Freedom

  Patty nodded uncertainly. “You love basketball, though, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Eliza said. “Basketball is pretty fascinating.”

  “Well, so, you definitely don’t hate sports. It sounds like what you really hate is gym.”

  “You’re right. That’s right.”

  “Well, so anyway.”

  “Yeah, so anyway, are we going to be friends?”

  Patty laughed. “If I say yes, I’m just proving your point about how I’m not careful enough with people I barely know.”

  “That sounds like a no, then.”

  “How about we just wait and see?”

  “Good. That’s very careful of you—I like that.”

  “You see? You see?” Patty was laughing again already. “I’m more careful than you thought!”

  The autobiographer has no doubt that if Patty had been more conscious of herself and paying any halfway decent kind of attention to the world around her, she wouldn’t have been nearly as good at college basketball. Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head. Reaching a vantage point from which she could have seen Eliza for what she was (i.e., disturbed) would have messed with her game. You don’t get to be an 88-percent free-throw shooter by giving deep thought to every little thing.

  Eliza turned out not to like any of Patty’s other friends and didn’t even try to hang out with them. She referred to them collectively as “your lesbians” or “the lesbians” although half of them were straight. Patty very quickly came to feel that she lived in two mutually exclusive worlds. There was Total Jockworld, where she spent the vast majority of her time and where she would rather flunk a psychology midterm than skip going to the store and assembling a care package and taking it to a teammate who’d sprained an ankle or was laid up with the flu, and then there was dark little Elizaworld, where she didn’t have to bother trying to be so good. The only point of contact between the worlds was Williams Arena, where Patty, when she sliced through a transitional defense for an easy layup or a no-look pass, experienced an extra little rush of pride and pleasure if Eliza was there watching. Even this point of contact was short-lived, because the more time Eliza spent with Patty the less she seemed to remember how interested in basketball she was.

  Patty had always had friends plural, never anything intense. Her heart gladdened when she saw Eliza waiting outside the gym after practice, she knew it was going to be an instructive evening. Eliza took her to movies with subtitles and made her listen very carefully to Patti Smith recordings (“I love that you have the same name as my favorite artist,” she said, disregarding the different spelling and the fact that Patty’s actual legal name was Patrizia, which Joyce had given her to be different and Patty was embarrassed to say aloud) and loaned her books of poetry by Denise Levertov and Frank O’Hara. After the basketball team finished with a record of 8 wins and 11 losses and a first-round tournament elimination (despite Patty’s 14 points and numerous assists), Eliza also taught her to really, really like Paul Masson Chablis.

  What Eliza did with the rest of her free time was somewhat hazy. There seemed to be several “men” (i.e., boys) in her life, and she sometimes referred to concerts she’d gone to, but when Patty expressed curiosity about these concerts Eliza said first Patty had to listen to all the mix tapes Eliza made her; and Patty was having some difficulty with these mix tapes. She did like Patti Smith, who seemed to understand how she’d felt in the bathroom on the morning after she was raped, but the Velvet Underground, for example, made her lonely. She once admitted to Eliza that her favorite band was the Eagles, and Eliza said, “There’s nothing wrong with that, the Eagles are great,” but you sure didn’t see any Eagles records in Eliza’s dorm room.

  Eliza’s parents were big-deal Twin Cities psychotherapists and lived out in Wayzata, where everybody was rich, and she had an older brother, a junior at Bard College, whom she described as peculiar. When Patty asked, “Peculiar in what way?” Eliza answered, “In every way.” Eliza herself had patched together a high-school education at three different local academies and was enrolled at the U. because her parents refused to subsidize her if she wasn’t in school. She was a B student in a different way than Patty was a B student, which was to get the same B in everything. Eliza got A-pluses in English and Ds in everything else. Her only known interests besides basketball were poetry and pleasure.

  Eliza was determined to get Patty to try pot, but Patty was extremely protective of her lungs, and this was how the brownie thing came about. They’d driven out in Eliza’s Volkswagen Bug to the Wayzata house, which was full of African sculpture and empty of the parents, who were at a weekend conference. The idea had been to make a fancy Julia Child dinner, but they drank too much wine to succeed at this and ended up eating crackers and cheese and making the brownies and ingesting what must have been massive amounts of drug. Part of Patty was thinking, for the entire sixteen hours she was messed up, “I am never going to do this again.” She felt like she’d broken training so badly that she would never be able to make it whole again, a very desolate feeling indeed. She was also fearful about Eliza—she suddenly realized that she had some kind of weird crush on Eliza and that it was therefore of paramount importance to sit motionless and contain herself and not discover that she was bisexual. Eliza kept asking her how she was, and she kept answering, “I am just fine, thank you,” which struck them as hilarious every time. Listening to the Velvet Underground, Patty understood the group much better, they were a very dirty musical group, and their dirtiness was comfortingly similar to how she was feeling out there in Wayzata, surrounded by African masks. It was a relief to realize, as she became less stoned, that even while very stoned she’d managed to contain herself and Eliza hadn’t touched her: that nothing lesbian was ever going to happen.

  Patty was curious about Eliza’s parents and wanted to stick around the house and meet them, but Eliza was adamant about this being a very bad idea. “They’re the love of each other’s lives,” she said. “They do everything together. They have matching offices in the same suite, and they coauthor all their papers and books, and they do joint presentations at conferences, and they can never ever talk about their work at home, because of patient confidentiality. They even have a tandem bicycle.”

  “So?”

  “So they’re strange and you’re not going to like them, and then you’re not going to like me.”

  “My parents aren’t so great, either,” Patty said.

  “Trust me, this is different. I know what I’m talking about.”

  Driving back into the city in the Bug, with the warmthless Minnesota spring sun behind them, they had their first sort-of fight.

  “You have to stay here this summer,” Eliza said. “You can’t go away.”

  “That’s not very realistic,” Patty said. “I’m supposed to work in my dad’s office and be in Gettysburg in July.”

  “Why can’t you stay here and go to your camp from here? We can get jobs and you can go to the gym every day.”

  “I have to go home.”

  “But why? You hate it there.”

  “If I stay here I’ll drink wine every night.”

  “No, you won’t. We’ll have strict rules. We’ll have whatever rules you like.”

  “I’ll be back in the fall.”

  “Can we live together then?”

  “No, I already promised Cathy I’d be in her quad.”

  “You can tell her your plans changed.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “This is crazy! I hardly ever see you!”

  “I see you more than practically anybody. I love seeing you.”

  “Then why won’t you stay here this summer? Don’t you trust me?”

  “Why wouldn’t I trust you?”

  “I don’t know. I just can’t figure out why you’d rather work for your dad. He did not take care of you, he did not protect you, and I will. He doesn’t have your best interests at heart, and I do.”

  It
was true that Patty’s spirits sagged at the thought of going home, but it seemed necessary to punish herself for eating hash brownies. Her dad had also been making an effort with her, sending her actual handwritten letters (“We miss you on the tennis court”) and offering her the use of her grandmother’s old car, which he didn’t think her grandmother ought to be driving anymore. After a year away, she was feeling remorseful about having been so cold to him. Maybe she’d made a mistake? And so she went home for the summer and found that nothing had changed and she had not made a mistake. She watched TV till midnight, got up at seven every morning and ran five miles, and spent her days highlighting names in legal documents and looking forward to the day’s mail, which more often than not contained a long typewritten letter from Eliza, saying how much she missed her, and telling stories about her “lecherous” boss at the revival-house movie theater where she was working in the ticket booth, and exhorting her to write back immediately, which Patty did her best to do, using old letterhead stationery and the Selectric in her dad’s mothball-smelling office.

  In one letter Eliza wrote, I think we need to make rules for each other for protection and self-improvement. Patty was skeptical about this but wrote back with three rules for her friend. No smoking before dinnertime. Get exercise every day and develop athletic ability. And Attend all lectures and do all homework for ALL classes (not just English). No doubt she should have been disturbed by how different Eliza’s rules for her turned out to be—Drink only on Saturday night and only in Eliza’s presence; No going to mixed parties except accompanied by Eliza; and Tell Eliza EVERYTHING—but something was wrong with her judgment and she instead felt excited to have such an intense best friend. Among other things, having this friend gave Patty armor and ammunition against her middle sister.

  “So, how’s life in Minn-e-soooo-tah?” a typical encounter with the sister began. “Have you been eating lots of corn? Have you seen Babe the Blue Ox!? Have you been to Brainerd?”

  You might think that Patty, being a trained competitor and three and a half years older than the sister (though only two years ahead of her in school), would have developed ways of handling the sister’s demeaning silliness. But there was something congenitally undefended about Patty’s heart—she never ceased to be shocked by the sister’s lack of sisterliness. The sister also really was Creative and therefore skilled at coming up with unexpected ways to render Patty speechless.

  “Why do you always talk to me in that weird voice?” was Patty’s current best defense.

  “I was just asking you about life in good old Minn-e-soooo-tah.”

  “You cackle, is what you do. It’s like a cackle.”

  This was met with a glittery-eyed silence. Then: “It’s the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes!”

  “Please just go away.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend out there?”

  “No.”

  “A girlfriend?”

  “No. Although I did make a really great friend.”

  “You mean the one who’s sending you all the letters? Is she a jock?”

  “No. She’s a poet.”

  “Wow.” The sister seemed a tiny bit interested. “What’s her name?”

  “Eliza.”

  “Eliza Doolittle. She sure does write an awful lot of letters. Are you positive she’s not your girlfriend?”

  “She’s a writer, OK? A really interesting writer.”

  “One hears whispers from the locker room, is all. The fungus that dare not speak its name.”

  “You’re so disgusting,” Patty said. “She has like three different boyfriends, she’s very cool.”

  “Brainerd, Minn-e-soooo-tah,” was the sister’s reply. “You have to send me a postcard of Babe the Blue Ox from Brainerd.” She went away singing “I’m Getting Married in the Morning” with much vibrato.

  The following fall, back at school, Patty met the boy named Carter who became, for want of a better word, her first boyfriend. It now seems to the autobiographer anything but accidental that she met him immediately after she’d obeyed Eliza’s third rule and told her that a guy she knew from the gym, a sophomore from the wrestling team, had asked her out to dinner. Eliza had wanted to meet the wrestler first, but there were limits even to Patty’s agreeability. “He seems like a really nice guy,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, but you’re still on probation guywise,” Eliza said. “You thought the person who raped you was a nice guy.”

  “I’m not sure I actually formed that particular thought. I was just excited he was interested in me.”

  “Well, and now here’s somebody else who’s interested in you.”

  “Yes, but I’m sober.”

  They’d compromised by agreeing that Patty would go to Eliza’s off-campus room (her reward from her parents for having worked a summer job) directly after dinner, and that if she wasn’t there by ten o’clock then Eliza would come looking for her. When she got to the off-campus house, around nine-thirty, after a none too scintillating dinner, she found Eliza in her top-floor room with the boy named Carter. They were at opposite ends of her sofa, with their stockinged feet sole to sole on the center cushion, and were pushing each other’s pedals in what might or might not have been a sister-and-brotherly way. The new DEVO album was playing on Eliza’s stereo.

  Patty faltered in the doorway. “Maybe I should leave the two of you alone?”

  “Oh God, no no no no no, we want you here,” Eliza cried. “Carter and I are ancient history, aren’t we?”

  “Very ancient,” Carter said with dignity and, Patty thought later, mild irritation. He swung his feet down onto the floor.

  “An extinct volcano,” Eliza said as she leaped up to make introductions. Patty had never seen her friend with a boy before, and she was struck by how altered her personality was—her face was flushed, she stumbled over words and steadily emitted somewhat artificial giggles. It seemed to have slipped her mind that Patty had come over to be debriefed about her dinner. Everything was about Carter, a friend from one of her high schools who was taking time off from college and working at a bookstore and going to shows. Carter had extremely straight and interestingly tinted dark hair (henna, it turned out), beautiful long-lashed eyes (mascara, it turned out), and no notable physical flaws except for his teeth, which were jumbled and strangely small and pointed (basic middle-class child maintenance such as orthodontia had fallen through the cracks of his parents’ bitter divorce, it turned out). Patty immediately liked that he didn’t seem self-conscious about his teeth. She was setting about making a good impression on him, trying to prove herself worthy of being Eliza’s friend, when Eliza stuck a huge goblet of wine in her face.

  “No, thank you,” Patty said.

  “But it’s Saturday night,” Eliza said.

  Patty wanted to point out that the rules did not oblige her to drink on Saturday, but in Carter’s presence she got an objective glimpse of how odd these rules of Eliza’s were, and how odd it was, for that matter, that she had to report to Eliza on her dinner with the wrestler. And so she changed her mind and drank the wine and then another enormous gobletful and felt warm and excellent. The autobiographer is mindful of how dull it is to read about someone else’s drinking, but sometimes it’s pertinent to the story. When Carter got up to leave, around midnight, he offered Patty a ride back to her dorm, and at the door of her building he asked if he could kiss her good night (“It’s OK,” she specifically thought, “he’s a friend of Eliza’s”), and after they’d made out for a while, standing in the cold October air, he asked if he could see her the next day, and she thought, “Wow, this guy moves fast.”

  To give credit where credit is due: that winter was the best athletic season of her life. She had no health issues, and Coach Treadwell, after giving her a tough lecture about being less unselfish and more of a leader, started her at guard in every single game. Patty herself was amazed at how slow-motion the bigger opposing players suddenly were, how easy it was to just reach out and steal the ball from them,
and how many of her jump shots went in, game after game. Even when she was being double-teamed, which happened more and more often, she felt a special private connection with the basket, always knowing exactly where it was and always trusting that she was its favorite player on the floor, the best at feeding its circular mouth. Even off the court she existed in the zone, which felt like a kind of preoccupied pressure behind her eyebrows, an alert drowsiness or focused dumbness that persisted no matter what she was doing. She slept wonderfully that whole winter and never quite woke up. Even when she was elbowed in the head, or mobbed at the buzzer by happy teammates, she hardly felt it.

  And her thing with Carter was part of this. Carter was perfectly uninterested in sports and appeared not to mind that, during peak weeks, she had no more than a few hours total for him, sometimes just enough to have sex in his apartment and run back to campus. In certain respects, even now, this seems to the autobiographer an ideal relationship, though admittedly less ideal when she allows herself a realistic guess about how many other girls Carter was having sex with during the six months Patty thought of him as her boyfriend. Those six months were the first of the two indisputably happy periods in Patty’s life, when everything just clicked. She loved Carter’s uncorrected teeth, his genuine humility, his skillful petting, his patience with her. He had many sterling qualities, Carter did! Whether he was giving her some excruciatingly gentle technical pointer about sex or confessing to his utter lack of career plans (“I’m probably best qualified to be some kind of quiet blackmailer”), his voice was always soft and swallowed and self-deprecating—poor corrupt Carter did not think well of himself as a member of the human race.

  Patty herself continued to think well of him, hazardously well, until the Saturday night in April when she came back early from Chicago, where she and Coach Treadwell had flown for the all-American luncheon and award ceremony (Patty had been named second-team at guard), to surprise Carter at the party he was having for his birthday. From the street, she could see lights on in his apartment, but she had to ring his bell four times, and the voice that finally answered on the intercom was Eliza’s.