They stood outside the health club for a moment and talked. There was still an April chill in the air. He could feel his heart racing from the tennis and the steam room. Ace could feel his body temperature quickly cooling down. He hesitated, trying to decide if he should invite Hal to play tennis again next week. A breeze kicked up, blowing sand and dirt from the empty parking lot into their eyes. Ace put his tennis bag down and pulled the hood up over his wet hair, which was still damp from the hot shower.
His instincts told him should be careful striking up a friendship with someone from work, especially a team leader. These people were basically junior managers as far as Ace was concerned. He knew he had to be careful since they were all very tight with the pricks from Human Resources. If word got around that Ace liked to smoke a little pot, they might start looking for a reason to make him take a drug test him. Besides, it would definitely be an odd friendship if he and Hal started hanging out at work. Outwardly, they seemed like an odd pair and it wasn't just because Hal was a black kid from the city and he was a white boy from the suburbs.
Growing up in northern Virginia taught Ace all the typical bigotry and small minded thinking that was common in high school in those days. He was not friends with any of the couple of dozen or so colored kids at Washington & Lee High School. There was one colored kid on the football team his senior year but he was kicked off the squad by the third week. The coach never said why. Ace's family had a colored housekeeper that came twice a week. Bertha was almost three hundred pounds and wasn't exactly a go getter when it came cleaning, but she did the laundry, polished the silver and did a little cooking. Ace's favorite dish was her smothered, fried chicken. She had been with the family ever since they moved from Rhode Island. He was in first grade when his parents escaped dreary Providence and landed good jobs with the federal government. Even at age six, Ace immediately understood that this place was going to be better than what they left behind.
That's what black people were called during the early sixty's, before the civil rights movement and the growth of Black Power. Colored. If Bertha was telling a story about someone who was on the bus ride with her as she made her way out of the city and into the suburbs she would say "this colored boy" did this or this "colored girl said that. There was nothing racist about it as far as Ace knew. It was simply a way to describe whether a person was black or white. Bertha was more like an aunt or something. That was the way he looked at it. His mother even helped her fill out the paper work to get her started paying into Social Security so she would have some savings when she was too old to work. Years later, he would learn that his parents had helped with both of her children's college expenses.
He came so close to staying in Virginia. Ace often wondered how different his life would be if he had gone to Randolph Macon college along with four of his best friends after high school. He didn't even really want to go to college. His sister went to Colorado but neither of his brother's went anywhere. His parents were dumbfounded at the lack of intellect the boys demonstrated. After all, his dad went to Princeton and his mother got her master's from Columbia a few years after the war, long before most women even went to undergraduate school. All four of his friends had dropped out of school by their sophmore year. He knew that if was with him the same thing would have happened to him. But Ace was lucky. He had a girl and she said it would be okay if he wanted to apply to school with her in New England.
The relationship didn't last. They were too young for that and besides, it was the seventies. The drinking age was eighteen, pot was practically legal and all the girs were on the pill. Ace thought life in Massachusetts was much better than anything the south had to offer. There weren't nearly as many black folks up north, that was for sure, but he liked the progressive attitude that he saw. His older brother had been a JFK fan and even had President Kennedy's "Ask Not" inaugural speech framed and hanging on his wall in his bedroom along with a heavy metal paperweight with the Presidents profile embossed on the top. He was in second grade when the president was shot and they told all the school children to go straight home. When he ran itno the house and his mother asked what he was doing home so early he gleefully told her the president had been shot. He will never forget the image of his mother standing at the ironing board and then running to the television and bursting into tears.
By the start of his senior year in college he knew he wanted to stay up north. Lindsey, however, decided to stay in Virginia when her mother got cancer. He wanted her with him in New England. Afterall, she was the one who saved him from becoming just another country bumpkin by bringing him here. But he knew she couldn't stay and besides, it was the best thing for both of them. He had never cried like that before after he said goodbye. He sobbed uncontrollably behind the wheel of his VW Beetle, packed with his precious stereo, over sized speakers and growing record collection as he puttered back up the highway to Boston. On the floor in front of the passenger seat where she would normally have been sitting lay his wooden, Bancroft tennis racquet that she bought him for his birthday earlier that summer.
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