Goodbye, Columbus Read Free

sight.
    “Hello,” I called.
    “Hello, Neil. One more game,” she called. Brenda’s words seemed to infuriate her opponent, a pretty brown-haired girl, not quite so tall as Brenda, who stopped searching for the ball that had been driven past her, and gave both Brenda and myself a dirty look. In a moment I learned the reason why: Brenda was ahead five games to four, and her cocksureness about there being just one game remaining aroused enough anger in her opponent for the two of us to share.

    As it happened, Brenda finally won, though it took more games than she’d expected. The other girl, whose name sounded like Simp, seemed happy to end it at six all, but Brenda, shifting, running, up on her toes, would not stop, and finally all I could see moving in the darkness were her glasses, a glint of them, the clasp of her belt, her socks, her sneakers, and, on occasion, the ball. The darker it got the more savagely did Brenda msh the net, which seemed curious, for I had noticed that earlier, in the light, she had stayed back, and even when she had had to msh, after smashing back a lob, she didn’t look entirely happy about being so close to her opponent’s racket. Her passion for winning a point seemed outmatched by an even stronger passion for maintaining her beauty as it was. I suspected that the red print of a tennis ball on her cheek would pain her more than losing all the points in the world. Darkness pushed her in, however, and she stroked harder, and at last Simp seemed to be running on her ankles. When it was all over, Simp refused my offer of a ride home and indicated with a quality of speech borrowed from some old Katherine Hepburn movie that she could manage for herself; apparently her manor lay no further than the nearest briar patch. She did not like me and I her, though I worried it, I’m sure, more than she did.
    “Who is
she?
”
    “Laura Simpson Stolowitch.”
    “Why don’t you call her Stolo?” I asked.
    “Simp is her Bennington name. The ass.”
    “Is that where you go to school?” I asked.
    She was pushing her shirt up against her skin to dry the perspiration. “No. I go to school in Boston.”
    I disliked her for the answer. Whenever anyone asks me where I went to school I come right out with it: Newark Colleges of Rutgers University. I may say it a bit too ringingly, too fast, too up-in-the-air, but I say it. For an instant Brenda reminded me of the pug-nosed little bastards from Montclair who come down to the library during vacations, and while I stamp out their books, they stand around tugging their elephantine scarves until they hang to their ankles, hinting all the while at “Boston” and “New Haven.”

    “Boston University?” I asked, looking off at the trees.
    “Radcliffe.”
    We were still standing on the court, bounded on all sides by white lines. Around the bushes back of the court, fireflies were cutting figure eights in the thorny-smelling air and then, as the night suddenly came all the way in, the leaves on the trees shone for an instant, as though they’d just been rained upon. Brenda walked off the court, with me a step behind her. Now I had grown accustomed to the dark, and as she ceased being merely a voice and turned into a sight again, some of my anger at her “Boston” remark floated off and I let myself appreciate her. Her hands did not twitch at her bottom, but the form revealed itself, covered or not, under the closeness of her khaki Bermudas. There were two wet triangles on the back of her tiny-collared white polo shirt, right where her wings would have been if she’d had a pair. She wore, to complete the picture, a tartan belt, white socks, and white tennis sneakers.
    As she walked she zipped the cover on her racket.
    “Are you anxious to get home?” I said.
    “No.”
    “Let’s sit here. It’s pleasant.”
    “Okay.”

    We sat down on a bank of grass slanted enough for us to lean back without really leaning; from the angle it seemed as though we