And then suddenly, we could hear the crunch of the gravel that was my father walking back up the path. Marco pulled his hands away.
It was over almost as quickly as it had begun. Marco whispered, “I’ll see you around,” and then took off just as my father came back. My father picked up his racket and stood across the court from me and started calling out the shots he wanted to do.
I hit the ball the same as I always did, but inside, I felt flushed and in possession of my first real secret. It was like opening the front door and letting fresh air into the house.
For the next month, every day after training, Marco would be there. Whenever my father and Elena weren’t around, he would kiss me in the corner of the court. I felt embarrassed by how much I looked forward to it, by how desperate I was to feel more of him, how often I thought of him when he was gone.
I felt such an insatiable need for him to touch me, a hunger for his body. It felt exactly like the hunger I felt to win. The sense that at the center of my being there was an unfillable void. There would never be enough matches to win. There would never be enough of Marco.
And it wasn’t one-sided. He seemed to need me too. I could tell in the hurried way he grabbed me, in the look on his face when I had to leave. I felt bright and shiny for maybe the first time in my life, glowing with the knowledge that I was wanted.
I’m stunned at what Marco and I got away with in those small pockets of time that spring in Florida, just how far things went. Eventually, we found our way to the back of his parents’ old sedan, parked in the far corner of the parking lot.
Marco opened up a whole slice of the world for me, a whole new thing my body could do. And I felt consumed by it. I could torture my body all day—making my muscles so tired that my whole body felt heavy. And then in just a few minutes, Marco could lighten every limb, loosen my chest.
“Are you my boyfriend?” I asked him one afternoon in June, pulling my shirt down and fixing my hair. The start of Junior Wimbledon was only two short weeks away.
“I don’t think so,” Marco said. “We don’t hang out or anything.”
“Well, maybe we could,” I said. “After the tournament. It’s in a couple weeks, and when it’s over, I could convince my dad we should come back here.”
“I don’t want you to come back here just for me,” Marco said as he kissed me on the lips. When he pulled away, he was smiling. I loved his smile—the way his dimples were barely there but I was close enough to see them.
“But if we like each other…”
“Sure,” he said. “But it’s good, how it works now. Where we both do our own thing but then do…this.” He kissed my neck, and all over again I found myself closing my eyes, on the verge of surrendering.
What little I knew of Marco outside of our time together mystified me. He got Cs in school and didn’t play a single sport. His mother and father never kept track of where he was. All he did was play guitar and try to get his band together in his garage to practice. I could barely imagine his world, and yet I could not stop trying.
I liked the way he talked a lot but never said much. That he never took anything seriously. That nothing ever felt like a big deal. Sometimes, I pictured being with him outside that car. I pictured me sitting across the table from him at a restaurant and having him reach his hand out for mine. For other people to see that he chose me. “I’m just saying, if we wanted to, we could figure it out,” I said.
“It’s not like you even have time to go to a party with me or do anything I want to do. You’re obsessed with tennis.”
“I’m not obsessed with anything,” I said. “I’m dedicated to winning. And I work hard at that.”
“Right,” Marco said. “And so let’s just keep doing what we’re doing.”
I did not like his answer, but the next afternoon, I met him right back in that car with a smile on my face.
Maybe Marco and I would never go out to dinner. Maybe I was not the sort of girl who became a girlfriend at all. Maybe I was the type of girl you kissed when no one was looking and that was it. If that was the case, then fine. I would not demean myself enough to want more. But that did not mean I could not have the rest, that my body did not deserve what he could give it.
When we left Saddlebrook for London, I knew I would probably never see Marco again. But I did not cry. As I watched the plane lift up above the clouds, it seemed obvious to me that there would be other Marcos—that Marcos were easy to find now that I knew to look for them.
But then as the plane leveled out, I glanced back at my father, who was talking to the flight attendant. I couldn’t quite make sense of him. I kept staring at his face, trying to understand why he looked so foreign to me now.
There was a space between us that had not ever been there before, a gulf for which there would be no bridge.
* * *
—
Weeks later, I won Junior Wimbledon. I went on to win the next three juniors events. All the coverage started touting me as “the Next Tennis Phenom.”
My father cut out the headlines from the sports papers. They said things like Upstart Carrie Soto Proves Unstoppable. He put them in frames and hung them up in my bedroom. When they ran an article with the headline is Javier Soto’s Style the Future of Women’s Tennis? he hung that one on the fridge.
Our phone started ringing so often we had to get an answering machine. Journalists wanted interviews; a racket company was offering me an endorsement deal.
And there was also a representative from the Virginia Slims tour. In her message, she suggested that it was time for me to enter the main women’s draw.
My father and I looked at each other.
My moment was here.
1975–1976
The morning of my first match on the Virginia Slims tour, my father gave me a pep talk before I went into the locker rooms. “You can talk and joke around with the other players if you have to,” he said, “but remember they are not your friends, they are your…”
“Enemies.”
“Opponents,” he said.
“Same thing,” I said.
“And like we talked about, everyone will be looking at you, looking to see if you’re as good as they’ve heard. Ignore all that. Just be good––don’t try to prove it.”
“Bueno, entiendo.”
As I turned to go into the locker room, the door swung open and hit me hard in the shoulder. Out walked Paulina Stepanova.
Eighteen years old, six feet tall, white-blond hair and arms like cannons—she had come out of nowhere. A baseliner from just outside Moscow, she was the kind of competitor I was not expecting. She had just joined the tour two months prior and had already gotten to the final in the Australian Open.
As Paulina walked by, she barely looked at me. “Izvinite menya, I did not see you there. You are so short.”
I gave a tight smile and then turned to my father. “I want to beat her to the ground.”
* * *
—
My first year on the tour, I clinched some big titles and quickly turned pro, bringing in tens of thousands of dollars. I was up against some of the biggest names in tennis, women I had looked up to for years, like Amparo Pereira, and players who had long eluded me, like Mary-Louise Bryant. But it was Stepanova the newspapers were talking about.
Paulina the Powerful Dominates the Rest. Stepanova Steps Out to Deafening Applause.
Publicly, I kept my face neutral. But afterward, in the hotels and on the long flights, I raged.
“She is in my way,” I told my father.
“It is your first year on the tour,” he said. “Not everything comes the second you want it. Keep your head down and keep working. You will get there.”
I did what he told me. I did everything he told me. Extra training sessions, no Sundays off, studying tapes of other opponents’ matches. I watched Mary-Louise Bryant up against Tanya McLeod, Olga Zeman vs. Amparo Pereira. I watched tape of Stepanova up against everybody. Even me.