Freedom [29]
“So, how’s life in Minn-e-soooo-tah?” a typical encounter with the sister began. “Have you been eating lots of corn? Have you seen Babe the Blue Ox!? Have you been to Brainerd?”
You might think that Patty, being a trained competitor and three and a half years older than the sister (though only two years ahead of her in school), would have developed ways of handling the sister’s demeaning silliness. But there was something congenitally undefended about Patty’s heart—she never ceased to be shocked by the sister’s lack of sisterliness. The sister also really was Creative and therefore skilled at coming up with unexpected ways to render Patty speechless.
“Why do you always talk to me in that weird voice?” was Patty’s current best defense.
“I was just asking you about life in good old Minn-e-soooo-tah.”
“You cackle, is what you do. It’s like a cackle.”
This was met with a glittery-eyed silence. Then: “It’s the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes!”
“Please just go away.”
“Do you have a boyfriend out there?”
“No.”
“A girlfriend?”
“No. Although I did make a really great friend.”
“You mean the one who’s sending you all the letters? Is she a jock?”
“No. She’s a poet.”
“Wow.” The sister seemed a tiny bit interested. “What’s her name?”
“Eliza.”
“Eliza Doolittle. She sure does write an awful lot of letters. Are you positive she’s not your girlfriend?”
“She’s a writer, OK? A really interesting writer.”
“One hears whispers from the locker room, is all. The fungus that dare not speak its name.”
“You’re so disgusting,” Patty said. “She has like three different boyfriends, she’s very cool.”
“Brainerd, Minn-e-soooo-tah,” was the sister’s reply. “You have to send me a postcard of Babe the Blue Ox from Brainerd.” She went away singing “I’m Getting Married in the Morning” with much vibrato.
The following fall, back at school, Patty met the boy named Carter who became, for want of a better word, her first boyfriend. It now seems to the autobiographer anything but accidental that she met him immediately after she’d obeyed Eliza’s third rule and told her that a guy she knew from the gym, a sophomore from the wrestling team, had asked her out to dinner. Eliza had wanted to meet the wrestler first, but there were limits even to Patty’s agreeability. “He seems like a really nice guy,” she said.
“I’m sorry, but you’re still on probation guywise,” Eliza said. “You thought the person who raped you was a nice guy.”
“I’m not sure I actually formed that particular thought. I was just excited he was interested in me.”
“Well, and now here’s somebody else who’s interested in you.”
“Yes, but I’m sober.”
They’d compromised by agreeing that Patty would go to Eliza’s off-campus room (her reward from her parents for having worked a summer job) directly after dinner, and that if she wasn’t there by ten o’clock then Eliza would come looking for her. When she got to the off-campus house, around nine-thirty, after a none too scintillating dinner, she found Eliza in her top-floor room with the boy named Carter. They were at opposite ends of her sofa, with their stockinged feet sole to sole on the center cushion, and were pushing each other’s pedals in what might or might not have been a sister-and-brotherly way. The new DEVO album was playing on Eliza’s stereo.
Patty faltered in the doorway. “Maybe I should leave the two of you alone?”
“Oh God, no no no no no, we want you here,” Eliza cried. “Carter and I are ancient history, aren’t we?”
“Very ancient,” Carter said with dignity and, Patty thought later, mild irritation. He swung his feet down onto the floor.
“An extinct volcano,” Eliza said as she leaped up to make introductions. Patty had never seen her friend with a boy before, and she was struck by how altered her personality