15

The first job I got was also the best job I’ve ever had: clerk at the tennis shop. My job was to reserve courts, send players to available courts, watch the clock and take the players’ money. The reality was that all kids hung around the counter, told jokes, and watched everyone else playing tennis. The job was enhanced by the handsome young tennis pro Fritz who thought we were cute. The job was further enhanced by Fritz’s brother-in-law who was even cuter than Fritz and wasn’t married.

What a good life! I rode my bike to the courts, bought my lunch at the hotdog stand, and played tennis whenever I wasn’t working. I made a wage of a buck fifty, ample money for twenty-five-cent dogs. Cokes from the machine were ten cents for a paper cupful and everyone took a stab at reaching skinny fingers up the dispenser and trying to wheedle out a free coke.

Joe was home for the summer; well, everyone was home for the summer. A lot of my friends went to boarding schools far away and some even lived far away and came here to spend the summer. There was a bounteous overflow of friends. That summer Joe had a joke he’d perfected. It was called The Jawbreaker Joke.

I can’t remember the text of The Jawbreaker Joke because it was totally irrelevant. The joke was that there was no joke, but Joe would tell it and then laugh. Eventually someone would laugh with him, pretending he got it. The more Joe told the joke, the more people laughed with him, the more contagious the laughter was. By mid-summer, he would start The Jawbreaker Joke, chuckling through the first line, and we would collapse in giggles anticipating the non-joke and the puzzled looks of the guys not in on the joke. Joe spent the summer perfecting his art form, and I laughed til I thought I’d pee in my pants.

Joe picked Val to be his girlfriend and Val picked Joe to be her boyfriend. That was about the extent of the mating game at that point, but it was still a tangible. I didn’t have a boyfriend (See 16). I was still invisible. I had overwhelming crushes on boys that, with hindsight, prove the maxim “Love is Blind.” This one skinny kid at the courts had red hair, freckles, and huge buck teeth, and one day he stuck his head out of the window of a car, and I fell in love.

Not all girls were invisible. Gretchen wasn’t invisible. She had long blond hair and long straight legs. When I played against Gretchen, everyone rooted for Gretchen because she was so pretty. To add injury to insult, she beat me.

My mother told me not to worry. She said, when you get to college, you’ll be noticed. In the meantime, she had a few rules: we weren’t allowed to chat on the phone, we weren’t allowed to use the word “boyfriend”, and if we turned down a date, we were not allowed to go out. It made dating less of a mating ritual and more of a carnival duck shoot.

That’s why the tennis courts were so much fun. I didn’t have a driver’s license so I hadn’t yet wrecked the family car. I didn’t need a boyfriend to socialize so the meat market hadn’t yet begun. My earnings supported my lifestyle. We didn’t have global warming, pollution, police brutality, pandemics, wars, or guns to worry about. Joe wouldn’t die of AIDS for another 25 years. Life was a Jawbreaker Joke.