Kate Christie (11 page)

Beautiful Game 7

A question like that usually precipitated the kind of deep conversation I liked to engage in with my dorm friends in the off-season, late at night over coffee and an occasional cigarette. I couldn’t remember ever talking like that with a jock before, though, not even with Holly. Maybe especially not with Holly.

I faced Jess, cradling my head on one hand. “I guess. I think there’s luck, too, like the kind of family you’re born into. But the choices you make on a daily basis are what lead you to a particular fate.”

She tilted her head sideways. “It almost sounds like you believe we’re responsible for everything bad that happens to us.”Did I? I frowned. “No, I’m just saying there are certain decisions we make that lead to specific outcomes. Like getting in a car wreck. You make so many small decisions—the time you left, how fast you drove, the route you picked. If you get in a wreck, it’s lousy luck, but it’s a fate you’ve sort of made for yourself.”

“Got it. I think. So are you religious?”

“Not really. My parents are both Unitarians and believe in Christ as a historical figure, not as the literal Son of God. But I guess I’m more of an agnostic myself. My brother too. What about you?”

“Organized religion is at the root of so much evil in the world, it isn’t something I’m interested in participating in. Besides, I don’t believe in God.” She said it firmly, as if there were no doubt in her mind.

An atheist, then—I wasn’t sure I had ever met one, though I knew I must have. Maybe atheists were like gays and lesbians, closeted for fear of how other people would react to the truth.

We talked religion for a while, oblivious to the people around us—soul versus the body, mind versus spirit, heaven versus hell.

Zen Buddhism and the practice of meditation. Hindu beliefs about gods and bovines. It turned out we shared a lot of the same views, not to mention a lot of the same unanswered questions about life and death.

“I kind of believe in reincarnation,” she said at one point,

0 Kate Christie

watching me out of the corner of her eye. “I think there are old and young souls. The old souls are the ones who have been a bunch of different animals and people. Like, they were a centipede and then they were a person who lived to be a hundred and then they were a cat.”

“Hmm,” I offered. “Interesting.”

I wasn’t sure what else to say. I had spent time thinking about such matters, of course, but not enough apparently to formulate my own hypothesis on the nature of souls.

Jess didn’t seem to hold this against me. “This friend of mine,” she continued, “used to say she thought the ultimate state of being was a tree.” She paused. “That probably sounds bizarre.

You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

We were so close I could see myself reflected in her sunglasses, light a halo behind me. “I kinda thought you were crazy already, Maxwell.”

“Nice.” She plucked a handful of grass and threw it at me.

I almost told her to stop killing all those souls, but decided I didn’t know her well enough yet to be truly obnoxious.

“Seriously,” I said, “I love hearing what other people think about this stuff. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who lays awake at night trying to figure it all out.”

“You’re definitely not the only one.” She fell silent, resting her cheek on her sweatshirt.

“So what about you?” I asked. “What religion did you grow up in?”

I held my breath, waiting to see how she would react to my probing into her past.

“Lutheran,” she said, unsmiling. “Until high school.”

“In Bakersfield?”

“Yeah. And back in Chicago.”

I watched the shadow of a small cloud creeping toward us across the green. “I didn’t know you lived in Chicago.”

“I was born there. My mom and I moved out here when I was seven so we could be close to her family.” Her voice was so low I almost didn’t hear the question: “You’re wondering about my father, right?”

“Um.” I was starting to get that floundering sensation I’d Beautiful Game 1

had that night at her apartment when we were talking about tennis and her future. “Yes,” I hazarded, unsure what the correct answer was.

“He killed himself.” Her voice was tight like the muscle I could see pulsing in her jaw. “He hung himself in our basement when I was in first grade. He was a musician, a jazz pianist, and I guess his career wasn’t going well. I don’t remember much about him. My mom and I were visiting her parents here at the time, so we just stayed.”

“God, Jess. I’m so sorry. That’s awful.”

How traumatic for a little kid. A piece of the puzzle slipped into place. Now I could begin to understand the distancing, the walls, the shyness. Almost.

The cloud enveloped us. Jess gazed up at the sky. “The thing is, for the longest time I thought he was killed in a car wreck. My mom didn’t tell me the truth until I was a senior in high school.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. She never said.”

We were both quiet. I was trying to imagine Jess’s father, a Spaniard with wavy dark hair and golden eyes. Her mother, the Scandinavian, I pictured as a cool, patrician blonde with remote blue eyes. I really was beginning to understand. And with that inkling of comprehension, I wanted to reach out and smooth the frown lines from her forehead.

The cloud inched away, leaving the sun exposed again. Jess plucked at thick shoots of grass.

“I don’t know why I told you all of that,” she said. “You’re the first person I’ve told in a while.”

“I am?” Not that that should surprise me. “That’s cool. I’m glad you did.”

“I don’t know what it is about you. It just feels—I don’t know.”

She stopped and shook her head, looking back at her hands. “Just don’t tell anyone, okay? The last thing I need is the student paper breathing down my neck, trying to get a feature. ‘Local Athlete Triumphs Over Personal Tragedy.’”

I smiled a little. “Don’t worry.” I wanted to say,
What is it
about me?
But I didn’t. Instead I reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “You can trust me.”

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She flashed me a speculative look. “Yeah? To hear it told, you’re not exactly the most trustworthy woman on campus.”

I pulled my hand back quickly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do.” She was openly grinning now, enjoying my discomfiture. “Wait, are you speechless? I thought you always had the perfect comeback.”

I turned over on my stomach. About time I worked on the tan lines on the backs of my legs.

“You’re just jealous. You wish you could be me.”

“That’s totally it,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

A little while later, we walked our bikes across the bridge toward the Plaza de Panama where a beautiful ceramic-tiled fountain drew local visitors and tourists alike. This section of the park contained the zoo, several museums and an arts and crafts village. We locked up our bikes near the Art Institute and went for a stroll, making our way eventually to the Spanish Village Art Center where working artists kept their studios open to visitors. Jess seemed excited as we wandered the old-fashioned village watching metalsmiths, basket makers and sculptors at work. She lingered longest at a demonstration of paint-mixing using a variety of plants and roots harvested from the wild.

“Some day I’m going to try this,” she murmured almost to herself, watching the Village Paint Master dip a crushed root into a small container of water to produce a rich brown watercolor.

“You paint?” I looked at her with interest. I knew she was taking a studio art class this semester, but I’d gotten the impression that her interest in art was mainly academic.

She smiled her shy smile. “A little. Come on. Let’s go check out the pottery demo.”

Hooking her arm through mine, she pulled me along gently, mindful of my sore foot. Somehow the world seemed right and SDU very far away as we wandered the art center together. We kept smiling at each other, exclaiming at the smallest things, enjoying everything we saw. When we’d had our arts and crafts fill, we left the village and crossed a cement bridge that led over a four-laned, divided street to a cactus garden. To the right was Beautiful Game 3

a sprawling maze-like gazebo, vines growing in and around the wooden structure. We headed for the center, where a fat cactus grew beside a bench.

I dropped onto the bench, slipped my shoe off and rubbed the sole of my right foot. I hoped the bruise would heal soon. I wanted to be able to play in Tuesday’s game.

“Are you doing okay?” Jess asked, touching my foot hesitantly.

“Fine,” I said, continuing to massage my foot. “Just a little sore.”

“Do you want to head back soon?”

I checked my watch, a Timex Ironman my parents had given me for my eighteenth birthday. Best sports watch on the market, they had said proudly.

“It’s four thirty. Do you want to go?”

She shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

An idea occurred to me. “Why don’t we eat at that café near the gate? Then we can head back to the car and maybe check out University Ave.”

“Perfect,” Jess said.

We walked back to the café and ordered sandwiches that we carried to a covered veranda at a wrought iron table. A comfortable silence reigned as we dug into our sandwiches and chips, trying to satisfy our sports-trained appetites. Sparrows fluttered around the sidewalk just beyond the eating area, cleaning up stray crumbs. Jess tore tiny pieces from her crust and started to feed the hungry birds. She tossed the bread closer and closer to her chair, until eventually the bravest sparrows were eating from her hand. I watched, thinking that she could have crushed any one of the little brown birds in her racket hand. But she just held the food out to them, her eyes glowing with pleasure.

The scene reminded me of what she’d said earlier about reincarnation and old souls.

“So which are you, Maxwell? An old soul or a young one?”

She tossed a final crumb. “Old.” She sounded very sure.

I brushed my napkin across my mouth, hearing the sparrows cheeping at our feet. “What do you think I am?”

She tilted her head. “Middle-aged, I’d say. Not very young but not terribly old, either. What do you think?”

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“You’re probably right. Although my body feels pretty old right now,” I added lightly. “Guess that’s what fifteen years of playing a contact sport will do.”

Later, as we rode our bikes back to the car, I wondered what she thought made her an old soul. She enjoyed life, you could tell by the way she leaned forward over her handlebars and rode into the wind, ponytail flying behind her. Then there was the way she played tennis, fierce and barely contained and driven, almost.

But sometimes, when her eyes darkened and her jaw tightened and her walls sprang up, fully formed, setting her apart from everyone and everything, she looked as if she had never been happy. As if she never would be.

A half hour later we were perched on stools at a coffee shop on University, watching people pass on the street. I had ordered my cappuccino in typical L.A. fashion to amuse Jess: “Single tall half caf half decaf cap with skim milk, chocolate,and cinnamon.

For here, please.” Meanwhile, she’d ordered a pot of raspberry herbal tea because, she said, she was trying to limit her caffeine intake. This reminded me of Jake Kim and his obsessive dietary constraints. Plenty of SDU students had eating disorders.

The cult of beauty seemed particularly powerful in Southern California, where conservative politics combined with a long swimsuit season to afflict even the most secure of women—and some men—with pangs of self-doubt. During my sophomore year, a freshman on the volleyball team had died suddenly.

The autopsy had determined that her heart had been severely damaged by starvation. After that there was a flurry of eating disorder workshops and support groups, but now, a year later, the issue had faded to the back burner of campus politics.

“Everyone has dogs,” Jess said, interrupting my depressing reverie.

I focused on the Jeep Wrangler stopped at the light just outside the café window, cute woman driving, cuter pit bull hanging out in the passenger seat watching pedestrians walk by.

There had been an inordinate number of attractive women in Beautiful Game 5

cool cars with animals at their sides today. Maybe I would have to move to the city once I graduated.

“That’ll be you in a couple of years,” I said, sliding a glance at Jess. She wasn’t looking too bad herself, hair tucked under her white Nike cap, eyes bright from our bike ride.

“I’d have to get a bigger car if I want a dog like that.”

Dangerous territory, but I couldn’t resist asking, “Do you think you’ll stay in the area after graduation? Or are you going to take off for grad school or something?”

Frowning a little, she looked down into the swirling red of her tea. “I don’t know. I like the area, I like Sidney and Claire.

This is perfect for now. I’m just not sure about later.”

“Sometimes I get scared, thinking about The Future. You know, after we graduate and they send us packing.”

“You get scared?” she repeated. “I thought you had it all worked out.”

I shrugged. “I’ve always thought I would like to be a teacher, like my dad. But sometimes I wonder if there might not be something else, something better. There’s just so much to choose from. It would be easy to get lost.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. “My mother used to say that when she was growing up she was told she could be a teacher, a nurse or a housewife. She always said how lucky I was to have so many options. But for us, we don’t know what it was like to live in such a narrow time, and we still have to figure out what to do when college ends.”

I sipped my cappuccino. This was the first time I had heard Jess voluntarily mention her mother. An image of the woman in the white hat who had shown up at the tennis match the previous spring flashed into my mind.