Freedom

Based on her inability to recall her state of consciousness in her first three years at college, the autobiographer suspects she simply didn’t have a state of consciousness. She had the sensation of being awake but in fact she must have been sleepwalking. Otherwise it’s hard to understand how, to take one example, she became intense best friends with a disturbed girl who was basically her stalker.

Some of the fault—although the autobiographer hates to say it—may lie with Big Ten athletics and the artificial world it created for participating students, for boys especially, but also, even in the late 1970s, for girls. Patty went out to Minnesota in July for special jock summer camp followed by special, early, jocks-only freshman orientation, and then she lived in a jock dorm, made exclusively jock friends, ate exclusively at jock tables, cluster-danced at parties with her jock teammates, and was careful never to sign up for a class without plenty of other jocks to sit with and (time permitting) study with. Jocks didn’t absolutely have to live this way, but the majority at Minnesota did, and Patty went even more overboard with Total Jockworld than most, because she could! Because she’d finally escaped from Westchester! “You should go wherever you want,” Joyce had said to Patty, by which she’d meant: it is grotesque and repulsive to attend a mediocre state school like Minnesota when you have great offers from Vanderbilt and Northwestern (which are also more flattering to me). “This is entirely your personal decision, and we will support you in whatever you decide,” Joyce had said, by which she’d meant: don’t blame me and Daddy when you ruin your life with stupid decisions. Joyce’s transparent aversion to Minnesota, along with Minnesota’s distance from New York, was a key factor in Patty’s deciding to go there. Looking back now, the autobiographer sees her younger self as one of those miserable adolescents so angry at her parents that she needed to join a cult where she could be nicer and friendlier and more generous and subservient than she could bring herself to be at home anymore. Her cult just happened to be basketball.

The first of the nonjocks to lure her out of this cult and become important to her was the disturbed girl Eliza, who Patty, of course, initially had no idea was disturbed. Eliza was exactly half pretty. Her head started out gorgeous on top and got steadily worse-looking the lower down you looked. She had wonderfully thick and curly brown hair and amazing huge eyes, and then a cute enough little button nose, but then around her mouth her face got smooshed up and miniature in a disturbing sort of preemie way, and she had very little chin. She was always wearing baggy corduroys that slid down on her hips, and tight short-sleeved shirts that she bought in Boys departments at thrift stores and buttoned only the middle buttons of, and red Keds, and a big avocado-green shearling coat. She smelled like an ashtray but tried not to smoke around Patty unless they were outside. In an irony then invisible to Patty but now plenty visible to the autobiographer, Eliza had a lot in common with Patty’s arty little sisters. She owned a black electric guitar and a dear small amp, but the few times Patty convinced her to play it in her presence Eliza became furious with her, which almost never happened otherwise (at least not at first). She said Patty was making her feel pressured and self-conscious and this was why she kept fucking up after only a few bars of her song. She ordered Patty to not be so obviously listening, but even when Patty turned away and pretended to read a magazine it wasn’t good enough. Eliza swore that the minute Patty was out of the room again she’d be able to play her song perfectly. “But now? Forget it.”

“I’m sorry,” Patty said. “I’m sorry I do that to you.”

“I can play this song amazingly when you’re not listening.”

“I know, I know. I’m sure you can.”

“It’s just a fact. It doesn’t matter if you believe me.”

“But I do believe you!”

“I’m saying,” Eliza said, “it doesn’t matter if you believe me, because my ability to play this song amazingly when you’re not listening is simply an objective fact.”

“Maybe try a different song,” Patty pleaded.

But Eliza was already yanking the plugs out. “Stop. OK? I don’t want your reassurance.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Patty said.