When No One Was Looking

by Rosemary Wells

  Had it not been for the “turn of events,” as her mother called it, Kathy knew she might not be in this plane at this moment. She might never have won the Newton championship. Mrs. Collins of the New England Lawn Tennis Association might never have made that wonderful telephone call inviting Kathy to Florida.

  Kathy could still not reconcile the facts that Ruth had been a superb, strong swimmer and yet had drowned. Mornings, lying in bed, Kathy had constructed a vivid half-dream. She tried again and again to twist the outcome of Ruth’s dive. Always the large body in the blue tank suit slipped powerfully into the pool and swam uneventfully to the other side. Then Kathy would open her eyes and know that this was not true. Had there been a puddle on the tiles in which she had skidded? Had she dived clumsily and swallowed too much water, or wrenched a muscle doing that exhaustive butterfly stroke? No one would ever know.

  “Why are your folks moving your grandmother?” came Julia’s question, too quickly for Kathy. It alarmed her like the sharp surprise ringing of the fire bell during a study hall.

  “I don’t know,” she answered quickly. “I guess it’s a nicer place, and Dedham is closer to Plymouth and all.”

  “You look sad, Kathy.”

  “I do?”

  “Why don’t you have your grandmother live at home instead? I’ve read that even the ritziest nursing homes make the inmates feel like dogs sent off to the pound to die.”

  “She needs a lot of medical care,” Kathy answered. The shrieking of the plane’s engines seemed suddenly to come from inside herself, a near-human sound.

  “But surely you could get a nurse...

  “Julia! That would cost about three hundred bucks a week, for crying out loud!” Kathy snapped without intending to snap or release this information.

  “I’m sorry,” Julia said. “That was an awful thing to say. My parents couldn’t afford it either,” she added in a loyal voice.

  “Don’t say lies! They could so. Look at your grandmother. She had a nurse for six months before she died, not to mention a maid and gardener.”

  “Kathy, I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry.”

  “Forget it,” said Kathy shortly. Why, she asked herself, am I doing this to Julia just when I need her most?

  “I can’t forget it. I hurt your feelings, and I’m sorry. I feel awful.”

  “Don’t feel awful. Just please don’t ever look down your nose at me again.”

  “I wasn’t. I was trying to make you feel better, and I said the wrong thing. You never, never told me anything about your grandmother before, except she was in a beautiful place with big green lawns around it.”

  “Well, she isn’t. Anymore.”

  “Kathy, please. Money doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter a bit.”

  “That’s a good one,” Kathy answered. She was aware of the onset of another headache. It began at the base of her neck and spread as if it had fingers extending to her temples. She tried to look out the window again but was only reminded that the window seat was hers because Julia had been on so many planes before it didn’t matter to her to see out. “Money means absolutely nothing to me,” said Julia. “I hate people with money. That’s why Daddy didn’t want me to go to a private school with all the little rich girls and their expensive birthday parties and their own ponies.”

  “Julia, you just don’t understand,” said Kathy, and she turned to find Julia crying in the most silent and dignified way she had ever seen anyone cry. She felt as confused as she would have had Julia suddenly fallen and begun to spit blood.

  “I remember something,” said Julia after she had drawn a settling breath. “The first time I went over to your house, I think it was. When we were both six. In the hall on the shelf were two boxes. One was labeled SHOE MONEY, KATHY and the other SHOE MONEY, JODY. When my mother came to pick me up, the boxes had been taken away. I wouldn’t have thought anything, except I asked my mother what shoe money was, and she told me never to mention such a thing to you or your mother or I would hurt your family in some way. Another time I remember having dinner at your house. Jody was about four, and she said it was the first steak you’d had since Christmas. Your mother gave her a look that could have killed a horse. I felt so ashamed of myself for being different. I never thought you were different. I used to go to bed at night wishing we were poor.”

  “Julia, that is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “It’s true.”

  “Well, if it’s true,” said Kathy, rubbing the back of her neck, “it’s stupid. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “You feel humiliated, and you want to humiliate me back. I don’t blame you at all,” Julia added, “but I wish you knew how little money matters to me. Maybe if you win really big, Kathy, and get going like the streak of lightning everybody says you are, you’ll turn pro in a couple of years. When you start making scads of money like Tracy Austin or somebody, you’ll realize how pitifully little it means.”

  “When I pay off a few bills, maybe.”

  “Bills?” Julia asked.

  Kathy sighed loudly. “My father and mother combined make just enough to get by,” she began, biting off the ends of her words. “With Bobby’s doctor bills, which come to about seven hundred since January, and the mortgage and paying off the car loan and my father’s new Rolleiflex, not to mention Grandma and not to mention my tennis, we’re about three thousand behind. They make what amounts to peanuts, both of them put together.”

  “They do?”

  “Julia, I bet you don’t have the faintest idea how much your family has. I bet your folks have never had a fight about money in their lives.”

  “No. They don’t fight at all, really. Sometimes I wish they would.”

  “Oh. You think that’d be a lot of fun too? Like being poor?”

  “I didn’t say that. I meant only that it isn’t as easy as you seem to think...

  “Not easy? Not easy having somebody else cook meals and wash the dishes every night? Not easy living in a house big enough for ten people? Not easy going to Spain for a Christmas vacation?” Julia was silent. Was this all coming out, Kathy asked herself, because she’d had a glass of wine? “Do you think I like the idea—my folks like the idea of putting my mother’s mother in a nursing home? Don’t you think I know it’s like putting her away in an ASPCA shelter? Have you ever been in a nursing home?”

  “No,” said Julia in a tiny voice.

  “The smell alone is enough to make you throw up. That and the noises the old people make. The food—all brown and gunky and predigested. The skin on those old people. My God, it’s all waxy and white. Even the Black people look gray.”

  Again Julia was silent.

  The sea spun by far beneath Kathy’s window, shining like a fish skin, smooth as an egg. Julia’s half-full wine glass vibrated in the elastic pocket of the seat in front of her.

  “Some people,” Julia said at last, “act as if I stole—as if my family went out and stole the money they happen to have. You know who those kids are, Kathy. Now you’ve got the same chip on your shoulder. Now there is a terrible thing between us.”

  “Nothing is there between us that wasn’t there all along,” Kathy answered, still staring out the window.

  “Well, maybe, but I never meant to hurt you. It’s what you mean to do that counts.”

  Kathy thought this statement did not ring true. After all, she had never meant to deplete her family’s savings by being good at tennis. Nevertheless, this was happening. It was a fact of life. “It’s okay,” she answered in a dull voice.

  “No, it’s not,” said Julia. “Don’t say it’s okay if it isn’t. I know I’m going to sound stupid, Kathy—just like my mother when she tries to sound like Gone with the Wind or Wuthering Heights, but I wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world. I see I have. I apologize from the bottom of my heart. Kathy, you’re my best friend in the whole world, and I love you dearly.”

  The plane lurched slightly. A steward
ess walking down the aisle did not seem aware of it. She bounced along, smiling frostily. Kathy tensed against her seat and pulled her belt tight. She shut her eyes against the stewardess’s inquiring glance. How like my mother’s that smile is, Kathy thought. Cold and condensed. I hope I never smile like that. For Kathy to show her feelings just now was not in her to do. Julia was waiting anxiously for some reply, but Kathy might have been at the very bottom of the ocean looking up at a distant green daylight and afraid of the bends if she shot to the surface. “It’s my fault,” she said at last. “I’m mad at Jody for giving me a hard time, and I feel guilty about Grandma, and I’m scared to death about this tournament.”

  Julia relaxed and finished her wine. “But you’ll do so well. You know you’ll do well,” she said.

  Kathy smiled a little. Her head still pounded. “To know I can beat everybody there is professional,” she answered. “To know that I will is hack.”

  “Now who’s looking down whose nose?” Julia asked, laughing.

  And Kathy laughed at herself. “Ah ... you always know when I’m quoting Marty, don’t you?” she said.

  “Always,” said Julia. “Just as you know when I’m quoting Irene Beaufort Redmond.” And laughing still, she beckoned in just her mother’s manner to the pert, frosty stewardess and ordered another glass of wine for each of them.

  If anyone could be more disposed to hugs and kisses than Julia’s mother, it was Julia’s mother’s sister, Aunt Liz. Between hugs Aunt Liz admonished Julia for not visiting often enough, for not living in the South, for having a Yankee Daddy. Then she kissed and hugged Kathy and said it was thrilling to have a famous tennis player as their house guest. Kathy protested that she was not at all famous, but Aunt Liz said, “Fiddle de dee. You will be soon.” Then she asked Kathy to call her Aunt Liz, a thing Kathy did with no trouble, as she was unsure of Aunt Liz’s last name.

  Neither was she sure if it was Jeffrey or Roger who answered the call to drive her to the Hazard Bay Racket Club for evening practice. Whichever he was, he only said, “We’ll take my car,” and so they climbed into a Jaguar slightly older than Aunt Liz’s Jaguar. The brothers, as Julia had said, did indeed look very much alike, and they were both very attractive. Jeffrey/Roger told Kathy he was going to be a clerk to a judge, or was it a page in the state senate? Kathy couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. He wore only a pair of old-fashioned, baggy navy blue bathing trunks. He steered the car with one finger. A toothpick twirled in the corner of his mouth, and in his light blue eyes, which were fixed on the road ahead, was an expression of continual amusement. He did not seem to think Kathy was a famous tennis player as did his mother, nor was he the least bit curious about her or anything she might be doing. In his company Kathy felt quite out of her depth. If Julia’s parents had real money, then Aunt Liz had even more of it. She wore a gold choker under the collar of her golf shirt, her license plates read LIZ-1, and she paid someone to clip the hedges around her house into the shape of large birds. At least Kathy guessed they were birds, but she didn’t dare ask Jeffrey/Roger for fear of sounding dumb. The expression of perpetual amusement in Jeffrey/Roger’s face also frightened her, and she was relieved to jump out of the car at the entrance gates to the Hazard Bay Racket Club. Before she strode down the main path to get a copy of the draw and to search out a practice partner, to join the girls and boys who were walking around as if they all knew one another very well, Kathy fingered a wall shyly, hoping not to be noticed. The wall was covered with red hibiscus blossoms and looked as if it might crumble at a touch. Coral and adobe suggested themselves to Kathy as she leaned up against the wall’s rough surface. A lizard scooted down it and disappeared into a vine, causing her to jump in surprise. The hot air hung here as it did in overheated train cars with sealed windows from which there was no exit. Flowers seemed to grow without benefit of earth, on walls, in crevices, in piles of what appeared to be crumbled shells. Would a strange flower take root on her hand if she were to sleep outside all night? Were there poisonous snakes? Did the coconuts fall from the tall palms and hit people on the head during matches? She pictured herself being hit by a coconut as she was about to serve, but this only reminded her sharply of Ruth.

  According to Oliver, the day Ruth had died, people at the Plymouth Club had talked of little else. The day after that their interest trailed off, as there was little to discuss, and then life had continued in a perfect string as it had done before. Time closed up over Ruth’s existence as the high tides closed up twice a day over the jetty, leaving no trace of the rocks. There had been a day or two when people felt squeamish about using the pool. First the children, who didn’t know or understand, had gone in, then the adults, who knew better than to be queasy, and at last all the teen-agers. Since almost no one had ever noticed anything about Ruth or her family, she was, as Kathy saw it, like a dead letter.

  Kathy walked straight through the unfamiliar Hazard Bay Racket Club grounds and found the beach. While jogging her two miles down the sand she also found a Californian to practice with whose name she instantly forgot.

  As many as sixty times in a row Kathy and the girl from California slammed a ball back and forth across the net in the heavy dusk. There was still, for Kathy, an exquisite wonder to this ritual. It drained her of worries and of sadness. In this simple near-dance with a stranger she was consumed with joy in the execution of every perfect stroke. Her happiness, unfettered as a very young child’s, mounted until she was lost in it, grinning at her nameless partner, who grinned back from across the net.

  No scores were posted, no tricks contemplated. The girl was an excellent player. What a thing it is, Kathy thought, to be happy about that and not try to beat her. She was aware that she loved the game best when hitting without hatred and without calculation. She also knew that this was not supposed to be so and that it was a pity she felt that way because that feeling would likely trip her up someday, as Marty had warned. Nonetheless, as the other girl returned a particularly difficult backhand with a yelp of pure ecstasy and Kathy returned that shot low and hard to exactly the same spot, catching the girl out of position and causing her to laugh out loud at herself, Kathy supposed that this exhilaration and unity with another person was found seldom, except by people in lifeboats and catchers on trapezes.

  “Come,” said the California girl. “Come meet some of the kids. There’s a welcoming party tonight in the main clubhouse. Food and everything. Are you staying with a family or in the motel?”

  Kathy followed the girl uneasily. She did not want to meet the kids. On the one hand she was frightened of so many strangers all of whom seemed to know each other. On the other hand she didn’t want to appear a silly, frightened loner. “Who’s your first round tomorrow?” the girl asked. Kathy answered the unfamiliar name, stumbling over it.

  Oh, ho!” said the California girl. “Lucky you. You know she’s only ten? Playing up.”

  “No, I’ve never heard of her.”

  “Couple of issues back Tennis World did a piece on her and a bunch of other babies. She’s on the cover. I know her. She comes from Santa Monica. I think you can take her though. Keep away from her backhand. It’s like a cannon. Most of the kids hate her. She’s spoiled. Cries all the time when she loses. Little brat. Clothes all custom made with her initials on the collar. Copied straight from Tinley designs ... The girl turned and fixed her friendly slanted hazel eyes on Kathy’s dress. “Yours are made by hand too, though, aren’t they?” she asked.

  “My mother ... likes to sew,” Kathy answered, feeling herself blush. Kathy owned six wash-and-wear tennis outfits made from store-bought patterns by her mother. The dresses fit her well and were quite pretty; however Kathy longed for a Bogner tennis dress or even a pleated heavy linen Fred Perry skirt. Those things were unaffordable by her family, and there was simply no chance of having them. It was enough that she wore out a pair of twenty-five-dollar sneakers every three weeks. As Kathy and the California girl neared the clubhouse she noticed the clothes
of the other players who sauntered around. Each one looked like a model for one or another maker’s outfits. Suddenly she hated her plain white dress with the red and white gingham facing. The party would be twice as unnerving since Kathy felt as conspicuous as if she were dressed in black.

  “We’ll shower,” said the girl. “Then we’ll go have a beer. I know some kids who’ve sneaked in a case of Coors.”

  “No, thank you,” said Kathy, suddenly stopping short of the clubhouse. “I’m expecting a ride. It’s late. I have to wait out by the gate.”

  “Well, see you around,” said the girl and waved.

  A pair of high French doors opened into the central clubhouse, revealing to Kathy what lay inside. There was a fountain with revolving colored spotlights and four marble cupids. At the bottom of it coins winked and glittered. Lost wishes for tournaments past? There was a junior boys’ tournament going on somewhere nearby, and so the room was filled with boys and girls. They stood and talked in groups, not in a way, Kathy decided, she had ever stood in a group but in the easy way grown-ups did. Near the fountain stood a girl Kathy recognized immediately from pictures in tennis magazines. Johnson or Jackson was her name, nationally ranked about sixth in fourteen and under. A Black girl from Detroit, or was it Cleveland? She seemed to be looking for someone. Another highly ranked player, or another Black player? Kathy wondered, it never occurring to her that the girl might feel as lonely as she, because she was not only a good player but as beautiful and poised as a full-grown woman.