Sunday nights: an apartment with a view of the Pacific, manchego and hummus, then down to the recreation room to play ping-pong. That was our ritual: sometimes four of us, sometimes six or seven, with the oars turning. He had insisted on one rule: no politics.
Meredith lived up the street. In Los Angeles, where friendships often depend on traffic patterns, that proximity mattered. She collected people like her dog collected burrs: random encounters in the park that somehow stuck. We were his stray dogs, but during those hours each week, we became a small tribe united by the sound of a ball against wood.
Last March, we celebrated the life of Peanut, Meredith's former stray dog who had been our Sunday mascot. My boyfriend José came with me. Cara found us on a large couch at the end of the party: José and I snuggled together while about 30 people mingled with drinks in hand.
“You two look so beautiful together,” he said, pulling out his phone. “It's all about love, guys. I once took ayahuasca and that's what I learned. It's all about love.”
José smiled his careful smile, the one he uses when white people need him to validate their enlightenment.
We stayed to watch the slideshow: Peanut as a puppy, Peanut on the beach, Peanut with gray muzzle and dignity. Many of the photos were of me: Meredith and Peanut together on the couch in the park. One that I had taken from Peanut fell into my arms. When Meredith cried, I got up to hug her. José and I walked home together, with the ocean wind hitting our faces.
Sunday afternoon, our usual game. José had returned home. Between games, while the others went upstairs to get more wine, Cara sat next to me.
We were alone, still breathing hard.
“How are things going between you and José?”
ICE was taking Latinos off the streets. Nobody asked for papers.
That's when I told him about his condition. How they had brought him here at 11 years old. How I worried that he had indigenous Mexican features, how I asked him to carry his DACA work permit with him, always. How we add each other in Find My on our iPhones.
We were sitting close, knee to knee. She nodded as if she understood.
“I'm sorry, but people like José need to be deported.”
He struck his paddle emphatically, as if striking not a ball but a body.
“It's the only way to fix the immigration system. Do it right.”
I had no words. The ball had rolled under the sofa. I could see its white curve in the shadow.
I wrote to Cara the next morning. Months earlier, she had welcomed me into her home for Thanksgiving: her gay son and her husband at the table, her granddaughter engaging me in a game. When I left, Cara placed a plate of leftovers in my hands at the door.
I wrote, “If someone told you that your son's marriage should be annulled to restore the sanctity of marriage, that wouldn't be political, it would be personal. That's how I feel about Joseph.”
His response came before I finished my coffee. Links, statistics, a YouTube video about the threat at the border, no-strings-attached arguments from José or the immigrants who make up the fabric of life in Los Angeles.
Meredith never responded to my texts. The conflict overwhelmed her. I asked him to understand, not to take sides.
When I told José what Cara said, his fury was immediate: “Never tell anyone!”
He was right. I made him feel vulnerable and handed him the ammunition.
I never went back.
What haunts me are those nights when the ball flew between us. The satisfying paddle on the ball, the fight through long rallies, and the dance moves with Chrissy after a perfect slam. Most of us hadn't played since we were teenagers; vertigo felt like freedom: competition without consequences.
Sometimes we would play until almost midnight: just one more game and no one wanted to give in. We could beat each other over the network, but dare not threaten each other's closely held policies.
I was proud to maintain this friendship across the divide. “We're only left with ping-pong,” he told José, as if he had discovered some secret of coexistence. I loved ping-pong too much to jeopardize it. Keith and I were the token liberals, José and I were the token gay couple. The group's former journalist had insisted on not being involved in politics and I continued to insist. If someone started to say something, he would shut them up: “Don't ruin this.”
When Chrissy played (new to ping-pong), we would slow down the game and make compromises. But politics? I knew we couldn't go there.
Months later, when I stopped going, I ran into Keith at Trader Joe's. He had stopped going too. “I couldn't stand their politics anymore,” he said.
Ping-pong had been Switzerland.
Thanksgiving, eight months later. I was walking along the Santa Monica Pier, having canceled my dinner plans due to a cold. Around me: Jamaican steel drums, an electrified sitar, Mexican women selling churros, Chinese immigrants painting tourists' names in calligraphy. Meredith's childhood friend called from the table. “Everyone misses you,” he said. There was laughter in the background and the clinking of glasses. As if it had simply stopped appearing.
The ping-pong table was never neutral territory. We could be intimate about everything: sex, drugs, the messy details of our lives, everything except the beliefs that would really tear us apart. All those Sunday nights we had been talking about serves and returns while our politics waited under our tongues.
When the ball stopped bouncing we had no other language.
I pass Meredith's building on the cliff several times a week. My Stiga paddle is in a drawer. Sometimes I imagine the table, the net taut like a border fence. Evidence of the limit of civility. The no man's land that he knew he shouldn't cross.
The last play Meredith and I played lasted minutes. Back and forth, neither of us fails, the ball blurs between us in that hypnotic rhythm that makes everything else disappear. When it was finally over (I don't remember who won), we stood there, oars down and breathing heavily.
The ball rolled toward the corner, that familiar sound growing quieter as it slowed. None of us moved to retrieve it.
I still follow José's blue dot moving around the city. Not for safety, for love.
The author is a ghostwriter, writing professor, and former Times contributor. Teaches creative writing at Power Word Study.
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