Freedom. Jonathan Franzen

I already promised Cathy I’d be in her quad.”

      “You can tell her your plans changed.”

      “I can’t do that.”

      “This is crazy! I hardly ever see you!”

      “I see you more than practically anybody. I love seeing you.”

      “Then why won’t you stay here this summer? Don’t you trust me?”

      “Why wouldn’t I trust you?”

      “I don’t know. I just can’t figure out why you’d rather work for your dad. He did not take care of you, he did not protect you, and I will. He doesn’t have your best interests at heart, and I do.”

      It was true that Patty’s spirits sagged at the thought of going home, but it seemed necessary to punish herself for eating hash brownies. Her dad had also been making an effort with her, sending her actual handwritten letters (“We miss you on the tennis court”) and offering her the use of her grandmother’s old car, which he didn’t think her grandmother ought to be driving anymore. After a year away, she was feeling remorseful about having been so cold to him. Maybe she’d made a mistake? And so she went home for the summer and found that nothing had changed and she had not made a mistake. She watched TV till midnight, got up at seven every morning and ran five miles, and spent her days highlighting names in legal documents and looking forward to the day’s mail, which more often than not contained a long typewritten letter from Eliza, saying how much she missed her, and telling stories about her “lecherous” boss at the revival-house movie theater where she was working in the ticket booth, and exhorting her to write back immediately, which Patty did her best to do, using old letterhead stationery and the Selectric in her dad’s mothball-smelling office.

      In one letter Eliza wrote, I think we need to make rules for each other for protection and self-improvement. Patty was skeptical about this but wrote back with three rules for her friend. No smoking before dinnertime. Get exercise every day and develop athletic ability. And Attend all lectures and do all homework for ALL classes (not just English). No doubt she should have been disturbed by how different Eliza’s rules for her turned out to be—Drink only on Saturday night and only in Eliza’s presence; No going to mixed parties except accompanied by Eliza; and Tell Eliza EVERYTHING—but something was wrong with her judgment and she instead felt excited to have such an intense best friend. Among other things, having this friend gave Patty armor and ammunition against her middle sister.

      “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 offcampus 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 was—her face was flushed, she stumbled over words and steadily emitted somewhat artificial giggles. It seemed to have slipped her mind that Patty had come over to be debriefed about her dinner. Everything was about Carter, a friend from one of her high schools who was taking time off from college and working at a bookstore and going to shows. Carter had extremely straight and interestingly tinted dark hair (henna, it turned out), beautiful long-lashed eyes (mascara, it turned out), and no notable physical flaws except for his teeth, which were jumbled and strangely small and pointed (basic middle-class child maintenance such as orthodontia had fallen through the cracks of his parents’ bitter divorce, it turned out). Patty immediately liked that he didn’t seem self-conscious about his teeth. She was setting about making a good impression on him, trying to prove herself worthy of being Eliza’s friend, when Eliza stuck a huge goblet of wine in her face.

      “No, thank you,” Patty said.

      “But it’s Saturday night,” Eliza said.

      Patty wanted to point out that the rules did not oblige her