Consent

by Donna Freitas

  It meant a lot that when my professor saw this article in the paper, he remembered how important this team was to me, that he knew it wasn’t “just” basketball, but something central and constructive to my family, something that cut to the heart of the complicated relationship I had with my father. My professor knew this so well he thought I might want to have the article and had cut it out of the paper for me as a keepsake.

  I know it might sound like an insignificant gesture, but I look back on this one tiny thing, a short article about my family’s basketball team, as one of the foundational acts on his part that I would come back to again and again as evidence of his innocence, of his selfless concern for my well-being. It was a gesture that won him a lot of forgiveness for other things, at least at the beginning. The way to my heart is through the heart of my father, of my family, and somehow in those early days, he already knew this to be the case.

  Basketball, this team in particular, was central to my childhood. The University of Rhode Island was the place my father wanted to go to college as a young man, but couldn’t, so he’d installed himself as an avid athletic supporter later in life and installed all of us around him in the venture. My mother, me, my grandmother, too.

  My father is a good man, a quiet man, stoic and enduring, hardworking, so hardworking that it hurts me to think about it directly. I love him so much that it’s painful to see through to his vulnerabilities. Life has been difficult for my father, as it was difficult for his immigrant Portuguese family when he was growing up. He developed a thick shell to weather such challenges, so many setbacks and disappointments. He is a small man, bald, with golden skin that turns the deep brown of the earth in summer. He doesn’t talk much, except to make the occasional wry comment or observation, and he keeps his emotions in check, so much that I have feared the moment when they will surely erupt, vast and terrible, burning him down in the process because he’s held them in for so long.

  But basketball, URI basketball, opens my father up like nothing else I’ve ever encountered, and he’s always taken me along with him in his excitement around it. On Christmas, gifts that were Keaney blue, URI’s jersey color, were especially prized in my family, and any time we could match a pair of socks, a sweater, a T-shirt, a tie, anything to that shade of blue was a triumph. Our family’s life revolved around each basketball season, from the first practice of the year until the very last loss during the tournaments. We went to every single home game and traveled in cars and on buses to some of the away games, too. URI basketball was as sacred to my family as church on Sunday. To miss a game, we needed to be on our deathbed, or perhaps receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Luckily, proms took place in the springtime, because if a prom had conflicted with a URI game, the prom would have been the obvious sacrifice, and not the other way around.

  I rarely resented this. Going to games is one of my happiest memories of growing up, of time spent with my family, with my dad especially. Being at Keaney Gym was an experience that spans the entirety of my childhood and young adulthood. I grew up there as much as I grew up at my house. When I was a little girl, the cheerleaders fascinated me so much that my mother and grandmother made me pompoms in Keaney blue and white, a painstaking process that took them weeks to complete. I dragged those things around with me for years, shaking them wildly and constantly in the stands. When I was small, games meant two hours of delightedly watching cheerleaders on the sidelines and during time-outs, learning their chants, and fantasizing about getting to be one someday. When later I fell in love with the baton twirler who did the halftime show, Santa brought me my very own baton that next Christmas. There was nothing as exciting as knowing that, just after the buzzer signaled the end of the first half, the lights would dim, a spotlight would go on at the center of the floor, and for five thrilling minutes the girl in the amazing spangled leotard and tights would twirl her baton and throw it high into the rafters, miraculously catching it without fail, while I watched her, rapt, sitting between my mother and grandmother.

  Basketball itself—the action on the floor, the players—was also a great attraction. I learned to love the game; my father taught me the rules as we watched together. I witnessed my normally subdued, working-class father come alive for those two-and-a-half-hour snatches of time as he shouted his approval of the players, and yelled and swore at the refs. My parents would invite the players to our house on the weekends for a home-cooked meal, and how I loved them all, loved having these seven-foot friends. The weekly ritual was that the moment they walked through the door, one of them would pick me up, high enough that I could put my hand on the ceiling. It delighted me, how they had to duck to get through the archway between the foyer and the living room. I loved their impossibly long legs, the way they towered over the grown-ups. Every week after we ate lunch or dinner, one of them would read me a story on the couch, usually something by Dr. Seuss, because it made me laugh when they tripped over those crazy rhymes. I think they did it on purpose because they knew I found it funny. The players closest to us were so trusted by my parents that occasionally they would pick me up from school or attend my gymnastics meets. One of my most thrilling memories of childhood is leaving school and seeing my favorite seven-foot player standing there outside the building, dwarfing the other parents and children. He lifted me high into the air for a hug, then set me on the ground again, taking my hand so we could walk to the car as everyone watched, mouths gaping wide.

  When my family didn’t go to the away games, if they were broadcast on TV we’d watch at home, all of us, my grandmother, mother, father, and me, gathered around the television set. When it comes to sports, I am tremendously and proudly superstitious, and it was during these games that I learned this essential aspect of being a dedicated fan. In between the screaming and the yelling, the jumping up from the couch and the chairs of the living room to clap and cheer, my father would bark orders about who could do what, who could enter the room and leave, who had to remain standing or sitting, depending on when things took a turn for the worse or better during the game.

  “Grandma,” my father would direct, “go back into the bathroom,” if my grandmother happened to have slipped out earlier when both foul shots were made. She would dutifully endure her banishment in the service of helping the team to more baskets as the clock ticked down its final seconds—as any of us would have, including my father.

  Nowadays, as friends and loved ones have witnessed my behavior at a sporting event, whether at a game or at home, they’ve been slightly shocked to see the extent of my superstitions, and the lengths to which I will go to act them out if the game is a nail-biter. During the 2017 Super Bowl, when the Patriots were embarrassing all of us New England fans in a game against the Atlanta Falcons that seemed impossible to turn around, the very moment they began to come back, when they scored the touchdown that changed everything, I happened to have gone upstairs. Because of this, I watched the rest of the game from the bottom step, jumping up and down and cheering from there, convinced that if I placed one foot on the living room floor and the Patriots lost, it would be my fault. I didn’t want that kind of responsibility on my shoulders, so I fulfilled my duty as a fan and stayed put.

  My superstition around sports may be a source of amusement to friends, but it’s a source of pride to me. It’s something I share with my father, a fun and funny trait we both have, a sign of our devotion to and investment in a team. My father taught me to care deeply about sports, he passed this love on to me, and the expression of these superstitions is a way of expressing his influence. I looked forward to telling him the story of my personal contribution to the Patriots’ 2017 Super Bowl win, because I knew how much he’d appreciate it. I knew he would recognize himself in my behavior. That he would say to himself, Yes, that’s my daughter.

  The love my father and I have for basketball and other sports is one of the central dimensions of our closeness. It is a shared truth between my dad and me, and we have relied on it to get us through some of the most difficu
lt turns in our lives over the years.

  My decision to become a philosophy major at Georgetown nearly destroyed us. My father, who had not been lucky enough to go to college himself, saw Georgetown as a means for me to avoid the economic hardships he’d faced as a young man trying to make a living without a degree. My parents had checked off the box for my major the summer before I left for college; they signed me up for accounting in the business school. Accounting was a sure thing for a life of steady work and a good salary, and this was what they cared about most. When I arrived on campus and discovered my love for philosophy, a love related to those books I’d read in my private English class during high school, I had no idea what a battle I was in for with my father over majoring in it. I thought he might never forgive me for defying him in this way.

  For nearly the entirety of my undergraduate years, basketball—URI basketball, Georgetown basketball—was the only thing he and I were able to talk about. We hung on to basketball for dear life. It was all we had.

  * * *

  When I said earlier that I gave my professor things during my first semester of graduate school, this is one of the things I’d handed over. This knowledge of my family, of my father in particular, this method through which he and I still held on to each other, that URI basketball was our enduring tether. Bits and pieces of this story had come out during my weekly visits to my professor’s office hours, including how my father had come around to the idea of my getting a PhD partly because of basketball.

  Just as he’d opposed my becoming a philosophy major during my undergraduate years, my father originally argued against this new pursuit of mine. He wanted me on a path to a stable, moneymaking career, and in his mind, a PhD was not going to get me there. Once again, we were in the middle of a familiar standoff. But when I was accepted into multiple graduate programs, the departments began to outbid one another in the amount of funding they could offer me.

  “It’s like you’re a basketball player,” my father observed one day over the phone, after I’d told him about the different offers.

  For him, this was a eureka moment, and the highest of compliments. Likening me to a sought-after basketball player was a sign that my father had finally understood, in his own way, that my getting a PhD was a good idea. I remember feeling teary on hearing these words from him, teary and relieved and happy that he was starting to make a shift away from dismay about the path I’d chosen toward support. Little by little, he continued this shift, and ever since he likened me to a basketball star being recruited by colleges, he’s never looked back. It was a turning point in our relationship.

  I don’t know why I told my professor so many personal things that semester. I’m not sure if I was needy for affirmation from someone I saw as a mentor, greedy for attention, or if he was sneaky and pulled these things out of me through innocuous, seemingly innocent conversation each time I visited his office. All I know is that I told him things, and plenty of them.

  It’s not as though my other professors in college or teachers in high school didn’t know me on a personal level. In fact, my philosophy professors knew all about my parents’ resistance to my course of study at Georgetown. I went to them for help when my father threatened to pull me out of school if I pursued a philosophy major. I was traumatized at the thought I wouldn’t be able to study what I loved, which was also what my parents hated. I wanted desperately to follow my intellectual desires, an experience they could not relate to, a reality that still makes me sad to remember. Like so many parents who were the children of immigrants, they’d longed to give me a college education, yet by giving it to me they’d unwittingly set me up to become a person they could no longer understand, who had hopes and dreams that were outside of anything they could imagine or conceive of as sensible. College was a means to a job and a steady salary, not a place to sit around and explore exciting ideas. If those ideas didn’t make you into an accountant, or get you a job on Wall Street, they weren’t worth thinking about, according to my mother and father. My parents did everything they could to set me up for the moneymaking career that no one had set them up for, and I was squandering it on a degree in philosophy.

  My undergraduate professors helped me frame my philosophy major as something more practical, helped me think about how to explain this to my parents. I am grateful to those professors at Georgetown for so many things, but I will always be indebted for their help in negotiating with my family, my father especially, on this issue. He never came around to supporting my philosophy major, but he eventually got to a point where he stopped threatening to pull me out of Georgetown. We can laugh about this now, though for many years, my studying philosophy during undergrad was something we didn’t speak about. Lucky for us, in addition to being a philosophy major I’d also become a basketball cheerleader, so when friends at my father’s bar would ask what I was doing at Georgetown, he would answer by telling them that I was a cheerleader.

  I stood there, next to the TA mailboxes in my department’s office, reading the newspaper clipping in my hand. My professor had placed the article in an envelope, addressed simply, my name written across it and nothing else. I was touched that he had taken the time to give me this small thing. I thought it incredibly sweet.

  Is it wrong that I told him so many things about my life? Poor judgment that I gave him such personal details about my life, my family? My fault that I spoke to him like he might be my age, telling him the kinds of details that I share with the people closest to me, stories that I would confide in a boyfriend or a best girlfriend? Why didn’t I know any better? Should I have? I was in my early twenties, not a child anymore, not a teenager.

  Or is it wrong that he took the things I gave to him, filed them away to use for later, as a means to get to me, as a means to get me, to try to make me his? I don’t know who is at fault here. If he believed that I was the one trying to create intimacy between us, if he thought that these stories about my family, my history, were an attempt to entice him into something else, something other than an appropriate relationship between professor and student, mentor and mentee. Did he regard me as some kind of Lolita, showing up to his office as I showed up everywhere else, in my skirts and boots and sweaters? Someone who was asking for it, asking for him, asking for something more from him?

  What I do know is that I regret it, that I wish I could take it all back. That I will blame myself forever for these initial, intimate offerings that I brought to him, like I sometimes brought the bread and wine to the altar at church. He was a priest, after all, accustomed to receiving gifts each week.

  But at that early point, it never occurred to me that this professor would have cut out that newspaper article and placed it in my graduate-school mailbox for any other reason than to be kind. It never crossed my mind that maybe he was trying to impress me, like a boy who wanted to date me might want to impress me, or that he hoped to deepen the intimacy between us, to use the tether between me and my dad as a way to insert himself into that tender space I reserved for my father in my heart.

  5

  My professor was outside my apartment, peering through the window.

  It was not quite a basement apartment, but sort of half underground, the windows level with the sidewalk. I’d gone to retrieve a pile of mail that had fallen through the slot in the front door. I jumped when I saw him, watching me from above. He wasn’t smiling, didn’t wave. It was a cold day in late February, or maybe it was early March, and he just stood there staring at me through the small rectangular pane of glass. He hadn’t warned me that he might show up, or asked if I’d be around that day, or requested permission to say hello at my home. He just arrived.

  I opened the door. Moved aside so he could descend the steps into the living room.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” he explained as he entered my house. He had a conference that day in Georgetown, he told me, or perhaps it was a meeting with other priests, or a visit to the library to pick up a book he needed. I can’t remember exactly. Or maybe it
was none of those things and he simply lied and invented a reason to be near my apartment so he could come by and visit, see where I lived, what my life was like outside school. He wore his typical all-black attire, the black shirt of a priest, black pants, but no collar. He rarely wore a collar and often had a loose black blazer of sorts that he wore over everything.

  He stopped in front of the couch, looking around.

  This was a first for me, to have a professor in my house.

  “Would you like some tea?” I asked. “Or coffee?”

  His face brightened, he said yes, he wanted tea, and I invited him to sit at the little wooden table pressed against the wall of the kitchen while I put on the kettle. The day was gray, a good day for drinking something warm.

  We were alone.

  My roommate worked during the week at an office, left at eight in the morning and usually didn’t return until well after six. I don’t remember if I’d told him about her, about our friendship, our style of living, the fact that she and I would occasionally put the music on loud and dance in the living room, how she was as obsessed with fashion as I was and we would have marathon shopping days, or how once in a while we would host a keg party and persuade one of our guy friends to go to the liquor store and bring the heavy metal barrel back for us and tap it on our back patio.

  I joined him at the table while we waited for the water to boil.

  We made small talk. He was very animated. I served him the tea when it was ready. I was still a bit startled that I suddenly had him in my house. But I wasn’t unhappy. I came around to enjoy the conversation, as I’d always enjoyed our conversations when we met in his office. He was a smart man, enthusiastic about our shared academic interests, and it was easy to like this part of him. I don’t remember how long he stayed. Maybe an hour? Eventually he went on his way again, and that was all. The visit wasn’t a big deal. Short, just a cup of tea, and then he was off.