Pickleballers

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Twenty-Nine

Meg shielded her eyes from the afternoon sun and surveyed the fence. After twelve days and fifty-four bottles of acrylics, she had laid the final brushstroke. She blew a long tunnel of air from her lips, fingers still buzzing from holding a brush steady hour after hour. She wiped a smudge of paint from the back of her wrist and let her eye travel along the posts.

Her feet carried her along as she circumnavigated the fence, allowing her mind to take in the entirety of the project. There was a kinetic feel to her work that moved the viewer from one moment to the next. When she arrived back at her starting point, Meg paused. She rested her hands on her hips and allowed the satisfaction to ripple up from her toes to her aching shoulders. Despite the pain in her body, she was elated. Her smile erupted naturally. It was the best thing she had ever painted.

And to top off her excitement, any minute now, Ethan would arrive. She had kept him away from the inn all week. They had practiced together, but nothing more. And each day, their weeklong agreement became more and more challenging.

Their contract had begun the day after Annie’s departure. Meg had twirled her glass between her fingers and sipped at a gewürztraminer: a wine that they’d both agreed they would rather drink than spell. When Ethan had reached beneath the table and skimmed his hand along her knee, she’d found herself stopping his fingers. “Okay. I’ve been thinking about this, and you’re not going to like it any more than I do, but…you are bad for my concentration.”

Ethan’s laugh was closer to a cough. “Am I distracting?” His face struck a runway model’s serious-sexy pose, which looked a little like his lips had been smushed against a windowpane.

“I’m serious,” she said, smacking his sneaking hand off her thigh. “All I can think about is how much I want to touch you. And I need to be thinking about the painting. I think we need a ban. On everything.”

“Everything?” he asked, incredulous.

“Sex,” she whispered. “And any related temptations. Until I’m done with the mural. I’m telling you. I can’t concentrate.”

“I don’t need a ban. I can resist temptation,” he said, and took a huge bite of the chocolate bombe cake. “This is delicious. Let’s order three more.”

Still, that same evening when she leaned toward him, he stepped back. “Nope,” he admonished. “I’m gonna do everything I can to support you in your painting. And if that means that I have to take cold showers and visit my friend Mr. Handy, so be it. In fact”—his gaze twinkled devilishly—“I think we should up the stakes.” She eyed him, suspect. “You know that all the best athletes lay off drugs, alcohol, and sex when they are prepping for a big game. We do have a tournament coming up…”

Now it was Meg’s turn to balk. The painting would be complete within the week, but the tournament was still three weeks away.

“Imagine our energies singularly directed,” he said. He spoke so close to her cheek she sensed the heat of his lips on her skin.

“Ack. You’re not helping.”

Still, they sealed the pact, confirming it with a chaste handshake.

Day by day, the plan worked. Without the compelling distraction of Ethan, she hunkered down and threw herself into her tasks. Her days were consumed with painting and pickleballing. Pickets and pickles. She breathed for them, ate for them, and dreamt of fenceposts and dink shots. Meg loved waking at sunrise, alert and attuned to her creativity. The early mornings offered her painting project the added benefit of softer light. At lunch, she shared her progress report with Mayumi at a shorefront picnic table beside the Outlook Inn. When she wasn’t painting, she drilled with Ethan or with Marilyn, whose age was no deterrent to her tenacity. Meg developed a routine and found that she was a strict taskmaster; once dedicated to either practice, she could not be diverted.

Now, standing back from the fence, she felt a tug of sadness at the end of such a momentous project. It had been a challenge, but looking at her accomplishment, she felt immense pride.

Her phone pinged. Here , Ethan’s text read.

Moth wings fluttered against her stomach lining. Now that the big reveal was imminent, her nervous excitement mounted. Adrenaline buoyed her as she jogged to greet him in the parking lot. She wanted the effect to be a total surprise, so she tied a scarf around his eyes and steered him around the uneven lawn toward the back of the fence.

“Boy. This is so rife with the opportunity for innuendo. I like it.”

“Hey. No innuendo. You promised.”

Meg positioned him so that he faced the fence. Her nerves did jumping jacks; it was a personal thing, showing off one’s artwork. She felt vulnerable, exposed, naked. She did not need his validation to prove that her work was quality. She felt that truth, right down to her bones. But she sure hoped he liked it.

“Okay. You can look.” She undid the knot on the blindfold. “I want you to get a feel for the whole story, so you have to start from the right angle.” Ethan blinked, his eyes adjusting to the sunlight. She watched him take in the mural. He did not speak, did not alter his expression while she worried the blindfold between her fingertips.

There at the rear of the inn, her artwork’s story began. In near-mirrored images, the mural created a progressive story that wrapped around the side yard and met at the hotel entrance.

The first segments near the back socked the viewer with the power of two clenched fists—modern, kinetic images in purples and browns. The matching, balled hands were squeezed tight, the blood disappearing from the skin, as if the hands were afraid of allowing enclosed secrets to escape.

Ethan’s head shifted to the right, in the direction he would “read” her piece. She’d designed it that way. English readers trained their gaze to measure visual cues from left to right. Ethan moved toward the next vibrant piece: an orangey hand, tight, but allowing the release of a glimpse of bright blue light.

He stepped at a deliberate pace, following the U of the fenceposts from back to front. She followed, keeping her distance to avoid breaking his focus, while he paused at another hand, in shades of pale yellow and ochre. The fingers opened slightly to reveal a portion of an indiscernible word. In the next image, he studied the burgundy hand covered in scars. The hand looked frozen on the brink of releasing a sunset-tipped rosebud.

Discreetly, she had scrutinized the hands of her friends and copied them here, not in realistic hues, but faithfully. Her stylized work captured the essence of Mayumi’s long fingers carrying the pain of her parents’ deportation; of Annie’s struggle to release her workaholic habits; of the roughened skin of Rooster’s self-destructive past. Along the way, the images changed—first pent-up and closed, then relaxed with the release of the torment and the secrets enclosed within their palms.

She followed Ethan as he viewed Rooster’s hand, at the back of the fence, scarred and broken, to where it reappeared toward the open gate in the front of the inn. In the latter painting, once unbandaged, his exposed skin bore images symbolizing his love for Laverne, his yearning for his unborn godchild. Mayumi’s hand, clasping the hand of her mother and her grandmother like nesting dolls, at first painted in blueish gray, resurfaced later in sky blue. In the latter image, her grandmother’s pain was lifted away on butterfly wings. At last, where the gate used to be, two open hands reached toward each other. On one side of the opening, a hand marked by a small freckle at the base of the thumb reached toward her own, both palms and splayed fingers welcoming visitors to explore the space between them.

Ethan shook his head and opened his mouth. In that elongated moment, Meg could hear the stampeding hoofbeats of her heart. What if he didn’t like it? What if he took offense? What if…

“It’s so powerful,” he said. And in the rawness of his tone, she knew she had moved him. “I didn’t know…what to expect. Something decorative and pretty, I guess. But this—” He closed his eyes in a long blink. “This is so much more than that.”

Meg allowed a slow smile.

“It’s such a clear story. All these people. Real people. I can see the pain they carried, and here”—he pointed to the first hand where a puff of dust escaped—“here is a person trying to let go of it.”

His eyes glinted with emotion as he turned to her, and Meg thought of his father’s disappearing act, and wondered what other private histories Ethan concealed beneath his confident appearance. She hoped that over time she would come to know all the dips and rises in the road of his life. He said, “We all do it: hold it in, keep it bottled up. But look how powerful it is to release that pain.”

“That’s what I tried to capture. There’s power in owning your past, even in the agony and the mistakes. And here”—she gestured toward the open gate—“that opening is like an escape hatch—the release spot. The place you can look back on and say, ‘Wow, I got through that and here I am.’?”

“I can relate to that.”

She beamed, pleased that he connected to her art. Now she was certain: the fence had been the perfect canvas for her project. A fence could be an enclosure, meant to keep people in. Or a barricade to block people out. But her fence, this fence with the gate removed, acted as a reminder. It offered permission to escape the prisons where people stored their pain. Now the fence was less like a barrier and more like a bridge, designed to welcome people in.

He reached his hand toward hers. Meg’s skin slid against his, their thumbs fitting like puzzle pieces. His freckle winked up at her, and she glanced at its twin on the fenceposts, all the while thrilling to the sensation of his skin against hers. The fence was complete, but there was still a tournament to win. Holding hands was within the boundaries of friendly behavior. Nothing sexual about hand-holding, she had to keep reminding herself.

They strolled the beachfront, their feet crunching against the pebbles. The sun took a dive into the pink water and a couple of blinking stars pressed through the evening sky.

“I can’t stop thinking about your painting. Not just about how it affected me, but about…you. You have that in you. I’ve never met someone who can imagine something like that. Something creative that touches people.”

She heard herself clear her throat, embarrassed by the sweetness of the sentiment. “Now, if only I could play pickleball that well.”

Ethan halted and clasped her hand. His eyes hit her. “You can. You do. You just have to believe it.”

Meg offered a tiny shrug. “I do. I believe it,” she said, but a puff of disbelief escaped her nose. True, she might be able to pull off a win. On the other hand, she might be humiliated by her ex-husband and his gorgeous, athletic partner.

“No. Really.” He tucked his chin, catching her eyes. “Have you ever heard of a thing called the Golden Pickledrop?”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course I’ve heard of it.”

“People always think that a single winning stroke is out there, a fast path to success if they can only find it. But the only Golden Pickledrop is here,” he said, and he touched a finger to her chest. “The sooner you believe it, the sooner you can play like you paint.”

He pulled her close and she fit perfectly into all the negative spaces. His embrace was the kind of hug she felt in her toes. His lips on hers were warm in the cool of the evening, turning her thighs to quivering jelly and making her nether regions tremble like june bugs near a lightbulb. Craving more, she dug her fingers into his back, her body alive with desire.

He groaned with frustration. “I want you.”

“Well. The fence is finished…”

“You know, if we want to kick some butt in that tournament, we do need more practice at working together…”

She smirked. “I thought you said that the best athletes abstain before the big game.”

“Meg. Those people are professionals. We can’t hold ourselves to those standards.”

“You make a good point. Okay. Pact over.”

“Oh, thank god.”

They stumbled, still clinging to each other, toward the shadowed bench high up on the beach. Sheltered by the pines that edged the shoreline, they tumbled onto the bench, groping each other. As his hand wandered up her shirt, her back pressed against the metal armrest. “Ow. Ow!”

“Here.” He shifted to seat himself on the wooden slats and lifted her onto his lap. They made out, deeply, passionately, rediscovering each other’s lips and tongues and…

“Ah!” he shrieked. “Leg cramp!” He shoved her off his legs and onto a patch of dark, dry sand below the bench. “Sorry,” he cried, and stretched out his calf. “Leg cramp. Are you okay?”

Laughing, she brushed off the sand. “Maybe we should…”

“Go inside?”

“I have a nice bed…”

“Come on.” They made their way up the beach and hustled up the porch steps of the Outlook Inn.

At the front desk, Mayumi perused a pile of receipts, her reading glasses set low on the bridge of her nose. When she spotted them, she peered curiously over the frames.

“Hi, Mayumi,” Meg said as they raced past.

“Hey, Mayumi,” Ethan echoed. Mayumi’s brows crept upward. She said nothing.

They took the stairs two at a time and spilled into the room like a tsunami.

·····

Later that afternoon, as she curled into the curve of Ethan’s body and drifted toward a delicious nap, Meg’s mind wandered. But instead of dreaming up a fence design, her brain played out a pickleball match. The details were so clear that she felt the wind, heard the tick-tock of the ball bouncing, noticed the stretch in her Achilles. Bending her knees, she scooped, keeping her toes just outside the kitchen line. She dinked from corner to corner. Plink, plink, plink. Until at last she spotted an opening. Meg aimed. She swung. Her arm lurched upward, thwacking at her dream ball and whacking against the headboard.

“Mmph,” Ethan muttered, dragging his arm out of the danger zone.

As she shuffled her pillow closer and her heart rate slowed, Meg smiled to herself. She imagined players around the globe smacking their lovers in the forehead while their sleeping minds returned a serve or volleyed at the net. There must be hundreds, no, thousands upon thousands of pickleball fanatics. And now that she had dreamed the pickledream, she was one of them. Even her subconscious knew it.

She snuggled against the comfort of Ethan’s sleeping form. For the rest of the luxurious midday snooze, pickleballs and sex filled Meg Bloomberg’s sweet dreams.

But not at the same time.