All the Houses (40 page)

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.