All the Houses (33 page)

And in the side yard Courtney worked and worked at her shot, her moves, her dribble, even things like cuts without the ball. I'd look out and see her jumping rope, or machine-gunning her feet, a regular Rocky of Northwest D.C. Though her best sport was lacrosse, and she'd already been contacted by lacrosse coaches from a few different colleges, she was obsessed with basketball. Or: the city was obsessed with basketball, and she'd caught the civic fever.

The second day of tryouts, I did better than I had the first day. One thing I could do was follow instructions, and on that day I did everything Coach E said.
Hustle up!
she yelled, and I dutifully hustled.
Hands up on D!
I put my arms in the air.
Boards!
I jumped up and caught the ball.
Box out!
My butt was on another girl. I did as I was told. On the third day, about halfway through the practice, Coach E split us up into teams of five so that we could scrimmage. I saw that the other four girls on my team were seniors, from last year's varsity, which unnerved me. I started fucking up again. On defense I ran under the basket toward the ball when I should've stayed over on the weak side to rebound. Then on offense I set a screen, squaring myself against one of the girls on the other team, but she shucked me off and I fell down, fell on the floor with a thud, and at that point I was ready to give up and head for the locker room.

A hand appeared, someone offering to help me up. It was Courtney, who was on the other team. She pulled me to my feet and then pulled me close to her and slapped my lower back, something I'd seen her do with her teammates but had never experienced myself, and I experienced it now not as a simple gesture of solidarity or support but as something greater, I want to say cosmic, though I know that sounds overblown. It was as if my sister, and therefore the universe, had for the first time in my life found a place for me. Then I heard Coach's gargly chiding,
Step on the gas, people!
and I did. I ran back on defense and blocked a girl's shot. I sprinted the length of the court, caught the ball, and fed it to the post player, who scored. And there was Courtney jogging by me, saying something,
N'est-ce pas
, I thought she said, but that didn't make any sense, and I refitted the sounds into our own language:
Nice pass.
Two syllables, and I bounded ahead like a dog running out of the water.

I didn't do anything spectacular, but I kept my girl from scoring and made a few shots and by the end of the game I felt good about it. After practice, the coaches posted the team rosters on the locker room bulletin board. My name was on the varsity list: I stared at it until it became unreadable, a pair of squiggles. I stood there in that humid cavern, in the swim of other girls' sweat, smelling everything. Courtney squeezed my shoulder and said, “Way to go!” It seemed like she was still deciding how she felt about it. She was in just her sports bra and shorts, looking around, thinking things over. “We're on the same team,” she said, accepting the fact if not quite celebrating it. Our parents sounded the same way when we told them I'd made varsity. That's nice, they said.

*   *   *

It had been maybe a week earlier that we'd all sat in the family room, the radiator hissing and the ice cream on the coffee table going soft, as the president addressed us, via TV, from two miles away. Our buoyant leader had turned old and false and sarcastic.

*   *   *

I know you've been reading, seeing, and hearing a lot of stories the past several days attributed to Danish sailors, unnamed observers at Italian ports and Spanish harbors, and especially unnamed government officials of my administration. Well, now you're going to hear the facts from a White House source, and you know my name.

*   *   *

The family room: Where my sisters and I would sit on a small hound's-tooth couch and argue over whose turn it was to get up and change the channel. Where plastic horses had been paraded, crayons melted over the radiator, mittens clipped to parkas, damp pool towels left on the floor, a shoe, thimble, and hat advanced around a board, sleepovers staged …

*   *   *

The charge has been made that the United States has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, that the United States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists.

*   *   *

In my scrambled memory, there is just a single, comprehensive Reagan speech, raveling in the wake of a breathy
Well
, regarding threats in the Caribbean and in Central America, the evil empire, welfare queens, SALT II, crack cocaine, hijackers and hostages. And somewhere along the way came the president's own failures to remember, the gaps—memento mori—in the sunny script.

*   *   *

All appropriate cabinet officers were fully consulted. The actions I authorized were, and continue to be, in full compliance with Federal law. And the relevant committees of Congress are being, and will be, fully informed.

*   *   *

Not true: my father must have known that was false. Or did he? How much did he know, that evening, and how much did he anticipate? If Dad, that night—in his armchair, necktie loosened, shoes off—foresaw what was ahead, he kept it from the rest of us. He sat and watched and ate his ice cream.

*   *   *

Even as the weeks went on and the clouds gathered, then let loose their storm, Dad remained a stalwart of the stands, just as he had been ever since Courtney's freshman year. As far as I know, he never left work before eight or nine at night for any other reason—didn't ever go to the doctor, I'd be willing to bet, during the four years that he served on the National Security Council staff—but he'd come to just about every home game and some of the others too. He would arrive while we were warming up, take off his hat and his long wool coat, smooth his damp hair and loosen his tie. He would shake hands with the other parents. And then, once the whistle sounded and the ball went up, this otherwise slightly formal, Republican, whiter-than-rice bureaucrat would turn into a zealot. He would stalk back and forth in front of the bleachers and cheer his heart out.

The days were short. Darkness had blackened the windows by game time. Beyond them lay our frosty, self-deceiving city, its marble walls sliced up by passing headlights, its statues watched over by park police as angry poor people fired guns in the distance. But the gym was lit up and warm. It had a faintly rancid odor, of furnace heat and floor cleaner and damp anoraks balled up and strewn about, of sweat and dried sweat. Our opponents would walk in preening and joking and slapping hands. Then came the tumble of feet, the sneaker-squeaks, the crying for the ball, the whiny bounce of rubber against wood, the second of silence as a shot went up: the game had started. On the sidelines, attorneys and economists in suits would clap the chill out of their hands, calling out, “Good shot!” “Get the ball!” “Go!” as their daughters ran this way and that.

Our dad didn't actually know much about the game of basketball. He was handy with a drill or a saw, but to watch him pick up any sort of ball and try to loft it into the air gave me pangs. It was only later that I recognized his clumsiness as partly a product of his childhood, which had been full of work and church—no one had ever taught him to throw. Yet at games he had picked up on various cheers, a bunch of things he'd heard other people say and adopted indiscriminately as his own. It was like he was speaking a foreign language, badly but with gusto. He might start with a few cries of “Let's go, ladies! Hustle!” He would round his large hands and clap them slowly. He would roll up his sleeves. When he really got going, there was no telling what might come out of his mouth. Sometimes he adopted a sort of announcer's yodel: “DEeeeeeeFENSE!” Other times he shouted, inappropriately, at members of the other team. “Hey you, pack a suitcase!” he hollered, and pointed a long finger at a girl who'd been called for traveling.

“PACK YOUR SUITCASE!”

Boys in the stands snorted and pointed. I tried to ignore it, but Courtney complained to our mom, who missed a lot of our games because she had to pick up Maggie from ballet school.

“He's blowing off steam,” she told Courtney. There was plenty for him to blow off. Before long he would become a target of the investigation and lose his job, but in the meantime our gym was a refuge. Afterward he would ask whether we wanted to stop at Swensen's for ice cream, as though we were still eight years old.

Actually I wouldn't have minded a trip to Swensen's, but Courtney set him straight. “Dad, we just played basketball. We're sweaty and tired and want to go home,” she said.

“Oh, okay,” he said, humbled. He had a way of deferring to her, which he didn't with Maggie or me or even our mom. “Home we go.”

That season we competed in empty, neglected gyms and small, crowded ones. The president's Special Review Board, tasked to make sure that “all the facts come out,” started to gather masses of information. We competed in damp, echo-ridden buildings with faded pennants hanging from the rafters. An independent counsel was appointed, and John Poindexter and Oliver North and Robert McFarlane and Robert Owen and Albert Hakim and Richard Secord sought legal help, as did my dad. We competed on brand-new courts with shiny floors and cinder-block walls painted the school colors. Depositions were taken, huge quantities of documents were exchanged, and the House and Senate Select Committees were created. We competed at ivied old girls' schools, against thoroughbred girls coached by thin, steely WASPs, and we competed at glossy suburban academies, against fleet-footed soccer players with hair-sprayed bangs, and we competed at the public school down the street, where black girls laughed at us, and at religious schools where the girls wore knickers and three-quarter sleeves.

And everywhere we played, people launched into the same cheer.
B-E! A-G-G! R-E-S-S-I-V-E! Be! Aggressive! B-E! Aggressive!
Whatever that meant. I chanted it too, lord knows how many times.

 

2005

After New Year's I returned to the office in Crystal City, and I was there when Nina called. I guessed that she wanted to schedule her driving lesson, but instead she invited me to go hear a band with her, an indie act popular enough that even I knew a few of their hits, minimalist ballads about breakups and the seaside and minor historical figures. Again her dad had planned to go with her, but he'd found out he would be in court the following day, which meant he had to spend that night preparing. “He said I could ask you,” she said.

I had to keep my voice low, and we were on cell phones. The undercurrent was lost in a tower someplace. I agreed to take her.

God, it was cold that night of the show, not a typical mid-Atlantic cold but some ice-fanged front from farther north blowing right onto my eyeballs. I hurried out of my building and hurried up the stoop next door, and after I was buzzed in I hurried up to the second floor as though the wind were still gnashing its jaws at me.

Here was Daniel welcoming me with a kindness that made me feel very young, a friend of his daughter's. I couldn't conceive of growing up like this, in a two-person apartment, so quiet! But inside of it, I could feel the quiet warmth intertwined with the quiet sadness, the sloppy odd-couple care that father and daughter had for each other. The place itself had the indifference to looks that you might expect in the home of a man and a teenager: there were pillows on the floor and days' worth of schoolwork and legal documents on the dining room table, and on the wall next to the door they'd taped Nina's basketball schedule and a calendar from a Salvadoran restaurant. Daniel showed me to the kitchen, where Nina was eating a sandwich over the sink. “We usually eat together,” he said, apologetically. “It's been a crazy week.”

I'd been wishing I could get out of the whole thing, because of the weather and because I didn't care about the band and didn't want to stand for two hours in a crowd of its giddy young fans, but Nina had put on eyeliner and she'd pinned her hair back with a mishmash of barrettes, and by the way she was wolfing down her sandwich I could tell she was more excited about this than I myself had been about anything in ages. Seeing her that way, I tamped down my reluctance and let Daniel call the taxi company.

In the cab she clasped her hands between her knees and looked out the front windshield. The sidewalks were nearly empty, blown clean, while the streets were full of cars. Angry trees wagged at us. An unlatched chain-link gate blew open and shut. Nina listened to music in her head that I couldn't hear. The cold had pinched her cheeks, and in the half light of the backseat, in profile, she had the ghostly look of a fashion model.

“Have you seen them before?” I asked.

“I've seen videos from their shows.”

“That singer is cute,” I said, though I actually thought he was scary-looking. In the photographs I'd seen here and there, he was shaggy and skinny and so white he was almost a pale blue, and when he smiled it was like his face had been winched open, so that you could tell what a sneering, miserable person lived inside his too-small clothes. But it was the sneer and the misery in his voice that made the songs into what they were.

“I
know
,” Nina said. “Adam is so adorable.”

We were trying to find each other, but there were no doors. As the cab rattled over a series of potholes I gripped the seat, and she let herself be jostled.

“You have the tickets, right?” I asked.

She frowned, and at first I thought she'd left them at home. Slowly she reached into her small khaki purse and pulled them out, then studied what was printed there. “I invited someone, a friend of mine,” she said.

I didn't get it. “Does your friend have a ticket?” I asked. Nina turned to me with so much pleading in her expression that I could barely stand it, and that's when I understood what she meant.