Zibby Mag

By Annabel Monaghan

I was too young to work in the summer of 1984, and that was fine with me. I’d just finished my freshman year of high school and was happy to put it all in the rear-view mirror. No more starched, pink uniform and saddle shoes. No more three-hour final exams. No more reading Beowulf. The Olympics were coming to Los Angeles, and flags waved all over the city. There was the sense that something fun was about to happen, and I was ready for it.

My mom had other ideas. Determined that I wouldn’t sit around all day watching soap operas while she was at work, she decided I should learn to play tennis. This was a terrible idea. You’d only have to live in my body for one minute to know that I’d never feel compelled to lunge across a tennis court to hit a ball. I’m not competitive, and it’s been rumored that my hand-eye coordination is lacking. But I was in the habit of doing as I was told, so I agreed to attend a daily tennis clinic for the entire summer.

She dropped me off at the tennis courts on the first day, and I waved goodbye in her too-tight tennis dress. It pinched my armpits in a way that predicted chafing, so I approached my group with my arms slightly extended. I set down my straw bag, pulled out my racquet, and joined the other girls at the net. The pro twirled his racquet and outlined for us how the summer of tennis was going to go: drills and running and tournaments. There was going to be something called a ladder, which sounded a little dangerous. There was an uptick in the prickly aversion I felt ever since I’d gotten out of the car. It crept up my neck where the collar of my school uniform usually sat.

Hitting a ball over a net, or in my case, into the net, was like reading Beowulf: difficult and unnatural and, even after finishing, left me wondering where the payoff was. Standing on that court, imagining another sixty days of trying to hit a ball within the confines of a green rectangle, I could barely breathe. We had a lengthy discussion about the ball being outside the line versus on the line (why would this ever matter?), and suddenly my desire to flee was too big to ignore. I faked a cramp, ran into the bathroom, grabbed the flip-flops from my straw bag, and hopped on the Wilshire Boulevard bus.

As the buildings started to get lower and the ocean came into view, I noticed how much better I felt living under the threat of punishment rather than on that hot tennis court, swinging and missing over and over.

My heart was racing as I said hello to the driver and dropped in my coins. I was high from the rush of having responded to my own flight instinct. My body was trying to tell me things that I was only beginning to learn about myself—not only that I don’t belong on a tennis court, but that I had a certain wisdom that I should listen to. Released from my saddle shoes, released from my tennis shoes, I let the hot vinyl seat burn the back of my legs and the warm air from the broken air conditioner blow against my skin. I wiggled my toes and rode the straight line of Wilshire Boulevard to the Pacific Ocean.

I am going to get in so much trouble.

That was the thought threatening to ruin the bliss of my bus ride. And it was a valid thought. We weren’t people with lots of extra money for things like tennis lessons. I’d just walked away from someone else’s luxury. But as the buildings started to get lower and the ocean came into view, I noticed how much better I felt living under the threat of punishment rather than on that hot tennis court, swinging and missing over and over.

I spent the rest of the summer living the most glorious lie. My mother dropped me off at the tennis courts; I watched her drive away and walked directly to the bathroom to change into my bathing suit. Then I hopped on the bus, the Olympic flags waving me on. At the last stop, I walked down the California Incline, across the Pacific Coast Highway, to the beach, sinking my feet into the sand just as it was starting to heat up for the day. I laid out my towel and waited for friends to show up. I moved in and out of the ocean, beholden only to the demands of the temperature of my skin. I read Danielle Steel and ate French fries.

This was the summer that I learned to trust my instincts, to get out of my head and follow my senses. I took in every detail. The salt drying on my skin. The cool relief of burying my hot feet a few inches beneath the dry sand. The coconut smell of Coppertone. A look from a boy whose nose was always peeling from the sun. The way the first few notes of a song can contain an entire season.

Forty years later, I carry what that summer taught me. There are times to buckle down, lace up the saddle shoes, and read Beowulf. And there are times to let the rules go. So, when I start to sense that prickly feeling, I follow it. The best things in my life have been found outside the lines and beyond the confines of what was expected of me. My best ideas are never cerebral; in fact, they’re usually plucked out of nowhere. They come from the part of me that’s nurtured by the summer, the part that’s beyond my head and wants to run into the ocean and see what happens.

And, remarkably, I never got caught.

Annabel Monaghan is the author of IndieNext and LibraryReads pick Nora Goes Off Script as well as two young adult novels and Does This Volvo Make My Butt Look Big?, a selection of laugh-out-loud columns that appeared in the Huffington Post, the Week, and the Rye Record. Her latest novel, Same Time Next Summer, publishes in June. She lives in Rye, New York, with her family.