Impersonation

by Heidi Pitlor

  About a year earlier, we had raced around my house, tidying up, putting out chips and salsa, some beer and wine. Pete and Sandra arrived first, followed by Jimmy in his red Make America Great Again T-shirt. The sight of it had unnerved me more than I would have expected. Kurt had talked me into having this party. “It’ll be a way to lighten the moment. You know, remind each other that we’re all friends and neighbors, that we still live in the same country.”

  I had sneaked out behind my house to smoke a quick joint and improvise a prayer for our first woman president.

  When I came back, a few results had already come in: he had taken Indiana and Kentucky, and she Vermont. On the New York Times website, a forecast needle gyrated across the “tossup” zone.

  An hour or so passed, time that I cannot seem to retrieve now.

  And then we lost Ohio. Over on the couch, Jimmy dropped his gaze to the floor. When he looked up, our eyes met and something passed between us. He half-smiled, but in a sad way, and I had the sense that he was aware of my thoughts, as if he were my father watching me take in for the first time some hard truth about the world. He appeared nearly contrite. I rose and went to lie down in my bedroom.

  After we lost North Carolina, Kurt came in to give me the news. “Is it rude if we ask everyone to leave now?” I said.

  “Kind of,” he said.

  He returned to the other room, but came back a while later to tell me that Utah and Iowa had not gone our way. At this point, I had hidden myself under my blanket, Cass’s stuffed hippo curled to my chest. “We were looking everywhere for that when Cass went to bed,” Kurt said.

  “People are still here?” I could hear a couple of voices talking quietly in the living room.

  “Just Pete and Sandra.”

  It became clear to me that I would not sleep at all that night. At around 2:30 a.m., we learned that Hillary Clinton had just called to congratulate him. His campaign manager described it. “They had maybe a one-minute conversation, very gracious very warm, he commended her for being smart and tough and running a hard-fought campaign.”

  “Wow. I cannot believe he will be president. I’m kind of numb,” Kurt said, beside me in bed with my laptop between us.

  I myself was something like a human plasma globe exploding with tiny lightning bolts. I could not stay still, but at the same time, I could not seem to move. There was no way to contain all this electricity, but there was nowhere for it to go.

  In our New York hotel room now, Cass murmured something in his sleep and threw off the thin blanket.

  Lana would not be a U.S. senator.

  “Go to sleep,” I told Kurt.

  “You sure?”

  I nodded. I suppose I wanted some solitude right then. I watched him pull off his undershirt, a sight that once made me quicken. It would again, I knew, at some point.

  He climbed beneath the sheets and said, “It’s bullshit, isn’t it? I mean what happened tonight. She should have won.”

  “Total bullshit,” I said.

  By now, Lana would have made her way to the podium and given my concession speech. “My friends, my friends! Look at all of us,” she would have said. “I am so full of thankfulness for every one of you here. You have each worked so hard. You have fought like soldiers in this ongoing war to defend women and people of color, immigrants and working people, LGBTQIA, and disabled people. To defend all of the people who have been resisting tirelessly to make this country our great home again. That’s right. We will keep fighting to make America great again, but on the people’s terms, not the terms of the one percent. Not the terms of the corrupt. And certainly not the terms of the current regime. We will continue in this fight together. Every day. Let this moment only make us try harder.”

  Chapter Twenty

  We made our way down the red carpeted aisle of the Minskoff Theatre, found our seats, Orchestra Right, and marveled at our close view of the stage and the size of the place—it had to hold over a thousand people.

  I noticed someone I recognized slouching alongside a group of kids about his age. He wore the same shirt, a red polo, that he had worn on the cover of the book. The group stopped just two rows ahead of us, squeezed past a woman with a toddler, and took a minute to match their tickets with their seats. A girl about thirteen or fourteen years old flicked Norton’s arm, and bent over laughing. He said something to her, then turned around. Our eyes met for a second. We had never been formally introduced. I did not know if he could identify me, although I assumed that Lana filled him in on the fate of the book. And it would take someone less than a second to find a photo of me online these days. For my part, I had seen him in person only from a distance at Lana’s election night party, that is in addition to the day I tailed him around his Manhattan neighborhood all those months ago.

  It seemed a kind of offer from Lana to me: Here is my son. Here he is in person, a flesh-and-blood boy, just like yours. Remember that I am a mother, too. There was truth beneath the fabrications of our book. It was not all in vain—certainly not for the people who read it.

  Would she have had a better chance at winning if she had kept her hair blue, her accent intact—and if she been honest about having delegated so much of Norton’s childcare? Changing her image had in fact meant apologizing for it. I thought back to my first impressions of her on Colbert; “I wanted viewers to see the world as Wanda did. We look at poverty, or at least most of us do, but we need to start looking from it.” I would have happily voted for that woman. I had found her boldness infectious. Of course she was not as involved with her child’s life as other women, but I would never have expected her to be.

  Norton appeared to be having fun with his friends. What did he think of his mother’s loss last night? Of course she was not Lana Breban to him; she was “Mom.” We can never see our parents as others see them, although we do get glimpses.

  Enough people had read All That Matters to propel it onto The New York Times Bestseller List. They had read of my difficulties implementing my birth plan, my awe at my first meeting my son, my challenges breastfeeding. They had read about Cass dropping the replica jaw into the fish tank, and my curdling shame in that waiting room. They had read of a mother’s wistfulness when watching her son grow older. Maybe some of those readers recognized their own true experiences parenting. If nothing else, I had written a book that I myself had wished to read.

  “Middle schoolers, you think?” I said to Kurt, gesturing to the group. If I wanted to, I could have identified Norton for him, as this of course was no longer confidential information. But something stopped me.

  “Looks like it,” Kurt said.

  I leaned closer so that no one else could hear. “What do you think Cass will be like when he’s in middle school?”

  Kurt shrugged.

  To my left, my son had pushed himself into the crook of his seat and was pulling his jacket zipper up and down.

  “It’s your first play!” I said, and he nodded eagerly. How many kids could say that their first time at the theater was a Broadway production of The Lion King?

  I turned back to Kurt. “You’re supposed to say that he’ll be handsome and poised and amazing.”

  “He’ll be handsome and poised and amazing.”

  “He’ll be happy and interesting and creative.”

  “He’ll be sulky and pimply and awkward,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “He’ll be in middle school. Come on.”

  Late last night, after the results of the special election were announced, I had considered returning these tickets to Lana. Attending a Broadway show had felt wrong now. A somber gong of truth rang over and over in my mind: nothing would change for our country tomorrow, or the next day, or even the next.

  I watched footage of Andrea Calhoun hugging Remy, and I hoped that she knew something about him that I did not. Maybe he had been a loving father despite everything and maybe she would nudge him toward a more progressive agenda. I thought about the many U.S. senators already putti
ng up a good fight and the massive Women’s March and even the rainbow peace flag that a neighbor had hung on his cracked, rotted fence just the day before. I thought about Maggie, who would return from Bolivia soon, about Luana and Carlos, who were not going anywhere at least for now, and about the fact that I would get to keep writing for Lana, whatever form that would take. Cass deserved to see The Lion King. He deserved everything I was able to give him. In the morning, we would go for breakfast somewhere for his favorite, chocolate chip pancakes, and then head up to Central Park. The three of us would wander that grandiose symbol, stop in at the zoo, go model boat sailing, see the Alice in Wonderland statue, maybe make our way over to Strawberry Fields and the Imagine mosaic. We would have a good day—we would have one great day.

  As the house lights went dark, I reached for Cass’s hand and imagined that I was him, a little apprehensive about what would come next. What would be the first sound? How loud would the music be? The stage lit up in yellow, and someone issued forth a sustained call. His hand squeezed mine.

  From a side box, a man with no shirt and a ram headdress belted out an answer to the first call. More lights came on and an enormous sun rose from the stage. Other voices rang out and joined in a complex unity, and a gentle drumbeat began. People dressed as elaborate hyenas and leopards swept down the aisles. Several women in white bird costumes twirled right beside Cass, and his eyes grew large at them.

  I saw Norton elbow the boy beside him when an antelope danced past.

  Here was the savannah, deafening and harmonious and vivid. Here was the enormous audience, sitting rapt in their seats as the animals made their way forward to gather on stage.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to the work of Dan Kindlon, Ellen R. Malcolm, Elizabeth Noble, Christia Spears Brown, Michael Thompson, and Virginia Woolf. Thank you, Neil Giordano, for the wiper blades, and needless to say, so much else. For putting me up while I wrote parts of this book, thank you Hemingway House, Emily Franklin, Susan Shepherd, and Wellspring House. For being an unbelievably smart, funny, and kind editor and friend, thank you, Kathy Pories. All my gratitude also goes to Maria Massie, Margot Landsman, Bonnie Hearn Hill, Bret Anthony Johnston, Rachel Kadish, Catherine Knepper, Tova Mirvis, Asata Radcliffe, Joanna Rakoff, Jane Roper, Anna Solomon, Chris Stamey, Sylvia True (I do not know a more generous person), Annie Weatherwax, Roger Wieand, Marisa Wilson, and Laura Zigman. Finally, thanks to Gareth Cook, everyone at the Mount (including the ghosts of Edith Wharton and her dogs), Jennifer 8. Lee, and Yael Goldstein Love for enlarging my horizons.

  Also by Heidi Pitlor

  The Birthdays

  The Daylight Marriage

  About the Author

  Heidi Pitlor is the author of the novels The Birthdays and The Daylight Marriage. She has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007 and the editorial director of Plympton, a literary studio. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Huffington Post, Ploughshares, and the anthologies It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art and Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers. She lives outside Boston.

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2020 by Heidi Pitlor.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009728

  e-ISBN: 9781643751085