Doing our best since 2009

Perhaps you’d like to join our newsletter?

After the Party, a Match

The hour was three, the rest had gone to bed, a tennis match aired, and Nelle had something to say to her mother.

Save the popping sound of the ball off the women’s racquets, the house was quiet. The sound, like an unplugged suction cup: puck, then puck, then puck. The rhythm calmed her.

Tomorrow: marriage. No, today. Twelve hours. She got herself a glass of water from the dispenser on the fridge, which emitted a stream with the urgency of held urine.

This is what Nelle had thought: that marriage would happen to her, as one receives a diagnosis or an award. Because she had absolute choice in the matter, and had not once truly doubted her decision, she suddenly questioned her judgment. Other people had. They asked, how did you know? As if knowledge of a certain person and situation can be abstracted to fit a general rule. As if knowledge naturally translates to confident action.

The two players sustained a 22-shot rally. A backhand down the line (on the run, whipped) was answered by a dropshot (hidden, nearly clipping the net) was answered by a crosscourt volley (all reflex, divine). The women hurled their bodies and their sneakers squeaked with the effort, but their racquets, as they sliced and swung, sent the ball whirling gracefully.

The plates and glasses from earlier were stacked by the sink. They had cut into a Norwegian Swiss and left the rind; they had pried all the grapes off their spindly vine; they had polished off bottles of bubbly and wine, how many, she did not know. It did not seem to her they had eaten or drunk that much. All excitement and unease, her bridesmaids, not many of whom knew one another, and none of whom had been married.

No, but Nelle’s mind was made up. He was a good man. Peas were his favorite vegetable. When he walked into a room, he did not have to make his presence known. In a handful of worrisome scenarios, he kept a cool head. He cried more readily than she did.

On court, one woman plunged a kickserve, and the other leapt to her forehand and missed, her racquet clattering.

Nelle’s mother had not said much. She spectated, ready to chaperone if enough bottles were flung rattling into the recycling bin. Her mother had arranged the games, the food, the scrapbook. This was not unlike her string of childhood birthday parties: her mother laid it all out, the dinosaur masks, the multicolored streamers, the cake decorated as a prehistoric landscape, a river of blue sprinkles winding through it, the triceratops napkins and matching bowls. All the while, she guarded the secrets of aging, the intractable nostalgia for childhood. Her mother and father had cleared out their retirement savings for that house.

Yes, Nelle had something to say to her mother. She nosed in the miscellany drawer for a notepad and pen, past a tangle of cords and an ornament shaped like a pickle. She found a blue-capped ballpoint, printed with their dentist’s name and number.

A year ago, dredging out the cotton wedged where the dentist had extracted two wisdom teeth, Nelle had been urged by her mother to clean it. Nelle mixed hot water and table salt. She drew the solution with a syringe and aimed it blindly into the two new holes in her gums. Like a bolt through the nerve to her skull, the pain made her eyes well and brought her horizontal.

Nelle did not excel at articulating her feelings. It appeared so easy for others, as easy as dipping your hands into a stream and bringing up water. She had written, “Dear Mom.” Then, she allowed herself to watch the women thwack the ball back and forth until one sent it with a muffled snatch into the net.

Nelle muted the match so she could hear her thoughts. Still, in her mind, the puck, puck, puck. The question was not how to first love, but how to second love, how to love third and fourth, ad infinitum.

This was the truth: the more Nelle loved someone, the harder it was to tell them. The more she knew someone, the more she despised what she saw of them in herself. Her expression of love, like a pen dipped in water, bent at a certain degree, refracting away from kindness and toward irony. Sentimentality was more terrifying than the dentist.

She realized she had, irrationally, blamed the pain of the salt water on her mother.

Mom had thought maybe you would ask her, her sister had said. To be your maid of honor. It was not unheard of, but she had not thought of it. Instead, she had asked her sister. Her mother never mentioned a thing.

Nelle’s knuckles grazed her mother’s door. Chicken. She knocked, but softly. She pressed her ear against the door. No movement. She turned the knob and pushed open the door, the light from the hallway making a cone of yellow on the floor. From the doorway, she could see her father’s shoulder, turned toward the wall. Her mother, the covers up to her chin, had opened her mouth in her sleep. On her nightstand lay a pile of books.

No, the question was not how to love. It was not even how to sustain love. It was how to answer love, love that surpasses your expectation or your deserving, love that has no concern for fairness or reciprocation.

It was a teaspoon of salt for a cup of water.

Nelle retreated down the stairs, taking a spatula from the counter and practicing her stroke, envisioning the form of the perfect serve, pronating her wrist, the ball spinning so fast her opponent would not lift a foot.

+++

Kelsey Peterson’s work appears or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Meridian, West Branch, Witness, and PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019 (Catapult). She teaches at Penn State and lives with her husband and daughter in central Pennsylvania.

Join our newsletter?