Aryn Kyle

RACKETS

THE DAY I GRADUATE FROM college, I receive in the place of my bachelor’s degree an empty envelope. This is a cause for neither concern nor surprise—I have been informed pre-pomp that I have three remaining credits to fulfill and that, until I complete these credits, my degree in English literature with a concentration in creative writing and certificate in women’s studies will be withheld. To be clear, the missing credits are not an issue of scarcity but specifics: numbers-wise, I have more than enough credits to graduate. My college transcript, like my high school transcript before it, is an artifact of scholastic overachievement. The hiccup is that, while I’ve spent four years packing my schedule with the most eclectic assortment of special-interest classes my state university has to offer—Women in the Bible! Women in Shakespeare! Ethics!—I have neglected to complete the single required course for Health and Fitness. Read: gym class.

It will likely come as little surprise to learn that a person who has (almost) graduated with a degree in English literature with an emphasis in creative writing and certificate in women’s studies is not especially inclined toward athletics. I do not descend from a sportish people—the closest to an athlete in my direct lineage was my grandmother, who had in her youth been a dancer and was throughout my childhood a devotee of Richard Simmons and Jane Fonda workout videos. But unless you count the bursts of elevated heart rate I experienced from her probably well-meant but undoubtedly problematic policing of my body size or the strained muscles I received from cranking my head in the opposite direction when I entered a room to unexpectedly find her sweating to the oldies in her bra and underpants, my grandmother’s inclinations toward health and fitness had no obvious influence on me.

Throughout my childhood, physical education loomed over any given school day like the dark shadow of every hulking, sadistic stereotype of a gym teacher that was, for the most part, also every actual gym teacher. The only aspect of gym class I ever looked forward to was the unit in which we learned to square dance—we didn’t have to first get naked in front of each other in order to square dance—though I will admit that the number of times my proficiency with do-si-dos has proven in any way advantageous to my personal or professional life has been real, real low. Also, I recently learned that the origins of teaching square dance in public schools stem from a heftily funded effort in the 1920s by rich industrialist and known anti-Semite Henry Ford to prevent American schoolchildren from being “corrupted” by jazz, which he (wrongly) believed had been created by Jewish people. And while it should not, at this point, come as any great shock to uncover yet another trail through our national history that connects eventually to white supremacy, it does, if possible, make even less cool the fact that I was, all three years of middle school, a member of the winning square.

In general, though, PE was for me a series of physical injuries and psychological humiliations—falling off balance beams and tripping over bases, crouching in the fetal position during dodgeball games and hanging like a dead weight from the pull-up bar while my teacher, perhaps worried that my sustained inability after three straight years to do a single pull-up for the President’s Physical Test might somehow reflect poorly on her, began at some point to, instead of “0,” write “1/8.”

My reluctance in college to register for a Health and Fitness class first thing and just get it out of the way was the result of a naive hope that the university would, during the time of my enrollment, drop the requirement. My advisor, an elderly socialist with a pointed beard who taught mythology and Shakespeare, thought that forcing people to exercise was fascist and told me there had for years been rumors that the requirement would be eliminated. “Sorry, kid,” he said when he broke the news during our last meeting of my last semester, then talked for a while about how mandatory physical education is a component of the military-industrial complex, preparing youth for the eventuality they have to fight in war. And while I was less than thrilled about the prospect of summer school, I wasn’t overly concerned that when reaping day came, high on the list of front-runners to defend our freedom and smite our enemies would be a person on record as having several times managed to do one-eighth of a pull-up.

Missing credits aside, though, I am golden. Literally. I’m graduating from college magna cum laude, which means that rather than a cap and robe in standard black, I’ve been given gold. Gazing over that ceremony to see myself and the handful of other gold robes scattered across the class of 2001 like the constellation of rising stars we must all imagine ourselves to be, I doubt that anyone would suspect my glittering grade point average is, in part, an assumption. Everyone—my advisor, the university in Colorado that has given me the gold cap and gown, the family members who have traveled from near and far to watch me walk across a stage in them, and the university in Montana to which I have been accepted for graduate school and for which I am already packing—understands that these last credits are little more than a formality. Obviously, I’m good for them. I mean, look at my gold cap.

There are plenty of classes I could take over the summer—Volleyball, Athletic Conditioning, Track—but the words alone trigger a series of Vietnam-style flashbacks of being smacked in the face by leather balls and whipped across the shins by plastic jump ropes and screamed at by an adult man as I, a timid, asthmatic third grader, am forced to run relay races through a field of pollen and bees. Billiards has some appeal in that I like the idea of Future Me impressing strangers in pubs with my unexpected aptitude for pool and, also, the class is scheduled to meet at the campus bar (my campus has a bar). But I sense the possibility that this class might attract a type of person who is very serious about billiards, and the last thing I want from my intensive summer class in Health and Fitness is for it to be full of people who are serious about it.

Which is how I end up in Rackets.

I choose Rackets because of its casual non-specificity, and because of the jaunty spirit it evokes of sipping mint juleps under striped umbrellas at garden parties. Mostly, though, I choose the class because my boyfriend, looking over my shoulder as I flip through the pages of the course catalog, points and says, “That looks fun.”

Quick note about my boyfriend: he is not really my boyfriend. He was my boyfriend, but broke up with me the previous summer, citing as his main reason the fact that he doesn’t love me.

But I am not one to shrink away from a challenge, especially one that involves winning the affection of a person who has made it abundantly clear they are not that into me, and I have chosen to deal with our breakup in much the same way my university has chosen to deal with my failure to complete all the credits required to graduate by the date of my graduation: by just carrying on as if it didn’t happen.

The idea that my summer Health and Fitness class might interest or engage my boyfriend, who, again, is not really my boyfriend, is especially compelling to me. I picture him at our wedding reception, champagne flute in one hand, microphone in the other, describing to our friends and family the summer he realized he couldn’t live without me, the summer I took Rackets.

There has been no discussion of what will happen between us after I move to Montana for grad school, just as there has been no discussion about the increasing amount of time we spend together. It would never occur to either of us to go no-contact after our breakup, in part because that is not a term that people will start throwing around for at least fifteen more years and in part because we work at the same bookstore and live in the same apartment complex and socialize with the same small circle of friends: our contact is more or less constant.

That said, I am already looking for apartments in Missoula, Montana, by which I mean that an aunt and uncle who live in Missoula are “keeping their eyes open.” But this is not something my boyfriend and I talk about. I assume it is going to work out between us and that we are going to end up together because I cannot imagine being with anyone else. And the main reason I can’t imagine being with anyone else is that, at this point in my life, I never have been.

Rackets meets three hours a day, five days a week, on a part of campus I know only by its adjacency to the store where I buy my cigarettes. I am surprised that first morning as I cross the parking lot toward the tennis courts to recognize nearly half the people slouching against the chain-link fence—a handful from the English department; a short-haired, sharp-eyed unicorn from my Images of Women in Art seminar with a double major in French and philosophy and a rage at capitalism bordering on revolutionary; a girl from the Feminist Literature class in which we didn’t write papers, but page-long “thinking questions,” and instead of a final exam designed a dinner party in the style of Judy Chicago; a guy from one of my poetry workshops who smokes so much marijuana that standing beside him is a buzz. We are a dozen or so, all together, an assembly of pale skin and poor posture, piercings and tattoos and hair still messy from bed, or from having not yet made it there. Almost all of us are dressed in black. Half of us are smoking.

Our instructor is a graduate student named Chris who lopes toward us like a friendly Labrador, a bag of tennis balls swinging at his side. Chris is the kind of person you expect to see at a state university in Colorado—tan and toned and always looking as if they’re on their way to or just returning from some hike to a hot springs or raft trip down a river—the kind of person the university photographs and features on the front page of its promotional pamphlets.

“Everyone from Colorado is beautiful,” a friend who doesn’t know I’m from Colorado will tell me years later after returning from a trip to Boulder, and I won’t bother to correct her—it seems unnecessary to her particular experience and potentially harmful to the tourist industry of a state in which most of my family still pays taxes to go spreading the word that Colorado is actually full of people like me, with my weak core and literal allergy to sunlight, and that most of those people who look like they grew up breathing fresh mountain air and drinking clean spring water and cooking wild game over a sage-scented campfire are actually from someplace else.

Chris is himself from Michigan, as he tells us in his introduction. He went to Michigan State for undergrad and came to Colorado to earn his master’s degree.

“In Rackets?” someone asks.

“In Health and Human Science,” Chris says.

The unicorn from Images of Women in Art exhales a ribbon of cigarette smoke and raises one pierced brow. “Science.”

As it turns out, there is exactly one type of person who signs up for a summer course in Rackets and that is a person who has spent four years avoiding physical activity and now has to bang it out in three weeks in order to graduate. It has not occurred to a single one of us that we are meant to already be in possession of our own racket and to have brought that racket with us today. Thus follows a lengthy and here-and-there heated discussion between a linguistics major and a logistics major regarding whether or not it’s fair to assume that people who sign up for a class called Rackets will understand they’re expected to provide their own.

If we’d signed up for Basketball, Linguistics says, we wouldn’t be expected to bring our own basketballs. If we’d signed up for Track, we wouldn’t have to bring a track.

We’d have to bring track shoes, Logistics says.

Everyone here is wearing tennis shoes, Linguistics points out, though a quick glance at our feet proves otherwise—several of us are in Birkenstocks; the unicorn is wearing Docs.

And so our first class centers not on rackets themselves but on the kind of clothing and footwear that will be most conducive to our success on the court once said rackets are obtained. We ought to wear sunscreen, Chris tells us. Also, we should bring water.

We stare at him, confused.

This is years before the advent of the ubiquitous stainless steel water bottle or the BPA-free water bottle or even, for the most part, the poisonous plastic water bottle that causes cancer. Millennials, the generation that will introduce the rest of us to the game-changing concept of hydration, are, in the year 2001, still children. I and my fellow Racketeers are Gen-X babies, raised on Coca-Cola and cow’s milk and educated in schools built out of asbestos. Water, on the rare occasions we drank it, came to us scalding hot from sunbaked garden hoses or rust flavored from ancient drinking fountains. To get a single sip of water during an eight-hour school day, we first had to raise our hands and ask permission, and even then we were mostly told no.

Before releasing us for the day, Chris goes through a checklist of details to consider when purchasing our rackets—measurements involving head size and grip size and weight—though, that night when I go with my boyfriend to a giant box store with pyramids of soccer balls and walls of athletic shoes, I will take into account none of that and instead select my racket based on its color. Then, because I’m kind of on a roll, I throw in something called a racket dampener—a little rubber W that looks like an eraser and wedges between the bottom strings of the racket—which is not anything Chris mentioned in class but is cute as hell and matches my racket.

My boyfriend also purchases a racket. He took lessons as a kid and is enthusiastic about the idea that we might play together, which in turn makes me enthusiastic about both learning how to play.

The next day, I show up at the courts at 8:00 a.m. with my purple racket and my purple racket dampener and my roommate’s army-green canteen that she bought during the fall semester to fill with orange juice and vodka for the one and only time we hiked. As a group, we are better prepared on the second day than we were on the first—we each have a racket now—but we are all still in black, half of us are still smoking, and while no one is in Birkenstocks, the unicorn will, for the entire three-week duration of the course, always wear Doc Martens.

I set my canteen along the fence with the other water bottles, most of which are plastic soda bottles that have been emptied and refilled with water, and a few of which are actual glasses of water that people have brought from home. I am not the only one who was lured by the siren song of the racket dampener—they really are cute—and Chris explains to us their purpose, which is to protect the wrist from the vibration of the racket during particularly long volleys involving particularly hard impact. “They’re not really necessary at this point,” he says, “but you might need them someday.” (Spoiler: I won’t.)

The first few days, we mostly practice bouncing balls on our rackets and hitting them off walls while Chris works with a few of us at a time, adjusting our grips and demonstrating swings and tossing balls to us so we can attempt to hit them back to him. Eventually, we move on to serving, then learning how to keep score. Then we start to play against each other.

Weirdly, Rackets is kind of fun. Chris isn’t a dick, which is nice. He doesn’t make us run laps or do push-ups or yell at us when we inadvertently whack him with balls or wander off to take smoke breaks or sometimes just sit down in the middle of the court. One morning, when it’s raining, he takes us to the student center to play ping-pong. The tables are in the campus bar and when we get there, Chris throws up his arms and asks, “Who’s drinking?”

It’s 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday. We all are!

I start to feel fond of my racket. I like seeing it propped beside the door of my apartment or riding shotgun in the passenger seat of my car. At night, my boyfriend and I drive to the park and hit balls back and forth. Our shift at the bookstore typically ends at midnight, but the courts stay lit all night, and so we play, sometimes for hours, as the lights hum and the moths flicker above us. It’s a perfect Colorado summer, with warm nights and soft air. I’ve gotten better and better as the days pass into weeks, and my boyfriend and I can now sustain a volley for what feels like a satisfying amount of time. Neither one of us has a thirst for blood and the goal is never to win. Instead we try to keep the match going, counting the number of times the ball is met and returned, cheering each other on and whooping with joy each time we beat our record.

Chris is required to give us a final, and so on the last day of class, he hands out a sheet of paper with ten questions. Keeping in line with his not-a-dick-ness, Chris has designed the final to be passable even by the least racket-proficient among us. There are some questions about scoring and some questions about strokes. For one of the questions, Chris has asked us, What’s my name?

As soon as we pass the finals in, the unicorn nudges me and whispers, “It’s Brian, right?”

And that’s that. Rackets is over. College is over. I pack up my apartment and start to plan my move to Montana. And then I panic. I panic hard. One night, in the break room of the bookstore, I ask my boyfriend to come with me. He says yes.

Though we spend all our time together, eat most meals together, and sometimes sleep together in the same bed, we have not since our breakup the previous summer kissed or had sex or even held hands. And though we have decided to move to Montana together, this doesn’t change. I am bewildered by the lack of physical intimacy between us, but I don’t bring it up, and neither does he. And somehow, I convince myself that once we get to Montana, things will change, they will go back to the way they were when we were still officially together, they will be better.

Then, a few weeks before we’re scheduled to leave, I open an envelope from the university to learn that I have failed Rackets. Which means that I haven’t graduated from college. Which means that I can’t go to grad school.

I am sure it’s a mistake. I was in class every day. I got second in the tournament (yes, there were only twelve of us, but two had played tennis before and the unicorn was fast as a fucking gazelle in those Doc Martens). Once, when I was practicing my serve, Chris walked by and said, “Nice.” All this I explain first to the woman who answers the phone in the Records Department and then to the woman who answers the phone at the Health and Human Sciences Department when I am told I have to deal directly with them. But the woman who answers the phone at Health and Human Sciences is not a regular Health and Human Sciences person, all the regular people being out on summer break. She tells me I have to contact my instructor directly. I ask for his number. She asks for his last name.

Let me remind you what kind of world we’re living in during the summer of 2001: there’s no social network, no vast and comprehensive online directory; you may be using Google, but chances are just as good you’re using AltaVista or Ask Jeeves, and, also, they all suck.

Let me also remind you that I am a person who has managed to convince a boy who is definitively and declaratively not in love with me to quit his job, pack up all his earthly possessions, and move with me to a town where he has never been, knows no one, and has no set plans for employment. In short, I am determined, not easily deterred, and more than willing to play a long and twisted game.

Which is all to say that I hunt Chris down like the dog he is and call him at his home at night. The phone is answered by Chris’s girlfriend, who I know without having ever seen is the female version of Chris—a girl with sun-streaked hair and sun-bronzed limbs who has probably spent her summer swimming naked with him in glacial lakes and giving him head at scenic overlooks. If, rather than calling on the phone, I’d shown up at Chris’s house in person (something I am, by the by, both willing and prepared to do), his girlfriend would immediately recognize me as someone who is neither interested in nor capable of seducing Chris away from her. But lacking any data beyond my voice, she turns instantly hostile when I ask for Chris, demanding to know who I am and what is the purpose of my call.

I explain again about my failing grade, and not missing any classes, and coming in second in the tournament, and Chris once telling me I have a nice serve, and being pretty sure I got a perfect grade on the final because I understand how to score a game and I can describe the difference between a forehand and a backhand and, also, I know that Chris’s name is Chris.

His girlfriend bursts out laughing. “Chris, you asshole!” she yells. “You flunked this girl and now she’s freaking out.”

“I’m so sorry, Aryn” Chris says after I repeat once more what happened and why I’m sure it’s a mistake. “There was an e-r-i-n on the roster who never came to class. I must have gotten you confused.”

I explain that I can’t graduate without the three credits from Rackets, and I’m supposed to leave soon to start my master’s degree in Montana.

He asks what I’m getting my master’s degree in, and when I tell him creative writing, he laughs, then says, “Oh, I thought you were kidding.”

Chris promises to fix my grade and he wishes me luck in Montana. He’s been there a few times, he tells me. There are some really great hikes.

Once we arrive in Montana, I start calling my boyfriend “my boyfriend,” not just in my head, but out loud as well. Though, we never have a discussion about this change in our official status. Nor do we change the way we interact with each other. We now share a bedroom and sleep every night in the same bed. But we don’t spoon or cuddle or kiss. It has been more than a year since we had sex. This is something I disclose to no one—I am too embarrassed, too ashamed, too hopeful that it will, eventually, change.

From the point we first met, we have been told by other people that we look like brother and sister, and more and more it feels as if we are. When, two weeks after we arrive in Montana, we wake up to learn that on the other side of the country an airplane has flown into the World Trade Center, we cling to each other like motherless children. This is the closest we will ever be again, holding each other as we watch the second plane strike, the buildings fall, the people screaming and bleeding and running through debris. We stay like this for days, side by side, watching as, again and again, it all comes crashing down.

By October, he is gone. By this time the following year, he will be engaged to someone else and I will be ankle-deep in an affair with a married man that will eventually swallow me whole. So much will be broken during this time, never to be rebuilt, so many things shattered and scattered to the wind. And so, when at some point I realize my racket is missing, I won’t have any idea when or where or how it vanished. In truth, I have no memory after that summer of ever seeing it again. Maybe it got lost in the move.

ARYN KYLE is the author of the novel The God of Animals and the short story collection Boys and Girls Like You and Me. She lives in New York City.