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