Over the years and matches, my father and I transformed Frank McAllister, and my father's inability to beat him, into a legend. He never mentioned Frank without referring to him as his nemesis. One time, at Christmas, when we ran into him and his other daughter, Melissa, at the mall, my father greeted him by extending his arm, as if about to strike his killer forehand, and exclaiming loudly, “If it isn't my tennis nemesis, Frank McAllister!” Melissa, who was thirteen and by some accident of chin length or nose placement nowhere near as pretty as Ivy, scowled at me and snapped her gum. Her father laughed heartily — he was always laughing heartily — but I'm not sure he knew what a nemesis was, or if my father was joking, or whether the whole thing was good or bad. My father didn't care. He worked in advertising and was a coiner of words, an inventor of slogans, a singer of jingles, and once he'd decided that Frank was his nemesis, his nemesis he stayed. We came to use “McAllister” as a code at home, a term referring to some long-desired but impossible goal. A McAllister was like a Pyrrhic victory or a Sisyphean task. It was a mythological situation.
“Going to get an A on that history paper, Kyle?” my father would say, only asking so I could answer him with the code.
“I'm hoping so, Dad, but I think it's a McAllister. Mr. Martin's a tough grader.”
“Don't give up,” he'd say, clapping me on the back. “Even McAllister will fall one day!”
Yet however large a place Frank McAllister assumed in our conversations, however grand a figure he became, however tightly he was wound into our family lore, he and my father never socialized off the court. It wasn't that they didn't get along, only that tennis was the single thing they had in common. Frank and his wife, Beth Ann, were younger than my parents and ran with a different crowd. Beth Ann was a professional caterer whose contributions to bake sales and potlucks were intimidatingly accomplished, while my mother brought Pepperidge Farm cookies to everything. She was an archivist, and at school functions, while other mothers congregated around the food to gossip, she would corner the librarian and discuss acid-free paper.
I was an only child, and both my parents treated family life as an enjoyable, if time-consuming, hobby. I knew them as relaxed, imperturbable, and lazy, and both liked and loved them. I also loved that because my mother was sick of driving me around she encouraged me to get my driver's license as soon as possible and practically forced the car keys into my hand. I used to spend hours on the weekends cruising around the neat suburban streets in my mother's Toyota, passing parks and pools and tennis courts and strip malls while pretending I wasn't just making a big loop around Ivy McAllister's house.
One day when I was seventeen, I finally parked the car. Ivy came to the door wearing a pink tank top whose straps seemed almost to blend into the pale freckles on her shoulders. My courage failed me, and I didn't ask her out; I couldn't. Instead, I asked her to play tennis, which seemed less wildly implausible than asking her out on a date. She shrugged and said, “Sure.” We were sort of friends by then, I guess — or at least we knew each other well in the way kids do who grow up in the same neighborhood, know the same people, see each other all the time without ever really talking to each other that much. At seventeen, Ivy still wore her hair long, but now she gathered it in a high ponytail that shook when she laughed, which was often, and that showed off her pretty, freckled cheeks. She agreed to play tennis with me, I found out, because she was on some kick involving exercise. She told me she had a new dream, of joining the youth tour in tennis, a dream I would've taken more seriously if she hadn't also taken up smoking.
The first time we played together, we hit the ball back and forth a few times for practice, then she told me to go ahead and serve. I watched her tuck a ball into the pocket of her short white skirt, bouncing my own ball against my racket a few times. I was torn between wanting to show her that I could play well and not wanting to beat her. Ivy crouched, an unusually serious look of concentration on her face, then nodded encouragingly, and I served. But instead of even trying to return it she straightened up, stood perfectly still, and watched the ball come to her, with a calm evaluating smile. The ball hit the court and then slapped against the fence behind her, all without her moving a muscle.
“Just checking out your technique,” she said, and this completely unnerved me. She lost that first point, but it took me the next four to get any rhythm going.
I think the psychology of the contest was the only part that interested her. She'd had plenty of lessons and her strokes were decent, but after a few minutes her attention would wander, making her miss easy shots. Soon enough I found out why. The reason she was into playing tennis now was that she was in love with a guy named Patrick Goddard. He also played tennis, and he was as out of her league — he was twenty-one and home from school for the summer — as she was out of mine. Before long she started telling me about him as we sat under an oak tree in the park, drinking water (me) and smoking (her), after tennis. There is a very specific hell reserved for teenaged boys, and it involves hearing the closest confidences of a girl you're in love with, feeling her unburden herself to you, get close to you, all the while knowing that the reason she can talk to you so freely is that she'll never want to kiss you, that the thought never even crosses her mind. It's hell but an exquisite one, is all I can say about it.
“I'm like completely fed up with all this bullshit,” is the kind of thing Ivy would say to me after tennis. She still said whatever she wanted, and didn't seem to care what other people thought, and now she swore a lot, too. The combination of her tennis outfits and her dirty mouth made me faint with desire. “I want to move on to bigger things. Don't you want to get the hell out of this suburban shithole?”
“I don't know. What are you talking about, exactly?”
“Hey, do you ever wonder if animals have souls?”
“Not really.”
“Ha! Me either,” she said, lying back on the grass and revealing an almost unbearable amount of thigh. “I'm so sick of stupid high-school stoners asking stupid questions like that when they get high, and thinking it's so deep. I want to have a real conversation with, like, an adult.”
“Okay. What about?”
“I meant with Patrick.”
“Oh.”
“No offense.”
“None taken,” I'd say, which both was and wasn't a lie.
Every once in a while we'd run into Frank and my father at the club. That summer they'd sometimes play doubles with my mother and a woman named Eleanor MacElvoy, who was a guidance counselor at our school. Beth Ann's catering business had taken off, Frank said, so she was working nights and weekends, but there were rumors this was a cover-up. Ivy never said anything about it.
“It's the Big Macs!” Frank McAllister would cry out as he bounded onto the court. Eleanor MacElvoy was a strapping young Scottish woman with long blond hair she wore in a single braid. She'd told me I should consider medical school — I wanted to study history — because there was going to be a medical shortage in rural communities and I could get somebody else to pay for it. She was constantly doling out these harebrained ideas she apparently thought were helpful.
“That cow,” Ivy said, watching her. “I told her I wanted to be a news anchor, and she told me I should consider being a certified public accountant because math was my highest grade last term. I told her to kiss my certified public ass.”