A fatefully slim envelope, return address Yale, arrived at our house in mid-December. Courtney had been rejected—not rolled over into the regular applicant pool, or wait-listed, but denied outright. I think we were all shocked that such a thing could happen to my straight-A, near-perfect-SAT-score, lacrosse-prospect, exemplary sister. Nobody said a word about it. Courtney herself didn’t let anything show: she bit down on her disappointment and finished her other applications. But Dad, oh Dad was so upset. They’d made a mistake, he believed, they’d mixed up her file with someone else’s. Our mother, who was sorry about it for Courtney’s sake but didn’t take it so personally, had to entreat him not to call up Yale to insist that they correct the error. Probably he tried to, regardless. Did he blame me for her rejection? Did Courtney? Not in any overt way, but I can’t say for sure. They blamed me, and the universe, and probably themselves too. The small blue pennant on the kitchen corkboard was tossed in the garbage.
By then we’d already played a few games of the type that always led off the season, against teams from outside our conference, which were often blowouts one way or the other. We’d lost a game by twenty points and won the next by more than thirty. Then came our first league game, at a girls’ school in Virginia, and though we were ahead for most of it, we threw it away in the end. We were sloppy. There was nothing Coach hated more, and during the desolate van ride back home she delivered a droning sermon from behind the wheel, which was not on one subject but shifted here and there; it was about attitude, it was about respect, it was about commitment, it was about showing up ready to play. It was about hustle. And it was about respect again. Can’t have a team without it. Can’t win games without it. It’s respect for the game that helps you comprehend your role on this team, she said. It’s respect that keeps you from throwing up stupid shots, or throwing an elbow at your opponent. Those girls you just played, they weren’t more skilled than you but they did use what they had. They weren’t faster than you but they did hustle.
We were tired and brooding, half-listening. The city lights were colored smudges, and it was as if Coach’s words were outside the windows too, filtered through cold glass. I started to dream the rest of her speech, it was about power and it was about fear, then about the color blue, it was about a trial taking place in the gym and about some papers I was required to alphabetize, and at last it was about loving one another as if we were all sisters—this just before the engine shut off and we were dispensed into the parking lot.
My actual sister was drifting away. Only a month earlier I’d thought we might become friends, something like friends anyway, but after the rejection from Yale she grew more distant. She started to play differently too. She’d always been a precise athlete, her form exact, deserving of an A grade in the subject of basketball, but now she had something she hadn’t had before. She stole the ball, sometimes snatched it right out of an opponent’s hands, she came home from games with bruises on her knees and on her arms. She never cracked a smile. She played angry, and we won the next five games in a row, three at a Christmas tournament and then the first two games of the new year.
Like everyone on the team I was drawn into Courtney’s field. I started to play better, if only out of fear. But then came the absence of fear. The apologetic, chattering voice in my head had quieted, and I heard only yes! and yes! and yes! I was drawn to the ball, and it to me, and I hung each shot like an ornament on a branch. One day Coach said to me, “When you go against Courtney in practice, you’re full of fight, but against anybody else you get nice. You’re too nice. Pretend every single one of your opponents is your sister.” And so I did, I saw Courtneys everywhere.
The relationship between my brain and my body shifted. In the next game, and in the next one after that, I was my body, which was strangely like being someone else and being no one at all. In movies these moments are given to us in slow motion, the sounds of the crowd muted, the ball crashing on the floor and swishing through the net, but for me it wasn’t like that. It was fast, grunting, awesome.
Coach started pulling me off the bench sooner, usually halfway into the first quarter. I would crouch by the scorers’ table, waiting for the whistle to blow so that I could go in the game, so nervous! Convinced, always, that my streak was about to end. As I jogged out, I would forget everything, all our plays, which girl I was supposed to guard, my own name, and then remember again. I didn’t always do well, but I was a part of things. And because people saw Courtney, they saw me, and they talked about us as a unit, the Atherton sisters, though we were in fact not the unit I wished we were. For all that time we spent together at practice and games and driving to and fro, for all the shots sunk and high fives, Courtney had gone away from me.
* * *
Dad still came to watch us, but he was not so fanatical anymore—and at home he was likewise subdued. He slipped in and out of the house. He slept in his clothes sometimes. There were pouches under his eyes, and his hair turned from mostly brown to slush-colored.
He and I were the early risers of our family. Dad typically left for work before 6:00, and one morning I crept downstairs at around quarter past and went out to our porch to pick up the newspaper. It was a half hour or so before sunrise. I read by the porch light while my mother slept. But what was I reading? Five or six paragraphs about a downed plane, the role of the Israelis, the assertions of this or that official.
My father must have been sitting in his car. All of a sudden he came surging up the steps with rigid arms and a rebuke at the ready, but then I think he recognized he couldn’t actually scold me for reading the paper.
“Let’s go inside,” he said.
He turned on the kettle, and we sat at the kitchen table, silently. He must have been trying to formulate an explanation. “I’ve been advised,” he began, then stopped. “Okay. What questions do you have?”
It was early. It was dark. Things I’d read bobbed around my head, just out of reach. I wanted him to read me a story, or teach me to ride a bike again.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked.
“We’re going to be fine,” he said. “Just fine.”
That’s a bunch of bull, I wanted to say.
Maybe he saw it in my face. He lowered his eyes. The kettle shrieked, and he stood to take it off the burner. He turned back toward me and asked, “How is school going?” His voice was as gentle as I’d ever heard it, but he didn’t have any words to go with the gentleness. It was all he knew how to ask. The time we’d once spent together, such as it was, had always been centered on activities, on biking or skiing, or trips to Roy Rogers for burgers, but then he took a job that consumed all his hours, and then I was too old to want to ride bikes with him.
“It’s fine.” I wanted to say so much more than that. “It’s okay.”
“Good.”
He started to spoon instant coffee into a cup, and then he asked me whether I wanted some. I said I did, so that I could drink it with him, and in the silence that followed, we discovered a new activity: that wordless coffee-drinking itself. I started waking up even earlier, listening for Dad’s footsteps. I would pull on a long-sleeved shirt over my pajamas and go downstairs and into the kitchen, where I would mix a little of his instant coffee into hot milk. While Dad heated water in the kettle, I would put milk in the microwave and watch to make sure it didn’t boil over, though often my attention would wander, last night’s dream would for a moment or two retake my porous 6:00 a.m. brain, and the milk would spume over the sides of the cup. I would sponge the milk scum off the microwave carousel, and then we would drink our coffees, in loud, slurpy sips.
Because of the scandal my father would have to resign, but his new boss allowed him to give three months’ notice, so that he was able to remain until early March, and his lawyer persuaded the joint committees to postpone the date of his testimony. We were living inside the temporary shelter of those deferrals, a lean-to of scavenged time. It was a chilly, exposed place. In spite of the restricted access to information on Albemarle Street, we all knew that it wouldn’t be easy for our father to find another job. The thing that scared me was to see him pick up the comics and read them straight through, Prince Valiant and Momma and Family Circus, all of them. Or: once I passed by the study and saw him playing one of our computer games. He’d never had any interest in those things before.
* * *
In the short time that Courtney went out with Rob, she never seemed in love with him so much as preoccupied by him, waiting for his calls and then answering them briskly, as though he were a nuisance. My suspicion was that she undertook Rob in order to undertake sex, sex as another entry in her list of achievements. Deflowering: check. But after the deed was done, and done a few times, she found herself attached to him and irritated by him and confused about what to do with him. Which was not all that different from how she felt about me.
She stared into space. She fouled out of two games.
One night Tanya, who was our team’s equipment manager, drove us home from an away game. I sat in a cramped backseat seemingly designed for the legless, making origami of my limbs and looking at Tanya’s long neck in the space between her seat and the headrest.
“Your dad couldn’t make it,” Tanya said to Courtney, who was in the passenger seat.
“He had to meet with his lawyer. I’m sure he’s hating it,” Courtney said.
“He told you that?” I asked, but the two of them went on talking to each other.
“Why does he have a lawyer again?” Tanya asked.
“Somebody decided that he and some other people he used to work with aren’t eligible to have White House counsel,” Courtney said. “They hung them out to dry.”
“I meant, what’s he accused of?”
Courtney exhaled deliberately. “They are accused,” she said, “of violating a law that said you can’t give military aid to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. But you know what? It’s not even the law anymore! Congress overturned it.”
It was as if she had learned Mandarin Chinese on the sly.
“How do you know all that?” I asked, louder this time. “Mom and Dad told you?”
“Yeah, right,” she said. “I read the newspaper at school, in the library.”
“You found out Dad was meeting with his lawyer from the newspaper?”
“No, Dad told me that.”
“Okay,” Tanya said. “There was a law, and now it’s not a law anymore.”
“But they broke it when it was a law, right? Doesn’t that still count as breaking it?” I asked.
Courtney sighed again.
Only much later did I think anything of the fact that Courtney would’ve seen Dick Mitchell during that period, a period when my father wasn’t supposed to contact him. She and Rob spent time at his house on the weekends. I thought about the plush suburban manor I’d seen when we’d gone to the party there. I pictured the two of them sunk into an overstuffed sofa, watching cable, this vision not sharp and realistic but fogged with envy: romantic, transcendent Saturday-afternoon cable.
My sister did mention Mitchell at least once. This was one evening when she’d come home late from dinner at their house. He’d let Rob and her each have a glass of wine, she told me, and had said the funniest things. He’s so cool, she said.
Our own house had become gloomy. It sounded so much better over there, for even though Rob’s stepdad was in the same bag as our dad, he was cool and our dad was not.
* * *
The goals were worthy…, said the president in his State of the Union address, but we did not achieve what we wished, and serious mistakes were made in trying to do so.
The first snow of the year came in late January. On the radio they warned of baffled traffic, dangerous conditions, abandoned cars. White out: the city was redacted. Tufts of snow topped the bus signs, and lost scarves lay wet and mangled in the road. People covered their little red ears.
School closed, and Anthony and I found each other outside, in a muddle of kids still deciding what to do with themselves. He said I had to come to Georgetown with him. Why would I do that? I asked. He thought the movie theater where he worked would still be open. His boss there would never close, not for a tornado, not for a tidal wave. He was going. There was no reason to go with him but for a snow-giddiness that drew me slipping and sliding, and we skidded all the way down Wisconsin, pushing each other, running in circles, burying snow in each other’s necks.
Then kissing. In the projection booth, it was. He had his hand up my shirt, he murmured “Oh god” as he sank his face into my hair, and that seemed like something he’d seen in a movie, but he was trembling too, while in the theater below a lone man watched the film. I did let Anthony unbutton my shirt, I’d sipped the vodka he’d taken from a cabinet, and I snuck my hand under his shirt too, reaching for his thin waist, soft in spite of how skinny. Patchwork of temperature, warm, cold, warm, cold, his lips, my hands, his breath, the air that came from someplace. The room didn’t seem clean enough for taking off clothes, everything black and metal, stacks of reels gathering dust, and there was dust on top of a file cabinet, thick and dense as a rug. Way too suddenly, his hand was inside my underwear and then his finger was in me. It hurt. Anthony! He pulled his hand out of my pants and leaped back. Shaken. We both were. I buttoned myself up. Here was this person who’d been sort of my best friend. And now what.
We stayed there, holding hands, for a few minutes after the movie ended, and when at last we zombie-walked down to the lobby, that man, the audience, was still shuffling around in his coat and hat, reading the blown-up reviews on the walls. He had on tinted glasses and hid his baldness under a maroon snow hat with a gold pompom.
“Did you like it?” Anthony asked him in that way of teenagers talking to adults, half ironic, half surprised that it is even possible to talk like this. It was his fourth time seeing it, the man said. There was something he wanted, he looked at us too eagerly, making me nervous, though all he did was pour some M&Ms out of a pack he was holding and push them into his mouth.
Although we tried to make fun of the man after he left, the joking fell flat. By then it was six or seven. We walked along the lit-up sidewalk, the darkness yellowed by the streetlamps and the headlights of the occasional taxi or SUV, the tires slurping through a stillness that made it seem much later than it was. The snow had stopped, it had been trampled, driven over, and we couldn’t tell whether the buses were running.
“That was sad,” I said.
“What?”
“That man all by himself.”
“Lots of people go to the movies by themselves. I go to the movies by myself.”
“Yeah but still. There was something about him.”
“Maybe that’s just your imagination.”
“Really, everything is my imagination, though. I’m imagining you,” I told him.
“And how do I look to your imagination?”
“Cold.”
“I’m serious.”
I didn’t know the answer. I liked him more than just about anybody, but I wanted to get away. I wished that I could think of a joke to tell or that a bus would come.
“You’re a fortress,” he said.
“That’s what we call our car.”
“I’m not talking about your car.”
His lips twitched. I nodded. Then we trudged very slowly up the hill. It was dark, and I assumed that by the time I got home my parents would be angry at me for coming in so late, and I also wondered whether they would see that there was something different about me, that I’d been drinking and messing around, but it wasn’t actually that late, and they didn’t notice anything.