Tell Me If the Lovers Are Losers (7 page)

Niki's team won two points, then lost serve again. Although Hildy was in the front row, she did not often spike. She sent the ball back, to her own team, over her head or sideways. She placed her shots when she made them over the net and ordinarily won the point. Her team won that game, and the sides switched again.

Ann and Eloise exchanged a glance, both with eyebrows raised. “I'm rather glad I decided to stop by,” Eloise said.

Ann nodded. Niki's face was mottled with exertion, and so was Hildy's. All twelve faces were serious. The blonde, Sarah, served a moderate underhand. Hildy passed it overhead to a player in the front row. Niki's team shifted toward that side of the court. “To Carol,” Hildy called, and the ball, instead of being sent over the net, was passed down to the opposite side of the front line, to the redheaded girl. She plopped it over for the point, into the emptied court.

The team rotated. To Hildy's serve. In silence.

Hildy served hard, and Niki returned it. Hildy's team passed it forward and over the net. Sarah returned it immediately, to the feet of a player who could not lift it back into play.

The team rotated. In silence.

A heavy, brown-haired girl, wearing boy's athletic shorts, served for Niki's team. The redhead, Carol, returned it easily, a long, high, floating shot. As soon as it left her hands, she slapped one palm against her forehead and looked about her apologetically, but nobody returned her glance. They watched the ball instead. Sarah moved to receive it. Niki poised by the net. The ball came off Sarah's hands at the same time that Niki left the ground. She executed the spike. Hildy dived for it, but missed.

Ann let her breath out.

Brownhair served again, across the court to the opposite side. Hildy's team passed it forward, then across the front to Hildy; who soared up to meet it with her fist, spiking it directly to Sarah; who caught it against her belly, surprised.

The team rotated. In silence.

Eloise crossed her legs beneath her and hunched forward.

The next serve was weak but accurate. Niki returned it to midcourt. Hildy crouched down to lift the ball enough so that another pass returned it over the net. Niki went to receive it, passed it to Sarah, who sent it back, deep and flat. The server ran to meet it and, with a frenzied fist, popped it up. Hildy was beneath it when it came down. She sent it to Carol who angled it across court. Sarah lifted it high, and Niki leaped.

“Hoo-aah!” Niki cried, as she fired the ball into the back of the court.

“All right! Now! We've got it!” Niki yelled. Her voice shattered the silence.

Ann repressed a nervous giggle. By a coolness at her back, she knew a third person had joined them. Word of this kind of contest must spread quickly. She turned her head to greet the newcomer, then scrambled to her feet.

“Miss Dennis,” Ann said as Eloise, too, hurried to stand.

“Miss Gardner,” the Munchkin answered. “Miss Golding.”

Eloise bobbed her head.

Miss Dennis wore a navy shirt dress that emphasized her squat body.

“I was on my way to the tea,” she remarked. “This seems to be a close game.”

“It is.”

“Yes. Well, so it appears.”

“It's the third,” Eloise volunteered. “Each team has won one.”

They watched in silence for a while. The score crept slowly upward to five-five. As Niki's team prepared to serve, Miss Dennis stepped up to one of the poles. “Ladies,” she announced. “If you continue, you will either miss the tea entirely or be embarrassingly late.”

Eyes turned to wristwatches. “Hell and damnation,” Niki said. Too loudly.

“Perhaps so,” Miss Dennis' dry voice carried over the babble that hastily arose. “Ah, Miss Koenig. I see you have arrived safely.”

Hildy's head swung around and she squinted toward the Munchkin. “Yes?” she said. She stooped and stepped under the net, coming to shake hands. “How do you do? It is good to meet you, yourself,” Hildy said.

“It wouldn't do to miss the tea you know,” Miss Dennis chided. “So I'll see you all there, in a few moments.” She loped away, lopsidedly ascending a small bank of grass.

“We could finish,” Niki said. But she knew she would not be heard. Girls were already running back to dorms.

“Dammit,” Niki said. She flung the ball at the ground. “Who wants to go to this tea anyway?”

“Why, I do,” Hildy answered. She picked the ball up and hurried off.

“See you there,” Ann said to Eloise, as Eloise nodded. Ann hastened after Hildy, leaving Niki to make her own angry way.

Hildy and Ann took quick baths, by which time Niki returned, her hair damp from a shower. As soon as she had stepped into the room, she said, “Hildy? What if I played volleyball for my fall sport? There's a tournament—if we were on the same team, I bet we'd win.”

Hildy had spread a brown cotton dress on her desk top and was smoothing it with the flat of her hand. When Ann asked what she was doing, she explained that this was her dress for the tea, but that she had worn it for two days' travel. Ann brought out a bright flowered Lanz, in the princess style. “Will you try this?” she asked. Hildy was taller than she but no broader. “Really,” Ann insisted.

“Is it the custom to share?” Hildy asked.

“My sisters and I do it all the time,” Ann said.

“Ah. I have only brothers,” Hildy said. She put the dress over her head and pulled up the back zipper.

“Pretty,” Ann said. The airy print and smooth lines of the dress suited Hildy's haphazard hair, her bright blue eyes and slender, tanned neck. It was a pleasure to see the dress on her Both the garment and its wearer seemed fresh, accidental, and eager as a bank of daffodils.

Hildy smoothed her hands down the front of the dress. “Pretty,” she agreed. “Isn't it too short though? You are several inches smaller than I. Am I immodest?”

“Never.” Niki laughed sharply. “Besides, we're all female here, so who cares? What's to show? Who's to see it?”

Hildy stared at Niki for a moment, without seeming to see her.

“Anyway, what do you think?” Niki asked.

“About what?” Ann asked. They were all dressing.

“Playing volleyball for a sport. Me. And Hildy.”

“I would not want to play on a team with you,” Hildy said.

“What? What do you mean? Why not?” The air in the room crackled. Ann squirmed.

“You do not know how to play on a team,” Hildy said. She apparently had not noticed Niki's fullblown reaction.

“What the—?” Niki said. “Holy pissing name of God.”

Ann, whose squirming had intensified to acute discomfort, felt Hildy's wrath while the third girl struggled to find her tongue. Hildy's hands clenched. She stepped up to Niki, into whose eyes she could look as equal, and her own eyes were luminous. Her jaw moved, once. Her voice when she spoke was stony: “You will not use such language where I must hear it. I have heard enough.”

Ann would have run from the room, had not her two roommates stood between her and the door.

Niki stood silent, sullen. Hildy faced her, implacable, not altering her gaze.

She spoke again: “You have not answered.”

Niki could not possibly have mistaken the tone for a challenge. But she chose to respond as if it had been. “I guess you expect me to apologize, and wash my mouth out with soap because I'm a bad girl.”

“You have not answered.”

Ann almost admired Niki's stubornness against the force of Hildy's anger.

“Just what am I supposed to say?”

“The truth,” Hildy said quietly.

That stopped Niki. “Oh,” she said. “OK,” she said, “I won't.”

Ann thought the argument would continue, but it didn't. Each girl retired to her bureau to brush her hair.

Niki spoke first. “Did you mean that about the team?”

“Of course.”

“I can play anyway.”

“I hope so.”

“I'm better than you are, you know that.”

“No, I do not know that. You are not, now, better than I; although you probably could be. You are much more agile, and your reflexes are quicker. But your emotion interferes with your play and with the play of your team. I am not confident that you are the better.”

Niki fell silent. Ann did not speak. She sat on her bed, waiting for Hildy to be ready, thinking that her vocal cords felt entangled. She might never speak again.

But this is bizarre, Ann said to herself, mindful of the future weeks and months they had to spend together. Somebody had to speak. Somebody had to say something. She cleared her throat experimentally and then hurled herself into the conversational breech, firing off the first thought that came to her mouth. “I think I'll play volleyball too.”

Hildy smiled, as at a child's foolishness, but Niki said, “Why?”

“Why not?” Ann answered, with a rhetorical waving of hands. “I don't particularly like field hockey and I don't enjoy playing it. It's time I tried something new. And besides, you two just blew up at each other and if I hadn't seen that game I wouldn't know why. So I have to take volleyball, to be able to keep up with your quarrels. And know when to steer clear of the room.”

Niki grinned. Hildy protested: “But we were not quarreling about the game.”

“You think not?” Niki asked.

“And we have understood one another, Niki and I,” Hildy continued. “We have seen, each, what the other is.”

“Speak for yourself,” Niki muttered. “But there's more to me than meets the eye.”

“Of course,” Hildy said, surprised.

Ann's head turned from one to the other. “Yes, I think I'd better take volleyball. With you.”

“If it is what you want, then that is fine,” Hildy said earnestly. “But we have made peace with one another, if it is not what you want.”

“Not what she wants? Peace?” Niki asked.

“What, volleyball?” Ann asked.

Hildy shook her head and her eyes peered at them. “You can't confuse me,” she said.

“Peace
is
what I want,” Ann babbled. “Serenity, security, balance— So, I'll take volleyball, whatever you say. How did that decision become so serious?”

“Ask Hildy,” Niki advised, grinning and holding the door for them.

The first weeks at Stanton passed both quickly and slowly, as Ann tried to settle in and feel at home. They lived together, Ann and Niki and Hildy, and grew to know one another There were classes to attend, professors whose methods had to be assessed, learning to accomplish. Ann worked at the ancient Greek declensions, neglecting science as much as possible, and finding the other courses rather easy. Hildy sat for hours at her desk, hunched over notebooks and textbooks; or she lay on the bed with a book up against her nose. Niki was frequently out.

They would get no grades until the results of the first set of tests, which were usually given three to four weeks after a course began. Ann studied regularly, as she had been trained to do, three or four hours a day given to preparation and review. Hildy rose with the sun, to sit over the books at her desk. Ann woke to see Hildy silhouetted against the desk light, her head low over papers, her fingers buried in her short hair. Hildy's hair looked ragged and unruly in the mornings, like a head just denuded of lifelong braids. Unprotected somehow. The same bent head, in more mellow light, was the last thing Ann usually saw before falling asleep.

Ann noticed in Hildy a consistent attitude, to every course, to every assignment. She approached all—even after several weeks, when Stanton had become familiar—with eagerness. What was odd was that her expectations were not disappointed. Hildy woke eagerly to each morning, turned eagerly to her studies, went eagerly to meals although she was neither a prodigious nor a fussy eater. About this last, Ann asked her. “I enjoy to be hungry,” Hildy answered, “because—then I eat and I am no longer hungry. And it feels good not to be hungry.” Niki snorted. Niki, opposite to Hildy in all things, criticized
the food in language both imaginative and vulgar; she ate out frequently but seemed to enjoy discussing the dormitory food, as if she appreciated the opportunity it gave her to make Ann laugh. Ann saw herself muddling about between the two of them. “You cover all the extremes,” she protested. “What about me?” And she would think, a little wistfully, about where she fit in, in this trio, before turning back to her own work.

Niki studied erratically and attended classes with notebook in hand. She was most often out of the room. She developed a wide circle of acquaintances, people she met in her restless search for something to do. Niki was always available to
do
something, tennis, touch football, softball, bridge, Clue, take a hike, or sit around the student center and talk. “You're making a lot of friends,” Ann remarked to her “Friends,” Niki answered, not bothering to disguise her scorn. “They've just got a lot of time to kill—and they think if they're laughing they're having a good time—and they want someone to do their thinking for them. You can't be friends with people who don't know anything about you—and don't want to. Can you? Huh Annie, can you?” Ann turned away. They were alone together in their room because it was Thursday; on Mondays and Thursdays, Hildy walked up to the Observatory, two miles into the hills.

Ann tried to figure out what they were like, Hildy and Niki. And Ann. Niki wore her intelligence like her jeans, close and comfortable. Hildy held hers like a lantern, to illuminate. And Ann? Like a string of real pearls around her neck, in the dark of night on the wrong street, she nervously concealed her mind, her unquiet fingers both cherishing and proud. Was that what they were like? What she was like? During those weeks, and always afterwards, she considered this.

Niki demanded her attention but it was Hildy who dominated her thoughts. Niki made Ann uncomfortable, kept her alertly off-balance; but Hildy fascinated her, with her suggestion of mysterious possibility. It was Hildy she asked questions of, as if by collecting facts she could approach understanding. Hildy came from a family of four brothers and herself. Her father's farm was three hundred and two acres, her father's brother had a contiguous farm of four hundred acres, so that the family had substantial holdings. Hildy, as the only girl, had
a bedroom to herself. She had taken the same five courses, all through high school: English, a math course, Latin, history, science. Her sports were volleyball, basketball, and track. her brothers were named Luke and Philip and Thomas and Matthew. Her mother had a vegetable garden and put up the fruits of it. Her parents were shorter than their children. All of this told Ann little. She could not attach Hildy to any of it. “What does your house look like?” she asked. “Is it a two-story one, with trees, among flat fields? With barns behind it? Is it white with a porch?”