When No One Was Looking

by Rosemary Wells

  “Wasn’t true, Mom. I lied.”

  “You mean she’s been beating you again? That dumb ox?”

  “Marty was furious with me. I couldn’t tell you, Mom. I was too ashamed.”

  Kathy’s mother considered for a short moment “Well, you’re going to have to do something about it. That’s all. Right now. Stop crying. You’re not a baby. After dinner you go right down to the public courts ... what’s been your worst shot, your worst fault with Ruth? What?” Her mother’s voice tightened.

  “Serve. I don’t know. I get tensed up and my toss goes. Keep trying to ace her all the time. Second serve dribbles away. I don’t know, Mom. It’s like a cloud descends on me when I have to play her.”

  “You go right down to the night courts and you serve it out of your system. Do you understand?”

  “I have algebra, Mom.”

  “Forget algebra.”

  “Now wait just a minute,” said Kathy’s father. I say she goes to algebra and that’s final.”

  “After algebra,” Kathy’s mother continued. “You go down there, and you serve until you’ve got Ruth Gumm out of your system for good, and then you tell Joe Potter to put on the ball machine. She plays like a ball machine anyway—at least her speed is about as challenging. My God! A dummy, a nothing like that scaring you! It’s ridiculous. If you go into the finals in this tournament, you’ll have a chance at an invitation to the Nationals. Marty told me today. She heard it straight from Caroline Collins of the NELTA. They’re not pleased with Alicia deLong’s record this summer at all. The Nationals, Kathy! Are you going to blow that chance over some stupid fat pig who can’t even play tennis?”

  “I wish I could do it in the morning, Mom. At five o’clock?”

  “What for?”

  “Nothing. I just ... the Sox are playing the Yanks, and I wanted to relax and see it on the tube.”

  “No, it’s not on,” interrupted Jody. “There’s a news special instead.”

  “You look here, young lady, and you listen. Stop looking at your feet. Look at me in the eye.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Your Dad and I haven’t spent God knows how much on this tennis game of yours for the sheer fun of it alone. You have an obligation here, and you are going to practice. All right?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “All right.”

  There was a silence, and Oliver cleared his throat conspicuously. “Jigger Marantz with baggy pants,” he said.

  “What?” Kathy asked, her voice trembling a little. She had lost all her appetite.

  “Baseball trivia,” said Kathy’s father. “It’s nothing, honey, nothing at all.”

  “Who has baggy pants, Oliver?” Jody asked.

  Oliver glanced at Kathy’s father. “Sorry,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” Jody asked.

  Mr. Bardy considered for a minute. “Jigger Marantz was a ballplayer many years ago, Jody,” he said. “You don’t want to know about ballplayers. You hate baseball.”

  “I’ll look him up in the library,” said Jody.

  “Oh, God, Jody, all right,” said her father. “Well, Marantz was an outfielder for the old St. Louis Browns. He was a bench warmer, really, never hit above two hundred. Anyway, there used to be a big pitcher in those days, Walter Johnson was his name. They called him the Big Train. He was probably the best pitcher in baseball history. Hall of Famer. Most of his records still stand to this day. Well, the only guy Marantz could ever hit was Johnson, and the only guy Johnson was ever afraid of was Marantz. When Johnson pitched in St. Louis, the fans went crazy yelling ‘Marantz, Marantz with baggy pants!’ Johnson was stupid. He let the guy get to him. He should have burned his fastball right down the middle and blown the guy away, gotten him out of his system. Instead he used to pitch around him, walked him and let Marantz hit home runs off him. Anyhow, the whole confrontation was never resolved. Marantz was hurt bad one night in a barroom fight. Blinded. Someone threw him into a mirror. He never played again.”

  “Did Walter Johnson do it?” Kathy asked.

  “No, honey. As far as I know they never caught the fellow who did it. Johnson was pitching in another city that night. It’s a very famous baseball story, though,” he added in a hopeful voice, sensing the chill that had settled around the table. At that moment the doctor called and the front doorbell rang.

  Kathy sat unmoving at the kitchen table. She pressed her fingernail along the line of checks on the Formica surface. Plans and arrangements flew in and out of her attention. The doctor wanted to take a throat culture, and so her father and Bobby were dispatched to the clinic. The druggist in Norwood would stay open until her mother arrived to pick up whatever miracle drug had just come on the market from Canada, or was it Germany? Yes, her mother would drop Oliver at the club so he could help Mr. Molina with the fiftieth anniversary cocktail party. Jody would stay home and do the dishes. Kathy was reminded that she’d left her racket in the garage and her algebra book under the bathroom sink.

  Suddenly Julia walked into the kitchen carrying a large cardboard box. “Mom’s waiting for me in the car, I can only stay a minute,” she began. “Where’s everybody going? Kathy, what happened? Did you lose today?” Julia asked, setting her box down in the middle of the table. “You look as if you’d eaten a bad clam!”

  The kitchen was suddenly empty except for Julia, Kathy, and Jody. “She just found out she has to play Ruth Gumm tomorrow,” said Jody. “What’s in the box, Julia?”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem like the right time for it,” said Julia, staring at Kathy’s snow-white face. “I just brought it over for a laugh, but nobody seems to be in the mood for a laugh.”

  “I am,” said Jody, and she unwrapped the parcel herself. “What in creation is this?” she asked. “It looks like the Cro-Magnon man at the Museum of Science.”

  “It’s supposed to be me,” said Julia. “Miss Greco made it. We just went over to pick it up at her house. You never saw such a mess in your life. Cats, cat food, dust all over the stairs, broken dishes.” Cast in attractive bronze, the head gazed out at them from its box. “But the funniest thing is,” Julia went on, “I could never figure out about Miss Greco’s heads until tonight. She has this son, or relative. His name is Sam. He’s very scary-looking. All her heads look exactly like Sam. Kathy, where are you going?”

  “Algebra,” said Kathy.

  “But wait! We’ll drop you off. Mom’s outside.”

  “It’s okay,” said Kathy. “I’ll run over.” And she left instantly, with no books.

  The following evening Mrs. Chan brought Kathy to her front door. Hearing the car in the driveway, Kathy’s mother came running out with a ten-dollar gift certificate from the photo shop in her hand. Kathy cringed. She could see that Mrs. Chan was insulted—she had given Kathy a ride as a part of an exchange of kindnesses. She had been on her way to Boston anyway. She did not want to hurt Mrs. Bardy’s feelings too much, and so she just smiled and returned the gift certificate, saying she didn’t have a camera. When Mrs. Chan drove away, Kathy told her mother that it was tacky to pay people for favors.

  “And I know,” said her mother, “just where you pick up words like tacky and ideas like that.”

  “Mrs. Chan took me because Susie promised me a ride. The Chinese are very big on promises, Mom. By trying to give her that money you made her lose face.”

  “It wasn’t money,” said her mother, opening the front door. “Now how did you do?”

  “I won.”

  “I knew it!” Her mother’s face exploded in a wide grin. “Kathy won!” she yelled to the rest of the family, who were in assorted places in the house.

  “Mom, you embarrassed me in front of Mrs. Chan. Now she’ll tell Susie, and Susie will tell Peachy Malone, and she’ll ...

  Kathy’s father trotted down the stairs and into the living room. He put his cigarette in an ashtray, spread his arms, and hugged Kathy in midsentence, “You’re my girl,” he said. “I knew you could do it
. I knew it. I knew you’d just go out there and beat the daylights out of that silly girl.”

  “Dad,” Kathy said, but he went on.

  “I knew it when I saw your face at the table last night, honey. After I told that Jigger Marantz story. There’s nothing like a good story to show a good example. You did just what Walter Johnson, a big grown-up man, couldn’t do. You went out and overcame fear. You went out there and said can do, and you made it happen all by yourself because you knew you were the one who had to do it. From this day on, honey, I know you’ll never let anyone get a whammy on you. This calls for a drink!”

  “Dad,” said Kathy.

  “Yes, honey, come on in the kitchen. Mom’s got dinner almost ready. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to send for tickets tonight for the next Yankee game at Fenway, and I’m going to take you and Oliver. You deserve a celebration for what you did. I’m—”

  “Dad, please,” said Kathy. She went into the kitchen after him and waited for him to pour a glass of whiskey. “Dad,” Kathy said, “Ruth didn’t show today. I didn’t do anything big. I beat Alicia this morning, but I was so jumpy it took me three sets to do it—ten match points! I waited for Ruth at two o’clock, but she didn’t show. I told the umpire I wouldn’t take a default even after an hour and a half had passed. I waited till three forty-five, and then Mrs. Chan came, and I didn’t want to hold her up. The girl never showed, Dad. I was lucky this time. I didn’t have to face her, so I didn’t do anything great. I just accepted her default.”

  “Oh,” said her father in a disappointed voice. “Still”—he raised his glass—“here’s to the round of sixteen tomorrow anyway. It was real sporting of you to wait. That shows you were up for her. You would have beaten the pants off her.”

  “It wasn’t necessary,” said her mother. “The NELTA has rules about players being on time. Kathy should have accepted the default after the regulation ten minutes. It may sound picky of me, but champions aren’t champions because—”

  “Mother, would you stop,” Jody interrupted. “Kathy did something nice for once. Champions, whatever that means, are on top because they’re good. Not because they nickel and dime people on a bunch of silly rules. Here’s Oliver. Let’s eat.”

  Oliver walked directly to the kitchen sink, washed his hands, grimaced, and then inspected his fingers in the light. “Steel wool,” he said in a self-important voice. “Did you hear what happened, by the way?” When everyone said no, Oliver explained that he had spent the entire day scrubbing the sides of the swimming pool with six other lifeguards. “Didn’t you hear?” he asked.

  “No, what?” said Kathy.

  “Ruth Gumm drowned this morning.”

  “What?”

  “Molina found her. The police said it was death by drowning.”

  “The police!”

  “He had to get the police. The doors to the pool enclosure were locked from the inside. Apparently she had a key because she did laps before the club opened. She always locked the doors from the inside. Molina had to get the cops to break down the door. He found her in the shallow end. They drained the pool. He tried to revive her, but the doctor said she’d apparently been dead about an hour and a half. My hands are full of these damn steel wool fibers. It’s like a million splinters. They won’t come out.”

  “That’s a shame about the girl,” said Kathy’s mother. “I’ll get you some Lava soap, Oliver.”

  “See what happens when you swim alone?” said Kathy’s father. “A damn shame. Fourteen years old.”

  “But she was such a fantastic swimmer,” said Kathy. “Good swimmers don’t just drown. Why did she lock the doors from the inside?”

  “Molina made her in case anyone came by to rape her. He said she always opened up at eight o’clock when he got there. He was really upset. Last night when they closed after the cocktail party, I watched him lock up. You know his routine? He locks the door, and then he unlocks, and then he locks it all over again and says, ‘The door is locked!’ like that. He’s been at the club thirty-three years, and they’ve never had a drowning before, even in the ocean. You’d have thought it was his kid the way he was carrying on.”

  “Well, accidents do happen,” said Kathy’s mother. “Try some Vaseline, Oliver. Look at that poor girl, that skier who was paralyzed from the neck down. They did a book on her.” She put a plate of franks and beans down in front of Kathy. “Honey, don’t make a face like that,” she said. “You’d think I’d given you a dish of worms.”

  But Kathy’s mind was far away, uneasy, dreaming as if she were deeply asleep. She had it pictured that all the roofs had been somehow removed from all the buildings she would ever find herself in for the rest of time. Individual rooms, with walls only, appeared like so many floor plans. Above the rooms, drifting, watching every move she would ever make, Ruth hovered in a kind of heaven that sat about a hundred feet above the world. She was not transformed in any way in Kathy’s mind. No wings decorated her shoulders. No light emanated from her body. Her complexion was still uneven, her hair still in a Dutch boy cut. She waited, showing no expectation, much as she did for a serve.

  5

  JULIA’S AUNT LIZ WAS always called the Bullet Aunt. This was because as a child in her father’s dry-goods store Aunt Liz had stepped right into the path of a holdup man’s bullet, which had been intended for her father. After that Aunt Liz had been visited every day in the hospital by the entire seventh grade of Valdosta Grammar School until their prayers took hold, the bullet ceased to infect, and Aunt Liz lived to tell the tale, which she did often, even though all this had happened thirty-odd years before.

  Kathy had never heard this story from the lips of Aunt Liz herself until the August evening she and Julia stepped off the plane into the fierce Florida heat. August was not the time of year to go to Florida. Julia’s mother had declined to come for that reason. The night Kathy had won the finals at the Newton Country Club tournament, she had been invited over the telephone by Caroline Collins herself to replace Alicia deLong as one of five New England girls to be represented at the National Championships in Boca Raton, which began two days after Newton. Unable quite to believe this honor which had fallen so suddenly at her feet, Kathy had told Julia, and Julia had told her mother, and her mother had immediately telephoned Aunt Liz, who lived smack in the middle of Boca Raton’s Gold Coast. It had been arranged in two minutes’ time that Kathy would stay with Aunt Liz, whose house was but a stone’s throw from the tournament, and that Julia would go along for the fun. Julia’s mother advised Julia that her cousins, Roger and Jeffrey, were two innocent young boys, unaware of northern ways, and that she should not say anything shocking in front of them. “They’re nineteen and seventeen, Mother,” said Julia in exasperation. “It doesn’t matter if they’re forty and forty-three,” Mrs. Redmond had said right back. “Don’t drink, and don’t you dare sit in either of their laps like you did when you were twelve.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “And don’t you girls go ordering a drink on the plane.”

  “Yes, Mother. Mother?”

  “What?”

  “Aren’t you going to tell Kathy to keep out of Roger and Jeffrey’s laps?”

  “Katherine has far better manners than you, Julia. Katherine is a young lady. I do not ever worry about Katherine. I worry about you.”

  At Logan Airport Oliver looked for a moment as if he were going to kiss Kathy good-bye. Then he thought better of it, stood back like a soldier who had broken ranks, and waved instead. Kathy, her precious rackets under one arm, waved until she could see no one behind the glare of the morning sun. She waved again through the tiny window of the plane, although she knew her family and Oliver could no longer see her. The plane, the first Kathy had been on in her life, shot down the runway and lifted into the air. She was not so much struck with the extraordinary mechanical miracle of this happening as she was transported, suddenly, with the certainty that this was the beginning of something new, and she was no more in
control of the something new than she was of the huge machine which carried her as a helpless passenger. Julia ordered a glass of wine for each of them. The stewardess, wary of their ages, seemed disinclined to bring them until she spotted Kathy’s several rackets lying on the extra seat and for some reason changed her mind. The wine swallowed in one gulp, Kathy felt both expansive and groggy. “I feel funny,” she admitted to Julia.

  “Good funny or bad funny?” Julia asked, knowing better than to guzzle her glass of wine.

  “I feel as if I’m sort of in a room all alone.”

  “You shouldn’t drink so fast.”

  “My folks have to go to Springfield today. They have to move my grandmother to a new nursing home. Dedham ... Kathy’s voice trailed off. She didn’t want to say to Julia that the home in Dedham was cheaper. This even her parents had not easily admitted. Kathy would not have known particularly that this was a fact but for Jody. Jody’s remarks, both rueful and triumphant, made it clear that she, Jody, knew more than Kathy and that it was her duty, so to speak, to keep Kathy’s feet grounded on the earth by reminding her of her shortcomings. “We can’t afford to keep Grandma in the Springfield home anymore” was all Jody had to say to release in Kathy a jerk of guilt, for Kathy knew her tennis had cost several thousand dollars so far and that the better she did, according to hushed late-night squabbles between her parents, the more it would cost in the future.

  Kathy closed her eyes against the vibration of the plane and the nausea the wine produced in her gullet. “Rotten luck,” Marty had told her the day before. It was Marty’s sharp view that Kathy’s first air fare should not coincide so closely with her grandmother’s being moved. “Don’t put those two things together in your head,” Marty had warned. “They have nothing to do with each other. You don’t understand now, but someday you will.” Understanding this logic was beyond Kathy, as Marty had guessed. Since she had been invited to the tournament Kathy had not looked at a magazine or newspaper for fear of coming upon advertisements that included Florida air fares. Well, I’m here, Kathy told herself. She avoided Julia’s conversation by pretending to stare out the window. She wanted no questions about nursing homes. She had never told Julia very much about her grandmother. The contrast between their respective grandmothers was too great, and nursing homes were part of the no-man’s-land between her family and Julia’s. The plane passed through a cloud, leaving tiny droplets on the thick window. Then it struck the light, and Kathy found herself staring directly down at a mass of still, white clouds that sat broodingly over the tip of Long Island. Like looking down at heaven, she thought suddenly. No sign of Ruth.