t, mythically speaking, either lucky or apt. But it was becoming the most fun I’d had all year. Sometimes in the evening, the summer moon a tangerine shard — an orange peel stuck up there like the lunch garbage of God! — I’d get all set to go out and my father would say, “Oh, I’m sorry, not tonight, we’re not harvesting tonight,” and I would say, “Oh, OK,” but then I’d just go out anyway. Perhaps I was becoming addicted to being a hawk or a falcon or whatever it was I was. Perhaps I just needed the evening run. Often Blot would come with me, trotting along behind. Lucy would look longingly from her rope. The thrushes whistled their flutey country song: Run to your home hear me / why don’t you come to me? They sounded insincere and happy.
Waning light rouged and bronzed the clouds so they looked like a mountain range. As the dusk washed over, I galloped up and down the rows of three-season spring mix, and my dreams of flying would return. As ever, in my flying dreams, I never got very far off the ground, and now here if I took a leap I felt my wings supporting me, kitelike, just a split second above the field. I would hover, buoyed, my wings finding a little air, and so when I landed I would instantly leap up again, the ball of one foot pushing off — that split-second feeling of almost being able to set sail was enough of a thrill. Actual sustained flight would have been beside the point, and too scary to boot. This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.