Actual Things My
Partners Have Said to Me on
the Squash Court
By Amy Sohn
Illustrations by Dalbert Vilarino
Did you get your daughter the cervical cancer vaccine? You need to because she’s going to start having sex.
“I still call him my husband even though we’ve been divorced seven years.”
“I’m not 64, not yet at least! I’m a young and spry 63! Hahahahaha!”
“I’m a wife now. I have to do wifely things. Like today, after we finish, I am going to buy meat.”
“Everything got better when I hired an assistant to help me. He gets the rice started. Now when I come home there is not so much for me to do.”
“This is bullshit. We run like little girls, with these tiny steps. We need to stop playing and learn how to lunge, like the men.”
“I think I’d like to play the long game. You’re welcome to play it too, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I’m doing it because there’s things I want to work on.”
“My husband asked me for a divorce. We never fought so it took me by surprise. He’s still living with me, though. That’s why I’m late. We started talking and I couldn’t get out the door. I don’t know why he wants to talk to me all the time, now that we’re getting divorced.”
“I started to read your novel last night and I decided to call a guy I haven’t talked to in five years. Whoa! I was up all night reading! You made me think of things I haven’t thought of in a long time!”
“I didn’t know there were two kinds of Cialis.”
“If those intermediaries show up early like they did last week, I am going to throw a shit fit. I can’t take any more of this. They stand there watching us, even though we have the court till 12:30. Ready to pounce. And none of them are really intermediaries anyway. They are all beginners.”
“You have definitely lost weight, my friend, but you did not do it with squash. You did it with that strange diet, and the protein. I cannot eat hard-boiled eggs every day. I cannot stand the gray part outside of the yellow.”
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“He broke up with me and went back to his ex-girlfriend. He told her, ‘I’ve tried dating other women and I don’t think I can do better than you.’ It’s so insulting. To her! Can you imagine having a guy say that to you, and taking him back?”
“I think I’m going to dump this guy. We have no momentum. We only see each other a few times a month. I was hoping it would fade away on its own but it won’t. So now I have to tell him.”
“You’re too hard on everyone, including yourself.”
“We are not good enough to play games. Why do we even keep trying? We have both been at this a long time and we are not getting better. From now on we play maximum two games. The rest of the time, we drill.”
“They didn’t promote me because of sexism even though I’ve been there four years.”
“I knew I would miss that. Whoever did not deserve the let loses the next point.”
“You are getting better with the lunges. You are actually moving a little.”
“I love those little noises that you make. You’re adorable!”
“Can I just say something? Can I just say one thing? You’re hitting them to the middle and making them easy for me to return… I didn’t know you weren’t trying to.”
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“You’re too hard on
everyone, including yourself.”
“I played well because I had this fear that I would lose you as a partner, and a competitive drive fired up in me.”
“When I lose points, I start thinking about how you’re going to beat me and I start to panic and I keep losing. I know I’m supposed to let the past points be in the past but I just keep thinking, I know I’m going to lose. And then I do.”
“The Inner Game of Tennis has a metaphor about three men who see a naked woman stumbling down the street at night. They all have different ideas about her, related to their different problems with tennis. That book is way too 1970s for me.”
“This court is too hot.”
“This court is too cold.”
“I would never play here if I had money. Anyone with money plays someplace else.”
“What is your goal with this? Do you want to be really good? I mean, really really good?”
“I can’t believe it hit the water pipe again! This would never happen on a real court. The shot would be in. We should play it as a let. You don’t want to? All my other partners play it as a let.”
“There is something wrong with this ball.” “I think there’s a hole in this ball.”
“Too much tennis! That’s why it hit the tin. I have to stop with the tennis.”
“I think there’s a hole in this ball.”
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Amy Sohn is the author of five novels, including Prospect Park West and Motherland. She is at work on a nonfiction book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about contraceptive activists of the 19th century. She first played squash at age 12 at the Park Place Squash Club in Lower Manhattan.
