Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Walter finally caught up with her at the end of February, late on the snowy day of the Gophers’ big game against UCLA, its highest-ranked opponent of the season. Patty was already ill-disposed toward the world that day, owing to a morning phone conversation with her mother, whose birthday it was. Patty had resolved not to babble about her own life and discover yet again that Joyce wasn’t listening and didn’t give a shit about the ranking of her team’s opponent, but she hadn’t even had a chance to exercise this self-restraint, because Joyce was so excited about Patty’s middle sister, who had tried out for the lead role in an Off Broadway revival of The Member of the Wedding at her Yale professor’s special urging and had landed the part of understudy, which was apparently a huge deal that might result in the sister’s taking time off from Yale and living at home and pursuing drama full-time; and Joyce had been in raptures.

When Patty glimpsed Walter rounding the bleak brick corner of Wilson Library, she turned and hurried away, but he came running after her. Snow had collected on his big fur hat; his face was as red as a navigational beacon. Although he tried to smile and be friendly, his voice was shaking when he asked Patty whether she’d gotten any of his phone messages.

“I’ve just been so busy,” she said. “I’m really sorry I didn’t call you back.”

“Is it something I said ? Did I somehow offend you?”

He was hurt and angry and she hated it.

“No, no, not at all,” she said.

“I would have called even more except I didn’t want to keep bothering you.”

“Just really, really busy,” she murmured as the snow fell.

“The person who answers your phone started sounding really annoyed with me, because I kept leaving the same message.”

“Well, her room’s right next to the phone, so. You can understand that. She takes a lot of messages.”

“I don’t understand,” Walter said, nearly crying. “Do you want me to leave you alone? Is that it?”

She hated scenes like this, she hated them.

“I’m truly just very busy,” she said. “And I actually have a big game tonight, so.”

“No,” Walter said, “there’s something wrong. What is it? You look so unhappy!”

She didn’t want to mention the conversation with her mother, because she was trying to get her head into a game zone and it was best not to dwell on these things. But Walter so desperately insisted on an explanation—insisted in a way that went beyond his own feelings, insisted almost for the sake of justice —that she felt she had to say something.

“Look,” she said, “you have to swear not to tell Richard,” although she realized, even as she said it, that she’d never quite understood this prohibition, “but Eliza has leukemia. It’s really terrible.”

To her surprise, Walter laughed. “That doesn’t seem likely.”

“Well, it’s true,” she said. “Whether or not it seems likely to you.”

“OK. And is she still doing heroin?”

A fact she’d seldom paid attention to before—that he was two years older than she was—suddenly made its presence felt.

“She has leukemia,” Patty said. “I don’t know anything about heroin.”

“Even Richard knows enough not to do that stuff. Which, believe me, is saying something.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

Walter nodded and smiled. “Then you really are a sweet person.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “But I’ve got to go eat now and get ready for the game.”

“I can’t see you play tonight,” he said as she was turning to leave. “I wanted to, but Harry Blackmun’s speaking. I have to go to that.”

She turned back to him in irritation. “Not a problem.”

“He’s on the Supreme Court. He wrote Roe v. Wade .”

“I know that,” she said. “My mom practically has a shrine to him that she burns incense at. You don’t have to tell me who Harry Blackmun is.”

“Right. Sorry.”

The snow swirled between them.

“Right, so, I won’t bother you anymore,” Walter said. “I’m sorry about Eliza. I hope she’s OK.”

The autobiographer blames nobody but herself—not Eliza, not Joyce, not Walter—for what happened next. Like every player, she had suffered through plenty of cold shooting streaks and played her share of subpar games, but even on her worst nights she’d felt ensconced in something larger—in the team, in sportsmanship, in the idea that athletics mattered —and had drawn true comfort from the encouraging cries of her teammate sisters and their jinx-breaking raillery at halftime, the variations on themes of bricks and butterfingers, the stock phrases that she herself had yelled a thousand times before. She had always wanted the ball, because the ball had always saved her, the ball was what she knew for sure she had in life, the ball had been her loyal companion in her endless girlhood summers. And all the repetitious activities that people do in church which seem vapid or phony to nonbelievers—the low fives after every single basket, the lovecluster after every drained free throw, the high fives for every teammate coming off the court, the endless shriekings of “Way to go SHAWNA!” and “Way to play smart CATHY!” and “SWISH, WOO HOO, WOO HOO!”—had become such second nature to her and made such perfect sense, as necessary aids to unthinking high performance, that it would no sooner have occurred to her to be embarrassed by them than by the fact that running up and down the court made her sweat a lot. Female athletics was not all sweetness and light, of course. Underneath the hugs were festering rivalries and moral judgments and severe impatience, Shawna blaming Patty for feeding too many outlet passes to Cathy and not enough to her, Patty seething when the slow-witted reserve center Abbie Smith turned yet another possession into a jump ball that she then could not control, Mary Jane Rorabacker nursing an eternal grudge against Cathy for not inviting her to room with her and Patty and Shawna in sophomore year despite their having starred together at St. Paul Central, every starter feeling guiltily relieved when a promising recruit and potential rival underperformed under pressure, etc., etc., etc. But competitive sports was founded on a trick of devotion, a method of credence, and once it was fully drummed into you, in middle school or high school at the latest, you didn’t have to wonder about anything important when you headed to the gym and suited up, you knew the Answer to the Question, the Answer was the Team, and any venial personal concerns were set aside.

It’s possible that Patty, in her agitation following her encounter with Walter, forgot to eat enough. Definitely something was wrong from the minute she arrived at Williams Arena. The UCLA team was huge and physical, with three starters six feet or bigger, and Coach Treadwell’s game plan was to wear them out on transition and let her smaller players, Patty especially, scurry and strike before the Bruins could get their defense set. On D the plan was to be extra aggressive and try to draw the Bruins’ two big scorers into early foul trouble. The Gophers weren’t expected to win, but if they did win they could move up into the top twenty in the unofficial national rankings—higher than they’d ever been during Patty’s tenure. And so it was a very bad night for her to lose her religion.

She experienced a peculiar weakness at her core. She had her usual range of movement in her stretches, but her muscles felt somehow inelastic. Her teammates’ loud pep grated on her nerves, and a tightness in her chest, a self-consciousness, inhibited her from shouting back at them. She succeeded in boxing out all thoughts about Eliza, but instead she found herself considering how, although her own career would be forever over after another season and a half, her middle sister could go on and be a famous actress all her life, and what a dubious investment of her own time and resources athletics had therefore been, and how blithely she’d ignored her mother’s years of hinting to this effect. None of this, it’s safe to say, was recommended as a way to be thinking before a big game.