Tell Me If the Lovers Are Losers (28 page)

“Niki,” Ann said. “Niki? We've got a match this afternoon. Can you play?”

Niki's face lifted.

“We've got a match to win,” Ann insisted.

“Annie.
You
talk about winning?” Niki studied Ann.

“Can you play? Will you? Because now you really are essential. I'll give you that now. We all are essential now.”

“Yeah. I'll play.”

“I don't think you should,” Mr. Jones protested. “You've had a rough time of it.”

Niki stood away from her father. “It's OK. I won't blow lunch all over the court. It's OK to do. I just won't eat lunch. How's that?”

He shrugged. “If you say so. You know best.”

“Yeah,” Niki agreed, her face as wan as her eyes.

It was then that Ann saw a young man standing alone, one of the pall bearers. He hadn't left the graveside. He had straight white-blond hair and a high pink color in his cheeks. His hands hung out of a worn overcoat. He wore heavy mittens, but no hat. Ann went over to him. “You must be Hildy's brother,” she said.

He looked at her with untroubled blue eyes.

“What are you doing here? I didn't think anybody was coming. I'm her roommate, Ann.”

The young man removed a mitten to shake Ann's hand. Tears welled in her eyes again.

“I came to see her gone,” he told Ann. “I had some money saved, so my father, he said if I wanted to spend it this way I could.”

“I'm so sorry,” Ann said, “we all are. Tell your family, how sorry we are.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said. “I guess we'll miss her She was some worker, Hildy was.”

Ann was shocked, a little angry, and immensely sad. “Some volleyball player too,” she said quickly.

He smiled at that. “She sure was.”

Ann smiled back at him. “Do you want to get her things, books and clothes?”

He shook his head. “No, thank you, I just—it didn't seem
right for her to stay so far away and nobody come to say goodbye. I guess she had a lot of friends here.” He surveyed the small crowd now moving into cars.

Ann gulped, nodded, blinked against the increasing snow. She tried to think of how to tell this young man how much she had admired his sister, knowing her and playing volleyball with her and working with her. Something that would show him that they, too, had appreciated Hildy's rare qualities.

“She taught me a lot,” Ann said.

This utterly confused him. “But—she said you were smart. How could Hildy teach you?”

“By example,” Ann said, which didn't answer him but answered her.

He nodded his head again. There wasn't anything more to say. “Do you have a ride back?” Ann asked.

“I came with her minister. He's waiting for me.” They shook hands in farewell.

Ann went slowly over to join her parents. Mr. and Mrs. Gardner suggested that she come back to the Inn with them, but Ann declined. “There's a game this afternoon,” she explained.

“You aren't going to play volleyball?” her mother said wonderingly.

“It's a match,” Ann said.

“But surely,” her mother said, raising her voice over Mr. Gardner's murmured “If Ann thinks—”

“How can you?” her mother demanded. “Why should you?” she asked.

“Because we're a good team,” Ann said. “You could stay and watch if you wanted.”

Mr. Gardner said they probably shouldn't, if they wanted to get home ahead of the snow. They drove Ann back to the dormitory. Ann thanked them for coming to be with her Mrs. Gardner hugged her and her father gave her a thoughtful look. “You're sure it's what you want to do?” he asked.

Ann nodded. “I think I really needed to have you here,” she blurted out.

“Of course,” her mother said. “Good luck to you—if you really are going to play.”

“We really are going to,” Ann told her “It's the right thing to do.”

♦   ♦   ♦

So they played the match and won it. (The team never lost a match, in all the four years they played together.) They played as if there were more at stake than the game. In time, the team (always these same six girls) took on some of Niki's fierceness to win. As if, having lost grace, they must acquire a human substitute. They played well, too, better each season than before, each of them and together, as if having once had grace they could never be entirely lost.

At the end of the four years they had four tin trophies, this team, gilded statuettes of a young woman stretching up with hands outhrust. When the time came to graduate, Ruth took one and Sarah another, Bess and Eloise the others. Niki said she didn't need any reminders, she wasn't in danger of forgetting. Besides, she said, she was going to law school and the only acceptable trophies for a lawyer were tennis or sailing. And Ann, Ann kept Hildy's glasses.

♦   ♦   ♦

When Niki returned to the room (after Christmas, after her father's wedding), Eloise remained. It came about this way:

Ann arrived first from the vacation. Then Eloise came to put two tentative suitcases down by the door. She asked if Niki was back yet and absented herself. “There are some source books on reserve at the library and if I don't get to them now, they are liable to be gone. I should be—an hour?”

Ann nodded and suggested to Niki when her roommate appeared that Eloise move in permanently.

“She's a bitch,” Niki said, tossing underwear into a drawer.

“Oh, come on, Niki, even you can't think that of Eloise.”

“No, I can't. Not even me.” Niki's smile flashed. “Ah, Annie, I'll tell you, but only you, it's good to be back. Nobody out there makes jokes in Greek.” Ann sputtered. “And I'm not old enough for eternal youth. I'm glad to be here.”

“Even—considering?”

“Even with Hildy dead?” A space of silence. “Yes—curse it.”

“I still—” Ann began. Niki came and stood before her She placed one of her hands on Ann's shoulder.

“Still and always, I'm afraid.”

“What about you? Are you OK?”

“Weeping and gnashing of teeth,” Niki said. “I lost, after all.”

“Yeah, well, you're alive,” Ann said harshly.

Niki said nothing to this. Instead, she said. “Which reminds me of the bitch. My stepmother.”

“I got your card. My mother was puzzled by it.”

“She read it?”

“Postcards are meant to be read by anyone who sees them. That's the tradition.”

“Sorry, Annie,” Niki said. She didn't sound sorry. She called up over her shoulder, “Sorry, Mrs. Gardner. Dad's pretty happy though, which is what counts, seeing as it's his marriage.” She continued unpacking. “I think I'll go to law school. I was thinking about it, over the vacation.”

“Why?”

“I was talking to some people, mostly at Berkeley—”

“Did you apply?”

“No. I don't know, Ann. I've been thinking, I might stick it out here. It'll be good for you.” She grinned. “And maybe me too,” she added. “Do you want to hear about law school?” Ann nodded. “They were saying—you don't want to hear it all, but the upshot is that the establishment has to go. The economy, the state, the church.” She waved a hand up into the air, describing the direction of exploding institutions.

“Your kind of people,” Ann murmured.

“I thought so too,” Niki said. “But,” she added, “listen. She was drunk, the woman who killed Hildy. She's an alcoholic, or something—poor bitch. But there was some bartender who kept pouring booze into her and he must have known. I'd like to get that guy. Because he's responsible—maybe even more than she is. And the law can't touch him. It can barely do anything, even to help her I'm not wild about that kind of law, Annie, and piss-all if I'll let it go.”

Ann started to ask how Niki had found all that out, but Niki interrupted her.

“Annie?” Niki turned to face her again, thrusting a finger at her “Are we going to be friends after all? I mean, friends—not hello-how-are-you people. I'd like that, Annie, and I'll tell you why. Might as well now I've started. Because you've got a good eye for the true thing, for excellence. Hildy said. So, see,
if we were friends—if you were my friend it might mean I was the true thing. See what I mean?”

Ann laughed. Then she stopped. “Hildy said that?”

“Yup.”

“And you think so too?”

“Yup.”

“We probably will,” Ann said. “Be friends.”

“You could sound a little more cheerful.”

“And you really think I've got an eye for excellence?”

“A natural affinity. It must be the Northeast, something in the rarified air You attract it. Trust me, Annie.”

“Then listen to what I think. I think Eloise should come live with us.”

Niki stood open-mouthed, briefly. Then she laughed, her head thrown back. “Serves me right,” she said, laughing. She returned to her unpacking. “It's OK by me. But you'll have to be careful not to pick on me, you two preppies.”

When Eloise returned, Niki greeted her. “It's fine with me as long as you don't cower. I can't stand people who cower.”

Eloise hesitated in the doorway.

“Come on in, dammit. You live here.”

“I don't know,” Eloise muttered.

“You heard me! See? You're cowering already and you don't even have the balls to come in and cower to my face. Look at Annie—she's survived a season with me.”

The same response crossed over all of their minds and hovered in the center of the room. They stared unseeing at it. It was Eloise who eventually gave it quiet voice: “And Hildy?”

Nicki said: “Hildy survived me. I'm the one who maybe didn't.”

Eloise answered her levelly. “Whom do you think you are deceiving?”

“If it's not you, then we'll all be all right together,” Niki said. She went back to her unpacking, then whirled around and faced them:

“What do you mean,
whom
. Are you picking on me? Annie? Wasn't I right? You two are going to gang up on me, with your whoms and your round collars and your Topsiders. Especially those Topsiders. But you're gonna have to accept my sneakers, they're permanent. Hear that? Both of you.”

Ann wished she had thought of sending Niki a circle pin for
Christmas. She would find out when Niki's birthday was. A circle pin engraved inside,
to Nicole from Annie.

♦   ♦   ♦

Niki got an A on her long paper She showed it to Ann and Eloise before she threw it out. “It's a lie,” she remarked. “It's an A-for-pity.” She looked at them. “Hildy would have said so too,” she said.

“And she'd have been right,” Ann said.

“Are you going to accept it?” Eloise asked.

“What else can I do? There's no machinery for protesting a grade that's too high.”

“You haven't answered my question though, have you?” Eloise asked quietly.

Then Niki smiled. “Now that you mention it, there must be something I can do.” She fetched the paper out of the wastebasket. “The machinery for protest is there. It would be a pity not to use it. I'll tell you, Eloise, I'm beginning to think you're as smart as our Annie says you are.”

“I am,” Eloise said.

♦   ♦   ♦

They gave Hildy's clothes to the Good Will and her books to the bookstore. They threw out her notebooks and papers.

Ann always kept Hildy's glasses and sometimes wore them, as she had before. Grief remained in her, intractable. Memory also remained and grew golden. In time. She had Hildy's glasses and could see through them. She knew better than to forget, or want to. After Hildy's life, her death, no blind peace.

By Cynthia Voigt

Published by Fawcett Juniper Books:

Tillerman Cycle:

HOMECOMING

DICEY'S SONG

A SOLITARY BLUE

THE RUNNER

COME A STRANGER

SONS FROM AFAR

SEVENTEEN AGAINST THE DEALER

TELL ME IF THE LOVERS ARE LOSERS

THE CALLENDAR PAPERS

BUILDING BLOCKS

JACKAROO

IZZY, WILLY-NILLY

TREE BY LEAF

ON FORTUNE'S WHEEL

THE VANDEMARK MUMMY

A Fawcett Juniper Book

Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright © 1982 by Cynthia Voigt

www.SimonandSchuster.com

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Ltd., Toronto.

http://www.randomhouse.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 81-8079

ISBN 0-449-70235-9

ISBN 978-1-4424-8925-7 (eBook)

This edition published by arrangement with Atheneum Publishers, in division of The Scribner Book Companies, Inc.

First Ballantine Books Edition: July 1983