Match Point

I started playing tennis over a year ago after not picking up a racket for nearly ten years. I found it incredibly relaxing to channel all of my fury into hitting, actually demolishing that yellow ball. It was less a game about finesse as aggression, my aggression, that is. I loved the running around, shamelessly grunting as I tried to kill this ball that had done nothing to warrant such ferocity. I was not out there to get a 'game' or to become a Tennis Bunny, the name I call all those women who make tennis their new found career. But rather, it was a way for me to relieve the excess amounts of stress that I suffer from for so many reasons, most of them genetically coded.

In LA, I knew a group of women, who all belonged to a particular tennis/swim club, most of their days spent playing in matches, practicing, and gossiping about all their fellow cohorts at this club--which I called THE CESSPOOL. I found them, as a group, quite off putting in their exclusivity and snobbishness about their particular world, which to me felt like a gilded cage or high-class prison. Their tennis playing was on some list, along with book club, scrap booking, and wine tasting, all of it designated for those aspiring or clinging to this precarious world of privilege. It is, I'm afraid to say, a world I know intimately. Yes, I do, did belong to a book club, although my club, I felt, was comprised of smart, interesting, intellectually engaged women, none of them remotely close to being labeled a Tennis Bunny. But that's my opinion, right? Someone outside our club may have found us lacking in so many ways, all of it depending on how smart, educated, and how intense their own snobbish meter.

So, in LA, I was relieved to be playing on public courts, far from the Cesspool that was the tennis club to which I would most likely have joined. It freed me to play as hard or not as I needed. There was no danger of running into one of those Tennis Bunnies, whose prying questions about what I'm doing or not would surely be repeated ad nauseum once they had walked far enough away to not be overheard recounting this discussion with someone on the other end of their cell phone. In fact, my tennis playing was something I didn't discuss with the members of the Tennis Bunnies sect. It was my secret, actually. Yes, I still engaged in the other activities that seemed de riguer for those in this class, but again most of it was far from the judgment of those that belonged to this particular group. My vehemence about the club and its members was something I thought just another aspect of life in LA I found reprehensible--a city that is not a city since it felt like living in a hyper-real Mayberry.

Oh, how wrong I was. It seems there are Tennis Bunnies everywhere, even on Martha's Vineyard. I found myself cringing in recognition at the same vapidness in the Tennis Bunnies here at Farm Neck. It seems there is some mold that churns out this particular breed in every state, every town, every Tennis Club. Or, is it simply that this particular sport, something which I enjoy so much, attracts all of those with characteristics I find so discomfiting? Yes, I am a hater of my own class, it seems. No matter how much I like to pretend to be a philosophical Marxist, I can't seem to shake my own inclination for, towards all those things that designate my class. See, I prefer playing at Farm Neck where the instructors, all male, all overgrown adolescents in adult bodies, are available to hit with me. The public courts in Oak Bluffs seem, well, dingy in comparison. Terrible to admit, but it is in fact how I feel each time I drive past these public courts.

So, I go to Farm Neck, gritting my teeth whenever a group of these women--why are so many of them blond?--come to play. I eavesdrop on their conversations about their 'kids--it seems all of their kids are in some baseball league together--,' 'book club'--everyone seems to be reading the newest written by the author of The Kite Runner--, and the mention of someone they are acquainted who is well-known for something--since this is the Vineyard and not LA, it is usually a writer and not a producer or actor. Their smugness is what I find so suffocating.

When I observe them, I can imagine them as they had been in high school, all of their insecurities or meanness barely hidden under the mask of adulthood. They are again vying for some top spot, although their 40ish, squishy bodies now makes it impossible for them to become the Homecoming Queen, if any of them were ever close to such a title. Instead, their competition is played within the arena of everything else in their lives: their spouses--whose makes more money, whose got the promotion, whose summer home is the grandest, who belongs to what yacht club--, and their kids, those unfortunate beings that are now shouldering the burden of the failures or disappointments of their mothers and, in most cases, their fathers. I assume, rightly or wrongly, most of them don't work, and have no real desire to do so. I know, I'm being incredibly narrow-minded in my own judgments since some of them, much to my shock, might be a Cardiologist, Professor, Marketing Executive--a glorified term for those who sell s**t we don't need--, and perhaps, even an anthropologist. Yet, I find this highly unlikely since most of my friends with rigorous careers have so little mental pr physical time for tennis, other than a quick hour lesson or run around on the courts, and certainly no time for the endless, inane discussions.

This being inside particular worlds, yet not truly inside is a familiar place for me. Perhaps it has do with being a child of transnationals. Perhaps not. I am starting to think this may be the way I am built, this need to be an observer, no matter how involved I am in whatever particular world. And so, I watch. And I take note. What I'm discovering is that class, this thing our country claims it doesn't abide by, is constantly in play at all times. It is the master behind all the chess moves of all the players--us. Whether we become pawns or the Queen is what most of us spend our entire lives battling. And then throw money--the desperate need to accumulate, the desperate need to spend what we accumulate--well, that is just the match to a building of sticks, dry sticks that is. So, I head off again for another lesson at Farm Neck, bracing myself for the most inane discussions I will, most likely, overhear. I wish I could say I find these women amusing instead of the profound sadness I feel for me and for them.