I stare at Uncle Isar as he strolls through the rooms and hallways of our house. I follow him the way my father followed the British and American soldiers. As I grow familiar with Uncle Isar, as I get to know him better, I like to hang from his shoulders and swing from his arms. He likes it too. He likes to roughhouse, to be tackled and tickled by his nephews and nieces. Every night I hide behind the front door and jump out when Uncle Isar comes home, because it makes him laugh. His booming laughter is the opposite of the sounds that come from the dragon.
One day Uncle Isar goes to the store for a few things. I count the minutes. At last, the front gate clanks open, then clanks shut, meaning I have exactly twelve seconds until Uncle Isar walks through the front door. It always takes people twelve seconds to go from the gate to the door. I crouch, count to twelve, and as the door opens I leap out.
Boo!
It’s not Uncle Isar. It’s my father. Startled, he yells, steps back, then shoots out his fist. Even though he only puts a fraction of his weight into it, my father’s left hook hits my jaw flush and sends me flying. One second I’m excited, joyful, the next I’m sprawled on the ground.
My father stands over me, scowling. What the fuck is the matter with you? Go to your room.
I run to my room and throw myself on my bed. I lie there, shaking, I don’t know how long. An hour? Three? Eventually the door opens and I hear my father.
Grab your racket. Get on the court.
Time to face the dragon.
I hit for half an hour, my head throbbing, my eyes tearing.
Hit harder, my father says. Goddamn it, hit harder. Not in the fucking net!
I turn and face my father. The next ball from the dragon I hit as hard as I can, but high over the fence. I aim for the hawks and I don’t bother pretending it’s an accident. My father stares. He takes one menacing step toward me. He’s going to hit me over the fence. But then he stops, calls me a bad name, and warns me to stay out of his sight.
I run into the house and find my mother lying on her bed, reading a romance novel, her dogs at her feet. She loves animals, and our house is like Dr. Dolittle’s waiting room. Dogs, birds, cats, lizards, and one mangy rat named Lady Butt. I grab one of the dogs and hurl it across the room, ignoring its insulted yelp, and bury my head in my mother’s arm.
Why is Pops so mean?
What happened?
I tell her.
She strokes my hair and says my father doesn’t know any better. Pa has his own ways, she says. Strange ways. We have to remember that Pa wants what’s best for us, right?
Part of me feels grateful for my mother’s endless calm. Part of me, however, a part I don’t like to acknowledge, feels betrayed by it. Calm sometimes means weak. She never steps in. She never fights back. She never throws herself between us kids and my father. She should tell him to back off, ease up, that tennis isn’t life.
But it’s not in her nature. My father disturbs the peace, my mother keeps it. Every morning she goes to the office—she works for the State of Nevada—in her sensible pantsuit, and every night she comes home at six, bone tired, not uttering one word of complaint. With her last speck of energy she cooks dinner. Then she lies down with her pets and a book, or her favorite: a jigsaw puzzle.
Only every great once in a while does she lose her temper, and when she does, it’s epic. One time my father made a remark about the house being unclean. My mother walked to the cupboard, took out two boxes of cereal, and waved them around her head like flags, spraying Corn Flakes and Cheerios everywhere. She yelled: You want the house clean? Clean it yourself!
Moments later, she was calmly working on a jigsaw puzzle.
She particularly loves Norman Rockwell puzzles. There is always some half-assembled scene of idyllic family life spread across the kitchen table. I can’t imagine the pleasure my mother takes in jigsaw puzzles. All that fractured disorder, all that chaos—how can that be relaxing? It makes me think my mother and I are complete opposites. And yet, anything soft in me, any love or compassion I have for people, must come from her.
Lying against her, letting her continue to stroke my hair, I think there is so much about her that I can’t understand, and it all seems to flow from her choice of a husband. I ask how she ever ended up with a guy like my father in the first place. She gives a short, weary laugh.
It was a long time ago, she says. Back in Chicago. A friend of a friend told your father: You should meet Betty Dudley, she’s just your type. And vice versa. So your father phoned me one night at the Girls Club where I was renting a furnished room. We talked a long, long time, and your father seemed sweet.
Sweet?
I know, I know. But he did. So I agreed to meet him. He showed up the next day in a spiffy new Volkswagen. He drove me around town, no place in particular, just round and round, telling me his story. Then we stopped to get something to eat and I told him my story.
My mother told my father about growing up in Danville, Illinois, 170 miles from Chicago, the same small town where Gene Hackman and Donald O’Connor and Dick Van Dyke grew up. She told him about being a twin. She told him about her father, a crotchety English teacher, a stickler for proper English. My father, with his broken English, must have cringed. More likely, he didn’t hear. I imagine my father not capable of listening to my mother on their first date. He would have been too mesmerized by her flaming auburn hair and bright blue eyes. I’ve seen pictures. My mother was a rare beauty. I wonder if he liked her hair best because it was the color of a clay tennis court. Or was it her height? She’s several inches taller than he. I can imagine him perceiving that as a challenge.
My mother says it took eight blissful weeks for my father to convince her that they should combine their stories. They ran away from her crotchety father and her twin sister and eloped. Then they kept running. My father drove my mother clear out to Los Angeles, and when they had trouble finding jobs there, he drove her across the desert, to a new gambling boomtown. My mother landed her job with the state government, and my father caught on at the Tropicana Hotel, giving tennis lessons. It didn’t pay much, so he got a second job waiting tables at the Landmark Hotel. Then he got a job as a captain at the MGM Grand casino, which kept him so busy he dropped the other two jobs.
Over their first ten years of marriage, my parents had three kids. Then, in 1969, my mother went to the hospital with ominous stomach pains. Need to do a hysterectomy, the doctor said. But a second round of tests showed she was pregnant. With me. I was born April 29, 1970, at Sunrise Hospital, two miles from the Strip. My father named me Andre Kirk Agassi, after his bosses at the casino. I ask my mother why my father named me after his bosses. Were they friends? Did he admire them? Did he owe them money? She doesn’t know. And it’s not the kind of question you can ask my father directly. You can’t ask my father anything directly. So I file it away with all the other things I don’t know about my parents—permanently missing pieces in the jigsaw puzzle that is me.
MY FATHER WORKS HARD, puts in long hours on the night shift at the casino, but tennis is his life, his reason for getting out of bed. No matter where you sit in the house, you see scattered evidence of his obsession. Aside from the backyard court, and the dragon, there is my father’s laboratory, also known as the kitchen. My father’s stringing machine and tools take up half the kitchen table. (My mother’s latest Norman Rockwell takes up the other half—two obsessions vying for one busy room.) On the kitchen counter stand several stacks of rackets, many sawed in half so my father can study their guts. He wants to know everything about tennis, everything, which means dissecting its various parts. He’s forever conducting experiments on this or that piece of equipment. Lately, for instance, he’s been using old tennis balls to extend the