When No One Was Looking

by Rosemary Wells

  “He looks like an orphan.”

  “He is an orphan. Well, practically.”

  “What do you mean, practically?” Her mother’s voice was impatient, as she liked everything to be exact.

  “Well, he’s here for the summer, living with an uncle, I think. His father is somewhere up in the deserted part of Canada, and he can’t live with his mother and stepfather because his stepfather hates him, and he hates his stepfather because he gambled away most of his mother’s money at the racetrack and playing cards.”

  “They sound like absolutely awful people. I don’t want you mixed up with people like that, Kathy. Gambling, of all things!”

  “Oliver isn’t awful, Mother. He can’t help his stepfather. He even put tacks under his stepfather’s tires when he was eleven years old. Besides, Mother, these things happen very frequently. Often stepfathers don’t get along with their new wives’ sons. The Chinese say the son bites the toe of the stepfather.”

  “What?” Mrs. Bardy turned and looked at Kathy with something close to horror on her face.

  “Oliver’s major is Oriental languages, Mother. At Yale. At Yale!”

  “Oliver seems to have told you a great deal about himself,” said her mother, meaning something entirely different. Kathy, through the drone of the motor and the singing of the cicadas, could almost hear her mother ask, What did you tell him about us? Did you mention that Grandma is in a nursing home too expensive for us but not expensive enough to be good? Did you say that twenty years ago I did not even come close to making the Olympic swimming team and that I use tea bags twice? Did you tell him Daddy works as a commercial photographer going to other people’s weddings and bar mitzvahs and confirmations, or did you try to make Daddy’s job sound artistic? But of course her mother did not ask any of these questions, which was a shame because, although Kathy felt estranged from her family at various times, she would no more have parted with any of this information than she would have described herself going to the bathroom.

  “Oliver’s sweet, Mother,” said Kathy. “He’s not like regular dumb boys at all. He isn’t all pimply and aggressive. He has no mother and father to take care of him. He doesn’t even have a sweater. He has to eat crummy old hamburgers at the club every night because his uncle doesn’t get around to shopping. Can we have him to dinner Thursday night?”

  “Did you invite him, Katherine? Did you?”

  “No,” Kathy lied. “I’m hitting with him Thursday afternoon, though. He’s ranked twenty in Boys’ Eighteen and Under in California.” Another complete lie.

  “He is?”

  “Yes, and he deserves a decent dinner, I think.”

  Her mother’s tone changed. “We can have him. Yes, Kathy, I think it would be very good for you to hit with a good boy for a change, and I feel sorry for him too. But I want to make one thing absolutely clear.”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “You are too busy with tennis and school to have anything else on your mind right now. You may not start dating and riding around on other people’s motorcycles.”

  “Yes, Mother. And, Mother?”

  “What is it?”

  Oliver has a twelve-year-old Chevy, not a motorcycle.”

  “I think we’ve had enough of Oliver,” said her mother, and she pulled into the driveway beside their house. The hats of three plaster dwarves gleamed on their next-door neighbors’ front lawn. Kathy’s was a common-looking wooden ranch house, painted pink by its previous owners years before, but it appeared to be almost magically silver in the light of the high full moon.

  2

  “OLIVER SAID HE’D COME to Quincy to watch today,” Kathy announced to her parents after a few general remarks had been passed about the morning’s weather.

  Her father shoved a picnic basket into the back of the car along with books for Jody and puzzles, games, and pillows for Bobby. “Who’s Oliver?” he asked.

  “Some boy Kathy met at the club last night,” said her mother. “Kathy, you didn’t say anything about him coming to Quincy.”

  “I forgot.”

  “Did you ask him to come?”

  “No. I told him I was playing today, and he said he’d just come along to see. I don’t mind.” Kathy watched her parents exchange glances. Her father took off his glasses and wiped them on the front of his shirt. He squinted up at the colorless sky and said, “Let’s go before it rains.” They’re not going to say much, Kathy decided, because they don’t want an argument before I have to play.

  “I know who he is.” Jody took up the subject as she settled her little brother’s head into her lap in the back seat beside Kathy. “I saw him last weekend at the club. He looks about my age.”

  “He does not,” said Kathy. “Just because he isn’t covered with hair like some ape doesn’t mean he’s twelve years old.”

  Jody smiled. “Kathy has a boyfriend!” she sang.

  “Stop it, Jody,” said their mother.

  “Kathy’s in love. Look at her blush!” Jody went on with plummy innocence in her voice.

  “I’ll bash you with my racket in another minute,” said Kathy.

  “Cut it out,” said her father. “Who’s your first round, Kathy?”

  “I don’t remember. Someone I’ve never heard of. Ruth something.”

  Kathy’s mother moved a cardboard file onto her lap. She shuffled through it and removed a copy of the draw. “Ruth Gumm,” she said. “What a name. Now, Kathy, if this Oliver person in any way affects your game ...

  “Mother, please,” Kathy said, looking sideways at her sister. Jody had rested a newspaper on Bobby’s sleeping head. The newspaper was always present in case Bobby became carsick. As she did with all printed matter that came into her hands, Jody read it. She read at dinnertime, in cars, in the dark, and at courtside during Kathy’s matches. What she read, she remembered, whether it was Time Magazine, Dickens, or the complete set of instructions for the Waring blender, and she had amassed in her head an encyclopedic amount of information of all kinds. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” murmured Jody.

  “Cut it out,” said her father.

  “I was just reading from the paper, Dad,” said Jody, hiding a smile.

  “Kathy, pay attention,” her mother directed. “Now you shouldn’t have any trouble in your second round. Pam Carly is sure to win her first round too, but remember, she has no second serve at all. Come way in on it. Her last match ... let me see. Her last match she double faulted twenty-two times. Keep the ball deep on her backhand side. She can’t do anything with it.”

  “Is that the girl with the pigtails?” Kathy’s father asked.

  “Yes,” said Kathy.

  Jody hummed “If I Loved You” barely audibly.

  “No problem with her,” said Kathy’s father. “Tomorrow you’ll probably play Betty Schultz in the third round. Talk about her instead. Forget Carly, you’ll beat her love and love. Schultz can trip you up. She beat Alicia deLong last January. Gordon’s doing well with her. Let’s go over Schultz and Alicia. You’ll probably play Alicia in the semis.”

  Kathy answered her parents’ questions mechanically, hardly hearing them. She argued with none of their advice and agreed to start deep breathing if she felt angry for any reason. She was aware of the constant passage of other cars around them. A horse van pulled into the slow lane in front. She wondered if the horse inside felt both bored and skittish at the same time, as she did. When she was sure Jody had stopped teasing, she fixed her eyes on Bobby’s small pink face. Bobby suffered a never-ending string of colds and minor infections, which often meant bringing penicillin to tournaments in a thermos or packed in ice. He also had what her mother called “problems adjusting,” although she never named what it was that he couldn’t adjust to. His hobby was emptying tissue boxes or Band-Aid boxes or even his father’s cigarette packs and stowing their contents, piece by piece, in hiding places all over the house. Kathy was forever coming upon bits of rolled-up tape or single M&M’s behind a book o
r under a sofa pillow. Only Jody took pleasure in the ritual of finding Bobby’s treasures. She exclaimed with glee when she discovered one, and Bobby still ran to her and hugged her and said it was her special present long after this game had stopped amusing Kathy and her parents.

  “Keep in mind, if you make the semifinals next weekend, that Alicia is much stronger on Har-tru than clay,” advised Kathy’s mother.

  “She won’t be in the big tournament next month at the Newton Country Club,” said Kathy’s father. “That’s your big qualifier, clay courts, honey, and you’ll have a chance at Penny Snider and even Jennifer Robbins. It wouldn’t hurt a bit to knock off numbers one and two.”

  “Let’s do one thing at a time,” said Kathy’s mother. “Now Daddy will watch Alicia’s first round. I’ll be at Pam’s. When you’re finished, meet us at the car for lunch, and we’ll go over whatever notes we’ve taken. Then Daddy and I will both watch Shultz in the afternoon.”

  Kathy felt her focus shifting back to her father. “Dad,” she said, “I can’t guarantee beating Penny and Jennifer Robbins in July. Please don’t make it sound so easy. Those girls are all more experienced than—”

  “Honey,” her father interrupted, “you don’t have the perspective your mother and I do. In five years you won’t even remember those girls’ names. They’ll fall by the wayside. Maybe you won’t beat them this time or even next time, but you will sometime. It’s a matter of putting things behind you one by one.”

  “There are thirty-one girls behind you now that were ahead of you last year at this time,” Kathy’s mother put in. “Daddy’s right, see?”

  “It may stop sometime,” said Jody suddenly.

  “Jody, that’s enough,” snapped her father.

  “But what happens to Kathy if it does stop?” Jody persisted.

  “Talent doesn’t stop,” explained her mother. “Do you think you’ll ever stop reading books?”

  “You don’t have to hate anybody to read a book,” said Jody dramatically. “You don’t have to beat somebody else to the last page. You don’t—”

  “Jody!” shouted Kathy and her two parents all at once. Bobby woke and turned over, thumb in mouth in Jody’s lap. Jody patted him and caressed his hair. They had a language together, those two. This thought occurred to Kathy. Also she was speechless at Jody’s use of the word hate. The word had never been used by Kathy, her parents, or anyone connected with tennis that she could recall since the day when she had first picked up a racket and begun.

  Kathy recognized Ruth Gumm at once, although Ruth showed no sign of recognizing Kathy back. She was Marty’s lumberjack, the lap swimmer. Ruth returned Kathy’s warm-up shots disinterestedly. The day was of no certain temperature as the sky was of no particular color, and the flat light caused Ruth’s round face to look especially blotchy. It fell without shadow on her earth-brown hair, which was cut in an odd Dutch boy style with bangs to hide the complexion of her forehead. Kathy asked Ruth if she was a new Plymouth Club member.

  “Yeah,” came the answer after a tiny pause.

  “Where do you go to school?” asked Kathy.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “We just moved here.”

  No form, Kathy calculated. Marty’s right. She is slow. I’ll chase her back and forth a lot. Ruth Gumm did have a completely untaught style. She hesitated before returning the ball, as if she were not quite sure what to do with it, but she managed at the last second always to hit it back.

  “You play a lot where you come from?” Kathy asked.

  “Some.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Out West.”

  “Well, you’re a terrific swimmer,” said Kathy cheerfully. “I saw you last night. I wish I had such endurance.”

  “I do laps.”

  Too much swimming is bad for tennis muscles. Kathy repeated this wisdom to herself but not to Ruth. “Are you ready?” she asked at last, stripping off her warm-up jacket.

  “Yeah,” Ruth answered, so vaguely that she suggested she would either never be ready or was always ready.

  “You toss, I’ll call. Rough,” said Kathy.

  Ruth flopped her racket indelicately on its side. “Smooth,” she declared.

  “I’m sorry, but that’s rough,” said Kathy.

  Ruth peered at her racket as if she were trying to read something too difficult to be deciphered. “Smooth,” she said again.

  “Look at the strings!” said Kathy. “Anybody can see it’s rough,” as indeed anybody could have seen.

  “It says smooth,” Ruth insisted and pointed to the tiny word smooth printed on the throat of the racket

  “I don’t care what it says. You had it strung wrong. It came up rough, and I serve.” Kathy heard her own voice rise at the injustice and pettiness of this.

  Ruth stood in the middle of her side of the court. She looked steadily but without apparent anger at Kathy. She did not give over the tennis balls. “It says smooth,” she repeated.

  “Oh, for Godsake, let’s play,” Kathy shouted, stamping to her position at the base line. “Go ahead and serve if you want to be like that. I don’t have all day.” Careful, she warned herself. She took in three deep breaths, as she had been taught.

  “Swearing is against USTA rules,” said Ruth evenly.

  “What?” yelled Kathy.

  “Swearing is against USTA rules and against the code,” said Ruth. She bounced one of the balls, and it dribbled away up to the net.

  “Swearing!” Kathy’s tone rose dangerously now. “What are you talking about? I’ll tell you what’s against the rules—delaying the start of a match and cheating on the call of a toss, that’s what’s against the rules! Go ahead. Serve! Play!”

  “ ‘For Godsake’ is swearing where I come from,” said Ruth as if she were remarking on the height of the Rocky Mountains.

  This time Kathy’s voice could be heard several courts away. “Will you shut up and serve?” she shouted. “If you don’t serve in ten seconds, I’m going to get a referee. I don’t give a damn whether they eat ... shingles where you come from, you stupid hick!”

  “What’s going on here?” a tired-looking woman asked, coming up to the back of the court. She seemed to take everything in in the space of a second.

  “This girl,” Kathy told the referee, “has cheated on the call ...

  “Kathy Bardy,” said the woman, “you are the one raising your voice. Calm down. You know about your temper, and you’ve been warned before.” She took one uncomprehending look at Ruth, who still stood balls in hand. “Just play, Kathy,” she said, and went away.

  Ruth popped all three balls lightly over the net to Kathy. “You serve,” she said. “I choose to receive.”

  “You what?” Kathy asked.

  “I won the toss, and I choose to receive.”

  “You did not win the toss, and nobody chooses to receive,” Kathy said.

  “Me. I do.” On the other side of the net Ruth Gumm stood ready. Neither crouching nor moving, she waited as if she expected to be thrown a softball.

  Kathy paused before she served. She stared at the toe of her left sneaker and breathed again, trying to rid herself of what felt like a red-hot whole egg in her throat. She was shaking a little. I’ll murder her, said one part of her. Just play your regular game, and you’ll finish her off in twenty minutes, said another part. Her serve, harder and more vicious than usual, kept spinning out, and the more she fought to control it, the less controllable it became. Kathy lost her serve. She lost the second game and third. She lost the first set, taking only one game from Ruth. Time seemed both to gather itself into a single minute and to stretch itself endlessly as in a dream.

  Kathy truly wanted to splinter her racket over Ruth’s head, even if it meant she would be barred from tennis forever. She wanted to kill Ruth, to yank her ridiculous Dutch boy bangs, to physically attack her in some way so as to elicit a squeal of agony, some concession from her slow-mov
ing soft body. Instead she fell twice, trying to reach Ruth’s easy return of service. An obscenely ugly sore appeared on her right knee. This made things worse for Kathy, not because of the pain but because she prided herself on her graceful game, and now she felt as humiliated as a first-grader who has had an accident in front of the whole class. Play your game! Wake up! she ordered herself desperately, but she found herself constantly out of position, her legs moving like gelatin under water. Waiting for Ruth’s awkward, accurate serve, she cried silently. She did not wipe her eyes to clear her vision except during breaks, when she plunged her whole face into a towel. I’m in bed, asleep. This is a nightmare, she thought, and she found she could not swallow.

  During a break toward the end of the second set, when she was losing two-five, Kathy saw Oliver in the grandstand. He waved with a small gesture. She looked at him wide-eyed for a moment, as if he could bring her back to her senses, but did not return his wave. Instead she fastened her eyes on Ruth Gumm. Ruth sat with both legs apart, sipping at a can of soda. She showed no pleasure but seemed to be gazing at a distant object, six courts away.

  At that moment a man’s voice asked, “Which one of you is Ruth Gumm?”

  Kathy turned, startled. A club official in a blue blazer was standing behind her, taking papers from a manila envelope and looking from Kathy to Ruth.

  “She ... she is,” said Kathy, pointing as if Ruth were a rare kind of spider.

  “Miss Gumm?”