When No One Was Looking (2 page)

Contemptuous of most of her summer pupils’ indifferent efforts to achieve a clean forehand, Marty had a string of nicknames for them. She called the most private of their weaknesses to their attention, knowing they would never admit to their parents to being called Jelly-rump or Pig-eyes. Marty was not well liked. It was said of her that had she been a swimming coach instead of a tennis coach, she would have tossed a baby off the jetty in January and expected it to swim to shore. But because Marty had suffered third degree burns over every inch of her body as a child and had been given up for a lifelong cripple, only to recover and beat Maureen Connolly at Wimbledon, thereby causing her name to be emblazoned on a line of Wilson rackets, Marty was somehow forgiven.

There were things said, and things left unsaid. One of the things that was said most often of Kathy was that she had a phenomenal gift, was the most promising New England girl to come along in ages. It was said that she would go “right to the top” if she learned to control her temper.

It was said that Marty was the only first-class woman coach in the country. (Proven most recently by Kathy’s jump from unknown to twelfth in New England in her age category and fourth in the district in the space of fourteen months.)

It was not said that Marty, whose days of glory came when tennis had been a gentlewoman’s game and therefore unpaid, had a great stake in Kathy Bardy’s future or that she had her eye on the prodigies and the publicity that would be hers should Kathy turn professional and become famous like Tracy Austin. Kathy was half-aware of the connection between her future and Marty’s.

It was not said that Kathy’s father worried about the money all this cost. Kathy was very aware of this, not in terms of sums or exact figures but in the same simple way that she knew by looking out the window whether it was raining.

It was not said (even by Kathy to herself) that at this very moment, when she ought to have been mentally preparing herself for tomorrow’s tournament in Quincy, she was instead avenging Carl Yastrzemski’s pop-up in the playoffs against the hated Yankees.

At exactly three o’clock Marty tossed her Coke bottle into the trash barrel and sauntered out onto the court. Her face, mildly scarred under a brilliant red head of hair, looked always to Kathy like the face of the joker in a deck of cards. Every day Marty wore an identical tennis outfit, a white dress, unfashionably long. It matched the dress in the photo that hung in her office of that day long ago when she’d been victor over the famous Maureen. Kathy wondered for the hundredth time why Marty clung to such things as the dress and, biting clean as they were, the old-fashioned high wool socks and old-fashioned deck sneakers instead of wearing Adidas or Tretorns. Marty scoffed at all changes. She would not tolerate metal rackets or a two-handed backhand no matter what Chris Evert had done. She also frowned on all the money the pros made. Officially Marty insisted that tennis was a ballet, a game of joy and a sport worthy of angels, and that the flashing about of six-figure incomes was ruinous to its spirit. However, she possessed a memory like a tax collector for every penny the pros turned over, and she repeated these statistics from time to time in between commands to “Keep the head
down
” and “Move, dammit, move!”

“Where is your mind, my dear?” Marty asked. “My dear” was her nickname for Kathy.

Kathy reddened. She had hit three backhands in a row directly at Marty instead of down the line. “I’m sorry, Marty.”

“I want you to play like a man, not like a lady who paints teacups on the side. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Marty.”

“You’ll never be any good unless you learn to play like a man. How do you think Althea Gibson got where she got?”

Kathy searched her memory for the name Althea Gibson. Out of what attic did Marty drag these names? “She played like a man,” said Kathy, who knew how to answer a question.

“She served like a man, she rushed the net like a man, and she was over six feet tall. You, my dear, are a shrimp and so have twice as far to go.” Marty’s logic was as wicked as her ability to return shots from mid-court. For an hour Kathy hit the same backhand shot down the same line.

“Why are you smiling?”

“I’m not smiling,” said Kathy, smiling.

“Are you smiling because you think you’re going to have such an easy time with Alicia deLong over the weekend? Alicia is number five.”

“No,” Kathy answered, this time not smiling.

“Are you smiling because you think you’ve done so well? That’s for me to tell you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Marty.”

“Well then, why are you smiling? Put on your sweater. Answer me.”

Kathy was too frightened to remember what had brought a smile to her face, “Just something ... she began, “at school.”

“Where is your mind, my dear?” Marty asked again, bending over for a ball. “After next week there’ll be no school to distract you. Now what are you crying for?”

Kathy sat down on the spectator’s bench in the shade of a green-and-white-striped awning. She tried to concentrate on a girl serving endlessly on court six.

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m not ... anymore.”

“Do you have your period?”

“No. That never bothers me anyway.”

“Don’t be a fool, of course it bothers you. I keep track of you. I know. Stop looking embarrassed. You know you never remember when you’re going to get it.”

Kathy sat silent, not because this was the thing that Marty could least stand but because nothing safe to say occurred to her. This was like an algebra test at its worst, like Chinese or Greek. “I may have to take tutoring this summer,” she managed to squeak out at last. Perhaps Marty would turn her wrath in another direction.

“In what? Tutoring for what?”

“Algebra. I can’t possibly pass the final.”

“Algebra! Why? Fail! Who cares? You think the USTA cares about algebra?”

“My folks do, especially my father,” said Kathy.

“I have told your parents a hundred times that you shouldn’t be pushed in all directions at once. The kind of pressure you’re under now doesn’t allow for algebra,” said Marty bitterly.

“My teachers say the opposite, you know. If I don’t improve my schoolwork next year, I’m sure they’ll never let me go at one thirty to practice every day in Swampscott.”

Marty chewed on her lower lip and then, amazingly, she whispered “Kathy” quite gently and covered Kathy’s hand with her own. “Don’t cry,” she began in what Kathy knew was a voice that did not come easily to her. “Just think, one day all this schoolwork will be over. You’ll just have your game to think about, and you’re going to be right on the top. In the Wightman Cup, at Wimbledon. No one is going to touch you, not even the little rich girls with twenty years of tennis clubs behind them. You’re going to show them all. But remember, your family isn’t rich. You don’t have the advantages some girls have. You’ll never be much of a student. This is the one way you’re going to break out of all the dullness in life. You’re going to go to England and France someday, Kathy. You’ll go to Rome and win the Italian championship. Think of that! And everyone who says a New Englander can’t do it, a girl who takes up tennis late can’t do it, a girl with a woman coach can’t do it—well, they’re all going to be eating crow someday. That algebra teacher of yours is going to sit back in her Jordan Marsh rocker and
read
about you in the papers someday, and maybe you’ll give her an autograph. I’ve been there, Kathy. I held up that silver plate in front of the Queen of England, and I know.”

Kathy knew two things. One was that Marty wouldn’t be likely to put her hand on her own mother’s if her mother had been run over by a car. The other was that Marty was being uncanny, as she was when it suited her. The phrase
show them all
had hit Kathy surgically, in the center of her belly. Yes, she wanted to show them all, although she didn’t know who “they” were. “Who’s that on court six?” Kathy asked at last.

“Nobody,” said Marty, withdrawing her hand.

“Just because she’s new doesn’t make her nobody. She has a strong serve.”

Marty sighed. “She’s big, she’s slow, and she has weasely eyes. She’s one of Gordon’s brand-new lesser lights.”

Gordon was the other coach in this part of New England. Once upon a time he too had been one of Marty’s pets, but he hadn’t the temperament to go very far. Gordon was handsome and popular and had many promising juniors in his stable. Marty had not spoken to him in years. “Foot fault,” said Marty, glaring at the girl. “She has big feet.”

“She has a strong serve,” repeated Kathy.

“She’s as big as a lumberjack.”

Kathy picked up her rackets and her bag. “She’s got a strong serve, Marty.”

“And as clumsy,” Marty continued, as if Kathy had said nothing.

Kathy knew it was hopeless to try and get in the last word, so she left Marty, promising to call after the next day’s matches. Once she looked back. Marty was concentrating on the girl, sitting alone on the newly painted white bench. Kathy had few moments of true revelation, but she did wonder as she crossed the neatly raked parking lot to join Julia for a swim whether Marty, gnarled and scarred, had such a thing as a mother.

As she mentioned all odd thoughts to Julia, Kathy mentioned this one when she’d come up from the water and settled herself in a deck chair.

“That’s a funny thing to say. Everyone has a mother.”

“I know. But Marty’s old. Past forty or fifty maybe. I thought her mother might have died in that fire when she was a baby.”

“Are you trying to excuse her awfulness?” Julia asked.

“No, not that. I just felt sorry for her suddenly.”

Julia rolled her eyes heavenward. She imitated her own mother’s drawl precisely. “No one on God’s green earth I feel sorry for less than that mean, hungry woman.” And then, switching to her regular voice, Julia said that not even a childhood spell in a concentration camp would excuse Marty’s excesses in her eyes.

“Excesses,” repeated Kathy.

“You take more you-know-what from that coach than I can believe. I couldn’t. I
couldn’t.
I’d cry like a baby or spit in her eye. I don’t know which.”

Kathy stretched and threw her towel over an empty chair. “You have to get to know her,” she said.

“There’s something about her that I hate,” Julia said slowly. “I don’t even really hate my Aunt Liz, who threw a vase at Mom on her last visit, but I hate that Marty.”

“Why?” Kathy asked.

Over the top of her magazine Julia looked Kathy in the eye, and without wavering as Kathy would have done she declared, “Because she’s mean to you, and I don’t like people being mean to you.”

For the second time that day Kathy asked in embarrassment, “I wonder who that is?”

“I don’t know,” said Julia, “but she’s a powerful swimmer. Probably races. Look at her strokes.”

The same large body that had been serving so steadily in court six now swam up and down the length of the pool with identical determination. She was still at it long after Julia had left and the evening shadows had fallen on the pool, the deck, and the surrounding empty chairs. At last she hoisted herself out and announced to no one, “Two hundred.”

By this time Kathy had finished a hamburger and a soda (free to employees of the club) and had started to net a few limp ginko leaves off the surface of the water. She collected what stray wet towels lay around and cleaned out the pool house. The club manager would check her work later with the energy of a room inspector at West Point. She lined up the containers of chlorine, although they were already arranged perfectly. Then she collected the things for the lost-and-found box and took them to the office. The previous summer Kathy had been the lone club employee without a single red stroke beside her name on the manager’s error sheet, or blacklist, as it was called by the lifeguards. She enjoyed this little contest, and the work required no thought at all. At seven, when the first people arrived for the dance, the pool house was immaculate, the water leafless and shimmering, and the deck as shiny as a liner’s on a maiden voyage. Kathy buttoned her sweater against the wind and climbed high up into her lifeguard’s chair. There she sat in the darkness, listening to the ocean wash and spill against the rocky jetty outside the three-story enclosure of lockers and public rooms that left the pool open to the sky, staring into the wonderful depths of the lighted water. She was quite happy. In one hour she would begin passing the rest of the evening listening to the Red Sox on a tiny transistor radio she kept hidden in her towel.

“I’m Oliver English,” said a voice from the deck. The voice cracked slightly in the middle of the sentence. “I’m afraid I got you into trouble with your coach.”

“Trouble?” Kathy asked. A boy with very heavy glasses and large white teeth was smiling up at her. But of course she remembered right away. He
had
indirectly gotten her into trouble with Marty. It had been Oliver whom she’d seen grinning at her at the end of her lesson, and she of course had smiled back. Marty had probably figured him to be a potentially more serious distraction than algebra.

“She’s pretty tough on you. She’s a real drill sergeant,” Oliver added.

Kathy laughed. “I know,” she said, “but she’s nicer to me than she is to anyone else. I’m quite used to her.”

“I’m the other lifeguard tonight,” Oliver announced. “You’re the best girl tennis player I’ve ever seen. Will you hit with me next week? I’ve played a lot out in California.”

“Sure,” said Kathy, and she began to laugh.

“Why are you laughing? You think you can beat me?” Oliver looked seriously annoyed behind his horn-rims.

Kathy pointed to the dance, now fully under way in the conservatory, a room reserved for senior members. People had gathered around the bar and talked in little groups, although no one danced yet. A woman in an evening dress, tall as an oak, stood holding a drink in both cupped hands. She was listening to a man in Madras pants. Her smile never wavered from a full horsy grin, and she wore a diamond choker that could be seen twenty yards away. The flashing teeth and sparkling diamonds complemented each other perfectly. “Look at her!” Kathy said. “Look at him! Don’t they seem big to you? That guy must weigh three hundred pounds. What would we do if he fell in the pool?”