6-0, 6-0
I can imagine my mother on the basketball court in the 30’s, a level-headed point guard directing traffic and sinking another long one from beyond the key. And it’s easy to picture her as catcher on a softball team since we once sat once on the couch looking at her newspaper clippings—home-runs beyond the track, spot-on pegs from home plate to second. But I can’t even begin to imagine my mother on a tennis court in the 30’s. My mom, a pert little thing in a white tennis skirt exposing our ample Polish thighs? Not! My mother leaning on the net after a weekly tennis lesson, a coy smile tugging at the corners of her lips? No way. Yet, self-taught, my mother, Julia, sliced her way through opponent after opponent, working her way up, at last, to the city tennis final.
Yes, Julie was lucky she could play any sport in those days. She was a girl. In her maroon and white uniform, she trotted the North Minneapolis miles to school from Washington Avenue and 34th to St. Phillip’s on 26th and Bryant. The pastor, Father Frank Rakowski, who was rumored to have a taste for young boys in the rectory, had no time for girls. Yes, he was an ecumenical pioneer, gathering together the disparate elements of the Northside, staging his own “seder” on Holy Thursday, in which he pow-wowed with rabbis from below Plymouth Avenue and African American preachers from below Broadway. And yes, his football teams struck terror into opponents. His maroon and white boys could take on the fighting Irish, if need be. But girls? Nie! Nie!
So thank God for Father John Sliwa, the assistant pastor, who lavished kosher affection on his girls as they chalked up victory after victory on court and field. Basketball? Yes. Softball. Yes. Tennis? Come on! Is this a country club? By the time I attended St. Phillip’s, Father John had been sent elsewhere, and we girls had nothing to call our own except jacks and balls and jump ropes and an occasional leap into the wild blue yonder off a full-throttling swing.
Father Frank did notice me, though, probably impressed by my consistency. I shattered the same bedroom window in the rectory three times with a center-field home run from the playground. One day after school he sat me down. I should not waste my brains at North high when I graduated. No! I should attend the Catholic girls’ school, St. Anthony of Padua, across the Mississippi and the Broadway Bridge. Did I want to go there? No! Never! Not me! Nanette who roller-skated with me and my sisters on the smooth sidewalk by the Holy Rollers’ church went to St. Anthony’s, and she was mean and tough. Nanette elbowed us like Roller Derby off the sidewalk and into the grass whenever she got the chance. What if the whole school were a hornet’s nest of girls like Nanette? I didn’t want to grow up to be a meanie. No!
But my mother thought St. Anthony might be a good idea since it was a step up, and my mother was all about steps up. Higher-class Polacks with fox-fur collars lived across the river, over Northeast, and if I got a scholarship, she and dad would hand over the rest of the dough. I did it. And I loved it. Young Irish nuns with wild Irish brains cherished us body and soul, taught us which fork to use on the table, and challenged our narrow and racist ideas every chance they got.
But my mom’s tennis final? The way Julie told it, she’d put in a full day at North Star Woolen Mills, she and the other girls on the floor, woofing and warping their way through an 8-hour shift at the blanket looms while the mighty Mississippi hurtled over St. Anthony falls outside the factory window. Take a day off? Nie. She’d be fired. And her opponent? Sheeesh. Popping bon-bons at the Edina Country Club all day and getting her nails done! No wonder Julie lost. No wonder! Julie never recited the scores of that ignominious defeat, and we four girls never asked. 3-6, 3-6? 5-7, 5-7? 0-6,0-6? She’d lost. That’s all there was to it. Lost. She never lost! When my youngest sister had kids, she told them the Gramma Julie success story as she drove them out to tennis matches in the burbs. Wasn’t Julie like Joan of Arc, crossing into alien territory and prevailing? “She hung in there all the way, Gramma Julie. Never gave up. She was city champion. And never had a single tennis lesson in her life.”
But of course, when I think about it, Julie’s opponent’s day might have been less than perfect as well, fraught with fantasies of what she might meet on the court. Would a holy-roller-derbying Nanette swat balls at her in the warm-up, utter unseemly words under her breath, all civility thrown to the winds? Would she meet a fierce Serena-lookalike from North Minneapolis, one who would put her lessons to shame and prove that she was, indeed, only a club player from the burbs?
And why am I telling you this, imagining that day when the two women met? Of course, I now play tennis. Of course, I am no champion. I win some days, lose some days. I am supremely grateful for flashes of my mother’s muscle memory buried deep in my core and invoke her slice when I’m in a jam, but my body is also admixed with my father’s genes, anxiety seeping into a wimpy serve or a return over the fence for a home run.
And me and country clubs? In the 70’s, when I lived in Seattle, my partner had a social membership in the exclusive Tennis Club on Lake Washington, a few blocks from our house and our mostly Republican neighborhood. On my runs along the Lake Boulevard, as I sweat my lugubrious way down the tar, I would cast a wistful glance down on those perfect clay courts and the happy people in their tennis whites. Why not me? Why not? The gardens with their tulips, cherry blossoms, and tea roses sang in perfect harmony with racquets kissed by wind, humming like Aeolian harps. But my partner was not yet out to her parents and no amount of cajoling could convince her that she should get a full membership or that I would be an apt match for the goings-on down in paradise.
In time, the Tennis Club became a moot point. I moved on to a bunch of sweet pals on public courts, where I could be kind without always having to be a good girl and where I didn’t have to worry about what would come out of my mouth when someone posed that familiar question, “Just who are your people?” And in time, Betty and I freed ourselves from the closet, and didn’t Betty’s mother just love Johnny Mercer and “Ac-Cent-Tchu-ate the Positive” I could tinkle out on her spinet, an instrument that had been, for years and years, untouched and mute? So what if I never got to knock the clay out of my shoes?
And my mom, what did she do after her defeat by the country club? At 26, she married my dad, Siggy, and followed the rules set down for a good Polish woman, giving up all sports, except her addiction to fishing and adoration of Billie Jean King. When my father retired, the two moved out of the city to Lake Mille Lacs, where she angled her heart out, summer and winter, my father augering new holes for her as she shacked up in her 20-below canvas tent, its sides precariously pitched along pressure cracks of open water, shelves of ice hammering against each other like tectonic plates. A series of strokes eventually sent her and Siggy to an assisted living facility in south Minneapolis, my mom’s short term memory fizzled and blitzed, gasping to remember the simplest of details.
When I began playing in a Wednesday afternoon singles league, I made it a point to visit her after my matches. As Julie sat in her chair at the window, I began my usual shtick. Yes, indeed, I had played tennis that very afternoon. Just got off the court, in fact. O yes. O yes. It was this woman from Edina. Yes, Edina. And, did I beat her? Of course, I beat her. The score? When I said 6-3, 6-3, my mother let out a whoop. Yes! Five minutes later, after she’d counted another three jets on their way up from the airport, I’d tell her my story again. Yes, I did play tennis today. Singles. The woman was from the Edina Country Club. Yes, the country club. Of course, I beat her. Yes. The score? 6-2, 6-2. And so on and so on, my mother ecstatic with the thrill of each win, and the final and absolute thromping of my opponent at 6-0, 6-0! Yes! Yes! How sweet the sound of each resounding victory, the distant strains of triumph in my mother’s ears, the memory of a memory of an acute loss banished for one single, silly moment—-success, indeed, as Emily Dickinson would say, counted sweetest by those who…….do succeed.
was a bit bristly in those days as we discussed our class differences. Would I embarrass her family and their old money?
like the ones she bought us as kids and that we used to hit balls over the fence in Fairview Park in North Minneapolis. Don Budge lives! Hitler invading Poland
What if I embarrassed her or her family? I admit that I was still my mother’s daughter, bristly at times at “economic disparities,” but I would have behaved myself for the privilege of playing in paradise. In all the years of our relationship, I never set a foot in that compound. A couple of years ago, when I attended her father’s funeral out in Seattle, her partner, also a life-long member of the Tennis Club, remarked that I had never once played tennis at the club, had I? Back home in the Midwest and since then, I have been invited to play at my share of country clubs,
6-0, 6-0
I can imagine my mother on the basketball court in the 30’s, a level-headed point guard directing traffic and, sinking another long one from beyond the key. And it’s easy to picture her as catcher on a softball team since we once sat once on the couch looking at her Star Tribune clippings—home-runs beyond the track, spot-on pegs from home plate to second. But I can’t even begin to imagine my mother on a tennis court in the 30’s. My mom, a pert little thing in a white tennis skirt exposing our ample Polish thighs? Not! My mother leaning on the net after a weekly tennis lesson, a coy smile tugging at the corners of her lips? Nope. Yet, self-taught, my mother, Julia, sliced her way through opponent after opponent, working her way up, at last, to the city tennis final.
Yes, Julie was lucky she could play any sport in those days. She was a girl. In her maroon and white uniform, she trotted the North Minneapolis miles to school from Washington Avenue and 34th to St. Phillip’s on 26th and Bryant. The pastor, Father Frank Rakowski, who was rumored to have a taste for young boys in the rectory, had no time for girls. Yes, he was an ecumenical pioneer, gathering together the disparate elements of Northside, staging his own “seder” on Holy Thursday, in which he pow-wowed with rabbis from below Plymouth Avenue and African American preachers from below Broadway. And yes, his football teams struck terror into opponents. His maroon and white boys could take on the fighting Irish, if need be. But girls? Nie! Nie!
So thank God for Father John Sliwa, the assistant pastor, who lavished kosher affection on his girls as they chalked up victory after victory on court and field. Basketball? Yes. Softball. Yes. Tennis? Come on! Is this a country club? By the time I attended St. Phillip’s, Father John had been sent elsewhere, and we girls had nothing to call our own except jacks and balls and jump ropes and an occasional leap into the wild blue yonder off a full-throttling swing.
Father Frank did notice me, though, probably impressed by my consistency. I shattered the same bedroom window in the rectory three times with a center-field home run from the playground. One day after school he sat me down. I should not waste my brains at North high when I graduated. No! I should attend the Catholic girls’ school, St. Anthony of Padua, across the Mississippi and the Broadway Bridge. Did I want to go there? No! Never! Not me! Nanette who roller-skated with me and my sisters on the smooth sidewalk by the Holy Rollers’ church went to St. Anthony’s, and she was mean and tough. She elbowed us like Roller Derby off the sidewalk and into the grass when she got the chance. What if the whole school were a hornet’s nest of girls like Nanette? I didn’t want to grow up to be a meanie. No!
But my mother thought St. Anthony might be a good idea since it was a step up, and my mother was all about steps up. Higher-class Polacks with fox-fur collars lived across the river, over Northeast, and if I got a scholarship, she and dad would hand over the rest of the dough. I did it. And I loved it. Young Irish nuns with wild Irish brains cherished us body and soul, taught us which fork to use on the table, and challenged our narrow and racist ideas every chance they got.
But my mom’s tennis final? The way Julie told it, she’d put in a full day at North Star Woolen Mills, she and the other girls on the floor, woofing and warping their way through an 8-hour shift at the blanket looms while the mighty Mississippi hurtled over St. Anthony falls outside the factory window. Take a day off? Nie. She’d be fired. And her opponent? Sheeesh. Popping bon-bons at the Edina Country Club all day and getting her nails done! No wonder Julie lost. No wonder! Julie never recited the scores of that ignominious defeat, and we four girls never asked. 3-6, 3-6? 5-7, 5-7? 0-6,0-6? She’d lost. That’s all there was to it. Lost. She never lost! When she became a mother, my youngest sister did tell a different story about Gramma Julie while driving her boys out to tennis matches in the burbs. Wasn’t Julie like Joan of Arc, crossing into alien territory and prevailing? “She hung in there all the way, Gramma Julie. Never gave up. She won! Never had a single tennis lesson in her life.”
But of course, when I think about it, Julie’s opponent’s day might have been less than perfect as well, fraught with fantasies of what she might meet on the court. Would a holy-roller-derbying Nanette swat balls at her in the warm-up, utter unseemly words under her breath, all civility thrown to the winds? Would she meet a fierce Serena-lookalike from North Minneapolis, one who would put her lessons to shame and prove that she was, indeed, only a club player from the burbs?
And why am I telling you this, imagining that day when the two women met? Of course, I now play tennis. Of course, I am no champion. I win some days, lose some days. I am supremely grateful for flashes of my mother’s muscle memory buried deep in my core and invoke her slice when I’m in a jam, but my body is also admixed with my father’s genes, anxiety seeping into a wimpy serve or a return over the fence for a home run.
And me and country clubs? In the 70’s, when I lived in Seattle, my partner had a social membership in the exclusive Tennis Club on Lake Washington, a few blocks from our house and our mostly Republican neighborhood. On my runs along the Lake Boulevard, as I sweat my lugubrious way down the tar, I would cast a wistful glance down on those perfect clay courts and the happy people in their tennis whites. Why not me? Why not? The gardens with their tulips, cherry blossoms, and tea roses sang in perfect harmony with racquets kissed by wind, humming like Aeolian harps. But my partner was not yet out to her parents and no amount of cajoling could convince her that she should get a full membership or that I would be an apt match for the goings-on down in paradise.
In time, the Tennis Club became a moot point. I moved on to a bunch of sweet pals on public courts, where I could be kind without always having to be a good girl and where I didn’t have to worry about what would come out of my mouth when someone posed that familiar question, “Just who are your people?” And in time, Ellen and I freed ourselves from the closet, and didn’t Ellen’s mother just love the Johnny Mercer and “Ac-Cent-Tchu-ate the Positive” I could tinkle out on her spinet, an instrument that had been, for years and years, untouched and mute? So what if I never got to knock the clay out of my shoes?
And my mom, what did she do after her defeat by the country club? At 26, she married my dad, Siggy, and followed the rules set down for a good Polish woman, giving up all sports, except her addiction to fishing and adoration of Billie Jean King. When my father retired, the two moved out of the city to Lake Mille Lacs, where she angled her heart out, summer and winter, my father augering new holes for her as she shacked up in her 20-below canvas tent, its sides precariously pitched along pressure cracks of open water, shelves of ice hammering against each other like tectonic plates. A series of strokes eventually sent her and Siggy to an assisted living facility in south Minneapolis, my mom’s short term memory fizzled and blitzed, gasping to remember the simplest of details.
When I began playing a Wednesday afternoon singles league, I made it a point to visit her after my matches. As Julie sat in her chair at the window, I began my usual shtick. Yes, indeed, I had played tennis that very afternoon. Just got off the court, in fact. O yes. O yes. It was this woman from Edina. Yes, Edina. And, did I beat her? Of course, I beat her. The score? When I said 6-3, 6-3, my mother let out a whoop. Yes! Five minutes later, after she’d counted another three jets on their way up from the airport, I’d tell her my story again. Yes, I did play tennis today. Singles. The woman was from the Edina Country Club. Yes, the country club. Of course, I beat her. Yes. The score, 6-2, 6-2. And so on and so on, my mother ecstatic with the thrill of each win, and the final and absolute thromping of my opponent at 6-0, 6-0! Yes! Yes! How sweet the sound of each resounding victory, the distant strains of triumph in my mother’s ears, the memory of a memory of an acute loss banished for one single, silly moment—-success, indeed, as Emily Dickinson would say, counted sweetest by those who…….did succeed.
was a bit bristly in those days as we discussed our class differences. Would I embarrass her family and their old money?
like the ones she bought us as kids and that we used to hit balls over the fence in Fairview Park in North Minneapolis. Don Budge lives! Hitler invading Poland
What if I embarrassed her or her family? I admit that I was still my mother’s daughter, bristly at times at “economic disparities,” but I would have behaved myself for the privilege of playing in paradise. In all the years of our relationship, I never set a foot in that compound. A couple of years ago, when I attended her father’s funeral out in Seattle, her partner, also a life-long member of the Tennis Club, remarked that I had never once played tennis at the club, had I? Back home in the Midwest and since then, I have been invited to play at my share of country clubs,