Freedom [46]
There’s not a lot to say about the six weeks that followed. She had two surgeries, the second one following an infection from the first, and became an ace crutch-user. Her mother flew out for the first operation and treated the hospital staff as if they were midwestern yokels of questionable intelligence, causing Patty to apologize for her and be especially agreeable whenever she was out of the room. When it turned out that Joyce might have been right not to trust the doctors, Patty felt so chagrined that she didn’t even tell her about the second operation until the day before it happened. She assured Joyce that there was no need to fly out again—she had tons of friends to look after her.
Walter Berglund had learned from his own mother how to be attentive to women with ailments, and he took advantage of Patty’s extended incapacitation to reinsert himself into her life. On the day after her first surgery, he appeared with a four-foot-tall Norfolk pine and suggested that she might prefer a living plant to cut flowers that wouldn’t last. After that, he managed to see Patty almost every day except on weekends, when he was up in Hibbing helping his parents, and he quickly endeared himself to her jock friends with his niceness. Her homelier friends appreciated how much more intently he listened to them than all the guys who couldn’t see past their looks, and Cathy Schmidt, her brightest friend, declared Walter smart enough to be on the Supreme Court. It was a novelty in Female Jockworld to have a guy in their midst who everybody felt so natural and relaxed around, a guy who could hang out in the lounge during study breaks and be one of the girls. And everybody could see that he was crazy about Patty, and everybody but Cathy Schmidt agreed that this was a most excellent thing.
Cathy, as noted, was sharper than the rest. “You’re not really into him, are you,” she said.
“I sort of am,” Patty said. “But also sort of not.”
“So . . . the two of you are not . . .”
“No! Nothing. I probably never should have told him I was raped. He got all squirrelly when I told him that. All . . . tender and . . . nursey and . . . upset. And now it’s like he’s waiting for written permission, or for me to make the move. Which, the crutches probably aren’t helping there, either. But it’s like I’m being followed around by a really nice, well-trained dog.”
“That’s not so great,” Cathy said.
“No. It’s not. But I can’t get rid of him, either, because he’s incredibly nice to me, and I really do love talking to him.”
“You’re sort of into him.”
“Exactly. Maybe even somewhat more than sort of. But—”
“But not wildly more.”
“Exactly.”
Walter was interested in everything. He read every word of the newspaper and Time magazine, and in April, once Patty was semi-ambulatory again, he began inviting her to lectures and art films and documentaries that she otherwise would not have dreamed of going to. Whether it was because of his love or because of the void in her schedule created by her injury, this was the first time that a person had ever looked through her jock exterior and seen lights on inside. Although she felt inferior to Walter in pretty much every category of human knowledge except sports, she was grateful to him for illuminating that she actually had opinions and that her opinions could differ from his. (This was a refreshing contrast to Eliza, who, if you’d asked her who the current U.S. president was, would have laughed and claimed to have no idea and put another record on her stereo.) Walter burned with all sorts of earnest and peculiar views—he hated the