When No One Was Looking (13 page)

Once she had seen a photograph of a night sky as luminescent as this one. In a
National Geographic
some years back she had pored over a picture of the Taj Mahal at midnight. Behind the minarets lay a deep indigo heaven as cloudless and star ridden as this.
How must it be,
Kathy wondered,
to come down to this place straight out of a Massachusetts February? How must it feel to stand in this warmth with your feet still cold from the Logan Airport parking lot?
Julia’s family flew down to Florida frequently in the wintertime, as Mrs. Redmond complained that the New England dampness got into her bone marrow. Julia came too, missing school, and as it didn’t affect her grades, the teachers didn’t mind. Julia, Kathy reminded herself, was also born with a silver spoon and as a child had left any amount of things out in the rain, and these things had been replaced without too much fuss. There had been a bicycle which rusted after two weeks behind the lilac bush. Then there was a doll. Kathy had never seen the doll, but Julia’s mother was fond of telling the doll story. At four years of age Julia had been given a French porcelain doll by this very Aunt Liz. It had real hair and a silk brocade ball gown. Julia had forgotten it one day and left it on the grass, where it was ruined by a northeaster; it was found in the woods a week later, crushed by a fallen tree. Julia was to be punished for this, “and we really tried,” Mrs. Redmond had said with a resigned chuckle, “but she refused to sleep for a week without it, and when she went on a hunger strike, we had to get her another.” Julia claimed not to remember the event, but Kathy guessed it was true since Mrs. Redmond told the story often without changing the details.

Kathy took one more glance through the glass into the living room where she’d felt so ill at ease. In this house, in the Taj Mahal itself, she decided, Julia would probably scorn the furniture just as she did at home. In the Blue Room of the White House she would sit with her back on the floor and her legs propped up against some priceless antique chair. Her presence anywhere would be as inviolable as the greenness of leaves or the drumming of raindrops.

Long after Kathy had gone to bed, she opened her eyes on a yet sleepless night. She listened to the pounding surf outside and to Julia’s regular breathing on the other side of the room, wishing the two rhythms would coincide exactly.
Think only about tennis,
she repeated to herself, trying to re-create the sound of Marty’s voice, or her mother’s.
Don’t start another argument with Jodi. Don’t think about Grandma. Stop picturing Oliver when you caught him in the shower. Stop picturing Ruth not drowning.
She changed position for what seemed to be the thousandth time that night. The sheets were soft and slithery under her.
If I win it all, and never stop,
Kathy reckoned,
I’ll have everything someday. One pro tournament championship with a big check, and I can pay back every cent my lessons and sneakers and everything else has cost. One pro tournament, and I’ll never sleep on those awful muslin sheets that Mother cuts in half when they get holes and sews up again with that uncomfortable seam.
At last the sound of the ocean breaking on the beach caught up with her thinking, and she slept. It seemed after a minute that her eyes had opened again, this time on the inside of her head.

What she saw was one of the three dwarves that stood in the front yard of their neighbors’ house. He had been there as long as Kathy could remember, although she did not know the reason why the people next door had chosen such things to be in their front yard. Upon him the snow had fallen and the November leaves. Summer sun had bleached his red hat pink. Against him Kathy had occasionally tossed a stone, and so his body was chipped. The dream had occurred to her several times recently. In it Kathy found herself to be in deep terror of this dwarf, although he did not move; she ran from him because under his quaint gnome’s hat were Dutch boy bangs.

“Mommy, Mommy!” she heard herself cry out but in a deeper voice than her own and in a pitch so desperate it might have come from a woman who had been suddenly shot.

“Kathy, what’s wrong? What’s the matter?” Julia was shaking her out of the dream.

“What?”

The bedside lamp was switched on. “Kathy, you’re dreaming. Wake up! It’s okay. I’m here. You’re down here in Florida with me and Aunt Liz. You’re okay!”

Kathy blinked in the light. She felt Julia’s hands firmly holding her shoulders, and she felt herself gag. She pushed Julia aside and made her way to the bathroom.

When she returned, an astonished Julia was still sitting on the bed. “Is it the heat?” Julia asked. “I don’t understand why they have August tournaments in Florida of all places. They must be crazy. I’d die of the heat.”

“Southern kids play outdoors all summer,” said Kathy, shaking her head. “They can’t just place the Nationals in Maine every year, you know.” The sight of Julia in her familiar pink forget-me-not nightgown was comforting, and Kathy managed a weak smile. “Sorry,” she said, “it’s like this before every tournament.” She tried but could not remember the dream.

“You never told me that! You mean you get sick before every match?”

“Usually in the morning. I never wanted to tell you,” Kathy added.

“But that’s awful, Kathy. I never imagined it was so hard for you. It looks so easy when you play.”

Kathy shrugged. “A lot of the girls have it worse than me,” she said. “You know super number-one Jennifer Robbins? The one with the hundred-mile-an-hour serve and the big boobs?”

“You’ve mentioned her.”

“She told me, one day when we were waiting out a thunderstorm, she not only gets sick before every big match, but her whole insides turn to water. She goes out and murders all her opponents anyway, so it doesn’t matter. She eats nothing but rice and boiled steak the day before, but it doesn’t help. She just tries to find a ladies’ room away from everybody else.”

Julia winced visibly at this description. “I’d quit tennis if that happened to me,” she said.

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Kathy, smiling a little more. “Even you’d lose your sense of modesty after a while. No one cares, really. We’ve all heard a hundred girls get sick or cry or sit moaning in a chair all doubled up with cramps. In a few months you wouldn’t even notice.”

“Are you still angry at me?” Julia asked suddenly.

Immediately Kathy switched out the light and got back into bed. “No,” she said. After a moment had passed in which she listened once more to the insects and the ocean, she added, “You know how I am.”

“How?”

“Well, I’m not too Yankee, as you always say, for some things. I get terribly mad when I play badly, and I swear and cry. I guess I’m not too Yankee to come to you whenever I’m upset, but ... I’m too Yankee, I guess, to be able to put things into words the way you do. To say I’m sorry ... or much of anything.”

“I know,” said Julia kindly. “It’s okay.”

“It’s funny. I hate admitting things like this, but this evening over at the Hazard Bay Racket Club I wouldn’t go in and meet anyone. I was scared of them, and I waited out by the entrance for half an hour rather than face all those in-group looking kids. The whole time I waited, I felt like the world’s biggest chicken. I wish you’d been there, Julia.”

“Kathy?”

“What?”

“Someday soon you’re going to be a better player than anyone at that silly club tonight, and you’re going to start believing in yourself.”

Kathy won both her matches the following day. The famous ten-year-old she dispensed with in twelve games, and the seventh seed from Port Washington in sixteen games. She felt a twinge of pity for the ten-year-old, who looked to be only eight. She was a thin girl with flaxen pony tails, almost colorless blue eyes, and a French tennis outfit that would cost at least a hundred dollars in most pro shops. In the locker room after the match she sat in a hard wooden chair and sobbed as if she had been suddenly orphaned. Kathy knew the girl was probably afraid to face her mother, because she’d seen the mother’s face just before the match point was served. Kathy did not identify the woman’s features, having no idea what Judy Garland looked like after a bad night, but she could single out that rigid, dark expression, the set of the jaw, and the eyes, as offended as a chained dog’s. Kathy hoped the girl had at least a teddy bear and that it wouldn’t be taken away.

The other girl, Kathy’s second-round opponent, simply disappeared after the match. She had thrown her racket to the ground and not retrieved it. These incidents Kathy reported to both her mother and Marty that night on the telephone to their satisfaction.

What she did not tell her mother was that Aunt Liz had observed that Kathy had every right to look just as snazzy as the rest of the girls and had taken her down to the local tennis boutique and advised her to choose three or four new outfits. Kathy did not mind this slight to her mother’s tailoring or her family’s income quite as much as she hankered after a real Bogner tennis dress. Although they cost over seventy dollars apiece, Aunt Liz paid for all three as casually as she would have paid for three Cokes.

Perhaps the dresses brought her the unimagined luck, for Kathy won and won until she reached the finals, where she lost to a girl whose picture had appeared in
Sports Illustrated.
By that time she had been interviewed by a local Florida paper and by a
Boston Globe
reporter and had received a congratulatory telegram from Kenneth B. Hammer of the Plymouth public schools. This she threw away, as it made her uneasy.

U
P THE OCEAN DRIVE
toward the Plymouth Club Kathy pedaled in the rain. She tried to avoid the muddy splashes of oncoming cars and trucks, but she could not, and in a short while she was drenched to the skin, just as Julia’s mother had said she would be. She didn’t mind. It was a great relief to be away from the stifling Florida air, and there was a jumpiness inside of her that could only be lessened by jogging or pedaling. Since the club was too far from Julia’s house to be jogged to, she had borrowed a bicycle, and ignoring Mrs. Redmond’s insistence on driving her, she was on her way. It occurred to her that her success in Florida had at least for the moment shot her past the age when someone else’s mother could absolutely forbid her to do something.

In Kathy’s pocket was a clipping Mrs. Redmond had saved from that morning’s
Globe.
The clipping had been flapping in Mrs. Redmond’s outstretched hand when she met Kathy and Julia at Logan Airport that morning. “Kathy,” she had explained breathlessly and protectively, “your mom and dad are tied up. Your mom’s with your grandma and your dad has to do a photography thing for the VFW, so you come right home with us, but, oh, Kathy, look at this! Read what they said about you in the morning paper! Julia, I want you to read what the
Boston Globe
has to say about your best friend.”

Kathy pulled to the side of the road to let a moving van pass. She patted the article with her free hand. It was still dry, folded in a tiny square and stuck in her bra. Would Marty have seen it yet? Of course. Would she be truly pleased? Yes, but would she say so? Probably not.
She’ll ask me what the girl beat me with in the finals,
Kathy decided.
And I’ll have to go over that rotten drop shot all week.

In the finals Kathy had faced a girl of just the sort Marty and her mother loved to hate. She was ranked fourth nationally. She had lustrous long dark hair, heavy eye makeup that did not run, and a solid gold necklace that shone against her deeply tan skin. The girl had been written up in
Sports Illustrated.
At home, which was in Houston, she had a private clay court and two coaches, one who appeared every morning at six thirty. The girl had not beaten Kathy easily. Kathy didn’t care a bit that she’d lost to her. She was so delighted to have come as far as the finals she had smiled broadly after the match point, something she guessed she oughtn’t to have done, and, the girl from Houston had congratulated her with grace and affection, as if Kathy had won.

Would her mother and father have seen the papers yet? Kathy hoped so. It might make her mother’s vigil at her birdlike grandmother’s bedside a little more bearable. For Jody, of course, it would do nothing. Jody started an argument in Kathy’s mind beginning with
You were spending two weeks playing in the sunshine while all the rest of us were in a foul-smelling nursing home
... When Kathy had last seen her, her grandmother had been temporarily attached to a beige machine. The machine hummed and then stopped and then hummed again. Kathy had been told its purpose but had deliberately forgotten what it was for.

“Dear God,” Kathy muttered, “please make Mom and Dad happy and untired tonight and please make Marty happy and please, please make Jody shut up for once.” The wind and rain blew furiously against her, and Kathy knew that these things were not God’s business. Rose, the Redmonds’ Rose, seemed to know God’s business well.

At her welcoming-home/victory-party lunch Mr. Redmond had made a joke about the Boston papers. The headline on her precious clipping read “Hub Girl Wins Big!” Anyone, Mr. Redmond had said, who had ever spent a night in Boston or within a hundred miles of it would rate as a “Hub person” as far as the Boston papers, were concerned. There had been lighted candles on the dining room table and a fire in the dining room fireplace, as the day was cool. Kathy had spent several Christmas dinners with Julia’s family, and this lunch was very like a Christmas dinner. The heavy silver service, engraved illegibly with Mr. Redmond’s grandmother’s initials, created a sense of eternal security as it clanked on the gold-edged plates. So did Mr. Redmond’s unsqueaking wing-tipped shoes and his clean strong hands. Kathy’s father’s hands were equally strong but stained with nicotine and photographic acids. The house and Julia’s whole existence were a place of eternal springtime where the dogwood was always just in bloom and only the promise of summer lay ahead. This springtime was magical for Kathy to share but, like a ring behind a jeweler’s thick glass window, it was not at all really hers.
Julia, with no adversity or trial to test her, will inherit a diamond mine at the end of the story,
Kathy decided, recalling a children’s book.
And me? Ah. Now I remember what’s bothering me.