Freedom

It’s easy now to see that Patty would have been well advised to take some years to develop a career and a more solid post-athletic identity, get some experience with other kinds of men, and generally acquire more maturity before embarking on being a mother. But even though she was finished as an intercollegiate player, there was still a shot clock in her head, she was still in the buzzer’s thrall, she needed more than ever to keep winning. And the way to win—her obvious best shot at defeating her sisters and her mother—was to marry the nicest guy in Minnesota, live in a bigger and better and more interesting house than anybody else in her family, pop out the babies, and do everything as a parent that Joyce hadn’t. And Walter, despite being an avowed feminist and an annually renewing Student-level member of Zero Population Growth, embraced her entire domestic program without reservation, because she really was exactly what he wanted in a woman.

They got married three weeks after her college graduation—almost exactly a year after she’d taken the bus to Hibbing. It had fallen to Walter’s mom, Dorothy, to frown and express concern, in her soft and tentative and nevertheless quite stubborn way, about Patty’s determination to be married at the Hennepin County courthouse instead of in a proper wedding hosted by her parents in Westchester. Wouldn’t it be better, Dorothy softly wondered, to include the Emersons? She understood that Patty wasn’t close to her family, but, still, mightn’t she later come to regret excluding them from such a momentous occasion? Patty tried to paint Dorothy a picture of what a Westchester wedding would be like: two hundred or so of Joyce and Ray’s closest friends and Joyce’s biggest-ticket campaign contributors; pressure from Joyce on Patty to select her middle sister as the maid of honor and to let her other sister do an interpretive dance during the ceremony; unbridled champagne intake leading Ray to make some joke about lesbians within earshot of Patty’s basketball friends. Dorothy’s eyes welled up a little, maybe in sympathy with Patty or maybe in sadness at Patty’s coldness and harshness on the subject of her family. Wouldn’t it be possible, she softly persisted, to insist on a small private ceremony in which everything would be exactly how Patty wanted it?

Not the least of Patty’s reasons to avoid a wedding was the fact that Richard would have to be Walter’s best man. Her thinking here was partly obvious and partly had to do with her fear of what would happen if Richard ever met her middle sister. (The autobiographer will now finally man up and say the sister’s name: Abigail.) It was bad enough that Eliza had had Richard; to see him hooking up with Abigail, even for one night, would have just about finished Patty off. Needless to say, she didn’t mention this to Dorothy. She said she guessed she just wasn’t a very ceremonial person.

As a concession, she did take Walter to meet her family in the spring before she married him. It pains the autobiographer to admit that she was a tiny bit embarrassed to let her family see him, and, worse, that this may have been another reason why she didn’t want a wedding. She loved him (and does love him, does love him) for qualities that made abundant sense to her in their two-person private world but weren’t necessarily apparent to the sort of critical eye that she was sure her sisters, Abigail in particular, would train on him. His nervous giggle, his too-readily reddening face, his very niceness: these attributes were dear to her in the larger context of the man. A source of pride, even. But the unkind part of her, which exposure to her family always seemed to bring out in force, couldn’t help regretting that he wasn’t six-foot-four and very cool.

Joyce and Ray, to their credit, and perhaps in their secret relief that Patty had turned out to be heterosexual (secret because Joyce, for one, stood ready to be strenuously Welcoming to Difference), were on their very best behavior. Hearing that Walter had never been to New York, they became gracious ambassadors to the city, urging Patty to take him to museum exhibitions that Joyce herself had been too busy in Albany to have seen, and then meeting up with them for dinner at Times-approved restaurants, including one in SoHo, which was then still a dark and exciting neighborhood. Patty’s worry that her parents would make fun of Walter gave way to the worry that Walter would take their side and not see why they were unbearable to her: would begin to suspect that the real problem was Patty, and would lose that blind faith in her goodness which already, in less than a year with him, she had rather desperately come to count on.