Doubles Play

by Sharon Mollerus

“I can’t live without this knife--you don’t mind, do you?” Helen asked, pulling out a gleaming cleaver with a broad black handle. “Nothing like it for quartering a chicken. You won’t need it being vegetarian.”

“Please, keep whatever you like,” Vanessa said.

“Neal won’t mind eating your tofu and asparagus? I always had trouble getting him to eat his greens—except for green apples.”

“I think it’s all in how you present things, with color and texture.”

“He’s into texture—all things tactile. But will he eat it?” Helen wrapped the knife in a cherry-colored towel and added it to her box with the aluminum plates. Vanessa’s husband Jack was no veggie either. Every night he fired up the grill at 8 or 9 when he got home and flipped the blood rare steaks and stabbed the sausages with a two-pronged fork as they sizzled and spat. He didn’t mind chicken parts either, whether unskinned splayed breasts or fleshy legs that bubbled as they browned over the blue flames. When Vanessa went veggie it was a bone of contention, he had told Helen; it was the beginning of the end.

”Neal can pick up a hamburger on his way home. No expectations, right? I’m just sorry you’re the one who ends up with less rooms. If Jennifer would agree to live here, it would be much more comfortable for you.” Vanessa brushed a blonde curl out of her eyes with a missile-shaped melon-colored nail.

“Fewer rooms. Besides, she hasn’t said she’s moving with me, only that she’s not staying here. What’s the difference--same boxy two-story sand-colored house with small square rooms and tiny windows, except in this model they chopped an office out of the living room.”

“I think the Delphi and the Luna models are both nice. You need the apple-corer?”

“Just leave yours there. Anyway, isn’t this all about what Neal wants? How sensitive he is to change? Never mind Jennifer; he’s the one who makes everybody else move.” Helen’s dark bangs swayed over her thick eyebrows as she opened and shut drawers.

“Every negative can be a positive—he likes continuity and stability.” Vanessa emptied a drawer over a towel on the counter and sorted the jumbled utensils into a sectioned plastic insert.

“Stable, is he?” Helen coughed out a sound halfway between a snort and a sigh and held a bundle of long metal skewers across her palm; they had large loop handles and points at the other end for spearing. “I suppose you might use these too—for veggie kabobs.”

“We can split them. Anyway, I believe some changes are necessary and salvageable.”

“Salvific did you mean, or perhaps just salubrious?” As soon as she said it, Helen winced at playing this silly English teacher game with simple Vanessa, a part-time cashier at an auto parts store, and it reminded her to turn in the name change paperwork to payroll at the community college.

“Useful. Whatever. People change. And I believe that as long as everybody’s happy, that’s what’s important. Jennifer should be old enough to see that everyone is going to be better off this way.”

“Everyone except herself, evidently. She’d as soon divorce us all and live in foster care.”

“If Jennifer isn’t happy, it’s because she refuses to be. Jack always said he would trade me in before I was forty—I guess I beat him to it.” Vanessa tittered and handed over the heavy mallet with waffle spikes. “I won’t need this either.”

Vanessa was blonde with buttery skin and ten years younger than her neighbor Helen. She moved lightly and was chatty on the tennis court where the four met and played doubles together, whereas Helen played with verve and attention. Before they switched sides, Helen and Neal won together when he was on, but more often he was off. Since Vanessa was unruffled by the score, there was now less spatting on the court. Jack was indifferent at play, despite his usual sarcastic remarks, but consistent, and Helen noticed he had a better view of Vanessa’s butt now, like every time she left the net to run back to the baseline.

“Will you be keeping the tennis trophies on the mantel over there with Jack like I did?” Vanessa asked.

“Those cheesy things they give to participants because they’re just there and it’s all so good-sporty? They tend to topple when someone slams the door.”

“I think they’re meaningful. They remind me of how I met Neal—of how we all met.”

“Why don’t you bring them here then?”

“I will. You’re not sentimental, are you?” Vanessa asked.

“Couples photo session. Double wedding and connecting honeymoon suites. You accuse me of not being romantic?”

“I think it’s therapeutic, like Sylvia says, with everything open and together.” Sylvia, their couples counselor, was facilitating a smooth transition for their cross-marriage, as she called it. “Don’t you think, Helen—subconsciously, I mean—that you might be encouraging Jennifer? Are you having second thoughts about next Saturday? It’s normal.”

“About Neal? Not hardly.”

“About Jack. I feel I should warn you that when the honeymoon’s over, he’ll go back to his double personality, Narcissist & Ratfink. You never know which one you’re with when he switches off the lights.” Vanessa ruffled back her curls on both sides with her index fingers.

“And what will Neal do other than drink and follow you around like a spaniel with his nose to your ass? Will you two have enough to live on?”

“Jack wasn’t even through law school when we started going out. You see how far he’s come. I can worry about Neal and his job.”

“Which new middle manager position would that be opening soon?”

“I believe he’s right that he shouldn’t waste his talent in the wrong position doing something that won’t even help his resume.”

“These glasses were from our wedding,” Helen said, moving from the kitchen drawers to the china hutch with the beveled glass doors. She held up a narrow fluted piece with a pink cast. “I wonder if it’s possible for Neal to be more drunk for our cross-wedding than he was at our own. I’m sure he’ll try.”

“Isn’t it 7:30 already? I thought Jennifer was supposed to be home right after school.”

“I’ll take care of Jennifer. If you get Neal out of my hair, I’ll be grateful.”

“Doubles at ten tomorrow.”

“Of course.”

* * *

Of the 100 plus invited to the nuptials, 18 RSVP’d. Only two attended of the four sets of relatives: Vanessa’s mother, who sat in the back row of metal folding seats arranged on the lawn, and Neal’s four-times married 63-year-old great-aunt, now living with a man twenty years her junior. Jennifer was the conspicuous no-show. The four-year-old girl and boy twins of Jack’s client carried the flowers and rings. The ceremony was dispatched quickly by a judge friend of Jack’s with the couples vowing simultaneously and the guests subsequently paraded from the garden to the reception room.

Since they needed at least fifty guests to have a choice of entrees, Jack chose the roast beef for everyone. At their elevated table for four, Vanessa gave Jack her beef, and since the string beans had been tossed with bits of bacon, she scraped them over his plate as well. When it came time for the cake, Vanessa smeared strawberry frosting over Neal’s face, sketching a witless grin from one ear lobe to the other. Helen aimed Jack’s piece deftly between his teeth and over his tongue, the way she used to spoon in Jennifer’s pureed carrots, and then she wiped his moustache with her napkin. At some point after the dancing got closer and more shoes were kicked off and lost, and after several guests had to be guided out by more sober spouses, all the newlyweds left in a stretched white limousine with tangled salmon streamers and silver cans clattering down the street behind them.

In Jack and Helen’s suite, the couples sat on the long couch together and opened a bottle of champagne and another one while the women chatted in the center. Jack leered both at Vanessa’s bare back and Helen’s low neckline. Neal drank glass after glass of frothy spirits, with his glazed eyes glancing off the round glass table with the glare of the fluorescent lights. At the bottom of the bottles, Jack helped Neal into the adjoining room. The couples parted.

“First night,” Helen said to Jack, after changing in the bathroom. She swayed down the hall to bed in an all-lace white chemise beneath an open pearl kimono with am empty champagne glass dangling by the stem in her hand. That morning she had spent 45 minutes trying on and trying to choose between a red teddy with fur collar, a black French maid set with garters and thigh-high fishnets, or just a white mesh chemise split neck to navel with a thong. She had decided on the teddy until at dinner Jack stated he hated red; she had then pushed it to the back of the drawer.

“Not first, but new game. Love love. That went smoothly,” he said.

“For everyone except Jennifer.”

“Jennifer doesn’t choose who her mother sleeps with.”

“Neal thinks he does.”

“That’s the most brilliant part,” Jack said.

“What happens if we all get bored?” She asked it with her back to him, as she slipped off her robe. Tall and large-boned, though proportionate, she thought, she still felt conspicuous with her big feet and straight banged hair. Neal had never appreciated her unique dimensions, and once—he was drunk, of course—had called her a brown Brunhilde. That time she twisted the freckled flesh of his underarm into a purple knob. Jack instead focused on the less distinctive anatomical region under her amber curlicues and on her prodigious energy—thanks, he’d never know, to the eight-week “Vigor in Intimate Expression” course she’d taken at her college from a visiting nationally-renowned sexologist and its prescribed daily exercises.

“Then we just open that door and switch back,” he answered. She turned and tried to read his broad smile; baffled, she giggled.

“Or check out another neighborhood,” she grinned back.

“Whatever.” As she knelt on the bed, Jack slipped his fingers under the straps and split the gown as he pushed it off her shoulders. He pinched her two breasts with double sets of fingers like crab pincers and ran his palms down her hips and in, to the flapped vortex of her legs.

* * *

“This is boring,” Neal said as he stood at the baseline leaning on his racket like a cane. A green ball glowed inside his gleaming white polyester pocket.

“You’re supposed to be going to the net, darling,” Vanessa said, grabbing a buttock.

“Let him play the way he likes. Maybe he should just sit down and you can volley for him,” Helen said. She stood close to the net, bent over with her hands on her knees and catching her breath as the sweat streamed down the tanned V of her neckline.

“Just be a sport and play to the end of the game, Neal,” Jack said, smiling. He pinched Helen’s nipple as they all faced off again over the sagging net of white diamonds.

“Go on without me.” Neal pinned the racket into his elbows behind him and walked off the court while the others followed. At the fountain in front of the bathroom, he splashed water over his head and pulled a beer out of their shared cooler, twisting the top into his glistening mesh polo shirt. Helen peeled open a diet coke.

“What’s with the purple pup tent?” Neal asked her, indicating the canvas lean-to staked against the rust-colored brick bathroom structure next to the gated pool. He was swinging his tennis racket over his head with his right hand and guzzling beer from the left.

“I told you, that’s where Jennifer lives now.” The ten-year-old had moved by the time they all came back from the honeymoon, leaving everything in her old room except some old clothes and a few books. Now she ate plastic-boxed salads and vanilla milkshakes from the Dairy Queen, bathed in the outdoor pool shower, and spent her days sitting cross-legged in her tent reading. Vanessa would come up to the tent flap and coo for her to come to dinner, while Jennifer flung back aphorisms from odd books. Her mother would sit at the shallow end of the pool splashing her feet and try to talk with her, but Helen refused to plead or bring her anything--on the advice of Sylvia.

“If you talk to her, she asks to be called Jacinta.”

“You’re not supposed to be humoring her,” Jack said.

“You try talking to her—she’s not humorous.”

The girl’s voice announced from the tent: “Is there some One Principle from which all take their grace, or is there a beauty peculiar to the embodied and another for the bodiless?”

“Plotinus,” Helen explained. “Some bum passed her a volume from his shopping cart over the homeowners’ fence in exchange for a carton of orange juice.”

“I thought I saw someone floating over the pool under the moon the other night,” Neal said dropping his voice low.

“You mean floating in the pool?”

“Forget it.”

“You were the one floating over the moon, you and your green apple schnapps,” Helen said, raising her voice to roll over the recreation grounds and looking back at Jack and Vanessa who were whispering something together.

“Under the moon. Whatever. Don’t you think she’s overreacting?”

“She says she’s bored of being with us.”

“What’s more boring than sitting in a tent all day?” he asked.

“Don’t worry, Sylvia says she’ll come home in the fall when the evenings get cooler.”

* * *

“I have something to tell everybody,” Vanessa announced. It was their weekly couples breakfast on a Saturday morning in mid-fall. The breakfasts were Sylvia’s idea. When it was suggested at their session, Jack said it was such a great idea he thought Sylvia herself should come and cook. The therapist bobbed her pointed sandaled toe in the air off her crossed legs and asked if he didn’t think his statement might be latently hostile. Helen thought it more patent and was feeling rancorous herself, since every time they discussed Neal’s alcohol problem her ex-husband rotated it into a focus on his ex-wife’s own nagging. At another session Jack suggested they could call themselves “out-laws,” as a variation on “in-laws,” which might better describe their continued relatedness. No one knew how to take that one. Nor did anyone have a solution to the latest problem of what to do with Jennifer now that the homeowner’s association had stopped heating the pool and the evening temperatures were dropping.

“What now?” Helen asked as she flipped pancakes in her old house. They were served as fast as she slipped them off the griddle. Vanessa always had some announcement for these occasions, and she could never wait until everyone sat down. It would be, “Guess what: Neal got an interview and they really liked him,” or, “Hey, everybody! Jacinta ate the Waldorf salad I offered her yesterday, except she picked the apples out.” Vanessa stood with her plate held out toward Helen for pancakes while she picked up two pieces of bacon with tongs and put them on her plate. Helen poured more batter out in four even rounds.

“What’s with the meat?” the cook asked.

“That’s connected to my announcement. I’m pregnant everybody,” Vanessa said. “So I need the protein. And besides being vegetarian is boring.”

“What the hell. We all agreed,” Helen said, sputtering. “It’s in the mutual prenuptial. Nobody has a new kid.”

“Wh--?” Neal started and jumped up. “It wasn’t me. I swear I wore condoms every time.”

“How would you know when you’re in such a loving boozed haze every night?” Helen returned. The pancakes hissed, releasing puffs of air through crusting craters of dough as they curled into charcoal underneath. She held the spatula out at Vanessa as if to smack her hands. Vanessa moved to the head of the table and set down her full plate, smiling with her curls bobbing. Jack, at her side, lowered his twisted grin to the table and poured syrup over his pancakes in wide swirls.

“What do you think is so funny, Jack?” Helen asked.

“I think we should all be supportive,” Jack said. “That’s what Sylvia would tell us.” He folded shreds of pancakes over and stuffed them in his mouth.

“This is not going to be a problem for anybody,” Vanessa said, still standing.

“Why not? What are you planning now?” Helen asked. “Jack’s right. We should all talk about this, together.”

“Don’t worry about me. I have everything I need right here.” She clutched her purse to her stomach and waved them all off as she walked out in her cut-offs and T-shirt, shuffling through the unraked speckled yellow leaf mounds over the lawn. Jack finished off her pancakes and bacon, while Neal trailed her to the edge of the property, asking, “Tell me, is it mine?” Vanessa didn’t turn back as she padded down the center of the tree-lined street in white flip-flops toward the open highway with her left arm and thumb already thrust straight out at her side.

2005