Jersey Tomatoes are the Best Read online

  Here’s what we never did: keep score. Eva doesn’t play competitive games. Nothing with points, nothing with balls, nothing with sticks, bats or rackets. That’s because she hates those games. Says losing makes her sad, and winning makes her feel sad for the other person. I’ve never minded. Playing Eva’s way was a nice break from … well, the dogs, for one thing.

  One hot summer day Dad wanted me to call dogs before lunch. It was, like, ninety degrees. I argued, but he turned the machine on anyway. Then he told me I didn’t have to just call the names: I had to call the numbers, too. Which is impossible because they’re too small.

  I was so pissed that I just started calling out any old number. “Wilson Three! Penn Two!” Smacking away and lying my head off. Finally, he turned off the damn thing. Said he’d filled the machine with Dunlops. Said he knew I cheated on our drills. Said I didn’t work hard enough, and it showed. He punished me for lying by taking away my TV privileges for a month and making me do dogs for an extra hour a day.

  I was nine years old.

  Around that same time, Eva traded in her rubbery ballet slippers for pointe shoes. Ballet started getting serious for her around then, and hours spent just hanging out … or playing pretend … became rare. By now I’ll bet she’s accumulated enough frequent driver miles crossing over or under the Hudson River into the city for ballet stuff to travel to the moon and back. She tells me I’m wrong.

  She says she’s earned enough miles to make it to Pluto.

  Today is a rare Sunday afternoon we both have off, and … predictably … Eva has dictated that we must spend it together drinking her famous Pink Decadence smoothies. Once upon a time this was a regular event. Now I can’t remember the last time we had smoothies.

  “For example,” Eva says, continuing to make her case for surviving New Jersey. “Take … cancer.”

  “Pass,” I groan. But Eva’s on a roll.

  “I once saw a map of the U.S. that had a tiny red dot wherever there was a cancer cluster. I don’t know how many cases per thousand the dots represented, but the state of New Jersey? Completely red. That’s how many dots we’ve got.”

  “And this is supposed to make us feel good?” I say.

  “Yes!” she exclaims. “We don’t have cancer! What are the odds of that, living in New Jersey? If we haven’t gotten cancer by now, we probably never will.”

  “Eva, we’re sixteen. Well, at least I am. We’ve got, like, another seventy years to get cancer,” I say. Eva shakes her head as she presses the plastic lid onto the top of the blender. She’s loaded it with fresh strawberries, vanilla yogurt, lemonade and chopped ice. She pushes a button and the whole thing spins and shakes. When it all turns a uniform shade of pink, she shuts it off.

  “My point is that if you can emerge from the heap in Jersey, you can make it anywhere.”

  “Uh, no offense, but I think that comes from the song about New York.”

  Eva smiles and fills two tall glasses with the creamy liquid, then pushes one across the counter to me. She raises hers in a toast.

  “Today New Jersey, tomorrow … the world!” she declares. “Congratulations, Hen.” We clink, then drink. Yum. Total Pink Decadence, but Eva insists it only has 180 calories per serving. Not that it makes much difference to me. I’m a pretty mindless eater, devouring whatever is on my plate until the growling stops. Ballerina Eva, on the other hand, never seems to eat a morsel without whipping out her calculator.

  When she lowers her glass, she’s wearing a pink mustache.

  “Your dad must be happy,” Eva says. I reach over and wipe her upper lip with my napkin.

  Eva knows Dad.

  “Something did happen,” I say.

  “Of course,” she says matter-of-factly. “Spill, girlfriend. You’ll feel better.”

  Ages ago, Eva and I figured out that we’re good friends because we never compete with each other. Except about one thing: who has the most obnoxious parent. She insists her mother takes the prize. Once, when Eva didn’t get the lead in a local production of the ballet Coppelia, her mother let all the air out of the casting director’s tires. Eva claims my dad’s outbursts are nothing compared to her mom’s terrorist attacks.

  “This girl I beat, in the final? Dad accused her, right in front of everyone, of talking to her coach between games.” Eva’s never so much as even picked up a tennis racket, but years of hanging out with me have made her a tennis rules expert. She knows: no coaching during tournament play.

  “And … was she?” Eva asks.

  “I don’t think so. She told me she’s diabetic and her dad was just asking how she felt.”

  Eva rolls her eyes.

  “Let me guess: Mark learned the truth and apologized to the diabetic girl?”

  “Guess again,” I say.

  “Hmm. He continued to press his point? Even after his little darling triumphed?”

  “Try: he rubbed it in her face that she’d lost, accused her of cheating and pissed off her dad so much that I thought the guy was going to deck him.” Eva lets out a long, low whistle of admiration.

  “Ten points, Mark!” she exclaims. “Watch out, Rhonda. If he keeps this up, we’ll have to transfer the Obnoxious Parent of the Year trophy from the Smiths’ house to the Lloyds’.”

  The Obnoxious Parent of the Year trophy was Eva’s idea. She bought it a couple of years ago from this online trophy and plaque place and got them to engrave OPY on the brass plate at the base. Depending on Mark’s and Rhonda’s latest escapades, we swap the trophy between us.

  I know I should be laughing, but the Attitude Deficit has a real hold on me today. The bubbles at the top of my smoothie are suddenly fascinating.

  Eva puts her hand over mine.

  “You know I’m kidding,” she says. “Honestly, Henry, was it really that bad?”

  My throat closes at this point. Even to Eva, this is hard to say. Because it’s not just Dad’s behavior that has left me feeling bad about this match. I’m used to Dad. The whole Jersey junior circuit is used to Dad.

  “I don’t know,” I finally say. “It’s like … the crowd is never with me. They’re always pulling for my opponent. And I know, you think that’s because I’ve got the bigmouth father. And probably that’s partially true. But it’s something else, and I don’t get it.”

  “Well, you’re pretty dominant,” she suggests. “Maybe they’re pulling for the underdog because they want to see a big upset?”

  “No,” I say firmly. “Look at Mike Adams, that guy from Port Chester. He’s the uncontested New Jersey boys junior champ every year, and fans, like, follow him from court to court. His opponents almost seem happy to play him. Like it’s an honor to get bageled by Mike Adams.” I don’t need to explain “bageled” to Eva. She knows it means losing a match 6–0, 6–0.

  “They probably feel sorry for your opponents,” Eva suggests. “I mean, you crush them.”

  “What’s more crushing than a bagel?” I counter.

  “Not the score, Hen. The whole thing. I’ve seen you do it. You … well, it’s what I said. You crush them. You make it so that they dread ever having to play you again.”

  “Yeah, but this is competition tennis. You want them to fear you,” I explain.

  “But it won’t win you the Miss Congeniality award, will it?” Eva laughs, coaxing a smile out of me, as well. The idea of Henriette Lloyd winning a Nice Kid prize at a tennis match is … pretty unlikely.

  “You can’t have it both ways, Hen,” Eva concludes. “You can’t humiliate them on the court, then expect them to friend you on Facebook afterward. Put on your big-girl panties and handle it: you are a badass, kick-ass tennis player.”

  “Hmm,” I reply, a little skeptically. Eva smiles and dumps some of her smoothie into my now-empty glass. She moves lightly on to the next subject, this topic dealt with and checked off in some imaginary box in her head. She’s good like that, compartmentalizing messy emotional junk into neat boxes that you can label, then seal tight with packing tape. I
wish I could do that, but my junk spills out and runs around, and even if I could stuff it in a box it’d squeal to get out.

  There’s more to say, and I worry that Eva’s too nice to say it. To say that maybe when it comes to me and my dad, keeping an eye on the ball isn’t the only thing I’ve learned.

  Chapter Four

  EVA

  Paybacks are hell. Which is why I find myself in Henry’s kitchen the morning of the state tournament.

  The Lloyds are jumpy. Even Henry’s mom, the sane parent. She’s nuking oatmeal in the microwave, grabs the hot dish without mitts and drops it. The oatmeal hits the floor and spatters spectacularly, soft gray blobs daubing the cabinets, the dishwasher. Her shorts.

  “Damn!” she exclaims. Mrs. Lloyd never swears. At least, not when I’m around.

  “What?” Henry’s dad walks in, freshly showered, his hair slicked back like the fur of a wet seal. His white-collared golf shirt makes his tan neck look practically maroon.

  “I dropped the oatmeal,” Mrs. Lloyd says, ripping off a paper towel. “It’s everywhere.” I grab a napkin and go after blobs on the floor as Mrs. Lloyd starts on the cabinets.

  “Eva, you don’t have to do that,” she says. I smile at her. Of course I do. Oatmeal streaks the straight lines of the tiled floor.

  “Where’s Henry? She needs to eat,” Mark says. “Did all the oatmeal spill?”

  “More like, flew,” I comment. I look up at him and my eyes glance over his head.

  “Oh no,” I groan. They follow my gaze. A line of oatmeal blobs stretches across the ceiling. It reminds me of the girls’ bathroom at school, where kids take handfuls of toilet paper, soak them in the sink, then fling them up, so they stick. The custodian has to climb a stepladder in order to scrape them off.

  “What the hell did you do, Marian?” Mark demands. Mrs. Lloyd’s eyes narrow.

  “I was doing the oatmeal dance, Mark,” she says. “You whirl around in a circle yelling ‘dammit’ and fling hot oatmeal everywhere. Then the tennis gods guarantee you a victory that day. I’m surprised you had to ask.”

  I suck in my breath and wait for the onslaught. I haven’t witnessed Lloyd-on-Lloyd battles, but from what Henry tells me they aren’t pretty. I’m wishing I hadn’t shown up so early today. Wishing Henry weren’t my best friend and I didn’t have to be here.

  But I do, because that’s the thing about a best friend: for all the big stuff, she is there.

  It’s the sort of thing a lesser mortal, like my Family Frenemy, Paige, doesn’t get. (Henry uses that word for her: a cross between friend and enemy. So much love between those two.) Paige’s mom and my mom went to college together. She’s in our class at Ridgefield High and usually doesn’t like anyone who has better hair. Not only does Henry have movie-star long blond hair and a Victoria’s Secret body, but she’s got Olympic gold athletic ability and rocket-scientist intelligence.

  “Honestly, Eva. Isn’t it depressing to be around that much perfection?” Paige once said. How could I explain to a person like Paige why I love Henry? Who has no clue how gorgeous she is. Who lives in jeans and sweatshirts. Who doesn’t own a microgram of makeup, doesn’t know her own weight. And when I do my South Park imitations? She laughs until she cries. Unlike Paige, who says, “Could you, like, not talk in that funny voice for a change?”

  Of course, sometimes, like this morning, I wish I didn’t love Henry. Then I wouldn’t have agreed to spend the day with her warring parents, watching her play tennis. But she’s put up with equally boring afternoons, and with Rhonda, too. Like the day I got my first pointe shoes, a red-letter day in a dancer’s life.

  My mother had scheduled a fitting at the Gaynor Minden showroom in New York, an old Victorian brownstone in Chelsea. Gaynor Mindens are like no other shoes, and their showroom is like no other ballet store. An imposing iron gate greets you at their front door, and you have to buzz to be admitted. Once inside, you sit in an elegant living room, before a fireplace, as a salesperson spends unlimited time making sure the length, width, box, shank, vamp and heel of your little satin shoe is perfect.

  Other ballet shoes have to be broken in. I know girls who press new shoes under the tires of an SUV a few times before dancing in them. Gaynor Mindens, however, start out perfect and stay that way; when they stretch, you replace them. At eighty dollars a pop. I can usually get six weeks out of a pair of pointe shoes. Principal dancers in big companies might replace theirs every three days. So not only are pointe shoes a huge investment; they are also a sign that, as a dancer, you’ve “arrived.” Finally strong enough and committed enough to go on pointe.

  Henry had asked to come along. Nine years old, a non-dancer, and she wanted to be there. She watched with interest. She clapped when we finally found the right pair. And as we skipped down Gaynor Minden’s front steps—our next destination Ruby Foo’s, where my mother had made a reservation for lunch—Henry slipped her hand into mine, and squeezed.

  You can forgive a girl for looking like a supermodel if, at age nine, she was already such a good friend.

  Miraculously, she appears that moment at the kitchen entrance.

  “Hey, Eva,” she says in a cheery voice. She sees her mother and me, paper towels in hand, wiping. She frowns. “Smells like breakfast but looks like a food fight.”

  “Right on both counts,” I reply. I tip my head toward Mark, who steps over some blobs.

  “Henry needs to eat,” he repeats, opening the fridge. “And we need to walk out this door in twenty minutes.”

  “Cold cereal, Dad,” Henry says briskly. “Breakfast of champions.” She grabs the Raisin Bran, a bowl and the milk, and I follow her out to the patio table. As she eats we pretend not to hear her parents’ muted angry voices from the kitchen. The scrape of chair legs across the floor as someone climbs up to wipe the ceiling.

  Henry looks across the table, her eyes strafing me from head to toe.

  “Let me guess: Lawrence of Arabia?”

  “Very funny,” I reply. I’m wearing a long-sleeved white cotton shirt and baggy white parachute pants. My white cap has a flap down the back to protect my neck, and my nose is coated with zinc oxide. I smell like a Coppertone factory.

  “I may be dressed for an afternoon in the desert, but when you sun worshippers are all wrinkled and leathery by age forty, my face will still be as smooth as a baby’s behind,” I say.

  “You look great,” she says, laughing. “Thanks for coming today.”

  * * *

  When the four of us drive up to the Lenz Tennis Center in Princeton, we see scores of other competitors dressed in their snazzy outfits. It’s only May, but the day burns hot and humid. Henry has been seriously thriving on Poland Spring water during the trip and needs a bathroom break, fast.

  She’s gotten quiet during the last fifteen minutes of the drive, and she stares intently out the window, at the crowds of players. She jounces one leg rapidly, up and down, and anyone who didn’t know her might mistake it for nerves. I know it’s pure, pent-up energy.

  Here’s the thing about Henry: she’s a ruthless competitor. Not Michael Jordan ruthless, mind you. He’s the type who freaks out if you beat him in tiddlywinks, while Henry only cares about tennis. But when it comes to tennis … she’s a little scary.

  It’s a part of her I don’t get. I mean, this winning and losing stuff? Why? Who cares how many points you earn or how many times you throw the orange ball through the metal hoop? Can’t we just enjoy the beauty of Michael Jordan flying through the air without keeping score? Why do we always have to measure, assess, tally up the count or register the applause meter? Why does somebody always have to lose?

  I tried to explain this to her once. She had attended one of my performances as Clara in The Nutcracker. It was this totally crazy season where I’d committed to dancing Clara with three separate groups, and the schedule was brutal. The toll on my body was terrible; every tendon ached, and I went through a whole bottle of ibuprofen. We even started calling it Vitamin I. I moved
as if in a bad dream, through the shows, the lights, the music, the endless driving in bad weather as my mother raced me from one stage to another.

  Henry had come to the show at our high school and the next day told me I’d done a great job.

  “You know,” I said to her carefully, not sure she would understand. “That wasn’t my all-time favorite performance.”

  “Yeah, you didn’t have much of a partner,” she said, laughing a little. “I mean, where did you dig up the prince? Eva, the guy was useless, he—” I cut her off.

  “I’m not talking about ‘best.’ I’m talking ‘favorite.’ As in most joyful, ‘dancing in my happy place’ performance. Can you guess?” Henry frowned.

  “You played the Mouse King,” I prompted. The lines of her face relaxed when she remembered a once-upon-a-time afternoon at my house. She and I staged The Nutcracker in the basement, with the help of my dress-up box of costumes, sheets from Rhonda’s linen closet and a fake, plastic sword. The Nutcracker was a big stuffed panda.

  “I kicked the Nutcracker’s ass,” Henry said.

  “You skewered him with the sword and his stuffing poured out,” I corrected her. “Rhonda was predictably pissed off, but Henry, we were Clara and the Mouse King. I felt more alive in the story that day than I ever have in a staged performance. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure,” she said easily. “I think when we’re little kids our imaginations take us places that we just can’t go when we get older. Reality is never as much fun as make-believe. I mean, no amount of imagination could get around that Nutcracker Prince last night!” She laughed.

  I didn’t push it further with her. Henry’s a competitor. A scorekeeper. It’s coded in her DNA, like her flawless facial bone structure. And even though this killer competitive thing bothers her, she couldn’t change it any more than she could rearrange her own skeletal system.

  Mark drops us off at the registration building and goes to park.

  Inside the tennis center the line for the women’s room snakes out the door and into the hallway. We get behind some gaggle of little girls in matching Fila dresses. They share a three-pack of Reese’s peanut butter cups, breaking them into bits, licking melted chocolate off their fingers. They do this while reading a sheet of paper taped to the wall.