by Karen Olsson
“I know that,” I said. Why was it that people who weren’t alone always forgot what it was to be alone? I told her I would just take the Metro home, because I needed to stop at a store on the way back, though the real reason was that I couldn’t stand her, my sister with her husband and her house and her money. In that instant I could not stand her.
All her jabs at me seemed semiconscious, meaning they weren’t the product of forethought, and she would forget them afterward, but they were still jabs, even if the reasons for them remained obscure to me and probably to her too. There was one mishap from high school that I felt sure she’d never forgiven me for (though she would’ve denied it), and then no doubt there were a whole slew of other events, most of them unremembered, that continued to influence us. I did still think about that one accident from the beginning of tenth grade. It had not only made her furious but had cemented my family identity as a hopeless bungler.
Mid-August, 1986: the city a swamp, window units rattling, buses gasping for breath. Everyone with wet skin, chugging soda from wet cans. The disk drives whirring: Courtney worked on her college essays, composing them on the Apple IIe computer my father had bought and put in his study. There was an unspoken agreement not to speak loudly, or play music, or otherwise disturb her when we were nearby. I would creep past and hear the patter of the keys as she typed. Or I would hear her letting out a long sigh.
Or I would sneak into the room. She sat there in front of the black-and-white screen, intent, immobile, not even noticing that I’d come in—or so I thought.
“Get out,” she said, without turning her head from the screen.
“I was just checking if you needed anything.”
“What’s another word for achievement?”
“Um, feat?”
“I’m proud of my feats during high school. I don’t think so.”
“How about conquests?”
“Shut up.”
“If you need me I’ll just be enjoying my summer vacation—”
“Get out.”
Her applications became a family obsession. For us the process of applying to college had been vested with outsize significance, as if the overwhelmed junior administrators who made up the admissions committees at top schools were in fact deciding our ultimate worth, as if there in some dank New England basement they were weighing our souls on silver soul-scales. It’s hard to even express how feverish, how snobbish, how riddled with collective self-importance, how idol-worshipping that whole business was, at our school and all the more so at home, where Dad looked forward to our matriculation at colleges as a kind of anointment—for these would be Ivy League colleges, book-lined palaces out of which we would one day stride triumphant in our mortarboards, with snappy a cappella numbers ringing in our ears and our tentative footholds in the overclass made solid and permanent.
When Courtney was just a freshman in high school, Dad led our whole family on an Eastern seaboard trip that just happened to include Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton, where we were the youngest non-Asian kids on the campus tours. Dad had graduated from Cornell, but he never took us there, even Cornell wasn’t good enough. He wanted something else for us, more ease, more access, a status-granting vitamin X that had not been part of his youthful diet, but he didn’t really know what it was, or where we might acquire it. He decided it must be at Yale.
As a seventh-grader my interest was limited to the pizza we ate in each town, and I was young enough that I was not overly mortified, or at least not as mortified as Courtney was, by Dad’s endless questions for those backward-treading tour guides. I do remember that after we passed a science building on one of the campuses he asked a question about “the new physics.” The guide, ever cheerful, didn’t have an answer for him.
During Courtney’s junior year, the college bulletins started flocking to the house, in bright, chirruping clusters, and Dad’s anticipation grew all the keener. At night he would nestle into a chair and open those bullish gazettes as if peeling the wrapper from a fine cigar, reading even the brochures for schools we never would’ve considered. “Juniata College!” he would announce bluffly as he turned the pages. “Let’s see here.” My own leafing through the brochures had revealed them to be nearly identical; at every college, winsome students tossed Frisbees across a grassy quad, performed plays, and conducted experiments in science labs. But Dad would actually read the text—sometimes aloud, when a sentence struck him as funny. “A dedication to harvesting the seeds of intellectual inquiry!” he’d snort. “Why wait for them to grow?” (He’d go on in that way until he had beat the thing to death.) “Educating the leaders of tomorrow,” he’d say, and then, lowering his voice: “with tomorrow’s curriculum.” Or he might hold up something for us to see: “A nice picture here of their new parking garage.”
Yale was his first choice and Courtney’s. Her application for early admission was due in mid-September. By the time the school year started, she’d more or less finished the essays, but she kept tinkering with them when she was at home. She didn’t let anybody else read what she’d written. Soon, though, I had assignments to do, and one afternoon shortly before her deadline, I went to the study to type up a history paper while Courtney was at tennis practice. The computer had been left on, and one of her essays-in-progress filled the screen.
“My intellectual interests are wide-ranging,” it said. “One of my favorite courses in high school was 11th grade English,” it said. “I also believe in the importance of community service,” it said. “My participation in athletics has taught me invaluable lessons,” it said.
How jarring it was to read those sentences, written by Courtney, about Courtney, and yet containing nothing of Courtney. I didn’t recognize her in those polysyllabic assertions, the candidate-speak. It made me feel strange, to see all the games she’d played reduced to invaluable lessons.
Those were the early days of home computers, and I’m still not sure how it happened. I opened a new document, typed my paper, printed it out, closed the document. Maybe I’d closed the word processing program as well, I don’t remember. But that evening, a wail sounded from the study. The essay wouldn’t open. A message on the screen told her the file was password-protected.
I sat under the kitchen lights, staring at the vinyl tablecloth.
“What did you do?” Dad kept saying to me.
“I don’t know,” I said. Soon I was crying too.
Then Dad was on the phone to the software store, to the company that had made the software, but the file still wouldn’t open. At some point my sister had printed out a draft, but we went through the garbage and couldn’t find it. She had to rewrite the essay in two days. She’d stared at the lost essay for so long, she must have known much of it by heart, and the next day Mom called her in sick to school, so that she could stay home and finish—what I’m trying to say is that the rewriting she did, of a two-page personal statement, was not a superhuman feat. Yet we all treated it as though it were. She would’ve never done anything in such a slapdash way, writing entire paragraphs at the last minute, though that was the way I wrote everything. She finished, and my father drove the application to the post office, and all was calm.
A day later, however, she went back and reread her essay and discovered two typos, which she’d missed in the rush to finish it. An essay with two typographical errors had been sent off to Yale, and there was nothing she could do. I was to blame, I knew. I had ruined Courtney’s application.
Later on (and I mean years later) the loss of the original essay would come to seem emblematic, in that so much Atherton family data was eventually lost. All our papers and letters and records from those years were stored on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies, while technology moved on, until the files could no longer be accessed and the disks were thrown out. Whatever history of our family was contained in those documents, it wound up in the garbage.
No one else could rile me the way Courtney could. It wasn’t anything she explicitly said or did, so much as t
he attitude, the superior stance. She was the older sister with her shit together and I was the incompetent, self-absorbed, lost one. She’d found this place for herself, a fancy pouf to park her butt on, and from it she watched me and criticized me and offered up stupid suggestions until I just wanted to kill her. I don’t mean that only figuratively. I can remember fights we had as girls, the kicking and the biting that would begin tentatively and then turn vicious. The urge to annihilate each other had always been there, tamed over the years but never uprooted.
I e-mailed Rob. A half day with my sister had left me wanting a treat, better yet the one treat that would stick it to her. I sent the e-mail vengefully, not expecting a reply, much less one with exclamation points.
Hey! I broke my phone/lost your info! What’s up?
Though I wasn’t proud of my meager studio I invited him over, excited not only by the prospect of sex but by the realization (and it did feel like a Realization, a bell going off) that I’d come to the wrong conclusions about him, and that probably all my judgments over the past several weeks had been clouded by living with Dad and seeing so much of my family. I felt newly righteous about having found my own place. Maybe the apartment had changed everything after all.
In bed, after we’d slept together, Rob put his hands behind his head and started telling me something about his work, and I was content enough to have him there, to hear him talking, to look at his forearms or his chest the way I might look at a diagram, discovering the way one part was connected to another. He got up for a glass of water, and when he came back he was holding a few pages I’d printed and left on the table.
“Don’t read that,” I said.
“What is this?”
“Just something I’ve been working on. Don’t read it.”
“Sorry,” he said, still reading.
I got up, took the pages from him, then asked him whether he remembered coming to our house for a pool party. “You and your mom and your stepdad came over, this one time.”
He said he didn’t remember the party. He did remember an argument that his parents had once had about going to our house. “My mom didn’t want to go,” he said. “And my stepdad said that your dad was the one decent friend he’d ever had and damned if we weren’t going to go.”
“Do you know why your mom didn’t want to?”
“Probably because she hated leaving me alone.”
“When you were sixteen.”
“Fifteen, sixteen. Unless I already had other plans, she always wanted me to come along to everything. She worried about me staying home and getting into trouble, getting high.”
“Your stepfather didn’t have other friends?”
“I guess he didn’t think they’d stick by him. Honestly, he was right. After the shit hit the fan, they all ditched him. Or that’s what he thought. He was depressed too, and he wasn’t leaving the house at all except to see his lawyer or his shrink. And he wasn’t taking his meds, we found that out later, though why the fuck my mom wasn’t on top of that a little sooner, I have no idea. It was the same thing with me, she was sort of in denial about the drugs I did and about my stepdad not taking his pills, but she knew enough that she was always hovering. She’d try to keep us around her so she could watch us. I guess she thought she could keep us from doing anything really stupid, but she was wrong about that.”
“She was probably doing the best she knew how,” I said.
“No she wasn’t.”
“Okay.”
“God forbid she actually get out of her comfort zone.” He’d been standing halfway between the kitchenette and the bed, and then he walked past me, to the window.
“I know the feeling. It’s a drag.”
“No, it’s more than a drag,” he said. “It’s called enabling.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I should probably get going.”
“You don’t have to,” I said in a voice that conveyed more than I wanted it to convey.
He turned back and gave me his head-tilt, and although I now recognized that as a mannerism, he snagged me with his fond—or fond-seeming—eyes. I wanted him to stay whether or not they were actually fond. He sat on the edge of the bed and lay back across it, so that his hair grazed my foot.
“It drove me nuts. Her and my stepdad, no matter how bad it got, they would pretend to me that nothing was wrong.”
“Where was your dad in all this?”
“In Ohio. His company moved him out there. My mom would always threaten to send me to live with him, so that he could discipline me. Actually I would’ve much rather lived with him, I just didn’t want to change schools or live in Columbus.”
I listened to him go on, assured by his voice that he was still there with me. I’d asked him to stay, if not in so many words, and he did stay.
It’s true that my bar could’ve been higher. I did wish to find someone with whom I might reproduce and/or purchase real estate and/or adopt a medium-size dog, and yet all too often I chose to spend time with guys who were obviously not that person, because they were the guys who happened to be around, and I was very susceptible to a certain kind of confidence.
Exhibit number one would be the disaster of a man I’d been dating before I left L.A.
Lessons learned in sunny California: Never go a-trysting with a man who keeps looking at his watch. Never trust a man who hesitates before saying your name, as if he’s not a hundred percent sure, and then says it three times in a row. Never trust a man who always walks one step ahead of you, in fancy loafers. Never trust a man you meet at a mall—that was where I’d met Gary Doyle, at the Grove, buying coffee.
But I was always analyzing my extinct relationships this way, shaking my failures out of them. Does being single force a person to adopt regrets at least as hypotheses, tried on for size? Was that what I’d done wrong? Or that? Or that? I wish I could be more tolerant of myself, but in this instance I know that I am at least partly to blame. There were warning signs aplenty.
Helen, he would say to me, Helen, Helen. As though he had to keep reminding himself. I bet you raised hell in high school, didn’t you. Was he kidding? Nothing could have been further from the truth. The first syllable of my name had led him off track. But he was funny, just his delivery was funny, so that even things he didn’t intend as humor cracked me up, and he was brash and very successful, and there was something poignant to me about the way he was always starting a new diet. I wanted to help him make healthier choices.
Or did I really just want to pig out with him? I now wonder whether that one night, our worst night together, had been caused by a food coma—or maybe there had been something in the nachos. We’d had Tex-Mex delivered, just before everything went off the rails, and after we ate I felt extremely drowsy. Incapable of operating heavy machinery, and Gary Doyle himself was something of a heavy machine. This was our fourth or fifth date, we’d already slept together a couple of times, and it came after a terrible weekend in Santa Barbara, it was his friend’s forty-fifth birthday and Gary had turned mean, badgering me because I’d never seen Taxi Driver, because I didn’t actually know what happened at a seder (this even though Gary himself was not Jewish) or who Stu Sutcliffe was, whatever assorted things he knew. I was letting him down left and right. He’d imagined I was something else and so I’d found myself trying to be that something else even though I didn’t know what he’d imagined. Somebody more conversant in the history of popular culture and the basics of other religions, I guess. My point is, there were signs aplenty, and yet I ran deeper into the maze, chasing after the bull-type animal.
Then came that one bad night. The man had strange proclivities, and yes, I would have cut it short had it not been for the silk ropes around my wrists and the fact that I was just so tired. But I wouldn’t want anyone to think, or think that I think, that one evening of unduly prolonged nudity and some unwished-for splooge on my face counted more than it did. I’d agreed to the ropes. I wasn’t protesting as it happened—at least I don’t think
I was, though now I’m not sure what I experienced and what I dreamed.
What I do wonder at now is less the weight of my mistake than the obviousness of it—the fact that I’d gone back for more after the weekend trip. I’d been more afraid of ending things than of what the badgering portended. I was willing to put on those black fake-leather chaps he’d ordered from some tawdry website and later to scrub off the streaks of black dye they’d left on my thighs. I was willing to indulge the whims of a vaporing man who’d jerked away too many Sunday afternoons watching porn. A man who kept the radio tuned to the classic rock station even as he undressed me, none other than Cheap Trick playing as he enacted his tacky little fantasy. What I regretted, much more than the experience itself, which was merely kind of gross, was the fact that I kept remembering it.
Even more regrettable was what happened two weeks later. He called me, and I picked up the phone so that I could yell at him, but after that he wound up coming over, one last time. We hadn’t communicated since then.
What I’m trying to say is that in comparison to Gary, Rob seemed like a peach, a prince, and I was ready to cut him all kinds of slack.
* * *
One evening I came home from work to find a squad car parked in front of the building. A thin, dripping fog had spread, and I took in the scene as if through wax. On the stoop stood a woman who lived downstairs, and a lady cop in a cop hat who was interviewing the woman and making notes on a clipboard. I felt my throat pucker. Everything was blue and darker blue, save for the blinking lights on top of the police car, with their feathery halos.
A second policeman stood by the stair rail talking into a radio. A robbery, he told me. Because of the yellow police tape across the front door I awarded myself a kind of importance, that of a person who, unlike the handful of nonresident spectators who’d gathered to gawk, was entitled to cross the do-not-cross threshold. Except that I wasn’t: the policeman explained that they had reason to believe the intruder might still be in the building, or at least no reason to believe he or she wasn’t in the building, and I would have to wait “just like everybody else.” This exile was, he implied, for my own safety, despite the fact that it would consign me to wandering the streets after dark.