JULIA’S AUNT LIZ WAS always called the Bullet Aunt. This was because as a child in her father’s dry-goods store Aunt Liz had stepped right into the path of a holdup man’s bullet, which had been intended for her father. After that Aunt Liz had been visited every day in the hospital by the entire seventh grade of Valdosta Grammar School until their prayers took hold, the bullet ceased to infect, and Aunt Liz lived to tell the tale, which she did often, even though all this had happened thirty-odd years before.
Kathy had never heard this story from the lips of Aunt Liz herself until the August evening she and Julia stepped off the plane into the fierce Florida heat. August was not the time of year to go to Florida. Julia’s mother had declined to come for that reason. The night Kathy had won the finals at the Newton Country Club tournament, she had been invited over the telephone by Caroline Collins herself to replace Alicia deLong as one of five New England girls to be represented at the National Championships in Boca Raton, which began two days after Newton. Unable quite to believe this honor which had fallen so suddenly at her feet, Kathy had told Julia, and Julia had told her mother, and her mother had immediately telephoned Aunt Liz, who lived smack in the middle of Boca Raton’s Gold Coast. It had been arranged in two minutes’ time that Kathy would stay with Aunt Liz, whose house was but a stone’s throw from the tournament, and that Julia would go along for the fun. Julia’s mother advised Julia that her cousins, Roger and Jeffrey, were two innocent young boys, unaware of northern ways, and that she should not say anything shocking in front of them. “They’re nineteen and seventeen, Mother,” said Julia in exasperation. “It doesn’t matter if they’re forty and forty-three,” Mrs. Redmond had said right back. “Don’t drink, and don’t you dare sit in either of their laps like you did when you were twelve.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“And don’t you girls go ordering a drink on the plane.”
“Yes, Mother. Mother?”
“What?”
“Aren’t you going to tell Kathy to keep out of Roger and Jeffrey’s laps?”
“Katherine has far better manners than you, Julia. Katherine is a young lady. I do not ever worry about Katherine. I worry about you.”
At Logan Airport Oliver looked for a moment as if he were going to kiss Kathy good-bye. Then he thought better of it, stood back like a soldier who had broken ranks, and waved instead. Kathy, her precious rackets under one arm, waved until she could see no one behind the glare of the morning sun. She waved again through the tiny window of the plane, although she knew her family and Oliver could no longer see her. The plane, the first Kathy had been on in her life, shot down the runway and lifted into the air. She was not so much struck with the extraordinary mechanical miracle of this happening as she was transported, suddenly, with the certainty that this was the beginning of something new, and she was no more in control of the something new than she was of the huge machine which carried her as a helpless passenger. Julia ordered a glass of wine for each of them. The stewardess, wary of their ages, seemed disinclined to bring them until she spotted Kathy’s several rackets lying on the extra seat and for some reason changed her mind. The wine swallowed in one gulp, Kathy felt both expansive and groggy. “I feel funny,” she admitted to Julia.
“Good funny or bad funny?” Julia asked, knowing better than to guzzle her glass of wine.
“I feel as if I’m sort of in a room all alone.”
“You shouldn’t drink so fast.”
“My folks have to go to Springfield today. They have to move my grandmother to a new nursing home. Dedham ... Kathy’s voice trailed off. She didn’t want to say to Julia that the home in Dedham was cheaper. This even her parents had not easily admitted. Kathy would not have known particularly that this was a fact but for Jody. Jody’s remarks, both rueful and triumphant, made it clear that she, Jody, knew more than Kathy and that it was her duty, so to speak, to keep Kathy’s feet grounded on the earth by reminding her of her shortcomings. “We can’t afford to keep Grandma in the Springfield home anymore” was all Jody had to say to release in Kathy a jerk of guilt, for Kathy knew her tennis had cost several thousand dollars so far and that the better she did, according to hushed late-night squabbles between her parents, the more it would cost in the future.
Kathy closed her eyes against the vibration of the plane and the nausea the wine produced in her gullet. “Rotten luck,” Marty had told her the day before. It was Marty’s sharp view that Kathy’s first air fare should not coincide so closely with her grandmother’s being moved. “Don’t put those two things together in your head,” Marty had warned. “They have nothing to do with each other. You don’t understand now, but someday you will.” Understanding this logic was beyond Kathy, as Marty had guessed. Since she had been invited to the tournament Kathy had not looked at a magazine or newspaper for fear of coming upon advertisements that included Florida air fares. Well, I’m here, Kathy told herself. She avoided Julia’s conversation by pretending to stare out the window. She wanted no questions about nursing homes. She had never told Julia very much about her grandmother. The contrast between their respective grandmothers was too great, and nursing homes were part of the no-man’s-land between her family and Julia’s. The plane passed through a cloud, leaving tiny droplets on the thick window. Then it struck the light, and Kathy found herself staring directly down at a mass of still, white clouds that sat broodingly over the tip of Long Island. Like looking down at heaven, she thought suddenly. No sign of Ruth.
Had it not been for the “turn of events,” as her mother called it, Kathy knew she might not be in this plane at this moment. She might never have won the Newton championship. Mrs. Collins of the New England Lawn Tennis Association might never have made that wonderful telephone call inviting Kathy to Florida.
Kathy could still not reconcile the facts that Ruth had been a superb, strong swimmer and yet had drowned. Mornings, lying in bed, Kathy had constructed a vivid half-dream. She tried again and again to twist the outcome of Ruth’s dive. Always the large body in the blue tank suit slipped powerfully into the pool and swam uneventfully to the other side. Then Kathy would open her eyes and know that this was not true. Had there been a puddle on the tiles in which she had skidded? Had she dived clumsily and swallowed too much water, or wrenched a muscle doing that exhaustive butterfly stroke? No one would ever know.
“Why are your folks moving your grandmother?” came Julia’s question, too quickly for Kathy. It alarmed her like the sharp surprise ringing of the fire bell during a study hall.
“I don’t know,” she answered quickly. “I guess it’s a nicer place, and Dedham is closer to Plymouth and all.”
“You look sad, Kathy.”
“I do?”
“Why don’t you have your grandmother live at home instead? I’ve read that even the ritziest nursing homes make the inmates feel like dogs sent off to the pound to die.”
“She needs a lot of medical care,” Kathy answered. The shrieking of the plane’s engines seemed suddenly to come from inside herself, a near-human sound.
“But surely you could get a nurse...
“Julia! That would cost about three hundred bucks a week, for crying out loud!” Kathy snapped without intending to snap or release this information.
“I’m sorry,” Julia said. “That was an awful thing to say. My parents couldn’t afford it either,” she added in a loyal voice.
“Don’t say lies! They could so. Look at your grandmother. She had a nurse for six months before she died, not to mention a maid and gardener.”
“Kathy, I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry.”
“Forget it,” said Kathy shortly. Why, she asked herself, am I doing this to Julia just when I need her most?
“I can’t forget it. I hurt your feelings, and I’m sorry. I feel awful.”
“Don’t feel awful. Just please don’t ever look down your nose at me again.”
“I wasn’t. I was trying to make you feel better, and I said the wrong thing. You never, never told me anything about your grandmother before, except she was in a beautiful place with big green lawns around it.”
“Well, she isn’t. Anymore.”
“Kathy, please. Money doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter a bit.”
“That’s a good one,” Kathy answered. She was aware of the onset of another headache. It began at the base of her neck and spread as if it had fingers extending to her temples. She tried to look out the window again but was only reminded that the window seat was hers because Julia had been on so many planes before it didn’t matter to her to see out. “Money means absolutely nothing to me,” said Julia. “I hate people with money. That’s why Daddy didn’t want me to go to a private school with all the little rich girls and their expensive birthday parties and their own ponies.”
“Julia, you just don’t understand,” said Kathy, and she turned to find Julia crying in the most silent and dignified way she had ever seen anyone cry. She felt as confused as she would have had Julia suddenly fallen and begun to spit blood.
“I remember something,” said Julia after she had drawn a settling breath. “The first time I went over to your house, I think it was. When we were both six. In the hall on the shelf were two boxes. One was labeled SHOE MONEY, KATHY and the other SHOE MONEY, JODY. When my mother came to pick me up, the boxes had been taken away. I wouldn’t have thought anything, except I asked my mother what shoe money was, and she told me never to mention such a thing to you or your mother or I would hurt your family in some way. Another time I remember having dinner at your house. Jody was about four, and she said it was the first steak you’d had since Christmas. Your mother gave her a look that could have killed a horse. I felt so ashamed of myself for being different. I never thought you were different. I used to go to bed at night wishing we were poor.”
“Julia, that is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“It’s true.”
“Well, if it’s true,” said Kathy, rubbing the back of her neck, “it’s stupid. It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“You feel humiliated, and you want to humiliate me back. I don’t blame you at all,” Julia added, “but I wish you knew how little money matters to me. Maybe if you win really big, Kathy, and get going like the streak of lightning everybody says you are, you’ll turn pro in a couple of years. When you start making scads of money like Tracy Austin or somebody, you’ll realize how pitifully little it means.”
“When I pay off a few bills, maybe.”
“Bills?” Julia asked.
Kathy sighed loudly. “My father and mother combined make just enough to get by,” she began, biting off the ends of her words. “With Bobby’s doctor bills, which come to about seven hundred since January, and the mortgage and paying off the car loan and my father’s new Rolleiflex, not to mention Grandma and not to mention my tennis, we’re about three thousand behind. They make what amounts to peanuts, both of them put together.”
“They do?”
“Julia, I bet you don’t have the faintest idea how much your family has. I bet your folks have never had a fight about money in their lives.”
“No. They don’t fight at all, really. Sometimes I wish they would.”
“Oh. You think that’d be a lot of fun too? Like being poor?”
“I didn’t say that. I meant only that it isn’t as easy as you seem to think...
“Not easy? Not easy having somebody else cook meals and wash the dishes every night? Not easy living in a house big enough for ten people? Not easy going to Spain for a Christmas vacation?” Julia was silent. Was this all coming out, Kathy asked herself, because she’d had a glass of wine? “Do you think I like the idea—my folks like the idea of putting my mother’s mother in a nursing home? Don’t you think I know it’s like putting her away in an ASPCA shelter? Have you ever been in a nursing home?”
“No,” said Julia in a tiny voice.
“The smell alone is enough to make you throw up. That and the noises the old people make. The food—all brown and gunky and predigested. The skin on those old people. My God, it’s all waxy and white. Even the Black people look gray.”
Again Julia was silent.
The sea spun by far beneath Kathy’s window, shining like a fish skin, smooth as an egg. Julia’s half-full wine glass vibrated in the elastic pocket of the seat in front of her.
“Some people,” Julia said at last, “act as if I stole—as if my family went out and stole the money they happen to have. You know who those kids are, Kathy. Now you’ve got the same chip on your shoulder. Now there is a terrible thing between us.”
“Nothing is there between us that wasn’t there all along,” Kathy answered, still staring out the window.
“Well, maybe, but I never meant to hurt you. It’s what you mean to do that counts.”
Kathy thought this statement did not ring true. After all, she had never meant to deplete her family’s savings by being good at tennis. Nevertheless, this was happening. It was a fact of life. “It’s okay,” she answered in a dull voice.
“No, it’s not,” said Julia. “Don’t say it’s okay if it isn’t. I know I’m going to sound stupid, Kathy—just like my mother when she tries to sound like Gone with the Wind or Wuthering Heights, but I wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world. I see I have. I apologize from the bottom of my heart. Kathy, you’re my best friend in the whole world, and I love you dearly.”
The plane lurched slightly. A stewardess walking down the aisle did not seem aware of it. She bounced along, smiling frostily. Kathy tensed against her seat and pulled her belt tight. She shut her eyes against the stewardess’s inquiring glance. How like my mother’s that smile is, Kathy thought. Cold and condensed. I hope I never smile like that. For Kathy to show her feelings just now was not in her to do. Julia was waiting anxiously for some reply, but Kathy might have been at the very bottom of the ocean looking up at a distant green daylight and afraid of the bends if she shot to the surface. “It’s my fault,” she said at last. “I’m mad at Jody for giving me a hard time, and I feel guilty about Grandma, and I’m scared to death about this tournament.”
Julia relaxed and finished her wine. “But you’ll do so well. You know you’ll do well,” she said.
Kathy smiled a little. Her head still pounded. “To know I can beat everybody there is professional,” she answered. “To know that I will is hack.”
“Now who’s looking down whose nose?” Julia asked, laughing.
And Kathy laughed at herself. “Ah ... you always know when I’m quoting Marty, don’t you?” she said.
“Always,” said Julia. “Just as you know when I’m quoting Irene Beaufort Redmond.” And laughing still, she beckoned in just her mother’s manner to the pert, frosty stewardess and ordered another glass of wine for each of them.
If anyone could be more disposed to hugs and kisses than Julia’s mother, it was Julia’s mother’s sister, Aunt Liz. Between hugs Aunt Liz admonished Julia for not visiting often enough, for not living in the South, for having a Yankee Daddy. Then she kissed and hugged Kathy and said it was thrilling to have a famous tennis player as their house guest. Kathy protested that she was not at all famous, but Aunt Liz said, “Fiddle de dee. You will be soon.” Then she asked Kathy to call her Aunt Liz, a thing Kathy did with no trouble, as she was unsure of Aunt Liz’s last name.
Neither was she sure if it was Jeffrey or Roger who answered the call to drive her to the Hazard Bay Racket Club for evening practice. Whichever he was, he only said, “We’ll take my car,” and so they climbed into a Jaguar slightly older than Aunt Liz’s Jaguar. The brothers, as Julia had said, did indeed look very much alike, and they were both very attractive. Jeffrey/Roger told Kathy he was going to be a clerk to a judge, or was it a page in the state senate? Kathy couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. He wore only a pair of old-fashioned, baggy navy blue bathing trunks. He steered the car with one finger. A toothpick twirled in the corner of his mouth, and in his light blue eyes, which were fixed on the road ahead, was an expression of continual amusement. He did not seem to think Kathy was a famous tennis player as did his mother, nor was he the least bit curious about her or anything she might be doing. In his company Kathy felt quite out of her depth. If Julia’s parents had real money, then Aunt Liz had even more of it. She wore a gold choker under the collar of her golf shirt, her license plates read LIZ-1, and she paid someone to clip the hedges around her house into the shape of large birds. At least Kathy guessed they were birds, but she didn’t dare ask Jeffrey/Roger for fear of sounding dumb. The expression of perpetual amusement in Jeffrey/Roger’s face also frightened her, and she was relieved to jump out of the car at the entrance gates to the Hazard Bay Racket Club. Before she strode down the main path to get a copy of the draw and to search out a practice partner, to join the girls and boys who were walking around as if they all knew one another very well, Kathy fingered a wall shyly, hoping not to be noticed. The wall was covered with red hibiscus blossoms and looked as if it might crumble at a touch. Coral and adobe suggested themselves to Kathy as she leaned up against the wall’s rough surface. A lizard scooted down it and disappeared into a vine, causing her to jump in surprise. The hot air hung here as it did in overheated train cars with sealed windows from which there was no exit. Flowers seemed to grow without benefit of earth, on walls, in crevices, in piles of what appeared to be crumbled shells. Would a strange flower take root on her hand if she were to sleep outside all night? Were there poisonous snakes? Did the coconuts fall from the tall palms and hit people on the head during matches? She pictured herself being hit by a coconut as she was about to serve, but this only reminded her sharply of Ruth.
According to Oliver, the day Ruth had died, people at the Plymouth Club had talked of little else. The day after that their interest trailed off, as there was little to discuss, and then life had continued in a perfect string as it had done before. Time closed up over Ruth’s existence as the high tides closed up twice a day over the jetty, leaving no trace of the rocks. There had been a day or two when people felt squeamish about using the pool. First the children, who didn’t know or understand, had gone in, then the adults, who knew better than to be queasy, and at last all the teen-agers. Since almost no one had ever noticed anything about Ruth or her family, she was, as Kathy saw it, like a dead letter.
Kathy walked straight through the unfamiliar Hazard Bay Racket Club grounds and found the beach. While jogging her two miles down the sand she also found a Californian to practice with whose name she instantly forgot.
As many as sixty times in a row Kathy and the girl from California slammed a ball back and forth across the net in the heavy dusk. There was still, for Kathy, an exquisite wonder to this ritual. It drained her of worries and of sadness. In this simple near-dance with a stranger she was consumed with joy in the execution of every perfect stroke. Her happiness, unfettered as a very young child’s, mounted until she was lost in it, grinning at her nameless partner, who grinned back from across the net.
No scores were posted, no tricks contemplated. The girl was an excellent player. What a thing it is, Kathy thought, to be happy about that and not try to beat her. She was aware that she loved the game best when hitting without hatred and without calculation. She also knew that this was not supposed to be so and that it was a pity she felt that way because that feeling would likely trip her up someday, as Marty had warned. Nonetheless, as the other girl returned a particularly difficult backhand with a yelp of pure ecstasy and Kathy returned that shot low and hard to exactly the same spot, catching the girl out of position and causing her to laugh out loud at herself, Kathy supposed that this exhilaration and unity with another person was found seldom, except by people in lifeboats and catchers on trapezes.
“Come,” said the California girl. “Come meet some of the kids. There’s a welcoming party tonight in the main clubhouse. Food and everything. Are you staying with a family or in the motel?”
Kathy followed the girl uneasily. She did not want to meet the kids. On the one hand she was frightened of so many strangers all of whom seemed to know each other. On the other hand she didn’t want to appear a silly, frightened loner. “Who’s your first round tomorrow?” the girl asked. Kathy answered the unfamiliar name, stumbling over it.
Oh, ho!” said the California girl. “Lucky you. You know she’s only ten? Playing up.”
“No, I’ve never heard of her.”
“Couple of issues back Tennis World did a piece on her and a bunch of other babies. She’s on the cover. I know her. She comes from Santa Monica. I think you can take her though. Keep away from her backhand. It’s like a cannon. Most of the kids hate her. She’s spoiled. Cries all the time when she loses. Little brat. Clothes all custom made with her initials on the collar. Copied straight from Tinley designs ... The girl turned and fixed her friendly slanted hazel eyes on Kathy’s dress. “Yours are made by hand too, though, aren’t they?” she asked.
“My mother ... likes to sew,” Kathy answered, feeling herself blush. Kathy owned six wash-and-wear tennis outfits made from store-bought patterns by her mother. The dresses fit her well and were quite pretty; however Kathy longed for a Bogner tennis dress or even a pleated heavy linen Fred Perry skirt. Those things were unaffordable by her family, and there was simply no chance of having them. It was enough that she wore out a pair of twenty-five-dollar sneakers every three weeks. As Kathy and the California girl neared the clubhouse she noticed the clothes of the other players who sauntered around. Each one looked like a model for one or another maker’s outfits. Suddenly she hated her plain white dress with the red and white gingham facing. The party would be twice as unnerving since Kathy felt as conspicuous as if she were dressed in black.
“We’ll shower,” said the girl. “Then we’ll go have a beer. I know some kids who’ve sneaked in a case of Coors.”
“No, thank you,” said Kathy, suddenly stopping short of the clubhouse. “I’m expecting a ride. It’s late. I have to wait out by the gate.”
“Well, see you around,” said the girl and waved.
A pair of high French doors opened into the central clubhouse, revealing to Kathy what lay inside. There was a fountain with revolving colored spotlights and four marble cupids. At the bottom of it coins winked and glittered. Lost wishes for tournaments past? There was a junior boys’ tournament going on somewhere nearby, and so the room was filled with boys and girls. They stood and talked in groups, not in a way, Kathy decided, she had ever stood in a group but in the easy way grown-ups did. Near the fountain stood a girl Kathy recognized immediately from pictures in tennis magazines. Johnson or Jackson was her name, nationally ranked about sixth in fourteen and under. A Black girl from Detroit, or was it Cleveland? She seemed to be looking for someone. Another highly ranked player, or another Black player? Kathy wondered, it never occurring to her that the girl might feel as lonely as she, because she was not only a good player but as beautiful and poised as a full-grown woman.
Kathy, keep your mouth closed when you smile, your braces reflect. Kathy, you walk like a boy, said her hygiene teacher’s voice in her head, and silently Kathy stepped backward and walked away down the driveway, the crumbling stucco wall at her side under her fingertips. She reached the outer gates and stood by them in the shadow of a thick, squat palm until Jeffrey/Roger should come back for her.
Aunt Liz herself came for Kathy. Because Kathy could think of nothing else to say, she asked Aunt Liz to tell her the bullet story, which Aunt Liz was delighted to do, stretching the details out until the moment she pulled into the driveway and turned off the ignition, the air-conditioner, and the stereo, which had played some unenduring Broadway show tunes the whole of the trip.
Dinner was served by a butler, whose name Kathy did not catch, on the terrace beside the pool. The presence of Jeffrey and Roger, whom she could not yet tell apart, the butler, and Aunt Liz came between Kathy and Julia, and Julia seemed more a part of them than Kathy wished. Aunt Liz sat low in her leather-padded wrought-iron chair. Kathy’s eyes took in the whole of her, although she tried not to stare, and not to gobble all those unidentifiable things on her plate that lay under various sauces.
There was, to begin with, Aunt Liz’s turquoise-blue silk blouse and the deeply suntanned face, nearly as dark as a new penny. The gold choker had been replaced by pearls. In her conversation Aunt Liz made easy reference to past events and people, all unknown to Kathy but all apparently extremely important or amusing. This served to make Kathy feel desperately ignorant, and she looked across to Julia for support, but Julia’s eyes did not catch hers. Aunt Liz’s right hand bore two diamond rings, and it held and set down a wine glass without allowing the glass to make a circle on the tablecloth as Kathy’s glass had done six times so far. Each of Aunt Liz’s fingernails was a perfect oval containing a perfect white moon, and her hair moved in the slight breeze as if it had been orchestrated just so.
Kathy wondered how such a woman could ever have thrown a vase at Julia’s mother, since she was positive Aunt Liz was not the type ever to be angry, dirty, or even to go to the bathroom very often, if at all. A brief argument occurred about whether Kathy’s telephone call home should be made collect, which Kathy lost. As she excused herself to make the call Aunt Liz remarked that she was sorry to have forgotten to have steak that night but that she hoped it would not affect Kathy’s match the next day. It was Aunt Liz’s view that athletes ate only large amounts of steak and raw eggs.
The telephone rang ten times before Kathy remembered that her family was probably somewhere between Dedham and Plymouth, possibly still at the new nursing home with her grandmother. Evidently it had been a long day’s work. She could see Bobby’s head resting in Jody’s lap in a waiting room somewhere. The lounge at the Springfield home had been pleasant enough with comfortable overstuffed chairs and fresh flowers in crystal vases. Would this second home be all that much worse? Would it be dirty and dreary with plastic armless furniture like the bus-station waiting room in Boston? She remembered the salmon-colored plastic lounges there. They had stuck to the backs of her thighs one hot night.
“Marty!” said Kathy aloud before she dialed Marty’s number, as if to assure herself that she was going to call Marty. Her fingernail caught slightly in a beige silk sofa cushion, causing a run in the material. Kathy turned the pillow over and placed it at the far end of the sofa. As she dialed the number she had written on the side of her sneaker in case she lost it she stared straight into the face of an Inca dancer that had been assembled out of copper and brass pieces and stuck to the wall opposite her. He was very large and expressionless with only a suggestion of a face, as the metal bits, like small wings and shelves, were meant to be an abstract design. Kathy told Marty about the ten-year-old whose picture had been on the cover of Tennis World.
“You know who she is, don’t you?” Marty asked.
“No.”
“Kathy, with one of the most famous last names in California tennis?”
“Oh, gee, I didn’t know there was another sister,” said Kathy.
“Well, there is, and she’s it, and you can take her,” said Marty, “even if she has been coached for nine and a half years and has played against her older sisters and brother, not to mention her old man, who’s the biggest coach in southern California. Keep in mind, she’s only ten. She won’t have much of a serve yet, so don’t hang back too much. She’ll have a fast return herself, since her brother and sisters will have served to her as hard as they can. I know these young superstar types. She’ll have learned to cover the whole court, so this is what you do. Are you listening?”
“Yes, Marty.”
“Don’t give her what she’s used to. Don’t play a base line game. She’ll wait for you to make an error in a long rally. Spin your serves, even your first serves. Dink her and lob her and get her off balance. Act like you’re having a ball doing it, smile, and you’ll drive her crazy and have her where you want her, mad as a hornet. Remember one thing.”
“Yes, Marty.”
“She won’t have much court sense yet, she’s too inexperienced. You have to play really mean to get court sense, and her sisters won’t have played that mean. Watch for signals. Since her father is her coach, he won’t do anything, but her mother may signal from the stands. She can’t stop herself. You’ll recognize her because she looks like Judy Garland after a bad night. If you see the little angel looking up at her mother or see a hand raised or anything, call the referee. Only if you’re sure. She’ll lose her concentration after that. Remember, little Miss Muffet’s old man has put about forty grand into each of his kids, and this one’s a spoiled brat. You play fair but mean and make her feel ten years old. It’ll mess up her game, and she’s got it coming. Who’s your second round?”
“Either the seventh seed or a girl named Foster from New Jersey.”
“It’ll be the seed. Where’s she from?”
“Port Washington.”
“Well, don’t let her ranking bother you. Just be a little hungrier and a little better than Miss Port Washington. She’s probably loaded. Most of those kids are. You know Angie McKenzie, the sixteen-year-old whiz, at Wimbledon this year? She’s a Port Washington special too. Her last tournament she was playing one of the older pros. Someone in her thirties. Anyway, McKenzie started off the match with a rally of a hundred and thirty shots from the base line before one of them netted a ball. She completely exhausted the other player. Nearly gave her a heat stroke. I want you to know what some of the girls do. There’s no way you can lose to this girl if you use your head and play your own game. Don’t get mad and don’t get scared. Remember that dummy who almost beat you at Quincy ...
“Marty, please. The girl drowned ...
“That hardly makes her a saint, my dear, or a good player. Just keep certain things in the forefront of your decent little Christian mind. Tennis is full of smarties like Angie McKenzie who’ll do anything to win. You have a reputation preceding you for blowing your stack, and I want that reputation killed right now in this tournament. If you get a bad call, stare straight ahead. If you double fault three times, follow it up with three aces. I want you to go into every match as cool as ice inside. You do that, and Miss Port Washington is going to think a snake bit her after the first set. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, Marty.”
“Tell me what you understand.”
“I’ve got to control my temper.”
“If you do, you’ll be a leg up on every opponent. Believe me they’ll all have a couple of notes about your famous thin skin. They’ll try to get to you. Make it a waste of time. Did you do your two miles?”
“Yup, and it’s about a hundred and ninety degrees here.”
“Don’t eat much breakfast. Go into both matches knowing you’re going to egg both girls. Just remember they’ve both had every advantage that you haven’t. Their parents are rolling. They have private courts at home. Private lessons at the age of four. Girls like that are trained like racehorses. Born with a silver spoon, Kathy, full of caviar. Grandma puts a grand in the savings bank every birthday, and they leave a gut-strung racket out in the rain and Daddy buys them another one. Are you there?”
“Yes, Marty. I’m listening.”
“Good. Call me tomorrow night same time. I know people down there. They’ll be watching you.”
Kathy said good-bye and rubbed her ear as if Marty’s words were still lodged in it. Trying her own number again, she gazed at Aunt Liz’s living room as the distant telephone rang unanswered. She definitely could not recall ever having been in a room as clean as this in all her fourteen years of being in various rooms. She hung up the telephone and, checking to make sure she was unobserved, stepped cautiously around, going first to the copper and brass Indian, or so he seemed to be. She looked closely at the gleaming pieces of metal and decided that if such a thing were to be in her own living room, she would have placed tiny objects on each of the shelflike precipices. Perhaps pebbles or coins. The pure white carpet was as soft as down and as deep as the second knuckle on her finger. This was not a room in which a somersault had ever been turned, a dog had ever lifted a leg, or a piece of pizza had landed cheese side down—And you’d better get out of it before anything happens, Kathy advised herself. She opened the sliding glass door and between two whispering palms stepped out into the night.
Once she had seen a photograph of a night sky as luminescent as this one. In a National Geographic some years back she had pored over a picture of the Taj Mahal at midnight. Behind the minarets lay a deep indigo heaven as cloudless and star ridden as this. How must it be, Kathy wondered, to come down to this place straight out of a Massachusetts February? How must it feel to stand in this warmth with your feet still cold from the Logan Airport parking lot? Julia’s family flew down to Florida frequently in the wintertime, as Mrs. Redmond complained that the New England dampness got into her bone marrow. Julia came too, missing school, and as it didn’t affect her grades, the teachers didn’t mind. Julia, Kathy reminded herself, was also born with a silver spoon and as a child had left any amount of things out in the rain, and these things had been replaced without too much fuss. There had been a bicycle which rusted after two weeks behind the lilac bush. Then there was a doll. Kathy had never seen the doll, but Julia’s mother was fond of telling the doll story. At four years of age Julia had been given a French porcelain doll by this very Aunt Liz. It had real hair and a silk brocade ball gown. Julia had forgotten it one day and left it on the grass, where it was ruined by a northeaster; it was found in the woods a week later, crushed by a fallen tree. Julia was to be punished for this, “and we really tried,” Mrs. Redmond had said with a resigned chuckle, “but she refused to sleep for a week without it, and when she went on a hunger strike, we had to get her another.” Julia claimed not to remember the event, but Kathy guessed it was true since Mrs. Redmond told the story often without changing the details.
Kathy took one more glance through the glass into the living room where she’d felt so ill at ease. In this house, in the Taj Mahal itself, she decided, Julia would probably scorn the furniture just as she did at home. In the Blue Room of the White House she would sit with her back on the floor and her legs propped up against some priceless antique chair. Her presence anywhere would be as inviolable as the greenness of leaves or the drumming of raindrops.
Long after Kathy had gone to bed, she opened her eyes on a yet sleepless night. She listened to the pounding surf outside and to Julia’s regular breathing on the other side of the room, wishing the two rhythms would coincide exactly. Think only about tennis, she repeated to herself, trying to re-create the sound of Marty’s voice, or her mother’s. Don’t start another argument with Jodi. Don’t think about Grandma. Stop picturing Oliver when you caught him in the shower. Stop picturing Ruth not drowning. She changed position for what seemed to be the thousandth time that night. The sheets were soft and slithery under her. If I win it all, and never stop, Kathy reckoned, I’ll have everything someday. One pro tournament championship with a big check, and I can pay back every cent my lessons and sneakers and everything else has cost. One pro tournament, and I’ll never sleep on those awful muslin sheets that Mother cuts in half when they get holes and sews up again with that uncomfortable seam. At last the sound of the ocean breaking on the beach caught up with her thinking, and she slept. It seemed after a minute that her eyes had opened again, this time on the inside of her head.
What she saw was one of the three dwarves that stood in the front yard of their neighbors’ house. He had been there as long as Kathy could remember, although she did not know the reason why the people next door had chosen such things to be in their front yard. Upon him the snow had fallen and the November leaves. Summer sun had bleached his red hat pink. Against him Kathy had occasionally tossed a stone, and so his body was chipped. The dream had occurred to her several times recently. In it Kathy found herself to be in deep terror of this dwarf, although he did not move; she ran from him because under his quaint gnome’s hat were Dutch boy bangs.
“Mommy, Mommy!” she heard herself cry out but in a deeper voice than her own and in a pitch so desperate it might have come from a woman who had been suddenly shot.
“Kathy, what’s wrong? What’s the matter?” Julia was shaking her out of the dream.
“What?”
The bedside lamp was switched on. “Kathy, you’re dreaming. Wake up! It’s okay. I’m here. You’re down here in Florida with me and Aunt Liz. You’re okay!”
Kathy blinked in the light. She felt Julia’s hands firmly holding her shoulders, and she felt herself gag. She pushed Julia aside and made her way to the bathroom.
When she returned, an astonished Julia was still sitting on the bed. “Is it the heat?” Julia asked. “I don’t understand why they have August tournaments in Florida of all places. They must be crazy. I’d die of the heat.”
“Southern kids play outdoors all summer,” said Kathy, shaking her head. “They can’t just place the Nationals in Maine every year, you know.” The sight of Julia in her familiar pink forget-me-not nightgown was comforting, and Kathy managed a weak smile. “Sorry,” she said, “it’s like this before every tournament.” She tried but could not remember the dream.
“You never told me that! You mean you get sick before every match?”
“Usually in the morning. I never wanted to tell you,” Kathy added.
“But that’s awful, Kathy. I never imagined it was so hard for you. It looks so easy when you play.”
Kathy shrugged. “A lot of the girls have it worse than me,” she said. “You know super number-one Jennifer Robbins? The one with the hundred-mile-an-hour serve and the big boobs?”
“You’ve mentioned her.”
“She told me, one day when we were waiting out a thunderstorm, she not only gets sick before every big match, but her whole insides turn to water. She goes out and murders all her opponents anyway, so it doesn’t matter. She eats nothing but rice and boiled steak the day before, but it doesn’t help. She just tries to find a ladies’ room away from everybody else.”
Julia winced visibly at this description. “I’d quit tennis if that happened to me,” she said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” said Kathy, smiling a little more. “Even you’d lose your sense of modesty after a while. No one cares, really. We’ve all heard a hundred girls get sick or cry or sit moaning in a chair all doubled up with cramps. In a few months you wouldn’t even notice.”
“Are you still angry at me?” Julia asked suddenly.
Immediately Kathy switched out the light and got back into bed. “No,” she said. After a moment had passed in which she listened once more to the insects and the ocean, she added, “You know how I am.”
“How?”
“Well, I’m not too Yankee, as you always say, for some things. I get terribly mad when I play badly, and I swear and cry. I guess I’m not too Yankee to come to you whenever I’m upset, but ... I’m too Yankee, I guess, to be able to put things into words the way you do. To say I’m sorry ... or much of anything.”
“I know,” said Julia kindly. “It’s okay.”
“It’s funny. I hate admitting things like this, but this evening over at the Hazard Bay Racket Club I wouldn’t go in and meet anyone. I was scared of them, and I waited out by the entrance for half an hour rather than face all those in-group looking kids. The whole time I waited, I felt like the world’s biggest chicken. I wish you’d been there, Julia.”
“Kathy?”
“What?”
“Someday soon you’re going to be a better player than anyone at that silly club tonight, and you’re going to start believing in yourself.”
Kathy won both her matches the following day. The famous ten-year-old she dispensed with in twelve games, and the seventh seed from Port Washington in sixteen games. She felt a twinge of pity for the ten-year-old, who looked to be only eight. She was a thin girl with flaxen pony tails, almost colorless blue eyes, and a French tennis outfit that would cost at least a hundred dollars in most pro shops. In the locker room after the match she sat in a hard wooden chair and sobbed as if she had been suddenly orphaned. Kathy knew the girl was probably afraid to face her mother, because she’d seen the mother’s face just before the match point was served. Kathy did not identify the woman’s features, having no idea what Judy Garland looked like after a bad night, but she could single out that rigid, dark expression, the set of the jaw, and the eyes, as offended as a chained dog’s. Kathy hoped the girl had at least a teddy bear and that it wouldn’t be taken away.
The other girl, Kathy’s second-round opponent, simply disappeared after the match. She had thrown her racket to the ground and not retrieved it. These incidents Kathy reported to both her mother and Marty that night on the telephone to their satisfaction.
What she did not tell her mother was that Aunt Liz had observed that Kathy had every right to look just as snazzy as the rest of the girls and had taken her down to the local tennis boutique and advised her to choose three or four new outfits. Kathy did not mind this slight to her mother’s tailoring or her family’s income quite as much as she hankered after a real Bogner tennis dress. Although they cost over seventy dollars apiece, Aunt Liz paid for all three as casually as she would have paid for three Cokes.
Perhaps the dresses brought her the unimagined luck, for Kathy won and won until she reached the finals, where she lost to a girl whose picture had appeared in Sports Illustrated. By that time she had been interviewed by a local Florida paper and by a Boston Globe reporter and had received a congratulatory telegram from Kenneth B. Hammer of the Plymouth public schools. This she threw away, as it made her uneasy.