Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Eliza was determined to get Patty to try pot, but Patty was extremely protective of her lungs, and this was how the brownie thing came about. They’d driven out in Eliza’s Volkswagen Bug to the Wayzata house, which was full of African sculpture and empty of the parents, who were at a weekend conference. The idea had been to make a fancy Julia Child dinner, but they drank too much wine to succeed at this and ended up eating crackers and cheese and making the brownies and ingesting what must have been massive amounts of drug. Part of Patty was thinking, for the entire sixteen hours she was messed up, “I am never going to do this again.” She felt like she’d broken training so badly that she would never be able to make it whole again, a very desolate feeling indeed. She was also fearful about Eliza—she suddenly realized that she had some kind of weird crush on Eliza and that it was therefore of paramount importance to sit motionless and contain herself and not discover that she was bisexual. Eliza kept asking her how she was, and she kept answering, “I am just fine, thank you,” which struck them as hilarious every time. Listening to the Velvet Underground, Patty understood the group much better, they were a very dirty musical group, and their dirtiness was comfortingly similar to how she was feeling out there in Wayzata, surrounded by African masks. It was a relief to realize, as she became less stoned, that even while very stoned she’d managed to contain herself and Eliza hadn’t touched her: that nothing lesbian was ever going to happen.

Patty was curious about Eliza’s parents and wanted to stick around the house and meet them, but Eliza was adamant about this being a very bad idea. “They’re the love of each other’s lives,” she said. “They do everything together. They have matching offices in the same suite, and they coauthor all their papers and books, and they do joint presentations at conferences, and they can never ever talk about their work at home, because of patient confidentiality. They even have a tandem bicycle.”

“So?”

“So they’re strange and you’re not going to like them, and then you’re not going to like me.”

“My parents aren’t so great, either,” Patty said.

“Trust me, this is different. I know what I’m talking about.”

Driving back into the city in the Bug, with the warmthless Minnesota spring sun behind them, they had their first sort-of fight.

“You have to stay here this summer,” Eliza said. “You can’t go away.”

“That’s not very realistic,” Patty said. “I’m supposed to work in my dad’s office and be in Gettysburg in July.”

“Why can’t you stay here and go to your camp from here? We can get jobs and you can go to the gym every day.”

“I have to go home.”

“But why? You hate it there.”

“If I stay here I’ll drink wine every night.”

“No, you won’t. We’ll have strict rules. We’ll have whatever rules you like.”

“I’ll be back in the fall.”

“Can we live together then?”

“No, I already promised Cathy I’d be in her quad.”

“You can tell her your plans changed.”

“I can’t do that.”

“This is crazy! I hardly ever see you!”

“I see you more than practically anybody. I love seeing you.”

“Then why won’t you stay here this summer? Don’t you trust me?”

“Why wouldn’t I trust you?”

“I don’t know. I just can’t figure out why you’d rather work for your dad. He did not take care of you, he did not protect you, and I will. He doesn’t have your best interests at heart, and I do.”

It was true that Patty’s spirits sagged at the thought of going home, but it seemed necessary to punish herself for eating hash brownies. Her dad had also been making an effort with her, sending her actual handwritten letters (“We miss you on the tennis court”) and offering her the use of her grandmother’s old car, which he didn’t think her grandmother ought to be driving anymore. After a year away, she was feeling remorseful about having been so cold to him. Maybe she’d made a mistake? And so she went home for the summer and found that nothing had changed and she had not made a mistake. She watched TV till midnight, got up at seven every morning and ran five miles, and spent her days highlighting names in legal documents and looking forward to the day’s mail, which more often than not contained a long typewritten letter from Eliza, saying how much she missed her, and telling stories about her “lecherous” boss at the revival-house movie theater where she was working in the ticket booth, and exhorting her to write back immediately, which Patty did her best to do, using old letterhead stationery and the Selectric in her dad’s mothball-smelling office.

In one letter Eliza wrote, I think we need to make rules for each other for protection and self-improvement . Patty was skeptical about this but wrote back with three rules for her friend. No smoking before dinnertime . Get exercise every day and develop athletic ability . And Attend all lectures and do all homework for ALL classes (not just English ). No doubt she should have been disturbed by how different Eliza’s rules for her turned out to be— Drink only on Saturday night and only in Eliza’s presence ; No going to mixed parties except accompanied by Eliza ; and Tell Eliza EVERYTHING —but something was wrong with her judgment and she instead felt excited to have such an intense best friend. Among other things, having this friend gave Patty armor and ammunition against her middle sister.

“So, how’s life in Minn-e-soooo-tah?” a typical encounter with the sister began. “Have you been eating lots of corn ? Have you seen Babe the Blue Ox!? Have you been to Brainerd ?”

You might think that Patty, being a trained competitor and three and a half years older than the sister (though only two years ahead of her in school), would have developed ways of handling the sister’s demeaning silliness. But there was something congenitally undefended about Patty’s heart—she never ceased to be shocked by the sister’s lack of sisterliness. The sister also really was Creative and therefore skilled at coming up with unexpected ways to render Patty speechless.

“Why do you always talk to me in that weird voice?” was Patty’s current best defense.

“I was just asking you about life in good old Minn-e-soooo-tah.”

“You cackle , is what you do. It’s like a cackle .”

This was met with a glittery-eyed silence. Then: “It’s the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes!”

“Please just go away.”

“Do you have a boyfriend out there?”

“No.”

“A girlfriend?”

“ No . Although I did make a really great friend.”

“You mean the one who’s sending you all the letters? Is she a jock?”

“No. She’s a poet.”

“Wow.” The sister seemed a tiny bit interested. “What’s her name?”

“Eliza.”

“Eliza Doolittle. She sure does write an awful lot of letters. Are you positive she’s not your girlfriend?”

“She’s a writer, OK? A really interesting writer.”

“One hears whispers from the locker room, is all. The fungus that dare not speak its name.”

“You’re so disgusting,” Patty said. “She has like three different boyfriends, she’s very cool.”

“Brainerd, Minn-e-soooo-tah,” was the sister’s reply. “You have to send me a postcard of Babe the Blue Ox from Brainerd.” She went away singing “I’m Getting Married in the Morning” with much vibrato.

The following fall, back at school, Patty met the boy named Carter who became, for want of a better word, her first boyfriend. It now seems to the autobiographer anything but accidental that she met him immediately after she’d obeyed Eliza’s third rule and told her that a guy she knew from the gym, a sophomore from the wrestling team, had asked her out to dinner. Eliza had wanted to meet the wrestler first, but there were limits even to Patty’s agreeability. “He seems like a really nice guy,” she said.