To Obama

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

  Tim is the last to enter the room. He’s a rounder version of Neil and Nick, bald on top, white tufts on the sides. He’s any guy you’d see at Home Depot. He’s the guy who would let you go ahead of him in line because you only have a few things. When he retires in a few years, Tim wants to stay right here in this house and in this beautiful part of the country. All the outdoors, all the activities. He’ll be able to do things during the workweek. No lines. This entire area has become jammed with people and money and huge houses. It was good for the asphalt business, though.

  Anyway, it’s time to deal with it. The fact of Tim’s vote and the pain it has caused. A family has to deal with it. America has to deal with it.

  Vicki pulls up a chair so she has a good view of everybody gathered together on the couches. They ordered a fish plate from the local deli—smoked salmon, cheese, crackers—which should be here soon.

  “You know, I felt it was a vote against our family,” Vicki starts, turning to Tim. It’s not the first time she’s uttered these words. “I was like, Who am I married to?”

  “I know there are people who voted in the sense of, like, trolling,” Neil offers, looking over at his dad. “ ‘The election is broken. Let’s break it further and vote for a reality TV star!’ ”

  “He was against everything that we are as a family,” Dani says, the pile-on continuing without interruption.

  “What upset me was that Trump didn’t upset you. He doesn’t upset you!”

  “He gave permission to people who were on the fence about being racist. He gave them the green light. You see now, like, holy shit, it’s still alive and kicking.”

  “That cynicism—Trump is such a cynical choice. And I don’t believe that you are cynical, Dad.”

  “He’s a con man. He conned America. Some people think that makes him a great businessman. He’s a con man and a bully. I think you’re smarter—I know you’re smarter.”

  Tim has his arms folded tight, his gazed fixed on a spot on the carpet.

  “I realize I’m the bad guy here,” he says. “But somehow this has got to stop.”

  * * *

  —

  Nick would like to take a moment to address a related topic. He would like to offer an image of the hell that was his and Dani’s house on Election Night.

  “Dani’s mom was staying with us, and those two got in a big argument,” Nick says.

  “Huge argument,” Dani says. She is happy to tell the story, as many times as necessary if it will help her…deal. “So we’re watching TV,” she says, “and my mom comes into the room. My dad’s there too. And I’m like, ‘I can’t believe this asshole won.’ And she’s like, ‘Well, we voted for him.’

  “And I just went, ‘What?!’ ”

  She takes a gulp of air, slides forward on the couch as if needing the proper position from which to gather and emit a high volume of hot steam. Isla, for her part, does not stir. Isla appears prepared to snooze on through her mother in revved-up mode.

  “Because up until that point, it was all about this family,” Dani goes on. She talks fast, a patter that draws people in. “This entire time I was like, I still can’t believe Nick’s dad voted for Trump. His entire family is what Trump’s trying to fight. So for my parents to tell me that they had voted for him, to me it was like, What are you doing? He doesn’t want us here! My brother’s not a citizen yet. When he was younger, he got in some trouble with an ex-girlfriend. So I’m telling my mom, ‘Do you realize that the president you voted into the White House is probably going to want to deport your son?’ I could see the lightbulb going on in her head. I was like, ‘This guy’s going to deport your son!’ And she said, ‘Well, I never thought of it that way.’ Well, what do you think he’s been up to this entire time? Two years we’ve been hearing Mexican people are rapists. We’re criminals. We’re drug dealers. We’re everything. What do you think he’s going to do? And she’s like, ‘I just thought he was a good businessman.’ And I’m like, ‘Please elaborate.’ I just went, like—I couldn’t believe it. Even my dad was like, ‘Should we leave?’ Even Nick was like, ‘You need to go easy.’ ”

  “It was pretty rough,” Nick says.

  “I worry about my brother constantly,” Dani goes on. “I’m always telling him, ‘You need to have a backup plan.’ Go to Canada or Belgium. And now when my mom talks to me about politics, like, ‘Did you see what Trump said or what he did?’ I’m like, ‘Don’t even talk to me about it. You have no right to talk shit about him; it’s your fault. People like you who are uneducated about the candidates basically made this asshole president.’ ”

  “It’s still pretty rough,” Nick says.

  * * *

  —

  The doorbell rings. It’s the guy with the fish. Everybody gets a break, bags opening, plates clanking. Vicki fixes the spread so it looks pretty, the lemon-pepper-smoked fillets fanning down the sides, candy-smoked and alder-smoked in the middle, a ring of rosemary and sesame crackers around the edge.

  On the far wall in the living room, off in a corner, inside a frame, hangs the letter Vicki got back from Obama in response to the note she wrote to him on the morning after the election. “Remember that although politics can significantly affect our lives,” reads the letter, typed on White House stationery, “our success has always been rooted in the willingness of our people to look out for one another and help each other through tough times—rain or shine.”

  “To get a personal response,” Vicki says. “I felt light. I felt heard. It made me feel: There’s still goodness out there. That he made it a part of his day. That there was a place for me…”

  This in contrast to the way her husband made her feel in the aftermath of the election, a point lost on no one.

  “A former president writing a letter, though,” Tim says, motioning toward it. “He’s acting like I don’t even live here. It makes it a little tough.”

  Vicki shoots him a warning glance: Leave Barack out of this.

  This has nothing to do with Barack. This is about Trump.

  “You can’t have a conversation about the presidential race without including the people who were in it,” Tim announces firmly. “You can’t have that conversation with me without acknowledging the fact of who he was running against.”

  This is not about Trump. This is about Hillary.

  “Well, I’m pro-Hillary,” Neil says, “which I think is not a common stance in this room.”

  Definitely not a common stance in the room. Both Nick and Dani voted for Hillary reluctantly, and Vicki, who determined that neither candidate was worthy, did not vote at all. She knows her decision not to go to the polls makes her voice weak. Everybody knows it, but nobody, not even Tim—who could certainly use some firepower—brings it up. Respect your mother is the subtext in this house.

  “I’m so done with the Democratic Party,” Tim says. “I should have been more vocal about that. The reason I voted the way I did was to stop somebody else. It was a protest against the Democratic candidate. That’s what it was—that’s exactly what it was.”

  Tim thinks that should be the end of it. What more is there to say? A protest vote. Can’t that be the end of it? Why is everyone still so upset about this? Another person might storm off. You people are being ridiculous. I said my piece. Deal with it.

  “Do you think if we had been a swing state,” Nick asks his dad, “you’d have thought about it differently?” If this were Ohio, or Florida, or Pennsylvania, surely his dad would have voted more…responsibly.

  “No,” Tim says. “Not with Hillary Clinton. I thought her story was way outdated, and she doesn’t represent—she only represents herself.”

  “But so does Trump,” Dani says.

  “Both of them are exactly the same in that respect to me,” Tim says.

  “That’s really fascinating,” Neil says. “So like—her exp
erience doing that job, being a politician, doesn’t count for anything?”

  “It was a direction I didn’t want to go in,” Tim says. “It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re going the wrong way.”

  “Trump’s complete lack of experience—did that also not count?” Neil asks him.

  “The only requirement is to be a citizen in this country,” Tim says. “I disagree that career politicians mean that they’re more qualified to represent me.”

  “I’m just trying to understand,” Neil says. “So Trump’s plan for the country was the better plan?”

  “I felt that he would be pretty irrelevant,” Tim says. “But not more of the same; I was not interested in more of the same.”

  “So it’s like you’re driving your car,” Neil says, leaning to the edge of the couch. His arms bounce up and down as he offers this metaphor, one, two, three: Get this straight. This is what you’re saying, Dad. “You’re driving your car, and you see that you’re almost out of gas, so you crash your car into the wall and say, ‘Well, now I don’t need to get gas because I stopped!’ ”

  “I’m sorry this upsets you at the level that it does,” his father replies.

  “I think about when Mount St. Helens blew up,” Vicki says.

  Isla awakens, kicks her legs out.

  “Does anybody want more fish?” Nobody wants any more fish.

  Perhaps Tim just needs to apologize, admit he made a horrible mistake. Because here’s Vicki mad, and Neil working overtime on a metaphor, and Nick throwing out lifelines, and Dani offended. How do you clean this up? Perhaps independent voters across America just need to apologize, whether they think they did anything wrong or not.

  Isla clamps her fist around her mother’s thumb, pulls it back and forth. Dani jiggles her knee—“Whee!”—while the others look on.

  “The thing that’s interesting to me is our current state of politics is absolutely against the sense of community,” Tim says. “It’s separated all things right and left.”

  “Voting for someone doesn’t equal all our problems getting solved,” Neil offers. “We start at the wrong end. Even if Sanders had been elected, that’s just getting one person in power.”

  It’s one thing, besides Isla, that everyone in the room can agree on. You need a starting point. “My analogy has been we have this big ship, and it has this really small rudder,” Tim says. “Turn it all the way one way, it’s just going to move a little bit. The presidency only has a certain amount of power.”

  “I do believe that if Hillary was in power right now and she were involved with the Russians, that it would be ten times the clamor,” Neil says.

  “She would be out on her ass right now,” Dani says. “She would be impeached already.”

  “So the waste of time would’ve been comparable,” Neil says.

  Everyone’s trying to make this be okay. Trump is a waste of time. Hillary would have been a waste of time.

  Maybe?

  “What did Barack say to you?” Tim says to Vicki, motioning again toward the letter. “It’s going to be all right. He believes it; I believe it too. Democracy is messy. It’s loud.”

  Maybe.

  “What about the Access Hollywood tapes?” Vicki says. It’s the one thing she’ll never get past. “What did you think when you heard that statement?” she asks Tim. “When he said that about women?”

  “To hear he’s got those kind of standards didn’t surprise me a bit,” he says.

  “But what he said against women,” Vicki repeats. “It upset me so much.” Does that not matter to him?

  “This is a really bad thing to say out loud,” Tim says. “But there’s a certain kind of language some people on the East Coast have. They seem to be— Howard Stern is really welcome there. It’s more typical and more common in New York than it is out here. Their culture’s different. I never gave it much thought.”

  “I just know how much you respect women and how polite you are,” Vicki says. “And I would have thought that that would have offended you.”

  “It most certainly did,” Tim says. “The guy’s a pig.”

  This declaration seems to break much of the tension in the room.

  “Remember we had the Women’s March on TV?” Vicki says as if to verify the fact that Tim thinks Trump is a pig. “I saw one sign that I would have been so happy if you carried it. It said: ‘Stop Pissing Off My Wife.’ ”

  “I’d be happy to carry that sign,” Tim says.

  Well, this is all such a relief. Tim is still the Tim they know and love.

  Except, wait, Tim voted for a pig on purpose?

  What the hell is the matter with him?

  Isla screams abruptly.

  “She’s hungry,” Nick says.

  “She needs to be changed,” Dani says, standing, hauling Isla to the back bedroom, the scream losing volume as they head down the hall. “Niiiiick!” Dani shouts then, and so Nick jumps to his feet, and so does Vicki, both of them heading back to help.

  * * *

  —

  Alone together in the living room, baby clamor in the distance, Neil and his dad lean back on the couch, their heads at the exact same height, underneath the shelf with the row of little houses. They both have their legs crossed the same way, as if one is copying the other. It’s like all those Fridays again. Here in the living room. Every Friday, no matter what, no matter how the conversation had gone the week before or how they left it. They got to know each other again.

  “I respect you and I love you,” Neil says finally. “But there’s still, like— That moment, that choice, I wasn’t there. And I wonder about that. I trust how intelligent you are and how caring you are and sharing and giving. But can you see where I would just have that moment of, like, How?”

  “So did Dani,” Tim says. “So did your mom. All you guys did.”

  “Well, I think it’s brave of you to be able to talk about how you voted,” Neil says. “Like, there’s no malice in there. I get that.”

  “I don’t put the weight on it that you guys do, and I never will. And I’m not going to change about that.”

  “I’m interested in the fact that people who didn’t feel heard now feel heard,” Neil offers. “And what that means for them.”

  This is not about Barack, not about Trump, not about Hillary. This, now, is about rebuilding.

  “I didn’t know that they didn’t feel heard,” Neil continues. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested. I was maybe oblivious, but I didn’t know.”

  “All these people are vocal now, and none of these people were vocal a year ago,” Tim says. “Hopefully good people will stand up, find leadership that makes some sense.”

  “I’m glad we’ve gotten to a place where we can continue to discuss ideas,” Neil says. “This election changed me. I don’t even know if I was prepared for how different I would feel. I do feel differently in this modern world.”

  By the time Dani comes marching back in, with a cleaned-up Isla and the others trailing behind, the mood in the room has completed its shift. Like an eclipse happened. But it’s not just the Earth routinely spinning on its axis. It’s all human effort. “For people who are so disappointed,” Neil says to the group, “or confused by family members’ votes, or the way they’re talking about politics right now, I think we all have to listen to each other and admit when we don’t understand. I think everyone wants to be heard right now. I even think Trump wants that. I think he just wants someone to say, ‘You are the president!’ To acknowledge that he did that. As a human to a human, I can have compassion for needing to be heard.”

  “Yay! I agree with you,” Dani says. “I love you.”

  “I have this silly phrase that I like,” Neil says. “ ‘Forgiveness equals fun.’ The more forgiveness I can have, the more I get to enjoy things, because I’m not so cau
ght up. Like, the point of contention doesn’t have to be where we stop. It’s where something new starts.”

  “Well, I told Nick,” Dani says. “I said, ‘You need to apologize to your dad.’ We need to be more understanding. We’ve all got to move on. And I feel like we did. I feel like we did a good job. I think we moved on, right?”

  “I think so,” Vicki says.

  “We’re still angry,” Dani says. “But, like, not at each other.”

  “I’m not mad at anybody in this room,” Vicki says. “But I’m mad at the situation.”

  “Conflict is a way of demonstrating love,” Neil says. “As long as you keep at it. You have to keep the work up.”

  * * *

  —

  “I thought that was a pretty gloves-off letter you wrote,” Tim says to Vicki, after everyone has gone. “Am I the only person you throw under the bus when writing emails?”

  “I didn’t write anybody else,” she says. “I just wrote to Barack. It was a factual statement. I was telling him that you voted against our family as though he were sitting across from me. It was like a friend thing.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Obama in Jeans

  Fiona told me she was nervous, and when I asked her why, she let out a burst of laughter, like, What a stupid question. It was a windy day in March 2018, and we were in my hotel room, about to head over to meet with Obama in the postpresidency office he maintains in Washington.

  Since leaving the White House, Fiona had become a mom. She and her husband, Chris, whom she had met in her earliest days working in OPC (he was the person assigned to handle mail containing threats to the president), had named the baby Grace.

  The fact that Obama had agreed to a postpresidency conversation said more than probably anything he was about to put into words that day. He’d been largely absent from public life since he left office, working on his foundation and his book, offering no comment on the cascading tumult that characterized America’s new political landscape. Like Bush before him, Obama had been careful to step off the presidential stage, no matter how weird things got, no matter how destructive the new administration may have been to the accomplishments of the old, no matter how many of his supporters clamored for him to jump in and somehow rescue America from what they came to see as the grip of a tyrant.