All winter long I would tread over dirty snow in my loose-laced high-tops, across expanses of salted pavement, across empty parking spaces, in and out of gymnasiums and locker rooms, pulling sweatpants on or off, always short of breath, hurrying, lost. Blowing into the bowl of my hands. I was usually too cold or too hot or, somehow, both. In freezing buses and suffocating vans, wired from adrenaline, I would chant to myself: don’t fuck up today, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up. I had a way of holding on to the missed shots, the rebounds I didn’t get, the times I let the other team score by giving some girl the baseline. I cared too much about all that. I wouldn’t say that the team was a family, since I barely knew some of my teammates, but it shared some of the qualities of my family, of people yoked together with limited intimacy but with a kind of job to do. An occupation. The team consumed my time, it consumed me.
And it linked me to Courtney, who had stopped bringing me to parties or telling me anything, who’d reverted to just tolerating me. We still spent two or more hours together each day, at practice, at games, or in transit, and I would wish for her to sit next to me on the bus, or even just to walk into the locker room by my side. Instead she stuck with the other seniors, and I kept my eye on her. She’d started to look skinny—she was losing weight, I thought. She wasn’t playing as well as she’d played earlier in the season. She’d jammed one of the fingers on her right hand, and her shots were often flat.
Every team in the conference played every other team twice, and in early February came our home game against the team that had handed us our ugliest loss back in December. This rematch was the high school game I would remember best of all as an adult (and then again I’ve presumably remembered it worst, by remembering it most often: no doubt all my later revisiting has altered, bit by bit, the picture in my head). The game started off just as badly as the December one had ended. Everybody was jittery and winded. The shots weren’t falling for either team.
From a seat on the bench I watched Courtney air-ball a jump shot and then stay too long where she’d landed, frowning at the basket when she should’ve been running back to play defense. Because of it she lagged behind the girl she was supposed to be guarding, and as that girl caught the ball, Courtney tried to reach for it and got called for a foul. Her face mottled with—frustration? Remorse? Not a minute had elapsed before one of the officials slapped her with another foul, for leaning into another girl’s back on a rebound. That call was questionable. There was booing from the stands. Courtney started stalking toward the ref to protest before she checked herself and went back to playing.
Coach beckoned and told me to go in for Courtney. I did want to play, but I also wished I could stay on the bench, to sit next to my sister when she came out, even if I couldn’t really comfort her. I waited by the scorer’s table for the next whistle, which, when it sounded, was simultaneous with the hinge and crack of the heavy double doors.
Another sort of official entered: into the gym stepped a broadly built, white-haired man in a plenipotent overcoat and black leather gloves. The man’s dry, planar face would have been known to those who scrutinized the newspaper’s political pages, and here he was in the flesh, now pausing to check the score as he pulled off his gloves, now striding along the baseline, as such men strode toward helicopters or up marble stairs, to the opposing team’s section of the bleachers, where the spectators parted to make room for him, and where he took a seat, naturally, at the very top.
A U.S. senator. The people who’d been watching the game developed split vision, and would glance from the court to the senator, court, senator, court. And our dad, oh god, our dad who’d been sitting on our team’s side, crossed the gym, climbed up to the top of the bleachers, and wedged himself in beside that other, more eminent father. Dad sat with his hands on his knees, pitched forward as if there weren’t quite enough room to sit straight, twisting his head back awkwardly to speak. Even from a distance it was obvious the senator wanted to be left alone.
As is maybe clear enough from the fact that I was clocking all this business on the sidelines, my mind was not quite where it should’ve been, i.e., in the body that was running and jumping, catching and passing. I did, however, notice a shift in the game, for when I came onto the court the pace still seemed frenetic and out of sync—there were wild passes, forced plays, balls not saved before they rolled out of bounds—but slowly it settled, and at the same time it soured. The two teams had it out for each other, we banged around under the basket and steamed and cussed. The game was shaping up to be a low-scoring bruiser, the kind that isn’t so much won by either side as it is terminated, and although one team can then point to the scoreboard and claim victory, there’s not much pride in it.
We needed a run, a boost. Coach took a chance and put Courtney back in, though my sister risked picking up a third foul before halftime. I had assumed I would come out, but Courtney signaled to another girl, and I stayed on the court with her.
It was a minute or two before I realized she hadn’t taken a single shot. Not a one. She caught the ball and then passed it. Her defender started to hang off her, and Coach was calling, “Shoot the ball.” She didn’t. Had she lost her nerve? It felt more like some strange protest.
From the stands came the rataplan of pounding feet: “Let’s go Ea-gles” stomp-stomp stomp-stomp-stomp. “Shoot the damn ball!” Coach yelled, and I did. I made two baskets, and after that my defender started to tackle me whenever the opportunity presented itself. She was the senator’s daughter—I think so anyway—and it was as though the refs knew it and granted her immunity. They didn’t call anything. Meanwhile she sneered and elbowed me, and even then my dad was still cozying up to the senator, and it was all just too much. The next time that girl had the ball, I ran right at her, shouting, “You! You! You! You!” I tried to block her shot but wound up hitting her head with my forearm. The whistle blew, and she was about to charge at me, but Courtney nudged me out of the way. The girl went at Courtney instead, and I don’t think either of them had any idea what to do when they made contact; they more or less grabbed each other’s arms, and my sister tried to break free, then fell to the ground.
More whistles: they called fouls on both Courtney and the other girl. I held a hand out to my sister and saw her wince. I pulled her up to standing, and she walked back to the sidelines, stepping normally with her right foot and tiptoeing with the left.
At halftime, in the locker room, she kept walking, circling the rest of us until she was sure of her ankle. “I’m good, I’m good,” she said to Coach.
“Okay,” Coach said, “now listen. Don’t let them throw you off your game. This is your game. You’ve got to go out there and want it. You’ve got to go out there and assert. That means shoot when you have the shot. That means hands up on D. You gotta want it, ladies.”
The second half was even grislier, the players shrieking, the crowd wailing. The windows had fogged over. The floor shook. For a while the score didn’t budge, and with every scoreless possession the pressure in the gym rose, the air became hotter, more fans stripped off their sweaters. The boys’ team returned from their own game and pushed their way into the bleachers, whooping. I saw that Dad had made it back to our side, thank god, and still more and more people kept filing into the gym, as though word had been spreading about the game, as though all of Northwest Washington were on alert.
Courtney with her three fouls stayed on the bench for most of the third quarter. We held steady without her, but slowly the other team eked out a small advantage—three points, five points, eight—and I felt the first tremors of panic. Coach called another time-out. “Focus, people,” she said. “Get in control of yourselves.”
She looked at Courtney: “You okay?”
“It’s fine. I’m ready.”
“Here’s what we’re going to do.”
I have no idea what she said after that, what offense she might have diagrammed, because it was irrelevant. Courtney went in—it was the other team’s possession—and stole the ball on the inbounds pass and made an easy layup. Soon after, she scored again. And then she just took over. She owned the rest of the game. I’d never seen her play like that. I’d never seen anyone on our team play like that. She was everywhere—she would block a shot on their end and sink one on ours. It was as though she could jump higher, run faster than she ever had. Take after take: she missed nothing. Someone would feed the ball to her and she would get it to the basket, one way or another, spinning and contorting herself and hooking it over her head. And one. The other team called a time-out, in hopes of killing her momentum, but when the game resumed she was just as intent.
And our father could not contain his joy. He started cheering the way he once had, the way he no longer did, a pentecostal of the sidelines, sweating and shouting praise. He kept yelling, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” Which wouldn’t have been so bad had he not kept repeating it, and so loudly, in a voice that clambered up and over all the other voices.
My sister was something else, something unexampled, and when the buzzer sounded and we’d won, everyone on the bench and a multitude from the bleachers swarmed onto the court and surrounded her, reaching over to touch her, just to finger a piece of her sweaty jersey. Dad fought his way through all the people, beaming, and when he reached her he said something, I couldn’t hear what, and then just stood next to her with a big smile on his face. He was so happy. That night, Courtney seemed like the savior who’d lifted Dad out of his distress, like the one person in the world who’d ever done right by him.
* * *
I don’t know exactly when Courtney and Rob stopped going out. She never told me. I just stopped seeing them together. He no longer called or came by the house or showed up at our games. For a few weeks she was mopey. That was the one time she ever seemed to want our pity. But at the same time she rejected us, she snapped at us. I studied her all the more closely. I peeked into her backpack. I went up to the third floor when she was out. Her bedroom was tucked under the eaves. Unlike my own room, hers had shed its ruffled bedspread and dolls, and at her request our mother had redecorated it with white laminate furniture and gray bedding—teenage modern, livened with sports trophies and a bulletin board that she’d papered with snapshots of her friends and box scores torn out from the newspaper. I opened her drawers and looked in her closet, searching for something I could seize. I wanted a secret, any secret. A diary, a love letter, a condom. What I did find only bewildered me: a black floor-length nightgown, with spaghetti straps, folded up and wedged into the back of her desk drawer. In that same drawer was a big bottle of Tylenol and a change purse with some other pills inside.
Since the game I hadn’t given much thought to her fall—the athletic trainer had given her an ankle brace, and she’d gone on playing. If she’d scowled more and smiled less at practice, there could’ve been other reasons for that. By then everyone in the family was high-strung, stepping carefully over trip wires that may or may not have been present, we were all nervous, we were all angry, so that at the very time we should’ve rallied around one another and mustered some Atherton solidarity, we were instead straining at our tethers. We didn’t stick together and we didn’t split apart, we just wandered around our big house, went off, and came back.
Then one afternoon in the locker room I happened to see Courtney unlace her ankle brace and peel off her sweatsock, and at first glance I thought she’d been wearing some sort of dark purple hose underneath, because there were big wine stains running up the side of her foot, which was also puffy and criss-crossed with grooves left by the laces. She very quickly put on another sock, and when she saw that I was watching her, I looked away. In the next moment she went on getting dressed as though nothing had happened.
That night Courtney came to my room and asked me to do her a “huge, huuuuuge favor.” She took three twenties out of her bright-blue leather wallet and asked me to find Rob the next day and give them to him. He’ll know what I need, she said. The same thing as before, she said.
“What is it?”
“He’ll know. It’s just to get me through the season.”
“Can’t you just—”
“It’s like impossible for me to deal with him right now,” she said. “He won’t be an asshole to you.”
“But shouldn’t you—”
“Please?”
* * *
Around that time Dick Mitchell, or some lesser hologram of that man, appeared on the show Evans & Novak. He leaned back in his chair, like an old friend of Evans’s or Novak’s, as Evans explained to the camera that tonight’s guest would offer an insider’s perspective on the Nicaragua conflict. My father watched in the family room, staring at the screen as if it were an optical trick and he couldn’t make out the trick. He saw only the bearded guy and not the fancy lady. He drained his beer.
So charming in person, Mitchell on TV came off as glib—every other word he uttered was “certainly” or “absolutely.” Even though the interview was not the least bit confrontational, even with Novak tossing softballs at him, even when he said just what he presumably thought, he seemed slippery.
Q: Oliver North has been a star in this administration, has he not?
A: I would certainly have to agree with that. He’s absolutely been a key player vis-à-vis our efforts in Central America. No question.
Q: And what was the involvement of the State Department in those efforts?
A: The way I see it, if we’re speaking about the State Department qua the State Department, I would say that its role has been to support, diplomatically, the policies of the Reagan administration.
Our household media embargo had lapsed by then. My mother walked into the family room and took a seat. She had untucked her shirt from her skirt, and her face was flushed from standing over the sink. She didn’t say anything at first, but during a break in the show she suggested to Dad that he turn off the TV.
He may or may not have shaken his head. The television stayed on. When the three men on-screen resumed, she cleared her throat.
“I really think—”
“It’s Dick.”
“I know who it is.”
Maggie had an oral report due the next day, and she was practicing in the living room: “In 1831 Her Majesty’s ship the Beagle set sail for South America.” I’d been in the kitchen helping Mom with the dishes, then watching the TV through the doorway.
I saw my father’s pursed face in profile. He disapproved, but I didn’t know whether he faulted Mitchell, the show, the situation, or my mother for that matter. At the same time there was something childlike in his expression, he was so fixated on the screen, and maybe it was that youthful rapt attention or the angle, but I believe there was something hungry in it too. It could be that I misread his face, yet I would learn soon enough, if I didn’t quite know it yet, that even when our friends are genuinely sorry for our misfortune, often they are not merely, plainly sorry.
Courtney entered through the back door. She’d been out with Tanya, and she walked in just like she always did, still bound up in the outside air and her outside people, and when she encountered us in the family room it irritated her, I could tell. She would’ve rather gone straight upstairs. Then she saw who it was we were watching on television. She paused. She sucked that irritation inside of her and, oddly, smiled.
“Why is Mr. Mitchell on TV?”
“He just is,” our mom said.
Dad countered: “He’s explaining our Nicaragua policy.”
“Oh, we have a Nicaragua policy?”
But Dad didn’t take the bait, nor did she wait for an answer. They were both too riveted by the show. Finally Maggie came in, planted herself right in front of the television, and said that she needed help practicing her report. “We’re watching this,” my dad said. My mom stood up and left the room with her.
Not long after that, Mitchell was linked to one of Iran-Contra’s odd footnotes. It had to do with that part of the affair my dad was not involved in, the Iran side of things, the doomed negotiations and half-baked arms deals that McFarlane and North had arranged. During the secret talks, North had given the Iranians, as a gift, a Bible inscribed by the president (or, in the ass-covering language that was used at the time, inscribed “in the handwriting of President Reagan”). Of course when this detail came to light, the press had a field day with it, and at the same time word got out that Mitchell had known about this Bible and had maybe even bought it for North at a B. Dalton in Bethesda. When he testified, later that spring, the congressmen started asking about that, whether it was consistent with U.S. policy to hand out Bibles in the course of secret negotiations, and so on and so forth. They seemed more preoccupied with it than with any of the larger questions, presumably because they knew it would make better copy, get them quoted in somebody’s column. A day or two later came the Herblock cartoon of Mitchell as a gap-toothed Bible salesman.
The inscription had come from Galatians: All the nations shall be blessed in you.
Mitchell became the star of his own sideshow. Though many things would bother our dad about the way the scandal played out, this was one that really got to him, the way his friend Dick Mitchell was mocked, lampooned, not for taking part in the supply operations but because he’d maybe purchased a Bible that had then been given to somebody in Iran.
The night that we saw him on television, he hadn’t yet been brought low, at that point nobody knew what was coming. Mitchell was just commenting on another story of the week, and I’d watched him with the excitement that came from seeing someone I’d met talk on TV—but also with a premonitory shiver. I may not have been especially attuned to the subterranean shifts around me, but I could tell that Dick Mitchell was on the brink.
* * *
It never occurred to me to say no to my sister’s request. It made me uneasy, but I longed to please her, and more than that: I thought that I was helping her. There were some false starts. I would spot Rob and head toward him and then chicken out, because he was with other people, or because I’d forgotten what I’d practiced saying.
Finally I found him by his locker. He looked so amused by me that I guessed he had seen all my prior failed approaches.
“Okay, finally. What is it?” he asked.
“Could we talk privately please?”
He steered me around the corner, to a short, empty hallway that led to the lunchroom, and I found myself backed up against the wall, Rob standing over me with one hand planted near my shoulder. I held my breath until I realized I was holding my breath.
“Courtney needs some of that stuff you gave her.”
“I’m sure she does…”
I took the money out of my pocket. “She gave me this to give to you.”
“You have your sister’s lying eyes,” he said quietly.
“I have my very own eyes.”
“You have her mouth too.”
It was as though he were going to kiss me, and in that moment I wouldn’t have resisted. But we were standing right under a school bell, which rang, loudly, and he straightened up and took the bills out of my hand. “Come find me again tomorrow and I’ll have it for you,” he said. I had a notion that this was the wrong way to go about things, that I shouldn’t have given him anything until he had the goods, so to speak. Yet it seemed too late to get the money back.
I countered: “Or why don’t you come find me?”
He said no, I should find him, actually. Which I did, the next day as school was ending. He unzipped my backpack and put something inside of it, and later on, at home, I mounted the stairs with the sandwich bag full of pills concealed in my bathrobe, and I passed that on to Courtney. She took the bag and shut her bedroom door.
On the weekends she would go out with her friends and come home electrified or angry, in one high-voltage mood or another. She would return at midnight or later, after our parents had gone to bed. I’d be in the family room, not waiting but waiting.
“Where were you?”
“Adams Morgan.”
“How’d you get home?” I hadn’t heard a car come or go.
“I walked.”
“You did?”
“It’s a beautiful night.”
I looked at her. “Dad would be so pissed.”
“So don’t tell him.”
My thinner sister became a bat in our midst, flying away every evening at sundown to feed, ignoring our parents’ (weak, unenforced) instructions to be home by nine on school nights. I never knew what to say to her. I worried about her sprain, but it was righteous worry, i.e., she was wrong to hide her injury just as she was wrong to hide everything else she was hiding from me. I judged her and feared for her and resented her, and finally, one Saturday, I told our mom.
She was down in the basement, shoving clothes into the dryer. I felt shaky and kept one hand on the table where we folded our laundry. My parents had let the housekeeper go, that’s why Mom was transferring gobs of damp bath towels from one machine to the other—in dozens of small ways she was holding our household together, but she was unhappy to be doing it. And there I was, serving up another nuisance.
“It’s sprained, maybe broken.”
“But she’s been playing on it, hasn’t she? Could it be just a bruise?” my mother asked, hopelessly.
“Anything’s possible.”
“Christ.”
Mom had confronted Courtney as soon as she got home that night and, after inspecting her big purple sausage link of an ankle, had dragged her to the emergency room. The worst part of it wasn’t that my sister was put on crutches for the rest of the season, that for our last game and the league tournament I would start in her stead and she would sit on the end of the bench in her street clothes and ace bandages; it wasn’t that we were eliminated in the first round of the tournament by a team we’d beat twice during the regular season, or that my sister was now treating me with a thousand cutting looks and under-the-breath comments, silences, snubs, slow rolling of the eyes, daily reminders of my zero worth. More than all that, it was that I’d set off a chain reaction: Courtney was furious with me, Mom was furious with Courtney and also (she couldn’t help it) with me, Dad stayed in his study most of the time, and Maggie, we thought little Maggie had no clue, but of course she knew as much as anybody. A couple of times I saw her sucking her thumb, a twelve-year-old. Courtney refused to sleep on the first-floor sofa bed and instead hopped her way up and down the stairs, which became the erratic drumbeat of our distress.
* * *
In March Dad gave his first congressional deposition, which would be followed by grand jury testimony in May and an appearance before the joint committees in June. Then would come a series of interviews with the Office of the Independent Counsel. We never knew what happened at any of them, we were never told. During those months he spent hours and hours—billable hours—at his lawyer’s office.
Further cutbacks were imposed: Did Courtney really need a salon haircut? What was the matter with last year’s bathing suit? It had as much to do with my parents’ panic than with the actual cost of anything. Mom still had her fund-raising job, and she started working on weekends, which wasn’t going to bring us any more money but which served as a distraction, I suppose, an escape. And she traveled more, visiting donors and going to conferences, two purposes that were combined in my imagination. I saw her floating through a ballroom full of wealthy donors wearing name tags, my mother in a chiffon blouse with a sash at the neck, kissing people on the cheek as she lifted the change out of their silk-lined pockets.
One day during that spring of our family’s unraveling, I’d come home from school before my sisters, and I walked into the first-floor bathroom, only to find Dad sitting on the toilet. I shrank and backed out before I understood what I’d seen. The toilet lid was closed. He was just sitting there, in an unlit bathroom. I stood outside the door. “I didn’t know you were here,” I said.
“I came home early,” he said.
My head was full of Shakespeare’s Henrys and Richards, the rulers of my assigned reading. It was as though Dad had come home from a battlefield upon which glory had been exposed as a sham, kings were only body doubles of kings, friends betrayed friends, and cowards outlived the brave.
“Do you have homework?” he asked.
“I have some,” I said.
“Is there anything you’d like some help with?”
He hadn’t helped me with my homework in years. It had been years since we’d discussed my homework, or played card games, or done anything like that.
“Not really,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Do you want to watch TV?”
He said that he did. He got a beer and I got a Coke; we turned on the set and watched Wheel of Fortune, and before one puzzle had been solved (CHERRIES JUBILEE was the answer) he’d fallen asleep in his chair.
Dad was now under a kind of low-intensity, erratic siege by reporters, a zillion of them all rushing to develop their own angles. They called the house, they sometimes stopped by. There was a tendency toward conspiratorial thinking, an urge to make the big story even bigger, so that suddenly men my father had worked with on the NSC staff were being talked about as possible Mossad agents—I heard him rant about this to my mother. He himself was never accused of anything so exotic, though he was named in some of the articles: there was one piece in Time that referred to a phone call Dad had supposedly made to an official in Costa Rica. “Like many of the young bucks on the NSC staff,” it said, “Atherton was tireless, committed to the cause, and sometimes arrogant.” After that, Mom actually called an editor at the magazine, someone whose kids we’d gone to grade school with, and gave him hell for it. “Arrogant?” I heard her saying. “Arrogant?” As for Dad, he was less angry about that one article than about the sheer amount of classified information that had come flooding out of the White House, every last administration official suddenly unburdening himself.
He continued playing video games on our Apple IIe, late at night. Apple Panic was the name of one: you had to climb ladders and lure pulsating bad guys into holes and then hit them with mallets until they vaporized. One day I turned the game on and saw that he had all the high scores.
* * *
On plenty of nights that spring, just Maggie and I were home, while Mom worked late or attended a conference, Dad racked up more hours at his lawyer’s office, and Courtney went out with her friends. We’d order a pizza and pay for it with money that Mom or Dad had left on the counter, and we’d watch fantasy households on TV, Full House, The Cosby Show, 227, The Golden Girls. All those hijinks and misunderstandings and reconciliations. Sometimes I’d look over at Maggie, who’d be sucking on a Jolly Rancher, one skinny leg launched over the chair arm, and I’d wonder who she was, who she would be. She was the changeling of the family, fair-skinned and fine-boned, and when we were younger she’d been content to spend hours on her own, drawing elaborate maps of other worlds or talking to her dolls in an invented language.
Or, we made the mistake of treating her as that, as an imaginative child instead of as a full-fledged person. On one of those nights the two of us were sitting in the family room with the TV on, and she got up and went to the kitchen, and when she came back she had a bottle of beer for each of us. I’d never seen my twelve-year-old sister drink before, but I shrugged off whatever concern might’ve pinged at me. A single beer wouldn’t kill her. And there was something about how we’d been left there alone, to guard the house that the rest of our family had abandoned, that made me think the hell with them. Cheers. I drank about half of my beer, rested my head on the sofa arm, and fell asleep.
When I woke up a different show had come on, and there were two more bottles on the coffee table—Maggie was on to her third. I found her in the kitchen, standing on the stool she needed to reach the wall phone, and dialing a number. As soon as she was done dialing she planted her free hand on the counter to steady herself.
“Is Brian there?” she asked, her voice all in flux.
I walked over to her and hung up the phone, then dragged her stumbling and protesting over to the sink and made her drink some water. Half of it went down her shirt. I grabbed a banana from the fruit basket and told her to eat it.
“No way,” she said. “You eat it.”
The stairs went slowly, and she was still talking about Brian, whoever that was, and suddenly I got angry. I told her Dad would notice how many beers were missing. Maggie turned her head back and forth.
“No. He won’t.”
At last we reached her room, and I told her to get ready for bed. I ran downstairs, gathered up the bottles, and took them outside to the neighbor’s garbage can. Back upstairs, my sister had passed out. I took off her socks, then tried to take off her sweatshirt but it was too hard to do that. I put the blanket over her and then went to bed myself, though I didn’t sleep for a while, thinking Maggie would wake up and be sick. I kept listening for puking noises. None came. Courtney returned, my parents returned, everybody went to their rooms and slept.