Freedom

Patty had always had friends plural, never anything intense. Her heart gladdened when she saw Eliza waiting outside the gym after practice, she knew it was going to be an instructive evening. Eliza took her to movies with subtitles and made her listen very carefully to Patti Smith recordings (“I love that you have the same name as my favorite artist,” she said, disregarding the different spelling and the fact that Patty’s actual legal name was Patrizia, which Joyce had given her to be different and Patty was embarrassed to say aloud) and loaned her books of poetry by Denise Levertov and Frank O’Hara. After the basketball team finished with a record of 8 wins and 11 losses and a first-round tournament elimination (despite Patty’s 14 points and numerous assists), Eliza also taught her to really, really like Paul Masson Chablis.

What Eliza did with the rest of her free time was somewhat hazy. There seemed to be several “men” (i.e., boys) in her life, and she sometimes referred to concerts she’d gone to, but when Patty expressed curiosity about these concerts Eliza said first Patty had to listen to all the mix tapes Eliza made her; and Patty was having some difficulty with these mix tapes. She did like Patti Smith, who seemed to understand how she’d felt in the bathroom on the morning after she was raped, but the Velvet Underground, for example, made her lonely. She once admitted to Eliza that her favorite band was the Eagles, and Eliza said, “There’s nothing wrong with that, the Eagles are great,” but you sure didn’t see any Eagles records in Eliza’s dorm room.

Eliza’s parents were big-deal Twin Cities psychotherapists and lived out in Wayzata, where everybody was rich, and she had an older brother, a junior at Bard College, whom she described as peculiar. When Patty asked, “Peculiar in what way?” Eliza answered, “In every way.” Eliza herself had patched together a high-school education at three different local academies and was enrolled at the U. because her parents refused to subsidize her if she wasn’t in school. She was a B student in a different way than Patty was a B student, which was to get the same B in everything. Eliza got A-pluses in English and Ds in everything else. Her only known interests besides basketball were poetry and pleasure.

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.”