Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can’t make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person. All I can say is, I wish it were true.
In November, I began attending his basketball games; he never came over the night before a game. I sat high up in the bleachers, often next to Rufina, who went because Nick Chafee played, too. The Saturday night games were crowded-I’d get Martha to go with me to those-but during the afternoon ones, other students had their own games, so most of the spectators were parents who lived nearby, random teachers, or JV players. The reason I was free to go was that all seniors got one sports cut and I was taking mine that winter. The strangest part was that I had actually played basketball myself for the last three years, but when I watched Cross, it was like a new game; it was almost like sports were new to me, and I could understand for the first time in my life why people liked them.
For home games, they wore white uniforms with maroon trim; Cross, who played center, was number six. He wore black high-tops, and his legs were long in the long white shorts, his arms pale and muscular in the jersey.
During my own basketball games, I had always, I realized, been half-asleep, paying attention less to the other team than to whether my shorts were riding up, or whether the chicken nuggets from lunch were churning in my stomach. But during Cross’s games, I was alert to the sport itself: the squeak of the players’ shoes, the refs’ whistles, the way the players and coaches would protest after calls they didn’t like. At the Saturday night games, the people in the bleachers around me would chant: “Let’s go, Ault!” or, if Cross was running the ball down the court, they’d say “Sug! Sug! Sug!” I never cheered at all-under the bright lights, among the excited crowd, I always felt tense and slightly nauseated-and at first I was amazed by how much everyone seemed to care. Or maybe, by how little they concealed that they cared.
And then I realized that here, in sports, it was okay to show that something mattered to you. Maybe because it didn’t actually matter, it was okay to invest yourself-investing yourself was almost ironic-but then you really had invested yourself and you really did care yet it was still okay. They’d get angry-I once saw Niro Williams get a technical foul for setting the ball against the court and walking away instead of passing it to the ref-and it was okay to be disappointed and it was okay to try. You could grunt or trip, you could twist your body and make fierce expressions when you were trying to rip the ball from someone else’s hands and all of it-it was fine. When they played Hartwell, Ault’s rival, the teams were within a couple points of each other the whole game, and then Hartwell got eight points in the last minute and a half. When the buzzer sounded, I looked at Cross and was astonished to see that he was crying. I looked away reflexively, then looked back; his face was scrunched-up and red, and he was roughly wiping his eyes and shaking his head, but he wasn’t dashing to the locker room or otherwise trying to hide it. Darden Pittard stood in front of him, and then Niro joined them, and Darden was talking-it looked like he was saying something nice-with his hand set on Cross’s upper arm.
Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I’d think how girls’ coaches were never that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world to be were young and strong and fast. To play a great game of high school basketball-it was something I myself had never done, but I could tell-made you know what it was to be alive. How much in an adult life can compare to that? Granted, there are margaritas, or there’s no homework, but there are also puffy white bagels under neon lights in the conference room, there’s waiting for the plumber, making small talk with your boring neighbor.
Once, also in the fourth quarter of a close game, Cross made a shot from behind the three-point line, and when the ball went through the net, his teammates surrounded him, patting his ass, holding up their hands for him to slap. No one in the bleachers glanced at me like they did at Rufina when Nick scored (even teachers glanced at her; I’m not sure they knew they were doing it). Cross didn’t belong to me, and seeing him on the court, I understood that even if he’d been my boyfriend, he still wouldn’t have belonged to me.
I don’t know if Cross himself realized I went to his games. I didn’t mention it because I feared it would seem like a violation of our agreement, either clingy or just too public. And he never talked about the games, though if they’d won and if he came over (he never came over when they lost and only sometimes came over when they won), he was pushier than usual, the way you’re led to believe guys are when you’re eleven years old-that they’ll pull at your clothes and grope you and mash against you. But the fact was that I always wanted to be mashed and groped. Later on, when I tried to imagine how I might have ruined things, that would occur to me-that I’d so rarely resisted, that I hadn’t made it hard enough for him. Maybe he felt disappointed. Maybe it was like gathering your strength and hurling your body against a door you believe to be locked, and then the door opens easily-it wasn’t locked at all-and you’re standing looking into the room, trying to remember what it was you thought you wanted.
As a freshman, I had gone home for Thanksgiving, but never after that-only three weeks elapsed between Thanksgiving break and Christmas break, and the plane fares were high. (“We love you,” my father said once, “but not that much.”) At Martha’s house for Thanksgiving, as in other years, we stayed up late watching movies, woke at eleven a.m., and ate pumpkin pie for breakfast. On the twin beds in her room were two-hundred-count percale white sheets and white duvets that I always worried about getting a pen mark on, and in the cupboards and closets were extra of everything-towels and toilet paper and boxes of cereal; there was even a whole extra refrigerator in the basement. I often wondered, while visiting the Porters’ house, if my exposure to their way of living would be fleeting or if one day I would live in a house as nice as this, if it would be as easy for me to be generous to other people as it seemed for them to be generous to me. It actually appeared true that it didn’t matter if Mrs. Porter had to make an extra serving of lobster bisque because I was there, or if they had to buy an extra ticket to the choral performance at their church (that I would pay for my own ticket, let alone for my own portion of lobster bisque, was not a possibility anyone considered). There were other kids at Ault I had a feeling about, kids who came from poorer families than I did and would probably grow up to make a lot more than I would-they’d be surgeons, or investment bankers. But making a lot of money didn’t seem like something I’d be able to control; I’d gotten as far as Ault, but I wasn’t sure I’d get any further. I wasn’t smart or disciplined the way those kids were, I wasn’t driven. Presumably, I’d always be aware of lives like these without living one; I couldn’t confuse familiarity with entitlement.
On Thanksgiving itself, Martha’s cousins came over, and Ellie, who was eight and inexplicably fond of me, squatted behind me on the couch, braiding my hair. When that got boring, she took grapes from the cheese platter and tried to persuade me to open my mouth so she could throw them in, and I actually did a few times, when the adults and Martha and Martha’s brother weren’t looking; I liked Ellie because she reminded me of my own brothers. Mr. Porter carved the turkey wearing an apron that said Kiss the cook, though as far as I could tell, Mrs. Porter and her sister had been the ones to prepare everything. Then we all ate too much; after dessert, I started eating mashed potatoes again and, uncharacteristically, so did Martha.