The social contract of care

What speaking for the Phoenix Mercury diminishes and remembering how to make yourself big.

October’s always this internal fight of wanting to be as close as possible to the people I love most and burrowing inside of myself for the month. I’m not sure I ever get the balance right.

I pulled myself out of a three day writing hole deadline to bike down and meet Steph for a coffee, the day turning violently bright and dark in three to five minute intervals the way it does here in the fall. The light hard gold, direct, an X-ray right down to what you’re trying not to think about. There’s one hill I can ride down for blocks in a straight shot south and at the top of it, on clear days, the lake at the bottom stretching out to New York is always a surprise.

I hopped the curb to lock my bike right in front of where she was pulling her car in to park, neither of us noticing at first, but not saying anything about how kind of impossible that was until later for how regular it seemed right then.

The temperature was shifting with the sun, dropping with a lurch our bodies immediately tensed to when the clouds piled in, relaxed our shoulders for when they cleared out. I was vibrating cagey, the kind of frequency Steph, after 21 years, can pick up on like conversation. After circling the blocks and each other for an hour we made it back to sit across from where we’d met, so we could be in the sun, and to the soundtrack of a woman playing surrealist covers of classic rock songs on an electric keyboard on the sidewalk a few paces away we, or mostly I, warmed up enough to realize I was out now, not in, and started acting like it.

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They should’ve done the postgame.

The thing about the media requirements that WNBA and NBA players have, of being available either before or after a game, is that as much as it’s “required”, it’s more of a social contract. The same social contract that keeps you answering, in varying degrees of the truth for how close and honest the relationship, how you’re doing when you’re asked. The same one that encourages you to be on time, to the best of your own personal ability. The same one that, if a stranger asks you for help on the street, for the time or directions, you feel compelled to help to the best of your ability.

You don’t have to do any of that. You can ignore the inquiry, be late or not show up at all, say you don’t have a watch or a phone, say you’re not sure or aren’t from here. What happens to you if you don’t? Nothing. What happens to person on the other end of the ask? Maybe they think you’re having a bad one, maybe their opinion of you changes, maybe they’re late or get lost or never arrive to the place they were going to fulfil their own social contract with somebody else.

But the thing about declining, like the Mercury not doing the postgame, is you take the best interests of someone else into your own hands, even if you’re not thinking about their interests, or them, at all. You forfeit the social contract of care.

Did Diana Taurasi, or Brittney Griner, or Sophie Cunningham care about the media who might be waiting on the other side of the locker room door (locker rooms which, if you didn’t know, media can’t go into this season for the WNBA or the NBA)? No one but them can answer that. But did they think about them, just then? No.

It isn’t that not getting a quote from Taurasi or any Mercury player, kept media from doing their jobs after the game, it was anomaly enough that I’m sure they all made due, but without hearing from the players the story shifted.

The story was about the Mercury not doing media after losing a finals game, it was also about the Mercury not doing media after losing a finals game in one of the most popular WNBA seasons the league has had. It was about mental health, but that was because people started to speak for the players who weren’t speaking in a way that felt too quick and too close. It was about giving them a break, that it was a job and the job could come second, but what that was about, no matter how well-intentioned, is different expectations for the women’s and men’s game.

Can I imagine people saying the same thing if the Suns declined to do a postgame after losing Game 6? That no one would call into question Chris Paul’s leadership, or call Monty Williams too sensitive a coach, say Devin Booker still wasn’t ready for the spotlight, that the team was too young, too inexperienced, too uncomfortable with the bright lights and the moment? No, I literally cannot imagine it.

Look, we could’ve got a “both teams played hard” to every question, we could’ve got one word answers, what else is someone going to say when they get asked, like they would’ve got asked, how it felt to lose like that other than “it sucked”? So say it sucked, then leave.

But the social contract, in this case, has broader consequence because of the moment and the shitty sexist overtones the WNBA already pushes against and the fact that there is no voice that people are as comfortable co-opting or speaking over or on behalf of than a woman’s.

Do you know this was about mental health? Or work-life balance? Did Diana Taurasi call you and tell you why she punched a hole in a door? Then dude, I don’t know what to tell you, but don’t tell me anything.

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Walking the dogs quick, before an interview I’d been trying to get for weeks, and when we got to the top of the park there was a cluster of high school kids coming toward us on the sidewalk and the other side, a mud puddle. The dogs didn’t care, they’d be happy to walk through it. But I stood in place, momentarily frozen.

They passed close, a kid at the end veering his shoulder as not to hit me with it. But still, after, I pushed at myself for not taking my half of the sidewalk and just walking. Where it fits, that’s the rule.

There are times when I feel I’ve diminished myself for people, by virtue of how I will bend to catch them with conversation, with accommodation, with whatever I can do to streamline, so that I feel my shoulders slouching farther and farther in as the time wears on of me doing it that when I realize it’s been happening I have to consciously roll them back, push them out and up, make myself big again. It feels like a caricature at first, for how I think it must look. 

I have small tokens when I need to will that reversal, that broadening. Everyone does. Little items of power. One is a silver ring, a braided horseshoe that takes up the top half of my finger, biker sized. Another is lipstick — but that’s sort of whatever with masks — the song ‘Gloria’ by Laura Branigan, ‘The Champ’ by Ghostface. These things are pep talks, incantations that conjure up a sterner ghost of yourself to stand behind you and massage your shoulders, knock you around the head a bit, send you back out there.

Most of the time I don’t need that stuff, and the reason that stuff works is you use it sparingly. Most of the time you’re underestimating yourself anyway and how much it actually takes to move through the world, make good or even decent of the days. But no one thinks of that when they need the boost, or thinks of all the other times they did the thing they’re scared of, or avoiding, or freezing up at, or didn’t contort themselves to accommodate, because the talismans are like break in case of emergency glass, reactive, decisive, a tangible thing to put on.