When No One Was Looking

by Rosemary Wells

  “I told her how well you did against Pam. She was real pleased, although she said she expected it. She wished you luck tomorrow.”

  “Did you say anything about my first round? Not that it matters. Peachy Malone was blabbing about it all over the locker room this afternoon.”

  “We had a nice talk, honey. Marty told us what she thinks of you again. She says she’s never run into natural ability like yours in all her years of coaching.”

  “Did you say anything about my first round?”

  “I was thinking about that,” said her mother, untying and then retying a shoelace. “Two days ago we had a customer come into the shop. You know that wedding Daddy did in Foxboro last month?”

  “Yes?”

  “Customer came in and wanted a full refund on the pictures. I know she had them copyprinted cheap somewhere. Some people will do anything. Boy, was I burned up!”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “What didn’t I tell her! I was seeing red. Probably just like you with that Gumm girl this morning. You’ve got your mom’s temper, honey, but just try and ride above it and, like Daddy says, put it behind you.”

  “I’ll try, Mom,” said Kathy, finishing off a glass of milk.

  But Kathy was unable to do this, as she had one indistinct but terrifying dream about Ruth Gumm that night and another early the next morning.

  3

  MIRTH AND CATCALLING ASIDE, the Plymouth Bath and Tennis Club Championships were taken quite seriously by most members. It was arranged as a round robin and dragged on for weeks, its schedule hopelessly complicated, and Marty, being the director, was as busy as the mother of a bride. Kathy was a shoo-in for the Ladies’ Singles Championship, as she had won it easily the year before. This year Marty and Kathy would team up and try to take the ladies’ doubles from Mrs. Rice and Mrs. Rosino, who had won it twelve years in a row. They were two ladies in their sixties who played a lovely old-fashioned game with the precision of a dancing couple on a Black Forest music box. The tournament counted for nothing, so Kathy’s parents did not attend, but they did insist Jody earn twenty-five dollars as a ball girl, an amount Jody said she’d be glad to make pulling stumps out of their neighbors’ garden instead.

  Kathy had never played better than she had at the Quincy tournament, and so she had won the whole thing. This under her belt and school done, Kathy felt an excellent lightness of mind, connected too with the golden July days that spun themselves out like a reward and the gradual warming of the flinty blue North Atlantic. The thorn in her side was Mrs. Diggins.

  Mrs. Diggins had seemed more saddened than appalled when she’d caught Kathy staring at the answers on Julia’s conveniently slanted paper during the algebra final. She had been too kind to punish Julia as a coconspirator. With the air of a wise old nun who has seen and forgiven all kinds of wickedness, Mrs. Diggins tutored Kathy in algebra three nights a week. Three nights a week Kathy sat on Mrs. Diggins’s nubbly brown sofa behind a card table, sweating over equations, trying to ignore the children in the neighborhood who shouted and laughed chasing their Frisbees and baseballs over the grass. This was impossible. Her mind would fly to the most insignificant fragment of conversation between unseen children outside the window and stay there until the speakers wandered away. Mrs. Diggins turned the air conditioner on loud and high to block the voices. It was an old machine and rattled away like a trash masher. Kathy counted in her head to the beat of a loose piece of metal inside it and confused herself further.

  In Mrs. Diggins’s opinion Kathy was obviously not stupid. She wasn’t lazy either because as anyone could see, she really did perspire and gnash her teeth, chewing her pencil to splinters over the simplest problems. She had only to overcome her unreasonable hatred of mathematics and all would come clear, like the sunshine after a thunderstorm. Despite help from Oliver, Julia, and Mrs. Diggins, Kathy did poorly, since her hatred of math was as much a part of her as the color of her eyes. “If you would only apply yourself, Kathy,” Mrs. Diggins told her forlornly, “with a fraction of the attention you give your tennis, you would at least pass the exam—at least have some basic comprehension of the course.” But Kathy always lowered her eyes in real shame and promised to do better. Then a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday evening would roll around, and Kathy found herself opening Mrs. Diggins’s front door with the apprehension she usually saved for the dentist. One evening, when Kathy appeared, sunburned and flushed from four straight victories in the round robin, Mrs. Diggins asked her to sit in the wing chair instead of on the sofa. She offered her an anemic-looking glass of iced tea, which Kathy was too afraid to refuse, and then sat in an opposite wing chair. The fallow evening light suffused even the plastic ottoman on which Mrs. Diggins propped her feet with a delicate richness. “Kathy, do you know what growing up is all about?” she asked.

  Kathy recalled a pamphlet, entitled Growing Up and Liking It, handed out at the beginning of freshman year. The pamphlet dealt with eggs and Fallopian tubes. To her dismay she also recalled that two nights before she had noticed a trace of blood on the sofa pillow when her lesson was finished. She’d done the only possible thing, and that was to turn over the pillow quickly when Mrs. Diggins had left the room. Oh, God, she thought and wiped beads of sweat off her upper lip. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Diggins,” she began, but Mrs. Diggins interrupted her.

  “Growing up means doing things we don’t like at least passably well,” she said.

  With thanks to God for the dark upholstery Kathy listened attentively.

  “You are a wonderful athlete, Katherine, but you must do your schoolwork also. You will not pass freshman year unless you do. This will snowball into more failures. You cannot graduate from high school unless all your courses have been fulfilled.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Diggins.”

  Mrs. Diggins snapped on a lamp, as an intense shadow had covered the whole of her. “Your father said you must pass just in case. What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  “Well, I guess in case my tennis ... in case I don’t do well enough at tennis...

  “Exactly. And what you are doing, because you are young, Kathy, and think like all young people that nothing will ever really hurt you in life, is to coast. You are refusing to concentrate on algebra the way a baby refuses to eat spinach and throws it across the room when its mother’s back is turned. Math is not your enemy, Kathy. Math is a tool, and you can make it your friend.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Diggins.”

  “I understand that serious tennis matches require a great deal of strategy and calculation, sudden calculation.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Diggins.”

  “Well, then you can calculate as well in algebra.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Diggins.”

  “I understand also that there is a certain amount of petty cheating that goes on in the early stages of the tournaments when there are no umpires. Is that so?”

  “Sometimes, Mrs. Diggins.”

  “Do you ever cheat, Kathy?”

  “No!” Kathy answered scornfully.

  “But would you if you had to?”

  “Never.”

  Whether Mrs. Diggins believed this answer or not, she didn’t say. She took Kathy’s glass and her own into the kitchen. Instantly Kathy inspected the sofa cushion. The spot had been discovered and removed. When Mrs. Diggins returned, she found Kathy working feverishly on the evening’s lesson, her eyes wide and frantic like a guilty lawbreaker’s. Mrs. Diggins smiled.

  Oliver had become quite a fixture. Kathy’s mother quickly sensed he was more like a brother than a boyfriend, and so she tried to fatten him up. Oliver nursed his injured pride at losing set after set daily to Kathy by wolfing down huge amounts of meatloaf and corn. At first Kathy had been unsure whether his questionable background would appeal or not appeal to her parents, but after the first two or three evenings she could tell that they felt more at ease with him than they ever had with Julia—a fixture in the house for almost nine years. “Lose again, son?” Kathy’s father always
greeted him at the door. This was a standard joke Oliver encouraged by pretending to laugh at it.

  “Math is a tool. Math is my friend,” said Kathy when Oliver walked into the kitchen. “I’m supposed to say that three times before I fall asleep at night.” Kathy’s father gave her a meaningful look, but he did not laugh as he had the night before when Kathy had told him about Mrs. Diggins and her positive thinking.

  “Hi! Mrs. B., everybody!” said Oliver, and he plunged both hands into the everyday silver drawer as if he had lived in the house for years. He set six place settings around the kitchen table and announced he had a surprise for Kathy.

  “What, what, tell me!” Kathy insisted.

  “Diamonds, I bet,” said Jody.

  “Nope, but just as rare. Tickets to tonight’s Yankee game at Fenway. Box seats!”

  “Oh, Oliver!” Kathy yelled, and she began to jump like a child.

  “No,” said Kathy’s father.

  “What do you mean, no, Daddy? Come on, please,” Kathy implored.

  “No. Mrs. Diggins came into the shop today. She says unless you study harder, you might fail your final in August. I want you to put in another hour on your algebra tonight.”

  “And I say no too,” said Mrs. Bardy. “Fenway Park is in a very dangerous part of Boston. I’m not having you two innocent things going out in the middle of the night and getting mugged.”

  Kathy could not meet this disappointment aloud without swearing unforgivably and landing herself, she knew, in unimaginable trouble. Through her teeth, which she’d clamped tightly together, she muttered a few words she’d heard from a Boston girl in the shower room during her last tournament. Her parents went on about the dangers of Fenway Park, and her mother forbade Oliver to go alone. Finally Mr. Bardy agreed to take the extra ticket and go to the game with Oliver.

  Kathy said nothing during dinner until Oliver mentioned that he’d hit with and beaten a friend of hers at the club that afternoon.

  “Who?” Kathy asked, still having eaten nothing.

  “Eat,” said Kathy’s father.

  “That girl who nearly beat you in Quincy in your first round. I beat her love and love,” said Oliver with false snootiness in his voice, although he meant only to make Kathy laugh.

  “Everybody beats her,” Kathy growled. “She’s lost six of her round-robin matches. Her doubles partner is a ten-year-old. The only girl who’d agree to play with her.”

  “Have you played her yet?” Oliver asked.

  “I play her tomorrow. But Marty will be around, and she won’t dare pull any funny stuff.” Kathy’s voice was pure vinegar.

  “Don’t snap at Oliver just because you can’t go to a silly baseball game,” said Jody, cutting into a baked potato.

  Kathy was about to throw her own potato at Jody when she felt her father put out a restraining hand. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said, “but that’s the way it’s got to be.”

  “But it’s the Yankees, Dad. Nobody can get seats. I promise I’ll do four hours of homework tomorrow. Please, oh, please!”

  “No, and your Mom’s right about the two of you going to Boston alone.”

  “Take her, Mr. B.,” said Oliver. “You can have my ticket.”

  “You have to think about algebra. The answer is no. You can watch it on TV if you finish your assignments.”

  “Big deal,” said Kathy. Her eyes filled.

  “Young lady,” said her father, “first you apologize for that remark. Then you thank Oliver for being so generous. Then you learn something right now about responsibility. If you’d done your math right, I would have taken you both to Fenway, waited for you, and brought you back. It’s your fault, Katherine, not your mother’s or mine.” When there was no answer to this, he continued in a gentler voice. “Honey, I want you to look at this. A saltshaker, right?”

  “It’s pepper,” said Kathy.

  “Never mind. I have four of them, right?”

  “I can count to four, Dad.”

  “Two in this hand, two in this hand. Now I’m going to put two down here on. one side of the ketchup bottle, and one on the other side of the ketchup bottle. The one in my hand, right here, I’m going to call x. Now pretend the ketchup bottle is an equals sign. What does x equal?”

  “Two,” said Kathy quickly.

  “Oh, Kathy.”

  “Three!”

  He slammed the pepper shaker down hard. “How can it be two or three? Two and two is four. One and one is two. X is one, Kathy. Bobby could do that!”

  “Then why don’t they teach algebra in the first grade?” Kathy asked miserably.

  “Go easy on her, Frank,” said Kathy’s mother. “Algebra isn’t going to ruin Kathy’s life. She’s just got to get through it.”

  “How the hell is she going to get through it if you tell her it’s not important?” her father shouted, throwing his napkin onto his plate. “She just may have to get a decent job someday and earn a decent living. Do you want her to be a waitress? Even waitresses have to add. You want her to be a maid someday?”

  “Hush, Frank. I just meant tennis is the most important thing. This will pass. I did rotten in math when I was her age too.”

  “Well that’s a fine thing to say,” he growled, stabbing at his pork chop. “I wanted to give her hell for cheating on the final, and you wouldn’t let me. Okay, I said, okay. Now you tell her it isn’t important.”

  “All I said, Frank, was, if the teacher hadn’t caught her, I wouldn’t have gone running to the principal and told on her. What is important here? She has a gift. A marvelous talent. One girl in a million can play like Kathy. A million girls can count saltcellars.”

  “I think Kathy has a deep psychological resistance to algebra,” Jody put in.

  “I have a deep psychological resistance to know-it-alls,” said Kathy, choking slightly. “Go ahead. Sink yourself into books all day, Miss Smart ... aleck. What’s that going to get you? By the time you’re in college, you’ll probably wear glasses an inch thick, and when you get to be fifty, you’ll marry some creepy professor who looks like Henry Kissinger with dandruff and bad breath and zits on his—”

  “Kathy, that’s enough,” said her father.

  “I don’t understand what’s so hard about algebra,” Jody went on as if nothing had been said. “Mary Beth Pendleton passed it, and Mary Beth’s a real dip.”

  Kathy’s potato hit her square on the forehead. Kathy was sent to bed. Instead she ran out the front door. She sprinted across the lawn, over the low privet hedge and the neighbors’ barbecue, and then on to the next street. As she turned the corner she could see her father and Oliver looking after her from the backyard. Her father was shaking his fist in the air. She knew they wouldn’t follow her, because they knew she could run ten miles with ease, avoiding streets and, should they take the car, losing them in an instant.

  She jogged without effort, but no easy, light feeling came over her. She took shortcuts, over the Parrishes’ lawn, past the Steins’ enormous vegetable garden, trying to make sense out of the evening and out of Jody, trying to erase the picture of Mrs. Diggins as a secret trapper, soft as a patch of new grass on the surface but with solid mahogany punji stakes just below. Why were people like that always so right? Why did they always spot her dreadful little flaws, save them up like money, and present her with them, cooked and flavored like a perfect chowder of inconsistency, temper losing, and vile habits? “Math is a tool,” she repeated to herself in rhythm with her pounding legs. “Math is my friend. Math is my friend. I can do it. Yes, I can.” Mrs. Diggins, at the end of the lesson, had quoted extensively from a book about positive thinking. I’ll try it a hundred times, Kathy thought, and see what happens. “I can do math, I can, I can, I can!” She repeated it aloud, and in a much less strident tone she murmured, “And, dear God, I promise never to forget to change a Tampax again if you will only let me pass algebra.” Kathy could not fit this prayer into the proper positive sounding words, so she left off and continued with “Math
is my friend! Yes, I can! Yes, I can!” Inadvertently she had come to the railroad, a distance of three miles and certainly a thousand Yes, I can’s from her house. Neither the running nor the chanting had improved anything. No one was around to hear, as this was only a freight track overgrown with weeds. Kathy stopped. From the rawest depths of her senses she cried, “I hate you, Mrs. Diggins!”

  She recalled looking in Mrs. Diggins’s medicine cabinet in search of aspirin one night. In it was a sizable collection of false tooth cleaners, deodorants, and stickers-to-the-roof-of-the-mouth. “You toothless, heartless old bat!” Kathy bellowed. “Math is my enemy! No, I can’t! No, I can’t! I hate math and I hate you!” Kathy followed this up with a string of curses so colorful it surprised her that she knew them. As she trotted into an unfamiliar residential district she felt wonderful.

  The two-story houses were narrow and set so close together there was barely room for a cat to slip between. They were all shingled brown and gray, some with little pebbly maroon pinstripes on the shingles. The smell of sour cooking was general to the street. People sat in swings or on metal chairs. Jogging was not done in this neighborhood, Kathy decided, so she slowed to a walk, embarrassed by their stares.

  She stopped near an old car, half off the sidewalk and half on. Four boys were fixing it or tinkering with it. They had the radio tuned to the Red Sox game. They were not the kind of boys she usually said anything to in school, but she wanted to hear the score and so she listened. The boys found this amusing, and one of them asked her, snapping his gum in a yellow-toothed grin, whether there was anything he could do for her. Afraid, Kathy edged away as if he had been a German shepherd and continued down the street.

  “Hello, dearie!” said a voice, and Kathy jumped. She glanced to the house at her side. In a broken rocking chair sat an enormous man. His hair grew in odd tufts, and two sleeping cats nestled in his lap. His clothes were neat but sat on him queerly, as if someone else had dressed him. The man rocked slowly under the light of a single bulb, ignoring the swarm of moths and insects that the bulb attracted. He was one of those, Kathy saw immediately, who had never grown up and who never would grow up, because she couldn’t begin to guess his age. One of those whom neighborhood people kept an eye on but said was “harmless.” There was also a woman on the decrepit wooden steps. It was Miss Greco.