Freedom [59]
A great thing about the young Walter was how much he wanted Patty to win. Where Eliza had once mustered unsatisfying little driblets of partisanship on her behalf, Walter gave her full-bore infusions of hostility toward anybody (her parents, her siblings) who made her feel bad. And since he was so intellectually honest in other areas of life, he had excellent credibility when he criticized her family and signed on with her questionable programs of competing with it. He may not have been exactly what she wanted in a man, but he was unsurpassable in providing the rabid fandom which, at the time, she needed even more than romance.
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.