Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  At home, one of her siblings was in the back yard doing something like juggling with screwdrivers of different sizes. Another was reading Gibbon unabridged. The one who’d been subsisting on Yoplait and radishes was in the bathroom, changing her hair color again. Patty’s true home amid all this brilliant eccentricity was a foam-cushioned, mildewed, built-in bench in the TV corner of the basement. The fragrance of Eulalie’s hair oil still lingered on the bench years after Eulalie had been let go. Patty took a carton of butter-pecan ice cream down to the bench and answered no when her mother called down to ask if she was coming up for dinner.

  Mary Tyler Moore was just starting when her father came down after his martini and his own dinner and suggested that he and Patty go for a drive. At that point in time, Mary Tyler Moore comprised the entirety of Patty’s knowledge of Minnesota.

  “Can I watch this show first?” she said.

  “Patty.”

  Feeling cruelly deprived, she turned off the television. Her dad drove them over to the high school and stopped under a bright light in the parking lot. They unrolled their windows, letting in the smell of spring lawns like the one she’d been raped on not many hours earlier.

  “So,” she said.

  “So Ethan denies it,” her dad said. “He says it was just roughhousing and consensual.”

  The autobiographer would describe the girl’s tears in the car as coming on like a rain that starts unnoticeably but surprisingly soon soaks everything. She asked if her dad had spoken to Ethan directly.

  “No, just his father, twice,” he said. “I’d be lying if I said the conversation went well.”

  “So obviously Mr. Post doesn’t believe me.”

  “Well, Patty, Ethan’s his son. He doesn’t know you as well as we do.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Does Mommy?”

  “Of course she does.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  Her dad turned to her like an attorney. Like an adult addressing another adult. “You drop it,” he said. “Forget about it. Move on.”

  “What?”

  “You shake it off. Move on. Learn to be more careful.”

  “Like it never even happened?”

  “Patty, the people at the party were all friends of his. They’re going to say they saw you get drunk and be aggressive with him. They’ll say you were behind a shed that wasn’t more than thirty feet from the pool, and they didn’t hear anything untoward.”

  “It was really noisy. There was music and shouting.”

  “They’ll also say they saw the two of you leaving later in the evening and getting into his car. And the world will see an Exeter boy who’s going to Princeton and was responsible enough to use contraceptives, and gentleman enough to leave the party and drive you home.”

  The deceptive little rain was wetting the collar of Patty’s T-shirt.

  “You’re not really on my side, are you,” she said.

  “Of course I am.”

  “You keep saying ‘Of course,’ ‘Of course.’ ”

  “Listen to me. The P.A. is going to want to know why you didn’t scream.”

  “I was embarrassed! Those weren’t my friends!”

  “But do you see that this is going to be hard for a judge or a jury to understand? All you would have had to do was scream, and you would have been safe.”

  Patty couldn’t remember why she hadn’t screamed. She had to admit that, in hindsight, it seemed bizarrely agreeable of her.

  “I fought, though.”

  “Yes, but you’re a top-tier student athlete. Shortstops get scratched and bruised all the time, don’t they? On the arms? On the thighs?”

  “Did you tell Mr. Post I’m a virgin? I mean, was?”

  “I didn’t consider that any of his business.”

  “Maybe you should call him back and tell him that.”

  “Look,” her dad said. “Honey. I know it’s horrendously unfair. I feel terrible for you. But sometimes the best thing is just to learn your lesson and make sure you never get in the same position again. To say to yourself, ‘I made a mistake, and I had some bad luck,’ and then let it. Let it, ah. Let it drop.”

  He turned the ignition halfway, so that the panel lights came on. He kept his hand on the key.

  “But he committed a crime,” Patty said.

  “Yes, but better to, uh. Life’s not always fair, Pattycakes. Mr. Post said he thought Ethan might be willing to apologize for not being more gentlemanly, but. Well. Would you like that?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Coach Nagel says I should go to the police.”

  “Coach Nagel should stick to her dribbling,” her dad said.

  “Softball,” Patty said. “It’s softball season now.”

  “Unless you want to spend your entire senior year being publicly humiliated.”

  “Basketball is in the winter. Softball is in the spring, when the weather’s warmer?”

  “I’m asking you: is that really how you want to spend your senior year?”

  “Coach Carver is basketball,” Patty said. “Coach Nagel is softball. Are you getting this?”

  Her dad started the engine.

  As a senior, instead of being publicly humiliated, Patty became a real player, not just a talent. She all but resided in the field house. She got a three-game basketball suspension for putting a shoulder in the back of a New Rochelle forward who’d elbowed Patty’s teammate Stephanie, and she still broke every school record she’d set the previous year, plus nearly broke the scoring record. Augmenting her reliable perimeter shooting was a growing taste for driving to the basket. She was no longer on speaking terms with physical pain.

  In the spring, when the local state assemblyman stepped down after long service and the party leadership chose Patty’s mother to run as his replacement, the Posts offered to co-host a fund-raiser in the green luxury of their back yard. Joyce sought Patty’s permission before she accepted the offer, saying she wouldn’t do anything that Patty wasn’t comfortable with, but Patty was beyond caring what Joyce did, and told her so. When the candidate’s family stood for the obligatory family photo, no grief was given to Patty for absenting herself. Her look of bitterness would not have helped Joyce’s cause.

  Chapter 2: Best Friends

  Based on her inability to recall her state of consciousness in her first three years at college, the autobiographer suspects she simply didn’t have a state of consciousness. She had the sensation of being awake but in fact she must have been sleepwalking. Otherwise it’s hard to understand how, to take one example, she became intense best friends with a disturbed girl who was basically her stalker.

  Some of the fault—although the autobiographer hates to say it—may lie with Big Ten athletics and the artificial world it created for participating students, for boys especially, but also, even in the late 1970s, for girls. Patty went out to Minnesota in July for special jock summer camp followed by special, early, jocks-only freshman orientation, and then she lived in a jock dorm, made exclusively jock friends, ate exclusively at jock tables, cluster-danced at parties with her jock teammates, and was careful never to sign up for a class without plenty of other jocks to sit with and (time permitting) study with. Jocks didn’t absolutely have to live this way, but the majority at Minnesota did, and Patty went even more overboard with Total Jockworld than most, because she could! Because she’d finally escaped from Westchester! “You should go wherever you want,” Joyce had said to Patty, by which she’d meant: it is grotesque and repulsive to attend a mediocre state school like Minnesota when you have great offers from Vanderbilt and Northwestern (which are also more flattering to me). “This is entirely your personal decision, and we will support you in whatever you decide,” Joyce had said, by which she’d meant: don’t blame me and Daddy when you ruin your life with stupid decisions. Joyce’s transparent aversion to Minnesota, along with Minnesota’s distance from New York,
was a key factor in Patty’s deciding to go there. Looking back now, the autobiographer sees her younger self as one of those miserable adolescents so angry at her parents that she needed to join a cult where she could be nicer and friendlier and more generous and subservient than she could bring herself to be at home anymore. Her cult just happened to be basketball.

  The first of the nonjocks to lure her out of this cult and become important to her was the disturbed girl Eliza, who Patty, of course, initially had no idea was disturbed. Eliza was exactly half pretty. Her head started out gorgeous on top and got steadily worse-looking the lower down you looked. She had wonderfully thick and curly brown hair and amazing huge eyes, and then a cute enough little button nose, but then around her mouth her face got smooshed up and miniature in a disturbing sort of preemie way, and she had very little chin. She was always wearing baggy corduroys that slid down on her hips, and tight short-sleeved shirts that she bought in Boys departments at thrift stores and buttoned only the middle buttons of, and red Keds, and a big avocado-green shearling coat. She smelled like an ashtray but tried not to smoke around Patty unless they were outside. In an irony then invisible to Patty but now plenty visible to the autobiographer, Eliza had a lot in common with Patty’s arty little sisters. She owned a black electric guitar and a dear small amp, but the few times Patty convinced her to play it in her presence Eliza became furious with her, which almost never happened otherwise (at least not at first). She said Patty was making her feel pressured and self-conscious and this was why she kept fucking up after only a few bars of her song. She ordered Patty to not be so obviously listening, but even when Patty turned away and pretended to read a magazine it wasn’t good enough. Eliza swore that the minute Patty was out of the room again she’d be able to play her song perfectly. “But now? Forget it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Patty said. “I’m sorry I do that to you.”

  “I can play this song amazingly when you’re not listening.”

  “I know, I know. I’m sure you can.”

  “It’s just a fact. It doesn’t matter if you believe me.”

  “But I do believe you!”

  “I’m saying,” Eliza said, “it doesn’t matter if you believe me, because my ability to play this song amazingly when you’re not listening is simply an objective fact.”

  “Maybe try a different song,” Patty pleaded.

  But Eliza was already yanking the plugs out. “Stop. OK? I don’t want your reassurance.”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Patty said.

  She’d first seen Eliza in the only class where a jock and a poet were likely to meet, Introductory Earth Science. Patty came and went to this particular huge class with ten other freshwomen jocks, a herd of girls mostly even taller than herself, all wearing maroon Golden Gopher tracksuits or plain gray sweats, everybody’s hair at various stages of damp. There were some smart girls in the herd, including the autobiographer’s lifelong friend Cathy Schmidt who later became a public defender and was once nationally televised on Jeopardy! for two nights, but the overheated lecture hall and those tracksuits and the damp hair and the nearness of other tired jock bodies never failed to give Patty a contact dullness. A contact low.

  Eliza liked to sit in the row behind the jocks, directly behind Patty but slouched down so deep in her seat that only her voluminous dark curls were visible. Her first words to Patty were spoken into her ear from behind, at the start of a class. She said, “You’re the best.”

  Patty turned to see who was speaking and saw lots of hair. “I’m sorry?”

  “I saw you play last night,” the hair said. “You’re brilliant and beautiful.”

  “Wow, thank you so much.”

  “They need to start giving you more minutes.”

  “Funnily enough, ha ha, I have the exact same opinion.”

  “You need to demand that they give you more minutes. OK?”

  “Right, we’ve got so many great players on the team, though. It’s not my decision.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the best,” the hair said.

  “Wow, thank you so much for the compliment!” Patty answered brightly, to end things. At the time, she believed that it was because she was selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments made her so uncomfortable. The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.

  After the lecture ended, she enveloped herself in her fellow jocks and took care not to look back at the person with the hair. She assumed it was just a strange coincidence that an actual fan of hers had sat down right behind her in Earth Science. There were fifty thousand students at the U., but probably less than five hundred of them (not counting former players and friends or family of current players) considered women’s athletic events a viable entertainment option. If you were Eliza and you wanted to sit directly behind the Gophers’ bench (so that Patty, as she came off the court, couldn’t help seeing you and your hair as you bent over a notebook), all you had to do was show up fifteen minutes before game time. And then, after the final buzzer and the ritual low-fiving line, it was the easiest thing in the world to intercept Patty near the locker-room door and hand her a piece of notebook paper and say to her: “Did you ask for more minutes, like I told you to?”

  Patty still didn’t know this person’s name, but the person obviously knew hers, because the word PATTY was written on the notebook paper about a hundred times, in crackling cartoon letters with concentric pencil outlines to make them look like shouts echoing in the gym, as if a whole wild crowd were chanting her name, which could not have been further from reality, given that the gym was usually ninety percent empty and Patty was first-year and averaging less than ten minutes a game, i.e., was not exactly a household word. The crackling penciled shouts filled up the entire sheet of paper except for a small sketch of a player dribbling. Patty could tell the player was supposed to be her, because it was wearing her number and because who else would be drawn on a page covered with the word PATTY? Like everything Eliza did (as Patty learned soon enough), the drawing was half super-skilled and half clumsy and bad. The way the player’s body was low to the ground and violently slanting as she made a sharp turn was excellent, but the face and head were like some generic female in a first-aid booklet.

  Looking at the piece of paper, Patty had a preview of the falling sensation she would have a few months later after eating hash brownies with Eliza. Something very wrong and creepy but hard to defend herself against.

  “Thank you for this drawing,” she said.

  “Why aren’t they playing you more?” Eliza said. “You were on the bench practically the whole second half.”

  “Once we got the big lead—”

  “You’re brilliant and they bench you? I don’t understand that.” Eliza’s curls were thrashing like a willow tree in heavy winds; she was quite exercised.

  “Dawn and Cathy and Shawna got some good minutes,” Patty said. “They did great holding the lead.”

  “But you’re so much better than them!”

  “I should go shower now. Thanks again for the drawing.”

  “Maybe not this year, but next year, at the latest, everybody’s going to want a piece of you,” Eliza said. “You’re going to attract attention. You need to start learning how to protect yourself.”

  This was so ridiculous that Patty had to stop and set her straight. “Too much attention is not a problem people have in women’s basketball.”

  “What about men? Do you know how to protect yourself from men?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, do you have good judgment when it comes to men?”

  “Right now I don’t have much time for anything except sports.”

  “You don’t seem to understand how amazing you are. And how dangerous that is.”

  “I understand I’m good at sports.”

  “It’s sort of a miracle you’re not already getting t
aken advantage of.”

  “Well, I don’t drink, which helps a lot.”

  “Why don’t you drink?” Eliza pursued immediately.

  “Because I can’t when I’m in training. Not even one sip.”

  “You’re in training every day of the year?”

  “Well, and I had a bad drinking experience in high school, so.”

  “What happened—somebody rape you?”

  Patty’s face burned and assumed five different expressions all at once. “Wow,” she said.

  “Yes? Is that what happened?”

  “I’m going to go shower.”

  “You see, this is exactly what I’m talking about!” Eliza cried with great excitement. “You don’t know me at all, we’ve been talking for all of two minutes, and you basically just told me you’re a rape survivor. You’re completely unprotected!”

  Patty was too alarmed and ashamed, at that moment, to spot the flaws in this logic.

  “I can protect myself,” she said. “I’m doing just fine.”

  “Sure. OK.” Eliza shrugged. “It’s your safety, not mine.”

  The gym echoed with the thunk of heavy switches as banks of lights went out.

  “Do you play sports?” Patty asked, to make up for not having been more agreeable.

  Eliza looked down at herself. She was wide and blady in the pelvis and somewhat pigeon-toed, with tiny Kedded feet. “Do I look like it?”

  “I don’t know. Badminton?”

  “I hate gym,” Eliza said, laughing. “I hate all sports.”

  Patty laughed, too, in her relief at having got the subject changed, although she was now quite confused.

  “I didn’t even ‘throw like a girl’ or ‘run like a girl,’ ” Eliza said. “I refused to run or throw, period. If a ball landed in my hands, I just waited until somebody came and took it away. When I was supposed to run, like, to first base, I would stand there for a second and then maybe walk.”

  “God,” Patty said.

  “Yeah, I almost didn’t get my diploma because of it,” Eliza said. “The only reason I graduated was that my parents knew the school psychologist. I ended up getting credit for riding a bike every day.”