Stan said he only went to bed with her because of her decisive volley, and then he said, that deep slow voice in her ear, No, that’s not true, your volley needs work, you crowd the net, I went to bed with you because as soon as I saw those legs I knew I wanted them wrapped around my back, and Joy swooned, she thought that was so wicked and poetic, although she did not appreciate the criticism of her volley.
‘. . . this causes the release of neurotransmitters . . .’
She looked at the grater. It was covered in carrot, which the dishwasher wouldn’t wash off. She rinsed it in the sink. ‘Why am I doing your job for you?’ she said to the dishwasher, and thought of herself in pre-dishwasher days, standing at this sink, rubber gloves in hot dishwater, a skyscraper of dirty plates by her side.
Her past kept bumping up against her present lately. Yesterday she’d woken from a nap in a panic, thinking she’d forgotten to pick up one of the children from school. It took her a good minute to remember that all of her children were adults now: adults with wrinkles and mortgages, degrees and travel plans.
It made her wonder if she had dementia. Her friend Linda, who worked at a nursing home, said a wave of restlessness swept through the place at school pick-up time each day as the elderly ladies became agitated, convinced they should be rushing to collect long-since-grown children. Hearing that had made Joy teary, and now the exact same thing had kind of happened to her.
‘It’s possible my superior intellect is masking my dementia symptoms,’ Joy had told Stan.
‘Can’t say I’ve noticed,’ said Stan.
‘My dementia symptoms? Or my superior intellect?’
‘Well, you’ve always been demented,’ he’d said, and then wandered off, probably to climb a ladder, because his sons had informed him that seventy was too old to climb ladders, so he liked to find excuses to climb them as often as possible.
Last night she’d listened to a very informative podcast called This Dementia Life.
The cheese grater refused to join the frypan in the dishwasher. She studied the two items. It felt like a puzzle she should be able to solve.
‘. . . trigger a change in the size of the blood vessels . . .’ said the Migraine Guy.
What? She was going to have to rewind this podcast and start again.
She’d heard that retirement caused a rapid decline in brain function. Maybe that’s what was going on here. Her frontal lobe was atrophying.
They had thought they were ready to retire. Selling the tennis school had seemed like the obvious next step in their lives. They couldn’t keep coaching forever and none of their children were interested in taking on the business. In fact, they were insultingly disinterested. For years Stan had nursed a wild hope that Logan might buy into Delaneys: that old-fashioned idea of the eldest son becoming his proud successor. ‘Logan was a great coach,’ he’d mutter. ‘He got it. He really got it.’
Poor Logan had looked completely aghast when Stan had diffidently suggested he might like to buy the business. ‘He’s not very driven, is he?’ Stan had remarked to Joy, and Joy had snapped at him because she couldn’t bear to hear criticism of her children, especially when that criticism was valid.
So they sold up. To good people for a good price. She hadn’t anticipated this sense of loss. She hadn’t realised how much they were defined by Delaneys Tennis Academy. Who were they now? Just another pair of boomers.
Thank God for their own tennis. Their most recent trophy sat, heavy and proud, on the sideboard, ready to show off when everyone was together on Father’s Day. Stan’s knees were paying for it now, but it had been a good solid win over two technically excellent players: she and Stan had held the net, attacked the middle and never lost their cool. They still had it.
In addition to tournaments, they still played in the Monday night social comp that Joy had established years ago, although that had recently got depressing because people kept dying. Six months ago Dennis Christos had died on the court while he and his wife, Debbie, played against Joy and Stan, which had been terribly traumatic. Joy believed poor Dennis’s heart couldn’t take the excitement of thinking he was going to break Stan’s serve. She secretly blamed Stan for making Dennis think it was a possibility. He’d deliberately let the game get to 40–love for his own pleasure. It was taking a lot of willpower for her not to say, ‘You killed Dennis Christos, Stan.’
The truth was, she and Stan weren’t suited to retirement. Their six-week dream holiday to Europe had been a disaster. Even Wimbledon. Especially Wimbledon. When the plane landed back in Sydney they’d both been giddy with relief, and they’d admitted that to no-one, not to their friends or their children, not even to each other.
Sometimes they tried to do things that their other retired friends did, like ‘a lovely day at the beach’, for example. Joy cut her foot to shreds standing on an oyster shell and they got a parking ticket. It had reminded her of those occasions when she had got it into her head that she and Stan would take the children on a lovely picnic, and she’d tried so hard to pretend they were a lovely picnicking family but something inevitably went wrong, there was always someone in a bad mood, or they got lost, or it rained just as they arrived and the drive home was silent and resentful, except for the regular sniffles of whichever child felt he or she had been unjustifiably admonished.
‘We’ve actually become quite romantic since retirement,’ one annoyingly chipper friend told her, which made Joy want to gag, but the other week she bought two banana milkshakes at the food court, as a kind of fun gesture because she and Stan used to buy them for breakfast at small-town milk bars when they used to travel together for regional tournaments in the early years of their marriage. They’d save on motels by sleeping in the car. They had sex in the back seat.
But it was clear that Stan didn’t even remember their banana milkshakes, and then on the way home he dramatically and unnecessarily slammed on the brakes when someone pulled out in front of them, and Joy’s milkshake went flying, so their car now permanently and disgustingly smelled of sour milk: the sour smell of failure. Stan said he couldn’t smell a thing.
They needed different personalities to retire with grace and verve like their friends. They needed to be less grumpy (Stan did) and have a wider variety of interests and hobbies beyond tennis. They needed grandchildren.
Grandchildren.
The word alone filled her with the kind of giant, complicated emotions reserved for the young: desire, fury and worst of all, spiteful, bitter envy.
She knew one tiny grandchild was all it would take to stop the silence roaring, to make her days splutter back to life again, but you could not ask your children for grandchildren. How demeaning. How ordinary. She believed herself to be more interesting and sophisticated than that. She was a feminist. An athlete. A very successful businesswoman. She refused to be that particular cliché.