A letter in response to Katha Pollitt’s article in The Nation, in which Pollitt lays some blame for the Penn State scandal on athletes’ ruination of academia, and in which she succombs to much gross and unoriginal stereotyping. I challenge The Nation to publish this, too, on its pages.
This past June, I graduated with honors from one of the world’s best universities. I held a 3.7 GPA, and various university awards for my academic accomplishments.
I also had, beneath my gown, and my dress painstakingly selected for the occasion, five small scars etched in each of my hips; bruises dotting my legs.
This is a story about a kid who worked hard. I am not special because of this; I would be special, for some time, until I was corralled among all the other especially gifted children: a uniquely special set, but a set nonetheless. I was (and remain) focused, and goal-oriented. I wanted, in choosing my school, to be around others like myself – for the challenge, and, conversely, the nurturing. The sense of belonging.
I wanted a community that would make me better, in every way: a better person, a better student – more curious, more confident, hungrier.
I wanted, too, to become the best athlete I could be. Our bodies break down, eventually; most of us get one shot at this thing (whatever our thing might be). It is for very few of us about a free education or professional pursuits. It is about the chance to have our hobby – that is, our love, our passion, our identity – verified; the chance to play for a purpose, for just a little while. We make a commitment to play; someone has recruited us, and that person’s job is partially relying on our effort, our skill. The talent, the hours, the runs and weights, the missed school dances and football games and late nights with friends the likes of whom you’ll never have again – those tender high school years, hours and days and months of which were spent in a gym, on a field, in cleats or sneakers or spikes…it was because you loved it, but this scholarship, this signature, means it was all for something, too.
And so this past June I graduated from a school after playing for a top twenty program at one of the nation’s best athletic programs, an opportunity I was only partially afforded by my athletic ability (40 percent, to be exact, as programs like lacrosse are not “fully funded,” and thus a certain number of full scholarships must be divided among players). I walked across the small stage at my tiny major’s departmental graduation (of which my undeniably brilliant Harvard- and Oxford- and Yale-trained professors are quite proud) with ten scars on my hips, relics of an injuries suffered at the hands of something that has defined me as much as my degree. The hands that reached for that diploma are the same hands that could once (could they still?) dazzle with behind-the-back shots and no-look passes. They are the same hands that mixed protein shakes and callused against weights. The same hands that drank coffee and Muscle Milk in equal, copious amounts. (Because yes, it takes over forty hours a week to play a top-level sport; it also takes well over forty hours a week to be a top-level student. They are not mutually exclusive, as one discovers in that way of life. We multi-task, and sleep less.)
They are the same hands that penned a novel in my senior year; the same hands responsible for award-winning writing; the same hands that turned pages of reading through long nights after long practices after longer days after long morning runs. They are the hands controlled by a brain that can think and question Fitzgerald as it can a field; powered by a heart and lungs that can deliver speeches as well as they can amaze in V02 Max testing.
In June, I graduated from one of the world’s best academic institutions as a former athlete. My stick gathers dust under my bed; the dirt across my cleats is cracked, a dry film. I run, now, because there will always be a part of me that craves that unique kind of freedom. I will always have this identity as an athlete, as much as I am a daughter or a sister or a woman.
A condensation of my own novel-in-progress, Can’t Be Too Hard, based on the life of Madame Restell, Nineteenth-Century Abortionist.
The woman arrived as people then did: on a boat, with almost nothing, in search of work and wealth and a future better than her past. With change sewn into hemlines. Her daughter clutched to her chest. Her husband – them newlyweds – sick, already.
He would die within the year.
The woman found work as women then did: a seamstress, struggling. She met a man who was a rare find: in their relationship, they behaved as equals. They spent evenings with friends with big ideas, philosophical discussions, too much drink.
Together they started a business. It was small, at first, as businesses in this country once were. It involved pamphlets and advice, and in time a small store front.
The business grew. Trades were practiced, skills honed, knowledge sold: the woman sold pills and powders and euphemistic cures for the then-unspeakable. At some point, a tool kit was pieced together: a syringe, a hook, small blades, mechanical joints, an arrow-shaped spear. The woman became a physician, of a sort.
She operated under an alias, as doctors of her practice were once forced to do. This name became a trusted brand, and in time their small business built their small family a mansion on Fifth Avenue: four stories, smooth brownstone, fifty-two windows, French lace, gold statues, mahogany staircases, marble floors. There was a driver, a carriage, four horses, and a housekeeper.
There were millions, and there were lawyers.
There was a girl named Maria. She came for an operation, and died days later. These things happened, then. The woman was arrested, and this time – her fourth – she served a stay in prison. The year was not bad, as prison stays go: wardens were paid off, better meals delivered, a straw mattress replaced with a feather bed. The year was passed with some degree of loneliness, and some degree of comfort, and without much effect on the business.
Her fame rose. There were elaborate parties, weddings, divorces, three grandchildren, family feuding. The woman’s patients grew wealthier, her business simultaneously more private and more notorious. There was a wrought iron fence, a staircase below the sidewalk, an entrance off Fifth Avenue on Fifty-Second; outside, a plaque: “OFFICE,” in neat letters.
The woman honed her craft. She spent long hours in her den, manipulating tools until she could operate blindly: her fingers hooked in the claws of the forceps; her hands knew the extra care required with the worn-too-loose speculum. The syringe was smooth, cold, delicate, its base elaborate, its measurements hand-painted, dried slightly raised. She knew the each ridged grip of the hook and scalpel. She spent solitude rehearsing: pinching her thumb and hooked forefinger, flexing her wrist forward with her fingers open, withdrawing as her fingers touched. With her eyes closed, no patient before her, she imagined the satisfaction of a grasp, the adrenaline of a completed pull, an elbow drawn inward, a mass between the clamps, dropped in the steel basin seated beneath her upper arms with a soft, oddly gentle splat. The woman came to know her talent.
She practiced for many years. Her husband died; her grandson-in-law became her unwanted carteaker, as grandson-in-laws will. Estranged from her son and daughter, missing her husband to an extent beyond acknowledgment, she took solace in long carriage rides, her practice; breakfasts of hardboiled eggs, seeping yolks damming against toast, with her housekeeper.
A man with red hair and redder muttonchops became famous, like her. They were equals and opposites in influence and ideas. He came to her door, armed with deception and search warrants and, finally, an arrest.
There was a knife, in the end, found when little advice was to be had and a final prison stay all but ensured. The woman was sixty-three, prison-bound, set in her ways. On the eve or the pre-dawn hours of her trial, the abortionist found an ivory-handled carving knife from her kitchen. She draw a bath, and wondered only briefly who would find her, and if by then the waters would run clear.
It is a Tuesday. He walks into the hospital for a procedure that is routine but not inconsequential. He is alone, having insisted it be as such. He lives this way: not alone, truly, but with a certain degree of reclusiveness. His wife is at work. His daughter is at the house waiting for his son to get home from school. This is not something his daughter has done before. She arrives on Sunday from college and it is a surprise, but not the exciting kind. “I want to come,” his daughter says. “Don’t you need my help?”
There are no more possibilities. They need to know, for sure. The doctors are at a dead end. It is very small, but of course paraplegia is a risk. Common complications can range from small losses of sensation to a spinal headache, which is in fact very common and is something like the pain of a migraine times a thousand and often lasts, accompanied by extreme nausea, for over forty-eight hours. His daughter controls the strange desire to quote a line from an old movie and laugh, even, and asks instead, “What are the risks?” He tells her that he is, finally, having a lumbar puncture.
He doesn’t call his daughter much. There is nothing she can do. She shouldn’t worry about him. She is busy, and far away. This much is clear: he is sick. The sickness comes in waves. The severity of the symptoms ebbs and flows. The nausea is new. The nausea is crippling. He is dizzy. Each room he enters spins and rocks. A thousand bees buzz in his right ear. He cannot hear. He embellishes: “The stroganoff?” he guesses, smiling lines cracking in the corners of his bright, tired eyes. His wife asks how to turn to the stove off. His family makes fun of him for his poor hearing. “I’m an old man,” he kids. He cannot see well. He squints a lot. He pours over manuscript pages. He stares at a computer screen. He is a writer.
He buys a road bike. The doctors do not tell him outright that his running days are over. The doctors drain the cyst. It will be his sixth knee surgery, although the doctors concede that the first ACL repair is unrelated to all these. The cyst in his knee has come back. The doctors are confused. The cyst in his knee disappears. His knee is swollen and it turns out it is a cyst. He is gaunt. He is a runner. He and his brother run together. He is better than his brother (he weighs less, and this helps), although they are both still very talented runners. His daughter is a very talented runner. He teaches his daughter how to train. He teaches his daughter how to run.
He and his little girl are very close. His daughter wants to be a writer, like him. He meets his daughter at the bus stop every afternoon. He puts his daughter on the bus every morning. He works from home, now. He decides to go freelance. He is a very talented writer. He takes his daughter to work, where she sits at his computer and types nonsense in neon green letters onto gray-black backgrounds. He is the sports editor. He works at a newspaper.
His parents are alcoholics. He grows up in the middle-of-nowhere. His mother was once a nurse and his father is a judge. He runs. He plays basketball. Alone he goes out fishing for hours on end. He watches patiently for tugs on the line. He sits shirtless getting sunburned in his small motorboat, imagining stories.
Among glinting bridles, clicking hooves, tossed manes. Among hot walkers and feed buckets. Among horses.
She grew up with peppermints in her pockets, with lost wrappers found stuck to clothing in the wash. She grew up with her small hands stained orange from carrots and leather. With her legs sore from hours perched on split rail fencing, the rungs bruising her slowly.
She was raised in mornings on the track. Her father lost her among the stables, the backstretch workers, the owners’ wives, the exercise riders. She was raised by this village. At home, mangled Spanish crept into her sentences: exclamations, mostly. Protests, sometimes.
Her mornings were short at first. When very little, she’d go half-asleep, hair un-brushed, still in her pajamas. Her fist wrapped tightly around her mother’s fingers. She was never afraid of the horses, but she didn’t always like them. They meant early mornings and loud laughter and conversations with people she didn’t know. They meant her father’s broken wrist, cracked rib, exploded knee. They came to mean, though, usefulness. When she was young enough to listen, she would creep under the betting counters, ears trained for tips. She learned to ride. Not well, but enough. She learned to wrap ankles. She learned patience: in rubbing the horses, waiting for muscle knots to give way, to melt into the spine. In racing. In workouts. She learned that horses need time to recover. Time to heal. More than people, sometimes.
The girl grew up with hands stained gray from working the animals. With her feet aching from hours in stiff boots. She learned to drive on roads strewn with hay and caked with shit and faded with dirt. The girl grew up in a horse racing town: there are not many left. Knowing no other way, it would be some time before the girl understood the place she grew up.
It would be some time before she saw the way the old man’s hands shook as he counted out lost cash from his wallet. Before she noticed the way the cigarettes piled on ashtrays in a fury, smoldering, small curls of white unfurling from their depths. Before she noticed the lines addiction etched.
It would be longer still before she noticed the too-young girls with too much makeup. Before she noticed the phone calls made in whispers. Before she noticed the way hundreds of thousands of dollars were won without a word of celebration. Lost, too, in a similarly quiet way.
She would know all this, all this seediness, all this filth, all this permanent sadness, and still she would find herself more than once against a too dark wall of the barns, chipped paint pressing into her back as the man lifted her up, pinning her, both of them straining at quiet in the strange stillness of a barn at night. In the mornings she would imagine their footprints in the packed dirt. She would run her eyes past where they had been. It would be some time before she would realize in its entirety the cliché, the loud eroticism of their world: the horses, the smells, the quiet, the rules unlike anywhere else.
The pain of obviousness would not ruin this place for the girl. She would come to realize it is only unoriginal in myth, in stories, in legends of the tracks people tell rather than know.
They do not know the world this girl grew up in. They don’t know the quiet of a world shuddered to life at four a.m. They’ve never watched the sun catch against a bit, reflecting across the track in a kind of mirrored Morse code. They’ve never heard the slow rumble of a horse working alone on the turf: how just one can sound as thunderous as a dozen racing. They’ve never seen the way the dust filters through the air among the stables in low-lying, slowly-diffusing clouds: permanent, refusing to settle.
There is a place on the drive between his house and hers where the road curves while mounting a slight hill. It is poorly lit, and fenced by forest on either side. To the right, on the inside of the turn, are two oaks, separated by an empty ten feet. The most astounding thing about the accident will be how their car shot so neatly through the gap, streaking forty feet into the forest beyond without so much as losing a mirror on the way.
First responders to the accident will assume that it is the result of drunk driving. They will be right, but not entirely: the driver’s blood alcohol level will turn out to be hardly more than the legal limit. This is of course unsafe, but as the medical examiner knows, if everyone who drove on four beers had accidents like this…there’s no way to guess how many times over the number of drunk driving deaths would multiply. Five, maybe. The boy should not have been driving. But there was something else that caused him to misjudge the turn.
The girl’s parents will want to blame the boy, as girls’ parents will. When they learn that she, too, could not legally drive, they will naturally manipulate their anger. It will be she that knew better than to get behind the wheel. They will compartmentalize facts and theories. One night, amidst a never-ending stream of sleepless ones, her father will remember a time in high school when he and his girlfriend drank stolen beer in a grocery store parking lot. He will remember how she reached across as he drove, toying at his zipper, twisting her hair back over her shoulders as she leaned forward…
The boy’s parents will be silent. They will avert their eyes when they meet the girl’s parents in the hospital. They will be unable to escape the simple fact that it was their son who was driving. His mother will cry, heavily, before turning irate. She will make assumptions. She will think of the tattoo the girl had: a set of three waves across the bridge of her foot, small, in black. She will remember a girl she knew in college with a tiny horseshoe behind her ankle. The horseshoe girl wore thick eyeliner and ripped jeans. She was trash.
A month will pass, after the accident, the wakes, the funerals, the public mourning and vigils at school, and then the rumors will start. They will be ordinary and of average meanness. One will say the girl was pregnant; another, that she was cheating on the boy (with the soccer captain, with a senior at the local college; worst of all, with his father). Another yet will say that he was the jealous type, and might have done it on purpose – how else could the car have flown so neatly between those trees? Another rumor will speculate he wanted to get back together with his ex-girlfriend. It will turn out, of course, that she started this one. There will be a rumor they were both into drugs. The most hurtful rumor will be that they were drag racing, and the other car bolted; this rumor will be unfair, because for some time both sets of parents waste months believing another set of families are to blame.
Kind people – family members, close friends – will venture advice and lend helping hands. More than one person will suggest a simple truth: bad things do happen to good people with ordinary lives. High school seniors make mistakes, against the best advice of their well-meaning parents. Someone will struggle for words, and mistakenly land upon unlucky.
The boy’s father will take to driving past the trees between his house and hers. Sometimes, he will ease off the wheel, allowing the car to float over the middle line. He will do this again and again, testing the angles, searching for the one that aims between the gap. He will find it impossible, frustratingly. What kind of luck, he’ll wonder – what kind of luck is that?
It is the kind of restaurant with paper lanterns bought from a dollar store, or for a dollar at a cheap decorating store. Lorraine hates this restaurant, but here she is, at this fucking Benihana’s, on a night when Lorraine will learn something about her boyfriend she’d rather not know.
Her brother tugs on her arm, as little brothers do. She feigns annoyance. It occurs to her simultaneously that he is perhaps too big to tug on her sleeve: he doesn’t reach up in quite the same way, grasping at the lowest branch. A chef lights a cone of onions on fire. They erupt from within as a volcano. The heat basks the table, the hostess, the families waiting. It is reflected in her brother’s eyes. Lorraine reclaims her arm, using it (rather than her arm already free) to reach for her phone in her back pocket, flicking it open and checking for nothing. They’ve had a fight; she is always the first to apologize. This will make knowing what she is about to discover far more difficult.
She follows her parents – her father, perfectly loveable in sandals with socks; her mother less so, due to the way that teenage girls do not get along with their mothers – to a grill where they’re seated next to another average looking family. In this one, the son feigns interest. The little sister is perfectly adorable. The father is not wearing sandals with socks, but wears instead his phone in a holster on his belt loop.
In another mood, Lorraine might share an eye roll with the son-feigning-interest. She does not. She checks her phone. Her mother requests that she put away her phone, Lorrie, sweetie, please.
There are no menus. The circus starts, oil dancing slickly across the heat, darting knives, rhythmic clanging. Her brother loves every second of it, as always. Her parents love that her brother loves it, as Lorraine supposes she once did. She picks at her nails. There is a stubborn hangnail on her left index finger. Lorraine grips the flake of skin between two longer fingernails. It refuses to tear away; it bleeds, slow at first, a tiny moat of red seeping around her bitten-short fingernail. It pools quickly in a large, bright orb in the corner of her nail bed. She brings the finger to her lips, sucking in a way she hopes is indiscreet.
There is a flood of vegetables on the grill now, browning and almost indecipherable in their mess. Steam condenses on their noses, across their temples; across the room, a man’s glasses fog over and his family laughs. Smoke filters through the room, heavy – later, or tomorrow morning, their hair will smell thick with it. The air in their showers will become unbreathable.
Lorraine has been here with her boyfriend. The restaurant famously doesn’t ID; they drank beer and afterwards fooled around in his car. If they were not in a fight, she would text him this memory.
Her mother miraculously catches a piece of shrimp in her embarrassingly eager mouth, a feat whose credit is due in equal measure to the chef’s deft skills. The next piece flings off the barrier between her brother’s front teeth and his upper lip. They laugh, even Lorraine. Her eyes wander past her brother to a table in the corner – two people in a small booth, waiter service.
Lorraine’s stomach plummets; her throat clogs. Her hand darts for her back pocket. She leans forward, narrows her eyes against the red lighting and the stinging smoke. The woman in the booth in the corner is her boyfriend’s mother. They get on well enough.
The man in the booth is not her boyfriend’s mother’s husband. Lorraine has never seen him before. She has never seen her boyfriend’s mother curl her hair behind her ear like that: with feigned nervousness. She has never seen her boyfriend’s mother toy with her bracelets like that, with calculated distraction. Lorraine knows these moves - all girls do.
Lorraine fingers her phone. Her thinking slows rather than grinds to a halt. This is bad, she thinks, simply. This will be bad, for them.
It comes to her at random times: unbidden, unwanted, without cue. While searching for her keys. Brushing her teeth. Folding the laundry. Showering — there he is. There they are. The worst thing she ever did, maybe. She thinks that’s an exaggeration. but people react strongly to these things. Some do, at least.
They say their good-byes, everyone half-drunk, sweating, celebratory. They go to one another last, after making the rounds. She doesn’t know how it will go — she’s always followed his lead — but whatever she thought, it wasn’t this: he reaches in, lifts her face to his with a curled knuckle, and their lips meet, like that, in front of friends, for a beat too long.
His living room, the floor, one a.m. All lights off. He had laid a blanket down — the kind of worn-thin comforter families everywhere own, a staple strewn across countless couches — and she’d thought the touch was nice, almost. A brief glimpse of some lost boyishness. But they’re quick — he’s quick — like always, and it barely warrants the extra care. She stays half-dressed.
Someone watches them from inside. This is what he sees: their faces close, his half-smiling. The girl is not. She talks animatedly, even as they try to keep their conversation theirs only. Her hands flutter, her fingertips at times almost brushing his cheek in their fury. The man gently takes one of her wrists and stills it at her side. The girl takes a half-step away. She props the other hand on her hip. The man leans forward. He has that look of humoring apology. Watching through the window, the onlooker thinks this scene is familiar, somehow. It’s been done before.
She wakes up early to run, as always. Stretching on the pavement, she feels a stiffness in her back. She runs thin fingers along protruding vertebrae; the points are tender. Later, she finds a mirror and counts the bruises, small, yellowed at the edges, dotting her lower back. It takes her a moment — but then, she realizes: the hardwood floors, him on top. She bites her lip against a smile, not exactly ashamed.
This girl has a tendency to shake. They sit outside, alone, close but not touching. There is champagne, because she asked for it, and the too-bright glow of his burning cigarette. It’s a summer night, and the stars coat the black backdrop of the too-clear sky in a dusty film. And the girl is shaking. Shivering. Cold is not the reason, but that’s what they both assume. He moves closer to her, and from behind places a hand on each shoulder — her smallness is amplified in his grip. He circles his thumbs into the softness between her shoulders and her neck. His fingertips slide forward, across her clavicle, inching down her chest, following the deep v of her dress. He feels her shaking cease; she inhales, rising and falling beneath his waiting palms.
He pulls the car over, on a street that’s not quite busy and not well-lit, after a night that hasn’t gone exactly how he wanted. He leans over, on top of her, almost before she has time to react. She pushes away, says she can’t. They tug-of-war like this: pushing away, leaning in; the whole thing feels longer than it really is, to both of them. She pulls away, averts her eyes, and he feels her hand on his, her small fingers brushing across the hard metal wrapped around the second finger on his left hand, pressing lightly.
The man sees the woman on his way to work. She labors across the street, weighed down by straining shopping bags, wavering on small heels against uneven cobblestones. She’s older, not old but not quite young enough to safely call middle-aged. The light is grey, cliched in this morning hour, forgiving some of the tiredness etched beneath her eyes. Her hair is unkempt. She looks miserable, simply, and the man has a fleeting moment where he considers lending a hand, helping her across the stones, perhaps lifting one of the bags threatening to break from her weathered hands and accompanying her to her destination.
He doesn’t. He passes her at the corner, each of them averting their eyes, each of them tired, each of them prisoner to the rules of these streets. The man thinks about the woman as he waits for the subway, as he stands limply in the wet heat, wanting but unwilling to loosen his tie, shifting his grip on his briefcase, his palm slipping against the soft leather, the fingertips of his other hand blackening from newspaper print never quite dried. He thinks about the woman as he counts cigarette butts on the rails, as he categorizes trash floating in the mud between the tracks, as he watches a rat climb the barrier opposite his platform. He thinks about the woman in his too-warm, slightly damp, half-awake stupor, and for no real reason beyond boredom he thinks about this woman and invents her story.
It is not a kind one. She is lonely, he imagines, and recollecting on her shoes (which were wedges, cork-bottomed, with some kind of not-leather, too-shiny white sandal upper), her pants (a dull khaki, and high-waisted, but not in the fashionable way), and her hair (which was really the saddest thing about her, somehow colorless without being grey), he imagines that she is poor, too, not from his neighborhood. He focuses his memory — or some version of it — and sees her shopping bags as old, their paper seams worn the way of a brown bag at lunchtime, packed in the pre-dawn. She is someone’s housekeeper, he decides, some caretaker of a loft or duplex anywhere in his hip and too-expensive neighborhood. But the hour was too early, he realizes, and she was white, wasn’t she? Tanned, leather almost, but certainly white. He imagines she has a name like Julia or Tracey — something old, something nobody names their children anymore. She isn’t someone’s housekeeper, because housekeepers here are not white with old Italian-American names and they don’t come to clean houses before he (this man, the one standing uncomfortably waiting for his train) goes to work, beating his boss in only to spend the early hours in unproductively. This man with the expensive briefcase loosens his tie, absentmindedly, almost pleasantly distracted by the puzzle of this sad-looking woman alone and struggling across the cared-after cobblestones. He wonders why he’s never seen her before, and he constructs a new narrative wherein she is just passing through, one of those kinds of people who takes a new route to or from work every other day. He’s heard about those types: the ones who realize the risks of monotony in routine. He is not that kind of man.
And the woman is not that kind of woman. Those people look up, he’s heard, they walk as though they’re looking forward to something they’re not quite sure of. Excited, almost, but intent. Searching. This woman looked down, her heels too much for the stones, her legs too old for the imbalance wrought by their combination with her heavy and straining bags. He has never seen this woman before. Perhaps she is a visitor, although not a friend of anyone on his block. Maybe, the man thinks, she has a new job somewhere near here, where he stands waiting for the subway. Maybe he’ll see her tomorrow.
His train comes with a thunder, as always, a hot and slightly suffocating breeze, and as he tightens his grip on his briefcase and re-rolls his wet newspaper in his palm he has the sense that he met someone new today, already. Because that is how this city is, he knows but does not think: one hears new stories every day, born in moments and glances, crafted half-consciously in endless minutes spent alone and waiting.
