CHRISTMAS CHEER IN THREE ACTS by Henry F. Tonn
Thesis
He is the big stud with the big arm and the big serve and king of the courts. She is the glitter girl, the glamor queen, the incandescent prodigy of homecoming competitions. She consorts with star basketball players who are six foot eight and academically challenged but cocky because they can dunk blindfolded. However, everything changes the afternoon she looks at him in that certain way through the wire fence of the tennis facility and says something that is lost in the wind. But he rises to the occasion by asking, “what in the world are you doing on this side of campus when the basketball facility is definitely over there,” and points with his racquet. “I like tennis players’ legs,” she says, hooking polished fingernails coyly through the fence. “Yeah,” he says, “and they’re tanned too, not like that anemic white you get from running around in gymnasiums. Those guys might as well be living underground like goddamn Morlocks.” And she laughs. The two of them dine that evening in the university cafeteria and then stroll to the school’s arboretum—that facilitator of budding romances and carnal lust—where they neck for several hours. A month later they are sitting in the student lounge sharing an ice cream cone and discussing his plans to enter the professional tennis ranks. She shakes her head and says, “darling, you’re a wonderful tennis player, but only a few pros make any money on the circuit and I don’t want to be a tennis widow sitting around waiting for you to come home. I want to get married and live a normal life. You need to decide how important I am to you.” He will wonder many years later if he made the right decision. So they marry at a country club during the summer and very soon acquire a home on the eighth fairway of the same club. There follows a nice middle-class existence of friends, social events, theater tickets, and vacations to exotic locations. There is little to complain aboutAntithesis
until he is sitting contentedly on the patio one evening with a half-consumed daquiri in hand and she sits down somberly to inform him that she is planning to visit her sister in Philadelphia and would be staying for a while so she has “time to think.” A vague ripple of anxiety passes down his spine and he wonders if perhaps he has not paid sufficient attention to the subtle changes that have been occurring in his marriage over the past year. William Shirer, the writer, once remarked that “time and circumstance take their toll” on marriages, but he never believed this applied to him. The following day he stands mutely in the driveway as she pulls away in her Toyota Avalon with hardly a backward glance, and returns to a home that has suddenly undergone a dramatic transformation. It is silent. In fact, the silence is palpable, infiltrating his mind and body like some poisonous radiation. He realizes for the first time that he has never been alone. In the beginning there was his family and then the dormitory with all the guys horsing around and then the marriage. And now . . . . He stands in the middle of the living room while a knot forms in his stomach. In the next few weeks the knot worsens and he begins walking around slightly bent over like an old man. He visits a physician and complains, but the physician is clueless. He asks, “have you been experiencing any stress lately?” He laughs. His wife phones and informs him that the marriage is over and she is “moving on,” plunging him into a profound depression. For months he goes through the motions of daily necessities but is curiously detached. He is reminded of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”: sealed off from the world while everyone else is blithely carrying on their activities. Food is tasteless, relationships don’t matter, work is a boring waste of time. Rage wells up inside him as he struggles to figure out what he has done to deserve this. Christmas eve arrives. He knows getting up in the morning will be a struggle. Why bother? Instead, he decides, take your useless, sorry ass down to Walmart and buy a nice Christmas holiday weapon of your choice and then go home and get your joyous holiday affairs in order and type out a note on the computer that serves as your Last Will and Testament for these wonderful holidays and make sure the cat has enough food and water to last a couple of days in case your sorry, useless ass isn’t discovered while everyone is celebrating the wonderful holidays and then put the gun into your mouth and squeeze the trigger . . . .Synthesis
but a tennis court materialize before him, the university tennis court, the final match of the season, the conference championship, for all the marbles, with his eternal nemesis Harper Ruff on the other side, serving his last serve, that big kicking monster you can barely return, allowing Harper to volley sharply into the opposite corner, a shot seemingly out of reach, but you anticipate, sprint madly, racquet drawn, wrist cocked, for that final headlong dive to send the ball screaming over the net, just out of Harper’s reach, the ground crashing into your body, watching the ball as it soars down the line, as Harper looks on, as the crowd looks on, as time stands still, as the ball descends, drifts downward, gently, to kiss the outside of the white tape, leaving that glorious mark of victory, and you are, by god, for the first time ever, the conference champion. “Memories are not key to the past, but to the future,” Corrie ten Boom once said. Yes. It is time to move on. There may be a way out of this. Christmas is calling.