Sunday nights: an apartment overlooking the Pacific, Manchego and hummus, then down to the rec room for ping-pong. That was our ritual — sometimes four of us, sometimes six or seven, paddles rotating. I’d insisted on one rule: no politics.
Meredith lived just up the street. In Los Angeles, where friendships often hinge on traffic patterns, that proximity mattered. She collected people like her dog collected burrs — random encounters in the park that somehow stuck. We were her strays, but for those hours each week, we became a small tribe bound by the sound of a ball against wood.
This past March, we held a celebration of life for Peanut, Meredith’s ancient mutt who’d been our Sunday mascot. My boyfriend José came with me. Cara found us in a big armchair at the edge of the party — José and I snug together while 30-some people mingled, drinks in hand.
“You two look so beautiful together,” she said, pulling out her phone. “It’s all about love, guys. I did ayahuasca once, 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 for the slideshow: Peanut as a puppy, Peanut at the beach, Peanut gray-muzzled and dignified. Many of the photos were mine — Meredith and Peanut together on the couch, at the park. One she’d taken of Peanut flopped in my arms. When Meredith wept, I rose to hold her. José and I walked home together, the ocean wind sharp against our faces.
Sunday evening, our regular game. José had headed back to his place. Between matches, while the others went upstairs for more wine, Cara sat beside me.
We were alone, still breathing hard.
“How are things with you and José?”
ICE was grabbing Latinos off the street. No one was asking for papers.
That’s when I told her about his status. How he’d been brought here at 11. How I worried about him having Indigenous Mexican features, how I asked him to carry his DACA work permit — always. How we’d added each other on Find My on our iPhones.
We were seated close, knee-to-knee. She nodded like she understood.
“I’m sorry, but people like José need to be deported.”
She swiped her paddle — emphatic, like swatting away not a ball but a body.
“It’s the only way we’ll fix the immigration system. Do it right.”
I had no words. The ball had rolled under the couch. I could see its white curve in the shadow.
I wrote to Cara the next morning. Months earlier, she’d hosted me at her home for Thanksgiving — her gay son and his husband at the table, her granddaughter pulling me into a game. When I left, Cara pressed a plate of leftovers into my hands at the door.
I wrote: “If someone told you 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 José.”
Her reply arrived before I’d finished my coffee. Links, statistics, a YouTube video about the menace at the border, arguments untethered from José or the immigrants who make up the fabric of life in Los Angeles.
Meredith never replied to my texts. Conflict overwhelmed her. I’d asked her to understand, not take sides.
When I told José what Cara said, his fury was immediate: “Never tell anyone!”
He was right. I’d made him feel vulnerable, handed her the ammunition.
I never went back.
What haunts me are those nights when the ball flew between us. The satisfying pock of paddle on ball, battling through long rallies, and breaking into dance moves with Chrissy after a perfect slam. Most of us hadn’t played since we were teens; the giddiness felt like freedom — competition without consequence.
Sometimes we’d play until nearly midnight — just one more game, nobody wanting to yield. We could vanquish each other over the net, but not dare threaten each other’s tightly held politics.
I took a certain pride in maintaining this friendship across the divide. “We just keep it about ping-pong,” I’d tell José, as if I’d discovered some secret to coexistence. I loved ping-pong too much to jeopardize it. Keith and I were the token liberals, José and I the token gay couple. The former journalist in the group, I’d insisted on no politics, and I’d kept insisting. If someone started to say something, I’d shut it down: “Don’t ruin this.”
When Chrissy played — just new to ping-pong — we slowed the game, made allowances. But politics? I knew we couldn’t go there.
Months later, after I’d stopped going, I ran into Keith at Trader Joe’s. He’d stopped going too. “I couldn’t stomach their politics anymore,” he said.
Ping-pong had been Switzerland.
Thanksgiving Day, eight months later. I was walking on the Santa Monica Pier, having called off my dinner plans because of 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 their dinner table. “Everyone misses you,” he said. I could hear laughter in the background, the clink of glasses. As if I’d simply stopped showing up.
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 actually tear us apart. All those Sunday nights, we’d been speaking in serves and returns while our politics waited under our tongues.
When the ball stopped bouncing, we had no other language.
I walk past Meredith’s building on the bluff a few times a week. My Stiga paddle sits in a drawer. Sometimes I imagine the table, the net taut as a border fence. Evidence of civility’s limit. The no-man’s-land I knew not to cross.
The last rally Meredith and I played went on for minutes. Back and forth, neither of us missing, the ball blurring between us in that hypnotic rhythm that makes everything else disappear. When it finally ended — I can’t remember who won — we just stood there, paddles lowered, breathing hard.
The ball rolled toward the corner, that familiar sound growing quieter as it slowed. Neither of us moved to retrieve it.
I still track José’s blue dot moving through the city. Not for safety — for love.
The author is a ghostwriter, writing coach and former Times contributor. He teaches creative writing at Mighty Words Studio.
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