Freedom

Patty stayed talking to Walter, answering his many questions, describing her siblings’ mad Yuletide acquisitiveness, and her family’s annual humiliating reminders of how amusingly old she’d been before she stopped believing in Santa Claus, and her father’s bizarro sexual and scatological repartee with her middle sister, and the middle sister’s “complaints” about how unchallenging her freshman course work at Yale was, and her mother’s second-guessing of her decision, twenty years earlier, to stop celebrating Hanukkah and other Jewish holidays. “And how are things with you?” Patty asked Walter after half an hour.

“Fine,” he said. “My mom and I are baking. Richard’s playing checkers with my dad.”

“That sounds nice. I wish I were there.”

“I wish you were, too. We could go snowshoeing.”

“That sounds really nice.”

It genuinely did, and Patty could no longer tell whether it was Richard’s presence that made Walter appealing or whether he might be appealing for his own sake—for his ability to make whatever place he was in seem like a homey place to be.

The dreadful call from Eliza came on Christmas night. Patty answered it on the extension in the basement, where she was watching an NBA game by herself. Before she could even apologize, Eliza herself apologized for her silence and said that she’d been busy seeing doctors. “They say I have leukemia,” she said.

“No.”

“I’m starting treatments after New Year’s. My parents are the only other ones who know, and you can’t tell anyone. You especially can’t tell Richard. Will you swear you won’t tell anyone?”

Patty’s cloud of guilt and worry now condensed into a storm of sentiment. She wept and wept and asked Eliza if she was sure, if the doctors were sure. Eliza explained that she’d been feeling increasingly draggy as the fall went on, but she hadn’t wanted to tell anyone, because she was afraid Richard would dump her if it turned out she had mono, but finally she’d felt so crappy that she went to see a doctor, and the verdict had come back two days earlier: leukemia.

“Is it the bad kind?”

“They’re all bad.”

“But the kind you can get better from?”

“There’s a good chance the treatments will help,” Eliza said. “I’ll know more in a week.”

“I’ll come back early. I can stay with you.”

But Eliza, oddly enough, no longer wanted Patty staying with her.

Regarding the Santa Claus business: the autobiographer has no sympathy with lying parents, and yet there are degrees to this. There are lies you tell a person who’s being given a surprise party, lies told in a spirit of fun, and then there are lies you tell a person to make them look foolish for believing them. One Christmas, as a teenager, Patty became so upset about being teased for her unnaturally long-lived childhood belief in Santa (which had persisted even after two younger siblings lost it) that she refused to leave her room for Christmas dinner. Her dad, coming in to plead with her, for once stopped smiling and told her seriously that the family had preserved her illusions because her innocence was beautiful and they specially loved her for it. This was both a welcome thing to hear and obvious bullshit belied by the pleasure everybody took in teasing her. Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.

Suffice it to say that Patty, in her many winter weeks of playing Florence Nightingale to Eliza—trudging through a blizzard to bring her soup, cleaning her kitchen and bathroom, staying up late with her and watching TV when she should have been sleeping before games, sometimes falling asleep with her arms around her emaciated friend, submitting to extreme endearments (“You’re my darling angel,” “Seeing your face is like being in heaven,” etc., etc.), and refusing, all the while, to return Walter’s phone calls and explain why she didn’t have time to hang out with him anymore—failed to notice any number of red flags. No, Eliza said, this particular chemotherapy wasn’t the kind that made people’s hair fall out. And, no, it wasn’t possible to schedule treatments at times when Patty was available to take her home from the clinic. And, no, she didn’t want to give up her apartment and stay with her parents, and, yes, the parents came to visit all the time, it was just coincidence that Patty never saw them, and, no, it was not unusual for cancer patients to give themselves anti-emetics with a hypodermic needle such as the one Patty noticed on the floor underneath Eliza’s nightstand.

Arguably the biggest red flag was the way she, Patty, avoided Walter. She saw him at two games in January and spoke to him briefly, but he missed a bunch of games after that, and her conscious reason for not returning his many later phone messages was that she was embarrassed to admit how much of Eliza she was seeing. But why should it have been embarrassing to be caring for a friend stricken with cancer? And likewise: how hard would it have been, when she was in fifth grade, to open her ears to her schoolmates’ cynicism regarding Santa Claus, if she’d had the least bit of interest in learning the truth? She threw away the big poinsettia plant even though it still had life in it.

Walter finally caught up with her at the end of February, late on the snowy day of the Gophers’ big game against UCLA, its highest-ranked opponent of the season. Patty was already ill-disposed toward the world that day, owing to a morning phone conversation with her mother, whose birthday it was. Patty had resolved not to babble about her own life and discover yet again that Joyce wasn’t listening and didn’t give a shit about the ranking of her team’s opponent, but she hadn’t even had a chance to exercise this self-restraint, because Joyce was so excited about Patty’s middle sister, who had tried out for the lead role in an Off Broadway revival of The Member of the Wedding at her Yale professor’s special urging and had landed the part of understudy, which was apparently a huge deal that might result in the sister’s taking time off from Yale and living at home and pursuing drama full-time; and Joyce had been in raptures.

When Patty glimpsed Walter rounding the bleak brick corner of Wilson Library, she turned and hurried away, but he came running after her. Snow had collected on his big fur hat; his face was as red as a navigational beacon. Although he tried to smile and be friendly, his voice was shaking when he asked Patty whether she’d gotten any of his phone messages.

“I’ve just been so busy,” she said. “I’m really sorry I didn’t call you back.”

“Is it something I said? Did I somehow offend you?”

He was hurt and angry and she hated it.

“No, no, not at all,” she said.

“I would have called even more except I didn’t want to keep bothering you.”

“Just really, really busy,” she murmured as the snow fell.

“The person who answers your phone started sounding really annoyed with me, because I kept leaving the same message.”

“Well, her room’s right next to the phone, so. You can understand that. She takes a lot of messages.”

“I don’t understand,” Walter said, nearly crying. “Do you want me to leave you alone? Is that it?”

She hated scenes like this, she hated them.

“I’m truly just very busy,” she said. “And I actually have a big game tonight, so.”

“No,” Walter said, “there’s something wrong. What is it? You look so unhappy!”

She didn’t want to mention the conversation with her mother, because she was trying to get her head into a game zone and it was best not to dwell on these things. But Walter so desperately insisted on an explanation—insisted in a way that went beyond his own feelings, insisted almost for the sake of justice—that she felt she had to say something.

“Look,” she said, “you have to swear not to tell Richard,” although she realized, even as she said it, that she’d never quite understood this prohibition, “but Eliza has leukemia. It’s really terrible.”

To her surprise, Walter laughed. “That doesn’t seem likely.”

“Well, it’s true,” she said. “Whether or not it seems likely to you.”

“OK. And is she still doing heroin?”

A fact she’d seldom paid attention to before—that he was two years older than she was—suddenly made its presence felt.

“She has leukemia,” Patty said. “I don’t know anything about heroin.”

“Even Richard knows enough not to do that stuff. Which, believe me, is saying something.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

Walter nodded and smiled. “Then you really are a sweet person.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “But I’ve got to go eat now and get ready for the game.”

“I can’t see you play tonight,” he said as she was turning to leave. “I wanted to, but Harry Blackmun’s speaking. I have to go to that.”

She turned back to him in irritation. “Not a problem.”

“He’s on the Supreme Court. He wrote Roe v. Wade.”

“I know that,” she said. “My mom practically has a shrine to him that she burns incense at. You don’t have to tell me who Harry Blackmun is.”

“Right. Sorry.”

The snow swirled between them.