All the Houses (37 page)

I shook my head.

“Let me clean up a little, and I'll drive you back over.”

“You don't need to—”

“I'm not busy.”

“Weren't you exercising?”

“I was just finishing. Happy to drive you.”

The heaviness I'd been dreading beforehand was not present now: sometimes he was suffused with it and sometimes not at all. You never knew.

He went upstairs to rinse off and change, and I sat in the living room. I reached into my purse for a magazine and then remembered what else was in there. I had to give it to him. And what could I tell him? When he came down I pulled the pistol out of my bag and said, “I brought this back. I can't have this.” And then: “It freaks me out to have it.”

“Oh,” he said. He looked at it, then shook his head very slightly, almost talking to himself. “If you can't have it—”

“I can't have it.”

“I'll put it in the safe.” And up he went again, to his study, where he had a safe bolted to the wall behind his desk.

It was as though I were trying to unload not only the thing itself but some excess of maleness I'd been saddled with—because of my dad? Was it in trying to please him that I'd become more of a boy than was good for me? Or in trying to compensate for him? It was a subtle thing, for it's not like anybody who met me would've found me especially masculine, but there was a way in which I tended to tamp down those parts of myself I found girly, preferring to stand around making wisecracks. Although I couldn't really get rid of that by returning the gun, I felt better after I did.

I heard the phone ringing, then the toilet flushing, and so I went to answer the phone myself.

“Hello?”

“Hello?” echoed a woman's voice, surprised. “Is—Tim there?”

“He's not available just now. Who's this?”

“It's Valerie. Who's this?”

“Helen,” I said, shortly.

“Ah. His daughter Helen?”

“Yes.”

“This is Valerie,” she said again. “If you wouldn't mind telling him I called.”

“Sure.”

“Valerie called,” I told Dad when he came back. “Thanks,” was all he said in response. Then he clapped his hands and asked me was I ready to leave.

“Who is Valerie?”

“She's the, uh, a woman who calls sometimes.”

“A woman who calls sometimes?”

“We've had dinner together.”

I couldn't get any more out of him. I was glad to know there was a woman who called him, though as it sank in—the fact of these occasional calls and at least one dinner—I grew tense. Oh please! I scolded myself. For I knew what I was feeling and it was: abandoned. I let him drive me back. Mass Ave was deserted, nothing but dark buildings. More Washington arcana spilled out of Dad as he drove, and I let it wash over me, the sound of my dad when he was feeling good, or good enough.

 

1986–87

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.