Page 51 of Carrie Soto Is Back

I take the pen and I scrawlTake ’em all down, Carrie Sotoacross the paper and hand it back to her.

“Thank you so much, Ms. Soto,” she says. “I’ve been a fan of yours since I was thirteen and you won here back in ’85. I was there in the stands with my father. He loves you too.”

“You don’t mind that I’m an arrogant, ambitious bitch?”

She laughs. “No, I do not,” she says.

“I’m going to win today,” I tell her.

“I have no doubt,” she says.

I nod at her, take the Discman out of the box, and put the headphones on. I tap the desk and smile at her as I make my way back toward the door. I press play and start running out of the lobby.

Instantly, I hear the familiar stinging riff of “The Bitch Is Back.”

I run on the sidewalk past the hotel. I breeze past people out for coffee, parents with strollers moseying down the street. When I turn the corner and Elton John gets to the chorus, I know—I can feel it in the way the blood is pumping with intention through my veins—that Madlenka Dvoráková is dead in the water.

—

“All eyes are going to be on your first serve, to see who you are at thirty-seven. Knock the socks off her from the jump,” my father says to me just outside the locker room. “Scare her, you hear me? Scare everybody out there.”

I nod, staring down at the scuffs on my Break Points. I picked out the white ones with green stripes this morning, to go with my white tank top and tennis skirt.

This moment—my father and me here in the hall, waiting to go out—feels just like it used to. I’m back at war, after years of not knowing how to live during peacetime. This is the only place where I make sense to myself.

I pick up my racket and turn it around in my hand. My whole arm begins throbbing, ready to be used.

I luxuriate, for one moment, in the quiet din of the stadium that filters through the walls. I inhabit the silence of this moment with my father, when we are still asking questions and do not yet have to live with the answers.

“Te quiero mucho, pichona,” he says.

I open up my eyes. “I know. I love you too.”

“Go out there…” He looks me directly in the eye with an intensity I have not seen in years, maybe even since I was a kid. “And show them that the Bitch, the Battle Axe—whatever they want to call you—it doesn’t matter. They cannot stop you. And they don’t get to decide what your name is. Carrie Soto is back.”

I breathe in deep and then wipe the tops of my shoes clean and start walking—one step at a time—onto the court.

SOTO VS. DVORÁKOVÁ

1995 Australian Open

First Round

It is not deafening, byany means, but as I step into the Rod Laver Arena I can hear it begin. “Car-rie, Car-rie, Car-rie!”

I look up to see signs with my name on them.Welcome back, Carrie!andThe Bitch Is Back!I smile at the last one, and I point to the young woman holding it.

I can only imagine what the sportscasters are saying in their booths, what delightful euphemisms they are using to describe just how “too old” or “too cocky” they think I am. It will be a pleasure to make them report my win today. I breathe in deeply, ready to make it happen.

Madlenka Dvoráková looks so tiny, so far away. Her long blond hair is pulled back into a bun. She is wearing a navy blue tank and matching tennis skirt. She looks guarded and nervous, and though her right hand grips the racket firmly, I can see the fingers quivering on her left hand.

I win the coin toss.

As I make my way to the baseline, my whole chest starts thumping, my heart beating heavy and strong. The crowd cheers, and I look up into the players’ box to see my father taking his seat.

The loudspeaker erupts. “Miss Soto has won the toss and elected to serve first.” I can feel the vibrations of it in my sternum and feel myself turn on, every far edge of my body tingling. I hear the next part in my head before it comes over the loudspeaker, the routine as known to me as my own name.

Linesmen, ready.

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