by Karen Olsson
The pages were still warm when I took them in my hands. He was already heading back toward the stairs. “But you should be writing something of your own, not helping me with a book I might never finish.”
I thanked him; I said I was really excited to read it, which truly I was. And then again I was reluctant. I took those pages home and didn’t touch them for a long time. I also put my own book on hold. The more I’d written, the more the whole construct had threatened to collapse, maybe because I’d never actually been part of the professional world I was trying to re-create, though that wasn’t the only reason. Iran-Contra was too convoluted. My father was too close and also too distant. And did it matter so much what he had done in his career, or had I just fallen into an all-too-Washingtonian trap, believing his career had defined him?
This wasn’t just about his career. This was my family’s encounter with History. The scandal seemed to me, in its mysterious, byzantine way, to be more than a political mess that had sullied my dad. I sometimes thought of it as a puddle in which a whole swath of sky was reflected, as well as, from certain angles, my own face.
Yet it was a relatively recent obsession. I’d only become compelled by Iran-Contra once I’d had the idea to write a script—in other words, my curiosity about the story and my urge to tell the story had presented at the same time, like two symptoms of the same illness, back when I’d hoped to convert our family crisis into Hollywood drama. The longer I stayed away from L.A., though, the less I believed that such a conversion was even possible, never mind desirable. I lost track of my three-act structure. I no longer knew who the antagonists were.
I set my book aside, but I didn’t stop thinking about that time. Everything—the streets, the season, the smells in the air—reminded me of the past, and I was remembering things I hadn’t thought about in years.
PART THREE
1986
It was the year Len Bias died. Len Bias, All-American, star of the University of Maryland basketball team, was picked second in the NBA draft by the Celtics on June 17 and pronounced dead, at Leland Memorial Hospital, less than forty-eight hours later. The day after the draft he had flown with his father to Boston and back, and that night, while celebrating in a Maryland dorm room, he’d ingested enough cocaine to stop even a young athlete’s unscarred heart. He collapsed on the floor. The friend who called 911 told the dispatcher, “This is Len Bias. He can’t die,” and though the dispatcher didn’t recognize the name, countless other people would’ve understood: not only was it unacceptable for Len Bias to die of an overdose before he’d played his first game in the pros, it was inconceivable. Not Bias with his defiant hang-time, Bias who would bring off his perfect jump shot on one possession and on the next soar straight to the hoop. Bias, one of the two greats to come out of the Atlantic Coast Conference in those years, along with Jordan.
If you were a kid who cared about basketball back then, the death of Len Bias was another Challenger explosion—and a much bigger deal than the reports about weapons sales to Iran and covert aid to the Contras that began surfacing later that same year. He can’t die. No one could believe that the demigod had been so crudely exposed as a mortal, that such talent could vanish so quickly from the earth, and that nothing would be left but the game tapes and a photograph of Bias at the draft, in an ivory suit and a green Celtics cap, not beaming like you might expect but smiling shyly, more Lenny the quiet boy who used to go home from college on the weekends and wash his mother’s car than Bias the big-time baller. On the news they showed that photo over and over, the picture of a glorious beginning that would be snuffed two days hence. Poor dead Len Bias, his happy face was everywhere.
* * *
D.C. was nuts for basketball, at least lots of us were, and the same ardor that had produced a Len Bias infected many, many lesser athletes, even a contingent of private-school girls who were, practically speaking, playing a different game that just happened to have the same rules.
Our team tryouts were in mid-November: three days and thirty-odd ponytailed teenage females, in faded T-shirts and new high-tops, crouching and sliding sideways, zigzagging across the shiny wood floors. This at an “elite” secondary school. Most of us were daughters of privilege and most were white, a small herd of spindly-legged jeunes filles running around in a cloud of estradiol and the bright, fruity scents of our bath products. We ran and jumped desperately, desperate to be better than we were.
Each afternoon a skimmed light fell from the high windows and faded as we went on. Coach E—the varsity coach, Deanna Estes—pushed us until we were raw and heaving and more or less mute. We might make eye contact and stick out our tongues, but then it was back to the pain and the striving, each of us trapped inside our hopeless bodies, lashing at them, go on, go on, until the sky was dark and the air in the gym had thickened into a fug of sweat and nerves. There were two secondary authorities, the varsity assistant and the junior varsity coach, but Coach E, fortyish and wide-hipped and hoarse and intimidating to me, was in charge, and all business.
The year before, as a junior, Courtney had been the varsity’s leading scorer. I’d been a freshman on JV and had come in off the bench, and so my hope was to start for the JV that season. But on the first day of tryouts I flubbed everything. I missed shots, I dropped passes, I stumbled around the gym like some sedated heavyweight, wondering whether I would so much as stay on the JV team, even as Courtney was nearly perfect. She moved through the drills matter-of-factly, like someone doing housework, like a charmed person doing housework. When it came time to shoot she hit shot after beautiful shot, lowered her head and ran on. It wouldn’t be quite right to say that she was a superior athlete, or that she was egoless, but she had worked very hard to become pretty good, and she was something like her best self when she played on a team, and you couldn’t help but feel grateful for it. Her body was loose, easy, but if you looked at her face you saw her eyes always scanning, alert to the steal, the cutter, the shot, the hole.
In my room that night, I sat on my bed and rubbed at the red indentations my socks had left in my ankles, then wiped my nose against my sleeve. Oh fuck it. Fuck me. Well as if anyone would. I stood up and stalked around the room. I ripped a taped-up picture of the Georgetown Hoyas off the wall and crumpled it up, which was hardly satisfying.
I could hear him climbing the stairs. My dad, in his slippers.
“Knock knock.”
“Go away.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Go away!”
“Aren’t you going to eat?”
I shook my head, though he couldn’t see me do it, a piece of my dark wet hair attaching itself to my jaw. He cracked the door.
“Your mother says you missed dinner.”
“I’m not hungry.”
He stepped into the room and, seeing my face, spoke more softly. “You should eat.”
“I messed up. I did terribly.”
“I’m sure you did better than you think you did. Courtney said things went well.” He nodded to himself and started to look around the room. I’ll eat later, I told him.
Because we were sisters who played basketball, people assumed that Courtney and I had grown up playing together. I can picture it myself, an alternate girlhood in which we unwound game after game of one-on-one from a fat spool of afternoons, sweating and squealing and laughing all the while. But when we actually tried to play, it sucked. We would come this close to punching each other, and between punching each other and killing each other was barely any distance at all. She was the older sister, and so she absolutely had to win. She did in fact beat me consistently, but she wasn’t expert enough to win every single game: she wasn’t quicker than I was or any kind of ball-handling whiz. I was more reckless, more physical, which sometimes worked in my favor and sometimes backfired. Every now and then I took the lead, but I didn’t want to make her mad, and so I would start to giggle and do silly things. I would, when I had the ball, turn my body away from the basket and then back myself toward
it, dribbling and backing into my sister until I got close enough to attempt an unlikely hook shot. Those hook shots infuriated Courtney. “Come on!” she would say. It didn’t take long before she grabbed my hair, and I would exclaim, jovially, “Folks, now she’s got her sister by the hair!” which only made her yank harder.
I wanted her approval badly, but instead of doing things she’d approve of, I did the opposite.
In other words we didn’t play together much. Mostly, I ran. Ran the trails down to Georgetown and back up through the streets, ran along the parkway by the river, ran on Reno Road and Nebraska Avenue, ran around the grounds of the cathedral, ran up and down the hills in Battery Kemble Park. Ran in excess of what was necessary or even desirable for basketball, for I was overworking the wrong muscles. I had much more lung capacity than I had power. But in high school everyone has to find her own way to keep her head on straight, and my way was to lope around for an hour at a stretch with a mix tape in my yellow Sports Walkman, taking refuge in those patches of woods that are scattered among the Washington neighborhoods, jumping over roots and skirting the muddy sections and shortening my stride to skitter along exposed pipes.
And in the side yard Courtney worked and worked at her shot, her moves, her dribble, even things like cuts without the ball. I’d look out and see her jumping rope, or machine-gunning her feet, a regular Rocky of Northwest D.C. Though her best sport was lacrosse, and she’d already been contacted by lacrosse coaches from a few different colleges, she was obsessed with basketball. Or: the city was obsessed with basketball, and she’d caught the civic fever.
The second day of tryouts, I did better than I had the first day. One thing I could do was follow instructions, and on that day I did everything Coach E said. Hustle up! she yelled, and I dutifully hustled. Hands up on D! I put my arms in the air. Boards! I jumped up and caught the ball. Box out! My butt was on another girl. I did as I was told. On the third day, about halfway through the practice, Coach E split us up into teams of five so that we could scrimmage. I saw that the other four girls on my team were seniors, from last year’s varsity, which unnerved me. I started fucking up again. On defense I ran under the basket toward the ball when I should’ve stayed over on the weak side to rebound. Then on offense I set a screen, squaring myself against one of the girls on the other team, but she shucked me off and I fell down, fell on the floor with a thud, and at that point I was ready to give up and head for the locker room.
A hand appeared, someone offering to help me up. It was Courtney, who was on the other team. She pulled me to my feet and then pulled me close to her and slapped my lower back, something I’d seen her do with her teammates but had never experienced myself, and I experienced it now not as a simple gesture of solidarity or support but as something greater, I want to say cosmic, though I know that sounds overblown. It was as if my sister, and therefore the universe, had for the first time in my life found a place for me. Then I heard Coach’s gargly chiding, Step on the gas, people! and I did. I ran back on defense and blocked a girl’s shot. I sprinted the length of the court, caught the ball, and fed it to the post player, who scored. And there was Courtney jogging by me, saying something, N’est-ce pas, I thought she said, but that didn’t make any sense, and I refitted the sounds into our own language: Nice pass. Two syllables, and I bounded ahead like a dog running out of the water.
I didn’t do anything spectacular, but I kept my girl from scoring and made a few shots and by the end of the game I felt good about it. After practice, the coaches posted the team rosters on the locker room bulletin board. My name was on the varsity list: I stared at it until it became unreadable, a pair of squiggles. I stood there in that humid cavern, in the swim of other girls’ sweat, smelling everything. Courtney squeezed my shoulder and said, “Way to go!” It seemed like she was still deciding how she felt about it. She was in just her sports bra and shorts, looking around, thinking things over. “We’re on the same team,” she said, accepting the fact if not quite celebrating it. Our parents sounded the same way when we told them I’d made varsity. That’s nice, they said.
* * *
It had been maybe a week earlier that we’d all sat in the family room, the radiator hissing and the ice cream on the coffee table going soft, as the president addressed us, via TV, from two miles away. Our buoyant leader had turned old and false and sarcastic.
* * *
I know you’ve been reading, seeing, and hearing a lot of stories the past several days attributed to Danish sailors, unnamed observers at Italian ports and Spanish harbors, and especially unnamed government officials of my administration. Well, now you’re going to hear the facts from a White House source, and you know my name.
* * *
The family room: Where my sisters and I would sit on a small hound’s-tooth couch and argue over whose turn it was to get up and change the channel. Where plastic horses had been paraded, crayons melted over the radiator, mittens clipped to parkas, damp pool towels left on the floor, a shoe, thimble, and hat advanced around a board, sleepovers staged …
* * *
The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists.
* * *
In my scrambled memory, there is just a single, comprehensive Reagan speech, raveling in the wake of a breathy Well, regarding threats in the Caribbean and in Central America, the evil empire, welfare queens, SALT II, crack cocaine, hijackers and hostages. And somewhere along the way came the president’s own failures to remember, the gaps—memento mori—in the sunny script.
* * *
All appropriate cabinet officers were fully consulted. The actions I authorized were, and continue to be, in full compliance with Federal law. And the relevant committees of Congress are being, and will be, fully informed.
* * *
Not true: my father must have known that was false. Or did he? How much did he know, that evening, and how much did he anticipate? If Dad, that night—in his armchair, necktie loosened, shoes off—foresaw what was ahead, he kept it from the rest of us. He sat and watched and ate his ice cream.
* * *
Even as the weeks went on and the clouds gathered, then let loose their storm, Dad remained a stalwart of the stands, just as he had been ever since Courtney’s freshman year. As far as I know, he never left work before eight or nine at night for any other reason—didn’t ever go to the doctor, I’d be willing to bet, during the four years that he served on the National Security Council staff—but he’d come to just about every home game and some of the others too. He would arrive while we were warming up, take off his hat and his long wool coat, smooth his damp hair and loosen his tie. He would shake hands with the other parents. And then, once the whistle sounded and the ball went up, this otherwise slightly formal, Republican, whiter-than-rice bureaucrat would turn into a zealot. He would stalk back and forth in front of the bleachers and cheer his heart out.
The days were short. Darkness had blackened the windows by game time. Beyond them lay our frosty, self-deceiving city, its marble walls sliced up by passing headlights, its statues watched over by park police as angry poor people fired guns in the distance. But the gym was lit up and warm. It had a faintly rancid odor, of furnace heat and floor cleaner and damp anoraks balled up and strewn about, of sweat and dried sweat. Our opponents would walk in preening and joking and slapping hands. Then came the tumble of feet, the sneaker-squeaks, the crying for the ball, the whiny bounce of rubber against wood, the second of silence as a shot went up: the game had started. On the sidelines, attorneys and economists in suits would clap the chill out of their hands, calling out, “Good shot!” “Get the ball!” “Go!” as their daughters ran this way and that.
Our dad didn’t actually know much about the game of basketball. He was handy with a drill or a saw, but to watch him pick up any sort of ball
and try to loft it into the air gave me pangs. It was only later that I recognized his clumsiness as partly a product of his childhood, which had been full of work and church—no one had ever taught him to throw. Yet at games he had picked up on various cheers, a bunch of things he’d heard other people say and adopted indiscriminately as his own. It was like he was speaking a foreign language, badly but with gusto. He might start with a few cries of “Let’s go, ladies! Hustle!” He would round his large hands and clap them slowly. He would roll up his sleeves. When he really got going, there was no telling what might come out of his mouth. Sometimes he adopted a sort of announcer’s yodel: “DEeeeeeeFENSE!” Other times he shouted, inappropriately, at members of the other team. “Hey you, pack a suitcase!” he hollered, and pointed a long finger at a girl who’d been called for traveling.
“PACK YOUR SUITCASE!”
Boys in the stands snorted and pointed. I tried to ignore it, but Courtney complained to our mom, who missed a lot of our games because she had to pick up Maggie from ballet school.
“He’s blowing off steam,” she told Courtney. There was plenty for him to blow off. Before long he would become a target of the investigation and lose his job, but in the meantime our gym was a refuge. Afterward he would ask whether we wanted to stop at Swensen’s for ice cream, as though we were still eight years old.
Actually I wouldn’t have minded a trip to Swensen’s, but Courtney set him straight. “Dad, we just played basketball. We’re sweaty and tired and want to go home,” she said.
“Oh, okay,” he said, humbled. He had a way of deferring to her, which he didn’t with Maggie or me or even our mom. “Home we go.”
That season we competed in empty, neglected gyms and small, crowded ones. The president’s Special Review Board, tasked to make sure that “all the facts come out,” started to gather masses of information. We competed in damp, echo-ridden buildings with faded pennants hanging from the rafters. An independent counsel was appointed, and John Poindexter and Oliver North and Robert McFarlane and Robert Owen and Albert Hakim and Richard Secord sought legal help, as did my dad. We competed on brand-new courts with shiny floors and cinder-block walls painted the school colors. Depositions were taken, huge quantities of documents were exchanged, and the House and Senate Select Committees were created. We competed at ivied old girls’ schools, against thoroughbred girls coached by thin, steely WASPs, and we competed at glossy suburban academies, against fleet-footed soccer players with hair-sprayed bangs, and we competed at the public school down the street, where black girls laughed at us, and at religious schools where the girls wore knickers and three-quarter sleeves.