Freedom

“Wait!” Eliza ran over and seized Patty by the hand. “I fucked everything up, but I’ll get better, and then we can see each other again. OK?”

“Yes, OK,” Patty lied as the parents moved in to pry their daughter off her.

Outside, the sky had cleared and the temperature had fallen to near zero. Patty drove breath after breath of cleanness down deep into her lungs. She was free! She was free! And, oh, how she wished she could go back now and play the game against UCLA again. Even at one in the morning, even with nothing in her stomach, she felt ready to excel. She sprinted down Eliza’s street in sheer exhilaration at her freedom, hearing Coach’s words in her ears for the first time, three hours after they’d been spoken, hearing her say how it was just one game, how everybody had bad games, how she’d be herself again tomorrow. She felt ready to dedicate herself more intensely than ever to staying fit and improving her skills, ready to see more theater with Walter, ready to say to her mother, “That’s really great news about The Member of the Wedding!” Ready to be an all-around better person. In her exhilaration, she ran so blindly that she didn’t see the black ice on the sidewalk until her left leg had slipped gruesomely out sideways behind her right leg and she’d ripped the shit out of her knee and was lying on the ground.

There’s not a lot to say about the six weeks that followed. She had two surgeries, the second one following an infection from the first, and became an ace crutch-user. Her mother flew out for the first operation and treated the hospital staff as if they were midwestern yokels of questionable intelligence, causing Patty to apologize for her and be especially agreeable whenever she was out of the room. When it turned out that Joyce might have been right not to trust the doctors, Patty felt so chagrined that she didn’t even tell her about the second operation until the day before it happened. She assured Joyce that there was no need to fly out again—she had tons of friends to look after her.

Walter Berglund had learned from his own mother how to be attentive to women with ailments, and he took advantage of Patty’s extended incapacitation to reinsert himself into her life. On the day after her first surgery, he appeared with a four-foot-tall Norfolk pine and suggested that she might prefer a living plant to cut flowers that wouldn’t last. After that, he managed to see Patty almost every day except on weekends, when he was up in Hibbing helping his parents, and he quickly endeared himself to her jock friends with his niceness. Her homelier friends appreciated how much more intently he listened to them than all the guys who couldn’t see past their looks, and Cathy Schmidt, her brightest friend, declared Walter smart enough to be on the Supreme Court. It was a novelty in Female Jockworld to have a guy in their midst who everybody felt so natural and relaxed around, a guy who could hang out in the lounge during study breaks and be one of the girls. And everybody could see that he was crazy about Patty, and everybody but Cathy Schmidt agreed that this was a most excellent thing.

Cathy, as noted, was sharper than the rest. “You’re not really into him, are you,” she said.

“I sort of am,” Patty said. “But also sort of not.”

“So … the two of you are not …”

“No! Nothing. I probably never should have told him I was raped. He got all squirrelly when I told him that. All … tender and … nursey and … upset. And now it’s like he’s waiting for written permission, or for me to make the move. Which, the crutches probably aren’t helping there, either. But it’s like I’m being followed around by a really nice, welltrained dog.”

“That’s not so great,” Cathy said.

“No. It’s not. But I can’t get rid of him, either, because he’s incredibly nice to me, and I really do love talking to him.”

“You’re sort of into him.”

“Exactly. Maybe even somewhat more than sort of. But—”

“But not wildly more.”

“Exactly.”

Walter was interested in everything. He read every word of the newspaper and Time magazine, and in April, once Patty was semi-ambulatory again, he began inviting her to lectures and art films and documentaries that she otherwise would not have dreamed of going to. Whether it was because of his love or because of the void in her schedule created by her injury, this was the first time that a person had ever looked through her jock exterior and seen lights on inside. Although she felt inferior to Walter in pretty much every category of human knowledge except sports, she was grateful to him for illuminating that she actually had opinions and that her opinions could differ from his. (This was a refreshing contrast to Eliza, who, if you’d asked her who the current U.S. president was, would have laughed and claimed to have no idea and put another record on her stereo.) Walter burned with all sorts of earnest and peculiar views—he hated the pope and the Catholic Church but approved of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which he hoped would lead to better energy conservation in the United States; he liked China’s new population-control policies and thought the U.S. should adopt something similar; he cared less about the Three Mile Island nuclear mishap than about the low price of gasoline and the need for high-speed rail systems that would render the passenger car obsolete; etc., etc.—and Patty found a role in obstinately approving of things he disapproved of. She especially enjoyed disagreeing with him about the Subjugation of Women. One afternoon near the end of the semester, over coffee at the Student Union, the two of them had a memorable talk about Patty’s Primitive Art professor, whose lectures she approvingly described to Walter by way of giving him a subtle hint about what she found lacking in his personality.

“Yuck,” Walter said. “This sounds like one of those middle-aged profs who can’t stop talking about sex.”

“Well, but he’s talking about fertility figures,” Patty said. “It’s not his fault if the only sculpture we have from fifty thousand years ago is about sex. Plus he’s got a white beard, and that’s enough to make me feel sorry for him. I mean, think about it. He’s up there, and he’s got all these dirty things he wants to say about ‘young ladies today,’ you know, and our ‘scrawny thighs,’ and all, and he knows he’s making us uncomfortable, and he knows he has this beard and he’s middle-aged and we’re all, you know, younger. But he can’t help saying things anyway. I think that would be so hard. Not being able to help humiliating yourself.”

“But it’s so offensive!”

“And also,” Patty said, “I think he’s actually really into thunder thighs. I think that’s what it’s really about: he’s into the Stone Aged thing. You know: fat. Which is sweet and kind of heartbreaking, that he’s so into ancient art.”

“But aren’t you offended, as a feminist?”

“I don’t really think of myself as a feminist.”

“That’s unbelievable!” Walter said, reddening. “You don’t support the ERA?”

“Well, I’m not very political.”

“But the whole reason you’re here in Minnesota is you got an athletic scholarship, which couldn’t even have happened five years ago. You’re here because of feminist federal legislation. You’re here because of Title Nine.”

“But Title Nine’s just basic fairness,” Patty said. “If half your students are female, they should be getting half the athletic money.”

“That’s feminism!”

“No, it’s basic fairness. Because, like, Ann Meyers? Have you heard of her? She was a big star at UCLA and she just signed a contract with the NBA, which is ridiculous. She’s like five-six and a girl. She’s never going to play. Men are just better athletes than women and always will be. That’s why a hundred times more people go to see men’s basketball than women’s basketball—there’s so much more that men can do athletically. It’s just dumb to deny it.”

“But what if you want to be a doctor, and they don’t let you into medical school because they’d rather have male students?”

“That would be unfair, too, although I don’t want to be a doctor.”

“So what do you want?”

Sort of by default, because her mother was so relentless in promoting impressive careers for her daughters, and also because her mother had been, in Patty’s opinion, a substandard parent, Patty was inclined to want to be a homemaker and an outstanding mother. “I want to live in a beautiful old house and have two children,” she told Walter. “I want to be a really, really great mom.”

“Do you want a career, too?”

“Raising children would be my career.”

He frowned and nodded.

“You see,” she said, “I’m not very interesting. I’m not nearly as interesting as your other friends.”

“That’s so untrue,” he said. “You’re incredibly interesting.”

“Well, that’s very nice of you to say, but I don’t think it makes much sense.”

“I think there’s so much more inside you than you give yourself credit for.”

“I’m afraid you’re not very realistic about me,” Patty said. “I bet you can’t actually name one interesting thing about me.”

“Well, your athletic ability, for starters,” Walter said.

“Dribble dribble. That’s real interesting.”

“And the way you think,” he said. “The fact that you think that that hideous prof is sweet and heartbreaking.”

“But you disagree with me about that!”

“And the way you talk about your family. The way you tell stories about them. The fact that you’re so far away from them and having your own life here. That’s all incredibly interesting.”

Patty had never been around a man so obviously in love with her. What he and she were secretly talking about, of course, was Walter’s desire to put his hands on her. And yet the more time she spent with him, the more she was coming to feel that even though she wasn’t nice—or maybe because she wasn’t nice; because she was morbidly competitive and attracted to unhealthy things—she was, in fact, a fairly interesting person. And Walter, by insisting so fervently on her interestingness, was definitely making progress toward making himself interesting to her in turn.

“If you’re so feminist,” she said, “why are you best friends with Richard? Isn’t he kind of disrespectful?”

Walter’s face clouded. “Definitely, if I had a sister, I’d make sure she never met him.”

“Why?” Patty said. “Because he’d treat her badly? Is he bad to women?”

“He doesn’t mean to be. He likes women. He just goes through them pretty quickly.”