Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Looking at the piece of paper, Patty had a preview of the falling sensation she would have a few months later after eating hash brownies with Eliza. Something very wrong and creepy but hard to defend herself against.

“Thank you for this drawing,” she said.

“Why aren’t they playing you more?” Eliza said. “You were on the bench practically the whole second half.”

“Once we got the big lead—”

“You’re brilliant and they bench you? I don’t understand that.” Eliza’s curls were thrashing like a willow tree in heavy winds; she was quite exercised.

“Dawn and Cathy and Shawna got some good minutes,” Patty said. “They did great holding the lead.”

“But you’re so much better than them!”

“I should go shower now. Thanks again for the drawing.”

“Maybe not this year, but next year, at the latest, everybody’s going to want a piece of you,” Eliza said. “You’re going to attract attention. You need to start learning how to protect yourself.”

This was so ridiculous that Patty had to stop and set her straight. “Too much attention is not a problem people have in women’s basketball.”

“What about men? Do you know how to protect yourself from men?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you have good judgment when it comes to men?”

“Right now I don’t have much time for anything except sports.”

“You don’t seem to understand how amazing you are. And how dangerous that is.”

“I understand I’m good at sports.”

“It’s sort of a miracle you’re not already getting taken advantage of.”

“Well, I don’t drink, which helps a lot.”

“Why don’t you drink?” Eliza pursued immediately.

“Because I can’t when I’m in training. Not even one sip.”

“You’re in training every day of the year?”

“Well, and I had a bad drinking experience in high school, so.”

“What happened—somebody rape you?”

Patty’s face burned and assumed five different expressions all at once. “Wow,” she said.

“Yes? Is that what happened?”

“I’m going to go shower.”

“You see, this is exactly what I’m talking about!” Eliza cried with great excitement. “You don’t know me at all, we’ve been talking for all of two minutes, and you basically just told me you’re a rape survivor. You’re completely unprotected!”

Patty was too alarmed and ashamed, at that moment, to spot the flaws in this logic.

“I can protect myself,” she said. “I’m doing just fine.”

“Sure. OK.” Eliza shrugged. “It’s your safety, not mine.”

The gym echoed with the thunk of heavy switches as banks of lights went out.

“Do you play sports?” Patty asked, to make up for not having been more agreeable.

Eliza looked down at herself. She was wide and blady in the pelvis and somewhat pigeon-toed, with tiny Kedded feet. “Do I look like it?”

“I don’t know. Badminton?”

“I hate gym,” Eliza said, laughing. “I hate all sports.”

Patty laughed, too, in her relief at having got the subject changed, although she was now quite confused.

“I didn’t even ‘throw like a girl’ or ‘run like a girl,’ ” Eliza said. “I refused to run or throw, period. If a ball landed in my hands, I just waited until somebody came and took it away. When I was supposed to run, like, to first base, I would stand there for a second and then maybe walk.”

“God,” Patty said.

“Yeah, I almost didn’t get my diploma because of it,” Eliza said. “The only reason I graduated was that my parents knew the school psychologist. I ended up getting credit for riding a bike every day.”

Patty nodded uncertainly. “You love basketball, though, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Eliza said. “Basketball is pretty fascinating.”

“Well, so, you definitely don’t hate sports. It sounds like what you really hate is gym.”

“You’re right. That’s right.”

“Well, so anyway.”

“Yeah, so anyway, are we going to be friends?”

Patty laughed. “If I say yes, I’m just proving your point about how I’m not careful enough with people I barely know.”

“That sounds like a no, then.”

“How about we just wait and see?”

“Good. That’s very careful of you—I like that.”

“You see? You see?” Patty was laughing again already. “I’m more careful than you thought!”

The autobiographer has no doubt that if Patty had been more conscious of herself and paying any halfway decent kind of attention to the world around her, she wouldn’t have been nearly as good at college basketball. Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head. Reaching a vantage point from which she could have seen Eliza for what she was (i.e., disturbed) would have messed with her game. You don’t get to be an 88-percent free-throw shooter by giving deep thought to every little thing.

Eliza turned out not to like any of Patty’s other friends and didn’t even try to hang out with them. She referred to them collectively as “your lesbians” or “the lesbians” although half of them were straight. Patty very quickly came to feel that she lived in two mutually exclusive worlds. There was Total Jockworld, where she spent the vast majority of her time and where she would rather flunk a psychology midterm than skip going to the store and assembling a care package and taking it to a teammate who’d sprained an ankle or was laid up with the flu, and then there was dark little Elizaworld, where she didn’t have to bother trying to be so good. The only point of contact between the worlds was Williams Arena, where Patty, when she sliced through a transitional defense for an easy layup or a no-look pass, experienced an extra little rush of pride and pleasure if Eliza was there watching. Even this point of contact was short-lived, because the more time Eliza spent with Patty the less she seemed to remember how interested in basketball she was.

Patty had always had friends plural, never anything intense. Her heart gladdened when she saw Eliza waiting outside the gym after practice, she knew it was going to be an instructive evening. Eliza took her to movies with subtitles and made her listen very carefully to Patti Smith recordings (“I love that you have the same name as my favorite artist,” she said, disregarding the different spelling and the fact that Patty’s actual legal name was Patrizia, which Joyce had given her to be different and Patty was embarrassed to say aloud) and loaned her books of poetry by Denise Levertov and Frank O’Hara. After the basketball team finished with a record of 8 wins and 11 losses and a first-round tournament elimination (despite Patty’s 14 points and numerous assists), Eliza also taught her to really, really like Paul Masson Chablis.

What Eliza did with the rest of her free time was somewhat hazy. There seemed to be several “men” (i.e., boys) in her life, and she sometimes referred to concerts she’d gone to, but when Patty expressed curiosity about these concerts Eliza said first Patty had to listen to all the mix tapes Eliza made her; and Patty was having some difficulty with these mix tapes. She did like Patti Smith, who seemed to understand how she’d felt in the bathroom on the morning after she was raped, but the Velvet Underground, for example, made her lonely. She once admitted to Eliza that her favorite band was the Eagles, and Eliza said, “There’s nothing wrong with that, the Eagles are great,” but you sure didn’t see any Eagles records in Eliza’s dorm room.

Eliza’s parents were big-deal Twin Cities psychotherapists and lived out in Wayzata, where everybody was rich, and she had an older brother, a junior at Bard College, whom she described as peculiar. When Patty asked, “Peculiar in what way?” Eliza answered, “In every way.” Eliza herself had patched together a high-school education at three different local academies and was enrolled at the U. because her parents refused to subsidize her if she wasn’t in school. She was a B student in a different way than Patty was a B student, which was to get the same B in everything. Eliza got A-pluses in English and Ds in everything else. Her only known interests besides basketball were poetry and pleasure.