Ann giggled, remembering. “OK. I’m no athlete, I’m not even competitive—”
“Hot news flash,” he announced to the table.
“—but you should understand this: I feel like I know how to get better at it. Do you know what I mean? I can almost feel—see—what it would be like to be really good. Like you are at tennis. I never will, of course, but—listen.”
“I’m listening. I can eat and listen.”
“I’ve always been good in school, but I never had to work that hard, especially for the things I liked, like languages and English. It was all sort of accidental. I did the only thing I could think of to do and it was excellent.” She didn’t care if she was boasting, because she was figuring something out. “But in the volleyball, because it’s a team maybe and there are other people . . . . Always before, I never tried for anything I wasn’t naturally good at. Maybe I figured I’d lose anyway, or maybe I was too scared of looking stupid. But now, in this, I’m really working hard even though I know I’ll never be as good as I’d like to be. Doesn’t that happen to you in school? Don’t you know what I mean?”
He looked thoughtfully at her. “You must have a good teacher,” he said.
“Hildy,” Ann said. “She and Niki are really good players. Really good. I’m the worst on the team.” That was true, Ann realized, and wondered why she had never thought of it that way before. “Except maybe the sub. Eloise.” She forestalled her brother’s inevitable question. “No, not pretty. But Hildy . . . well, just wait and see.”
He groaned and smote his breast. “If I were only two years older.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The room was empty when Ann returned. She unpacked quickly. The snake coiled in furry indolence on her bed. The poster, with its photograph of JFK, she tacked over her desk. Ann changed into trousers and walked over to the gym, to see if there might be a practice. She wanted to see Hildy in her new glasses. But nobody was at the gym, so she went back, drew herself a bath and lay in it, sketchily reading The Secret Garden.
A steamy and silent time passed before Niki rapped on the door of the cubicle. “Ann? Is this where you are?”
Niki entered and sat on the little white stool, moving Ann’s towel and underclothes onto her lap.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” Ann said.
“You’re not embarrassed, are you?”
“Yes. I am.”
“Don’t you want to see Hildy? We were looking for you. I saw your suitcase. We’ve been walking around. It’s like having a baby in tow. Shall I call her?”
“No! Just give me a minute to get out and clean the tub.”
“OK. OK. Keep your hair on.”
Ann padded down the hall expecting—what? Some great surprise. But there was not that, only alterations. Hildy’s glasses were thick, gold-rimmed. They magnified her cornflower eyes, giving to her face a slightly befuddled expression. “So you see,” she said, self-consciously.
“You see,” corrected Niki.
“I am clumsy still,” Hildy said. “It is the change in depth perception. I fell off your bike, but there was no harm done. I have been practicing.”
“She can recognize people at a hundred yards,” Niki reported, “and read a book at arm’s length. Leap tall buildings at a single bound.”
Ann studied Hildy’s new face. Its simplicity was made more obvious by the thick lenses. There was something helpless about it, appealing—like a startled elf. “What do you think?” Ann asked. “Do you like them?”
“I grow accustomed,” Hildy answered. “There is so much—I did not know. Colors, and light. Everything is cluttered.”
“Don’t tell me,” Ann said. She lay on her bed and crossed her ankles. “I’ve just spent an hour washing the city off myself.”
“Do you ever think about how much garbage a city makes?” Niki asked. “Picture it. The garbage from your own house, multiplied times a million, all piled up, on the streets say.”
“That’s depressing,” Ann said.
“It’s terrifying. Garbage will take over the world, poured into rivers and lakes and the oceans, dug into marshes and meadows. Now there’s a problem with a future. Turn your mind to that one, Annie.” She bit a nail. “I hate cities. Where’d you get that?” She pointed at Ann’s poster.
“From home.”
“I wouldn’t have figured you for a Kennedy fan.”
“Why not? He’s—educated, witty—”
“Rich, good-looking. In short, an aristocrat. I guess I can see it.”
“Well and why not?” Ann challenged her.
“You really buy all that stuff?” Niki asked her. “You don’t know anything about what really goes on?” Ann squirmed. “His daddy bought the nomination for him.” Ann had heard that story. “He’s not even faithful to his wife.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Not from personal experience, no. And what about the Bay of Pigs?”
Ann couldn’t think of a rebuttal.
“You’ve fallen for a pretty face and a quick wit—charisma, that’s all.”
“I don’t know,” Ann said. “But you can’t tell me you would have voted for Nixon,” she attacked. Niki waved that objection away. “Besides,” Ann said, “when there is someone you can be proud of—yes proud, because he speaks well, because he picks intelligent advisors, not political ones—”
“—that’s another of his mistakes,” Niki said.
“Who reads books and treats them as if they’re important, somebody better than the ordinary. It gives you—it gives me at least—the sense that excellence is possible. That it’s not just in stories, or in somebody long dead, excellence; but now. I don’t know, I like being a citizen of the country he’s president of. It’s like—being at Stanton.”
Niki snorted.
“Or like the volleyball team, our team, that’s doing something well. Or even being a member of the class that has that team, even if I didn’t play on it.” She thought. Niki chewed on a finger and watched her. “Besides everybody makes mistakes. Napoleon should never have gone into Russia, but that’s not important. Neither is the way he made his brothers emperors.”
“What is then?” Niki asked.
This time it was a question Ann had hoped for. “The Code Napoleon, he revised the whole legal system of France.”
“Good point,” Niki approved. “But what does it have to do with supporting Kennedy?”
Ann couldn’t say.
“My father does not vote,” Hildy volunteered. “He says they are all great liars and out to deceive, and he will give no one his vote.”
Ann and Niki exchanged a glance.
“What does that look mean?” Hildy asked.
Ann flushed. Niki remarked, “You begin to see how things have changed?”
“It means, in my case,” Ann told Hildy, “that it is a privilege of democracy to vote and that the system rests upon each person using his vote.”
“That little speech is enough to keep me away from the polls forever,” Niki said.
Hildy was watching their faces. Her eyes were—inscrutable.
“My dad is a Republican by reaction,” Niki said. “All the screaming liberals in California make him nervous. But I’d have thought the Gardners were Republicans by choice.”
“The rest of my family is. I’m a heretic,” Ann said. “My grandmother, do you want to know all she had to say about Kennedy? ‘All that hair, my dear, and all that money.’ ”
“The real question is, can he govern,” Niki said. “What history will say about a man who calls his kid Jon-Jon, I don’t know. But it’s history’s verdict that will count, and that’ll take a hundred years. If we have a hundred years. Nobody’s managed to ban the Bomb yet.”
“It is in God’s hands,” Hildy said.
“Do you think so? Do you really think so?” Ann asked, because if Hildy thought it, it might be true.
Hildy nodded.
“In the meantime,” Niki announced briskly, “we have h
ere Hildy, no longer half-blind, in need of some care. Can you ride with her to the lab tomorrow night, Ann? I’ve got a lot of math. All the assignments for the last three weeks, if the truth were known, all due Tuesday.”
“Sure. I’ll take some work. What is it like with glasses, Hildy? What do you see?”
“I cannot tell, it is all so confusing.”
“Let me try them?” Ann held out her hands. Hildy took off her glasses and became herself again.
Ann could see blobs of color and light. Areas in shadow. A pale shape, framed in fluid black, Niki; her tensed body as if—Ann lost the thought. Ann stood up and put out a hand to steady herself. The light from the hall swam before her eyes. The little muscles that control focus strained to make details clear. She turned a head grown suddenly cumbersome to where Hildy sat. Light there, and two deep, darker circles that must be eyes. The body sure and strong there, firm as a tree, supple as spring wood, silent.
Ann rubbed her temples and took off the glasses. “Wow they’re strong,” she said. “It makes me dizzy.”
“It makes me dizzy also,” Hildy said. “But I will adjust.”
“Think of what it’ll do for your volleyball game,” Niki said. “You’ll blast us off the court.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Oddly enough, just the opposite happened. Hildy, looking out-of-proportion with magnified eyes and long legs, played an altered game. On serves, she brought her arm forward with less assurance and power, with more conscious care. She watched the passage of the ball and the expression of the receiver and was, thus, late into position for the return. When her team passed the ball forward, her head followed its progress. Her spike was improved, her blocking hampered. When she made a poor shot, she would shake her arms and stand puzzled, her hands clenched. It was as if her entire internal tempo had shifted.
“You’ll get used to it,” Niki assured her. “You didn’t play badly.”
“I know that,” Hildy said. “I must try harder. It is noisy here.
“It’s always been noisy.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Ann rode with Hildy to the observatory Monday evening. While Hildy looked at the stars, she sat in an empty office studying Ancient Greek. Her absorption was so complete that it was not until a shadow fell over the page of the textbook that she knew lab was over. Hildy leaned down to touch the Greek letters. “What does it say?”
Ann translated: “Whom the gods love, die young.” Then she read the Greek aloud.
Hildy’s eyes stayed on the page. “Those would be cruel gods, to love so,” she said, and her fingers moved over the lines of exercises, as if it were Braille. “People spoke this language.”
“Yes. Although nobody now knows for sure how it was pronounced.”
They walked out to the bicycle rack. Clouds scudded over the stars. “There are lost languages, ancient ones,” Hildy said. “Languages—how many?—there are also, other than our own. Some spoken only by members of isolated tribes. Each with its own vocabulary. Why is that?”
“Some are cradle-of-civilization tongues,” Ann explained. “Like Indo-European, which has word forms, roots, that appear in many languages. Because of that, many languages are quite similar, and in grammars too.”
“Does that make it clear to you?” Hildy asked.
“No. Especially when I think of the infinite variation,” Ann said. “It’s like thinking about stars and space.”
“It would be better if we all spoke the same language,” Hildy said. “How could so many differences exist?”
“The tower of Babel?” Ann suggested.
“Is that possible?” Hildy wondered. She looked at the sky, where the few visible stars seemed snared by bare branches. “It seems a heavy punishment.”
They rode down the mountainside together, in windy silence. Hildy had Niki’s bike. She did not use the gears. Neither did she ride quite steadily. Part of the reason for this was her constant turning of the head, to see Ann, to look up, to look back.
“May I come with you Thursday too?” Ann asked. “I got a lot of work done. There’s no distraction at all, up there.”
“Of course. I would be glad of the company and I am not yet, as you can tell, riding well. But I am so much better than on Saturday, when Niki first took me out.”
♦ ♦ ♦
They played the third sophomore match that Thursday. They had practiced every day, and her team had adjusted to Hildy’s new limits. They covered for her more and counted on her less to back them up. This was no sharp alteration, merely a shift.
The gymnasium stands were full. The audience screamed approval, disapproval, general excitement. Hildy’s team played softly and accurately, except for Niki whose shots had still the old force and crispness. They won the first game, lost the second.
“Push it a little,” Niki urged the team. “Try it a little harder and faster You’ve got to.”
They nodded.
They concentrated, they forced the ball over the net at unexpected moments, they set up more spikes for Niki and Hildy, and they won the game. For some reason, victory did not elate them.
♦ ♦ ♦
Eloise, when she came to see what Ann was doing wrong in science, expressed her understanding of the difference in the team to Ann and Niki. She had stood in the doorway, wearing a skirt and sweater, her feet in penny loafers. “Me and my brace of preppies,” Niki greeted her. Eloise sat on the edge of Ann’s bed, tentative.
“We have all lost confidence in Hildy, so we are unsure of ourselves,” she said. “Except you,” she added to Niki. There was approval in her voice as she said that.
“She’s changed,” Ann said. “You must have felt it.”
“But not that much,” Eloise protested. “Not as much as we have. I didn’t know I was doing it while I was in, but when I watched I could see—you’d look at her, as if you expected her to say something, or you’d move closer to her if the ball was going there. And now move back into position. Everything was taking you by surprise. I don’t know. I’m probably wrong, but that’s the way it seemed to me at the time.”
“You’re probably right,” Ann said.
“Bess remarked,” Eloise went on, “afterwards, that she felt as if she were playing alone.”
“Me too,” Ann said.
“I always felt that way,” Niki said.
“There’s a message in that,” Ann answered.
Eloise looked from face to face, as if dreading Niki’s reaction. It was Niki who reassured her. “We deal directly with one another, me and Annie. I’m not conversant with your prep school subtleties.”
“And proud of it,” Ann said. “Anyway”—she changed the subject and gave herself the last word—“I have this problem.”
The two looked over Ann’s notes and her tests. They muttered over her lab reports and laughed at her drawings. Eloise and Niki were in complete agreement that Ann needed to devise memorization tricks for science. They worked through a vocabulary list at the back of her notebook, grouping the words, making associative connections, connections so outrageous that they were memorable. Some were classical, some literary, many simply obscene. Then Niki fixed Ann with a truculent eye and announced: “You’ve got to stop writing this way.”
“What?”
“She’s put her finger on something rather important,” Eloise agreed, reluctant to offend Ann. “I’m afraid I agree with her,” she apologized.
“Nothing’s wrong with my writing,” Ann said. After all, she was the one with advanced English placement.
“It’s too good,” Niki said. “Too subtle. Too complex. Too thoughtful. Too much dependence on idea.” She grinned. “Make it flat. Stop using verbs well, use to be instead. Be pedestrian. No joke, Ann. I’m succeeding in biology with just that style.”
“But that would make it so dull,” Ann said.
“C dull, do you think?” Niki asked. “Maybe even B-minus dull? Think on it, Annie.”
The shame of a D was great enough to bend Ann’s p
ride.
Niki had a bridge game at ten—“I’m working up to playing for stakes. Money, eventually; they’re coming around”—and Eloise lingered, reluctant to leave. Ann, who thought she would let her new resolution settle in for a night before she got down to work employing it, welcomed the distraction.
“Where’s Hildy?” Eloise asked.
“In the library. She studies there.”
“Is this her bureau?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I thought so; it’s peculiarly bare. Doesn’t she have any photographs of her family?”
“I’ve never seen any. How are your roommates?” Ann hadn’t thought about them for weeks.
“They’re fine, I presume. We don’t encounter one another frequently, and when we do— They like having me be on the volleyball team, do you know that?”
“We’re getting a reputation. Some of the people in my Shakespeare class said they were going to come to a game. Do you like that, being famous?”
“Yes,” Eloise said firmly. “Yes I do. I never . . .” Her voice dwindled off.
“I know.”
“We’ve really left the Hall behind,” Eloise said. “Not just me, you too. Doesn’t it seem a long time ago, if you remember last fall? Like another country.”
Ann agreed, and added that she was not sorry. “But I loved it there. If I have a daughter, I’ll send her there. If I get married.”
“Is Niki being humorous most of the time?” Eloise asked. “I’d never realized that before. Now it seems possible. Is it all intended to be amusing?”
“Who knows?” Ann said. “I doubt it, but I can’t be sure. Sometimes, I think maybe. It’s easier to take her that way, so I try to. You should too.”
“I’ll try,” Eloise said.
They chattered and gossiped until a few minutes before the dormitories would close. Then Eloise started to leave. “It’s pleasant here,” she said.
“Even Niki?” Ann grinned.
“Try my terrible twosome from Texas. Niki’s not so bad, not so bad at all.”
They met Hildy on the porch, and she and Ann stood together watching Eloise trudge down the path between the trees.
“You like her,” Hildy said to Ann.
Tell Me if the Lovers Are Losers Page 14