People don’t expect me to be good at basketball. Most basketball players are tall, and I am an unassuming short woman. But for this reason, I am skilled at sneaking past bodies without them noticing. This is as true on the street, when I spot someone I know walking toward me, as on the basketball court. I may not be the first person you would ask to reach for something on the top shelf, but if I can reach it, I’ll be the quickest. I’ll get the job done. Last week, we were playing five-on-five on a full court, and I have an advantage on a full court because I can sprint. I kept us in the lead all game just running lay-ups on repeat. One of my teammates would pass me the rebound, and I’d race past the midcourt into the paint and toss one of my classic l’ups. That’s what we call lay-ups, me and the boys. They’re actually not boys; most of them are over forty. Two are not even of the masculine gender. Some are married or in a steady relationship. The others are single, like me. Single and playing ball.
When other members of the YMCA watch us, I know they think we’re only playing a game. This is true in one sense. In another sense, basketball is something more. It is a next-level game, where winning is hardly the point. At the end of every match, players walk around the water bench, high fiving and giving one-armed hugs to each other, saying, “Good game,” but I don’t mean it the way they mean it. How do I put this? I am never not playing. Just as the soul never stops longing. Basketball is the shape of that longing.
◆
Paul lives in the other unit of our duplex and is a passionate and mission-driven man. I have always been in awe of the person who devotes their life to one cause. It can be any cause: ending world hunger, honoring the dead, looking the best. It’s true, some causes are nobler than others, but it’s the devotion that gets me. The sincerity of the effort. I have a photo of Jens Rasmussen, ardent champion of the bike lane, perched in the frame of my bathroom mirror. I read a profile on him in one of Paul’s periodicals that was delivered to my mailbox by accident. Each issue features someone chasing their life’s dream. The first time Paul and I spoke was when I finally returned all the magazines and catalogs that had accumulated in my coat closet. “Some pages must have been ripped out in transit,” I said.
Paul introduced himself as a co-founder of a company that digitizes every book ever published and amends the copyright to make them freely accessible to all of humanity for the rest of time. What is his cause? Infinite knowledge. It’s hard to say those words without tearing up. Infinite Knowledge. The boldness, the improbability, the small human figures stacking one brick at a time to make it happen despite the odds. Sometimes I have to flip over the photo of Jens because it all becomes too much.
The first time Paul brought up basketball was to grumble that he hated when anyone asked if he played. This happened at one of my parties, in a circle of people talking. I had invited Paul last minute because I thought it would be rude if music was blaring through our shared wall and he wasn’t a part of the action.
“It’s my slender physique actually. It gives the illusion of being tall.”
“How tall are you?”
“I’m five-eleven.”
I did a quick search on my phone. “The average NBA player is six-six.”
“That’s my co-founder Marie’s height. Which shows that you can be tall and—”
“Tech-savvy,” one person in our conversation circle said.
“No.”
“Data-driven?” said another.
“Also no.”
“IT-oriented?” I offered.
“Relatable to the masses.”
“Relatable to the masses?” The two people locked eyes in shock and burst out laughing because they’d spoken at the same time.
“Because Marie and I are missionaries.”
The conversation circle quieted when Paul said this word, “missionaries.”
What did he mean?—everyone but me wondered.
Because I knew hearing about Paul’s job again could get me too emotional, I inched away from the circle. I motioned with my hand that I was going to check on the food by holding an invisible serving platter and pointing at it. No one noticed me leaving. They were absorbed in Paul’s story.
“I can’t stand Marie,” Paul said once the other guests had left. “She screws up everything. She always saves the files first and then renames them, but everyone knows it’s faster to rename files as you save.”
“They’re both right,” I said.
“Did you say something?”
“No.”
“Angela, are you okay? Are you crying?”
“I have allergies.”
Even conflicts with Marie seemed necessary to the cause. I, too, had a cause, but I didn’t share it with the world, and certainly not with someone saving knowledge from extinction. It was more of a deep desire. It was my reason for leaving bed each morning, for going to company happy hours, for throwing parties in the first place. I called it my plan.
“What’s your plan, there?” Paul shouted at me from his front door the next morning, watching as I lugged my overflowing trash bin to the curb.
The night before had been the most I’d talked to Paul since I first moved into the duplex earlier that year, but suddenly it felt like Paul knew something about me. I turned around.
“Let me lend you a hand with that,” he yelled.
Paul speed-walked toward me, saying how it was foolish not to ask for help if I clearly needed it, one needn’t wheel the whole trash bin to the curb on one’s own. I have never been the type to beg, but I must have been wearing that desperate expression on my face. The one that says, “God help us all.” He took the bin right out of my hands and carried on about Marie and her maternity leave and how it was leaving the mission hanging.
“I know it’s not feminist for me to say this and, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining.” He trailed off, giving the bin an extra tug.
I walked behind him, holding the lid closed to show that I could have taken out the trash myself.
“I’m just saying, it’s inconvenient to the Mission. Kids. Taking time off.”
He wiped his brow and released the bin for a rest.
“Wild party last night.”
In reply, I nodded the smallest nod I could, which is the physical equivalent of acknowledging what someone said but definitely not agreeing with it. The truth was, throwing parties exhausted me. That’s why they were always on Wednesdays, so that people might leave early. But I had to keep throwing them. My plan. Paul turned around and continued to haul my bin toward the curb, and I followed, intrigued, listening to his latest fantasy about building a storage device that would archive everything he ever typed, even the things he ended up deleting, even all the errors.
At the curb, I dusted off my hands as if I had dragged the bin myself. We walked back to our respective front doors. He chuckled to himself, shaking his head, pretending to yank something heavy behind him. He was making fun of me in that way that means we’re friends. Then he caught the time on his watch. We waved goodbye, not wanting to be late for work.
After this first party that Paul attended, he became my top-shelf friend. On party nights, Paul helped reach for the serving plates from the top shelf of my pantry. I always asked him to arrive early, and he told me what tasks I needed to do in the order that I needed to do them. I was so tired after work and from being wholeheartedly devoted to my plan that, by the time the party rolled around, the part of my brain that is usually adept at putting things in their place had turned to mush.
“Cut the veggies. Set out the chips and dip. Cutlery? Microwave the beans. Don’t microwave the beans in the can.”
It helps that Paul is a generous eater, consuming a lot of food at my parties and always offering to take home leftovers. I’ve learned that overbuying food for a party never hurts in case people come who I don’t expect. I always invite as many people as can fit in my junior two-bedroom. On party nights, I welcome anyone who shows up to my door. It makes up for the rest of the time when I keep my home immaculate and prefer that nobody sets foot inside.
◆
The idea to throw parties came to me fully formed one night while struggling to fall asleep. I had been scrubbing the toilet with the regained awake hours when the lightbulb went out. I stood in the darkness, sponge in my cleaning glove, shocked from the sudden spark. Some would take this as a sign to try sleeping again, to deal with everything in the morning, but not me. I heard a voice. A silent voice. A stirring in my stomach. Some call it intuition, some call it the voice of God. Who can really say? It came from so deep within me, its origin was beyond me. I don’t remember the exact words because the voice spoke rather verbosely, but the gist was to throw parties. For every two people I invited, the voice said, I would receive at least one reciprocal invitation in return.
I devised a plan to throw parties as a surefire method for friendship maintenance, to trigger a stream of incoming invitations that I could at any moment decline. At the end of my life, because I’d have had at any moment the opportunity to be with another person, I would have never been technically alone.
The thought set my limbs so aflutter, I stayed up scrubbing in the dark another hour. Finally, at peace, I surrendered to slumber, and the next day, I obliged. Who was I to ignore the voice that had soothed me to sleep like a mother? I had a plan.
I picked a date and invited everyone I knew, and I told them to tell everyone they knew, and I threw my first party. I put out snacks and drinks and asked the people to come. It worked just as the voice had prophesied. The invites began rolling in like waves to the shore. Like the shore, I just needed to exist. I accrued invitations, most of which I declined, that made it such that I could see people if I wanted, whenever I wanted. When the invites stopped, because I had declined so many, I’d throw another party, see everyone at once, and the deluge of invites would begin again. My dream in life is to be alone. I want a life where I can be alone whenever I want. But it’s not a choice to be alone if I am always alone. My plan granted a structure to my life such that I could opt out and be alone almost any night of the week, such that I could bask in sweet solitude whenever I wanted, knowing that others would be there if I needed them. I could be a drunken bee, part of the hive but free from the hive.
“I’m Opting Out,” I said to Jens every morning.
“I’m Opting Out,” I said to myself, deleting my coworker’s half-birthday evite.
“I’m Opting Out,” I whispered in the night, as I recycled a block party flier.
My plan was perfect. It was nearly perfect.
◆
One Thursday, Paul and I wheeled our trash and recycling bins down to the curb together. Paul mentioned how a group of his friends had recently moved into houses and apartments near each other. The idea appealed to me at first: your greatest friends within a few blocks. There would always be something going on, some ritual to partake in, some other life to escape into. But I don’t have the friends for that, nor the money to move. I’m a secretary at an insurance firm.
“It seems that one could have a lot of children and get a similar setup,” I said, realizing that this was what my parents did and what their parents did before them.
I have two siblings, and I am the oldest. My childhood home was boisterous, a circus of aunts and cousins everywhere, uncles puckering their lips around cigarettes, exhaling grunted phrases so abbreviated they may as well have been pecking the air. In the old country, there was never silence. The crying, the laughing, the loogie hocking, and all that groaning from constant work. You got to know people just by moving around them, fitting yourself into their empty space.
“Children suck though,” Paul said.
“Right,” I replied.
“I know I’m biased, but still. You can’t be a part-time missionary.”
I hadn’t felt the desire to become a mom. That’s not to say I hadn’t felt the urge. I felt the urge all the time, but it was easy to ignore when I just thought about the practicalities. I loathe cleaning up after others, and I’d need an apartment with at least another bathroom. That way, if one bathroom was occupied, as was always the case growing up, I could excuse myself into the other one for a moment alone. I would savor my deliberate solitude on the tile floor, or just sit in the tub, knowing that my family would be there when I opened the door.
“What about Marie? Is she a part-time missionary, part-time mom?” I asked.
“No, she’s a full-time missionary. But you make a good point.”
“I do?”
“On second thought, she still screws up everything. She says the e-books should be saved as .doc for running text recognition, but everyone knows you can run text recognition on PDFs.”
“She’s a mother and a missionary.”
“Angela, do you have allergies again?”
“Marie has it all.”
“Angela, are you okay?”
My sniffles grew profuse. I had never met her, this Marie, this passionate new mother with just as much if not more passion for her job. “Invite her to the next party,” I kept reminding Paul.
“It’s a busy time,” he kept saying.
He told me everything about their work together for the mission, and I craved every detail. I pictured two Israelites walking through the desert following Moses, but Moses was absent, and the promised land was less a place than a book that contained everything. It awaited them at the end of the journey. The two Israelites quarreled every step about which route to take, whether to cross over the valley, which would get them to the promised land faster, or to detour along the river, which was the closest source of water. Paul and Marie needed each other if either one of them was to survive. The book could not exist without them both. They remained on the same path even if they argued about which way to go. The paradox broke me, repeatedly. The simultaneous compatibility and incompatibility of their visions was too much for one heart to bear. Could anyone else see this? My snot ran like honey.
“Earth to Angela.”
“Hi, Paul.”
“Something is clearly bothering you.”
“I’m fine.”
“Is the bin too heavy?”
“It’s nothing.”
“How come I don’t believe you?”
My mind stalled when I imagined explaining to Paul the cause for my weeping. Where would I begin—with the voice, the parties, the Israelites? I would have to go back further and explain who it was that had promised the Israelites anything at all, giving them a sense of conviction, bringing into our conversation long-standing religious and archeological debates that I knew nothing about. Around a certain kind of person who works in the technology sector, it’s taboo to allude to things that might counter the laws of physics. And it’s a bad idea to tell someone who holds you in high esteem that you have heard a voice. It’s the quickest way to get disqualified from their esteem. I evaluated the pros and cons of confiding in Paul and decided it was safer to act it out.
I held up my two index fingers to symbolize the two Israelites. I marched them from left to right to indicate the path they were on. My palms opened and closed to suggest a book. I jerked my hips around and rocked sideways to refer to my parties, the dancing he was familiar with. I pointed to myself, by which I meant Me. I held up one pointer finger, by which I meant Alone. I pretended to be asleep and dreaming. I frowned because in this dream I was sad. Then I smiled, remembering all the reasons to be happy. I looked past the heavens and wore an expression on my face like it was the moment before my death, and I was glancing back on my life, and it had been a full life, a rich life, a life of blissful aloneness but with the knowledge that, even in my solitude, I was everywhere surrounded by others.
I made a circle with the thumb and pointer finger of one hand. The circle symbolized all the people in the world, everyone I had known and everyone I had yet to meet and everyone whom I would never meet because there are not enough minutes in a lifetime to meet even half those people. But I included them in the circle anyway. I jabbed my other pointer in and out of the circle many times. I thrust my pointer repeatedly for emphasis.
Opting Out, my fingers screamed to Paul. I’m Opting Out.
As I relayed my life’s dream, Paul gave me a quizzical look that melted into a look of recognition. He nodded knowingly. His eyebrows bounced up and down, perkier than I’d ever noticed before. He shot me a snarling, devious grin, and a true understanding formed between us.
In typical Paul fashion, he told me the tasks I needed to do in the order that I needed to do them.
“Find a man. Marry him.”
My eyes widened at the suggestion. It was like when your brain has been speaking another language, and it doesn’t remember how to switch back. My brain had been speaking charades. I squinted at Paul in case there was a second meaning behind his message, in case the man he referred to was himself. But no. That possibility was not in his eyes. He was a man with a mission, and I was a woman with a plan. My eyebrows raised a logistical question. But how do I do that?
Paul pondered.
“Go to the YMCA. Get a membership. Play a team sport so you can meet other people. Basketball? Find a man. Et cetera.”
I stared at him with astonishment. It was clear he had a point. Even more than with friends, I could choose to be alone with a partner. There would always be a person whose company I could opt out of, and even more so if we had a child or two. Children always needed you, even if just to make sense of their existence, so in a sense, you were never alone, even when you were. This was my new plan, the Grand Plan. The voice had spoken again, but this time it spoke through Paul.
◆
People assume that because the YMCA is not part of a league, pick-up games must be amicable and low stakes. They could not be more wrong. Since today’s men are encouraged to tamp down their competitive drive in public, the basketball court is one of the few bastions of unapologetic competition. As a result, the competition on our court was threefold. The first fold was the competitive nature of the sport itself. The second fold was the added competitiveness from all other areas of life, such as work. It took me a while to notice the third fold, but then it dawned on me. There was another woman on the team, and the men, the single ones, were competing for us. We were playing two games at once: basketball and survival of the sexual fittest.
With all Paul had going on at work and all I had going on with my Grand Plan, it was easier to continue miming from our front steps instead of talking. He made the Opting Out motion to ask me how it was going. I shrugged, signaling to him it was tricky, no luck so far. I signaled to him there were so many hot, buff men to choose from but that some of them were married or uninterested in women, so really there were only four. I tapped the tips of my two index fingers together to show that the other woman had paired up with one of the men, so there were technically only three. Paul looked sympathetic. I used the signal for the two Israelites to ask how it was going at work with Marie. Paul shook his head in dismay. Things were not going well, the world was imperfect, the journey to the promised land was long.
Brock flirted with me first. This wasn’t the first time a giraffe-sized man was drawn to me instinctually. The flame ignited during a huddle. Brock said the play was to pass the ball to me. His exact words were, “Angela, get open.”
“I’m available,” I told him, with a twinkle in my eye.
I had shown the team that I made up for being short by being fast and efficient, and my l’ups were evidence of that. The connection wasn’t perfect, but what relationship is? Brock never had to jump to snag the rebound. He would chuck the ball down the court and by the time it bounced, I was there to scoop it up for the l’up. On the court, it was hard to ignore the idea that our bodies were made for each other. Our play felt more like a dance, which came to feel more like a mating ritual. We gave each other intercourse at the Y and at my place. I really mean that we gave it to each other. At my house, he wanted to compare our body parts. “Give me your hand,” he said.
I held my hand up to his.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
“Jens! Don’t worry about him.”
In the locker room of the Y, he said, “give me your ear,” and I tucked my hair back and stuck my lobe out for him to inspect.
“Woah, my face is like twice the size of your face.”
After anal, he remarked that it was like threading a needle. I hadn’t expected him to know about sewing. It put all our failed attempts into perspective. Just getting the thread through was half the pleasure. But where to go from there? Were we making something or mending it? It seemed I got to decide what happened next, me, the needle. While being objectified was not my first choice, I considered it a fair trade.
What I gave to Brock anatomically, he returned spiritually. With Brock, it was easy to close my eyes and imagine that it was I who knelt behind me between my own legs. It was just me and my flesh. Me by myself, alone but not. I was playing pick-up games three times a week, and the nights that Brock came over, we fell into a smooth routine. He rummaged through my closet and chose clothing for me, and we pretended he was dressing me up as a doll. Then I’d say, “pass the earplugs and blindfold.”
When I didn’t feel like wearing a blindfold, Brock offered to wear one of my tank tops, always thereby ripping it, but it helped. Riding him, I entered myself. I became one with myself. I went so deep inside me that I went beyond me. I imagined a land of milk and Oreos, where the desert finally ended and there stood everyone who had ever gone in search of anything. We were all parched. No one could say a word. We smiled wearily at one another in disbelief at what we had been through. Paul and Marie were there, patting each other on the back. They turned to look behind at the road they had traveled, all the decisions they had made together, all the fights they had endured. And for what? The everlasting book of everything. Where was the book? It lay open beneath a tree as though someone in the middle of reading it was only gone for a moment. As though it had been there all along with no intention of going anywhere. We needn’t have rushed. It was all there, all the documents collected and organized in one place, all the things you could ever want to know. I closed my palms and rested my cheek against them to signal to Paul that I was going to lay down now. I walked past two large rocks like I was walking through a bathroom doorway on the other side of which was everyone I had ever met in my life. At any moment, I could open the door and begin a conversation with any one of them. We could chat about what it was like to have a body, to be blown on by the wind, or I could stand alone so still as to feel the blood pass through my veins. I could cry for as long as I wanted, as loud as I wanted. When I heard laughter on the other side, I could rejoin the group. I knew I wouldn’t have to leave myself until I was ready, until I had experienced the longing and contentment fully. I listened to the laughter on the other side of the door. I pictured all the bellies laughing. I’m ready, I told them. I’m coming.
◆
Paul bought me a pair of basketball sneakers the day after Brock ended things. Brock said he had a wife. He said his wife had been going through a tough time at work and he had felt abandoned and bored and restless. He said it was a rash decision. I said it happened more than once. He said anyway, it was wrong. He said they were getting divorced now, that it was better for him to focus his energies there, that he had a lot to gain from the settlement, not to mention custody over his daughter. Each fact from Brock’s life was like a free throw I was missing. It hurts even when you don’t think you like the person that much. When a relationship ends, part of you becomes a corpse—but worse, because you start to believe that corpses can rise from the dead.
Paul dribbled an invisible basketball and pointed at the shoes. I could still play, he was saying, that part of me didn’t have to die. But I pretended to misunderstand him because the thought of playing made me forget to breathe. I bowed, thanking him for the shoes. They looked nice on my feet. I marveled at them as they took their first trip around the block. They carried my legs forth the way the game of basketball had carried my life forth in the last half year, without thought, as pure movement. Basketball was like riding a bike, which was like walking, which was like breathing. When I looked up from my feet, I was at the Y.
After several months, I gathered the courage to throw another party. The invitations had long since dried up, but when Paul told me that he and Marie were getting along and that their work was being funded by a prestigious national grant, I was imbued with hope. I revived both my plan and my Grand Plan. I set out the chips and dip. I arranged the baby carrots and red pepper. I microwaved the beans out of the can. I even invited some friends from the team; not all of them, but some. They brought friends of theirs, who brought friends of theirs. Paul, speaking, introduced me to Marie, who was incredibly tall, and Marie’s daughter, a bald infant, whose rattle had a little basketball on top. Can you blame me for almost asking if Marie played? I didn’t, in the end, because it was Marie who brought it up.
She complimented my beans, and I said, “Why, thank you.”
Then she complimented my basketball sneakers and asked, “Do you play?” And I said, “Why, thank you. I did play. I do play.”
Then she placed a hand on my forearm and said, “Angela, that’s so funny, my ex-husband plays basketball. He’s right over there.”
When I looked to where she was pointing, it all happened out of habit. I entered my body, and I was standing behind myself. Marie was laughing, and I laughed because she was laughing, and then I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I settled my plate of snacks beside the sink and closed the door. My fingers brushed Jens’ face. Brock had replaced the bulb, but I left the lights off. I folded myself into the tub and rested my eyes. The chatter from the other side of the door drifted between my ears. A whole neighborhood full of chatter. A whole YMCA full of chatter. All those teeth nibbling baby carrots. I pretended it was my funeral. I felt the warmth of everybody there, but it was so nice to be alone now, for it had been a full life. It had been a rich life.