To Paradise

But until my first free nights, I had never been to the center for recreation, even though that was one of the things the center was for. Grandfather had brought me once, after the center had opened, and we had stood and watched a game of ping-pong. The center had two tables, and while people played, other people sat in chairs around the perimeter of the room and watched them, and clapped when someone scored a point. I remember thinking that it looked like fun, and it sounded like fun, too, the bright, sharp tap that the ball made as it struck the table, and I stood there for a long time.

“Do you want to play?” Grandfather whispered to me.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t know how.”

“You can learn,” Grandfather said. But I knew I couldn’t.

As we left the building that afternoon, Grandfather said, “You can come back, little cat. All you do is sign up for the team, and ask someone to play with you.” I was quiet then, because sometimes Grandfather said these things as if they were easy for me to do, and I became frustrated because he didn’t understand, he didn’t understand that I couldn’t do the things he thought I could, and I felt myself growing itchy and angry. But then he noticed, and he stopped walking and turned to me and put his hands on my shoulders. “You know how to do this, little cat,” he said, quietly. “You remember how we practiced talking to other people? You remember how we practiced having a conversation?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I know it’s not easy for you,” said Grandfather. “I know it’s not. But I wouldn’t be encouraging you to do this if I didn’t believe, with everything I am, that you were capable of it.”

And so up I went to the Recreation Center, if only because I wanted to be able to tell Grandfather—who was still alive then—that I had. But once I was there, I wasn’t even able to make myself walk inside. Instead, I sat on a ledge outside the building and watched other people walk in, in twos or alone. Then I noticed that there was a window on the other side of the front door, and that if I stood at the correct angle, I could watch the people inside playing ping-pong, and it was nice, because it was almost like I was one of them, but I didn’t have to actually speak to anyone.

That was how I spent my first month or so of free nights—standing outside the center and watching ping-pong through the window. Sometimes the matches were particularly exciting, and I would walk home quickly, thinking that I might tell my husband about one game or another I’d seen, even though he never asked what I did on my free nights, and never told me what he did on his free nights, either. Sometimes I imagined that I had made a new friend: the woman with the short curly hair and dimples who slammed the ball across the table, lunging back on her left heel as she did; the man who wore a red tracksuit printed with white clouds. Sometimes I imagined that I joined them at the hydration bar afterward, and I thought about what it would be like to tell my husband that I wanted to use one of the bonus liquid coupons so I could have a drink with my friends, and how he would say that of course I could, and maybe he would come and watch me play a game someday.