Tennis, to me, smells like chlorine and white sage and tuna fish. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the courts always wheeze dust when you walk on them and the dry heat shimmers off the net in the middle of summer. Our family belonged to a tennis club, but not the kind with rolling hills and security gates—instead, our courts were somewhat dumpy and gray, down near the university area filled with tattoo parlors and ratty cafés that seemed progressive in the ’90s for their hummus-forward menus. The club was made mostly of cement and gravel and funnel cakes, and its pro shop featured six-packs of tube socks and fresh cylinders of key-lime-colored balls and not much else. It may very well be fancier now, but my family stopped paying dues two decades ago. We moved to the base of the mountains when I was 14, and my father started playing tennis every day at High Point, a gym filled primarily with active seniors and women doing Zumba. When he does go downtown to play, he meets my brother at one of the college courts near the hospital, where my brother spends most nights sewing throats back together as a resident in facial surgery. My father, who also cuts people open for a living, started playing a lot more tennis when my brother became a doctor; it is how they communicate wordlessly about what bloody traumas they’ve seen during the day. I imagine hitting something really hard back and forth is useful in this regard.
I never took tennis lessons when I had the chance; I didn’t have the patience or the aptitude to learn a game that required both coordination and aerobic prowess. I preferred to use my summer hours at the club for the snack bar and for the pool, where I would spend long afternoons diving for rings in the deep end with children I had just met that day, wearing my Coke-bottle prescription goggles around the deck because I was blind without them. Tennis was something that older people did while I was learning to flip-turn, and so to me it had a foreign smell, the smell of something happening across a fence, of a world I had no easy way to enter. I remember going into the pro shop, still shivering from the water, and being struck by the way that the corporate-strength air-conditioning amplified the smell of the Dunlops. It was like being locked in a freezer made of rubber, like being in an airplane seat under a fan that wouldn’t turn off. I felt immediately very small, and very alien, in that space. It was not meant for me; and all I had to do to sense it was sniff the air like a curious coyote. Sometimes odors tell you everything about where you don’t belong.