When No One Was Looking Read Free Page A

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