It Occurs to Me That I Am America Read online

  “And what about Susan?” asks Rebecca Darrow, who appears suddenly at her side. Eleanor knows Rebecca slightly from the kids’ camp. Her husband recently sold his software development business in Texas and they bought a huge house on the North Shore, the one part of the island that isn’t eroding at an alarming pace. She’s been pursuing Eleanor to get together all summer, since, as Rebecca said, they’re both the new kids in town. But Eleanor suspects that her friendly faux-country Texan twang masks some bald social ambitions, and so far she’s steered clear.

  “First the hurricane warning, then Kennedy. Alden must have known how close he was to dying. She’s probably been debating all week.”

  “About canceling the party?” Eleanor asks, thinking that would be an extreme response.

  “No, not canceling it, wondering whether he”—Rebecca nods to an empty space in the middle of the room—“is coming or not.”

  It seems pretty obvious to Eleanor that he isn’t. There’s no evidence of Secret Service that she can see. No checkpoints or nondescript men in their khaki pants and Ray-Bans. The white van in the driveway belongs to one of Lauren’s workers, for all Eleanor knows. She doesn’t point this out. Rebecca’s open speculation about the Obamas’ attendance strikes her as unseemly. There’s a certain protocol against naming the no-show elephant in the room, a reflexive face-saving, wiping-clean-of-the-memory-banks denial that one cares.

  Eleanor, for example, is busily trying to forget the fact that she was dropping hints to Daniel all day, trying—unsuccessfully—to engage him in a speculation about will they or won’t they show; that she got dressed imagining herself talking to Michelle in this outfit or that one (it isn’t him that she wants to impress; it’s her); that her heart dropped on the absence of security checkpoints when they pulled into the dirt road; that she looked for Lauren when they first arrived since her friend probably knew by now whether or not the first couple was expected.

  When she poked her head inside the kitchen to say hello, Lauren was standing hunched behind the kitchen island, rapidly arranging sunflower petals and bright red chili peppers around trays of miniature lobster rolls, while simultaneously giving her staff crisp, concise directions to fetch this and plate that. Eleanor stood for a moment appreciating the complex choreography of Lauren and the fresh-faced young women who worked for her as they moved about the kitchen. They looked like one synchronized body.

  “Everything looks beautiful, Lauren,” Eleanor called, and her friend looked up. She looked beautiful too, with her bushy blond hair twisted on top of her head, a black-eyed Susan tucked into the bun, with that chunky wampum necklace that somehow looked modern and chic on her. Lauren smiled wryly and they exchanged a loaded glance—there was already so much to tell each other. But it would have to wait. Lauren shooed her out of the kitchen back to the party.

  It’s possible, Eleanor tells herself, that at a small private party like this, the security would be much lighter than at a fundraiser where anyone can buy their way inside. After all, everyone here is a personal friend of the Michaelses’ (although she and Daniel have never actually met them in person, Eleanor did chat at length with Susan about how wet the weather has been this summer when she called with the invitation). It would be offensive to subject them to having to get out of their cars, the whole dog-and-wand business. She tries to read the current in the room.

  There is undeniably a vibration, a buzz of expectation, a feeling of a thirst that is building up and will need to be quenched in some way. Eleanor looks around, wondering who she could ask, who would know. She doesn’t want to appear overly invested like Rebecca. She doesn’t want to seem as if she cares more than anyone else does. At the homeless shelter where Eleanor spends many hours each week doing everything from calling potential donors in her role as the president of the board to sanitizing the toys in the intake center when they look particularly grimy, she once overheard a night manager describe her as a “junkie for significance.” She’s one of those people who is desperate to matter, the woman told another employee who had asked why Eleanor spent so much time there. It was all Eleanor could do not to have the woman fired.

  Eleanor’s mind keeps wandering in conversation. She wishes she could retreat to the kitchen and have Lauren put her to work. Even Daniel, who has the admirable talent of being able to focus exclusively on the person to whom he is talking, appears distracted, glancing up from his conversation and looking around.

  He is standing with a few men on the far end of the deck closest to the ocean. They look to Eleanor like captains standing on the bow of a ship, plotting its course. Like the captains of industry they are.

  • • •

  The sound of sirens rises over the hill; it grows louder and louder. Eleanor and the group she is chatting with—they all turn their heads at the same time toward the noise. It seems to be coming from the ocean, rippling across the pond to rise above the pasture.

  Eleanor notices that the sheep are gone now, driven back to the barn for the night. There is a collective pause, as the partygoers listen, trying to decipher more exactly which direction these sirens are traveling and the number of them, the degree of alarm they should be feeling.

  It continues—a seemingly endless line of patrol cars or fire trucks, and for a moment the conversation turns to mention of other stories of accidents that summer. There’ve been at least three or four articles in the Vineyard Gazette about people drowning, moped riders hit and killed, drunk driving accidents.

  Husbands and wives seek out each other’s gazes. They perform a quick mental inventory of the kids’ whereabouts and the likelihood that they could be involved. Eleanor catches eyes with Daniel, who is back in line at the bar. Thomas and Justine are at the other end of the island, eating at the Thai restaurant in Oak Bluffs with the nanny, Ruby. A current of relief passes between them.

  Eleanor’s thoughts turn to Ted Kennedy when he was a young senator leaving that party on Chappaquiddick so many years ago. There were no sirens for poor Mary Jo Kopechne trapped in the car under the bridge. How is her family feeling today? Does his death give them a moment of peace?

  Among the partygoers, a face or two brightens: maybe Obama is coming after all, accompanied by a full siren escort. No, the motorcade doesn’t normally travel with sirens on. Do those black Secret Service SUVs even have sirens? Eleanor didn’t think so.

  Just that morning, Ruby and the kids encountered the motorcade leaving the entrance of the farm where the Obamas were staying. Through the open rear window of the last SUV in the line, they spied men dressed like ninjas (this was Thomas’s description) carrying machine guns. Ruby reported back that Thomas kept asking why someone would want to kill Barack Obama. After Ruby tried to explain that any president needs a lot of protection, Justine interjected that people wanted to kill Obama because he was black. “I just thought you should know,” Ruby said. Eleanor simply nodded. Justine was right.

  What if something terrible happened? The proximity of the party to the sea brings to Eleanor’s mind visions of young Arabic-looking men in black wetsuits crawling out of the water under the cover of darkness with shoulder-fired rockets. She shakes her head, trying to dislodge these disturbingly racist visions, and realizes that the image itself comes straight from one of Daniel’s movies.

  Daniel steps onto the deck, holding a glass of wine. Number two already. This might be a three-glass night. To him, she can mention the unmentionable. “You don’t think . . . ?”

  He shakes his head, dismissing the idea.

  “Maybe it’s a fire,” she says.

  He shrugs. “It’s been such a wet summer. More likely an accident.”

  The sound finally fades and the group standing with Eleanor returns to their prior conversation. Should he or shouldn’t he mention the health care plan in his memorial speech for Kennedy?

  “No,” opines a fast-talking redheaded white woman who introduces herself as an education consultant. “It’s not his style to turn this into a political opportu
nity, and that’s right.”

  “But,” counters the black circuit court judge from New York, a Bush Sr. appointee, “Ted Kennedy lived and breathed for the health care plan. It was the thing he cared about the most. He’d want Obama to make hay of it. Hell, he would.”

  Eleanor tries to jump in about the importance of holding on to the single-payer vision, but the conversation moves on to who would take Kennedy’s Senate seat. Would it be nephew Joe or son Ted? But aren’t Americans getting tired of these political family dynasties? Maybe Mike Dukakis. His name has been popping up recently in the press. And then there’s Massachusetts attorney general Martha Somebody who apparently wants the job. A petite muscled brunette who ran a legal aid organization in Boston lays out the arguments for and against each of them. No one else has much of an opinion. The judge wanders inside to find his wife.

  When the brunette pauses her mini-lecture to greet someone, the redhead takes the opportunity to whisper her husband’s name in Eleanor’s ear. Eleanor nods and makes appropriate expressions of being impressed, but she has no idea who the man is. A little while later, Eleanor catches the redhead whispering to the brunette and wonders if it is Daniel’s name on her lips this time. The redhead seems to have the background on every guest at the party.

  A young dark-haired woman of indeterminate origins wearing a very low-cut dress introduces herself as the wife of a prominent democratic fundraiser whose name they do all know. Eleanor remembers that she is a friend of Rebecca’s. This woman seems particularly knowledgeable about Obama’s social schedule: whom he called and didn’t call, who has been invited to play golf and out to dinner and over to the house. According to Rebecca’s friend, none of the high-end donors, except for one CEO who was tapped for a round of golf, are getting any face time.

  “I know someone who had dinner at their house just last night,” pipes up the brunette. This someone’s husband was part of Obama’s election finance committee, she explains.

  “Really?” says Rebecca. “Who? What’s their name?”

  “Keith, Kevin, somebody. She’s really more my friend’s friend. But I saw the wife this morning at the Farmer’s Market and she said that they couldn’t have been nicer and that they each drank two martinis before dinner!”

  “Impressive,” says Eleanor, liking Michelle even more.

  “Gin or vodka?” asks the indeterminate woman.

  “Are these people African American?” asks Rebecca. There is something in the way she says “African American” that Eleanor doesn’t like. Was it possible that Rebecca didn’t realize that Eleanor was African American too?

  “Well, yes,” says the brunette in a tone that suggests it didn’t matter.

  The indeterminate woman points at Rebecca. “I told you they’re only socializing with black people.”

  Eleanor can feel the redhead glancing at her. So she has the background on her racial identity too. The redhead smiles and Eleanor can see that she is looking forward to watching how Eleanor is going to respond, but Eleanor is going to disappoint her. She is not about to spend her time at this party playing the great Negro educatrix, explaining to the rest of them that if the Obamas were only socializing with black people why that might be the case. It’s too much fun watching the frustration of the indeterminate woman—who must be Greek or Spanish, something Mediterranean, since it’s clear she’s definitely not black—about her inability to penetrate the Obamas’ inner circle. Now you know what it feels like, Eleanor thinks.

  • • •

  On her third glass of wine, Eleanor wanders from conversation to conversation. She feels a familiar kind of moroseness settling in, from being a little too drunk in a beautiful place in the high, pure light of almost evening and not having a better time. It feels like a failure of imagination on her part, or of wit or charm.

  She’s been looking forward to this party since she received Susan’s call. She took the invite as an omen of the new direction of activism that her life has been taking since Obama entered office. She imagined that these would be her people—knowledgeable, effective, and committed. No one questioned whether they had a right to involve themselves in a political issue or examined their motives. They are all of them junkies for significance, because isn’t that what everyone should aspire to be, especially those of them with the ability to make a difference?

  But every conversation Eleanor begins—about the health care bill or the rising foreclosure rate, about the record number of families on the street because of the housing crisis and the extreme weather and temperatures making their lives even harder—circles back to public perceptions, spheres of influence, and political calculations. No one speaks of ideals or values, of hope and change. No wonder Obama wants to keep these people at bay. How can he hold on to all that good faith he garnered in the face of so much pragmatism and positioning?

  And yet as her mood darkens further, she begins to wonder if maybe they are right and Obama and Eleanor are wrong. What made him think—and convince everyone else—that he can possibly translate hope into action? What made him believe that he can “reinvent government” and get everyone to look past his or her own self-interest to finally live up to the promise of the country’s ideals? It’s hubris and grandiosity to think that so much entrenched power, so much systemic inequality and discrimination, could be upended by one historic election.

  Daniel posited on one of their morning beach walks that all the talk of hope and change was whitewash. Obama needed to do that to get elected. “But I’m sure most people in their heart of hearts didn’t really believe that he would be any more impervious to the machinations of politics than anyone else. What I felt was that I could trust him. I could trust his integrity, that he is a good and fair man. You get a sense of it, from the way his mind seems to work, from the quality of his hunches, the way he interacts in public with Michelle and his kids. And, most important, maybe, often enough he seems to make the right decision, the same one that I might have made if I were in his shoes.” Daniel laughed at the absurdity of that. “Assuming, of course, I was a much better person than I actually am.”

  Yes, yes, Eleanor agreed, but wasn’t the extreme reliability of Obama’s integrity part of the problem? She presented an analogy: it’s as if we are all passengers in a bus that he is driving, and we have so much confidence in his skill behind the wheel and sense of direction that no matter how lost we become or how bad the road conditions are or the number of reckless drivers out there, none of us passengers will pay one bit of attention to what is happening right outside our window. “But there are people dying out there. There are children who are living under terrible conditions, right here in the United States,” Eleanor said, planting her feet firmly in the sand. “By electing someone so trustworthy, we’ve stopped paying attention. We’re forgetting our own moral imperatives.”

  Daniel looked confused. “Wait, where is the bus headed?”

  “Forget the bus,” Eleanor said on the edge of tears. She tried to explain about her feeling of being so stupidly naïve, so hopelessly idealist. But if she doesn’t believe that these problems can be solved, how can she muster the energy to care about them? It was like all those people who made a living writing screenplays knowing that while their movies might be optioned or bought, they would never get made. She couldn’t do it. And if no one cared about these problems, then they would all be resigning themselves to an existence ruled by self-interest.

  “But isn’t your desire to make a difference a little self-interested?” Daniel asked gently.

  “So you think I’m a junkie for significance, too?”

  “I’m saying that we all fall short of our ideals; it’s part of our American legacy. But that doesn’t mean we should stop caring and trying.”

  Standing in the Michaelses’ living room by the bay window looking out upon the breathtaking vista, surrounded by a small handful of the most powerful people in the country, Eleanor feels taunted by her own lack of faith. Is there nothing that she can believe in? S
he listens with growing rage to the judge and the brunette legal aid woman playing the name game in the Boston Attorney General’s Office. Did he ever work with this one? She knows that one who clerked under him.

  Maybe Lauren has the right idea. Just make your small corner of the world a little better every day. That’s why she and Mitch chose to forget their career plans and raise their three boys on the island, where people will attack each other at a town meeting over something as petty as someone’s fence being a foot over a property line and then hand over their last dollar the minute someone is sick or her house catches on fire. There was the feeling that all of them were in this together, for better or worse. As Lauren liked to say, no man (or woman) is an island, entire of itself, especially on an island. Eleanor couldn’t say the same about her life in Los Angeles, where her friends, while generous and civic-minded, had little to do with people outside their immediate circle.

  Eleanor puts her hand to her purse. Her evening bag is vibrating. She pulls out her cell phone, grateful for the interruption. It’s the local exchange. After the call goes to voice mail, she sees that this is the second call that she has missed from this number. She steps outside onto the deck and returns the call. “This is Eleanor Temple,” she says, hoping whoever it was can’t hear the faint slosh of wine in her voice. “I just missed—”

  “Eleanor, it’s Mitch.”

  She puts a finger to her ear. “I’m sorry, who?”

  “Mitch. It’s Mitch. Lauren’s husband?”

  “Mitch, hey. What’s up?”

  “I got your cell from the fridge. I mean the number is written on the fridge.”

  The people next to her burst into laughter at something Alden has said. Eleanor glances over; she hasn’t had a chance to talk to him or Susan yet.