The Sporting Scene FEBRUARY 17, 2003 ISSUE
BY NANCY FRANKLIN
Jake Carter, aged twelve, played at the national table-tennis championships in Las Vegas.
CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY SYLVIA PLACHY.
I loved the house I grew up in, a big mock-Tudor, built in the twenties, with stained-glass windows and an old-time solidity, but I was afraid of the basement. It had two rooms where, for all eighteen years that my parents owned the house, I thought I might die. One was a storage room, with a raw rock outcropping that extended back farther than the light in the room allowed you to see. I thought that the black space above the rock went on more or less forever, and I was always expecting a man to emerge from it and kill me. The other was the small, hot room where the furnace was; there was a blood-red switchplate with a printed warning on it telling you not to turn the switch off, and, hanging next to the furnace, a large glass container full of red liquid, whose function I never knew. I was sure that if I touched it or the light switch the house would explode. And then, if I didn’t actually die, I would be in a lot of trouble. Beyond those two rooms, down a hallway and two steps, there was what we called the playroom. There wasn’t much in there—nothing good that might get ruined, and not much to play with, either—but there was a Ping-Pong table, which for me was, if not quite a reason for being, at least a reason for risking a trip to the basement. In this room, I was the killer.
My father had made the Ping-Pong table himself: it consisted of two pieces of plywood hinged in the middle and stained dark green, with a white painted center line, laid over a brown wool blanket on an old dining-room table from the Philippines, where my parents had lived when they were first married. It was the only piece of furniture in the room, except for an ugly blue couch in a corner, which sometimes had to be pulled scrapingly across the linoleum floor in order for you to get at an inevitably errant Ping-Pong ball. At some point, we got a pool table, adding another obstacle under or around which you had to go to fetch the ball.