BECAUSE JULIA WAS BEAUTIFUL and had a classic forehead, Miss Greco had chosen her to model for one of her many ceramic heads. Wildly differing students had posed for Miss Greco over the years, but the heads looked remarkably alike. In the back of the classroom Kathy Bardy waited for Julia. The questions in her algebra book lay horribly unsolved before her. Kathy fidgeted over them and dreamed in the sweet June air, looking for some sign of Julia’s features in Miss Greco’s brick-colored Plastilina. As yet there was none. The heads on the windowsill resembled not only one another but the work of Miss Greco’s favorite sculptor, whose lumpy, suffering peasants, published in Art News, decorated the bulletin board. There was an air of humility about Miss Greco that Kathy found unsettling. It seemed that Miss Greco was cheerfully resigned to being a high school art teacher who struggled to imitate the private style of a famous man. She appeared to accept without regret her mousy thinning hair, and her dust-coated orthopedic shoes, which tracked up even the ladies’ room floor, and Kathy, had she wakened one morning to find herself in Miss Greco’s place, would have certainly jumped out a window.
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Julia later on the way to the club.
“A high window,” Kathy added.
In a southern voice that purred as agreeably as the engine of her silver Mercedes 6.9, Mrs. Irene Beaufort Redmond, Julia’s mother, declared that suicide was an unseemly topic of conversation. “My Kathy,” which was what she always called her daughter’s best friend, “will never jump out any window on God’s green earth, because she is number one.”
“Number twelve,” Kathy amended.
“Number one, number twelve, it’s all tacky business anyway,” said Julia’s mother.
Kathy knew that was true in a sense; however, she did not like her ranking taken frivolously. Mrs. Redmond continued, “And my Julia is also a number one, but I wish, darling, you would take up some challenge like your friend Kathy has taken up tennis. Life has been too easy for you this far, and you need a challenge.”
Julia met this suggestion with silence and a wink at Kathy. Tennis, after all, was not something that Kathy had taken up, as a person might take up reading the horoscopes in the paper. At the time, over a year ago, when tennis had more or less happened to Kathy, she’d still harbored dreams of becoming the first woman shortstop for the Boston Red Sox.
They had discovered her “talent” one day at a tennis clinic which had been squeezed in between a fireman’s parade and the annual VFW Easter-egg hunt. The tennis people all talked about talent, and now even Kathy’s parents used the word, as if she were some sort of rising Rembrandt.
There was no denying that this was exciting. Kathy’s family had “no money,” as her mother put it, unlike Julia’s family, who had “real money.” Kathy had none of her younger sister Jody’s brains, or if she did, this did not show in her schoolwork. She did not possess Julia’s good looks and easy manner. Tennis had come suddenly to Kathy, like the unexpected winning of a state lottery. And like those gleeful lottery winners pictured in the papers grinning among the signals of poverty that were theirs moments before, Kathy cherished tennis, and outwardly she reveled in it.
Mrs. Redmond blew kisses through the car window to both “her girls.” “I’ll come get you at five thirty,” she said, “so Kathy has time for a swim after her lesson.”
“I’m on lifeguard duty tonight,” said Kathy. “It’s the first club dance of the season, and someone always winds up in the pool.”
“You work too hard, darling,” Mrs. Redmond answered sadly. “Just don’t pull any drunks out of the pool. Drunks are always dead-weightenized.” With this statement and ten more kisses Mrs. Redmond and the silver Mercedes glided away down the long petunia-lined pebble drive.
“You do work too hard,” said Julia when her mother had gone, for Julia never agreed with her mother if her mother was present. “Maybe when school’s out, you’ll have some time and we can just do nothing a little, the way we used to. You ought to get a tan, Kath, without the lines from your tennis dress.”
Kathy straightened her rackets and took the cover and press off one of them. “I’ll be lounging around with an algebra book. That’s what,” she said.
“Oh, come on. The final won’t be that bad. Don’t worry. I’ll help you. You’ll pass.”
Kathy grunted at her racket press.
“Why don’t you come for a quick Coke? You have time before your lesson,” Julia asked in an abnormally cheerful voice.
“Julia, you know I have to do the courts.”
“I know! I know!” Julia answered, raising a hand and shutting her eyes against this fact. “Give my hate to old Miss Pus-bucket.”
“I will,” said Kathy, and she walked slowly over to the courts past a series of whitewashed iron urns which had been newly planted with red-and-white-striped petunias. She would have liked to have a Coke and laugh for half an hour or so.
In Kathy’s view there were few things Julia did not understand with a quick and visceral reflex. The whole business of being talented was a thing Julia took quite for granted, as she took the fact of having money or having perfect teeth. She accepted Kathy’s new-found genius as if, in storybook fashion, Kathy had suddenly inherited a million dollars from a long-lost uncle. Julia welcomed Kathy’s still-tender ascendancy in the game of tennis with an I-told-you-all-along outlook that was childlike and grown-up at the same time. On the other hand, Kathy decided, Julia had no grasp of the need for working at anything. Whether Kathy had to work at odd jobs for money or work grueling, sweaty hours in the hot sun or on the public courts at night, Julia viewed hard work as an invention of unimaginative adults who had lost all sense of fun in this world. Having an immense library of first editions at home, many of them read to her aloud years before the school system tackled the same books, and having been to Europe several times, Julia came easily to her A-plus average, as if in every subject she had been already thoroughly educated. Algebra, English, drawing, and riding, all these things were to Julia pleasant diversions, presenting no more difficulty than the eating of an artichoke. Because of this, or perhaps in spite of it, Julia was not popular at school.
Whether this bothered Julia or not anymore, Kathy didn’t really know. Mrs. Redmond had always dismissed as hilariously petty anything that happened in school. At the same time Julia’s father was subject to occasional seizures of New England prudence and insisted that Julia stay in the public school and ride the school bus just like everybody else.
Kathy recalled vividly the second day of first grade. Behind the massive blue velvet curtain on the gymnasium stage the girls had all undressed to be weighed and measured by the school nurse. Someone had poked fun at Julia’s underwear. When Julia pointed out that it had been handmade in France and was much prettier than the nylon underwear of the girl who was picking on her, a crowd had gathered instantly. They jeered so cruelly at Julia’s dress, which was also handmade and too conservative in style, and at her diction, which had been carefully groomed by a succession of English nannies, that Julia had sat on the floor and cried miserably. After school that day Kathy had found Julia crouched behind a hedge, afraid to get on the bus and still in tears. Not even knowing Julia’s name, Kathy had sat beside her on the school bus and threatened to kill anyone who brought up the subject of underwear or accents again.
From that day on Kathy and Julia had been the best of friends, but Julia had established a pattern and never really pulled herself out of it. She was laughed at for bringing sandwiches of pâté de foie gras to school. Kathy remembered Julia pleading with her mother to give her tuna fish instead. Mrs. Redmond replied by saying that she’d never bought a can of tuna fish in her life and wasn’t about to, since the smell would drive a starving dog from the room. Kathy had repressed her hurt at this skewering of her own mother’s lunches because she was totally in awe of everything Mrs. Redmond did or said. Julia was laughed at because sometimes her grandmother picked her up from school in a chauffeur-driven car and because she missed classes with abandon for family vacations. Later she was teased for having a perfect accent in French.
Private school had been discussed from time to time, but since this would have required Julia to get up at seven in the morning instead of eight, Julia had outright balked and once had spent three days with a large piece of masking tape over her mouth, refusing to eat or drink until her mother dropped the subject. Whereas Kathy’s nature tended toward violent physical self-defense, jealousy, and blurting out whatever was on her mind at the moment, Julia avoided all conflicts. She waded through whatever souls dared to tease her like a missionary doctor among the lepers, completely unafraid of catching leprosy. This attitude worked wonders as it tended to drive a tormentor to ridiculous extremes. Julia knew she was envied more than hated, and so she had a sunny nature, and she and Kathy had spent the last eight years laughing at practically everything.
The petunias in the decorative urns had five stripes apiece, Kathy noticed, except for the few that had six. This only reminded her of the algebra final to come. Kathy pictured the final as if it were a huge bloated dead fish on the horizon, and she felt a wrench of jealousy toward Julia and the ease with which Julia faced such things as exams. She could no more rid herself of the jealousy than she could wish away her anger when she found herself losing a tennis match. Julia, Kathy reminded herself, had never been jealous of anything or anyone so far as Kathy knew, with the brief exception of Laura Mae Bullock, who had stolen Robbie Martin, Julia’s first real crush, away from her. Since Laura Mae had terrible acne and a reputation for doing things with boys behind the town water tower, Julia had not been jealous long. She had welcomed Kathy’s success at tennis with astonishing openheartedness, even though it took Kathy away from her company for long hours. Of course there was a reason for this. Kathy’s many tournaments, trophies, free rackets from Spalding, and her interview in the Herald American cut right through all the uncomfortable class and money business that was the only thing that had separated them since the first grade. It legitimized, like a new moon wish come true, a rite of eternal friendship both girls had performed, using the blood of a dead pigeon, when they were six and a half. It somehow made all right those times that their fathers, on meeting now and then in the Sears tool department or while buying the Sunday papers, had nodded and grunted to each other in recognition of their daughters but had said little more. Now Julia’s father would say hello and ask after Kathy’s latest victory, and her father would grin and fold up the sports pages and be wonderfully modest about the whole thing. Carefully Kathy hid her new sense of equality from Julia. From time to time she would mention Evert’s backhand or Andrea Jaeger’s nerve but never the prize money she read about with such awe. Unlike death, religion, and the details of menstruation, neither Kathy nor Julia ever alluded to money.
Kathy supposed that come Tuesday, Julia, ever-generous, would slide her paper and move her arm during Mrs. Diggins’s abominable final algebra exam and that she, Kathy, would find it too great a temptation.
“Where is your mind, my dear?” asked Marty in Kathy’s imagination. Kathy checked to see whether Marty was in her office. She was, as she always was at two thirty on Fridays, counting the week’s take. Kathy could see her silhouette, feet on the desk, Coke bottle in hand in the little white clapboard building, salt-licked and surrounded by more petunias in the window boxes. Kathy would not go in, as Marty disliked being interrupted while she was counting money. Half an hour remained before her lesson would begin, and in order to pay part of her membership fee for the Plymouth Bath and Tennis Club, Kathy had to pick up all the balls from the morning’s lessons and sweep the first three courts clean. Brushing the soft green dust from the tapes and collecting balls from the thistles and shells outside the fence gave Kathy time to play with her thoughts. She didn’t mind the work at all, except she knew Marty was watching every move she made. Marty always did that, because Kathy Bardy was her pet.
Contemptuous of most of her summer pupils’ indifferent efforts to achieve a clean forehand, Marty had a string of nicknames for them. She called the most private of their weaknesses to their attention, knowing they would never admit to their parents to being called Jelly-rump or Pig-eyes. Marty was not well liked. It was said of her that had she been a swimming coach instead of a tennis coach, she would have tossed a baby off the jetty in January and expected it to swim to shore. But because Marty had suffered third degree burns over every inch of her body as a child and had been given up for a lifelong cripple, only to recover and beat Maureen Connolly at Wimbledon, thereby causing her name to be emblazoned on a line of Wilson rackets, Marty was somehow forgiven.
There were things said, and things left unsaid. One of the things that was said most often of Kathy was that she had a phenomenal gift, was the most promising New England girl to come along in ages. It was said that she would go “right to the top” if she learned to control her temper.
It was said that Marty was the only first-class woman coach in the country. (Proven most recently by Kathy’s jump from unknown to twelfth in New England in her age category and fourth in the district in the space of fourteen months.)
It was not said that Marty, whose days of glory came when tennis had been a gentlewoman’s game and therefore unpaid, had a great stake in Kathy Bardy’s future or that she had her eye on the prodigies and the publicity that would be hers should Kathy turn professional and become famous like Tracy Austin. Kathy was half-aware of the connection between her future and Marty’s.
It was not said that Kathy’s father worried about the money all this cost. Kathy was very aware of this, not in terms of sums or exact figures but in the same simple way that she knew by looking out the window whether it was raining.
It was not said (even by Kathy to herself) that at this very moment, when she ought to have been mentally preparing herself for tomorrow’s tournament in Quincy, she was instead avenging Carl Yastrzemski’s pop-up in the playoffs against the hated Yankees.
At exactly three o’clock Marty tossed her Coke bottle into the trash barrel and sauntered out onto the court. Her face, mildly scarred under a brilliant red head of hair, looked always to Kathy like the face of the joker in a deck of cards. Every day Marty wore an identical tennis outfit, a white dress, unfashionably long. It matched the dress in the photo that hung in her office of that day long ago when she’d been victor over the famous Maureen. Kathy wondered for the hundredth time why Marty clung to such things as the dress and, biting clean as they were, the old-fashioned high wool socks and old-fashioned deck sneakers instead of wearing Adidas or Tretorns. Marty scoffed at all changes. She would not tolerate metal rackets or a two-handed backhand no matter what Chris Evert had done. She also frowned on all the money the pros made. Officially Marty insisted that tennis was a ballet, a game of joy and a sport worthy of angels, and that the flashing about of six-figure incomes was ruinous to its spirit. However, she possessed a memory like a tax collector for every penny the pros turned over, and she repeated these statistics from time to time in between commands to “Keep the head down” and “Move, dammit, move!”
“Where is your mind, my dear?” Marty asked. “My dear” was her nickname for Kathy.
Kathy reddened. She had hit three backhands in a row directly at Marty instead of down the line. “I’m sorry, Marty.”
“I want you to play like a man, not like a lady who paints teacups on the side. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Marty.”
“You’ll never be any good unless you learn to play like a man. How do you think Althea Gibson got where she got?”
Kathy searched her memory for the name Althea Gibson. Out of what attic did Marty drag these names? “She played like a man,” said Kathy, who knew how to answer a question.
“She served like a man, she rushed the net like a man, and she was over six feet tall. You, my dear, are a shrimp and so have twice as far to go.” Marty’s logic was as wicked as her ability to return shots from mid-court. For an hour Kathy hit the same backhand shot down the same line.
“Why are you smiling?”
“I’m not smiling,” said Kathy, smiling.
“Are you smiling because you think you’re going to have such an easy time with Alicia deLong over the weekend? Alicia is number five.”
“No,” Kathy answered, this time not smiling.
“Are you smiling because you think you’ve done so well? That’s for me to tell you, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Marty.”
“Well then, why are you smiling? Put on your sweater. Answer me.”
Kathy was too frightened to remember what had brought a smile to her face, “Just something ... she began, “at school.”
“Where is your mind, my dear?” Marty asked again, bending over for a ball. “After next week there’ll be no school to distract you. Now what are you crying for?”
Kathy sat down on the spectator’s bench in the shade of a green-and-white-striped awning. She tried to concentrate on a girl serving endlessly on court six.
“Why are you crying?”
“I’m not ... anymore.”
“Do you have your period?”
“No. That never bothers me anyway.”
“Don’t be a fool, of course it bothers you. I keep track of you. I know. Stop looking embarrassed. You know you never remember when you’re going to get it.”
Kathy sat silent, not because this was the thing that Marty could least stand but because nothing safe to say occurred to her. This was like an algebra test at its worst, like Chinese or Greek. “I may have to take tutoring this summer,” she managed to squeak out at last. Perhaps Marty would turn her wrath in another direction.
“In what? Tutoring for what?”
“Algebra. I can’t possibly pass the final.”
“Algebra! Why? Fail! Who cares? You think the USTA cares about algebra?”
“My folks do, especially my father,” said Kathy.
“I have told your parents a hundred times that you shouldn’t be pushed in all directions at once. The kind of pressure you’re under now doesn’t allow for algebra,” said Marty bitterly.
“My teachers say the opposite, you know. If I don’t improve my schoolwork next year, I’m sure they’ll never let me go at one thirty to practice every day in Swampscott.”
Marty chewed on her lower lip and then, amazingly, she whispered “Kathy” quite gently and covered Kathy’s hand with her own. “Don’t cry,” she began in what Kathy knew was a voice that did not come easily to her. “Just think, one day all this schoolwork will be over. You’ll just have your game to think about, and you’re going to be right on the top. In the Wightman Cup, at Wimbledon. No one is going to touch you, not even the little rich girls with twenty years of tennis clubs behind them. You’re going to show them all. But remember, your family isn’t rich. You don’t have the advantages some girls have. You’ll never be much of a student. This is the one way you’re going to break out of all the dullness in life. You’re going to go to England and France someday, Kathy. You’ll go to Rome and win the Italian championship. Think of that! And everyone who says a New Englander can’t do it, a girl who takes up tennis late can’t do it, a girl with a woman coach can’t do it—well, they’re all going to be eating crow someday. That algebra teacher of yours is going to sit back in her Jordan Marsh rocker and read about you in the papers someday, and maybe you’ll give her an autograph. I’ve been there, Kathy. I held up that silver plate in front of the Queen of England, and I know.”
Kathy knew two things. One was that Marty wouldn’t be likely to put her hand on her own mother’s if her mother had been run over by a car. The other was that Marty was being uncanny, as she was when it suited her. The phrase show them all had hit Kathy surgically, in the center of her belly. Yes, she wanted to show them all, although she didn’t know who “they” were. “Who’s that on court six?” Kathy asked at last.
“Nobody,” said Marty, withdrawing her hand.
“Just because she’s new doesn’t make her nobody. She has a strong serve.”
Marty sighed. “She’s big, she’s slow, and she has weasely eyes. She’s one of Gordon’s brand-new lesser lights.”
Gordon was the other coach in this part of New England. Once upon a time he too had been one of Marty’s pets, but he hadn’t the temperament to go very far. Gordon was handsome and popular and had many promising juniors in his stable. Marty had not spoken to him in years. “Foot fault,” said Marty, glaring at the girl. “She has big feet.”
“She has a strong serve,” repeated Kathy.
“She’s as big as a lumberjack.”
Kathy picked up her rackets and her bag. “She’s got a strong serve, Marty.”
“And as clumsy,” Marty continued, as if Kathy had said nothing.
Kathy knew it was hopeless to try and get in the last word, so she left Marty, promising to call after the next day’s matches. Once she looked back. Marty was concentrating on the girl, sitting alone on the newly painted white bench. Kathy had few moments of true revelation, but she did wonder as she crossed the neatly raked parking lot to join Julia for a swim whether Marty, gnarled and scarred, had such a thing as a mother.
As she mentioned all odd thoughts to Julia, Kathy mentioned this one when she’d come up from the water and settled herself in a deck chair.
“That’s a funny thing to say. Everyone has a mother.”
“I know. But Marty’s old. Past forty or fifty maybe. I thought her mother might have died in that fire when she was a baby.”
“Are you trying to excuse her awfulness?” Julia asked.
“No, not that. I just felt sorry for her suddenly.”
Julia rolled her eyes heavenward. She imitated her own mother’s drawl precisely. “No one on God’s green earth I feel sorry for less than that mean, hungry woman.” And then, switching to her regular voice, Julia said that not even a childhood spell in a concentration camp would excuse Marty’s excesses in her eyes.
“Excesses,” repeated Kathy.
“You take more you-know-what from that coach than I can believe. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I’d cry like a baby or spit in her eye. I don’t know which.”
Kathy stretched and threw her towel over an empty chair. “You have to get to know her,” she said.
“There’s something about her that I hate,” Julia said slowly. “I don’t even really hate my Aunt Liz, who threw a vase at Mom on her last visit, but I hate that Marty.”
“Why?” Kathy asked.
Over the top of her magazine Julia looked Kathy in the eye, and without wavering as Kathy would have done she declared, “Because she’s mean to you, and I don’t like people being mean to you.”
For the second time that day Kathy asked in embarrassment, “I wonder who that is?”
“I don’t know,” said Julia, “but she’s a powerful swimmer. Probably races. Look at her strokes.”
The same large body that had been serving so steadily in court six now swam up and down the length of the pool with identical determination. She was still at it long after Julia had left and the evening shadows had fallen on the pool, the deck, and the surrounding empty chairs. At last she hoisted herself out and announced to no one, “Two hundred.”
By this time Kathy had finished a hamburger and a soda (free to employees of the club) and had started to net a few limp ginko leaves off the surface of the water. She collected what stray wet towels lay around and cleaned out the pool house. The club manager would check her work later with the energy of a room inspector at West Point. She lined up the containers of chlorine, although they were already arranged perfectly. Then she collected the things for the lost-and-found box and took them to the office. The previous summer Kathy had been the lone club employee without a single red stroke beside her name on the manager’s error sheet, or blacklist, as it was called by the lifeguards. She enjoyed this little contest, and the work required no thought at all. At seven, when the first people arrived for the dance, the pool house was immaculate, the water leafless and shimmering, and the deck as shiny as a liner’s on a maiden voyage. Kathy buttoned her sweater against the wind and climbed high up into her lifeguard’s chair. There she sat in the darkness, listening to the ocean wash and spill against the rocky jetty outside the three-story enclosure of lockers and public rooms that left the pool open to the sky, staring into the wonderful depths of the lighted water. She was quite happy. In one hour she would begin passing the rest of the evening listening to the Red Sox on a tiny transistor radio she kept hidden in her towel.
“I’m Oliver English,” said a voice from the deck. The voice cracked slightly in the middle of the sentence. “I’m afraid I got you into trouble with your coach.”
“Trouble?” Kathy asked. A boy with very heavy glasses and large white teeth was smiling up at her. But of course she remembered right away. He had indirectly gotten her into trouble with Marty. It had been Oliver whom she’d seen grinning at her at the end of her lesson, and she of course had smiled back. Marty had probably figured him to be a potentially more serious distraction than algebra.
“She’s pretty tough on you. She’s a real drill sergeant,” Oliver added.
Kathy laughed. “I know,” she said, “but she’s nicer to me than she is to anyone else. I’m quite used to her.”
“I’m the other lifeguard tonight,” Oliver announced. “You’re the best girl tennis player I’ve ever seen. Will you hit with me next week? I’ve played a lot out in California.”
“Sure,” said Kathy, and she began to laugh.
“Why are you laughing? You think you can beat me?” Oliver looked seriously annoyed behind his horn-rims.
Kathy pointed to the dance, now fully under way in the conservatory, a room reserved for senior members. People had gathered around the bar and talked in little groups, although no one danced yet. A woman in an evening dress, tall as an oak, stood holding a drink in both cupped hands. She was listening to a man in Madras pants. Her smile never wavered from a full horsy grin, and she wore a diamond choker that could be seen twenty yards away. The flashing teeth and sparkling diamonds complemented each other perfectly. “Look at her!” Kathy said. “Look at him! Don’t they seem big to you? That guy must weigh three hundred pounds. What would we do if he fell in the pool?”
“That’s what I’m here for,” said Oliver seriously.
“But that’s why I’m laughing,” said Kathy. “You’re not much bigger than I am. It would take four of us to pull him out of an armchair.”
“I’m seventeen,” said Oliver, glaring at Kathy, “and I’m on the Yale freshman crew.”
“You must be strong,” said Kathy hurriedly.
“I’m very strong.” The corners of Oliver’s mouth turned down like the mask of tragedy. He continued to look unhappy behind his glasses, which, as if they came in sizes like shirts, appeared to be a size too big for him. “It isn’t a question of weight,” he went on. “I could pull a whale out of the pool if I got the right grip on him. It’s all in the grip, or didn’t they teach you that in lifesaving?”
“I guess you’re right,” Kathy answered. She noticed that Oliver’s black hair danced wildly in the wind. He wore it long over the front and very short at the back like World War Two fighter pilots she’d seen in late movies on TV. His skin was as clear and pink as a baby’s, his chest as hairless as Kathy’s, and although she knew she could have hidden her whole fist in the depression between his ribs, she liked him. “Who’s your girl friend?” Oliver asked huffily.
“Girl friend? Oh, Julia. The one I was sitting with.”
“She’s pretty. Very pretty,” said Oliver.
“I know,” said Kathy, hoping she didn’t betray any jealousy in her voice, and she told herself Julia would never have made a mess out of meeting a boy as she had done.
“Molina!” said Oliver suddenly and poked Kathy’s foot. “Look sharp!”
Out of the brilliantly illuminated assortment of drinkers and eaters at the other end of the clubhouse came the Plymouth Bath and Tennis Club manager. Busy as a hornet, he glanced at his clipboard as if he wished he could yell at it. “One of you,” he said to Kathy and Oliver, “is supposed to be in one chair, and the other is supposed to be in the other chair.” He paused for a tiny breath. “And who, may I ask, selected you two to be lifeguards at an adult party? This is not a toddler swim hour.”
“But, Mr. Molina,” Kathy began, “I got a letter telling me to work tonight and ...
“And you?” Mr. Molina interrupted.
“The same thing, sir,” said Oliver.
“That’s my secretary’s fault, of course,” said Mr. Molina. “She doesn’t know one from another. We have six big boys much better suited. You couldn’t pull a baby out of the shallow end,” he observed to Oliver.
“But—” Kathy began.
“It’s not your fault!” Mr. Molina shouted. “Now go pick up that towel over there. Have you checked the chlorine level in the pool?”
“Yes,” said Kathy.
“One of you pick up that Coke bottle before someone trips over it and winds up in the hospital. I’m going to keep an eye on both of you. No fraternization. You sit in one chair, and he sits in the other. You have a job to do, and you’re paid twenty dollars each to do it, so do it.” And twittering to himself like a head nurse on duty, Mr. Molina went back to the clubhouse, looking right and then left and walking in the exact center of the indoor-outdoor carpeting.
In a loud whisper Kathy asked Oliver why he hadn’t said anything about it all being in the grip.
“Oh, shut up,” said Oliver, also in a loud whisper.
Nobody fell in the pool. Like two undersized sentries, Kathy and Oliver slouched in their widely separated chairs. The drains gurgled from time to time. Why do they always look at Julia? Kathy asked herself. He’ll probably sit with her all summer, and I’ll be left out like someone’s extra little sister. Why do I have to be flat-chested and have dull hair? Why won’t Dr. Morrissey take my braces off? If I hit with him next week, he’ll want to play a set, and I’ll beat him, and he’ll never speak to me again. Why everything? Kathy did not dare put on the Red Sox game.
“Are your folks here?” asked Oliver suddenly.
“No. They’re ... not members,” Kathy answered.
“How come?”
Kathy began fabricating her usual reason in her mind, that her mother was allergic to the sun, that her father didn’t like the ocean because of a wartime trauma in the Pacific. “They can’t afford it,” she said.
“They pay for just you to belong?”
“They have to. I’m on lifeguard duty every day I can and work at the courts and in the lunchroom to help. My younger sister, Jody, waits tables in the cafeteria weekends, and my brother Bobby’s just a baby, so he comes free when Jody’s off and she can watch him.”
“What do you mean, they have to?” Oliver asked.
“This is my tennis coach’s summer job, at this club. I have to work with her at least five times a week. The courts are excellent clay, and there’re good people to hit with. I have to belong because it’s the best thing for my game.”
“You mean you’re serious about tennis? Are you a ranked player and everything?”
“Yes, I guess so,” said Kathy, staring at her toes and wishing the subject would go away.
“Are you going to be a professional?”
“My mom and dad and my coach think I have a chance. First I have to qualify for the National Championships. If I’m lucky enough to get national ranking in my age group, maybe I can take it from there in a few years. I’m number twelve now in fourteen and under, but that’s just New England. One in a million makes it to pro.
“I’m still impressed,” said Oliver.
“Don’t be,” said Kathy.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“Sure I like it. I couldn’t spend twenty hours a week practicing if I didn’t like it. And my mom has to drive me to tournaments and bring the kids along almost every other weekend. My dad has to pay for court fees and lessons and everything.”
“But do you really like it?”
“I want to win the U.S. Open someday,” said Kathy, and she surprised herself with the coldness of her own voice.
Oliver folded his hands between his bony knees. “But do you like it?” he asked again.
“Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Because when you said just then that you wanted to win the U.S. Open, you sounded so awful. I didn’t really mind you laughing at me before, and you sounded just like a ... person then, not just a girl. Now you sound like everybody else at this club. Like the stockbrokers who get drunk here on the beach Sunday afternoons.”
Kathy could think of no reply to that. Not even Julia addressed her so frankly as this odd boy. “I’m sorry,” she murmured after a minute had passed.
“What happens if you don’t win the U.S. Open?” Oliver persisted. “Supposing you don’t make it that far?”
“I’ll have to go to college and just have a normal life, I guess. I’ll have to think about my grades too, not just tennis, or I’ll never get in anywhere good.”
“But what would you like to be more than anything else?”
“I just told you,” said Kathy.
“But if you don’t make it.”
“Well, you’d laugh at me,” said Kathy, playing with the life preserver that hung on the side of her chair.
“No, I won’t.”
“I could never tell a boy,” said Kathy.
“What?” asked Oliver heatedly. “A urologist?”
“What’s that?” Kathy asked.
“A doctor who operates on men’s privates,” said Oliver.
“No! Of course not!” Kathy whispered angrily. “What made you think that of all things?”
“Well,” said Oliver, pushing his glasses up his nose, “if you don’t win the U.S. Open and you don’t want to be a urologist, what do you want to be?”
How did this happen? Kathy asked herself. “Shortstop for the Red Sox,” she said weakly. “I played little league until I was about twelve and then I started tennis full time.”
“Oh! Well, that’s not so bad. I wanted to pitch once. I’m a very good pitcher. I’ve got a nice slider, but I’m too small to make the Yale team.”
Kathy wished she could just tell Oliver how much she liked him for not laughing at her, but instead she pretended to gaze at the dancers. She tapped her foot in time to “Some Enchanted Evening.” “It doesn’t matter, being small,” she said when the music was over. “I’m a shrimp, but I’m still going to beat ’em all.”
“There you go again,” said Oliver, grinning.
“Who on earth was that?” Kathy’s mother asked after Kathy had jumped into the front seat of the station wagon and wrapped a towel around herself for warmth. “Where’s your sweater? Who was that boy?”
“I lent him my sweater,” said Kathy. “He was cold.”
“You lent him your sweater!”
“It’s my tennis sweater. It looks okay on a boy.”
“Kathy, that’s a fifty dollar sweater. Who was that funny looking boy?” Mrs. Bardy ran the fingers of her left hand through her hair, a masculine gesture that Kathy had not inherited and did not like. Her mother did this when she was worried or tired. It occurred to Kathy that her mother seemed worried or tired a great deal of the time. She was always pinching the bridge of her nose under her glasses in weariness. Her mother had never cared for hairdos or clothes or pretty objects, but recently she seemed to care even less for these things. Her time was divided in three parts: work, family, and Kathy’s tennis. As for the latter Kathy wished she could relieve her mother in some way, but that of course was impossible. Once upon a time her mother had been an athlete too, with a strong, hard body that looked so healthy and young that she didn’t need plucked eyebrows or lovely dresses. Ten years behind the counter at the photo shop had made her pallid and soft, or was it just the contrast with Julia’s beautiful mother that Kathy saw? “His name is Oliver English,” said Kathy, “and he goes to Yale.”
“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.