Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Fine,” he said. “My mom and I are baking. Richard’s playing checkers with my dad.”

  “That sounds nice. I wish I were there.”

  “I wish you were, too. We could go snowshoeing.”

  “That sounds really nice.”

  It genuinely did, and Patty could no longer tell whether it was Richard’s presence that made Walter appealing or whether he might be appealing for his own sake—for his ability to make whatever place he was in seem like a homey place to be.

  The dreadful call from Eliza came on Christmas night. Patty answered it on the extension in the basement, where she was watching an NBA game by herself. Before she could even apologize, Eliza herself apologized for her silence and said that she’d been busy seeing doctors. “They say I have leukemia,” she said.

  “No.”

  “I’m starting treatments after New Year’s. My parents are the only other ones who know, and you can’t tell anyone. You especially can’t tell Richard. Will you swear you won’t tell anyone?”

  Patty’s cloud of guilt and worry now condensed into a storm of sentiment. She wept and wept and asked Eliza if she was sure, if the doctors were sure. Eliza explained that she’d been feeling increasingly draggy as the fall went on, but she hadn’t wanted to tell anyone, because she was afraid Richard would dump her if it turned out she had mono, but finally she’d felt so crappy that she went to see a doctor, and the verdict had come back two days earlier: leukemia.

  “Is it the bad kind?”

  “They’re all bad.”

  “But the kind you can get better from?”

  “There’s a good chance the treatments will help,” Eliza said. “I’ll know more in a week.”

  “I’ll come back early. I can stay with you.”

  But Eliza, oddly enough, no longer wanted Patty staying with her.

  Regarding the Santa Claus business: the autobiographer has no sympathy with lying parents, and yet there are degrees to this. There are lies you tell a person who’s being given a surprise party, lies told in a spirit of fun, and then there are lies you tell a person to make them look foolish for believing them. One Christmas, as a teenager, Patty became so upset about being teased for her unnaturally long-lived childhood belief in Santa (which had persisted even after two younger siblings lost it) that she refused to leave her room for Christmas dinner. Her dad, coming in to plead with her, for once stopped smiling and told her seriously that the family had preserved her illusions because her innocence was beautiful and they specially loved her for it. This was both a welcome thing to hear and obvious bullshit belied by the pleasure everybody took in teasing her. Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.

  Suffice it to say that Patty, in her many winter weeks of playing Florence Nightingale to Eliza—trudging through a blizzard to bring her soup, cleaning her kitchen and bathroom, staying up late with her and watching TV when she should have been sleeping before games, sometimes falling asleep with her arms around her emaciated friend, submitting to extreme endearments (“You’re my darling angel,” “Seeing your face is like being in heaven,” etc., etc.), and refusing, all the while, to return Walter’s phone calls and explain why she didn’t have time to hang out with him anymore—failed to notice any number of red flags. No, Eliza said, this particular chemotherapy wasn’t the kind that made people’s hair fall out. And, no, it wasn’t possible to schedule treatments at times when Patty was available to take her home from the clinic. And, no, she didn’t want to give up her apartment and stay with her parents, and, yes, the parents came to visit all the time, it was just coincidence that Patty never saw them, and, no, it was not unusual for cancer patients to give themselves anti-emetics with a hypodermic needle such as the one Patty noticed on the floor underneath Eliza’s nightstand.

  Arguably the biggest red flag was the way she, Patty, avoided Walter. She saw him at two games in January and spoke to him briefly, but he missed a bunch of games after that, and her conscious reason for not returning his many later phone messages was that she was embarrassed to admit how much of Eliza she was seeing. But why should it have been embarrassing to be caring for a friend stricken with cancer? And likewise: how hard would it have been, when she was in fifth grade, to open her ears to her schoolmates’ cynicism regarding Santa Claus, if she’d had the least bit of interest in learning the truth? She threw away the big poinsettia plant even though it still had life in it.

  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 g
et 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.

  “Just be yourself, be great,” Coach Treadwell told her. “Who’s our leader?”

  “I’m our leader.”

  “Louder.”

  “I’m our leader.”

  “Louder!”

  “I’M our leader.”

  If you’ve ever played team sports, you’ll know that Patty immediately felt stronger and more centered and leaderly for saying this. Funny how the trick works—the transfusion of confidence through simple words. She was fine doing warm-ups and fine shaking hands with the Bruins’ captains and feeling their appraising eyes on her, knowing they’d been told she was a big scoring threat and the Gophers’ director on offense; she stepped into her rep for success as if it were a suit of armor. Once you’re in the game, though, and you start hemorrhaging confidence, transfusion from the sidelines isn’t possible. Patty scored one basket on an easy fast-break layup, and that was basically the end of her night. As early as the second minute, she could tell from the lump in her throat that she was going to suck as she had never sucked before. Her Bruin counterpart had two inches and thirty pounds and ungodly amounts of vertical leap on her, but the problem wasn’t only physical or even mainly physical. The problem was the defeat in her heart. Instead of burning competitively with the injustice of the Bruins’ size advantage, and relentlessly pursuing the ball, as Coach had told her to do, she felt defeated by injustice: felt sorry for herself. The Bruins tried out a full-court press and discovered that it worked spectacularly. Shawna rebounded and passed Patty the ball, but she got trapped in the corner and gave it up. She got the ball again and fell out of bounds. She got the ball again and faked it directly into the hands of a defender, as if making a little present. Coach called a time-out and told her to station herself farther up the court on transition; but Bruins were waiting for her there. A long pass went off her hands and into the seats. Fighting the lump in her throat, trying to get mad, she got a foul for charging. She had no spring in her jump shot. She turned the ball over twice in the paint, and Coach took her out to have a word.

  “Where’s my girl? Where’s my leader?”

  “I don’t have it tonight.”

  “You absolutely have it, you just have to find it. It’s in there. Find it.”

  “OK.”

  “Scream at me. Let it out.”

  Patty shook her head. “I don’t want to let it out.”

  Coach, crouching, peered up into her face, and Patty, with great effort of will, forced herself to meet her eyes.

  “Who’s our leader?”

  “I am.”

  “Shout it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You want me to bench you? Is that what you want?”

  “No!”

  “Then get out there. We need you. Whatever it is, we can talk about it later. OK?”

  “OK.”

  This new transfusion poured straight into the hemorrhage without circulating even once through Patty’s body. For the sake of her teammates, she stayed in the game, but she reverted to her old habit of being selfless, of following plays instead of leading them, of passing instead of shooting, and then to her even older habit of lingering around the perimeter and taking long jumpers, some of which might have fallen on another night, but not that night. How hard it is to hide on a basketball court! Patty got beaten on defense again and again, and each defeat seemed to make the next one more likely. What she was feeling became a lot more familiar to her later in her life, when she made the acquaintance of serious depression, but on that February night it was a hideous novelty to feel the game swirling around her, totally out of her control, and to intuit that
the significance of everything that happened, every approach and retreat of the ball, every heavy thud of her feet on the floor, every new moment of trying to guard a fully focused and determined Bruin, every teammate’s hearty halftime whap on the shoulder, was her own badness and the emptiness of her future and the futility of struggle.

  Coach finally sat her down for good midway through the second half, with the Gophers trailing by 25. She revived a little as soon as she was safely benched. She found her voice and exhorted her teammates and high-fived them like an eager rookie, reveling in the abasement of being reduced to a cheerleader in a game she should have starred in, embracing the shame of being too-delicately consoled by her pitying teammates. She felt she fully deserved to be abased and shamed like this, after how she’d stunk. Wallowing in this shit was the best she’d felt all day.

  Afterward, in the locker room, she endured Coach’s sermon with closed ears and then sat on a bench and sobbed for half an hour. Her friends were considerate enough to let her just do this.

  In her down parka and her Gophers stocking cap, she went to Northrop Auditorium, hoping the Blackmun lecture might somehow still be going on there, but the building was dark and locked. She thought of returning to her hall and calling Walter, but she realized that what she really wanted now was to break training and get trashed on wine. She walked through snowy streets to Eliza’s apartment, and here she realized that what she really wanted was to scream abusive things at her friend.

  Eliza, on the intercom, objected that it was late and she was tired.

  “No, you have to let me up,” Patty said. “This is non-optional.”

  Eliza let her in and then lay down on her sofa. She was wearing pajamas and listening to some kind of throbbing jazz. The air was thick with lethargy and old smoke. Patty stood by the sofa, bundled in her parka, snow melting off her sneakers, and watched how slowly Eliza was breathing and how long it took for the impulse to speak to be effectuated—various random facial muscle movements gradually becoming a little less random and finally gathering into a murmured question: “How was your game.”