stood up from the sofa. “When will I see you? Will I see you tomorrow?”
“No,” Patty said. “I don’t think so.”
“Wait!” Eliza ran over and seized Patty by the hand. “I fucked everything up, but I’ll get better, and then we can see each other again. OK?”
“Yes, OK,” Patty lied as the parents moved in to pry their daughter off her.
Outside, the sky had cleared and the temperature had fallen to near zero. Patty drove breath after breath of cleanness down deep into her lungs. She was free! She was free! And, oh, how she wished she could go back now and play the game against UCLA again. Even at one in the morning, even with nothing in her stomach, she felt ready to excel. She sprinted down Eliza’s street in sheer exhilaration at her freedom, hearing Coach’s words in her ears for the first time, three hours after they’d been spoken, hearing her say how it was just one game, how everybody had bad games, how she’d be herself again tomorrow. She felt ready to dedicate herself more intensely than ever to staying fit and improving her skills, ready to see more theater with Walter, ready to say to her mother, “That’s really great news about The Member of the Wedding!” Ready to be an all-around better person. In her exhilaration, she ran so blindly that she didn’t see the black ice on the sidewalk until her left leg had slipped gruesomely out sideways behind her right leg and she’d ripped the shit out of her knee and was lying on the ground.
There’s not a lot to say about the six weeks that followed. She had two surgeries, the second one following an infection from the first, and became an ace crutch-user. Her mother flew out for the first operation and treated the hospital staff as if they were midwestern yokels of questionable intelligence, causing Patty to apologize for her and be especially agreeable whenever she was out of the room. When it turned out that Joyce might have been right not to trust the doctors, Patty felt so chagrined that she didn’t even tell her about the second operation until the day before it happened. She assured Joyce that there was no need to fly out again—she had tons of friends to look after her.
Walter Berglund had learned from his own mother how to be attentive to women with ailments, and he took advantage of Patty’s extended incapacitation to reinsert himself into her life. On the day after her first surgery, he appeared with a four-foot-tall Norfolk pine and suggested that she might prefer a living plant to cut flowers that wouldn’t last. After that, he managed to see Patty almost every day except on weekends, when he was up in Hibbing helping his parents, and he quickly endeared himself to her jock friends with his niceness. Her homelier friends appreciated how much more intently he listened to them than all the guys who couldn’t see past their looks, and Cathy Schmidt, her brightest friend, declared Walter smart enough to be on the Supreme Court. It was a novelty in Female Jockworld to have a guy in their midst who everybody felt so natural and relaxed around, a guy who could hang out in the lounge during study breaks and be one of the girls. And everybody could see that he was crazy about Patty, and everybody but Cathy Schmidt agreed that this was a most excellent thing.
Cathy, as noted, was sharper than the rest. “You’re not really into him, are you,” she said.
“I sort of am,” Patty said. “But also sort of not.”
“So . . . the two of you are not . . .”
“No! Nothing. I probably never should have told him I was raped. He got all squirrelly when I told him that. All . . . tender and . . . nursey and . . . upset. And now it’s like he’s waiting for written permission, or for me to make the move. Which, the crutches probably aren’t helping there, either. But it’s like I’m being followed around by a really nice, well-trained dog.”
“That’s not so great,” Cathy said.
“No. It’s not. But I can’t get rid of him, either, because he’s incredibly nice to me, and I really do love talking to him.”
“You’re sort of into him.”
“Exactly. Maybe even somewhat more than sort of. But—”
“But not wildly more.”
“Exactly.”
Walter was interested in everything. He read every word of the newspaper and Time magazine, and in