by Karen Olsson
What’re you doing
Swinging
I heard Nina giggle. She had gone on ahead and appeared to be bumming a cigarette from some random guy, who must have been thirty at least. He seemed all too happy to oblige. What got me was the way she had positioned her hand on her hip, or maybe it was the way he was leaning over her. I froze: oh crap. Then I said her name, too loudly. Nina turned, and I saw she had the face of someone who knew exactly what she was doing, although she didn’t really know, she couldn’t have.
It happened so quickly, the transition from plastic horses and jumbo drawing pads to lingerie and lip gloss, from playing Marco Polo and holding tea parties underwater to lying beside the pool, soaking in the light. The magazines disclosed ten awesome beauty secrets and ten ways to tell if he really does like you and ten top accessories for fall. No more “tummy,” “poop,” or “mommy,” but instead “bogus,” “spaz,” and “dick,” or whatever they said these days.
Another text from him.
Let’s meet up
Nina had only just passed through it, the time of girls’ disappearing. They fell from the sky, from greater and lesser heights, and slid out of their girl-selves on the way to becoming someone’s girlfriend or the vice president of the French Club. At high schools the expired shells were molted off every which place, in bathrooms and classrooms, stuffed into lockers, useless. One moment you were adrift in the airspace above the field hockey field, and then down you came, tumbling, nauseated, Icarus in kilt and cleats.
The man walked away from us. I told her to lose the cigarette.
“Why?”
“I just can’t condone that.”
“I could hold it farther from you.”
“Put it out,” I said, and then I asked whether she wanted to get dinner. A friend of mine might join us, I said.
* * *
I was driving now, because it was getting dark.
“So is this guy your boyfriend?” she asked.
“Unclear. Not exactly.”
“What’s it like to have a real boyfriend?”
Did I even know the answer?
“My dad is never going to get me a car,” she said. “It’s the Metro for-evah.”
Eventually, I told her, you will have a car. And a nonsecret boyfriend.
The “pan-Asian” restaurant occupied a long narrow room with booths on either side, low-hanging lamps sheltering each booth from the darkness of the unfinished ceiling. Beautiful young women brought pots of steaming tea and bowls of food on wooden slabs to husbands and wives, to bright-faced students, to old friends. There was a sweet, hot smell. Rob had said to meet him there, and we found him at a table engrossed in his handheld device.
As we said our airy hellos and then read our menus, it was as though I knew every one of his motions already, each rustle, each breath, and I knew, therefore, that I was hardly out of the woods when it came to him. In fact I had barely entered them. In winter: storms coming and going, wires down, lines crossed.
I told him we’d been learning to drive.
Oh, where did you go? To Turtle Park and back again, up Reno and down Nebraska, over hill and dale and Rock Creek. Which we all agreed was a poor name for a waterway. I ordered stir-fry and they ordered soup, or was it the other way around, but theirs looked right and mine looked wrong.
“Can you do this?” Rob asked, and he took a few twined rice noodles from his bowl and stuck them above his lips, so that they dangled down like the tusks of a noodle walrus.
Nina copied him. I couldn’t have joined in if I’d wanted to, not with what I’d ordered, but then again I didn’t want to. I wanted them to stop. My companions suddenly seemed tipsy, though they weren’t drinking. Nina was pink. Rob was tilting his head right and left, so that the noodles swayed. I was quiet, waiting for a beat I could catch, but I had no rhythm at all. Once again she ought to have been teaching me, as I was going about it all wrong and steering her toward the dragons besides.
Rob asked her what school she went to, whether she liked it there, what bands were her favorites. This had the feel of teasing more than questioning, which is to say I don’t think he cared what the answers were. His directness made her shyer than she’d been a moment ago, and she answered shyly—coyly?—consulting her soup bowl before she spoke. Rob was an opportunistic listener, waiting for her to say something that grabbed him and then jumping in with his response, no matter whether she had more to say. He did the same with me, I realized, but when I was talking to him I got too tripped up to notice things like that.
When she was in the bathroom, I told him that Nina had a secret boyfriend. “Or not a boyfriend exactly. It’s her former math teacher. Or tutor.”
“What’s his name?”
“Sam, or Samed.”
“Am I supposed to choose?”
“He has two names. And he’s older, which I don’t know, is that bad?”
“Yes.”
“I just mean, like, two or three years older.”
“If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t let her go out with some older guy with two names. No way.”
Because I thought he was joking, I waited for him to ease up. He didn’t.
“This guy is like a nerdy student from Turkey. I don’t think he’s too dangerous,” I said. Rob didn’t seem at all swayed by that. I saw Nina come out of the bathroom and lowered my voice. “Don’t tell her I told you.”
He drew his finger across his lips.
* * *
Although I offered to split the check with Rob, I found myself, in the bathroom afterward, resentful that he hadn’t insisted on paying for all of us. By the time I walked back out to the dining room, he and Nina had already left the table. I could see them standing outside with their backs to the door of the restaurant. She was nearly his height, and they stood close enough that their silhouettes had merged into one. Granted, it was dark out, and they were wearing bulky coats, and as soon as I stepped out the door it seemed to me I’d been too sensitive, imagining things.
While Nina was distracted by something on her phone, I asked Rob did he want to get together later, after I dropped Nina off. He told me he had a breakfast meeting the next day. In other words, no.
I didn’t realize how late it was until Nina and I started back. On Vane Street, Daniel opened the door to the building just as she hit the steps. “Long lesson!” he said, with false cheer.
“We had dinner too,” Nina said.
“No accidents?”
“She did great,” I said.
“Bye!” she said, walking past him, through the door.
I stood beneath him, at the bottom of the stairs, and though I might’ve come up or he might’ve come down, we both stayed where we were. “She did all right?” he asked, wanting more reassurance than I could possibly give him, not just about her driving but about her entire state of being. His worries were vast.
“She’s a natural.”
“I’ve been meaning to teach her, but it was just one thing after another, really. Thanks so much for offering.”
“No problem.”
“Maybe next time, if you do it again,” he began, tentatively. “If you do go to dinner or something, if you could let me know…”
“I should’ve called you about that. I’m sorry.”
“You have my number, right?”
“It’s in my phone, yes.”
“It’s just that she sometimes forgets to let me know—”
“She’s sixteen, I guess.”
“Right! But she did okay?”
“She did.”
* * *
I entered my own building, and as I went up the stairs something started to squeeze my insides, I was tetchy on the landing and passed through the door to my apartment with a full-blown sense of grievance I couldn’t assign to anything specific. Since I’d come back to Washington I’d become more quick to anger, I noticed, and maybe that had a positive side—I wasn’t depressed anymore! I was fucking pissed off!—but it wasn’t so
positive overall.
I got down on my belly next to the bed and looked for my gun. It wasn’t there. I started to worry, until I remembered that one night I’d become unnerved by its presence and had stuck it under the kitchen sink, behind the spare paper towel rolls. I’d put it inside of a large freezer bag, like evidence in storage. I fetched it and eased it out of the bag and held it in my palm, then held it with two hands, posing.
I walked around like that, wanting to shoot, feeling like Elvis as I aimed at my pillow, my small TV, my refrigerator, my dirty dishes. I have to stop digging in the muck, I thought. A little less conversation, a little more action!
My head hurt. I put the gun down. I sat down. I looked out my window at the windows of Nina’s apartment, where the lights were already off.
The next day I wished I were a wanderer, a rambler, a hobo out of an old song or a folk tale, nobody’s daughter. I wished I were not in our nation’s capital but out on the plains, or in some bleached-out motel on the Mexican side of the border. Instead I parked my dad’s car on Albemarle Street. I was returning the car and meant to return something else too.
The neighbors’ houses, stripped of their holiday lights, squatted grimly on hills of ivy. The steps to our own house needed hosing down. I didn’t want to go inside. Much as I understood that my failings and failures couldn’t be blamed on this house, I still felt as though it had sapped too much out of me and that I’d been hobbled by it. I bided my time in the car, the little gun in my purse.
Or was I just avoiding my father? His sudden outbursts, his unacknowledged, indescribable needs, his heavy heart—I didn’t know what to do with him.
No one answered the door, and I let myself in. “Hello? Dad?” I heard footsteps on the basement stairs and then there he was, stumbling up from underground in his rowing singlet, his face reddish and sweaty and suddenly too large, with too much of that damp skin on it.
“Hello!” he said.
“Hi. I brought the car back.”
“You didn’t have to—I could’ve come out on the Metro to get it.”
“That’s okay,” I said. I knew he would’ve done it, had I asked. “Thanks for lending it to me.”
There was a basket of clean laundry by the stairs, not yet folded. I still wasn’t used to it, his doing his own laundry. And out of nowhere I had the thought, He needs someone over here taking care of him, though it wasn’t the laundry that was the issue, he was perfectly capable of laundry, and there was nothing about that basket of clothes or about the house generally or the way he himself looked that suggested he needed any special help. Even so, I understood in that moment why it had bugged Courtney when I’d moved out.
“Are you sure you don’t need it for longer? You could keep it for the weekend.”
I shook my head.
“Let me clean up a little, and I’ll drive you back over.”
“You don’t need to—”
“I’m not busy.”
“Weren’t you exercising?”
“I was just finishing. Happy to drive you.”
The heaviness I’d been dreading beforehand was not present now: sometimes he was suffused with it and sometimes not at all. You never knew.
He went upstairs to rinse off and change, and I sat in the living room. I reached into my purse for a magazine and then remembered what else was in there. I had to give it to him. And what could I tell him? When he came down I pulled the pistol out of my bag and said, “I brought this back. I can’t have this.” And then: “It freaks me out to have it.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked at it, then shook his head very slightly, almost talking to himself. “If you can’t have it—”
“I can’t have it.”
“I’ll put it in the safe.” And up he went again, to his study, where he had a safe bolted to the wall behind his desk.
It was as though I were trying to unload not only the thing itself but some excess of maleness I’d been saddled with—because of my dad? Was it in trying to please him that I’d become more of a boy than was good for me? Or in trying to compensate for him? It was a subtle thing, for it’s not like anybody who met me would’ve found me especially masculine, but there was a way in which I tended to tamp down those parts of myself I found girly, preferring to stand around making wisecracks. Although I couldn’t really get rid of that by returning the gun, I felt better after I did.
I heard the phone ringing, then the toilet flushing, and so I went to answer the phone myself.
“Hello?”
“Hello?” echoed a woman’s voice, surprised. “Is—Tim there?”
“He’s not available just now. Who’s this?”
“It’s Valerie. Who’s this?”
“Helen,” I said, shortly.
“Ah. His daughter Helen?”
“Yes.”
“This is Valerie,” she said again. “If you wouldn’t mind telling him I called.”
“Sure.”
“Valerie called,” I told Dad when he came back. “Thanks,” was all he said in response. Then he clapped his hands and asked me was I ready to leave.
“Who is Valerie?”
“She’s the, uh, a woman who calls sometimes.”
“A woman who calls sometimes?”
“We’ve had dinner together.”
I couldn’t get any more out of him. I was glad to know there was a woman who called him, though as it sank in—the fact of these occasional calls and at least one dinner—I grew tense. Oh please! I scolded myself. For I knew what I was feeling and it was: abandoned. I let him drive me back. Mass Ave was deserted, nothing but dark buildings. More Washington arcana spilled out of Dad as he drove, and I let it wash over me, the sound of my dad when he was feeling good, or good enough.
1986–87
A fatefully slim envelope, return address Yale, arrived at our house in mid-December. Courtney had been rejected—not rolled over into the regular applicant pool, or wait-listed, but denied outright. I think we were all shocked that such a thing could happen to my straight-A, near-perfect-SAT-score, lacrosse-prospect, exemplary sister. Nobody said a word about it. Courtney herself didn’t let anything show: she bit down on her disappointment and finished her other applications. But Dad, oh Dad was so upset. They’d made a mistake, he believed, they’d mixed up her file with someone else’s. Our mother, who was sorry about it for Courtney’s sake but didn’t take it so personally, had to entreat him not to call up Yale to insist that they correct the error. Probably he tried to, regardless. Did he blame me for her rejection? Did Courtney? Not in any overt way, but I can’t say for sure. They blamed me, and the universe, and probably themselves too. The small blue pennant on the kitchen corkboard was tossed in the garbage.
By then we’d already played a few games of the type that always led off the season, against teams from outside our conference, which were often blowouts one way or the other. We’d lost a game by twenty points and won the next by more than thirty. Then came our first league game, at a girls’ school in Virginia, and though we were ahead for most of it, we threw it away in the end. We were sloppy. There was nothing Coach hated more, and during the desolate van ride back home she delivered a droning sermon from behind the wheel, which was not on one subject but shifted here and there; it was about attitude, it was about respect, it was about commitment, it was about showing up ready to play. It was about hustle. And it was about respect again. Can’t have a team without it. Can’t win games without it. It’s respect for the game that helps you comprehend your role on this team, she said. It’s respect that keeps you from throwing up stupid shots, or throwing an elbow at your opponent. Those girls you just played, they weren’t more skilled than you but they did use what they had. They weren’t faster than you but they did hustle.
We were tired and brooding, half-listening. The city lights were colored smudges, and it was as if Coach’s words were outside the windows too, filtered through cold glass. I started to dream the rest of her speech, it was about power and it was
about fear, then about the color blue, it was about a trial taking place in the gym and about some papers I was required to alphabetize, and at last it was about loving one another as if we were all sisters—this just before the engine shut off and we were dispensed into the parking lot.
My actual sister was drifting away. Only a month earlier I’d thought we might become friends, something like friends anyway, but after the rejection from Yale she grew more distant. She started to play differently too. She’d always been a precise athlete, her form exact, deserving of an A grade in the subject of basketball, but now she had something she hadn’t had before. She stole the ball, sometimes snatched it right out of an opponent’s hands, she came home from games with bruises on her knees and on her arms. She never cracked a smile. She played angry, and we won the next five games in a row, three at a Christmas tournament and then the first two games of the new year.
Like everyone on the team I was drawn into Courtney’s field. I started to play better, if only out of fear. But then came the absence of fear. The apologetic, chattering voice in my head had quieted, and I heard only yes! and yes! and yes! I was drawn to the ball, and it to me, and I hung each shot like an ornament on a branch. One day Coach said to me, “When you go against Courtney in practice, you’re full of fight, but against anybody else you get nice. You’re too nice. Pretend every single one of your opponents is your sister.” And so I did, I saw Courtneys everywhere.
The relationship between my brain and my body shifted. In the next game, and in the next one after that, I was my body, which was strangely like being someone else and being no one at all. In movies these moments are given to us in slow motion, the sounds of the crowd muted, the ball crashing on the floor and swishing through the net, but for me it wasn’t like that. It was fast, grunting, awesome.
Coach started pulling me off the bench sooner, usually halfway into the first quarter. I would crouch by the scorers’ table, waiting for the whistle to blow so that I could go in the game, so nervous! Convinced, always, that my streak was about to end. As I jogged out, I would forget everything, all our plays, which girl I was supposed to guard, my own name, and then remember again. I didn’t always do well, but I was a part of things. And because people saw Courtney, they saw me, and they talked about us as a unit, the Atherton sisters, though we were in fact not the unit I wished we were. For all that time we spent together at practice and games and driving to and fro, for all the shots sunk and high fives, Courtney had gone away from me.