That steamy August morning, the Senate had released the 9/11 Commission Report, and as I walked the curved path that leads up to the White House after clearing the second security check, I could see dozens of press people standing in clumps outside the press room, their TV cameras and equipment weighing them down. Inside the White House, press aides greeted me and led me from one public anteroom to another in the progression that leads to the White House residence. They let me know the President was running a bit behind schedule for our interview because of the press conference, so I would first interview Mrs. Bush. This gave me plenty of time to go over all the careful prep work my brand-new team and I had done for this interview, and more time to get nervous and wonder why on earth I had come here by myself.
After a bit, I was ushered into the private White House elevator that leads to the residence—the top floor of the White House, the one with the big, arched window you can see from Pennsylvania Avenue—and then into the Green Room, a long room lined with bookshelves and furnished with gleaming wood furniture and toile-covered armchairs. Two recording secretaries were already seated. I said hello, pulled out my two portable tape recorders, and set them down on the coffee table next to their official transcript recording machines.
Mrs. Bush came in, dressed casually but with an air of relaxed formality. She led me over to the window, which seems small as you see it from the street, but which is actually at least twelve feet tall, and pointed down into the Rose Garden, where the President was speaking. Through the window’s wavy glass I could see the phalanx of reporters and cameramen. I wanted to ask the President some tough questions about why it was getting harder for families to make ends meet and make life work in America, and how he saw his role in helping relieve that pressure, but I was reminded by the scene unfolding below I was here for a casual chat as befit my publication, not a policy talk.
After a few minutes, Mrs. Bush and I sat down and started talking, first about her daughters (one of the twins, Barbara, was moving to New York City later that day) and her hopes for them, and then about her hopes for women in America and the world, because she had recently been to Afghanistan and met with women there.
Just then there was a stirring over by the elevator, and the President bounded into the room with a group of a dozen or so people around him. The deputy press secretary greeted him and talked directly into his ear for a minute, telling him my name, my affiliation, and what his wife and I had been talking about. Mrs. Bush said, “Hi, George,” and drifted over to the other side of the room, standing behind an easy chair as the President marched over to me, extended his hand, and said, in his easy cadence, “Hi, Stacy, howya doin’?” He plunked down right where Mrs. Bush had been a moment before.
The President’s minders spent most of the interview sitting back in their chairs, quietly chitchating with one another. But when I asked the President a question I’d asked Mrs. Bush—“What is the one thing you think people most misunderstand about you?”—the room woke up and sat forward, leaning in toward us. President Bush laughed and repeated my question. “What is the one thing I think people most misunderstand about me?” He paused, then said, laughing and grinning, “Just one?” He cast his eyes up to the ceiling. Mrs. Bush casually said, “You want to know what I said, George?” He started to turn toward her, but then he turned back toward me, and leaned forward as he said, with a strength and resolve in his voice that wouldn’t return for the rest of the interview: “That I long for peace.”
I felt it as he said it, and I thought, Point, Bush.
It was the highlight of the interview, the one moment that I felt I got to see George Bush as he really was, rather than the man who was saying what he was supposed to say. When I moved on to the questions I really wanted the answers to—questions concerning the ways in which women’s shifting roles have changed this country so dramatically in the last four decades, and the fact that the government and corporations haven’t helped in any meaningful way to address what those changes have meant for society and the American family—the President offered only platitudes and statistics I already knew very well myself.
As the interview drew to a close, President Bush ambled over to the console table where one of his aides was laying out documents for him to sign. As I started packing up my recorders and my notes, the press secretary came over to get my e-mail address so she could send me the Official White House Transcript of my interview, which, she informed me would be ready in less than an hour. President Bush, looking down as he signed the papers, said to me, “You look pretty young to me. How long you been running that magazine?”
I laughed. I was thirty-five, in fact, and not sure whether that was young or not young to be running a magazine.
I said, “Well, actually, just nine days, sir.”
President Bush looked up at me. “No foolin’?” he said, his voice turning up high at the end, like the voices of all the Texas boys I went to college with did when they found something amusing. He broke into a big smile and came around from behind the table, marching toward me, hand extended. “Well congratulations to you. What a start, huh? That’s just great.”
I nodded and laughed and shook his hand. And then he asked who, exactly, was Redbook for. I answered him—saying young women who are just starting to establish themselves as wives and mothers and workers and homeowners and more—and then added, “I’m doing my best to help couples stay married and get the divorce rate down.”
Oh, God! Now I was leaking in front of the President of the United States. I was making my problem bigger than my problem. I was making myself bigger than my problem. I was grandiosity in action. I was doing anything I could to get away from the feeling of being a small, scared girl in a life turned upside down.
But what I really was that second was embarrassed and suddenly deeply grateful that there wasn’t another Redbook staffer there to hear my strange statement. After the Official White House Photos were taken, I scooted out of there, still cursing myself for my slip, which, thankfully, hadn’t been recorded. My weakness would not make an appearance in the Official White House Transcript of that afternoon’s conversation.
By the time my cab pulled up at the airport curb, I was tightly wound with denial. All that was left for me to do with this day was to get home and open the door and walk into my almost-broken life and my kind-of-broken house, and figure out how to get through another day of this In Between without leaking. I tried to be strong and batten down the hatches, fearing that the leak would turn into a gushing torrent that I would simply disappear into.
But my house was continuing to leak. In the weeks after the White House interview, three more hurricanes ripped through the Northeast, and the force of the winds was helping water find new ways to come into our home. Leaks appeared in the third-floor guest room and in the second-floor hallway. At night, as the rains lashed our house, I’d lie in bed, awake and electric with attention, counting the seconds between lightning and thunder as a way to gauge whether the storm was moving on. Most nights, I’d get up and pace the house while Chris slept, checking all the sites where water was coming in, placing buckets and towels underneath the drips, opening the basement door and peering down the stairs. One storm passed with no water coming into the basement. I prayed that the flood had been a bizarre fluke, some backup in the sewer system that had unclogged itself. But I knew this wasn’t true from talking with the neighbors, some of whom had been born and raised on this street. Maryann, a feisty, nosy sixty-year-old with short silver hair, was one of them. She’d seen owners come and go in our house for the past ten years. It had stood empty for a long time, been boarded up and condemned by the city, and then discovered by a series of people who’d bought it, done a little bit of work, and then flipped the house. Maryann stopped me on the street after the first storm and asked if we’d taken in any water. Then she said the young couple we’d bought the house from had borrowed her Shop-Vac more than once to clean up after a flood, and they’d even borrowed it once after the
house had gone to contract with us. Maryann told me she’d seen Chris and me going in and out of the house, with Zack in his carrier. She told me she asked the husband if he’d fixed the flooding problem, and he’d said it wasn’t his problem anymore.
“I feel so bad for you, with a young kid like that and all,” she said. “I don’t know how they could do that to you.” I couldn’t know if Maryann was telling me the truth or not, but yes, I felt bad for me, too.
The second time the basement flooded, Chris and I were up for hours pushing the water toward the sump pump with a big push broom having given up on the Shop-Vac. The next morning, I went to work exhausted and devastated. How were we ever going to fix this problem? My mind could barely compute that someone would sell us a house with a “finished basement” knowing the house took in water in such a dramatic way. It made me sick. This had been our dream house, and now it was turning into a nightmare.
Chris and I had put every single penny we had into buying that place, and now we were going to have to sell it, but I would never be able to sell a flawed house and pretend it was fine. If we sold it as is, we’d lose a lot of money, but if we lost money on the house, then we would have nothing to divide.
I’d been running a sprint since I was twenty-one, thinking that saving money and gaining a foothold in a competitive career would make me feel that I’d found my safe place, and that I’d found a partner to share my life and grow old with. And now everything was going to be taken away from me. Balance sheet: zero.
As I walked onto the Redbook floor the morning after the second flood, I passed Janet’s office. I’d recently confided in her all that was happening with me, because I didn’t know how not to tell her: my looming breakup with Chris, our upcoming tenth wedding anniversary, the problems with my house. She looked up as I walked by and said, “How’d it go last night?”—referring to the storm. I broke down in the hallway, crying about the flood, about being exhausted, frightened, alone, worried about losing all our money, disbelieving that so much could go wrong at once. She got up and steered me into the privacy of my office, saying gently, “Let’s not do this out here.” I sat down on my sofa and sobbed. My home wasn’t my safe place. My marriage wasn’t my safe place. But work was still my safe place—in fact, my only safe place.
So after a few minutes of giving myself permission to wallow in all that was falling apart, I pulled it back together. I dove headfirst back into the comforting rhythm of meetings to attend, decisions to be made, story ideas to approve, photographs to edit, focusing on bringing my readers the best ideas of what life can be, to inspire in them optimism and comfort. This, in turn, comforted me as well. I have always believed in what I sell, and I sell only what I believe in. And so I spent those long, busy days at work making the magazine more honest and real as well as brighter and happier.
But even though the work was comforting, it was a lot of work. Every night, I was taking home a stack of manuscripts an inch or two thick, so I could read and edit every single word once, twice, three times or more before the issue was published. In addition, I needed to get up close and personal with the magazine’s budget, to be sure we were spending our money in the right places for the greatest impact.
I also had a coming-out party of sorts on the calendar: Redbook’s annual luncheon gala, a celebration of women and celebrities who have made an impact on the world with their charitable work. All the top executives from Hearst would be there. This year, Democratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry was slated to be the keynote speaker. This meant we’d have a full house, and it also meant we’d need twice as much security. Having our guests scanned with metal detectors as they arrived would add almost an hour to the tightly scheduled proceedings. An event of this size—350 guests, a cocktail hour, a luncheon and an awards ceremony with a keynote speaker—takes months to plan, and I’d come on board just seven weeks before the scheduled day. There were menus and décor to approve, and speeches to write: my own short speech and those that would introduce all the winners.
Making things a hair more complicated was the fact that the event was scheduled to take place the day after the wedding of one of my best friends—in Camden, Maine—in which I was supposed to be a bridesmaid.
Tina and I have been friends since we were roommates in college, and when I first moved to New York, she’d let me stay with her rent-free until I got settled and found my job at Mirabella. I lay awake every night in her living room for three months, yearning for my big New York life to start and staring out at the Empire State Building until its lights snapped off at midnight. Years later, Tina lent Chris and me the down payment for our first apartment. She was someone who, like me, had given her all and more to her career, logging insanely long hours on Wall Street as she launched an index for the Latin American emerging markets and later the Asian emerging markets. After leaving Wall Street and New York banking and moving to Boston in search of a more reasonable lifestyle (although she was also trying to make the Olympic rowing team at the time), she’d met what seemed to be her perfect match: she was a libertarian financial type who was a hard-core competitive rower; he was a conservative oil commodities broker who was a hard-core amateur sailor. It’s the kind of partnership you pray that you and your friends will find. And I’ve always believed that you have to show up for life; I couldn’t imagine not being at the wedding. There is always a way to figure out how to manage the fallout at the office.
Being in Camden, Maine, right before the Redbook luncheon meant making the hard last days running up to this event even harder. I would have to oversee and approve all the final details, edit and practice my speech after the speechwriter had handed it over, and edit and approve all the celebrity speeches, and do all this from a part of Maine known for being beautiful and remote—i.e., treasured specifically because it’s not electronically connected to the rest of the world.
Then there was the matter of Zack. I was torn about whether I should take my son: I wanted all my college friends to meet him; he was dazzlingly blond and outgoing and cute, just starting to speak, still refusing to walk because he could crawl like greased lightning. The last time I’d seen them was more than a year before, at another friend’s wedding, and I’d been hugely pregnant. I couldn’t imagine not taking Zack and showing him off; I couldn’t imagine being away from him.
But what I could imagine, quite clearly, was how miserable taking this trip would make Chris. He had never cared much for travel, while I love change and new places and not knowing exactly where I’m going. Since Zack had been born, though, Chris’s mild dislike of travel had turned into full-blown anxiety. Zack was a pretty good traveler, but of course he was still a baby, and so there were inevitably times where he couldn’t be entertained or wouldn’t be quiet or couldn’t fall asleep on a flight, and all three of us would emerge from the airplane after we landed throbbing with exhaustion and covered in smushed snack foods. To me, the mom, this is Just The Way It Is. Traveling with a toddler is hard, but you simply have to take it in stride, because the end result—visiting relatives, taking a vacation—is always worth making the journey. But traveling with both a toddler and someone who has scant ability to manage the realities of traveling with a toddler? That’s a fresh hell for sure.
So I suggested to Chris that he stay home with Zack, especially because I was going to have to fly back from Maine on Sunday, the day of the wedding, since I had a 6 a.m. call time for the event on Monday. Chris was torn; he’d known my friends from college for many years, and he wanted to show off Zack, too, as crazy in love with him as he was. Plus in trying to make our marriage work, he was trying to do things he knew were important to me—and neither Chris nor I ever got good at realizing that this was almost always a mistake for both of us, even after the weekend in the Hamptons. So we booked tickets, making arrangements for Chris and Zack to fly home Monday with my friend Eric and his partner, Dave, so there would be some extra hands to help Chris, and got ready for the hard, long trip.
Well, the
re’s long and hard, and then there’s epic. The trip to our wedding destination itself was fine: after a two-hour flight, we landed, got into our rental car, and drove two hours to where we were staying with the group of my college friends—a big house across the street from the main inn. But finalizing all the details surrounding the event was more intense than I could have imagined, and I was greatly hampered by the fact that my cell phone reception was very spotty and there wasn’t a phone in the guest house, so I couldn’t hook up my computer. I couldn’t rely on being able to get through to my office, and I couldn’t count on keeping the line while the conversation unfolded, either. The inn had an ancient fax machine, but it took almost an hour for the twenty-page document containing the luncheon’s “run of show”—a minute-by-minute breakdown of the event—to come through. I skipped most of the prewedding activities and spent the better part of the two days before the event seated at the long dining room table in the guest house, rewriting the speeches because the speechwriter’s drafts had come in way off the mark. I needed the words I said in my first public event to be exactly right, to capture the shift I was making in the magazine. Adding to my anxiety was the fact that it had been raining cats and dogs on and off the entire time we were in Maine, as hurricane rains swept the full length of the East Coast. I knew that the rains had already made their way through Brooklyn, and I couldn’t keep myself from worrying about what was happening in the basement at home. I’d let my mind touch on it, and then push it behind the sliding doors in my mind, keeping that empty space of calm in my mind’s eye. No point in thinking about that until you can do something about it later. Move on to What’s Next Now.
Falling Apart in One Piece Page 9