Tell Me if the Lovers Are Losers

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  These times Ann remembered. And the stubborn way Hildy refused to alter that original team, despite Carol’s arguments that she was “twice, thrice, ten times the player Ann is,” and despite a jealous collective anger among those freshmen excluded from this team. These things passed, and Hildy’s team played together, most often with Eloise in position and Hildy coaching. Hildy coached all the freshman teams. She coached everyone except Niki, whom she left alone.

  They practiced on weekends too. It was not always convenient, but the girls always made their way to the court. Niki was sure they were ready for the first match game. Hildy agreed, but seemed unimpressed by the challenge. Ann was nervous. She hoped aloud she would sprain a wrist and so cause Eloise to take her place. Eloise declared her prayers for Ann’s continued good health.

  chapter 4

  Niki’s father wrote to say he had a new girl friend. He enclosed a photograph of her, and another of the two of them. Niki’s father looked young, a handsome young man—slender, golden brown, muscular He had a shock of brown hair and even, white teeth. Ann, whose father always looked like a respectable, responsible man, whose father would never have been taken for anything other than the Philadelphia lawyer he was, gaped. “He looks so young,” she protested.

  “Well he is. He’s not thirty-nine yet.” Niki studied the second photograph. “What about her?”

  Ann looked at it. “How old is she?”

  “He doesn’t say. That means he thinks she’s pretty young for him. Or he thinks I’ll think or somebody’ll think. Hildy? What would you say?”

  “She looks sixteen, doesn’t she?”

  “He’s not that bad. He doesn’t seduce kids.”

  “Perhaps older than she looks? Where I live she would be sixteen or seventeen. But in California, where everybody stays younger longer—twenty perhaps.”

  “I can’t ever tell people’s ages,” Ann said.

  “Whatever, it’s too young,” Niki announced.

  “What can you do?” Ann shrugged, thinking that this blasé pose rather became her.

  “What I always do, tell him I’ll go live with my mother,” Niki said.

  “Huh? You mean you’d go live with her? After all these years when you haven’t seen her?”

  “I haven’t seen her and I don’t want to. I didn’t say I would go, I said I’d tell him I would.”

  “A threat?” Ann knew better than to try threatening her father. But she didn’t have a father who looked, and apparently acted, more like a brother. You could threaten a brother. But a father . . . .

  “A threat, Annie. Sometimes it’s the only way to bring him around.” Niki shrugged. “He gets fixated on these things.”

  “These women,” Ann corrected.

  “Not just girl friends. Matter of fact, he’s pretty good about his girl friends. Jobs, attitudes, causes; those. He gets idées fixes.”

  Hildy’s golden head turned toward them, a halo of lamplight behind it. “Your mother is not dead?” she asked Niki.

  “Not a bit of it. They’re divorced.”

  “I am sorry,” Hildy said.

  “Don’t mention it, it’s nothing unusual,” Niki said, then asked, “Don’t people where you live get divorced?”

  Hildy shook her head.

  “They do where I live,” Ann said. “Some of them.”

  “My parents were divorced when I was about a year old. My dad has custody. He always did.”

  “How is that so?” asked Hildy.

  “He wanted it,” Niki shrugged.

  “And your mother?”

  “She didn’t want it. Me.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Don’t ask me. I was just a little kid. My mother lives in Mexico now, somewhere, on the alimony. She never married again, although she’s had plenty of lovers. Or at least Dad says so. I don’t know for sure. He hasn’t married either. I’ve come in handy for that. If some dame gets serious, he just tells her I can’t stand her and he has to put his daughter first. And I usually can’t stand them, not as mothers.”

  “Do you ever hear from your mother?” Ann asked.

  “Not since I was little. She stuck around the area when I was young, until I started school. After that she moved out into the Big Sur and I’d go spend a month in the summer with her. Her and her friends. We’d camp, do wilderness stuff. I don’t know—I liked her but she scared me. She had this deep theatrical voice, and everything that happened to her was so serious. You know? Her life was a series of crises. I never knew what was going on. I don’t know.” She looked at the two photographs again, jabbing her finger at them meditatively. “I mean, Dad has his faults, but he’s OK. You can figure out what he wants.”

  “Doesn’t your mother—” Hildy began, but Niki interrupted her “No. Not since she moved to Mexico. I was ten I guess, or nine. And I’m just as glad, let me tell you.”

  “That isn’t right,” Hildy said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Niki shrugged.

  “A mother should not leave her child,” Hildy continued.

  “There’s no law that says so,” Niki said.

  “She must be a strange woman,” Hildy said. “Your mother A bad woman.”

  “Now wait a minute.” Niki’s voice had shades of anger to it. “She had her own life to lead, didn’t she? A husband and a child, especially the child, they tie you down. She needed to find herself, to know who she is. Women don’t have a fair chance at life, you know that. Ann? You know it’s true. Not a fair chance at a life of their own. Not tied down the way they are. Unless they’re old maids. I don’t blame my mother, not one bit. It’s what I would do.”

  Hildy stared vacantly at Niki. “Perhaps. Would you like yourself for doing it? Leaving your child?”

  “I don’t know,” Niki muttered. “How can you know ahead of time, a thing like that? Besides, who are we to judge?”

  “Not to judge,” Hildy said. “This has nothing to do with judgment. It is wrong.”

  “Nothing is that simple,” Niki said.

  “Yes. Some things are. People just—make excuses?—and this complicates things. But these excuses, they are not important. What she did, your mother, was wrong. If you did it, you would be wrong too.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to do it probably. I like kids. I do. Male or female, I’ve got no prejudices. I’d take the kid with me.”

  “That too,” Hildy said sternly.

  Niki glared at Hildy. Then she turned her attention to Ann. “Do you know any divorced people?”

  “Me? Or my parents?”

  “Parents, of course.”

  “A few. Four, maybe six.”

  “Any relatives?”

  “One of my uncles—his wife—I don’t know.” It was a family secret; well, nor exactly a secret but something they preferred to keep private. “He married again.”

  Niki nodded. “How about you, Hildy?”

  “None. Nor have I known any by hearsay.” Hildy smiled.

  “But what happens out there if the couple is unhappy? What if the husband screws around, or the wife? What if he’s cruel to her, or to the kids? What if she drinks? Or takes drugs? What if they just hate each other and can’t stand to live together and there is constant fighting and bickering with the kids in the middle all the time?”

  Ann sided with Niki. “In some cases, people should divorce. It is so much easier, on the kids, everyone. Better than pretending that you’re still happily married and the wife taking the kids off to a summer place; that’s expensive too. And the kids play the parents off, one against the other. I agree with Niki.”

  “It is still wrong, however many agree,” Hildy said. Her voice, for such a pronouncement, was curiously soft.

  “My God, Hildy—’scuse the language. But listen. What’s supposed to happen when a couple begins to fall apart? That can happen you know.”

  Hildy nodded. “I know.”

  “People get irrational. Nothing can save the marri
age. They can’t afford to live in separate places. That happens. What do they do then, in your never-never land? What does a wife do, stuck in the house with a man she hates?”

  “She kills him,” Hildy said.

  Niki’s mouth hung open for a second before she laughed. The tension in the room dissipated within the laughter, like a shriek dissipating into the clear sky. “But it’s true,” Hildy said, through her own laughter. “Why cannot people live apart? Even if in the same house. As if the other were dead. Only, one cannot remarry.”

  “What’s the point in that?” Ann wondered.

  “You keep your promises,” Hildy said. “You have promised. To one another. To God.”

  Ann could not answer this objection, but Niki could make an impatient gesture with her hand. “Do you think He cares? If He’s there.”

  “He’s there. He cares.”

  “So He wants people to suffer,” Niki pursued.

  “That is not it,” Hildy said.

  “To resist the temptation? He puts the temptation there so we can pass it by? Is that it? A test?”

  “No. He does not need to test. He knows.”

  “Then what’s the point? Who put that tree in the garden of Eden?”

  “God.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. How should I know?”

  “And the Jews in Germany? Or the blacks into slavery? Or a kid into a wheelchair, dying piecemeal? And his parents—watching, knowing. Or the Mexicans, the migrant worker. There’s a life for you, a test of endurance. What about all of that?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Not to mention the Crucifixion,” Niki continued. Her glance for Hildy was level, straight. “Do you know how people were crucified, exactly how they did it? Have you thought about the Crucifixion?”

  “Yes. That one; and the many thousands of others so executed.”

  They looked into one another’s eyes, searching. Profound bitterness reflected off, reflected in, profound sorrow.

  “Then, what about it?” Niki asked.

  “I do not know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “There is a purpose. They purpose is good.”

  Niki shook her head. “That won’t do.”

  “What do you think?” Ann asked Niki. “How do you understand it?”

  “Chance,” Niki said. “Accident. If I had been a boy for instance.”

  “Do you really think that?” Ann asked. “Does that mean you blame yourself?”

  Niki shrugged.

  Ann continued. “Maybe she would have gone anyway. Maybe she just used you as an excuse.”

  Niki shrugged.

  “It’s possible, isn’t it?” Ann insisted.

  “I guess so. But that isn’t what happened. It doesn’t matter anyway.”

  “Hildy?” Ann asked.

  “It does matter,” Hildy said. “And there is a reason. I must go to the observatory.”

  “A classic non-sequitur,” Niki said.

  “You should take a bike,” Ann remarked.

  Hildy protested. “It’s not far.”

  “Want to use mine?” Ann offered. Hildy did not have a bike. “No, I mean it. Not tonight, because I haven’t gotten a headlight yet, or reflectors. But would you?”

  “I would like that,” Hildy said. “But—”

  “I was going to get that stuff anyway,” Ann said. “I promised my mother I would. You know how they worry. She’s sure to ask, and this will make sure I do it.”

  “What do you go twice a week for anyway?” Niki demanded. “There’s only one lab a week up there.”

  “I’m learning to use the telescope,” Hildy said.

  “What for?” Niki asked.

  “To study the stars. I really must go. I am expected.” She buttoned a heavy woolen shirt, tied her shoes, and left.

  Niki turned to Ann. “Do you ever wonder what will happen when she sheds her illusions?”

  Ann nodded, disturbed by the appropriateness of the question. Whenever she thought she understood Niki, Niki threw her off-balance. “Maybe she knows something you don’t,” Ann ventured.

  “Balls.” Niki dismissed the possibility.

  “I don’t think she will,” was the strongest defense Ann could make. “Besides, what do you care?”

  Niki chewed on her nail and glared at Ann. “Sometimes, I think you’re just another stupid preppy bitch,” she remarked.

  “What do you care?” Ann repeated.

  “What do you care?” Niki mimicked her, in a nasal, whiny voice. “Nannynanny booboo and so’s your old man,” she said. “She doesn’t have any money, you know.”

  Ann looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “Full scholarship.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Sarah said.”

  “How does Sarah know?”

  “She knows these things. Don’t ask me how. Maybe Hildy told her.”

  “But she hasn’t told me,” Ann protested.

  “You her best friend or something?” Niki asked.

  Ann had thought perhaps so. “I didn’t know,” she said.

  “Do you ever see her spend money?” Niki continued.

  “No, never. Look, I’ve got to read this.”

  “Why? We don’t have class tomorrow.”

  “There’s a test next week; and papers coming up,” Ann remarked,

  “Tough darts,” Niki said. “But I’ll leave you to it. We play our first game tomorrow, don’t we?”

  “Don’t remind me. Please don’t remind me.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  All the match games were scheduled to be played on the gymnasium courts, indoors. As they walked to the gym the next afternoon, the three of them in a row, Ann tried to convince Hildy that Eloise was the better player. “Eloise will get to play,” Hildy said.

  “I don’t want to play,” Ann said.

  “But you are on the team.”

  So Ann found herself standing between Hildy and Sarah, goosebumps on her legs. “Maybe nobody will hit anything to me,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. The whistle blew.

  Carol was serving for the opposing team. Her first serve went directly to Ann, who missed it. The second serve she also fumbled. Niki turned to glare at her “Annie.”

  “Only lift it up,” Hildy said quietly. Ann’s cheeks burned. She could lose the whole game, without moving. She looked at Hildy. “Only lift it to me. Think only of that,” Hildy said.

  Ann concentrated. Carol grinned at her and waved a hand. The serve came to Ann. She thought only of getting it off to the right. Her hands clenched. Too late, she remembered her knees should bend. But she had her fists under the ball and it popped up, shoulder height. Hildy’s left hand lifted it higher and sent it to Bess at the net. Bess batted it easily across. Carol ran out of position. “Mine!” she yelled. She hit it up, high and long, back to Ann.

  “Only to me,” Hildy spoke.

  This shot was easier, because high. Ann popped it gently to her right.

  “Good,” Hildy said as she sent a high set shot forward to Niki—who leaped up eagerly and hammered down on the ball. Niki turned back to give Hildy the thumbs-up signal. Hildy did not respond.

  They rotated to Ann’s serve.

  “Sarah’s beside you,” Hildy said.

  Ann did not relax, but her panic gradually faded. She managed to initiate a winning point before she served a ball out of bounds.

  The game went on, on and on. Carol always sent her shots to Ann. Many, Ann still bungled. More she managed to lift sideways, to Sarah or Hildy. “You’re getting it, Annie,” Niki exulted. Ann knew better, but was too busy to argue the matter Most of the other players were no better than she, so she could often play their shots passably. Once, she tried to set a ball for Hildy at the net. It was too low, but Hildy rewarded her daring with a satisfied nod. They won the first game, fifteen to thirteen.

  As they switched sides for the second game, Niki called, “Close in,” to the
team. Nobody altered position. Everybody tensed. Niki was serving and earned seven points before Carol managed to return one of the straight, hard serves. This—Ann sensed it—dispirited the opposing team. Even Carol misplaced her shots, not caring where they went, no longer bothering to play at Ann. The second game took five minutes. Their victory was total, and Hildy’s team cavorted about briefly. Then they remembered their manners and thanked the opposition.

  “I want a hot fudge sundae,” Ruth announced. “Anyone else?”

  Everyone else. They trooped out of the gym on a wave of hilarity (“I told you, didn’t I?” “We creamed them.” “Did you see? We outplayed them.”) and were seated around a large table at the student center (“I’m going to hate myself in the morning,” Bess said as she lifted a spoon mounded with ice cream, dripping thick tears of fudge sauce) before anyone asked, “Where’s Hildy?”

  She had stayed behind to work with Carol’s team on service return. “There was time left in the class,” she explained, when Niki later criticized her absence.

  Ann said, “I’m not complaining about anything you did—you know that, don’t you, Hildy?—because you really helped me. I couldn’t have gotten through it without you.”

  “Yes, you could have. It would have taken longer on your own. That’s the only difference.”

  “But Eloise—she didn’t get a chance to play.”

  “She will, the next game.”

  Ann was relieved. And chagrined. “Is it the day after tomorrow? Isn’t that too soon?”

  “No,” Hildy said. “We’ll practice tomorrow.”

  “Bess has two tests to study for.”

  “She will spare the hour.”

  Bess spared the hour, and then some. They met in the crisp air by the outside court. Hildy would not let them play a game, although Niki argued for it, as the best practice for a match. “But these freshman teams,” Niki added as it became clear that the others would do whatever Hildy advised, “they’re such creampuffs it doesn’t matter.” She stayed for about fifteen minutes before she drifted away. Hildy watched her go, eyes squinted toward the lowering sun. Niki walked away, not angry, neither discouraged, just unconcerned. Such drills had nothing to do with her, her narrow back said to those who remained behind.