Beth kneels on the warm grass, squints through one eye, decides the angle is all off. She won’t be able to pound her grapefruit-sized red ridged ball through the weirdly angled wicket in only one shot. It will take two. One to get the ball close, and one to punch it through. She’s not likely to get the chance, though, as Evan’s big blue ball isn’t far away, and he’s got the next turn. There’s a good possibility she’ll have to take her next shot from under the porch, or in the midst of bushes, or, if Evan is feeling particularly nefarious and can pull it off, from the bottom of the driveway or the other side of the street.
This is backyard croquet. They’ve been playing it all summer, drunken afternoons under the inviting California sun, barbecue grill flared up, the smell of tangy smoked chicken in the air, Guns N’ Roses and XTC blaring on the stereo. Evan licks his lips in anticipation of sending Beth far away in search of her ball. Josh and Sarah stand nearby, gossiping about various professors. They’ve finished three years of a Ph.D., but at least three more lie ahead. Ted, Beth’s odd little boyfriend, sits in a lawn chair by the back door sipping a Sierra Nevada and watching the action. His chair is within the boundaries of the croquet court, but then again what isn’t? The rest of the group can’t quite figure out why Beth is with Ted. He is quiet and not easily classifiable. Beth is devoted, though, so questions about their relationship remain muted, not openly vented. The last of the group—Matt and Laura—are inside cutting vegetables, marinating meat. They are a couple, engaged just last month, and they will play in the next match. Unlike the others, they are not pursuing higher degrees in science. Laura teaches high school, Matt studies law. Matt and Evan are friends from way back, from the college summer they kicked in headlights, made stir-fries from compact discs.
Beth stands next to the ball and clunks it with the mallet, golf swing style. In the backyard, croquet players do not swing their mallets between their legs. Thudded solidly, the ball rolls across the yard, over some loose stones, down a slight ditch and then up again, through a patch of small twigs, coming to a rest about a foot from the wicket. With another turn, she could easily poke it through, but she doesn’t have another turn, and Evan grins devilishly as he strides toward his blue ball, his mallet swinging confidently at his side.
Evan puts his beer bottle on the ground next to him and sizes up the situation. If he wanted to, he could simply pop his blue ball right through the wicket and start his advance upon the next wicket—the one under the lip of the porch, next to the bush with all the thistles. But that wouldn’t be prudent. Beth could hit him on her next turn and knock him out of the yard, which is something Evan can’t afford right now because Josh is already two wickets ahead and Sarah is approaching quickly. Plus, it wouldn’t be much fun. Far better to send Beth flying. Evan gives his ball a tap, and it clunks against Beth’s. Now Evan has to concentrate. He places his ball right next to Beth’s, clamps his left foot down on it, and prepares to give Beth’s ball a long ride into croquet oblivion.
“Excuse me,” Evan says in an artificially deep voice to Josh and Sarah, still enraptured in their conversation about professors. They are standing directly between Beth’s ball and the side of the yard that leads to the driveway and street. “Please move.”
“Tee, hee, hee,” Ted twitters from his seated perch at the other side of the yard.
Evan turns and looks at Ted for a moment. He wonders: Who is this little man? Josh and Sarah move out of the way without objection. Had they not been in such deep conversation regarding the rumors of Professor Harry Feller’s possible sex-change operation they might have issued a caustic retort, but the discussion is too important to put on hold. Beth covers her eyes with her right hand and peeks out between fingers at Evan, now deeply concentrating on hitting his ball cleanly. The sound of Matt and Laura chopping celery can be heard, ever slightly, over Josh and Sarah’s chattering.
Evan takes several practice swings, lifting up his mallet to shoulder height and beyond, then bringing it down at half-speed to where his ball sits on the ground. This could be really bad, Beth thinks. As bad as the time Matt hit Ted’s ball so hard that Ted had to get on his bike to chase it down the street. As bad as anything backyard croquet has ever seen.
Taking a deep breath, Evan takes his backswing for real this time. He pauses for a split second at the top, then whips the mallet down like Tiger Woods off the tee at Pebble Beach. The mallet makes solid contact, fierce contact, but it is with Evan’s left foot, not the ball. He lets out a scream, plummets to the toasty grass. Beth lets out a celebratory yelp. She’s happy about the miscue, not yet worried about her friends metatarsal bones. Josh and Sarah pause from their discussion and look with some concern at their friend, who is writhing in both pain and embarrassment on the yard’s floor. Ted chirps out his usual “tee hee hee.” Hearing the ruckus, Laura calls out through the open kitchen window to find out what happened. Beth yells back: “Evan hit his foot. Evan hit his foot.”
“Fucking dope!” Matt barks.
Maybe ten minutes pass before play resumes. Evan walks off the injury the best he can. He is still limping, but the pain eventually subsides. Though he continues to play in the croquet match, he never really recovers from the foot-smashing incident. Beth, however, spirits lifted by her new found croquet life, plays the rest of the game like someone who has walked away from a fiery car crash. She takes each shot as though it might be her last. Repeatedly she utters the phrase: Seize the Turn. She overcomes Josh and sends his ball into a ditch. Josh becomes dispirited and can’t get himself back in the game. Sarah makes a bit of a run for it at the end, but there’s no catching Beth, and when Beth’s ball becomes the first to make it all the way around and hit the center peg, the mallet that she throws in the air to celebrate the victory comes only a hair away from thumping Evan on the head as it twirls its way back down to the earth.
Real croquet, it turns out, differs sharply from the backyard version. They find this out on a Saturday outing at the San Francisco Croquet Club. Evan reads in the Chronicle that the Club is seeking new members for its competitive league, and so on a bright lovely Bay Area morning the seven friends pile into two Honda Civics and make their way up the Peninsula to the City to try their hand at real croquet, on a real croquet lawn. How hard could it be, they figure? How hard could it be for a group of healthy, well-practiced youngsters to excel at a sport generally populated by effete, arthritic antiquarians?
They arrive full of vigor and hope, piling out of the two cars in front of a stately mansion near the top of one of San Francisco’s magnificent hills. Looking out on the long swaths of grass to each side of the club’s main building, thoughts turn to the upcoming San Francisco Open. They all agree that one of them will win the tournament, but they cannot agree on who, specifically, will prevail. Beth has been playing well lately it is true, but Evan has been the most consistent player over the summer’s long course, and Matt’s dead-on accuracy has to put him within the top three at least, even if he often lacks the attention span to see through any particular game to victory. Ted, most agree, will not win the Open.
A distinguished gentleman who introduces himself as Edward Wharton, outfitted entirely in crisp white, greets them upon arrival. “Welcome to the Club,” he says. “It is always nice when we find youngsters who are interested in the sport. It bodes well for our future.” He leads the group to a side lawn where two elderly patrons, also dressed completely in white, are practicing their shots. The old woman, her name is Hilda, encourages her geriatric husband Gerald, in his attempt to tap his red ball through a perfectly placed wicket four feet away. “You can do it, Gerald,” she says, and she is right. Gerald hits the ball squarely, and it glides smoothly over the finely trimmed grass directly through the center of the wicket. “Oh, goodie!” Hilda claps.
It is clear that they are no longer in the backyard. The perfection of the lawn is what they all notice first. No bramble bushes here, no garden hoses or ant hills to traverse, no rotted wooden boards with rusted nails sticking out to avoid. Everything else is flawless too, from the tall solid mallets to the straight square wickets to the gleaming balls, unscratched by pavement or tiny pointed pebbles, so unlike their own shabby equipment. They look down at their inapt clothing, mismatched colors, blue jeans clashing with orange t-shirts, slogans like “I Always Get My Drugs at Moe’s,” so apparently witty back home, now seem blatantly out-of-place. Evan thinks to look around for signs of casual alcohol consumption, but he finds no evidence of any beer, not even an empty plastic cup that might have recently held a gin-and-tonic. He thinks: Oh, dear lord, what have we done?
Edward suggests that two members of the group compete against Gerald and Hilda in an exhibition match. Everyone else will watch and learn the rules peculiar to regulation play. At one point, Sarah mentions to Edward that the group has been playing backyard croquet all summer. Edward grins and nods his head ever so slightly. “Yes, dear, I’m sure you have.”
Hilda goes first. She stands next to the ball and clunks it with the mallet, between-the-legs style. On the lawn, croquet players do not swing their mallets as though they were golf clubs. This slight deviation places Evan and Beth at a bit of a disadvantage. Beth’s first swing completely misses the ball. This is almost physically impossible, but the second swing, generously allowed by Gerald, nearly does the same; the ball ricochets off Beth’s right ankle and bounces backward. Not a good start. Evan’s ball, unlike Beth’s, goes forward, but much too quickly. The black ball just about sails over the other edge of the lawn, but luckily it bounces off the side of the far wicket and comes to a rest about 30 yards in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, Gerald and Hilda effortlessly glide through the first few wickets. Though their combined ages exceed those of Evan and Beth’s by almost a hundred years, Gerald and Hilda are well on their way to winning the exhibition game.
Before long, though, Evan and Beth, urged on by the cheering of the others and Edward’s patient instructions, begin to get the hang of the between-the-legs swing, and they make their way back into semi-respectable contention. At one point, Evan aims for Hilda’s ball from ten yards away and hits it dead on. “Nice roquet!” Edward exclaims, as Evan strides forward to send Hilda’s ball into croquet oblivion.
Ever since the foot-smashing incident in the backyard, Evan has been careful about this kind of shot, the shot that Edward refers to as the “croquet stroke,” much to everyone’s delight. This time he won’t miss, he won’t bruise any toes, won’t end up face first on the well-coiffed lawn. He looks out beyond the lawn’s edge. There is a steep hill that rolls down to a line of blossoming shrubs. He thinks that with enough topspin he could maybe reach them. The thought of watching the octogenarian hobble down the hill with her cane and scavenge through the shrubs for her green ball makes Evan smile wickedly in anticipation. He places his ball next to hers and steps on it solidly. Before anyone can stop him, Evan swings the mallet like Greg Norman off the tee at Augusta and slams it into his ball. Hilda’s ball soars off the lawn, just like Evan imagined, and bounces with such velocity that it is still rolling when it hits the line of shrubs and disappears.
“Oh, goodness!” squeals Hilda, grasping her chest.
“Sweet Jesus!” yelps Gerald.
“Tee hee hee,” squawks Ted.
“What are you doing?” Edward demands, his voice raised, stomping briskly toward Evan, who is thrusting his mallet sky high in celebration of his perfect croquet stroke. “You can’t do that here! What do you think this is, the suburbs? You can’t put your foot on your ball when you hit the croquet stroke. You can’t send someone out of bounds. Now, you’ll have to go down and get the ball and bring it back up here.”
Evan is crestfallen. He stops singing “We are the Champions” and looks at Edward in disbelief. “What? Are you kidding? You can’t slam someone? What’s the point?”
“I am not kidding. You must go retrieve that ball. I think you might have given poor Hilda a coronary.”
“Aww,” moans Evan. He throws the mallet down and goes off to retrieve the ball. Continuously he mutters: What’s the fucking point? It takes him several minutes to find the ball in the shrubs and extract it from its tightly ensconced position between two limbs. When he finally makes it back up to the lawn, he finds Hilda sitting in a lawn chair. Gerald is fanning her with a copy of the Atlantic Monthly. Edward hands Hilda a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, which she sips slowly. Evan meets up with the rest of the group. Collectively they wonder whether Hilda will return to the game and, if she does, whether she might be so frazzled by the incident that Evan and Beth could actually win this thing.
No such luck. After finishing her orange juice, Hilda shuffles back to the lawn, and they resume play. Evan and Beth make a few good shots, but the team is inconsistent and cannot keep up. Hilda and Gerald are toying with them. The two grandparents-many-times-over are thinking several moves ahead at all times. The game, as they say over and over, is like “chess on grass,” a phrase that sends the twenty-somethings into a mild state of depression each time they hear it. Gerald makes it all the way around the course and back again to the very last wicket before either Evan or Beth can make it to that wicket for even the first time. He has lapped them. When Gerald hits the center peg, there seems no sense in playing the rest of the game to see who comes in second, since Hilda is only two wickets away herself.
Back home on the Peninsula, the group sits around the living room eating reheated leftovers, microwaved TV dinners. Nobody says much. They have been humiliated by the day. None of them will ever return to the San Francisco Croquet club. The backyard croquet set, too, will fall into disuse. Breaking the silence, Ted tells a story about how his mother refused to buy him a pet bunny when he was nine, but no one is interested. “What the hell are you talking about?” Evan blurts. Beth looks at Evan angrily. “It’s O.K., Ted,” she says, putting an arm around Ted’s shoulder. “It will all be OK.”
About the author:
Jay Wexler lives and teaches in Boston. His fiction and humor have appeared online in eyeshot, the glut, mcsweeney's, opium, pindeldyboz, sweet fancy moses, and yankee pot roast.
© 2009 Word Riot
