The Deep End (13 page)

Joanne wiped her eyes, her sobs shuddering to a halt as she regained control, and lifted her head. “My God, what did you do to your hair?” she asked, really looking at the other woman for the first time that afternoon.

Karen Palmer’s hand flew immediately to the top of her head, her fingers picking through the remains of what had once been a luxurious crop of auburn hair. “It’s punk,” Karen explained. “Jim was getting tired of the old style. I’d been wearing it the same way for so long.” She tried to laugh. “He said I looked like I’d been frozen in the fifties. And he was right. Rudolph agreed. Couldn’t wait to get his scissors at it. Of course, now Jim claims he never meant he wanted it
this
short. Oh hell—men! They don’t know what they want half the time …” She broke off. “I heard about you and Paul. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s just temporary. We’re trying to work things out.” Joanne heard her words as if they came from someone else’s mouth.

“I’m sure you will,” Karen agreed, and Joanne wondered how anyone could be sure of anything, especially things that didn’t concern them, although she realized she would probably have said the same thing had their situations been reversed. “I don’t know what comes over men when they get to a certain age,” Karen continued.
“It’s like the books say—they go kind of crazy. How are you managing?” she asked.

“All right,” Joanne said. What was the point in saying more? “I’m installing a burglar alarm system,” she went on when she saw that more was expected.

“You mean you don’t already have one?”

Joanne shook her head.

“Not that they do much good,” Karen continued. “They’re always going off at the wrong times, and the police never show up anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“The police are too busy to answer every false alarm they hear.”

“But how do they know they’re false?”

“Most of them are. And even if they’re not, the police are just too busy. Have you ever tried calling Emergency? 911?” Joanne shook her head. “Try it sometime. See what happens. Nothing happens, that’s what. You listen to a recorded message tell you that all the lines are busy. If you’re still alive after the twenty minutes it takes for someone who isn’t a machine to come on the line, the police
may
decide to investigate the problem … if you’re lucky.” She laughed. “Of course, if you were lucky, you wouldn’t be calling them in the first place. But it’s still a good idea to have one,” she added illogically. “I mean it’s better than nothing. Are you installing panic buttons?”

“Panic buttons?” Panic, Joanne repeated silently, a word she could understand.

“You should get a few of those, just in case someone breaks into the house when you’re home. Then all you have to do is press the button and the alarm goes off. Assuming you can get to the button, of course.” She smiled.

Joanne wondered why she was talking to this woman. She was worse than the horror movie Eve had dragged her to. She checked her wristwatch. “I wonder where Eve is,” she said out loud. “She’s usually so prompt.”

“You’re having another tennis lesson?”

“In five minutes,” Joanne told her, lifting herself up and edging her way to the door.

“She’ll be here,” Karen Palmer stated with the same authority with which she had earlier assured Joanne that her marriage would work out. Where does she get such omniscience? Joanne wondered. She excused herself and escaped the warm pink and gray of the locker room for the cool green and white of the lobby.

“We’ve been paging you,” a woman she barely recognized informed her seconds later. “There’s a message for you at the front desk.”

Joanne approached a crisp blond young woman behind the reception desk, deciding that in her next life this was the woman she was going to be, and was handed a note informing her to call Eve Stanley at home.

“What are you doing at home?” she asked as soon as she heard Eve’s voice. “Are you okay?”

There was a slight pause. “Well, I’m not sure. I have this dumb sore throat and these stupid pains in my chest. I didn’t go to school today. My mother’s here.”

“So why’d you tell me to meet you here?” Joanne asked.

“Because I knew you wouldn’t go if you thought I wasn’t going.”

Joanne said nothing; Eve was right.

“Anyway, it’s probably nothing, but I thought—or, more accurately, my mother thought—that if I stayed in
bed for a couple of days, I might get rid of this thing, whatever it is.”

“Did you get the results of the blood tests?”

“Yes. Negative. Everything checked out.”

“Well, that’s a relief anyway.”

“My mother’s not satisfied. She’s making another appointment for me with her cardiologist.”

“Let me know when it is. I’ll take you.”

“Thanks. I’d better get back to bed. Mommy is making faces at me.”

“Okay. I’ll call you when I get home.”

“Have a good lesson.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“You have a strong, natural backhand, Mrs. Hunter,” Steve Henry was explaining enthusiastically. “You just have to learn to be more aggressive. You’re waiting too long to hit the ball. You should be hitting the ball when it’s out here”—he indicated where—”not back here.” He smiled. “You have to use your body more. You’re relying too much on your arm. Now, it’s a nice, strong arm, but it doesn’t have to work that hard. Lean into the ball more. Here, like this.” He positioned himself behind her to guide her right arm, pulling it back across the left side of her body, then pushing it forward to confront the imaginary ball. “Move into it. That’s right. When you see the ball coming at you, swivel … that’s right … back foot firmly on the ground … now lean into the ball and hit it when the little bugger is out here.” He indicated where. “Don’t wait till it’s back here. You’ve lost half your power that way. Okay? Let’s try some more like that. You’re doing very well, Mrs. Hunter. Just relax. You’re supposed to be having a good time.”

Joanne smiled, stealing a surreptitious glance at her watch to figure out how much time remained in her lesson. She was tired; her legs ached; her arm hurt; the sun was in her eyes; she was perspiring into her new white tennis dress. Can’t he see that I’m an old lady? she wondered, slapping at the sudden appearance of the lime green ball as if it were a pesky fly.

“Follow through, Mrs. Hunter,” the voice across the net urged. “Follow through.”

What was he talking about? Joanne asked herself, swinging wildly at the next ball and then accidentally lobbing the one that immediately followed high into the air. What does this man want from me? What am I doing here? Tennis lessons were Eve’s idea, damnit! Why does she get to stay at home in bed sick, while I have to run around this dumb court chasing fluorescent balls? Don’t you realize that I have more important things to do? Joanne shouted wordlessly at the young man on the far side of the court. Like what? she heard him demand as he effortlessly returned the ball she had somehow managed to get over the net. Lots of things, she pouted, running backward to reach a low, baseline shot. Like waiting for my daughters to come home from school! Like waiting for my husband to make up his mind! Like baking a bunch of goddamn lemon meringue pies while I’m doing all this waiting! She slammed the next ball straight into the net.

“Follow through, Mrs. Hunter,” Steve Henry called out, his body sweeping forward to underline his words.

You can’t understand, Joanne realized, you’re too young. Yours is the generation that thinks they can have it all. And maybe you can. Good luck to you. But I’m from the generation that just missed. When I was growing up, it
wasn’t fashionable for girls to be too bright or too independent. Girls were encouraged to encourage their men. We were taught to be clever, but never cleverer than, to be bright but dependent nonetheless, and to want only what a man would be able to provide. And I was good at that! I passed with honors! And then you come along and rob me of my degree. Is that fair? I’m too old to learn a new set of rules. She swung ferociously at an oncoming ball, missed it entirely, and landed hard on her behind.

Steve Henry was instantly at her side. “Are you all right?” His voice was solicitous as his arms reached under hers to help her up. “Well, you followed through all right,” he smiled. “But you took your eye off the ball.”

“I’ll never get the hang of it,” she told him, dusting off her white tennis dress, now ribboned with streaks of green clay.

“It might help if you got yourself a new, oversized racquet. It would improve your game tremendously.”

“I didn’t mean tennis,” she explained. “I meant life.”

He laughed. “Want to rest a few minutes?”

“You mean the lesson isn’t over yet?” This time they both checked their watches.

“We still have ten minutes.”

“I think I’ve had it,” Joanne said. “I’m too old for this.”

“Too old? You have the best legs of any woman at this club.” The remark was casual, delivered as if it were a simple, inarguable statement of fact. Joanne felt her face flush. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you,” he covered quickly, though his smile remained.

“You didn’t,” she told him, walking briskly off the court.

“How old
are
you?” he asked, suddenly at her side.

Joanne took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Forty-one,” she replied honestly, remembering that, even on her deathbed, her mother had refused to reveal her true age to her doctors.

“You look ten years younger.”

“That’s not young enough, I’m afraid.”

“For whom? Afraid of what?”

Joanne bit down on her bottom lip. Was he coming on to her? She dismissed the unsettling idea, deciding that she probably wouldn’t recognize a come-on if it climbed on top of her. No, he was just a natural flirt. Tennis instructors were supposed to make their students feel good about themselves. It was part of their technique.

“Your husband’s a lucky man,” Steve Henry said as he opened the door to the court and stepped back to let her pass through before him.

“He isn’t a leg man,” Joanne heard herself respond, not quite believing her ears. Why had she said that? It was something Eve would say.

“Then he’s a fool,” Steve Henry told her, ending the discussion. “You left these on the court,” he said, pulling her dark blue sunglasses out of his back pocket and handing them to her. “See you next week.”

Who was he kidding? Joanne thought as she sudsed herself in the club shower after her lesson; she looked every one of her forty-one years, maybe more. The strange thing was that she really didn’t feel any older than she had twenty years ago. Inside, she was still the same insecure little girl she had always been, trying to be the perfect realization of whatever everyone wanted her to be, afraid to laugh too loud or say too much, to run too fast
or want too much, to say something she might later regret, to fail at something she should never have tried. She found herself laughing into a harsh spray of hot water. She had failed anyway. But why? She had been a good girl. The perfect daughter who had grown into the perfect wife and mother, projecting an air of cheerful invincibility. You’re strong, her husband had told her as he was leaving her, and again a week ago. I am woman, Joanne sang silently as she submerged her head under the full blast of the shower spray.

So, what now? she pondered, stepping out of the shower and wrapping herself in one of the club’s luxurious pink towels. Pink for girls, she thought. What do you do, she asked herself again, when somebody suddenly stops loving you?

When had he stopped? On her fortieth birthday? On her thirtieth? Had he stopped little by little or all at once? Had it been a gradual decline or something that struck him suddenly one morning when he turned over in bed and saw her lying beside him, her mouth open in sleep, her hair askew across the pillow? When had he tired of the things he once found so reassuring? When had he stopped loving her?
Had
he stopped loving her?

He said he wasn’t happy. Who was happy? Nobody could be happy all the time, or even most of the time. Usually, people occupied a neutral middle ground. The only thing that prevented people from being happy twenty-four hours a day, Joanne thought with a sharp cackle, was life.

A short, surprisingly muscular woman weighing herself on a nearby scale shot Joanne a strange look. One didn’t laugh out loud when walking alone in the
women’s locker room of an expensive country club in Long Island. Joanne plopped down in front of one of the vanities provided for drying one’s hair, plugged in the hairdryer lying on its side on the little table, and aimed the gun-shaped blower at her head. Blowjob anyone? she heard Eve ask playfully, and looked in the mirror to see herself blushing.

What did Paul mean, he wasn’t happy? And was she the one who should be held accountable for his happiness? Yet hadn’t she handed Paul the responsibility for her own happiness many years ago? She stared with mild shock at the middle-aged woman in the mirror. “What on earth have I done to my hair?” she asked out loud, staring at the tangled mess of curls at the top of her head. It’s punk, she heard Karen Palmer say, deciding against wetting it and starting over. Nobody would be seeing it. She was going straight home, where she and Lulu would probably spend the evening watching television; Robin had a date. Would Scott be picking her up so that she could finally introduce him to her mother? “I’m not ready for daughters who date,” Joanne whispered at her reflection, then stuck out her tongue.

The short, muscular woman from the scales sat down at the table beside Joanne and threw her another worried look. She thinks I’m crazy, Joanne thought. Welcome to the club! She stood up, knocking over the chair on which she had been sitting. So what if I talk to myself? she demanded as she stooped to right it. As my mother always said, Whenever I want to talk to an intelligent person …

Things will be different for my daughters, she thought, picking up the thread of her earlier musings as she located her locker and started roughly pulling on her
clothes. They were being raised in a different world, being taught to stand on their own two feet, not to depend on anyone else for their happiness. She stopped abruptly as she was stretching her purple T-shirt over her head, her elbows in the air, her face completely hidden under the soft jersey.