Hand-Eye Coordination
jennifer m. currie
I woke up on the morning of August 1st staring out the window. Everything was upside down. I forgot that I had rearranged my room so that the head of me bed was underneath the window. I really don’t have to wake up until August 28th, I kept telling myself. But I knew that I would, if only to spite myself. And besides, I doubted that anyone could sleep that long. And there’s too much reality in doubt. Especially when the sun is slapping you in the face, so hard that your eyes burn. I looked around my room, observing the work that I had done the night before. There was a familiar nail sticking out the wall to my left. The photograph of my older brother Craig, the one with him and his Malamute in front of the Chatahoochee River, had fallen off the wall again. It must have happened sometime during the night. I hadn’t heard it. My mother had warned me that it wasn’t a very good frame when she gave it to me. I told her that it would work fine. I didn’t want to replace it, for fear that she would see it and know that she had been right. There’s just something about letting parents know that they were right.
My mother cried when Craig moved to Georgia. My dad tried to get me to take Craig’s place on the tennis court. I moped around for awhile, then moved out to go to college. Not as far away as Craig, but on my own, at least. My mother still cried occasionally. I played silent games of tennis with my dad. We were both used to playing with Craig.
- I can’t catch with my right hand, I would tell Craig when he tossed the ball over for me to serve. He thought that was odd, me being right-handed and all.
- Are you sure? he would ask. I nodded. He rubbed his chin. Well then, he would say in a very matter-of-fact voice, catch the ball with your left hand.
I never knew if he was trying to make a joke or not, so I just smiled and caught the ball with my left hand, though I wasn’t very good at that, either. One time I just let it bounce right by me.
- Are you moving to Georgia with Daphne, Craig?
- No, of course not. I mean, I might go down there to visit her for a couple of weeks or something. But I would never move down there.
Two months later I sat in his room and watched him pack all of his things. Form his bedroom window I watched him wave as he backed his car out of the driveway. The windshield of his car was filthy, but I knew that he had that dopey good-bye look on his face. The one where one of his eyes gets really big, much bigger than necessary, and the corners of his mouth get really tight. His dysfunctional scarecrow look.
Ten seconds later I was grinding my teeth and preparing to get on with the rest of my life. A year later, I moved into my apartment, so that I was closer to school. And all that I had left to do was wait for school to start on August 28th.
I twisted myself around so that my head was at the foot of my bed. Things were right side up this way. From here I could see the very tops of the trees, though, so I closed my eyes and pictured it, the water hopping over all of the small rocks. Like a faucet that has been accidentally left on, it never stopped running.
The lady, assuming that it was a lady, in the apartment down from me was outside with her (?) radio. She turned down all of the good songs, but turned up bad songs and commercials. Sometimes people can be so annoying. The man (I assumed again) across the creek was practicing his guitar. Practicing. Chord after chord. Always out of tune. And, obviously, not in unison with the radio. Nor was it in unison with the small girl (I knew it was a girl - I saw her) who was screaming her disappointment about who-knows-what to her parents. The cheap, dying battery sound of the radio and the squealing, off-key strum of the electric guitar were topped off with the ear-piercing, incessant waaaaaahhhhhh-hic-hic-waaaaaahhhhhh to create the perfect recipe for insanity. The kind of noise that contorts your face so that you feel like you are tasting something sour, and makes your hands clench into fists and your teeth grind without you even realizing.
I decided to get up and take a walk. It beat the alternative - taking a shower. It wasn’t the shower part that bothered me, though. It was the tedious chore of drying off and getting dressed, digging through my closet with a towel draped over me while my hair dripped cold water down my back. And, of course, I never knew what it was going to be like outside because even if I watched the weather on the local news, the forecaster went through so many maps and charts about stuff that I could not care in the least about that by the time he came to the forecast I forgot why I was watching in the first place and my mind had drifted onto a completely new topic. (gasp) So I decided to take a walk.
I weaved in and out of the rows in the cemetery down the road. There I escaped neighbors with bad radio-listening habits, wannabe guitarists with tone-deaf ears, and three year-olds with strong lungs. It was almost dark, so the only thing I had to worry about was ghosts. It wasn’t the thought of ghosts that scared me, though. It as the thought of all of those gaping eye sockets staring up at me from six feet under. And all the rotting corpses that surrounded me. Those were the things that scared me. But I liked to think about them as I walked through the cemetery. It prevented me from thinking too much about everything else. To this day, I’d rather be scared than be reminded. Anyway, the only thought that kept passing through my mind was damn, I have to take a shower when I get back to the apartment.
****************
I woke up with the sun in my eyes. Everything was upside down again. Soon I’ll be used to this, I thought. But not quite yet. Craig is coming home to visit today. Perfect, I can try to convince him to stay home for awhile, maybe forever. I knew tht he would just laugh at me, tell me that he had a life in Georgia now. He’d give me one of those looks. One of those condescending older brother looks. The kind that tell me how naive little sisters can be. The you’re so silly look that I spent my entire life trying to avoid.
My mother called the apartment when Craig pulled into the driveway back home. He was going to be coming up to the apartment later, she said. He wondered if I wanted to play tennis.
“Sure. I’d love to,” I lied.
An hour or so later, he showed up at the door with a brand new tennis racket and a new haircut. I didn’t like either.
“Of course,” I mumbled. I always mumbled around Craig. I was always careful of what I said. He was so defensive of Daphne. And I was so critical of her.
We walked to the tennis courts, five minutes away. He told me about his job. I told him about my schedule. I told him that I wished he weren’t living so far away. He changed the subject, opened the gate to the court, let me go in first, tossed me the balls.
“I don’t have any pockets,” he explained.
I caught the balls with my left hand, put two of them in my pocket and hit the third one over. bounce.
“How long are you going to stay in Georgia?” bounce.
“I can’t live at home forever.” bounce.
“I didn’t think you would.” bounce.
“Well then . . . “ bounce.
“You lied to me.” bounce. bounce. bounce. bounce.
“What?”
“You said that you weren’t going to move to Georgia.”
“I never said that.”
“Yes you did.” I took another ball out of my pocket and hit it over. I didn’t look at him. I never make eye contact when I’m upset.
Craig laughed his nervous laugh.
I changed the subject to make him feel more comfortable.
“I can catch with my right hand now,” I told him, proving it the next time he hit the ball over.
“Couldn’t you always?” he asked, completely confused. He had no idea of what I was talking about. He was getting nervous again.
“Yes, I could.”
He gave me a strange look and then shrugged. I hit the ball over. Every once in a while I let the ball bounce past me, just to see if he was paying attention. It was a peculiar game we were playing. Every new bounce had a deeper echo to it, which is not uncommon in a silent game of tennis.
