I didn’t want to fall in love with a hometown boy. Even worse, a hometown ex-varsity tennis player who knew the intricate rivalries of the Orange County high schools.
Years of tennis trained me to define myself—to see my intrinsic value—as everything I was not. I couldn’t master the kick serve of the #1 singles player, couldn’t finish conditioning drills as fast, couldn’t defeat her to claim the spot for my own. Our #1 player was none other than my older sister, whereas I was relegated to #2 on every iteration of the lineup. To her smug condescension, I defaulted to increasingly desperate measures, including challenging her while she was injured, to no avail. Her basement was spades higher than my ceiling.
Now that I’m years removed from the grime of varsity sports, I know that none of it mattered. Who cares if you have a letterman in your closet? Apparently, our old coach was suspended for making untoward advances to other players—related or not, I found it suspicious that he always had a select group in his classroom after 6th period. To be honest, I never liked tennis, but it was easier for my mom to drop me and my sister off at camp together as a matched pair.
“Don’t you want to be just like Sissy?” my parents cooed.
Really, what I craved the most was to be acknowledged as a standalone. As a teenager, I saw my sister as an asymptote that I could only strive toward, instead of a set of defined coordinates that I could reach. I was exasperated to be destined to push the boundaries of her enormous, immovable shadow, forever known as ‘the younger one’.
Nobody worked me harder than Coach, who’d sit behind the fence on game days and tally my statistics in a black Moleskine. #2, University High School, versus #3, Corona del Mar: 5 double faults, 4 backhands in the net, 3 missed volleys, 1 passing shot. Final score: 6-4. Even a victory was never enough to satiate him—he was fixated on the space between the player I was and the one he wanted to mold me into. And so, he continued to push. In return, I showed that I was malleable, that I permitted my self-worth to be under the tyrannical rule of numbers.
Meanwhile, my sister was the darling who set CIF championship records, blooming into a tantalizing prospect for college recruiters. Whenever I saw Coach beam as he watched her, Moleskine resolutely closed, I wanted to shove them down a flight of stairs.
Fortunately, blissfully, by the grace of whatever God presides over traumatized Vietnamese kids, I was injured after my sophomore season and used this as an excuse to quit the team. I ran as far as I could from southern California after graduating high school. From my bastion in New York, I watched as my sister fulfilled her filial duties by going to medical school. In her dermatology residency, she began dating a surgeon with an Instagram page dedicated to shirtless gym pictures. I imagine they’ll settle down in Beverly Hills and have boring Google Calendar-scheduled sex to keep the romance alive, only to be interrupted when he’s paged to go back to the hospital.
I didn’t plan to meet Eric in New York. I almost ghosted him on Hinge because he seemed too kind to not be a human trafficker in disguise. At the eleventh hour, my roommate nearly burned down our kitchen, and as smoke filled our apartment, I resigned myself to shave my legs and meet him for dinner.
And, indeed, he was kind and charming, at ease with his place in the world while striving to reinvent what was possible. I would learn from how he greeted each day with cautious optimism, his reminders that my spirit is stronger than my insecurity. But that evening, we sailed through the pleasantries before he admitted that he’d found my LinkedIn profile. The mutual realization: we’d grown up half an hour from each other, attending the same tennis academy a decade before. We’d never crossed paths since the coaches separated us by skillset, and he was placed on the coveted top court with my sister. As a player, he admired her agility and drive, but as a person, he found her prissy and insufferable. We bonded over this, giggling into a shared bottle of cabernet, and as the night progressed, he worked up the courage to intertwine his hand with mine across the table. While he lamented about the nerd he was in high school, laden with anxiety over breathing in the vicinity of girls, I knew then that I wanted him to be the keeper of my secrets.
As we prepared to return to California for the holidays, Eric asked me to consider playing tennis with him and his college buddies. He wanted to relish the nostalgia of their undergraduate years while including me—his present and, he hoped, his future—in the process. His best friend in Pasadena had a court in his parents’ backyard; once we were properly worn out, we’d pile into Eric’s Prius, barreling through the 110 to feast at their favorite Korean barbeque joint. To my surprise, I didn’t resist. My intuition told me to say yes, that things could be—no, they were—different now, and I listened.
We were to play doubles, me and Eric versus his Claremont bros. For the first time in years, I revisited an old ritual: lacing up my shoes, threading my ponytail into a cap, and lathering myself in the waxy Neutrogena sunscreen that stained the backseat of my mom’s Lincoln Navigator.
On the court, Eric opened a new can of tennis balls, and that metallic scent—rubbery, sticky, bloody—immediately returned me to the period of my life where I felt like I was being hunted. My breath caught in my throat as I braced myself to be scrutinized for the most miniscule infractions. Gradually, though, I settled into a familiar rhythm, and as I heard Eric’s footsteps synchronize with his measured breaths, I realized that tennis could be a dance, a partnership. The burden of excellence was no longer mine to bear, whether alone or at all.
At the baseline, I fumbled some backhands, hit even more out of bounds. When that happened, though, Eric turned to flash me an impish grin; when he missed his own shots, he laughed as he extended me his fist to bump. It was bizarre to me that, here, a fist bump was simply a fist bump, not a barbed reminder to focus, that my best was not enough. Perfection was no longer the goal; nobody was keeping tally of my shortcomings to leverage against me later. Basking in this newfound freedom, I watched myself glide across the court from above. I was lithe, confident, joyous. Uplifted by my none other than my partner.
Hours later, sitting shotgun, I watched Eric roll down the sunroof, the angled lines of his jaw protruding as he tilted his head back in full-bodied laughter. His friends queued the EDM we all somehow listened to in the mid 2010’s, even if on opposite sides of the country.
California’s warm, pervasive afternoon glow bathed us like a baptism, casting this moment of weightlessness into bronze. Miraculously, as the speedometer inched towards 80, I felt the claws of my past unhook themselves from my present, and I knew then that the ghost of regret was relief.
*****
Brittany Pham is a Vietnamese American writer and California transplant in New York. She hosts the book club at Yu & Me Books, New York City’s first Asian American female-owned bookstore, and reviews books on her Instagram @scienceowlreads. She is working toward receiving her PhD in pharmacology.
