Out in the Open
by Linnie Greene
At the Mets-Willets Point stop in Flushing, Queens, there are only two kinds of people, emblematized on a sign that reads “baseball” then “tennis,” which arrows pointing opposite directions. “Ahh, the two genders,” I thought as I turned right and down a long wooden boardwalk that dead-ended at the entrance to the Billie Jean King Tennis Center. That’s where I met Dad, who had carted a plastic bag full of Lance crackers and granola bars on the pre-dawn flight from North Carolina in case we got hungry mid-set. He splayed them proudly on a bench where he’d waited for me, the sky just lightening from an early morning gray.
The complex itself resembles a large, well-appointed shopping mall. On the left, a Polo store with emblematized rugby shirts and pleated skirts; on the right, a row of fast-casual dining options. Between were gazebos selling t-shirts and commemorative merchandise, and scattered throughout the park were other sirens beckoning the wealthy — brand-name European espresso, BMWs parked on display, Chase financial kiosks that doled out portable loaner phone chargers. The engineers of the last great recession are generous with their loaners, it turns out.
Things were branded more overtly than they were at the tennis clubs of my youth, but the feeling was much the same. I was wearing a pair of $2 plaid shorts from the Prospect-Lefferts Gardens thrift store and salmon pink Lacoste I’d ordered secondhand, thinking I’d show up as a parody, the caddy in a stoner comedy. Instead, I just looked like an imposter. Everyone else sported sleek, expensive workout wear, their stony calves suctioned into Lululemon or Nike as if they themselves might be called upon to sub in. If Serena couldn’t play, there were brave Peytons and Christinas from Long Island waiting in the wings to take her place.
Tennis has been a presence in my life since infancy, like television news or airport Chili’s: peripheral, mostly, but remarkably consistent. As a diapered child in Florida, I pointed to the boxy television and mistook men in the broadcast for my father and his singles partner. “Daddy, Todd. Daddy, Todd,” I helpfully explained as the professionals lobbed the ball back and forth.
In the suburbs, no one grunts like they do on TV. Affluent people in the gated North Carolina community where my stepmother lived when she and my Dad started dating tended instead toward chatter and collegial laughter, their strokes more languid, unhurried and unbothered. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys leisure. I never noticed a competitive edge, but then again, I only really paid attention from the corner of my eye, Discman playing Everclear, ordering French fries at the walk-up grill.
At my mom’s house in the same county, grass sprouted through the subdivision’s old clay courts defiantly; they were largely unused save for preteen boys horsing around on skateboards. The same facility takes on a different purpose depending on what surrounds it: the long-limbed unfussed versus the young and delinquent, elegant looping driveways versus squat two-bedrooms flush with gravel roads. In certain circles, “The Club” is synecdoche for an entire social sphere, and in others, it means nothing at all, just like “love” to a tennis player.
And because of these distinctions, it’s always seemed like those who belong can sniff out those, like me, who don’t. I possessed some ineffable quality that made me other, and it was never a matter of having the right shoes. My K-Swiss phase was short-lived, like two misplaced boats on my feet. I wanted to like Lilly Pulitzer more than the Paul Frank t-shirts from Delia’s with the monkey covering my prepubescent chest. I was both pained by and proud of the awkwardness I felt in places that capitalized the C in club, and then later at a big state school renowned for its athletics. It was not only that I could not really fit in but that I had no desire to. Tennis emblematizes a lot of the difficulty I felt in a particular wedge of the South: snobby, conformist, and married to tradition.
In my family, though, the ardor crops up everywhere, across social and political lines. My mom recently informed me that my aunt, a liberal former history professor, was a nationally-ranked mixed doubles player who served on the USTA committee. My dad plays weekly against hot shots half his age and volunteers swatting practice balls to my alma mater’s collegiate team. My parents’ own failed marriage began on courts in Mandeville, Louisiana, where they met reaching for Abita beer samples over the net. In a way, I owe my entire existence to the human proclivity for smacking a neon yellow ball into a narrow rectangle. That, and booze.
The booze in this particular corner of Flushing was of a decidedly different variety — $25 glasses of Moët-Chandon and botanical, effervescent cocktails. I saw fewer tattoos than any crowd in which I’d mingled for the past five years.
But as much as I felt like one planted in an alien land, that in itself was a familiar sensation, so I shrugged it off and followed Dad to the seats he’d secured mid-level near the courts. Knowing only a handful of tennis stars to begin with, I was oblivious to everyone who walked onto the rectangle of DecoTurf, but Dad’s commentary in my ear ran constantly, a pleasant tickertape.
“That’s John Isner,” he’d say while a presumably friendly giant bounced a ball against his racquet. “He’s from Greensboro.” There were never more than two degrees of separation from my father and the professional athletes on the court — they knew a tennis pro he knew, or their wife had looked at property he sold, or they played a tournament in Winston-Salem he’d attended, or their husband had coached his buddy back when he had played the circuit.
It was much like if I’d brought a relative along to a literary festival, enumerating the talents and dramas of the people who lurked around Brooklyn clinging to their manuscripts and complexes. “She got long-listed for a Booker and dated Jonathan Franzen’s assistant,” I might say, the largest difference being that everyone in earshot would be five foot two and taking antidepressants.
We rotated between matches and paused occasionally for overpriced Cokes. Tennis might be the only place where die-hards are more identifiable by their decorum than their lack of it; no one brandished signs or statement tees, the WASPy fear of tackiness manifest in all the khaki and sweat-wicking athleisure. Tennis, perhaps, is a last bastion of snobbery, growing to include minorities but drawing the line at people without taste. “The only taste she has is in her mouth,” my roommate’s mother is known to say, and I thought of this and pulled my new U.S. Open bucket hat further onto my head.
I could appreciate that aspect, at least. Even if my taste was an outlier, at least it wasn’t gauche; I can palate neutrals more easily than the kitsch of a Yankee’s fan or the showiness of the monied courtside at a Lakers game. The U.S. Open attracts rich people who intimidate not by throwing their affluence in your face but by adopting the cool confidence of someone who doesn’t need to brag, who has transcended such juvenilia. It’s just like the tech that suffused my West Coast life — the people in the vests making more than the woman with the Louis Vuitton purse, leaving the rest of us to chart those class nuances like high school gossips.
As the afternoon progressed it got hotter, and half the seats at any given match were in the direct glare of the sun. Dad pulled sunscreen from one his many Ziplocs and we reapplied.
I preferred to watch the women — rooting for Kazakh Zarina Diyas’s expressive game against the stoic Karolina Pliskova, to whom she barely lost. Holding my breath as American Sabrina Vickery lengthened her arm skyward and lobbed a serve over the net at Elina Svitolina. The impossible elegance of such quick movement, the way an angled racquet could make the ball touch down on a minute square inch.
Later, we ventured into the upper tiers of Louis Armstrong to watch minute versions Andy Murray and James Duckworth, like peering down at a diorama in a museum or a child’s set of matchbox cars.
It’s hard to know the last time my father and I shared anything about our inner lives. In adulthood, unlike childhood, we’ve achieved pleasantness, an anodyne and palatable state wherein we talk on the phone about once a month and text in the meantime — about the weather, a meme of a golden retriever, some distant relative’s new baby. We only occasionally broach politics and I made the mistake of buying him Hillbilly Elegy, a book he loved, before I knew what it was.
He probably finds my predilection for cats, socialism, and baroque thrifted outfits as puzzling as I find the scoring system in tennis, or the reason people play golf. He is a Scorpio, I am a Capricorn. We’re two vastly different people, and yet we share the same eyes and chin. We share the same context, the same knowledge of filling station BLTs and the superiority of certain mountain towns. For a day at the end of August, he shared the thing he loved most, and in his open enthusiasm, the enveloping quality of this sport in his life, I felt I knew him a little bit better.
Dad flew South again the same night he flew up, retreating quickly to his own job and the comfort of home, with its beagles and tree-dense solitude. It was as if he feared voyaging North too long might make him acquire a taste for absinthe or rideshare services. Later that summer, I would find out we had bed bugs and spend a weekend crying into plastic vacuum bags; he would tend to his ailing mother, situated in a nursing home in the Appalachians.
When the coverage came out about the final match — a tense set between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka that culminated in a series of questionable (racist) calls around Williams’ comportment — I was the first to text, clicking between several open tabs. “Can you believe this?” I said, in essence, tapping out a screed against racism, sexism, and the umpire in particular. A few minutes later, he replied, exasperated for altogether different reasons — something about sportsmanship, the embarrassment of chaos. We had found a new lingua franca. In the late East Coast summer, we had reached over the net and across the years, and unlike love in a tennis match, it meant something, even if I couldn’t tabulate the score.
Linnie Greene grew up in Durham, North Carolina and lives in Jersey City, New Jersey. She’s contributed to GQ, The New York Times, Pitchfork, and others, and is at work on a novel about art and jobs. Find her online at linniegreene.com, or at home with three cats, watching “Twin Peaks.”