Rites of Spring
Nadia Niva
Section / Genre: Fiction
Spring arrived with its usual sneaking violence and the children wailed all day due to spiritual vacancy. They’d been hollowed out by another tedious winter spent counting the minutes and seconds until the school bell rang, then arguing the long car ride home, only to spend the rest of the day glaze-bathing their eyes in pixelated wastelands. Tad was completely oblivious to me as usual, and I made myself invisible as a gesture of my disdain.
I spent my days waiting for the children to leave so I might get a few hours on the court, where I’d become something of a machine. All year, I’d been working on a method of advanced meditation imperceptible to everyone but myself, where the moment my feet hit the baseline I entered a state of bliss.
Belinda was the only local player I considered my equal, a paragon of kinetic beauty with a driving backhand to boot. That spring, after years of eyeing each other at bake sales and PTA meetings, we finally made our acquaintance. On the court, she was a nightmare. I emerged from our matches gasping for air, delirious and exhilarated.
“Let’s go again,” Belinda had the habit of saying when I was already drenched and dog-like.
“Again,” I’d pant, despite the rising heat, the time, my hunger. Nothing was of consequence but the many games we played.
It was like this on the court: we hardly spoke, but I had never met someone more attuned to the rhythm of my game. I’d drive through midday traffic in a daze playing back our volleys, searching for her in the queue to pick the kids up from school. I even asked the women with whom I maintained neighborly relations about Belinda’s marriage, and whether her lemon bars were up to snuff. But, being well-rehearsed in the art of suburban bullshitting, they refused to give me anything that curbed my desire for my neck-and-neck volleying with Belinda to progress beyond sore elbows and sweat-soaked T-shirts.
The kids went on a school trip to the city just as the irises came into bloom. Tad was off with his fishing buddies, gambling away our already dwindling savings, likely entertaining cheap hookers in some musty motel room, praying his unreliable manhood might make a brief but consequential bob to the surface. I packed my gear and left for the courts as soon as his car pulled out of the driveway. It wasn’t unusual for me to play against any number of men or women who hung around the park. Their skill levels and identities hardly mattered. It was all an exercise in becoming someone other than myself, and until meeting Belinda I’d succeeded in circumventing my ego and surrendering to the simplicity of the game, to which I’d been introduced early in life and returned to again and again as if out of a biological necessity.
I found her on a bench lapping up the unseasonable midday heat.
“Look what the cat dragged in.” Belinda gave me a once-over. We’d become familiar, almost friendly. Flirtatious, I hoped, comfortable to the point of teasing.
“Leave my cat out of this,” I riffed in my sad little rock-throwing way.
“Thought you’d be home with Tad and the kids today.”
“They walked out on me. Hallelujah. Where’s Robert?”
Robert was her husband who liked to hang around the court like a parasite, rarely playing, ejaculating various oohs, ahhhs, and hmmms at wildly inappropriate volumes. His pleasure derived not from watching the game, but from judging its players.
“I’m surprised you haven’t heard from the newsy neighbors. We’re getting a divorce.”
I had not understood how deeply I needed Belinda until those words left her mouth. I could have collapsed at her feet.
“I’m so sorry, Belinda—” I began to make the Herculean effort of feigning sympathy.
“Save it, sweetheart. You knew the man. Can’t you see I’m better off alone? Off the court, that is. Hit some balls in five?”
I nodded, fresh sweat caterpillaring down my back as I warmed up, locking eyes with Belinda every now and again, blushing then turning away. Until that day, I’d been playing the fool, dismissing what could only be called my schoolgirl crush on Belinda as an aberration in my endocrine system, some hallucination transposed from television shows and romance novels that could be explained away by a psychoanalyst or a priest, though why go through all that trouble?
Racket in hand, Belinda was slippery, eel-like. I would have envied her had I not been so touched by her grace. The possibility of a carnal encounter crystallized with every stroke, promising something better than the juvenile wish to become someone else—promising the genesis of a new language, a new species. It was as if we were inventing tennis with each volley, oblivious to the sun as it sprawled and withered. Regulars came and went, stopping to observe our match and leaving just as quickly for fear of intruding on something aberrantly intimate transpiring on the generally asexual, fenced-in court. Grunting was no word to describe our vocalizations, our frenzied, animal behavior.
I was up 2-1 in the third and final set, an unprecedented lead, but I hesitated to drive the ball where she’d be unable to return it. My secret wish was for the game to go on through the night, for the court to swell and swallow us up, for Tad never to return, for Belinda to finally recognize in me a woman willing to leave everything behind for love, to try it one last time.
I served straight down the center and she floated a forehand nimbly back. It was not subtlety or even beauty that I aspired to, but power. I channeled this power into returning Belinda’s steady ball, but my shot had barely landed when Belinda sent over a nasty crosscourt backhand. I was hardly able to return the shot over another, even harder one. All I could do to remain in the point was abandon all fantasies of controlling it and surrender to the reflexes I’d honed. We rallied on in our electric way until Belinda fumbled a forehand and I was able to finish her off easily. My winning shot abruptly ended the divine flow we’d established. In the half-light I could make out a foreign expression on Belinda’s face, a silent understanding that our convergence had not yet reached its limit.
She invited me back to her place for a drink as if it was something we’d done a hundred times. I knew by then that my life was over, that just punching her address into the GPS spelled the end of my marriage, the end of my relationship with my children, and I did not care. In fact I felt liberated, the muscles in my back loosened, my hips swelled with anticipation. When I finally arrived in a blind heat I ran through her open door and pushed my lips onto hers. She had tears in her eyes, as if she’d been rehearsing this confrontation with desire, steeling herself against it. But we were equally powerless at the divine point where skin met skin and spit met sweat and the sheets grew stained with our lust as the night’s heart bled a song for the housewives and soccermoms, for their kitchen magnets and cereal milk, for their overtreated hair and questionable tans, for their breasts, their bodies, their needs.
Before the honeymoon hormones had settled, Tad came back and our lives returned to unhappy stasis, albeit with a new arsenal of rendezvous points and the drama of illicit love. We’d meet at her office and fuck on the desk, against the wall, trading roles, tearing at each other’s clothes, trying them on, one of us holding the other’s mouth shut as she wailed, each orgasm a victory not dissimilar from a surprise winner after an exhilarating rally.
My home life was significantly worsened by Tad’s gambling habit. In the absence of my usual nagging, it had metastasized into a full-scale addiction. Belinda had become my primary concern: the smell of her hair, the taste of her sweat, the next time I might see her, how I’d fuck her, what sounds she’d make. Tad played online poker and watched YouTube videos. He yelled at our children as a confidence-building exercise. There was little to nothing of me left in our home. The children were busy drowning in the carefree bliss of their adolescent summers, and I was always either at the court, in the kitchen, or at the Lamplighter Motel with Belinda, delirious with lust and dreaming of some semblance of a future together.
By late summer, Tad had become suspicious of my comings and goings, and I’d become paranoid. That old game. Belinda’s and my lovemaking grew more and more frenzied. Our schemes grew more dangerous. Tad was erratic, volatile, violent, but I could only laugh at the ridiculous man with whom I had somehow, miraculously created life.
He caught us on a Sunday, having come back early from a fishing trip. We were naked in the living room, our bodies pressed so tightly together that we could have been mistaken for a single organism. The kids were probably losing their virginities or experimenting with marijuana at sleepaway camp. The look of disgust on my husband’s face was a divine hand guiding us towards our bloody destiny.
We buried Tad a week later. It was the only path, and we took it with much consideration for human dignity. Quick, quiet, and painless, it was over before it started, and we followed the plan with a dedication unique to those committing their first crime. The kids hardly seemed to notice the loss of their father. Tad had left us all years ago for a steady diet of internet filth and sports betting. There was a new air of freedom in the house; the windows let in more light, the dog quit barking at phantoms.
About a month after the “fishing accident,” Belinda moved in, supposedly to help me get Tad’s things in order and to support me in my time of grief. We still played tennis often, the kids joining in sometimes, or cartwheeling and cavorting courtside as Belinda and I reprised that fateful match of the previous spring. Our laughter could be heard from miles away.
This story originally appeared in the Portland Tennis Courterly’s Wet Issue. To purchase a copy, visit our online store.