Ping Pong Diplomacy

     The Bulldogs beat the Tahlequah Tigers Friday night, or at least the boys’ team did, but Tom didn’t go. He thought about going to the games, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble, because he’d run into Natalie, and he didn’t want to deal with her accusing stares. That was the trouble with his next-door neighbor being on the cheerleading squad, he thought – even at basketball games he couldn’t escape. And since his friend Trevor had moved away from Skiatook to somewhere around Chicago about a year ago, there weren’t that many people to be around. Tom had trouble making himself talk to new people. The thing was, though, that Natalie was right – he just didn’t want to admit that.

      She was mad at him for making fun of Svetlana’s reading – she had been adopted by the Maguires about the same time Trevor moved. She was from what had been the Soviet Union - it was now some new country spelled with an unpronounceable jumble of letters, and the encyclopedias in the school library hadn’t been updated with all these new countries yet. And was it his fault that he had always excelled at retaining written information? His mother said that that didn’t give him reason to make anybody feel inferior because they didn’t grasp concepts quite as quickly. That was pretty much what Natalie had said, too.

      So Tom sat on the couch with his younger siblings and watched the latest episode of Boy Meets World, which he found ridiculous and irritating – Corey Matthews was simply too boring to be interesting. But Jenny was obsessed with the show, alternatively attempting to recreate Topanga’s choices in hairstyles and clothing or gushing without end about Corey’s friend Shawn. And Lenny did whatever Jenny told him to, so he always watched the show, but only because his twin did. So the phone ringing gave Tom a welcome excuse to vault off the couch and into the kitchen to answer it.    

      “Curtis residence, Tom speaking. Who is this?”

     “It’s Nat.”

     “Hey. Couldn’t you just walk over if you had to talk?”

     “This feels too important,” she sighed. “Can you meet up tomorrow?”

     “I think so. What time?”

     “How about eleven, by the mailboxes.”

     The Curtises and Phillipses had lived on the same red river-gravel road for as long as either Tom or Natalie could remember, and the cluster of mailboxes near the highway turn-off was the bus stop, and thus  generally the neighborhood gathering place.  

     “All right.”

     “Didn’t see you in the stands tonight,” her tone sounded disappointed.

     “No, I didn’t go.”

     “Pete could’ve let you ride with us, you know.” Pete was the oldest Phillips sibling living at home, two were in Norman studying at OU, and Natalie fell the fifth out of six in terms of birth order.

     “Yeah, I know… I just….thought it would be good to spend some time with the twins.”

     He knew from experience that she would have one eyebrow raised and a hand on her hip right about then, playing with the phone cord.

     “Tom, you NEVER spend time with the twins if you can help it.”

     “So? I wanted to tonight. What’s so wrong with that?” Tom snapped out. His tone was much harsher than he meant it to be. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

     The cli-thunk of the phone slamming down on the receiver cut another another of her sighs.

     The wind was whipping along pretty well, even though the sun was shining, so Natalie and another girl, one with black hair, were wrapped up in coats. Nat was shivering, but the other girl - Svetlana Maguire - looked at ease.

     “Heeeyyy,” Tom greeted them warily.

     “Hello,” Svetlana greeted him back.

     “Hey. Since you’re here, you might as well come over to my place for ping pong,” Nat stated. Pete was by far the best of their family, but the Phillips garage could get noisy whenever there was a match in progress, they were all so competitive.

     The wind whistled by, obscuring the girls’ faces.

     “All right. I guess so,”  he agreed reluctantly.

     “Ah...what is….ping pong?” Svetlana asked.

     “It’s, uh - Shit, what is it called….?” Tom tried to answer.

     “Table tennis!” Nat smiled at the Russian girl. Her face lit up in response.

     “Oh! Table tennis! I know this, how to play.”

     She could, too. As had been Natalie’s plan, showcasing this skill cast Svetlana several rungs higher in Tom’s respect, as since he was a guy, athletic prowess in anything, even something as dorky as ping pong, equalled greater respect. That was part of the reason Nat became a cheerleader in the first place, though she would never admit that to anyone, and barely to herself. At some point through the day Tom apologized for his behavior, and Svetlana graciously accepted the apology.

     Pete drove the three of them and Natalie’s youngest sister Amanda into Tulsa to go see the Michael Jordan movie, since Svetlana needed to be indoctrinated into American pop culture more fully, and she had some knowledge of the Looney Tunes already.,full of sarcastic one-liners.

     “I bet I’m gonna show that to my kids someday,” Pete declared afterwards. 

     "That'd be, like....two thousand and fourteen. Will the world even exist by then?" Amanda asked.