by Karen Olsson
Coach beckoned and told me to go in for Courtney. I did want to play, but I also wished I could stay on the bench, to sit next to my sister when she came out, even if I couldn’t really comfort her. I waited by the scorer’s table for the next whistle, which, when it sounded, was simultaneous with the hinge and crack of the heavy double doors.
Another sort of official entered: into the gym stepped a broadly built, white-haired man in a plenipotent overcoat and black leather gloves. The man’s dry, planar face would have been known to those who scrutinized the newspaper’s political pages, and here he was in the flesh, now pausing to check the score as he pulled off his gloves, now striding along the baseline, as such men strode toward helicopters or up marble stairs, to the opposing team’s section of the bleachers, where the spectators parted to make room for him, and where he took a seat, naturally, at the very top.
A U.S. senator. The people who’d been watching the game developed split vision, and would glance from the court to the senator, court, senator, court. And our dad, oh god, our dad who’d been sitting on our team’s side, crossed the gym, climbed up to the top of the bleachers, and wedged himself in beside that other, more eminent father. Dad sat with his hands on his knees, pitched forward as if there weren’t quite enough room to sit straight, twisting his head back awkwardly to speak. Even from a distance it was obvious the senator wanted to be left alone.
As is maybe clear enough from the fact that I was clocking all this business on the sidelines, my mind was not quite where it should’ve been, i.e., in the body that was running and jumping, catching and passing. I did, however, notice a shift in the game, for when I came onto the court the pace still seemed frenetic and out of sync—there were wild passes, forced plays, balls not saved before they rolled out of bounds—but slowly it settled, and at the same time it soured. The two teams had it out for each other, we banged around under the basket and steamed and cussed. The game was shaping up to be a low-scoring bruiser, the kind that isn’t so much won by either side as it is terminated, and although one team can then point to the scoreboard and claim victory, there’s not much pride in it.
We needed a run, a boost. Coach took a chance and put Courtney back in, though my sister risked picking up a third foul before halftime. I had assumed I would come out, but Courtney signaled to another girl, and I stayed on the court with her.
It was a minute or two before I realized she hadn’t taken a single shot. Not a one. She caught the ball and then passed it. Her defender started to hang off her, and Coach was calling, “Shoot the ball.” She didn’t. Had she lost her nerve? It felt more like some strange protest.
From the stands came the rataplan of pounding feet: “Let’s go Ea-gles” stomp-stomp stomp-stomp-stomp. “Shoot the damn ball!” Coach yelled, and I did. I made two baskets, and after that my defender started to tackle me whenever the opportunity presented itself. She was the senator’s daughter—I think so anyway—and it was as though the refs knew it and granted her immunity. They didn’t call anything. Meanwhile she sneered and elbowed me, and even then my dad was still cozying up to the senator, and it was all just too much. The next time that girl had the ball, I ran right at her, shouting, “You! You! You! You!” I tried to block her shot but wound up hitting her head with my forearm. The whistle blew, and she was about to charge at me, but Courtney nudged me out of the way. The girl went at Courtney instead, and I don’t think either of them had any idea what to do when they made contact; they more or less grabbed each other’s arms, and my sister tried to break free, then fell to the ground.
More whistles: they called fouls on both Courtney and the other girl. I held a hand out to my sister and saw her wince. I pulled her up to standing, and she walked back to the sidelines, stepping normally with her right foot and tiptoeing with the left.
At halftime, in the locker room, she kept walking, circling the rest of us until she was sure of her ankle. “I’m good, I’m good,” she said to Coach.
“Okay,” Coach said, “now listen. Don’t let them throw you off your game. This is your game. You’ve got to go out there and want it. You’ve got to go out there and assert. That means shoot when you have the shot. That means hands up on D. You gotta want it, ladies.”
The second half was even grislier, the players shrieking, the crowd wailing. The windows had fogged over. The floor shook. For a while the score didn’t budge, and with every scoreless possession the pressure in the gym rose, the air became hotter, more fans stripped off their sweaters. The boys’ team returned from their own game and pushed their way into the bleachers, whooping. I saw that Dad had made it back to our side, thank god, and still more and more people kept filing into the gym, as though word had been spreading about the game, as though all of Northwest Washington were on alert.
Courtney with her three fouls stayed on the bench for most of the third quarter. We held steady without her, but slowly the other team eked out a small advantage—three points, five points, eight—and I felt the first tremors of panic. Coach called another time-out. “Focus, people,” she said. “Get in control of yourselves.”
She looked at Courtney: “You okay?”
“It’s fine. I’m ready.”
“Here’s what we’re going to do.”
I have no idea what she said after that, what offense she might have diagrammed, because it was irrelevant. Courtney went in—it was the other team’s possession—and stole the ball on the inbounds pass and made an easy layup. Soon after, she scored again. And then she just took over. She owned the rest of the game. I’d never seen her play like that. I’d never seen anyone on our team play like that. She was everywhere—she would block a shot on their end and sink one on ours. It was as though she could jump higher, run faster than she ever had. Take after take: she missed nothing. Someone would feed the ball to her and she would get it to the basket, one way or another, spinning and contorting herself and hooking it over her head. And one. The other team called a time-out, in hopes of killing her momentum, but when the game resumed she was just as intent.
And our father could not contain his joy. He started cheering the way he once had, the way he no longer did, a pentecostal of the sidelines, sweating and shouting praise. He kept yelling, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” Which wouldn’t have been so bad had he not kept repeating it, and so loudly, in a voice that clambered up and over all the other voices.
My sister was something else, something unexampled, and when the buzzer sounded and we’d won, everyone on the bench and a multitude from the bleachers swarmed onto the court and surrounded her, reaching over to touch her, just to finger a piece of her sweaty jersey. Dad fought his way through all the people, beaming, and when he reached her he said something, I couldn’t hear what, and then just stood next to her with a big smile on his face. He was so happy. That night, Courtney seemed like the savior who’d lifted Dad out of his distress, like the one person in the world who’d ever done right by him.
* * *
I don’t know exactly when Courtney and Rob stopped going out. She never told me. I just stopped seeing them together. He no longer called or came by the house or showed up at our games. For a few weeks she was mopey. That was the one time she ever seemed to want our pity. But at the same time she rejected us, she snapped at us. I studied her all the more closely. I peeked into her backpack. I went up to the third floor when she was out. Her bedroom was tucked under the eaves. Unlike my own room, hers had shed its ruffled bedspread and dolls, and at her request our mother had redecorated it with white laminate furniture and gray bedding—teenage modern, livened with sports trophies and a bulletin board that she’d papered with snapshots of her friends and box scores torn out from the newspaper. I opened her drawers and looked in her closet, searching for something I could seize. I wanted a secret, any secret. A diary, a love letter, a condom. What I did find only bewildered me: a black floor-length nightgown, with spaghetti straps, folded up and wedged into the back of her desk drawer. In that same drawer was a big
bottle of Tylenol and a change purse with some other pills inside.
Since the game I hadn’t given much thought to her fall—the athletic trainer had given her an ankle brace, and she’d gone on playing. If she’d scowled more and smiled less at practice, there could’ve been other reasons for that. By then everyone in the family was high-strung, stepping carefully over trip wires that may or may not have been present, we were all nervous, we were all angry, so that at the very time we should’ve rallied around one another and mustered some Atherton solidarity, we were instead straining at our tethers. We didn’t stick together and we didn’t split apart, we just wandered around our big house, went off, and came back.
Then one afternoon in the locker room I happened to see Courtney unlace her ankle brace and peel off her sweatsock, and at first glance I thought she’d been wearing some sort of dark purple hose underneath, because there were big wine stains running up the side of her foot, which was also puffy and criss-crossed with grooves left by the laces. She very quickly put on another sock, and when she saw that I was watching her, I looked away. In the next moment she went on getting dressed as though nothing had happened.
That night Courtney came to my room and asked me to do her a “huge, huuuuuge favor.” She took three twenties out of her bright-blue leather wallet and asked me to find Rob the next day and give them to him. He’ll know what I need, she said. The same thing as before, she said.
“What is it?”
“He’ll know. It’s just to get me through the season.”
“Can’t you just—”
“It’s like impossible for me to deal with him right now,” she said. “He won’t be an asshole to you.”
“But shouldn’t you—”
“Please?”
* * *
Around that time Dick Mitchell, or some lesser hologram of that man, appeared on the show Evans & Novak. He leaned back in his chair, like an old friend of Evans’s or Novak’s, as Evans explained to the camera that tonight’s guest would offer an insider’s perspective on the Nicaragua conflict. My father watched in the family room, staring at the screen as if it were an optical trick and he couldn’t make out the trick. He saw only the bearded guy and not the fancy lady. He drained his beer.
So charming in person, Mitchell on TV came off as glib—every other word he uttered was “certainly” or “absolutely.” Even though the interview was not the least bit confrontational, even with Novak tossing softballs at him, even when he said just what he presumably thought, he seemed slippery.
Q: Oliver North has been a star in this administration, has he not?
A: I would certainly have to agree with that. He’s absolutely been a key player vis-à-vis our efforts in Central America. No question.
Q: And what was the involvement of the State Department in those efforts?
A: The way I see it, if we’re speaking about the State Department qua the State Department, I would say that its role has been to support, diplomatically, the policies of the Reagan administration.
Our household media embargo had lapsed by then. My mother walked into the family room and took a seat. She had untucked her shirt from her skirt, and her face was flushed from standing over the sink. She didn’t say anything at first, but during a break in the show she suggested to Dad that he turn off the TV.
He may or may not have shaken his head. The television stayed on. When the three men on-screen resumed, she cleared her throat.
“I really think—”
“It’s Dick.”
“I know who it is.”
Maggie had an oral report due the next day, and she was practicing in the living room: “In 1831 Her Majesty’s ship the Beagle set sail for South America.” I’d been in the kitchen helping Mom with the dishes, then watching the TV through the doorway.
I saw my father’s pursed face in profile. He disapproved, but I didn’t know whether he faulted Mitchell, the show, the situation, or my mother for that matter. At the same time there was something childlike in his expression, he was so fixated on the screen, and maybe it was that youthful rapt attention or the angle, but I believe there was something hungry in it too. It could be that I misread his face, yet I would learn soon enough, if I didn’t quite know it yet, that even when our friends are genuinely sorry for our misfortune, often they are not merely, plainly sorry.
Courtney entered through the back door. She’d been out with Tanya, and she walked in just like she always did, still bound up in the outside air and her outside people, and when she encountered us in the family room it irritated her, I could tell. She would’ve rather gone straight upstairs. Then she saw who it was we were watching on television. She paused. She sucked that irritation inside of her and, oddly, smiled.
“Why is Mr. Mitchell on TV?”
“He just is,” our mom said.
Dad countered: “He’s explaining our Nicaragua policy.”
“Oh, we have a Nicaragua policy?”
But Dad didn’t take the bait, nor did she wait for an answer. They were both too riveted by the show. Finally Maggie came in, planted herself right in front of the television, and said that she needed help practicing her report. “We’re watching this,” my dad said. My mom stood up and left the room with her.
Not long after that, Mitchell was linked to one of Iran-Contra’s odd footnotes. It had to do with that part of the affair my dad was not involved in, the Iran side of things, the doomed negotiations and half-baked arms deals that McFarlane and North had arranged. During the secret talks, North had given the Iranians, as a gift, a Bible inscribed by the president (or, in the ass-covering language that was used at the time, inscribed “in the handwriting of President Reagan”). Of course when this detail came to light, the press had a field day with it, and at the same time word got out that Mitchell had known about this Bible and had maybe even bought it for North at a B. Dalton in Bethesda. When he testified, later that spring, the congressmen started asking about that, whether it was consistent with U.S. policy to hand out Bibles in the course of secret negotiations, and so on and so forth. They seemed more preoccupied with it than with any of the larger questions, presumably because they knew it would make better copy, get them quoted in somebody’s column. A day or two later came the Herblock cartoon of Mitchell as a gap-toothed Bible salesman.
The inscription had come from Galatians: All the nations shall be blessed in you.
Mitchell became the star of his own sideshow. Though many things would bother our dad about the way the scandal played out, this was one that really got to him, the way his friend Dick Mitchell was mocked, lampooned, not for taking part in the supply operations but because he’d maybe purchased a Bible that had then been given to somebody in Iran.
The night that we saw him on television, he hadn’t yet been brought low, at that point nobody knew what was coming. Mitchell was just commenting on another story of the week, and I’d watched him with the excitement that came from seeing someone I’d met talk on TV—but also with a premonitory shiver. I may not have been especially attuned to the subterranean shifts around me, but I could tell that Dick Mitchell was on the brink.
* * *
It never occurred to me to say no to my sister’s request. It made me uneasy, but I longed to please her, and more than that: I thought that I was helping her. There were some false starts. I would spot Rob and head toward him and then chicken out, because he was with other people, or because I’d forgotten what I’d practiced saying.
Finally I found him by his locker. He looked so amused by me that I guessed he had seen all my prior failed approaches.
“Okay, finally. What is it?” he asked.
“Could we talk privately please?”
He steered me around the corner, to a short, empty hallway that led to the lunchroom, and I found myself backed up against the wall, Rob standing over me with one hand planted near my shoulder. I held my breath until I realized I was holding my breath.
“Courtney needs some of that stuff you gav
e her.”
“I’m sure she does…”
I took the money out of my pocket. “She gave me this to give to you.”
“You have your sister’s lying eyes,” he said quietly.
“I have my very own eyes.”
“You have her mouth too.”
It was as though he were going to kiss me, and in that moment I wouldn’t have resisted. But we were standing right under a school bell, which rang, loudly, and he straightened up and took the bills out of my hand. “Come find me again tomorrow and I’ll have it for you,” he said. I had a notion that this was the wrong way to go about things, that I shouldn’t have given him anything until he had the goods, so to speak. Yet it seemed too late to get the money back.
I countered: “Or why don’t you come find me?”
He said no, I should find him, actually. Which I did, the next day as school was ending. He unzipped my backpack and put something inside of it, and later on, at home, I mounted the stairs with the sandwich bag full of pills concealed in my bathrobe, and I passed that on to Courtney. She took the bag and shut her bedroom door.
On the weekends she would go out with her friends and come home electrified or angry, in one high-voltage mood or another. She would return at midnight or later, after our parents had gone to bed. I’d be in the family room, not waiting but waiting.
“Where were you?”
“Adams Morgan.”
“How’d you get home?” I hadn’t heard a car come or go.
“I walked.”
“You did?”
“It’s a beautiful night.”
I looked at her. “Dad would be so pissed.”
“So don’t tell him.”
My thinner sister became a bat in our midst, flying away every evening at sundown to feed, ignoring our parents’ (weak, unenforced) instructions to be home by nine on school nights. I never knew what to say to her. I worried about her sprain, but it was righteous worry, i.e., she was wrong to hide her injury just as she was wrong to hide everything else she was hiding from me. I judged her and feared for her and resented her, and finally, one Saturday, I told our mom.