—
She started reading at a library table before her shift, and continued while eating a sandwich at lunch, and picked it up again on the bus on the way to class. Julia had handed her a physical mess: about two hundred typewritten pages held together with a rubber band, inside a paper bag. Sylvie’s first impression was that it was indeed a work in progress. Some chapters started and then stopped in the middle of a paragraph. There were question marks inside sentences, intended for William to answer at some point. There were footnotes filled with suggestions, ideas, and queries from William about what direction the material might go in.
It was ostensibly a book about the history of basketball, and it started in 1891 in Massachusetts, when Dr. James Naismith invented the game — using peach baskets as hoops — in order to keep off-season track athletes in shape during the frigid winter. The book jumped around according to what seemed like William’s whims, but still, it was roughly chronological. It covered the sport’s first league in 1898, Dr. Naismith’s thirteen rules, and the fact that until 1950 all the players and coaches in the official games were white. When the narrative broke off, William was in the middle of explaining the battle between the American Basketball Association and the National Basketball Association in the 1970s, when the two leagues fought for stars like Dr. J and Spencer Haywood. Interspersed with the history were the stories of specific games: A game in Philadelphia when Bill Russell battled the giant Wilt Chamberlain. A 1959 college game in which Oscar Robertson had 45 points, 23 rebounds, and 10 assists. The manuscript ended in the middle of game five of the 1976 finals between the Boston Celtics and the Phoenix Suns. The game went to triple overtime and was the longest finals game ever. William’s writing was solid — clean and unobjectionable — but Sylvie found herself little interested in the main narrative of the story; it was the footnotes and embedded questions that fascinated her. The footnotes seemed to be a conversation William was having with himself. He wrote things like:
Why am I so interested in Bill Walton’s injuries?
Am I just writing to catch up with the present day? Is that enough?
How could my father and so many other men in Boston hate Russell so much? I can’t even bear to write about what happened to his home there.
Where is the science on why these men grow so tall, when their parents are often short?
There’s no thread to this project.
This is terrible, I’m terrible.
Several times, William wrote: What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Who am I?
Once, toward the end of the unfinished narrative, a footnote read: It should have been me, not her.
Sylvie reread the footnotes. They felt like an answer key for a different story, not the history of basketball they were attached to. What did It should have been me, not her mean? That statement couldn’t be connected to basketball, could it? Was the her Julia?
The anxiety embedded in the questions made Sylvie shiver, and the bus rattled beneath her as if in agreement. Charlie had said to Sylvie: “We look out the window, or into ourselves, for something more.” In these footnotes, William was looking inside himself, but what reflected back was apprehension and uncertainty. Who am I? William didn’t seem to recognize the person in the mirror, or perhaps he didn’t see anyone there. Sylvie remembered the last time she’d stood in front of Rose and the feeling that she was disappearing. Sylvie had felt that way, to some degree, every minute since her father died. She’d become worried that it was her father’s attention that kept her intact, kept her Sylvie, and she felt great sympathy now for her brother-in-law. Sylvie had been feeling this way for only a month, and it was terrible. The size of this manuscript, and the effort in its pages, showed that William had been in this place for a long time.
When Sylvie finished reading, she was on the bus back to Julia’s apartment after her night class. She fit the manuscript into the paper bag and stared at the window, which showed her glassy reflection. She saw the outline of William’s face overlaying her own. Sylvie had always liked her brother-in-law; she felt comfortable around him, and they shared a smile occasionally when Julia talked with a lot of exclamation marks. Emeline, the barometer of everyone’s moods, had always described William as sensitive. But William had belonged to Julia from the moment Sylvie met him, so she’d never truly considered him as anything other than the man her sister had chosen. She wondered now, for the first time, if Julia had made a mistake. The writer of these pages was filled with her sister’s least favorite qualities: indecision, self-doubt, sadness. Julia was like a star baseball player who lived at the plate, smacking away any uncertainties with her bat. The only explanation that made sense was that Julia didn’t know this lived inside her husband — or hadn’t, until she’d read these pages too.
Sylvie felt a heightened physical awareness on the bus seat, her cells tingling as if they had just woken up. She felt the weight of the manuscript on her lap, the cloudy windowpane, Julia’s possible mistake, the tiredness of having spent weeks barely sleeping on someone else’s couch, her father’s gone-ness. Sylvie felt something move inside her too, but before she could figure out what it was, she’d started to cry. She fought to stay silent, so as not to draw any attention to herself on the half-filled bus, but the salty tears slicked her cheeks and soaked the front of her coat.
When she got back to the apartment it was late, and her sister and William had already gone to bed. Sylvie brushed her teeth, tugged her nightgown over her head, and fell onto the couch. She felt William’s questions like pinpricks to her skin. They reappeared in the darkness and seeped into her, demanding answers.
What am I doing? I’m lying on a couch in my sister’s apartment.
Why am I doing this? Because my father died, and he was my home.
Who am I? Sylvie Padavano. She heard her name in Charlie’s voice, said with relish, and smiled.
This last question, and the answer, made Sylvie realize for the first time why her mother had always frowned at her and not at her sisters. Rose recognized in Sylvie what had always bothered her about her husband. “Ugh, Whitman,” Rose would say in disgust when Charlie recited his lyrical lines. Not because Rose cared about Walt Whitman, but because she blamed the poetry inside Charlie for his lack of success in life. The reason his salary stayed small, the reason he refused to get upset when the furnace broke and yet would drag her outside to admire a full moon, the reason he didn’t care what people thought of him and yet hundreds of people turned out for his funeral. Sylvie was spiked with the same stuff Charlie was, and so when Rose looked at her daughter, she didn’t see Sylvie; she saw the failure of her own marriage and her personal failure in convincing Charlie to be who she’d wanted him to be. Sylvie thought of Julia, who had so much of Rose inside her. She knew that any glimpses Julia caught of the faltering sentences inside William would also be despised.
With her eyes closed, Sylvie placed herself on the wide expanse of her brother-in-law’s uncertainty. It resembled one of the foggy, rambling moors she and her sisters had loved in Victorian novels. Sylvie felt at home on the rough terrain, filling her lungs with murky air. Since Charlie’s death, she’d felt like she was spilling out of her edges and messily trying to scoop herself up at the same time. Her sisters and mother were safe, with their aspirations and routines; Sylvie was her heartbreak and loss. William wasn’t safe either, and his questions kept Sylvie company. She and her brother-in-law were both struggling to inhabit their own skin, a goal that would sound absurd to almost anyone else.