{"id":44823,"date":"2013-01-14T15:39:55","date_gmt":"2013-01-14T20:39:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=44823"},"modified":"2013-01-29T03:09:13","modified_gmt":"2013-01-29T08:09:13","slug":"thunder-stick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/01\/14\/thunder-stick\/","title":{"rendered":"ThunderStick"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It came in a box. A big box, with two or three others. Sam had finally cleaned house.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not every day you get a box of tennis racquets in the mail. I ripped it open and immediately shook hands with each one.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow guys, shake hands with the racquet.\u201d If I\u2019d said that once I\u2019d said it, I don\u2019t know, maybe twenty-five times. Once for each tennis clinic I\u2019d taught for little kids over high school summers. Kids who\u2019d devised a game called Hit the Ball at the Teacher, which they\u2019d passed on to their younger brothers and sisters, the little buggers.<\/p>\n

There was a Yonex in the box that felt cold and distant\u2014the shake of a bureaucrat. There was another I\u2019ve since given away that felt insubstantial\u2014the absent shake of someone scanning the room for more important hands. And then there was the Prince. I swear to you, the Prince\u2019s handle still felt warm.<\/p>\n

The grip was slightly sticky\u2014as a good grip should be\u2014and worn where my right index finger curled up the beveled edge of the shaft. It filled my palm easily and comfortably: the racquet\u2019s way of looking me straight in the eye as our hands met. This was Emma\u2019s racquet.<\/p>\n

The frame was a little slick for my tastes. Shiny black, with an aqua-blue and pink blaze up both sides of the head that looked like rain blotches on a Doppler weather map. And it was called ThunderStick. There was a lightning bolt through the diagonal slash of the n<\/em> \u201cThunder.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLord, did Emma know that?\u201d I wondered. Not her style. And there was another message from the manufacturer along the inside rim: \u201cSweet Spot Suspension.\u201d If that were true, I figured it was okay that it looked a little cheesy and was called ThunderStick.<\/p>\n

I fingered the strings and saw they were worn, with little bits of neon-yellow fuzz stuck at the junctions where the vertical and horizontal rows overlapped. Evidence that this racquet was not new. Evidence that Emma had hit with it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201c \u2026 and I\u2019m from New Jersey and I want to go to France my junior year and maybe I\u2019ll major in international relations and I play tennis and anyone who wants to hit, just let me know!\u201d<\/p>\n

Emma quoted that back to me for twenty-five years in a Valley-girl accent, finding it hilariously funny each time. She\u2019d grab my arm and double over laughing. I don\u2019t know why. Was I overeager? I guess. Maybe so. We were introducing ourselves to our hallmates on the first day of freshman year at Brown, and I wanted to play tennis. What\u2019s so funny about that? Heck, she\u2019d permed her otherwise straight, thick, black, half-Asian hair (the other half was Pennsylvania Dutch, but that showed up more in her cheekbones), and she looked like a Chia Pet.<\/p>\n

We hit for the first time a couple days later. My lack of a reliable backhand kept me off the team, but she made it, though she only played freshman year. Eventually, through her brother, who was a sophomore and hit singles on varsity, we began to hang out at men\u2019s matches to ogle a handsome transfer from the West Coast, a junior named Sam who also played singles.<\/p>\n

Emma was always more consistent than I was. She didn\u2019t hit as hard, but her balls stayed in the lines.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word on you is giant forehand, no backhand. Seems about right.\u201d That was Sam\u2019s assessment of me the first time the three of us played. We hit two on one, as we\u2019d do for years into the future. Sam played singles court lines, Emma and I played double, and still he beat us. Like everything else, we found this hilariously funny.<\/p>\n

Emma came from a tennis family. Her dad was tennis-crazed and had a lighted court built in their backyard. She and her two sisters and two brothers all played, though she was more off-handed about it than the others: skillful, but less obsessed. She didn\u2019t \u201cplay,\u201d she \u201chit,\u201d with casual grace laced through with outbursts of goofiness. Both her vocabulary and her game carried the message: \u201cYou may live and breathe tennis, but you know what? I\u2019m not taking this too seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was obsessed, and loved tennis too possessively to ever be a good doubles player, so we didn\u2019t make much of a team. On and off the court, though, Emma and I recognized something half-hidden and thrilling in one another\u2014something unspoken and nearly unknowable, even to ourselves. We were both good girls from the \u2019burbs, but we had a desire to know difference and otherness. Call it a yearning for freedom, maybe. While that yearning often took us physically away from each other, sharing the impulse to untie strings, to do things differently, kept us together.<\/p>\n

By the time I took my first stroke with Emma\u2019s racquet\u2014a forehand crosscourt\u2014her life had been over for two years. She\u2019d gone to inspect refugee camps in the Middle East and came back with what she thought was a stomach bug; it was actually pancreatic cancer, and she died a year after she\u2019d first heard the news. She and Sam had been together since college; he nursed her every step of the way.<\/p>\n

When I swung her racquet and the strings found the ball, it felt like a warm knife greeting butter. As if the ThunderStick were lightning instead of its namesake, turning a hard object into a jolt of electricity. It made the old Head I\u2019d been hitting with feel like a brick by comparison.<\/p>\n

It was the ideal tennis tool. And of course, it was Emma\u2019s. About a year before he sent the racquets Sam had posted another box that also arrived unexpectedly. This one was filled with Emma\u2019s scarves, perfume\u2014she and I wore the same brand, Ivoire, by Balmain\u2014and a magnificent outfit she\u2019d once worn to a fundraising event on Broadway. A black dress and matching coat, the latter lined in sumptuous, dark red satin.<\/p>\n

It was a treasure box. I\u2019d instinctively reached for one of the scarves, still tied in a knot from the days she\u2019d worn it over her head, after she\u2019d lost her hair from chemotherapy treatments, and held it to my nose: it smelled human. It smelled of Emma.<\/p>\n

Over time, as we wore her scarves\u2014Emma didn\u2019t care much for things, but she loved accessories, so there were a lot of them\u2014they ceased to smell of her and began to smell of us. Just as her scent was about to fade entirely the ThunderStick arrived, with its sticky handle and worn bevel. More evidence that Emma had been here on earth. But here\u2019s the amazing thing: my backhand got better.<\/p>\n

My backhand has sucked since I first hit a ball at age eleven. Someone said on that first day, \u201cNow this is the hard shot,\u201d and something in me clenched in fear, rushing to set up neuro-barriers between my brain and body. I trusted leading with my palm, but not with the back of my hand. When I began playing tennis everyone had one-hand backhands, so I used one hand too, and masochistically refused to add my left hand to the shaft until 1990, or thereabouts.<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t help. I still sprayed backhands over the fence or lamely plopped them at my opponents\u2019 feet. Every time\u2014and I\u2019m talking millions of times\u2014I saw the ball heading toward the lefthand side of the court, an alarm went off in my chest and I prepared for the worst. Which usually came to pass. But with Emma\u2019s racquet in hand, something changed. Maybe it was the Sweet Spot Suspension. Or my preparation, or my footwork, or my follow-through. For a time I thought it was the one lesson I\u2019d had with a local pro a few years ago\u2014the ThunderStick had prompted a new resolve for improvement\u2014during which we\u2019d worked on an arcing, over-the-shoulder follow-through. I\u2019m not sure what happened, but the result was that I began to trust my left hand. For the first time in my life I trusted the second hand on my racquet, and eventually came to let it do the steering through the shot. Within months I was playing like a normal person who could hit off both sides of the court. I experienced the new sensation of nailing the sweet spot on a backhand.<\/p>\n

After I\u2019d had the ThunderStick for almost eight years Sam looked at it one day and sniffed. \u201cYou\u2019re playing with an antique,\u201d he said, bluntly. He had a brand new Babolat. That\u2019s what I needed: Raphael Nadal\u2019s black, white, and yellow Babolat. Or people would laugh at me. He was laughing already. In fact, Sam had just bought another Babolat for his new partner, a good friend of ours we\u2019d introduced him to a few years ago. He taught her to play\u2014she got good fast\u2014and now they hit together as their baby naps in a basinet alongside the court.<\/p>\n

So we go \u201cBabolatting\u201d instead of hitting now. I\u2019m playing with Nadal\u2019s racquet\u2014it\u2019s called an Aero Pro Drive. Emma\u2019s old ThunderStick sits in my tennis bag in case I break a string. And none of that matters. I still have my backhand. It\u2019ll never be as good as my forehand, but it\u2019s pretty sweet. Sometimes I want to believe that Emma\u2019s backhand passed into her racquet through osmosis, and then slipped through the flesh of my hands into my body\u2019s memory. That can\u2019t be true (can it?). But what she did with the racquet, the grace she achieved, the coordinated symphony of firing neurons and responding muscles that allowed her to summon power and accuracy off the blind side of the court, is something my body finally understands, too.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always got a team of two hands on my Aero Pro Drive, now\u2014as there will be on whatever racquet I use\u2014and I trust the one I can\u2019t see to lead.<\/p>\n

Pamela Petro is the author of<\/em> Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World in Welsh<\/a>. She is still struggling to master the language. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It came in a box. A big box, with two or three others. Sam had finally cleaned house. It\u2019s not every day you get a box of tennis racquets in the mail. I ripped it open and immediately shook hands with each one. \u201cNow guys, shake hands with the racquet.\u201d If I\u2019d said that once […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[9754,8032,9753,85,288],"class_list":["post-44823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-equipment","tag-first-person-2","tag-raquets","tag-sports","tag-tennis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThunderStick by Pamela Petro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 14, 2013 \u2013 It came in a box. A big box, with two or three others. Sam had finally cleaned house. 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