Coach E used to lecture us on the topic of desire. What do I mean when I say the word desire? she would ask, with her arms folded and her chin out, her gaze aimed at the rim. I am not talking about lust. I am not talking about your teenage urges. Where does this word desire come from? From the stars. From the stars. Desire comes from the stars.
This is about something bigger than you, ladies. This game. This game! This game is greater than you. You reach for the sky, and that’s desire. You ask the stars for help. That’s desire. You strain with all your might toward something greater! That’s what desire is. The desire to play the game with everything you have, and more.
For me one desire swirled into another. I would watch the boys’ varsity team play basketball in a kind of terrific swoon. All those legs, the hairy, knobby legs and the smooth pillars, pale legs and dark ones, jumping up, up, up. I wanted to jump. I wanted a body that could hang in the air. It was amazing to me that the same boys who scuttled stupidly around the school in their stupid jackets could soar the way they did. I wanted to jump like them, and it’s true, I also wanted to be jumped by them. At their games I used to swish my tongue around my mouth, imagining what another tongue would feel like in there, and press my hands into the bleachers, and feel all my skin, the entire surface of me getting warmer. But when they put their stupid jackets back on, I didn’t want them anymore.
My friend Anthony used to come find me during free periods, and we would loaf in the student lounge or sometimes we would shoot around in the gym together. He had unruly blond hair and grasshopper legs and I guess a thing for me, ever since we were in math class together in ninth grade. I was quicker than him in math, which got his attention, and one day I’d found a screw on the floor and picked it up and said, Wanna screw?—then realized my mistake. The answer in his eyes was yes, yes, yes. But I’d just said it to be funny. He was really skinny, not that I was fat, but he had the kind of metabolism that made him susceptible to head-rushes and even fainting first thing in the morning. I was bigger than he was, that was one reason we never went out.
He was eleven months older and so had his driver’s license well before I did, and he also had his own car, which he drove to school and to his job as a projectionist at an arty movie theater. His parents were doctors, a neurologist and a psychiatrist, and loyal BMW owners. He drove one that had been his mother’s, a car that embarrassed him (though I cherished it, for it was like the car Cybill Shepherd drove in Moonlighting), with deep seats of cream-colored leather and a removable stereo and a car phone that didn’t work. Anthony used to slap the seat, or the steering wheel, or his own leg, to emphasize something ridiculous or to punctuate the silence when he wasn’t saying anything. “Mrs. Gonnerman!” he would say—this was our chemistry teacher—and then give the car a slap and then repeat, “Mrs. Gonnerman! Well, I never.” He would just say these nonsense kinds of things and I would laugh. We drove around doing that, parroting phrases we thought were funny and listening to Whodini and the Fat Boys. “So should I go buy some Timberlands?” I remember him asking, making fun of the other white boys who borrowed whatever bits of black style they could get away with, but also I think genuinely wanting to know whether he too could pull it off.
Otherwise I was at loose ends socially. My best friend from ninth grade had transferred to public school in Virginia, and besides Anthony I had people I sat with at lunch, but none of them called me at night, or wrote me notes during the day.
* * *
In November Dick Mitchell went before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and so did Assistant Secretary Elliott Abrams, who explained to the senators that the “State Department’s function in this has not been to raise money” for the Contras. Less than two weeks later, Abrams went back to the committee and owned that he himself had asked the foreign minister of Brunei to contribute $10 million to aid the freedom fighters of Nicaragua. During that second appearance, the senators raked him over the coals. (“You’ve heard my testimony,” said Abrams to Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri. “I’ve heard it,” said the senator, “and I want to puke.”)
Like most kids I couldn’t have told you much about any of that, but Courtney was paying attention, she was piecing things together, and after she read about Abrams’s second round, she had some questions for Dad. Why did he lie? she asked one night at dinner. Dad told her that Abrams may not have known what he was allowed to talk about and what he wasn’t allowed to talk about.
“He didn’t say that. He didn’t say, ‘I’m not allowed to talk about this.’ He lied.”
“If you look at the exact wording of what he said, I don’t know that it was a lie. It was an omission.”
Courtney looked toward Mom, who had a way of being studiously distant in those moments, who was serving herself some more salad.
“The thing is, at this stage, there’s a lot we don’t know,” Dad said.
“I know it’s lying,” she said, and on her face was betrayal. Dad mashed his lips together and then said, “We are not going to talk about this at dinner.”
Courtney didn’t say anything more, in that case she wasn’t going to talk at all.
After that, absurdly, our parents tried to shield us from what was going on. Not only did they pretend everything was normal, they pretended we were ten years younger than we were, or they treated us like that anyway. They imposed a news blackout—such a thing was still possible in 1986, insane but possible, though the gist of the affair did reach us eventually. They instructed us to cover our ears, and for a little while we went along with it, even as we learned also to read lips, to puzzle out what people were saying. Mom was the family censor: she no longer watched the evening news as she was making dinner, and every morning she cut out all the relevant articles, making lacework of The Post.
Of course she and Dad still read those snipped-out stories themselves, and after 11:00 p.m., the anthems of the late news seeped out of their bedroom. I used to sneak out to the hallway, trying to hear what was being said. I could sometimes hear Dad yelling, “That’s a bunch of bull!” at the television, though I had no way of knowing who was being accused, the men in the story—bull!—or the news program itself—bull! Or both: everybody was lying. On Sundays, when he was at home, he would be looking out the window or into the refrigerator, and his brow would lower. His lips would move ever so slightly. You could see him getting angry again, silently having it out with someone, everyone, the president himself.
It was as though the background chatter of TV and print news had been a string knitting together the household. Once it had been pulled out, we lost our footing. Rules and rituals were forgotten. When was dinnertime? Were the Redskins playing? Together my sisters and I did chores that we’d argued over in the past, wanting to keep some kind of order. And as we washed and dried the dishes I would perform for Courtney, to make her laugh, peddling dumb jokes about how grody our refrigerator was, or about the way our dog wiggled her butt when she walked. We would cackle as Maggie shimmied around the kitchen, with an eleven-year-old dancer’s grace, pretending to be the dog.
* * *
A year earlier, just before I started ninth grade, Courtney had handed me a piece of filler paper spritzed with Anaïs Anaïs. It contained a list of HIGH SCHOOL DOS AND DON’TS ACCORDING TO MOI (COURTNEY ATHERTON):
1. Do shower daily, or twice daily in the case of severe B.O.
2. Neither a borrower (of my clothing) nor a lender be.
3. Don’t stare at junior or senior boys even if you think they’re cute (trust me they’re all retarded).
4. Don’t put any personal info about yourself in writing, even if it’s a note to a friend.
5. Do take time for General Foods International Coffees. Ahhhh.
6. If life hands you lemons, stuff your bra with them! The Atherton females need ALL the help they can get.
I saved the note in my desk drawer. The boundary between us was always shifting, some days it was all tra-la-la and trips to Peoples Drug for no reason but to buy candy and Wet n Wild lipstick, but then the next day or week it was like she didn’t even see me, or like she thought I was the dumbest creature she’d ever come across. And there were times when I was the one who snapped at her, sick of all her achievements, her useless superiority, her advice.
When I say Courtney was pretty, I don’t mean that she was one of those skinny sylphs who came to school in teeny-tiny skirts on the coldest of days. She was muscular. She rarely wore makeup. Her smooth brown hair fell into place on its own, and her clothes all fit her just so. There was always some soft-spoken boy trailing after her—the shyer members of the lacrosse and soccer teams all loved her—but she only wanted to be friends with them. She liked a different type of guy.
She invited me to come along to a party—an unprecedented offer—and I yipped out a “yes!,” then tried to gin up some nonchalance after the fact. This was early December. We’d played our first game that week, an easy win (to which I had contributed two rebounds in two minutes of playing time), and I was giddy as we sallied out in our mom’s car, a Ford Taurus a.k.a. the Fortrus. First we drove to Courtney’s friend Tanya’s house, and I moved to the backseat, and there in Tanya’s driveway we puzzled over the Montgomery County map book resting open on top of the hand brake. Animals strike curious poses, Prince sang as we started for Bethesda. My sister and Tanya talked about boys I didn’t know.
It was Rob Golden’s house, that is to say Dick Mitchell’s, a big plush colonial, ivy on the outside and fields of chenille and carpet within—fibered surfaces where kids on the brink of a kiss could nestle their wads of gum, and these would lie undiscovered for weeks. Courtney and Tanya and I filed through the house, out the back door and into the yard. It was cold, but half the party had gone out there anyway. A keg sat on the flagstone, among patio furniture, guarded by one of those shy boys who preferred to spend the whole party priming the pump and squirting beer into cups, while around that outpost and its lonely viceroy radiated fleeting colonies of young bodies, moving erratically, huddling for a while and then breaking apart.
Tanya peeled off to go talk to some friends of hers, and Courtney kept several paces ahead of me. I could tell she wasn’t sure whether it’d been a good idea to bring me along. I looked around the yard and saw only one other sophomore, a promiscuous Deadhead who liked to get high and then let some lucky boy deprive her of her tie-dyed togs. She was sitting up on a stone wall at the edge of the yard, in a row of girls who were swinging their legs and holding their red plastic cups with two hands, like bouquets, while swains in baseball caps lined up below them. In the moonlight the girls reared their heads and ran their fingers through their hair.
Aside from that one girl they were all juniors and seniors, people I had never seen at night. Their faces were painted over with shadows. They looked like bears and squirrels and dogs. I drifted across the yard, craning my neck as though I were looking for someone.
“There you are,” a guy said, and I turned to face a person I didn’t know, though I knew his name, Greg, as I knew the names of all the upperclassmen. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I thought you were someone else.”
“It’s true, though,” I said desperately.
“You are someone else?”
“I am here.”
He nodded solemnly.
On the other side of a bush something rustled, and a security light went on. Greg was taller than I was, but not by much, with straight brown bangs and a blunt nose, and the pale skin and slight doughiness of someone who spent his daylight hours away from the daylight. His face was taunting and dappled.
“Did you crash this fiesta?” he asked.
“Not that I know of. Were there, like, invitations?”
“Engraved. Delivered by footmen.”
“I came with my sister. Courtney,” I said.
“Courtney Atherton? You’re her sister?”
“’Tis true.”
He peered at my face, and I mugged for him, tucking my chin.
“Okay, I can see it,” he said. “Wow. Amazing.”
“How is that amazing?”
“She’s just, like, an intense person.”
“She’s my sister.”
“She’s so—literal.”
“What does that mean?”
He told me his first and last name, Greg Jacobs. On a whim I lied about my own name. I said it was Becca.
Inside, someone had put a record on, and through the patio doors I could see boys thrusting their shoulders forward and back, chanting the words to “It’s Tricky.”
On the patio itself, five or six weight-room regulars were in heated discussion. One of the guys clapped his hands slowly and repeated, “Let’s do this, let’s do this.” A more prudent one said, “That’s foolish, y’all.” Then the one who’d been clapping abruptly pulled off his T-shirt. His muscles and his gut bulged. Jay Wood was his name, a.k.a. Woody, or Woody Woodpecker, or Good Wood, or just Wood, said pointedly—Good morning, Wood. All those boner jokes had done nothing to sweeten his personality.
Greg cocked his head toward the boys. “Some guy keyed Ben Sachs’s Volvo, that’s what they’re upset about.”
“Who?”
“I think they said he goes to Landon.”
“Is it Ben’s car or his parents’ car?”
Greg didn’t know. “Hey, isn’t your dad the one at basketball games who—”
“I should probably go look for Courtney,” I said.
“Nice meeting you, little sister.”
In the kitchen I saw Rasheeda, our point guard, who waved and called out my name but had nothing much to say to me, nor I to her. We cast our eyes around the room and back at each other and exchanged speechless smiles.
I went looking for the bathroom, just to give myself a purpose, then returned to the kitchen. My sister’s legs appeared on the back stairs, negotiating one step at a time. She was gripping the banister with one hand and holding her shoes in the other. Above her stood Rob Golden, studying her progress. He wore a letter jacket and a Duke baseball cap, and he had white tape over one ear. In the weak light I couldn’t make out the flavor of his grin, whether it was affectionate or just amused, but my first impression was that he was curious to see whether she would fall.
“Hells bells!” she squealed when she saw me. “What are you doing? Are you drinking? Are you having fun?” A cup of beer had found its way into my hands. I didn’t much like the taste, but I was doing my best. I took a gulp. “Yeah!” Courtney cheered. Then she said, “This is Rob.” She gestured behind her, unaware of how far away he was, but just then he hopped down after her and handled her from behind. I wanted to pry his fingers off her arms. Then she herself shook loose of him.
We’ve met before, I wanted to say, but Rob wasn’t looking at me. Close-up, I could see the deep dimple in his chin and the red vessels of his bummed-out eyes. What his disappointment had been about, Courtney explained to me later, on the drive home. Tanya had gone with her friends to another party. I was behind the wheel, even though I had only a learner’s permit and wasn’t supposed to drive after dark, and I went slowly through a maze of curving roads, hounded by headlights bearing down from behind. We had to pull over to consult the Montgomery County map book several times. It was so much darker than when we’d come, and the radio was off, and the meaningless names of suburban courts and circles glowered at us from small signs.
What Rob wanted, what they all wanted: “Not in a bathroom,” Courtney said. “Uh-uh.”
Certain boys may have hoped that by removing our hooded sweatshirts they would summon the lacy ladies of Cinemax, but that wasn’t Courtney. Under her sweatshirt were a cotton bra and a complicated heart.
“Did you see they had those padded toilet seats?” she asked.
“Yes! Oh my god.”
“Hey. Do you have any cigarettes?”
“Um,” I said. “Do we smoke?”
“Maybe we should stop and get some. Let’s, okay?”
“I think we’re lost.”
“Well there’s got to be a 7-Eleven around here somewhere.”
“Do you think you would … with him?” I asked her.
The sex talks we’d been given by teachers (not our parents, oh no) leaned heavily on the word special. When a man and a woman have special feelings about each other, they do this special thing with their special parts.
“He’s very—how should I put this?” She twisted her face up and I knew exactly what she was getting at, or thought I did.
“Large,” I said. “Humongous.”
“That’s not a word,” she said.
“It is!” I said. “I bet he has a humongous cock. A big kielbasa!”
She lowered her head and shook it back and forth a few times, then brought it back up with a jerk and stared at the road.
“So what’s up with the tape on his ear?” I asked.
“It’s something from wrestling. Cauliflower ear.”
“Is it, like, cauliflower in your ear?”
“Not actual cauliflower—”
“One time I had cheeseburger ear, and I had to tape this bun over it—”
“Seriously, you have got to stop talking about meat. I’m so going to hurl,” she moaned.
“You are?”
“Just keep driving. Did you have fun?”
“I talked to Rasheeda. And this guy Greg.”
“Greg Jacobs?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you talk to him about?”
“He called you literal.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I told him my name was Becca!” I’d forgotten until then.
“That’s cute. You’re cute,” she said, as though she’d just come to this conclusion. “Did Greg tell you you were cute?” She leaned her head against the window and then quickly straightened up and opened her eyes very wide. “I’m a dizzy lizzy.”
“Do you know where we are?”
“As soon as we find a 7-Eleven, we can just ask them where it is.”
“Where what is?”
“The 7-Eleven!”
“It’s almost midnight. Mom and Dad said—”
“They’re so asleep right now. They pretend like they’re waiting up, but they fall asleep.”
“Dad’s probably up watching TV.”
“Nope. Asleep.”
It was so dark. I was afraid I might never find the way home, and that was hardly my only fear. “Do you think something’s going to happen to him?” I asked.
“Don’t worrrrrry about it.”
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“I’m just saying. The other people that he used to work with, they’re the ones who did whatever they did.”
“But we don’t even really know what happened, or what Dad—”
“There’s nothing else I need to know. It’s like—”
She moaned again and told me to pull over. “Like, now.” She lunged for the wheel and I had to push her hands away. Before the car had even come to a full stop, she opened the door and threw up neatly into the gutter.
“Are you all right?” I asked, when we were back on the road.
“Good thing Mom keeps the Fortrus stocked with Kleenex,” she said, dabbing at her mouth with a tissue she’d taken from the glove compartment. “Where the fuck are we?”