A few years ago, I was a graduate student in English at a big public university in the Midwest. One of the undergrads during my time there was a girl named Madison. She was absolutely stunning in a very middle-America sort of way: Long, blonde hair, with perfectly-toned slender legs that she liked to show off in short skirts.
Her breasts were fairly large, given her otherwise athletic physique, and I noticed her walking around the department right away. My previous relationship was in the process of dying, so I chatted her up right away and quickly realized that she had a personality to match her outward beauty.
But Madison was engaged to a lawyer living in Atlanta, so I never bothered to ask her out.
The fall of my second year, when she was a senior, we took an advanced course on Latin American literature together that met two times a week.
One warm afternoon in September, she sat down a few seats away from me in class, wearing a sporty sleeveless mustard-colored dress that ended mid-thigh. "Hey, Alex," she said, and I studied how tanned her perfect legs were until the professor, an Ecuadorian who spoke in a dull monotone that was hard to stay awake to, began his lecture.
After class, as she closed up her laptop, Madison pointed to the floor beneath my chair. "Is that a tennis racket?" she asked.
I looked at her blankly, lost in thoughts about Ruben Dario's verses. I looked down and saw the long handle sticking out of my bag. "No," I said after a moment. "Squash."
"You play?"
It was a game that I picked up during my year abroad in Argentina, I told her. I tried to play two or three times a week, but it wasn't particularly easy to find partners. That might have had something to do with the university's only squash court being in the basement of the gym, literally next to the boiler room. There were no glass walls, like you see in courts of more modern construction.
The place just sweltered, especially in hot weather like today.
I asked, hopefully, "Do you?"
She shook her head. "I used to play a lot of tennis. Is it very different?"
I started gathering my stuff and half-shrugged. "Yeah," I said, "but I'm sure you could pick it up easily."
We both stood, and she gave me a critical once-over. I was in my late 20s, had a full, dark beard and the bare beginnings of a paunch. "I bet I could beat you," she said.
I said, "You're obviously in great shape, but squash is about technique not fitness."
"Sounds like a cop-out," she answered with a crooked little smile.
"What are you doing tomorrow night?" I asked. "I reserved the court for 9 p.m. and have no one to play with."
My most frequent playing partners were Brad, a third year in law school, and Tom, a junior professor in sociology, but my schedule didn't jibe with theirs very well.
"Great," she said, "but I don't have a racket."
"You can use my old one," I said, lying. We exchanged cell numbers and parted ways. I hadn't gotten more than five feet from the classroom before I texted Brad, telling him I needed to borrow his racket.
* * *
"Jesus, it's hot in here," Madison said as we stepped into the court, and I couldn't have agreed with her more.
She was wearing a little white tennis skirt that set off her tan spectacularly. On top, she had a loose-fitting, sleeveless white mesh shirt with a deep neck scoop that was cropped and showed her flat midriff. Under that was a dark-colored sports bra that strained to contain her breasts. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail.
I, on the other hand, wore my ratty old red gym shorts and a faded Chicago Cubs t-shirt. I handed her Brad's squash racket and saw how ridiculous it must look in her eyes. More like a badminton racket than a tennis one.
"Can you go over the rules with me?" she asked.
I ran through them quickly, waving the long racket around to point out the various out of bounds lines. She kept her eyes on me as I spoke, her top teeth overbiting her lower lip in concentration. She was ridiculously beautiful, I thought as I wrapped it up. "We play to seven, but you don't get a point unless you're serving. Got that?"
"I think so," she said, adding, "now what about a handicap?"
I tried to push back the brown locks that tended to cascade down my forehead annoyingly. "I'll spot you two points," I said.
"Oh, please!" she squealed with a little smile on her face. "We've got to make this
interesting
.
Five
points."
"No way!" I shot back. "Any chump can get two points -- and clearly you are not just any chump. I'll give you three."
We settled on four.
As we warmed up, I could see that Madison was coordinated and fit, but she didn't understand how to swing a squash racket. A tennis swing generates power but sacrifices placement -- the key to squash. Ideally, you want to hit the ball along the walls into the rear corners, or "bost" it, bouncing it off three walls, so that it dies into one of the front corners.
When I asked, "Are you ready?" she nodded, a shiny trace of moisture on her forehead and upper arms.
I stepped into the serving box and struck the ball toward the front wall. It bounced in a lazy, high arc toward the rear corner. As I moved to her side of the court, I watched Madison take an unfortunate path toward the ball, coming too close to the wall. Realizing that she wasn't going to be able to hit the ball any other way, she jumped and tried to backhand it four feet over her head. She missed and collapsed in a beautiful heap.
My momentum carried me nearly to her, and, glancing at the pink underpants that peeked out from beneath the jumbled hem of her skirt, I offered her my hand.
She was laughing at herself as she placed her small, warm hand in mine. "So that was..."
"My point," I said, pulling her up. As she came up onto her feet, the front of her breasts pushed into my ribs.
"Shit," she said. "I thought so."
