by Karen Olsson
But by the time she started at Brown, she seemed to have forgotten us. During her first visit home, at Thanksgiving, she announced with a flourish that she had nothing to be thankful for. Dad said she might at least be thankful that she wasn’t homeless, and a long argument about homelessness—and AIDS, and Reagan’s legacy, and Marion Barry—ensued, during which Dad made reference to the National Review and Courtney to Jean Genet. After that, she rarely came back to D.C.
As far as I could tell she spent her undergraduate years doing just what people did at high-status private colleges in those days, reading the deconstructionists, dabbling in drugs. Then she went off to Rome and spent a year and a half there learning the language and shacking up with this scrawny Italian who had a receding hairline and glasses but also a sexual presence you don’t often find in young American guys. When she returned she lived briefly with friends in New York, waited tables, applied to business schools, and chose Stanford. She kept smoking, though, and even sunny Palo Alto couldn’t uproot her chronic discontent. Then she moved home to Washington, for what looked like the long haul. That had been the most surprising of her sudden shifts.
* * *
We sat down to eat and did some drinking along with the eating and then (alas) waded into the subject of the recent election. Maggie had become a little obsessed. Republicans had stolen Ohio! As she denounced the voting machine manufacturers and a certain county’s Board of Elections, her voice became strident, though for all I knew everything she was saying might have been true. “They cut the number of machines, they purged the voter rolls,” she went on.
“Bush won by three million votes,” Courtney said. “Even if Ohio had gone the other way, would you really be satisfied with that? Another Bush–Gore?”
“If it got Bush out of office, then yes. Have you actually read about any of this?” Maggie asked her, then turned and looked at me. “Have you?”
“I guess it just seemed to me like Kerry conceded, so…” I said.
“You don’t care if it’s an illegitimate result?”
“I’m not as fully up to speed on this.”
“It’s over,” Courtney said. She reached for the wine and refilled her glass.
“Even if there’s nothing we can do about it now, the public deserves to know,” Maggie said.
“Honestly I don’t think the public really gives a crap,” Courtney said.
“But this goes back to what you were saying in the car,” she began, looking at me, then turning to address Courtney, “We need to know the real story, even if nobody gives a crap—especially if nobody gives a crap! Like, nobody gives a crap about Iran-Contra, which is why Helen’s writing a book about it.”
That wasn’t quite right. I wanted to say as much, and I wanted to say that more people cared about Iran-Contra than about early Tudor drama, though I didn’t know it for a fact.
Courtney pounced. “Good grief. You’re not still working on that?”
My fork and knife were noisy on my plate—actually Courtney’s fork, her knife, her plate, all of it sleek and Finnish, given to her as a reward for getting married. We were eating peppers stuffed with, I think, kamut.
“Maybe I am. Can we not talk about this?”
“I just can’t believe you’re so bent on doing that,” Courtney said. She twisted to one side and then the other, stretching her shoulders.
“Can we talk about something else?”
“All right,” she said. “Let’s talk about what you’ve been doing when you’re not working on your project.”
“That’s not what I had in mind.”
“I mean, I worry about you, and I know Maggie does too…”
I shot a look at Maggie, who seemed to be trying to hide behind her wineglass.
“What is this, an intervention?” My throat stiffened, as did the rest of me. I stared at Courtney, and she stared back with her big, blank eyes. I broke away, looked down at my lap and tugged at my napkin, her fancy linen napkin, from both ends, as if to tear it apart. My thoughts, all the things I thought to say, to yell—you bitch you bitch you bitch—would’ve only gratified her sense of her own superior composure, and besides, we just didn’t yell, we never had. That was our electric fence, and we stayed behind it, instead spewing little digs and behind-the-back insults, insults in the guise of analyzing one another’s behavior. I checked my voice before I said what I said next. “You don’t actually approve of anything I do, so.”
“That’s not true.”
“Hey guys—” Maggie began.
“Why did you have to bring up the book?” I shot back. “Did she tell you to?”
Maggie flinched.
“Now that’s just paranoid,” Courtney said.
“That’s what you think of me? That I’m paranoid? A paranoid fuckup?”
Courtney shut her eyes. “I think it’s fine if you write a book about something. That’s great. But Iran-Contra? Really? People did some dumb shit they shouldn’t have done. Our dad was one of them. It messed up his career. The end.”
I bit my lip and waited until she spoke again. “I mean, you have to put your own life first, right? This all feels to me like some kind of distraction,” she said. “You’re not in a real job, you’re single, and instead of facing the music—”
“What is ‘facing the music’? Facing the speakers?”
“You get so wrapped up in what things mean, and dwelling on things from a long time ago.” She pressed her lips together as though she’d just polished off one of her arugula frappés. “And now you say maybe you’re still working on it? Like you don’t even know if you are?”
I was committed to my book, I really did want to make something of it, I just didn’t know what. However: by that point in the evening, I had drunk two large glasses of pinot noir, and when I responded I was full of excess conviction, conviction with nothing but wine behind it. “Yes, I am working on it. It’s the story of our family!”
“Our family? That doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“Um, it does.”
“No it doesn’t. I mean, you two will always be my sisters, Dad will always be our dad, and Mom is … what she is, but they’re divorced. We’re grown-up. The thing you’re talking about, that family ended years ago. We can have our little nostalgic holidays, but…”
“Jesus, you guys,” Maggie said.
“You don’t even believe that,” I said, and all at once I was on the verge of tears. “That’s just something you’re saying.”
“And there’s no mystery about what happened to Dad back then, by the way,” Courtney continued. “He fucked up. He was too trusting, he went along with something he shouldn’t have, that was not legal. So he lost that job, and then he went to work for Intelcom and made a whole lot of money. I mean, boo hoo. He and everyone he worked with are lucky they didn’t go to jail! Honestly, I don’t see why that would be something you’d want to dig up.”
Because the last time I’d heard her talk about the scandal was in high school, and back then she’d been more generous to our father, I was actually more startled by this sudden lashing than by her other declaration, i.e., that our family no longer existed.
“Isn’t that kind of harsh? I always thought he just, you know, got caught in a storm without an umbrella,” Maggie said.
“He made mistakes, but we still don’t really have all the facts. And it’s not like he didn’t suffer. He was publicly shamed,” I said, still straining to hold myself together. “And then he spent all that time under investigation.”
That Courtney thought of our father as a wrongdoer, and Maggie wanted to protect him, and I was somewhere in the middle, forever seeking more information as if there were some data out there that would clear it all up—for a passing instant everything was so plain to me that I wanted to laugh as well as cry. Fuck! Of course!
“Of fucking course!” I said.
“Excuse me?” Courtney asked.
Her cold eyes. Her chilly little nose. The tiny gold earrings in her
ears.
“I’m just … I’m just sick of you,” I said, finally starting to lose it.
“Okay—”
“I’m sick of being dismissed, and talked down to, and then you tell me you’re worried about me? You love that, don’t you? You love having something to worry about. You have no idea—”
“Here you go, crying so that I’ll feel like the mean one.”
“It’s not on purpose!”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve been to therapy. I finished doing that. I’m no longer interested. I’m not even sure what your problem is…”
I buried my face in that linen napkin and then—ha! fuck this napkin!—I blew my nose into it. A small thrill went through me. “You’re the problem!”
I scooched my chair back and thrust myself out of it, almost knocking it over. We were silent as it teetered. Its legs settled back on the floor, and I rushed out of the room. What I’d said wasn’t strictly correct—Courtney wasn’t the problem—but I felt as though it had been true up until then. I was still furious, and still kind of crying. My ribs had locked around that old, hot thing, even as my body tried to snake its own drain, to push the thing out through my eyes and nose. I lumbered into my sister’s big, shiny kitchen and leaned against the island. In one hand I was still clutching the snotty napkin, and I dropped it there, on the countertop, then continued to the bathroom and slammed the door. I put my hands over my mouth and screamed into them, this with a twinge of self-consciousness, I mean, I could see myself in the mirror doing it, my loony red face, my red eyes, and even so I did feel (and was surprised to feel) some relief. She wasn’t my problem.
* * *
When I came back out, I found Maggie in the kitchen washing plates. I started drying them. The light over the sink glared too brightly. Behind it was a window, and the light’s glaring reflection.
“For what it’s worth, she wants things to be better for you guys,” Maggie said.
“For me and her?”
“Yes. She’s said that to me.”
It was plausible that she’d said as much to Maggie, but I didn’t quite believe Courtney wanted that wholeheartedly. “Yeah, like if everything would just go her way, then it would all be better, right?”
“I know it’s not easy.”
“Where is she?”
“Out back.”
I looked again through the window and saw her, in profile, lit from behind by the house. Her face was dark. “What’s she doing out there?”
“Smoking?”
“It feels like now I’m supposed to go out there and be all conciliatory.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Right.”
Maggie watched her out the window.
“Maybe I should go out there,” I said.
I left the dishes to Maggie and stepped outside. Courtney didn’t acknowledge me. She stood with her shoulders hunched forward, and for all the luxury that enveloped her, the house behind us, the sloping yard with its canopy of oak trees, the bulky turtleneck sweater whose sleeves fell halfway over her hands, she struck me as unprotected. She squinted out at the yard, as if she were seeing something other than lawn.
“This is a nice yard,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“Are you…” I didn’t know how to finish the question.
“I’m sorry if I made you cry,” she said.
A bullshit apology, and still I said, “That’s okay.”
“Has Rob said anything to you about me?”
“What? No.”
“Whatever he says about me is a lie.”
“We haven’t been talking about you.”
“Not at all?”
“Not at all.”
“Because it feels like this is a little bit about me, you guys … doing whatever it is you’re doing. And I just want you to know, he thinks things about me that are not true.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not going to say. I just wish you could get to know some guys who aren’t, like, sociopathic.”
“I don’t really think he’s a sociopath.”
“Well, whatever the opposite of a sociopath is, he’s not that. He’s more sociopath than, like, sociopal.”
But wait, I was the play-on-words sister! For a moment I felt infringed upon, and then I remembered that we were related, siblings, congenital infringers.
“So I guess he was kind of a dick to you in high school? I never really knew.”
“That’s in the past.”
A perfectly ordinary thing to say, it nonetheless sounded strange to my ears—what else is there to be sorry about but the past? It was as though my sister were wearing a big signboard with an arrow pointing to our childhood and the words DON’T LOOK OVER HERE printed above it. Or maybe it said I’M NOT MAD ABOUT THIS. I thought of Courtney in our basketball team photo, with thick bangs over her forehead and that wide, guileless smile. A happy kid, that’s what you’d think if you saw that photo. An athlete, cute, with a good solid life just up ahead. And now she did have that life, or she appeared to have it—she had a good husband, a good job, a good house—but she couldn’t enjoy it.
“I started to fall for somebody else, while I was going out with Rob. Which made him mad. And then he did some fucked-up shit…”
“That sounds bad,” I said, while silently wondering just how bad it was, whether it could be forgiven, whether all this was even true.
“When I think about it now I feel like he knew, of course he already knew how messed up things were for us. He knew I was an easy mark.”
“You think he was that much of a predator?” I asked.
“I do.”
“Things must’ve been bad for him too, since…” I started, even though I knew it was the wrong thing to say. She shut her eyes. When she opened them, they’d turned into stones.
“Why would you do that? Why do you have to take up for the other side, always?”
More and more Courtney and I were like puppets being operated by a malevolent puppeteer—I don’t mean to say that I had no agency in this, but when we were around each other we slid into the same ditch, every time.
“I just—”
“Forget it.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“It’s all shades of gray for you, all the time, isn’t it? Which seems very convenient,” she said. She wasn’t actually crying, but she touched the back of her hand to her face and drew out her breaths.
“I’d like to think that—”
She cut me off. “Forget it. I’m just really tired.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m going to take a shower.”
“Now?”
She nodded and went inside, and I followed as far as the kitchen, where Maggie was still washing dishes. Hugo had come home and was helping her, wearing an apron over his nice clothes. He seemed not at all fazed when his wife blew right by him and ran upstairs. I gulped some wine from what might or might not have been my glass. I heard the water turn on in a bathroom.
“She said she was taking a shower,” I said to Hugo.
“Sometimes to calm down, she takes a shower.”
“Maybe we should get going?” I said to Maggie.
“Do we say goodbye or not?” she asked.
Hugo led us upstairs and through their great big bedroom, then cracked the bathroom door and said we were leaving. “They are going,” he repeated into the steam. We stood in the doorway. Courtney’s clothes were in a heap on the floor. She stuck her head out from behind the white curtain and smiled, better now that she was clean and I was leaving. You are such a fucking weirdo, I thought, as I tried to stave off all these little emotional monsters that were coming right at me. “Bye,” she chimed.
Later on, back at my apartment, I called Nina again. No answer. I hung up, then called a second time and left a message.
1987
All winter long I would tread over dirty snow in my loose-laced high-tops, across expanses of salted pavement, across empty parki
ng spaces, in and out of gymnasiums and locker rooms, pulling sweatpants on or off, always short of breath, hurrying, lost. Blowing into the bowl of my hands. I was usually too cold or too hot or, somehow, both. In freezing buses and suffocating vans, wired from adrenaline, I would chant to myself: don’t fuck up today, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up. I had a way of holding on to the missed shots, the rebounds I didn’t get, the times I let the other team score by giving some girl the baseline. I cared too much about all that. I wouldn’t say that the team was a family, since I barely knew some of my teammates, but it shared some of the qualities of my family, of people yoked together with limited intimacy but with a kind of job to do. An occupation. The team consumed my time, it consumed me.
And it linked me to Courtney, who had stopped bringing me to parties or telling me anything, who’d reverted to just tolerating me. We still spent two or more hours together each day, at practice, at games, or in transit, and I would wish for her to sit next to me on the bus, or even just to walk into the locker room by my side. Instead she stuck with the other seniors, and I kept my eye on her. She’d started to look skinny—she was losing weight, I thought. She wasn’t playing as well as she’d played earlier in the season. She’d jammed one of the fingers on her right hand, and her shots were often flat.
Every team in the conference played every other team twice, and in early February came our home game against the team that had handed us our ugliest loss back in December. This rematch was the high school game I would remember best of all as an adult (and then again I’ve presumably remembered it worst, by remembering it most often: no doubt all my later revisiting has altered, bit by bit, the picture in my head). The game started off just as badly as the December one had ended. Everybody was jittery and winded. The shots weren’t falling for either team.
From a seat on the bench I watched Courtney air-ball a jump shot and then stay too long where she’d landed, frowning at the basket when she should’ve been running back to play defense. Because of it she lagged behind the girl she was supposed to be guarding, and as that girl caught the ball, Courtney tried to reach for it and got called for a foul. Her face mottled with—frustration? Remorse? Not a minute had elapsed before one of the officials slapped her with another foul, for leaning into another girl’s back on a rebound. That call was questionable. There was booing from the stands. Courtney started stalking toward the ref to protest before she checked herself and went back to playing.