When No One Was Looking

by Rosemary Wells

  “Kathy’s wasting her time in tennis,” said Oliver. “She’s only one among many women. In baseball she could be the first and only woman.”

  “Oliver,” said Kathy’s mother, placing the TV dinners in the microwave oven and stepping back from it in case it exuded harmful rays. “Get out of the way,” she said to Bobby. “You never know. Oliver, Kathy is not going to be a baseball player, and that’s that. Sit down everybody. This only takes a minute.”

  “Think of the endorsements,” said Oliver, undaunted. “Kathy’s picture on everything from fielders’ mitts to Alka-Seltzer.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I won the U.S. Open,” said Kathy.

  “Don’t look down your nose yet,” said her mother. “You know how much Willie Mays makes for advertising Brut? You know how much Bancroft pays Billie Jean for that ad?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Kathy’s father. “First things first. Shall we tell her?” he asked as he opened the foil over his dinner and let out the steam.

  Her mother, her father, and Oliver all wore identical smiles. Only Bobby, who was piercing indentations into his tinfoil with his fork, did not seem to be listening. Then there was Jody, who only stared glumly at her gray Salisbury steak. “Wait,” said Kathy. “Don’t tell me. Let Jody tell me.”

  “Why should I tell you?” Jody asked, tossing her hair out of her face.

  Because I’ll get it straight from you, was what Kathy wanted to say, but she didn’t. “Because,” was Kathy’s answer.

  Almost gratefully Jody put down her fork. Like a professor about to list the causes of the Civil War, she leaned forward and said, “If you win your next tournament, they’re going to change your coach, or at least get you some famous one part-time. You’re going down to some clinic, they call it, in Florida for an eight-week eight-hour-a-day crash session or else down to Port Washington, New York, to this other guy whose name I forget. He sounds like a kangaroo.”

  “Harry Hopman?” Kathy asked in astonishment.

  “Yes!” shouted her mother. “And—”

  “I’m not finished,” said Jody.

  “Eat your dinner,” said her father.

  “How can I eat this stuff?” Jody asked. “This meat was frozen in Kansas City seven years ago. And also, when school’s in session, they’re talking about taking you down to Newport, Rhode Island, every day to this other guy. Mom has to take off more time from the shop, and I have to baby-sit—”

  “Jody, eat. That’s enough,” said her mother.

  “But what about Marty?” Kathy asked.

  “You may have learned all Marty has to teach you, honey,” her mother explained smoothly. “This happens to everyone who really is tops sooner or later. Kathy, a man like Hopman is your ticket to the national circuit. You know that. He’s coached McEnroe, all the big young players. It’s like ... like Daddy buying a Rolls-Royce instead of a Ford.”

  Kathy watched Jody’s face carefully. Jody had opened her mouth, and then she snapped it shut as, unaccountably, her mother held up one finger and said, “We don’t want to talk about what happened Sunday, do we?”

  “I don’t really care if we do,” said Jody.

  “What happened Sunday? Why is everybody in on everything except me?” Kathy asked, looking from one person to another.

  “Nothing happened,” said her father.

  “I punched a nurse in the kisser,” said Jody.

  “You may leave the table,” her mother announced.

  Kathy’s father watched as Jody left. He seemed satisfied when the kitchen door closed, and giving Kathy his attention, he leaned on his folded hands and explained, “Kathy, in three days you have the New England Championships. It’s the biggest deal so far, now that you won in Florida, of your whole life up to this point in time. Understand, honey?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Tomorrow you have an algebra exam. Have you forgotten?”

  “Yes, Dad,” Kathy admitted.

  “I thought so. Well, you better crack the books tonight. After that you have nothing to do but run, work out all your kinks on the courts, sleep, and eat. You’ve got to be ready Saturday morning for the biggest match of your life. Now you’ve been away for a while, and you have to catch up. Nobody’s keeping a thing from you or excluding you.”

  “I’m going to work out with Marty.”

  Her father did not respond to this statement. Instead he and her mother and even Oliver began indulging in what Kathy found to be a mortifying amount of speculation about her future, tournaments to come, and what they had read in tennis magazines about life in a clinic in a faraway state.

  There had been many nights when Kathy had failed to fall asleep right away, and many afternoons when her attention had wandered from her books, when she’d pictured herself holding up the huge silver cup at the U.S. Open or that big plate at Wimbledon. In these daydreams she always gave a short speech. She changed the speech around every time she gave it in her imagination. She would have been mortally embarrassed to admit to holding up dream cups or thanking Billie Jean King for a bouquet of roses, yet here were her mother and her father and Oliver doing nearly the same thing.

  “Got a few well chosen words in mind for when you win the finals next week?” Oliver asked. “They have a microphone, and you’ll be on local TV.”

  “Come on, Oliver, you’ll jinx me.”

  “Hopman’s the best coach in the country,” said her father, going on with his conversation. “Hands down. No one can touch him.”

  “Van derMeer,” countered Kathy’s mother, blowing on her coffee.

  “Okay, but he spends a lot of time with middle-aged hacks.”

  “He worked with Heldman. He worked with King.”

  “Are you excited, honey?” her father asked, as if he had just remembered that Kathy was there. “Do you understand the full meaning of this? Do you understand the full meaning of what you did down in Florida?”

  “It means she has to do it again,” came Jody’s disembodied voice from the den.

  “Go to your room, Jody,” said her father sharply. “If you aren’t big enough to share a little of your sister’s happiness, we don’t want any glum faces around the dinner table.”

  Kathy looked down at her plate. Slowly she spooned some gray gravy into an indentation in her mashed potatoes. “I don’t want to leave Marty,” she said. “Not as a regular coach, anyway. Why is Marty being fired, Mom? Does it have anything to do with this stuff about getting me a new coach?”

  “Kathy, eat your potatoes. Of course not,” said her mother. “Sooner or later you’re going to have to go to a top pro and hit exclusively with other top players or your game won’t progress. You know that. Eat your mashed potatoes.”

  “Well, just tell me why she’s being fired or suspended or whatever is happening.”

  “Kathy, you know perfectly well Marty has a hot temper. She got into a fight with the club manager, and it’s all Greek to me, but that was bound to happen too. Marty just isn’t very popular, and unpopular people don’t last. Eat your potatoes.”

  “They taste like old ... forgotten oatmeal. Why was she fired?”

  “Oh, my!” said her mother. “We are getting expensive tastes, aren’t we? How about the silverware? That’s not as good as the Redmonds’ either, is it? How about some baked Alaska for dessert?”

  “Mom, I’m sorry. I know you’ve been in Dedham all day. I’m just not hungry.”

  “Honey,” said her father kindly, “if I get some Kentucky Fried Chicken, will you eat it? It’s your favorite. You’ve got to eat.”

  Kathy took a careful forkful of potatoes and swallowed it. “I’m working out with Marty,” she said as defiantly as she dared. Her father signaled something down the table to her mother that she did not catch.

  “Okay,” he agreed. “But no more baseball. Oliver, you hear that? She can pop a shoulder out making like Rick Burleson.”

  Kathy let the conversation go on between her mother and her fathe
r while Oliver cleaned up the kitchen and carried Bobby upstairs for his bath. “Are you listening, honey?” her mother asked once, and Kathy nodded, but she was not listening. She was not listening until after Oliver left and by chance, on her way to brush her teeth, she caught the tail end of a conversation downstairs. Her foot had creaked on the stair landing, and she would not have paused had her mother’s voice not stopped suddenly.

  “Jody knows everything,” her father had been saying.

  “Shush!” her mother had answered sharply. “Later. When the children are asleep!”

  Kathy brushed her teeth more noisily than usual.

  “Night, Mom. Night, Dad,” she called, and as they said good night and told her to sleep well and long she closed the door to her room, still standing in the hall.

  Three years earlier, when she and Julia had experimented with cigarettes in her mother and father’s bedroom, which already smelled of smoke, Kathy had memorized the squeaks of every board in the floor of the upstairs hall. “Jody,” she whispered after she had crept down the hallway like a thief and had sat softly on Jody’s bed so as not to alarm her. “Jody!” She placed a hand on Jody’s bare shoulder.

  “I knew you’d come,” whispered Jody. “I’m awake.”

  “Jody, what’s happening around here? First of all, why are you in trouble? What’s this about socking a nurse?”

  Jody punched her pillows against the headboard and sat up against them. “I lost my temper,” she whispered loudly.

  “Shush!” said Kathy.

  “I lost my temper,” she said again in a smaller voice. “I noticed, by the way, that nobody mentioned poor Grandma. Everybody was too excited about you, including you.”

  “I was going to ask,” Kathy faltered, “but ...

  “Nobody wants to disturb a nice TV dinner with unpleasant details, do they?”

  Kathy put her face in her hands. “You don’t understand,” she said. “I was going to, but I was afraid ... Here she began to cry and shake so that she stopped talking. When she’d regained a little anger, she asked, “Why, Jody? Why are you always, always so mean to me? Don’t you know you make me feel like a piece ... worse than that. You make me feel like some evil person who ought to be electrocuted or hung or something.”

  Jody did not apologize. She toyed with her top sheet and rubbed the material over one finger and against another. At last she said, “Hey! Cut it out. You want to know what happened?”

  “Yes!”

  “Sunday afternoon?”

  “For starts.”

  “Well, I really didn’t punch the nurse. I just sort of slapped at her.”

  “A nurse! Why?”

  Jody sighed. “You know what they’re doing to Grandma in this new place?”

  “God, no.”

  “Well, they have these little pills on her bed table. I asked the nurse what they were for. I mean I know she needs medication, and I was just interested. I wanted to know because ... I like to know about those things and all. Anyway. The nurse said one was a sleeping pill and one was a laxative. I said, ‘How come they’re prescribed for every night?’ The nurse said it was the policy of that place to give all the patients sleeping pills and laxatives because it made it easier for the staff to get them to sleep and to clean them up all at one time. Well, she didn’t actually put it that way, but that’s what it amounted to. Anyhow, I told that dirty, lousy Nazi nurse that that was a fine way to get Grandma dependent, addicted to those pills. That it was just dandy for the staff but not so dandy for Grandma and that they hadn’t put her in diapers in the last home. You know they used to take her to the john when she wanted? So I took the pills and tossed them out the window. The nurse had a fit! She grabbed me by the shoulder, and I told her to get her grubby Spanish Inquisition paws off me. Then she grabbed me by the other shoulder, and I just let her have it. I only gave her a little tap, but the stupid idiot cut her lip on her tooth, and you’d think she’d never seen the sight of blood in her life. You know Mrs. Finn’s cat that used to howl all night? She sounded just like that. Anyway, by that time Mom and Dad came in, and the nurse called the supervisor, and the security guards rushed in when they heard all the noise. The nurse wanted to file an assault-and-battery charge, but Dad smoothed it over.” The fire went out of Jody’s eyes. “I just wished one thing,” she added, playing with the edge of the sheet again.

  “What, Jody?”

  “I just wished ... I loved Grandma so much when she was alive ... I mean when she was normal and younger and when she lived here with us. We used to laugh all the time at the silliest things. I even said a little prayer that though she can’t talk much or recognize people, somehow God had kind of opened a window in her mind, in her brain, for just those few minutes and that she heard me. That somehow she knows I still love her and that she was laughing at the nurse too and that she wouldn’t think we had just abandoned her.”

  “Good for you, Jody. Good for you!” Kathy whispered. She wished she could reach out and hug her sister, but she thought it might embarrass Jody if she did. Particularly if Jody was still angry. “I would have done the same thing,” Kathy asserted strongly.

  “Would you?” Jody asked.

  “You know my temper.”

  “I’ve seen it on the tennis court ... Jody’s sentence trailed off in thought.

  “I would so have done it,” Kathy insisted. She waited for some approval from Jody, but of course it didn’t come. A chilly wind blew the curtains aside, and Kathy shivered. “Jody, I would have hit her. I probably would have taken out two teeth and landed myself in the can,” said Kathy, trying to laugh a little.

  “Okay. Okay, I believe you,” said Jody. “Now I’m going to sleep. Good night.”

  “Not until you tell me the rest,” said Kathy.

  “What rest?”

  “What’s going on, Jody? What’s this about Marty and this new coach business?”

  “Just what I told you. They’re sort of applying to these famous coaches like applying to a college.”

  “Jody, what happened with Marty?”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Jody, you’re a lousy liar.”

  “Kathy, I made a promise. I don’t break my word.”

  “Come on, Jody, I’m your sister. It affects me directly. If you think for one minute I’m going to sit there and cheerfully pass my algebra final and cheerfully concentrate on tennis, you’re wrong.”

  “Kathy, I gave my word.”

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “On the plane home from Florida I was talking to Penny Snider? Well, her little brother was going to be a ball boy at the Newport tournament this weekend, but he has to have his adenoids taken out, so there’s an opening. You want me to tell Mom? I’m sure she’d love to have you pick up a few bucks being ball girl for seven straight days.”

  “Kathy, you wouldn’t.”

  “I would so. Unless you tell me everything you know.”

  Jody considered. “Only if you make me two promises.”

  “What promises?”

  “First you promise not to say I opened my mouth.”

  “Of course.”

  “Second you have to answer one question and swear to God that He may strike you paralyzed from the neck down if you lie even one little bit.”

  “Okay.”

  “God, I hate to break my word,” Jody muttered.

  “Oh, Miss Saint,” said Kathy. “Miss Holy Mother of God. Jody, you know just how to get under my skin. I know I’m not the best person in the world. I know I have faults, but you don’t have to lord it over me all the time. How would you feel if ... if one day you sat down at the piano and started to play symphonies out of your head, and everyone went crazy and started spending money on lessons and pianos for you? And I gave you a lot of gas about how la-di-da you were and was jealous and mean? How would you feel?”

  “Okay, Kathy. You win. But you made two promises.”

  “I know. I
know.”

  “Well, let me begin at the beginning. Marty’s being fired or suspended. She was interviewed by the police.”

  “The cops! Why?”

  “Well, what happened is this. Apparently after Ruth Gumm drowned, her parents, Ruth’s parents, had an autopsy done. They thought she might have had an undetected heart condition or something. The report came back that she drowned all right, but the whole lining of her lungs was seared. They—”

  “Seared! Burned?”

  “Irritated. To make a long story short, they think somebody poured about a hundred times too much chlorine in the pool the night before. Ruth dived in and swallowed some, and I guess she choked and threw up and drowned. The cops said it was probably meant as a prank. No, not exactly a prank but that someone wanted to either make her sick or more likely affect her vision temporarily. Nobody intended to kill her of course, but you know what chlorine does to your eyes. Ruth used to swim without goggles. Everybody does because it’s a saltwater pool and they don’t use much chlorine because the water’s always fresh from the ocean. Anyhow, they found the traces of chlorine in her. Of course the pool was drained right afterward, so they couldn’t check the water, but they’re sure.”

  “But what does this have to do with Marty?”

  “Well, Mr. Molina was cleaning out the pool house that morning, and he found a footprint, a sneaker print, and he cleaned it up, not thinking anything. But when the news came out about the chlorine, he showed the sponge to the cops. They have the clay sample from Molina.”

  “But it could have been anyone. Why Marty?”

  “Kathy, it wasn’t green clay from the club courts. It was red clay. The only courts around with red clay are at Newton, and Marty was at Newton the day before Ruth died.”

  “But ... but so was I, Jody. And you for that matter, and Oliver and Mom.”

  “That’s right, Kathy.”

  “But, Jody. But ...

  “The cops called Molina right away. They interviewed Marty right there in his office.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “You know the Malones’ dressing room? Number one eighty-four? It’s right over Molina’s office. You could drop a dime through the floorboards onto his desk. Anyway, Peachy heard the whole thing. I bribed her with free ice cream from the snack bar. As much as she wants for the rest of the summer. She listened to the whole thing and told me. Marty’s in trouble, Kathy. She won’t say where she was the night before Ruth drowned. Says it’s her business. She got really mad at Molina apparently and told him he had a fat rear end and connections with the Mafia, right in front of an Italian police chief! Marty’s crazy.”