Tell Me If the Lovers Are Losers (3 page)

At the end of the set, Ann was hot and tired. Niki was flushed and triumphant. “That's more like it,” she said. “Another?”

“I can't,” Ann said.

“Rest a minute, then see.”

“It's getting dark,” Ann said lamely.

“There's half an hour still. We could get some games in, maybe even a set.”

Ann shook her head.

“You don't play to win,” Niki said.

Ann shrugged.

“You look good, but you don't win.”

Ann stared blankly at her.

“You don't fight.”

Ann snapped the press closed around her racquet.

“What sport are you taking?” Niki asked.

“I haven't decided. Are you going to take tennis?”

“I might. Or basketball. There's no track team.”

“I've been thinking of field hockey. We played that at school.”

“What's it like?”

“It's a team sport, with lots of running. It takes some skill too. Basically, it's a passing game, like soccer, not very exciting but . . .”

They walked back toward the dormitory. It was too early in September for leaves to have turned and fallen, but Ann knew how it would be when fall had really come. She loved fall. But she did not think she would ever feel at home at Stanton. She did not think she would ever feel at ease with Niki.

“They don't have much of a sports program here,” Niki remarked. She swung her racquet at a bushy mountain laurel. “Almost no competition. I don't know how much fun that'll be.”

“You're competitive,” Ann observed.

“That, Annie child, is an understatement. You've got to let people know you're worth fearing. You've got to get to the head of things. People call you Annie?”

Ann shook her head, no.

“I kind of like it. It's cute.”

Ann didn't, but she didn't say so.

“I wonder how we'd do at doubles. You don't charge the net, but you've got good ground strokes. Maybe we could play doubles sometime. We might be a perfect team.”

“Maybe,” Ann said. She hoped not.

“I'd have liked a second set.” The exercise, instead of deploying Niki's energy, had apparently increased it.

“I couldn't see well in this light,” Ann said.

“Play by sound—sonar tennis,” Niki answered. “What's your language?”

“Greek,” Ann said.

“You're kidding. Why?”

“I took Latin for a long time. Greek shouldn't be too much harder.”

“What are you, a Classics major?”

“I'd like to be.”

“You don't look it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You look like an English major, or History, maybe Sociology. You look too ordinary for anything else. Your type—”

“And what's that?”

“Don't kid yourself. You are a type.”

“And you aren't?” Annie was growing tired of denigration.

“No, ma'am. Not me. There are lots of you around, with tans and square jaws and that wavy hair You all move the same way, muscular but not strong, somebody's idea of femininity. It's a prep-school type.”

Ann quickened her step. All she wanted was to lie in a tub with a book and forget where she was.

“And that clear-sighted, luminous glance you all have. And those Topsiders too.” Ann glanced at her feet. “Topsiders and loafers, that's what preppies wear.” Niki had on a pair of boys' sneakers. Which looked terrible, Ann thought, which made her calves appear springy. Ann was no beauty, but she looked better than that. Why should she feel defensive? she demanded of herself. Didn't she believe in what she knew? Couldn't she trust her own eyes?

Back in the room, with an hour before supper, Ann picked out the
Odyssey,
dog-eared and well-beloved, and announced her intention of taking a long, hot bath. Niki said she would
have a shower Ann said she thought there wouldn't be any in the dorm, because it was so old; just in the gym. Niki declared her disbelief and her inability to take the time for a bath. Ann suggested she then go back to the gym and shower, which, to her surprise, Niki did. Leaving Ann alone.

She opened the window, first. Trees, hillsides, glimpses of sky among, behind, shadows. The smell of pin and sunshine and deciduous growings and rottings: a woods, a forest, beautiful. Their room, empty, was a peaceful, quiet place. She turned, her back to the window, and looked. Without seeing, without wanting to see. A puddle of late afternoon sunlight lay on the wooden floor Spartan, the beds and accoutrements. Ann regretted the lack of privacy in dormitory living, even resented it. At the Hall she had acquired some tricks to isolate herself: late night studying, quick breakfasts; long afternoon naps. But would these help here? She immersed herself in the emptiness of the room, until her reverie was broken into by sounds from down the hallway. Sounds of unfamiliar voices, unfamiliar plumbing, unfamiliar doors, unfamiliar feet on unfamiliar linoleum hall floors.

Ann decided to delay the bath; she lay down on her bed.

In a strange place, she thought, you are more vulnerable than at any other time. Everything conspires to keep you mentally off balance, ready to alarm. Your face is stiff, expressionless, keeping ready to smile, concealing. You feel, like prying fingers, the glances of strangers sliding over you, seeing the faulty details friends never notice. As if—Ann lay on the bed studying the ceiling and the patterns possible in the cracks there—you had found yourself in lands under the earth . . . an elevator that kept going down, or a cavern you followed too far, or a simple crack in the surface of the earth, through which you would stumble and fall . . . . However you got there, there you were, standing, half-blind in half darkness, surrounded by short creatures with outsized heads. Their long-fingered brown hands, covered with fur like the rest of their bodies, reached out to touch you. Because they had lost sight so many generations back that they could not remember the lamps of their eyes going dim, now they used spatulated fingertips for knowing. And those fingertips reached out at you, touched you to learn what you were. Ann imagined this,
vivid for a second, and her mind shuddered. That was what it felt like, being in a new place like this.

Ann got up, made herself undress and prepare for her bath. She opened the door to an empty hall and was smiling when she closed the door of the bathing cubicle behind her When she was settled back in a steaming tub, Ann picked up the book. It opened to the scene in the Cyclop's cave. Ann read, savoring the words, the picture and the character of Odysseus. She could even work up some ambiguous sympathy for the Cyclops. After all, to have your one eye put out by a sharpened piece of burning wood, worked into your eyeball—like a brace-and-bit, Homer said. Ann could almost feel that. There was something pitiful in the image Homer made: “He pulled the timber out of his eye, and it blubbered with plenty of blood . . . .” She wondered, reading over the scene, why she should relish the language of violence. Adjusting the hot water with an outstretched toe, she remembered the way she had covered her face with her coat during the murder scene in the movie
Psycho;
the way she had felt nauseated and terrified for days afterwards at the memory. Maybe books were easier to take; you could close a book and put it away, so they weren't as real. At least, she thought Niki would say that. It sounded like the kind of thing Niki would say, to show that you were inferior.

♦   ♦   ♦

When Niki returned, her tennis clothes in a bundle wrapped around with a towel, it was suppertime. Niki burst through the closed door and Ann—lying on the bed reading—was startled into a quick, involuntary leap of the muscles.

“Oh,” Ann said.

“Get dressed,” Niki said. “There's a line of people down there.”

“A line?”

“Well, a gaggle.” She brushed her hair at the bureau. Ann watched. Niki's hands knew what they were about, twisting, smoothing, pulling the rope of hair up to make a knot at the back of her head.

“I wish I could grow long hair,” Ann said. She pulled a cotton dress out of the closet.

“Why can't you?”

“Mine's too thin.”

“What difference does that make? Aren't you ready?”

“Just a belt and my shoes—you can't wear jeans to dinner. Don't you remember that?”

“You're kidding. Why not?”

“There's a dress code.”

“So what?” Niki stood still, considering. “There are things to be done about a dress code. We used to have one at my high school. I've got a skirt in here somewhere.” She rummaged about in the bottom drawer, to pull out a denim skirt as faded as her jeans. She still wore the high sneakers. Ann did not want to go down to dinner with this girl. She did not want to stand with her, waiting for the dining room doors to open. She did not want to sit with her.

“Let's go, c'mon!” Niki said. They raced down three flights of stairs, but even so were late into the dining room. The housemother, Mrs. Smythe, smiled at them and indicated two seats at her table. “Oh hell,” murmured Niki. “Next time don't dawdle, OK?” “OK,” Ann said. The room bloomed with some thirty or so strange faces, each one turned to them. Entering just as grace was to be said, they could not have been more awkward. Ann slipped into the seat beside Niki and ducked her head. She stared at her hands. Why had she come to dinner? She had no appetite. She wished she had arranged at least to be in the same dormitory as one of the other Hall girls, even if she didn't want to room with any of them. Just now she wanted, unexpectedly and shamefully, to go home.

Ann's eyes slid over to Niki's hands, which rested on the table, brown and muscular and unkempt. The nails were ragged.

Niki, she saw, did not bow her head for grace. The dark eyes glanced restlessly around the dining room, touching on bowed heads as if trying to attract attention, as if to awaken a sleeper with a push at the forehead. “Why, she looks dangerous,” Ann said to herself and was interested in her roommate then in a way she had not been before. The housemother said
Amen
and the room echoed her.

At dinner Ann learned that they expected the other girl, Hildegarde, “sometime tonight and did you girls get her books and notebooks?”

“Did we have any choice?” Niki asked, and Ann quickly
joined in to say “It was no trouble, no trouble at all, we were happy to do it.” Niki grinned at her.

After dinner there was a brief meeting to inform the freshmen of the house rules, and after that Ann and Niki went back up to their third floor room. They had really met no one at the meal. Ann had half-planned to visit some of her Hall classmates—thinking it might be a good way to pass the first uncomfortable evening—but decided not to, because she didn't know how to exclude Niki from such a walk. She sat at her desk, accustoming herself to the placement of it, to the quality of light, to the sounds, writing her name and dormitory on the covers of spiral-backed notebooks. Niki stared at her for a few minutes, then left. Ten minutes later she returned: “There's a volleyball game next door Do you want to come play?”

“A what?”

“Volleyball.”

“I've never played it.”

“We play it on the beaches. It's easy. Why not?”

“Why not?” Ann rose. “I'll find you. I've got to change if we're going to be doing a sport.”

“Good.” Niki left. Ann hung her dress in the closet, folded her slip into a drawer, and pulled out a pair of shorts and a matching blouse. Both were freshly ironed. She wished she owned a T-shirt. She wondered if she should wear one of her men's shirts. She got down on her hands and knees to find the sneakers she had kicked off near her bed. From that undignified position, she heard company arrive.

“Did you know Ann was such a meticulous housekeeper?” “What did she do this summer to cause the miraculous change?” “Hi, Ann, how was your summer?” “We're going around sort of collecting everyone from the Hall.” “Come with us?” “You won't believe what my roommate wants to major in.” “How come you're in this dumpy old dorm?” “How did you get into one of the old houses? I tried but they gave me a modern one.” “Are you coming? This is just the third house we've been to and there are lots more of us.” “Are you coming?”

“You bet,” Ann said. She tied her sneakers and picked out a sweater, glad that she had one to match the shorts. There were four of them as they passed the lighted outdoor volleyball court. Ann saw Niki leap up to punch down at the ball, her
teeth biting her lip and her eyes glittering. Niki did not see her, she thought. The pack from the Hall ran on and she was there in the middle of it, among familiar faces, familiar voices.

It was late when Ann returned, just before weekend curfew. The room lay in moonlighted darkness and had that unreliable clarity moonlight seems to give. Ann let her clothes fall in a pile by her bed and rummaged blindly in a drawer until she recognized the fabric of her red nightgown. She dropped it over her head and turned to see if the third girl had arrived.

Only Niki was in the room. Ann thought she was asleep, but could not be sure. If she was asleep then she slept more quietly than she did anything else. Her dark hair spread over the pillow behind her, her eyelashes lay darkly on moon-whitened cheeks, her mouth was slightly open. Her naked shoulder, her naked arm, curved gently. She looked like a statue, Ann thought. A statue of what? Some mythological creature, half-goat, half-woman. She liked Niki better asleep than awake, Ann decided.

Ann carefully folded back the top sheet of her bed and slipped in. She could never sleep in the nude, she thought. The night sky was dark outside the window. (Why hadn't Niki pulled the shades down? They would need curtains.) The empty third bed held a rectangle of moonlight. Ann closed her eyes and slept.

She woke early the next morning. She never slept well her first few nights in a new place, never deeply, never late. The other bed had someone in it; then Hildegarde had arrived in the middle of the night, after twelve certainly.