| In Lieu of Another Drink |
[Dec. 19th, 2006|11:32 pm] |
Remember when I walked with you, how my hand would reach for your back- it wasn’t to guide you, wherever you traversed; it was to pull you closer, me closer to you, always closer, like now, with you cradled in my hand, the bed as my second, the sheet as my cover, and finally, finally you’re as close as possible, as close as I can possibly be, like I’ve always wanted me to you.
*
Your kiss is sweet and dizzy. Arms locked around my waist, you push on me with the force of that snowball striking glass, and although my hips feel your growing and pressing desire, your fingers are painstaking under my sweater as if it would cut you to touch me the wrong the way. You have my tongue, so I try to tell you with pale yielding, that nothing of you would ever be wrong to me.
*
So many times before-/ no, I never thought of here or there, it was more “not here”- to never keep you alone, in my thoughts, for more than a passing glance or a smile traded through the doorway. You’re not smiling or glancing now- before, that used to make me crazy, but now, there’s so much more in your stoicism to the turned-down lights, the nonchalance of my lips on your neck. You lower yourself onto the bed and me onto you, as if to wonder aloud, where else would I be?
*
My breath on your chest, one lazy determined hand falters in your navel, which makes you gasp and me laugh a little. I tip my head to your chin at this impromptu entr'acte, but you’re not amused, you want me and yes, yes, it’s been nine years but it won’t be but a minute more. This is what you were talking about when you brought up "Coffee Cake and Candidates," but- god damn it!- I had to force it- tenacious, you chortle, if that’s what you call someone who puts their hand on the fire until the nerves are burned numb. And thus: now we’re here and we have to do this because this level of denial is enough to make a person cut his ear off and post it in the mail.
*
All the nothings I’ve asked you to do, and when I ask for the Biggest Thing of All, the openness in your eyes makes my heart twist and empty, inside me. And then-
*
You ask, does it feel okay? but I don’t know because it’s never been you before. I want to say it’s much better than to think of you with someone else. You move fast at first, desperate rushing blood, and then slower, desperate to answer the doubts that may be in my head. I want you just as much and the scared- well, that comes too, but I believe it stems from the wanting, not from you.
*
You think you are the perceptive one, but you would be surprised at what I know- that you never imagined I wanted you this badly, or that I had a plan all along, for what I would do if this should ever come to pass. That I want to take for myself every part of you that I was forced to endure be usurped: vindicated, I kiss the marauding gloss off your lips, liberate your shoulders from the veils of a blue empire-waist dress, reclaim your heel from that elusive strap, the one you teased me with in the most exasperating way. Most of all, I know you don't know there's never been a time when I didn’t see you.
*
I’ve seen you intense, delirious, sweat; your skin, your needs, chestnut curls loped over one ear, your scar, a little scruff on your chin, you mouth when it moves (but never on me), ankles, knees, elbows, veins- in fact, all of you that is visible to me now, I’ve seen, but never like this. I think it is only a human who can stay exactly the same and yet transform completely.
Such is the power of love. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 7th, 2006|10:50 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
In Expectation of Christmas Day
December 25 | 4 AM CST
I crack open the door to the den. Josh, who for some inostensible reason is on his cell phone in the wee hours of Christmas morning, is rumpled, in a dirty sweatshirt with a cowlick that I would have thought was a geometric impossibility, given the small amount of hair he has now.
“You better not have forgotten to get me a gift,” I warn him, ignoring his paralytic-deer look and coming over to his bed. “Don’t even bother trying to order flowers now if you did.”
He hastily slams his phone down, on the opposite side of me, I note- so I can’t see the number. “Aren’t you cold?” He tries to distract me by rubbing my arms.
“A little. Who were you talking to?
“Why are you wearing a tank top? It’s the middle of December!”
“It wasn’t cold in my bed! Who were you calling?” I press.
He pulls off his old, beat up Harvard sweatshirt and thrusts it towards me. I stare him down for a beat, before I desist and put it on. “Better?” he asks. I nod. “Good. Whatcha doing up?” he wants to know, as two dimples appear.
I offer him my best sadistic smile. “Are you cheating on me?”
“Are you serious?” I can tell by his face he’s only half-sure I’m not. Aw, cute. “Of course I’m not. No seriously, I’m not. It was a secret call- but it wasn’t about- God, I would never- seriously, Donna-”
“Yeah, I guess that’s pretty unlikely,” I chuckle.
“I would never do that to- hey, what do you mean by that? ‘Pretty unlikely,’” he demands.
“Well...” I gesticulate in his general direction. “I mean, come on. Maybe a few years back, you may have had a chance, but now...”
“You are mean. Mean, Donna Moss.”
I climb up over his lap, and wind my arms around his neck. “What I mean to say is that no other woman better lay a hand on you or I’ll kill them. It makes me crazy to think that other women can even look upon you and your studly physique.”
“My irresistible smile.”
“Your irresistible smile,” I oblige, kissing him.
“My irrepressible charm...”
“Your irrepressible charm.”
“- and intelligence,” he adds.
“And intelligence,” I repeat, bemused. “Had enough of yourself yet?”
“My inimitable you,” he grins up at me.
“Okay, one more,” I play along, pleased. “Dedicated to inimitable me.”
“See? No one else could turn you on with such verbal dexterity as I.”
We kiss and when we break away, I tell him, “I’m not repeating that. I think I’ve stroked your ego enough for one night.”
“Speaking of, you still haven’t told me what you’re doing down here. In my room. In my bed, actually, in the middle of the night.”
“Getting some water,” I demure.
“There’s a bathroom upstairs.”
“I don’t drink tap.”
“I know. But how’d you wind up in the den?”
“I got lost, Josh,” I retort, exasperated. “Have you no limits?”
But I’m sunk and he knows it. “You can’t sleep without me, can you?”
“Oh dear God...”
“Just wanted to come gaze upon my Adonis-like face, my Herculean chest.”
“Did you know there’s a huge spaghetti sauce stain on this sleeve?”
“Oh, that’s been there for years.”
“Well, that makes it much less gross.”
His smile is like a headlight through the night. “Were you plotting how you could take advantage of me in the dark?” he goads, with a glimmer in his eye.
“What can I say, Josh?” I sigh, as I slide off him and gather some blankets around me, feeling the hard metal coils through the three decades-old sofa bed. “When I see a man in an electric flannel blanket, I can’t control myself.”
He is inexhaustible. “Were you going to whisper dirty things in my ear?”
“Would you have wanted me to?”
“Whisper? I dunno... might be a nice change.”
“From what?”
“From me worrying that the old folks upstairs are going to have us evicted.”
“Shut up!” I punch him lightly on the leg.
“Hey, I’ll take our chances- I had no idea you could scream like that.”
“JOSH!” I smack him, mortified. I mean, it’s one thing when it just happens... another entirely to talk about it. On a pullout couch in your parents’ house wearing a dirty sweatshirt, no less.
“It’s hot, Donna- way hot.”
“I hope the memory turns you on.”
He ignores my threat, in order to further exacerbate me. “I pegged you for more of a breathy admonitions of love sort. But I was very pleasantly surprised.”
“You know, I was actually just thinking about that before I came down here.”
“Screaming my name in the night?”
“The first time we... with our guards down.”
“Yeah. That was- nice.”
“Way up there on the scale of niceness,” I agree.
“You certainly shocked me. All three times. If you hadn’t fallen asleep, I think you would have killed me.”
“Custer had his last stand, and I had mine,” I shrug. “I realized there was no way I could watch you dick around with that deadline for three and half more weeks. I would have killed you, and I assure you, it would not have been pleasant.”
“Good to know you’re not above sexual extortion. It’s the mark of a truly evolved woman.”
“Maybe. Sometimes, I think those Christian fundamentalists with the promise rings and no birth control might be onto something.”
“I must be tired- no delirious- because I just imagined you saying that crazy Christians who hate women have a point.”
“I was really mad at myself after we slept together before the election. I was alone, on the opposite side of the bed, and all I could think was, Damnit, I just knew this would happen! Sex never resolves anything and it didn’t.”
“No, the sex didn’t. But having you with me when Leo died, and when Santos won- being with you to share this amazing thing we accomplished together- that resolved a lot. I couldn’t have gotten through that without you, and moreover, I wouldn’t have wanted to.”
“Thank you,” I say, a little bowled over by his candor. “You really did an amazing thing, Josh. I know politics is a world of ‘What have you done for me today?’ but don’t lose sight of how huge it really was. You plucked a Congressman from obscurity and made him a president. I think you and Leo McGarry are the only two people in the world who could do that.”
“Yeah...” He’s quiet. I think maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned Leo. Then he asks, “Did I tell you I talked to the President after Leo’s funeral?”
“After we were all up in the Residence?”
“Yeah. He said, ‘Leo and I are the past; you’re the future.’ It made me think of you,” he tells me without looking at me.
“Why did it make you think of me?” I ask quietly.
“I don’t know. But you immediately came into my mind. I looked for you outside the Residence- I thought you might have hung around- but you had already left.”
“Yeah.” I know I was a real jerk to Josh the day of Leo’s funeral, and while he may have deserved my cold shoulder, I could have put it off for a day. “I’m sorry I didn’t wait for you.”
He shrugs it off; our détente that day is apparently not the point of this story. One thing I admire in Josh is that he never holds a grudge with people he cares about. He was definitely hurt that I snubbed him when we came back to Washington, but he’s never used it against me.
And now, he’s looking right at me. He’s still leaned over, but not on his elbow anymore, and there’s an earnestness on his face. “When I left the White House that night, I walked out through the gates and I swear, I could hear the faintest echo of the ‘Carol of the Bells.’ Then I realized why you were in my mind.”
He swallows hard, and continues. “A guy falls down a hole, and a friend walks by and jumps in. The guy says, Why’d you do that, now were both stuck. And the friend says, Yeah, but I know the way out.”
*
Donna's sapphire eyes are wide as saucers. I really musn’t tell her enough how much I love her- have always loved her, even before it was that kind of love. I feel a catch in my throat watching her as I recite the parable Leo told me in my darkest of hours. “Anyway, I realized I had always had two people, Leo and you. Now, there was only you- and I was afraid I’d blown it. I didn’t realize- no, I did realize, but I didn’t let you know how important you were to me. I should have. I didn’t, I should have, and I’m sorry.”
She’s crying now. “You don’t have to be sorry,” she whispers into the darkness, and then kisses me softly. Only when her breath hits my cheek do I realize I’m crying too.
She pulls away from me and wipes her eyes. “Why do people always cry at holidays? It’s silly. There’s no reason to be sad,” she mumbles, embarrassed.
“I’m not sad,” I tell her, taking her hand away from her face. “I’m grateful.”
Her gaze drops to my chest, and somewhere, to the hole still deep inside there. “Me too,” she sniffles.
“I know I’m not an easy person to love,” I start, with difficulty.
Her feverish shake of her head stops me. “No one is easy to love, Josh. Love isn’t easy. It’s hard. It’s hard because it can hurt and nobody likes to be hurt.”
“I love you for saying that, really, but I’m more pathological- more paranoid- than most.”
Donna laughs a little at that. “Well, that’s probably true. Not that you don’t have reason to be,” she admits, seriously. “You’ve lost a lot in your life. Of course it’s affected you.”
“When Joanie died, I swore I would never have children because I never wanted to be in as much pain as my parents were.”
She tries to do damage control, but her face is clearly devastated. “Well... we’ll work it out.”
“No, don’t misunderstand. I want to have kids with you. My point was just that you’ve managed to change my whole outlook on life. Before I felt like I was just watching people I cared about be taken away, so I swore I wouldn’t add any more to the mix to be picked off. But somehow you made it in anyway....” I smile, but it fades quickly. “And then Gaza happened.”
“And you swore me off,” she deduces.
“It wasn’t that deliberate, but yeah, I suppose that’s what happened. It wasn’t about you- it was just a pathological reflex to how much it hurt to see you in pain.”
“I know.” Then with a small smile, she adds, “Good thing your plan to ditch me didn’t work.”
“No, it didn’t,” I smile. “Must be fate.”
“Or locusts,” she offers. “They can be prickly ones to get rid of.”
There’s a moment where we just stare at each other, a flow of easy unspoken expressions passing between people who love each other, by the inky star-dotted sky filling the picture window behind us. Donna drops her head on my shoulder. We survey her old street in suburban Wisconsin, the colored lights and luminaria candles that have been left on in expectation of Christmas Day.
“I did get you a Christmas present,” I tell her with a playful tug at the spaghetti-stained sleeve. “Do you want it now?”
She nods. I reach down into my carryon and pull out a ring box wrapped in gold foil, tied with a red ribbon, and hand it to her.
Donna looks up at me, her eyes dancing, and then pulls the ribbon loose. She opens it, and lifts out a delicate antique band topped with a brilliant pearl. “That was the only heirloom my grandmother took with her when she fled the Nazis."
"It's beautiful."
"My father planned to give it to Joanie on her sixteenth birthday. I never knew about it until my mother came to see me after we won the nomination. She gave it to me and told me she and my father had put it away for me to give to my wife, who could pass it on to our daughter. And in her next breath, my mother- ever subtle- asked me, ‘So where is Donna going to work, now that Russell’s lost?’ She will be very, very happy if you accept it.”
*
Josh, laughing, takes the ring from my hand. “Obviously, this is just a token, you can pick out a diamond one when we’re back in DC.” He takes both my hands in his free one as he bends down on one knee on the faded, ancient olive-green carpet in my parents’ den and proceeds to propose to me in a pair of boxers and a sauce-marked shirt. And to top it all off, I can barely see through all the water clouding my eyes.
“Donnatella Moss, will you do me the honor, and marry me?”
Oh Lord, I’m a mess. “Yes. Yes, I will marry you,” I can barely say as I wrap my arms furiously around his neck.
“Thank you,” he whispers, and then places a few big smacking kisses on the side of my face. “Although, I have to say, I may have to stop giving you gifts because it just makes you all emotional-”
I laugh, thinking of how young and stupid and unbelievably touched I was that first Christmas together. “Can I just say, though, about that inscription?”
“The one I caught you rereading several times that day when you should have been doing your job?” he groans, no doubt expecting some pithy remark about his grammar or syntax or even the saccharine content. “What about it?”
"You know how I said I wanted skis?" I beam at my soon-to-be husband. “This is what I really wished for.” |
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| 20 Hours in Wisconsin |
[Dec. 5th, 2006|10:38 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
December 25 | 3 AM CST
Sleepless in Hollow Kettle: Part II
I toss. I turn. I miss Josh.
It took us awhile to figure out how to configure ourselves in bed. The first time we slept together, we were so far apart in the bed, I’m pretty sure we were in different zip codes. The second time, our (not so) quickie upstairs while waiting for the next round of exit polls on Election Day was better- we simultaneously occupied the same space. The third time we slept together, we actually shared our bodies a little- I vaguely remember Josh’s knee abutted into my calf and his hand lightly curled around my hip after a particularly raucous session following his California trip to recruit Sam.
We would joke about our post-coital ergonomic awkwardness later, in Hawaii, when more than a few Mai Tais did the trick of making us so sluggish that instead of “dismounting”- as Josh accused me of- we merely collapsed in a heap on top of each other.
“This is nice,” I mumbled, dazed and drunken, into Josh’s chest.
“Yeah, it is,” he replied, as his hand slowly crept up my shoulder to plop down on my hair. “Nice that you didn’t do that dismount and jump two feet forward move.”
“Did what?”
“Like the gymnasts on the Olympic team. They wait their whole lives to do their little jump over the horse or whatever, and then they can’t seem to get off the beam fast enough.”
“And you’re the horse or the beam? Which, by the way, are two totally separate events, not to mention apparatuses.”
“And then they hop, which I’ve never understood. And the hop earns them big points.”
“They hop?”
“Yeah, that that two-step bunny-hop thing they do at the end.”
“You think I do a two-step bunny-hop after we finish...?!”
“Yeah, after you ride me like a horse, you jump like a bunny as far away as you can possibly get without actually sleeping on the floor.”
I turned, hurt, and looked at him. “You think I wanted to get away from you?” Although as I asked, I heard the echo of: “I just thought maybe you needed some space or something...”
“Well, at first I thought that *you* thought that I- we - we just terrible. The sneaking out in the middle of the night thing wasn’t a particularly handy testament to my ability to satisfy you.”
“There was a lot of other stuff too, you know,” I retorted, my tone undoubtedly more defensive and pissy than was warranted. Isn’t it funny how sex alone really doesn't bridge the distance between two people?
“For me too,” he reminded me.
“I tried to talk to you-” I started to protest.
“I tried to talk to you! ‘How are you feeling?’ ‘You don’t have to leave.’”
“Well, I’m not leaving now,” I quipped, with forced caprice.
Josh responded with a sixth-grade smackdown. “Good!”
“Fine!” I nearly yelled. “You’re going to give me a hangover if we keep talking about this,” I muttered, reaching for my water.
“Not so good,” he said, as he eyed me critically from across the bed, to see what I would do after I put down the bottle. Would I return to his arms? Sidle up beside him? Grab a pillow and blanket and head for the floor?
I decided to put it back on him. I turned back towards him, propped up, expectantly on one arm. I mirrored him, propping myself expectantly on the opposite arm, so we were face-to-face, en garde, whatever you want to call it. Then he smiled at me. And suddenly, I wasn’t pissy anymore and I poked his knee with mine and he swooped over to my side and with a growl “captured” me, basically threw himself over and trapped me beneath him- where I was more than thrilled to be.
“You know what’s a good cure for hangovers?”
I expected him to say kisses or something completely lame. “No, what?”
“Sweat.”
And this is why women start websites for him.
How funny, I think, as I roll over one more time. Years ago, when Josh was over my shoulder, freaking out (in a completely owned way) about LemonLyman, there was absolutely not even the possibility of a real flirtation between us- banter about tax code, sure, but no double entendre. Okay, maybe some double entendre (hello, my streetcorner?).
I wonder if it’s true that men fantasize about all their female friends. Josh was single for a long time. He must have thought about it at some point...not that I want to imagine him imagining himself with CJ or Cathy or Debbie. (Ew...)
For the record, I never had a fantasy about Josh until after the Cliff Calley scandal, when he threw snowballs at my window and chided me for calling him “wild thing,” and he kept admiring my dress in a way that told me he wanted to see it thrown in a ball somewhere in the corner of a darkened room. He touched me a little too much to be inconspicuous that night, and when I got home I indulged in a little pre-bed fantasy about what it might be like to kiss my boss, and to have him kiss me back.
No doubt I loved Josh before this. There actually wasn’t a time when I wasn’t in love with him. But love is a many-colored thing- and the first year was powder pink, more infatuation for this person I admired so much, who was so much more amazing than anyone I had ever known before. After Rosslyn, the pink turned deeper- red, like a red light, bright and clear and able to seen from a mile away. Amy added the green, then came the black of an SUV, white fluorescent hospital lights, a touch of blue from Nevada and its precious 8 electoral votes.
When you mix it all together, I imagine you wind up with a color that is close to blood and that’s what Josh and I are now.
I know he’s scared about the future- for the record, so am I- but when you think about it, it’s not like we’re starting a life together. We’re actually just continuing a life that includes wild successes, professional failures, losing parents, losing mentors, losing Congress, beer, bullets, bad decisions, bad boyfriends, treason, tears, and two presidencies. We’ve survived it all; we’re bound by it all. And no matter what happens, we’ll be with each other for it all.
I won’t leave.
I throw the comforter off and am hit by the cold air in my old room. I want to see Josh, to fall into his arms and say, I want to marry you, and I won’t leave. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 18th, 2006|04:21 am] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
Sleepless in Hollow Kettle, Part I
Christmas Day | 3:00 AM CST
I blink into the darkness. There is a starving artist art show oil painting of a seascape on the wall across from the pullout couch. The outline of waves breaking on the rocks is vaguely discernible through the faint glow of Christmas tree light coming through the slats in the louvre doors.
I turn. Then I turn back over. I miss Donna.
I miss her body. I miss her arm slipped around my waist. I miss her lips on my neck and my face.
And yeah- I miss *that* too.
We haven’t spent much time apart since we’ve been together, and so the idea that I miss her is new and unusual. I don’t usually miss anyone. And yet, I miss her, right this second.
It’s not just that she’s upstairs. It’s that something happened- a space happened- when she kind of rolled her eyes after I said we should, you know, take up the marriage question when we’re back in DC. I know it was justified (it’s me after all). But it was just the way she seemed so... resigned to my ineffectualness as her lover that makes me miss her- in preparation, I suppose, of her imminently dumping me.
What she doesn’t know is that I have a ring- I had it before I came here, although I was not intending it to be an engagement ring- just sort of a pre-engagement thing. It’s a family heirloom kind of thing. But I figure it’s fashionable to take Donna to David Yurman or whatever to pick out her own ring- she’s an independent woman, knows what she wants yada yada- so it’s okay that its pearl and not diamond and she doesn’t have to wear it on her left hand if she doesn’t want to.
I have to ask her. Soon. Now, even. But how do I ask her? Do I have to get down on one knee? That seems lame, and trite.
Donna Lyman has a nice ring to it.
Donna Lyman at the White House...
The First Lady’s Chief of Staff Donna Lyman...
Josh and Donna Lyman welcomed their first child...
Before my head explodes, I reach for my cell.
“Hey Bob, it’s me. Listen, I want to run something by you... Do you think I have to do the whole one-knee thing?”
Toby heaves a heavy- no, leaden- sigh of exasperation. “You called me, in the middle of the night, on Christmas Eve, to ask me about your posture?”
“No,” I replie unfettered. “I called you because you’re the only one I know who isn’t doing anything on Christmas Eve-”
“You’ll note my shock that a Westport Presbyterian such as yourself knows even one Jew.”
“I was about to say,” I cut in, “who knows about this.”
“And by this, you mean you and Donna?”
“Yeah.”
“You think I’m the only one who knows about you and Donna?”
“The only one who doesn’t celebrate Christmas.”
Silence. Then- “BWHAHAHAHA.” A pause. “Are you serious? You think I’m the only-- who knows about you and-- Okay- Randy Finklestein [Dem pollster], Dan Tiberon [same], Mara Gelberg [Cong. aide], her old roommate Joy Madison [married a Lutheran]-”
“I know who these people are, Toby- what’s your point?”
“My point?! My point is that all these people have eyes and saw your tongue dragging all over the floor every time you looked at Donna. And my broader point is that they are all Jews, all free tonight, and thus available to take your call and discuss whether you need to get down on one knee. In fact, I think Mara and Joy would have quite constructive comments about it.”
“Donna and I were- I was nev- we were never-”
“You and Donna were the worst-kept secret in Washington politics.”
“There was no secret! Not until the very, very end of the Santos campaign.”
“Well, that’s why it was awful. The worst secret because there was no titilation, just tragedy.”
“We were tragic?”
“Who said were?”
“Why did I call you, you’re no help.”
“You read my mind.”
“You don’t have a wife, or a fiance. You can be absolutely no help to me at all. What do you know about women? Nada!”
“Zip. Zero. Zilch.”
“I should call CJ.”
“Go with that impulse.”
“Think she’s up now? It’s only 1am in California.”
“If she’s not up, she won’t answer the phone.”
“So why did you answer the phone?”
“I was up. I’m at Andi’s house. With Andi’s parents.”
“I thought Andi was basically living with someone.”
He clears his throat. “She is.”
“Wait, you’re there with Andi and Andi’s boyfriend, and Andi’s parents?!”
“And my children! You know, three feet tall, sticky hands, have weird names and oddly unisex haircuts?”
“You couldn’t just have come by tomorrow?”
“It’s my job to put the presents under the tree.”
“Why is it your job?”
“Because I didn’t want him to do it.”
“Aw, Toby... Sorry. I didn’t mean to-”
“You didn’t.”
“Okay.”
“Hey Josh-”
“Yeah?”
“Do the one knee thing. Donna’ll like it.”
“Yeah, she will. Thanks.”
“Mazel Tov.”
I click end on the call, then immediately dial a second number I know by heart.
CJ answers on the first ring. “Mi Amore!”
“Is this one 1-900-TallSex?”
“I’m 72 inches fully extended, babe.”
“I like ‘em big,” I grin.
“I hope you’re not using a White House phone.”
“Nah. We’re still in the breakdown lane”
“Ah, the OEOB. I used to threaten to send the press there, on days when execution seemed like to lenient a punishment. Josh Lyman... it’s 1am.”
“Not here. Here it’s 3am.”
“Here is... not DC,” she realizes, and I hear her bolt up in bed. “Are you in- are you in Wisconsin?”
“Did you just squeal?” I ask incredulously. Donna is likewise amazed at how one of the most powerful women in the world is completely pwned by the smallest trifle of JoshandDonnaLove.
“Are you at her house?” CJ squeals.
I am happy to inform her I am. “None other than the Moss family den.”
“NO!”
“Yes.”
“You came to meet her parents? That’s- that’s adorable!”
“Well, technically, I had already met her parents, but yeah, I am pretty adorable, aren’t I?”
“Are you engaged?”
“CJ....” I whine. “I called you! Can you at least let me tell you the news?”
“You are!”
“We’re not,” I say sadly. “Thanks, Buzzkill.”
“Why the hell aren’t you?” she demands, and then answers, “Because you suck. You have a beautiful woman, who adores you, and you can’t commit. You can’t say to her, You’re beautiful and I adore you, now marry me or I’ll... I’ll throw myself off a bridge!”
“Hang on, Claudia, I just found a pen. Repeat that last part one more time- off a what?”
“If you don’t ask Donna to marry you, you won’t need to plan your death because I will have already taken care of it for you.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I admit quietly. “I don’t know how to tell her.”
Her voice softens, even though her response is tough. “You don’t do the telling in this one, mi amore, you just ask the question.”
“Yeah,” I reply defeatedly. She doesn’t get it either.
“Don’t fuck it up, Josh. And if you run your mouth, you will, so just ask her and be done with it.” Maybe she does get it...
“I miss her,” I blurt out.
“Where is she?” CJ asks alarmed.
I can pratically hear her melt as I say, “Upstairs.”
“Awwww... can you sneak up? Maybe call her to come down?”
“Maybe I should just let her sleep and act, you know, four about the whole business.”
“You know, Josh Lyman, I meant what I said before. You really can be very sweet. I mean, it wouldn’t be enough to make up for your colossal ego and inexcusable diet, but I can see why Donna fell hard.”
“You can live vicariously. Even on the honeymoon.”
“Slow down there compadre, you have even asked yet.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? I can put you on the record on this?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. Okay. Done. On the record. Kiss Donna for me.”
“CJ, I can say without hesitation, I will have absolutely no problem doing that.”
“Doing what?” I look up to find Donna in a pink t-shirt and striped boxers in the doorway, twinkling Christmas lights circumscribing her like an angel.
Gulp. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 28th, 2006|12:35 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
Chapter XI: Questions Stirring
December 25 | 2:35 AM CT
The big hand makes another hop upward to the 7. I stare, wide-awake, at the ceiling. I know I was tired when I trudged upstairs an hour ago...
I had wanted to have cider and sit by the fire and watch the snow fall outside on the lamp-lit street. But by the time we pulled into the driveway after church, I was exhausted and Josh was more than exhausted because he had actually worked a full day before he flew out to Wisconsin to spend Christmas Eve with me and mine. My parents barely blinked before they headed upstairs to bed. I walked Josh to the den, where I helped him unfold the pull-out couch, and we kissed (a lot); then he walked me to the stairs, where we kissed a lot again, but then he heard a noise and scurried off, alone, lest my makers catch him with his hands on the wrong side of my cashmere Christmas sweater.
But now it’s almost 3am and Josh is below me, probably passed out. I wish he could sleep more than four hours a night. As it is now, he stumbles in around 1am on work nights, and is barely able to make it to the bathroom to brush his teeth before he collapses opposite me on the bed. Sometimes he’ll zonk for twenty minutes and then he’ll wake me up so we can R&R in other ways. Like the night before I left to come to Wisconsin...
“Josh....” Groan. In my dream, I was on a yacht, swaying gently in tune with the hum of the earth. Now I realize it’s Josh, tugging at the comforter. “Quit it!”
Yank! “Donna, you have all the covers!”
“Don’t whine.”
“I’m not,” he rebuffs. “But Donnnnnnnaaaaaaa.... you can’t *usurp* all the bedclothes!”
“I usurped them?” I question, pulling the comforter tighter around me, away from Josh.
“Yes. You have unjustly taken what was rightfully mine.” He’s now half-seated in bed, and boring into my back. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Oh please, don’t act like you’re some kind of lawyer or something...”
“DONNA! What have I told you about the jurist jokes?”
“I’m not a lawyer, I just play one at the OEOB.” I can’t help but giggle because I know the indignance on his face. Josh is not what you would call transparent. “You with your little ‘Men in Black’ glasses, trash talking about code six-four-one-whatever, trying to scare people who have no idea you’ve never even set foot in a courtroom!”
“Do I need to pull out the transcripts? Again, Donna?”
“You were...number two...hundred in your class?”
“Two, Donna! Number two! Beat out by Callum Wallace, who-”
“Who I’m sure has the jurisprudence to see that I’m sleeping here!” I open one eye. “Your powers of deductive reasoning leave much to be desired.”
“I had this assistant once, little blonde one, she was overcome by my powers. She used to love to remind me how powerful I was.”
“She probably just wanted a raise.”
“So many ways to respond to that- but alas, I am a gentleman.”
I have to turn around to face him, in order for him to fully see my narrow-eyed displeasure. He’s wearing the irresistible canary smile. “You sleep naked.”
“Is that a direct order, ma’am?”
“You sleep naked because you claim you’re always hot.”
“Well, yes...” he says, furrowing his brow. “I am hot and shouldn’t that be shared with rest of the world? Or at least with the rest of the bedroom?”
“When I say, ‘Josh, it’s the dead of winter. Let’s turn up the heat.’ And you say,” - and here I mimic the Josh whine which is so spot-on I should patent it - “Donnnnnaaaa! How are you cold?! We have forty dead geese in this comforter and a thermal blanket and a sheet. I can’t sleep when we turn up the heat! It’s too hot!”
He lets loose a howl of protest about midway through my little mockery. “Hey, come on- all you have to do is lie there, while I do all the work.”
Now it’s my turn. “Oh, Josh!”
“No really- no wonder you want it to be ninety degrees, it’s like a day at the beach for you! Meanwhile, I’m doing two hours with my personal trainer here, yelling at me to pick up the pace-”
I end his extended metaphor with a Standard European whack over the head. “You’re a bastard!” I laugh.
“Yeah, and you date me, so what does that make you?”
“I don’t want to know.” I pull myself up and make a pathetic reach for the water bottle on the opposite end table. Josh, always a gentlemanly bastard, quickly retrieves it for me. I take a drink. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. So...” He has that salacious look on his face. “You’re awake.”
Grin. “It would appear so.”
He grins back. “My powers of deduction.”
I slink one knee over his legs, and pull myself onto him, winding my arms around his neck. “And persuasion, apparently,” I mutter as I kiss him.
We break for a breath and he throws a look downward at his lap. “Yours are uh, effective as always. Apparently.”
So, all was fine, except this was the time I smacked the headboard and it really hurt, but I couldn’t concentrate on the pain, because at that point there was a loud crash from the old people’s apartment upstairs and the sound of pissed-off footfalls battering the ceiling. We woke them up. Again.
“Be quiet! Be quiet!” Josh whispers furiously. We lie frozen and listen. A few successive “Goddamnits” reverberate through the vent and we have our hands clasped over our mouths, practically choking to hold in our laughter.
“Someone needs to tell Mr. Roper to chill,” Josh mutters, annoyed, and I can feel why.
“He hates us.”
Josh raises one eyebrow quizzically. “Well, he definitely hates me. But he always checks you out at the mailbox-”
“He does not! He just wants to put faces with the Apartment of Sin downstairs.” Josh scoffs in disbelief. “Josh, he’s like a hundred. And married.”
“Eh, old or not, he wouldn’t mind sending you a package.” I swat his bicep. “Hey, that’s not a bad idea- if he complains, we can just send you up there as an ambassador.”
“You know, when you said you know women, you weren’t kidding. What woman wouldn’t want her man to sell her out to the dirty old guy upstairs?”
“For the team, Donna. For the greater good.”
“Team Moss-Lyman.”
He makes a face. “That doesn’t roll off the tongue so easily. Let’s just call it Team Lyman.”
“It’s a misnomer.” I wonder, is it me or did somehow the conversation turn on a dime from jocular to- quite possibly- our first discussion about...marriage?
His face is serious, and earnest, and hopeful and vulnerable- and yet, still confident and ruddy and beloved, all at once. “So change your name, and then it won’t be.”
Did he just ask me if I would-
CRASH!
Loud clomping on the copper tiles above us. Muffled expletives. We can hear partial strains of them coming through our vent.
“GODDAMNIT!” Josh booms up to the heavens; he has to put his hand over my mouth to stop me from erupting.
Silence. Then, a sheepish shuffle across the floor upstairs. A squeak as our nemesis slinks back into bed.
We completely crack up, quickly resume and finish our business, and fall asleep with just about an hour until the alarm goes off. In the shower, on the road, at my desk, on the plane to Wisconsin, and here at my parents’ house, I wonder whether I am technically engaged (or rather, spiritually or ‘for all intents and purposes’, as the technical part is probably the ring thing).
Now, I’m in my old bedroom, well past 3am four days later, Christmas Day, and I’m wondering the same thing. What did he mean at the church today? "We should talk about getting married." Is that the same as, We should get married? Or, I want to marry you? Or how about, Will you marry me? I hear the angel in my ear saying, Duh Donna, do you think he wants to talk about *not* getting married? But then that pesky devil says, Hell girl, if he were really in love he would have been one-knee down in a pile of slush with a diamond so bright Three Wise Men and a flock of sheep would be behind it.
It's not that I spend my days dreaming about bridal gowns and making lists of potential songs to first-dance to. I don't. I really don't, and never did, even when I was younger, no matter what Josh used to think. I have just always wanted to be in love- real love- and now I am. And I'm happy. And I'm enjoying each day as it comes, and not really thinking about the future.... but if Josh is thinking about the future, of course, I would prefer it be inevitable forever than imminent forget-about-it.
Not that Josh isn’t the sort who would feel out my answer before he asked... Who am I kidding? I have no idea what to think, what's in store for me and Josh. I know I love him. And he loves me. He'll ask me- someday. I just hope that this time, it doesn’t take nine years. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 31st, 2006|01:02 am] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
X: Look Homeward
Rating: PG
December 25 | 1:45 AM CT
Hour: 8
It turns out that after a church service ends, people don’t actually leave. At least, not in Wisconsin. There’s a whole assembly-line meet-and-greet I have to go through before we’re allowed to exit. Of course, as Donna and I start to walk down the salted coat of ice that is the church walkway, I’m consumed with nutty over how to do the thing I just decided in the pew to do.
We're walking down the path back to the car and I'm feeling a little dizzy and disoriented, because I've slept about four hours in the past two- now, three- days and probably also because I think I've just decided to marry Donna and make babies with her and that comes with a motherload of fears and questions and how-in-the-hell-will-this-work isms.
I glance over and notice that she's not worried in the least. She's just meandering along, peeking at all the candles in paper bags that line the walkway, looking quite statuesque in black heels and an elegant black coat. I almost can't believe she's the same girl who threw her arms around me and cried over a handwritten page in a Heimlich Beckengruber book. I suspect it will take slightly more to win her over this time.
I steal a look at her profile- Ms. Moss, my former much-abused assistant who now shares the same job title and makes just as much as me. Sure, back in the day, she used to date the gomers and I could call them such because I was more powerful and more important than they were. But now? Now, Donna's dates would call me- maybe not a gomer, but an aging, balding, twitching, tweaking, tied-to-his-desk, one-track-minded workaholic. She could hook up with the creme de la creme- maybe a Senator's son, or some liberal philanthropist. A curator at the Smithsonian. A diplomat from Monaco or hell, a prince even- she looks a lot like Grace Kelly, doesn’t she?
And then Grace Kelly marries Moe. Or not. No- I will not be Moe. I know women and I've known this woman for nine years. And I've dazzled her before... remember the snowballs at the window? And in a tuxedo and a white scarf no less!
Crap. All I've got this time are the dress slacks I've been wearing for the past 36 hours that I’m pretty sure could stand up on their own by now.
"Hey..." She touches my elbow and looks at me curiously. "What's up?"
Play it cool, Lyman. "Nothing," I shrug, forcing a small smile which she is in no way buying.
"Nothing?"
"Yeah, why?"
She stops and peers critically at me. "You look distressed."
"I do?"
"Your face is all screwed up and wrinkled-"
"Gee, thanks."
"Your forehead," she corrects with a laugh. "It's Christmas. And for you, at the very least, it's your big night off." She surveys her parents and the babies and the grannies negotiating the ice in the church parking lot. "Okay, so big was an overstatement,” she concedes. Off in the distance, her parents are talking to a family in the adjacent spot. Her mother kibitzes, and her dad is pointing upwards, as three little kids in hats and mittens gaze rapt up at the sky, searching for Santa and his trusty reindeer stead.
Donna sees it too, and murmurs, “Aw, cute.” I wonder if she notices that she takes a half-step nearer to me when she says that, so that she’s now not standing next to me, but is kind of smooshed into my shoulder. I put my arm around her and pull her even closer. “I wonder if he takes requests.”
“Who?”
“Well Santa, but I’m okay if your dad stands in as present-purchaser,” I tell her. “As long as he remembers to take the price stickers off the stuff.” A young Donna once found a price sticker on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” cassette tape and made the fateful deduction that Santa probably wasn’t taking part in the last-minute holiday scramble at the Madison KMart.
“I think he might be a little mad you tried to draft him in 2006.”
“Ah, yes- the infamous ‘Santas for President’ buttons.”
“Actually, I think Santa might just stick a ‘Santos for President’ bumper sticker on your stocking and call it a wash.”
“Yeah, I suppose in terms of getting what you ask for, I’m covered for this year and at least a couple birthdays.”
“Famous last words,” she needles.
“Tell me about it,” I mutter. “I can see the card now- ‘Dear Josh, Enjoy your 140 hour work week for the next four years of your life. Merry Christmas! Love, Santa.’ I should have read the fine print, huh?”
“It’s what you always wanted,” she tells me in a way that indicates she’s not entirely sure that’s true.
“It is,” I confirm resolutely. “It absolutely is.”
“It was always your dream to sit in the CoS chair. Wasn’t that your excuse for not getting more dates in college- you had to study so you could do this?”
“I had plenty of dates,” I counter defensively.
“That’s not what you told me-”
“Women love me! And when the hell did I ever tell you I didn’t have a lot of dates?”
“Okay, I suppose it was actually your mother who said that,” Donna amends.
Post-It Note to Self: Remember to call and have a word (or a few choice words) with my mother. “Good to know you can count on your mom to have your back. But you know,” I surmise thoughtfully, “she probably just told you that so you wouldn’t feel-” I stop short, realizing too late that this maybe isn’t the best tack to take with the woman I’m hoping to propose to.
She raises a pointed eyebrow at me. “So I wouldn’t feel what?” she asks suspiciously.
“Eh...” I deflect. “Nothing.” She pinches me- hard.
“Joshua...”
“I’m just saying that she- my mom, mind you- may have thought that you might, as women are want to do, feel a jealous and even a little inadequate-”
“Inadequate?!”
“- if you knew the full extent of my extensive romantic experiences. All I’m saying, is that she was probably just trying to be sensitive to you and your new role in my life.”
“Uh-huh,” Donna nods in a one-hundred percent patronizingly way. “Except that she told me this, like, six years ago.”
“Oh... well she probably knew you had it bad for me and just wanted to let you down easy.”
“Oh, I’m absolutely sure that’s what she intended to do. Who knows what I would have done, outside your office, consumed with unbearable heartlust for you.”
“I don’t how you stood it,” I grin.
“Oh, I bet you have an idea,” she says pointedly. “Don’t you have an idea of what it’s like to be consumed with unbearable-”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“- since you are...” she prompts me.
I take the bait- because it’s Donna and I always do, but it’s also the mood- the cold, completely still air, the little kids looking up at the sky, her mother who keeps looking over at us, her smile so bright from across the parking lot, people in China could probably use it for reading light. “Since I am consumed with unbearable heartlust for you.” In a spurt of I-don’t-know-what, I blurt out, “And since I am- maybe when we get back to Washington, we should talk about maybe, you know, um, getting married.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “Yeah,” she responds in this deadpan, noncommittal way. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?!” I exclaim (mean Donna makes my ego smart). “What do you mean, maybe? Are you waiting for a better offer?”
“I don’t know,” she says, all bambiesque. “Do you think I could get one?”
“I’m Chief of Staff to the President-”
“Almost President.”
“I attended both Harvard and Yale-”
“And yet, I had three times as many majors as you.”
“I was a Fulbright Scholar, and Law Review editor-”
“But you’re not a real lawyer.”
“I *am* the law!”
“-which the founding fathers would probably dispute.”
“I have my own fan club!”
“Actually, if you remember, they don’t like you so much.”
“Did I not just take you to Hawaii-”
“Yeah, about seven years after I asked you to, and you only did it because I threatened to quit sleeping with you.”
“Well, the last time I checked Gilda, you didn’t have any complaints.”
She turns to me and grins. “I do have complaints.”
“Like what?” I demand to know, narrowing my eyes at her.
She takes a step closer to me and kisses me softly on the mouth. “I don’t get to do it enough.”
“I’m hoping to remedy that,” I tell her. “You have a problem, I have a solution. You know- like it’s always been,” I tease.
“Josh Lyman- husband in chief? Chief domestic operative?”
“Can’t do better than that, baby.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.” She’s genuinely skeptical, and while not mad at me, it makes me feel bad anyway. Why doesn’t she think I’m serious?
“It took you nine years for you to kiss me, five weeks of no-strings-attached sex to get you to sit down and have a real conversation with me, and then another four weeks of me crashing at your place for you to say, hey, I think you should move your stuff in.”
“Yeah, and now we live together and I’m here in God-knows-where sleeping in the den of your parents’ house on some holiday I don’t even celebrate, so what’s your point?”
“Don’t be defensive," she chides me. "I’m happy you’re here and I absolutely appreciate it. And I’m happy with our lives now. I’m just saying, you don’t have to say things to me just because you think its what I want to hear.”
“That’s not why I said it.”
“Okay. So next week, when we’re both back in DC, we’ll talk about it,” she decides. “We’ll have dinner at that really great French restaurant in Georgetown- what’s it called?”
“Celleveleure. You can remember it by thinking that it sounds like ‘voiture’- which is ‘car’ in French- and you have to sell your car to afford a meal there.”
“You took me there once,” she reminds me. “After Roslyn, after that Christmas, remember? You were on the medication, and didn’t want to go out, so we stayed in and watched Dick Clark on New Year’s Eve at your apartment and then you took me out for dinner the next day as a thank-you.”
“I remember. Of course I remember.”
“You drove us home, though, so obviously the pricing situation wasn’t too bad,” she smiles.
“Nah, I just mortgaged the house again.”
“Well, this will be my treat. And we can talk, or not talk.” She smiles a little smaller now. “About whatever you want.”
I nod. We can see now the pack of children piling into their car, and her parents getting into theirs. The conversation stops and we walk over to them, but without holding hands. Just two alone, side by side. She has a point and I suppose I could have tried to talk her out of it. But actions speak louder than words ever could, and it’s time to put the ring where my mouth is. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 22nd, 2006|03:54 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
Chapter IX: Signs of the Time
December 25 | 12:30 AM CST
Hour: 6
The church has a steeple and a red door. It’s a First Church of Christ (if I ever found a “second” church in any town, I would take a picture) and full of the sort of people we in DC pander to, but never actually ever meet. Nuclear families with babies and grandparents pile out of station wagons and pickup trucks in their finest Sears suits. They talk about how the turkey turned out and where they’re having dinner tomorrow night. The kids are ablaze with pre-present anticipation. The women give each other gift baskets full of jams and gingerbread.
It strikes me that Donna does not seem the least bit out of place in this world. It’s both unexpected and intriguing to me, and I just want to hang back and watch.
In the pew, she points out the various people in Part One of the Life and Times of Donnatella Moss.
“That was my Sunday School teacher.”
“Is Sunday School like Hebrew school?”
“Not at all,” she whispers back. “You color mottos like “Jesus Loves Me” while you’re instructed on all the possible ways to wind up in Hell and you don't come out bilingual.”
“Ironic,” I remark. “I’m sorry I missed that.”
“I’m not,” she retorts. “You would have been the little shit who argued with the teacher on every fallacy. And it’s the Bible, so there’s a lot, and we would have been there all day.”
“Donna!”
“What?”
“You can’t swear!”
“Why not?”
“Because- it’s church!”
“So?”
“So I never went to Sunday School, but I’m pretty sure that’s on the list.”
“What list?”
“The How to Wind up in Hell list.”
“Josh.” She looks at me. “If I wind up in Hell, I’m blaming you. And Freddy.” She smiles slyly and sits back, obviously quite pleased with herself over the reaction that little “slip” garnered.
I lean into the nape of her neck. “Only in his dreams did Freddy have moves that would get you into hell.”
She turns to make some smart retort at which point I shush her loudly. “Stop talking.” I see her grin ear-to-ear in the periphery. I’m grinning inside too, but thinking that it’s okay if *I’m* thinking dirty thoughts about our bedroom antics because hey, if it is Jesus up there watching and being offended, it’s pretty much a sure bet I’m already on the list.
So we sit. I should be listening, I guess, to what the guy up there on the altar is saying, but you know, everyone’s seen this episode. And that’s pretty sad because I think I’ve only ever seen two episodes- the Christmas one and the funeral one, and this is definitely a rerun.
What I am watching are the people listening to this Reverend Somebody-or-other. The parents with little babies and kids crawling on their laps. Three rows up, a curly haired tot in yellow footie pajamas is pulling on the necklace of a woman with a tight blond bun. It reminds me of that famous picture of Jackie O. back when she was Jackie K- you know the one, with John-John tugging on her pearls? So I guess then there are no reruns, or maybe there are, but everything old is new again.
Would you believe it- I’ve only been in Wisconsin for 5 hours and I’m already tossing out the tropes like a neophyte of the But for the Grace of God Society. Oy vey.
I really can’t imagine someone calling Donna “Mom.” Or six someones. Or me telling a little someone, with affected sternness, “Mom says don’t...” Although I used to say “Donna says...” about fifteen thousand times a day when she worked for me, and usually in the shrill, throaty whine of a child, so maybe it’s not so much of a stretch. I can’t imagine her buying and mailing a grown man loafers, unless that man is me. But if she did that for our son, and he didn’t call her back, I’d kick his ass.
Can I imagine little starry-eyed kids on a sugar rush, shaking their presents and running around our house? Or a boy coming up to ask me if he will never see his sister again?
At what point did I start thinking about these things?
A blue-eyed baby with Donna’s pearls in its mouth, my arm protectively draped Dad-like around the back of her. My family. The future was always a blurry unknown for me- when did these people start to take shape?
Most people would say I’m past the time when I should have been thinking about it; indeed, some 44-year-old men have kids going off to college. Some don’t, that’s true. But most have given it some consideration. If I were being honest, I’ve been actively not considering it.
No, the really, truly, only-in-my-head honest answer is this: I was absolutely sure I did not want to have children. Not because I wouldn’t have liked them- I’m sure I would have. But I would rather not have them at all, than to lose one like my parents lost Joanie. I know Shakespeare, better to love and whatnot, but that’s different. That’s heartbreak, which yes, is a palpable and considerable pain. But losing a child is a whole other pain entirely, one I was absolutely convinced I couldn’t survive.
Until now.
I want a baby. Maybe more than one. Probably not six, but I’m not wholly adverse. I want to meet JoshandDonna in the flesh. And Donna wants kids, and I want Donna, so there’s that. But more than any of that, I know that if I have Donna, I can take whatever comes our way. I’m not afraid all the time anymore. I don’t feel like the other shoe is always about to drop. She’s provided me with a weird sort of absolution- like she’s made me realize the world isn’t turning on my axis (I think she may even have said that, in those terms, one exasperated day).
That sounds harsh, but for me, it was cathartic. The house didn’t burn down because of me, Joanie wasn’t trapped because I ran out, her blood and my Dad’s didn’t clot because I wasn’t there to stop it, Leo didn’t die because I wanted him on the ticket. “What would you have done to stop it? Seriously, Josh- the world doesn’t turn on your axis, it actually moves all on its own without so much as a care for you and what you’re doing.”
She can be blunt, and her bluntness probably saved my life.
So yeah, I’ve been giving it some consideration, but I come to the definitive decision right here in this pew: it’s time.
Reverend Such-and-Such is in front of me now, impressing the most well-known story in the Bible on me and the brethren of the sixth row. “And the angel of the Lord appeared to them and they were so afraid. And the angel said, ‘Fear not! For I bring you tidings of great joy...”
He pauses here, dramatically, as if the congregation is really hanging in suspense about what comes next. Completely in tune, Donna turns to me and jokes, “I bet you’re wondering what happens. I’ve already heard this one, but it’s good.”
The reverend rears up and shouts, “And the angel said, let this be a sign unto you!”
The little voice in my ear whispers louder, “It’s time.”
Hold up- this is out of bounds. The otherworldly are not allowed to speak to me in these environs. It’s heretical. Doubly heretical, since I’m actually only here as a courtesy and will probably be rewarded with truly mind-blowing sex for it, and don’t think I didn’t think about that when I agreed to come.
“Why Donna?”
It’s the peppermint ice cream and Moo Shoo on the floor day a few weeks ago. My chopsticks pause mid-air. “Excuse me?”
“That’s what Amy wants to know,” Donna informs me calmly, as she fishes a snow pea out of her carton.
I can’t quite tell if this is a “talk” yet, so I decide to scarf down this bite in case it's the last one for awhile. “Amy doesn’t care what I do,” I rebuff, mouth full. “Amy’s primary interest is Amy.”
“No, she cares,” Donna responds. “That’s why she she makes those subtle, snarky comments like she did after Leo’s funeral. It’s her way of dancing around the issue. She’s waiting for you to tell her.”
“Tell her what?”
“Why you want to date me.”
“You’re good in bed,” I retort breezily. “Can you pass the rice?”
“Fine, be that way,” she huffs, reaching for the carton of fried rice. “But you're the one who has to be her boss and that question will always be between you until you answer it.”
“I seriously don’t understand what it is with women,” I remark, as I shovel a few more spoonfuls onto my plate. “We dated, it didn’t work, we broke up. You and I are together now, it’s working, and Amy’s with the lumberjack. People move on. Simple.”
But Donna is shaking her head like I’m the dumbest person on earth, so clearly it’s not so simple. “What? Where’s the question there, I ask you?”
“Josh- it’s not like you broke up with Amy and then met me in a bar.”
Okay....and?
“We’ve always been- we’re just- how could someone-” She stutters, at first like she’s nervous and then I realize she’s struggling not to cry. “What the hell do I know, forget it!”
For the life of me, I’m not sure how it dawned on me, but it did, thank God.
She starts to stand up. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says, running one hand hurriedly across the cheek opposite me.
“Hey... don’t go.”
“I’m just going to the-”
“Don’t go.” I pull her down next to me on the floor, so her back is flush against my chest, and wrap my arms around her. She’s stiff and standoffish at first, but after a minute, relaxes into my embrace and lets me hold her. “I’m with Donna because she makes me happy in a way I never thought I would be.” I kiss the side of her face. “That’s what I’d tell Amy and anyone else who wants to know.”
When I say that, she turns and cuddles up to me. The Amy stuff threw me, but I’m not a complete dufus. This is about her and me- and specifically, all the stuff I was supposed to respond to in the four week window. We went on vacation and we didn’t have it out. We’ve been back three weeks, her crashing at my place, and we haven’t had the talk and she’s worried that soon it’ll be eight years and she’ll still be schlepping over here with an overnight bag. “I don’t want to you to go. And not just to the bathroom,” I tease, as I brush back some of her hair. “I don’t want you to go, period.”
She looks up, so hopelessly innocent that it makes my heart ache... to know that she will be made or broken on what I say next and that she trusts me so much that she’s not ashamed to show me her vulnerability. “I would really like it if you lived here. With me. We don’t have to stay here. We can find a new place. But I don’t want you to go.”
“Josh...” Her face is lit with love. “Are you sure?”
“You told me in Hawaii that you love me. That first night, when we were making love, you said you loved me so much.”
“Yes,” she says, looking a little embarrassed.
“I didn’t respond,” I continue.
She shakes her head. “No.”
“And you never said it again, for the rest of the trip or since we came back.”
Now she looks pained. “I didn’t want you to feel- I didn’t want you to think I wanted to trap you,” she tries to explain. “It was just a vacation.”
“Donna, it was so much more than a vacation.” I take one of her hands in mine on my lap. “You took me by surprise, when you said it. And I was ready to say it back, but I didn’t want to... belittle it. When you said it- it was very in the moment, it seemed like the words just pushed themselves out of you.”
“That’s how it felt,” she laughs. “I didn’t plan it, but I couldn’t hold back. I wanted you to know.”
“And I want you to know- I love you.”
That's what I'm thinking about when the curly kid with the footie pjs suddenly breaks into a toothless grin. Grinning and staring at me, staring at Donna in profile next to me.
It’s time. |
|
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 22nd, 2006|03:45 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
Chapter IX: Signs of the Time
December 25 | 12:30 AM CST
Hour: 6
The church has a steeple and a red door. It’s a First Church of Christ (if I ever found a “second” church in any town, I would take a picture) and full of the sort of people we in DC pander to, but never actually ever meet. Nuclear families with babies and grandparents pile out of station wagons and pickup trucks in their finest Sears suits. They talk about how the turkey turned out and where they’re having dinner tomorrow night. The kids are ablaze with pre-present anticipation. The women give each other gift baskets full of jams and gingerbread.
It strikes me that Donna does not seem the least bit out of place in this world. It’s both unexpected and intriguing to me, and I just want to hang back and watch.
In the pew, she points out the various people in Part One of the Life and Times of Donnatella Moss.
“That was my Sunday School teacher.”
“Is Sunday School like Hebrew school?”
“Not at all,” she whispers back. “You color mottos like “Jesus Loves Me” while you’re instructed on all the possible ways to wind up in Hell and you don't come out bilingual.”
“Ironic,” I remark. “I’m sorry I missed that.”
“I’m not,” she retorts. “You would have been the little shit who argued with the teacher on every fallacy. And it’s the Bible, so there’s a lot, and we would have been there all day.”
“Donna!”
“What?”
“You can’t swear!”
“Why not?”
“Because- it’s church!”
“So?”
“So I never went to Sunday School, but I’m pretty sure that’s on the list.”
“What list?”
“The How to Wind up in Hell list.”
“Josh.” She looks at me. “If I wind up in Hell, I’m blaming you. And Freddy.” She smiles slyly and sits back, obviously quite pleased with herself over the reaction that little “slip” garnered.
I lean into the nape of her neck. “Only in his dreams did Freddy have moves that would get you into hell.”
She turns to make some smart retort at which point I shush her loudly. “Stop talking.” I see her grin ear-to-ear in the periphery. I’m grinning inside too, but thinking that it’s okay if *I’m* thinking dirty thoughts about our bedroom antics because hey, if it is Jesus up there watching and being offended, it’s pretty much a sure bet I’m already on the list.
So we sit. I should be listening, I guess, to what the guy up there on the alter is saying, but you know, everyone’s seen this episode. And that’s pretty sad because I think I’ve only ever seen two episodes- the Christmas one and the funeral one, and this is definitely a rerun.
What I am watching are the people listening to this Reverend Somebody-or-other. The parents with little babies and kids crawling on their laps. Three rows up, a curly haired tot in yellow footie pajamas is pulling on the necklace of a woman with a tight blond bun. It reminds me of that famous picture of Jackie O. back when she was Jackie K- you know the one, with John-John tugging on her pearls? So I guess then there are no reruns, or maybe there are, but everything old is new again.
Would you believe it- I’ve only been in Wisconsin for 5 hours and I’m already troping like a neophyte of the But for the Grace of God Society. Oy vey.
I really can’t imagine someone calling Donna “Mom.” Or six someones. Or me telling a little someone, with affected sternness, “Mom says don’t...” Although I used to say “Donna says...” about fifteen thousand times a day when she worked for me, and usually in the shrill, throaty whine of a child, so maybe it’s not so much of a stretch. I can’t imagine her buying and mailing a grown man loafers, unless that man is me. But if she did that for our son, and he didn’t call her back, I’d kick his ass.
Can I imagine little starry-eyed kids on a sugar rush, shaking their presents and running around our house? Or a boy coming up to ask me if he will never see his sister again? At what point do you start to think about these things?
More specifically: when did I start thinking about these things- a blue-eyed baby with Donna’s pearls in its mouth, my arm protectively draped Dad-like around the back of her. My family. The future was always a blurry unknown- when did these people start to take shape?
Most people would say I’m past the time when I should have been thinking about it; indeed, some 44-year-old men have kids going off to college. Some don’t, that’s true. But most have given it some consideration. If I were being honest, I’ve been actively not considering it.
No, the really, truly, only-in-my-head honest answer is this: I was absolutely sure I did not want to have children. Not because I wouldn’t have liked them- I’m sure I would have. But I would rather not have them at all, than to lose one like my parents lost Joanie. I know Shakespeare, yada yada, but that’s different. That’s heartbreak, which yes, is a palpable and considerable pain. But losing a child is a whole other pain entirely, one I was absolutely convinced I couldn’t survive.
Until now.
I want a baby. Maybe more than one. Probably not six, but I’m not wholly adverse. I want to meet JoshandDonna in the flesh. And Donna wants kids, and I want Donna, so there’s that. But more than any of that, I know that if I have Donna, I can take whatever comes our way. I’m not afraid all the time anymore. I don’t feel like the other shoe is always about to drop. She’s provided me with a weird sort of absolution- like she’s made me realize the world isn’t turning on my axis (I think she may even have said that, in those terms, one exasperated day).
That sounds harsh, but for me, it was cathartic. The house didn’t burn down because of me, Joanie wasn’t trapped because I ran out, her blood and my Dad’s didn’t clot because I wasn’t there to stop it, Leo didn’t die because I wanted him on the ticket. “What would you have done to stop it? Seriously, Josh- the world doesn’t turn on your axis, it actually moves all on its own without so much as a care for you and what you’re doing.”
She can be blunt, and her bluntness probably saved my life.
So yeah, I’ve been giving it some consideration, but I came to the definitive decision right here in that pew: it’s time.
Reverend Such-and-Such is in front of me now, impressing the most well-known story in the Bible on me and the brethren of the sixth pew on the west side. “And the angel of the Lord appeared to them and they were so afraid. And the angel said, ‘Fear not! For I bring you tidings of great joy...”
He pauses here, dramatically, as if the congregation is really hanging in suspense about what comes next. Completely in tune, Donna turns to me and jokes, “I bet you’re wondering what comes next. I’ve already heard this one, but it’s good.”
“And the angel said, let this be a sign unto you...”
The little voice in my ear whispers louder, “It’s time.”
Hold up- this is out of bounds. The otherworldly are not allowed to speak to me in these environs. It’s heretical. Doubly heretical, since I’m actually only here as a courtesy and will probably be rewarded with truly mind-blowing sex for it, and don’t think I didn’t think about that when I agreed to come.
“Why Donna?”
It’s the peppermint ice cream and Moo Shoo on the floor day a few weeks ago. My chopsticks pause mid-air. “Excuse me?”
“That’s what Amy wants to know,” Donna informs me calmly, as she fishes a snow pea out of her carton.
I can’t quite tell if this is a “talk” yet, so I decide to scarf down this bite in case its the last one for awhile. “Amy doesn’t care what I do,” I rebuff, mouth full. “Amy’s primary interest is Amy.”
“No, she cares,” Donna responds. “That’s why she she makes those subtle, snarky comments like she did after Leo’s funeral. It’s her way of dancing around the issue. She’s waiting for you to tell her.”
“Tell her what?”
“Why you want to date me.”
“You’re good in bed,” I retort breezily. “Can you pass the rice?”
“Fine, be that way,” she huffs, reaching for the carton of fried rice. “But your the one who has to be her boss and that question will always be between you until you answer it.”
“I seriously don’t understand what it is with women,” I remark, as I shovel a few more spoonfuls onto my plate. “We dated, it didn’t work, we broke up. You and I are together now, it’s working, and Amy’s with the lumberjack. People move on. Simple.”
But Donna is shaking her head like I’m the dumbest person on earth, so clearly it’s not so simple. “What? Where’s the question there, I ask you?”
“Josh- it’s not like you broke up with Amy and then met me in a bar.”
Okay....and?
“We’ve always been- we’re just- how could someone-” She stutters, at first like she’s nervous and then I realize she’s struggling not to cry. “What the hell do I know, forget it!”
For the life of me, I’m not sure how this came to dawn on me, but it did, and thank God.
She starts to stand up. “I have to go to the bathroom,” she says, running one hand hurriedly across the cheek opposite me.
“Hey... don’t go.”
“I’m just going to the-”
“Don’t go.” I pull her down next to me on the floor, so her back is flush against my chest, and wrap my arms around her. She’s stiff and standoffish at first, but after a minute, relaxes into my embrace and lets me hold her. “I’m with Donna because she makes me happy in a way I never thought I would be.” I kiss the side of her face. “That’s what I’d tell Amy and anyone else who wants to know.”
When I say that, she turns and cuddles up to me. The Amy stuff threw me, but I’m not a complete dufus. This is about her and me- and specifically, all the stuff I was supposed to respond to in the four week window. We went on vacation and we didn’t have it out. We’ve been back three weeks, her crashing at my place, and we haven’t had the talk and she’s worried that soon it’ll be eight years and she’ll still be schlepping over here with an overnight bag. “I don’t want to you to go. And not just to the bathroom,” I tease, as I brush back some of her hair. “I don’t want you to go, period.”
She looks up, so hopelessly innocent that it makes my heart ache... to know that she will be made or broken on what I say next and that she trusts me so much that she’s not ashamed to show me her vulnerability. “I would really like it if you lived here. With me. We don’t have to stay here. We can find a new place. But I don’t want you to go.”
“Josh...” Her face is lit with love. “Are you sure?”
“You told me in Hawaii that you love me. That first night, when we were making love, you said you loved me so much.”
“Yes,” she says, looking a little embarrassed.
“I didn’t respond,” I continue.
She shakes her head. “No.”
“And you never said it again, for the rest of the trip or since we came back.”
Now she looks pained. “I didn’t want you to feel- I didn’t want you to think I wanted to trap you,” she tries to explain. “It was just a vacation.”
“Donna, it was so much more than a vacation.” I take one of her hands in mine on my lap. “You took me by surprise, when you said it. And I was ready to say it back, but I didn’t want to... belittle it. When you said it- it was very in the moment, it seemed like the words just pushed themselves out of you.”
“That’s how it felt,” she laughs. “I didn’t plan it, but I couldn’t hold back. I wanted you to know.”
“And I want you to know- I love you.”
The curly kid with the footie pjs suddenly breaks into a toothless grin. Grinning and staring at me, staring at Donna in profile next to me.
It’s time. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 17th, 2006|08:41 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
VIII: Unshakeables
December 24 | 11:45 PM CT
Hour: 4.5
I need to stop freaking out. It’s just the dishes.
That’s what I try to tell myself as her mom dons a pair of those yellow rubber gloves you see in commercials for Pine Sol and starts to wash. I pick up a towel, poised to dry. It’s the just the dishes, Josh.
But it’s not. It’s her mom and me, alone- both acutely aware of the last and only other time we were alone, in Germany, when she almost lost her only child and I almost lost the chance for all six (maybe) of mine.
Granted, by the time Mrs. Moss had arrived at Landstuhl, Donna had survived the embolism, but she hadn’t yet woken up. In the four hours she spent soaring in some morphine-induced space-time continuum, full of trippy lights and hazy thoughts, Mrs. Moss and I were suspended in our own horrible parallel universe: the World Without Her. Whenever I think about it, I can only recall the words of the men who returned from Vietnam and Toby’s unknown soldier- that you can’t know what it was like unless you were there, and while you may come back, you never come back unchanged.
I had a heads up she was coming, the White House had given her my number. When she arrived, I was keeping vigil in the plastic chair across from Donna’s bed. Colin was sprawled out, useless, in a chair outside her room in the ICU. I saw her through the window when she first walked up to the reception desk. I jumped up, wanting to head her off, because it didn’t seem right that she should have to see her without being prepared by a familiar face, someone who could really tell her what to expect. I was stunned when I saw Donna post-op- she didn’t look as bad as I expected when I first arrived, but after the embolism... it was then I realized she really could have, could still, die.
As I sat in the chair, I thought about my sister’s funeral. It was closed-casket, for obvious reasons, but there were pictures of her everywhere. Person after person stood up and made speeches about how she “had her whole life ahead of her,” but yet, whenever people came up to console my parents, they would say, “It was God’s plan, it was her time.”
A few nights after she was buried, I asked my father about it. “Which is it?” I demanded to know.
“What do you mean?”
“If God decided Joanie would live fourteen years with us, and then take her home to be with Him, then she didn’t have a whole life ahead of her. She was at the end of her life. God made the decision and nobody had a choice- right?”
I remember him telling me he didn’t have an answer for me. He said he would look into it, and told me please don’t ask your mother about that. That request, completely improvisational to a child’s question, was a defining moment for me. It was then I realized my childhood was over and that my life would never be the same. I was born into the world that day armed with only two concrete beliefs: I needed to protect my mother and God was full of crap.
When I saw Mrs. Moss outside, eyes bloodshot, face drawn, clinging helplessly to the cuff of an oversized, white cardigan sweater, I shot up and barred the door with my body. Colin, who had figured out who she was came up behind her. She looked between us, and having absolutely no clue who he was or why he was here, fell into me.
“How is she?” she asked, her voice raspy from exhaustion.
“She hasn’t woken up. The doctors removed the clot, but they don’t know any more.”
She looked directly into my eyes and asked me the one question I had really hoped to avoid. “You’ve seen her, you know her better than any- what do you think, Josh? Is she going to be okay?”
“Mrs. Moss, I don’t...” I looked over her head in an attempt to escape, only to lock into Colin’s face, staring at me, chiding me for even thinking to raise false hope in this mother’s heart.
I looked backed at Mrs. Moss and told her I believed Donna would make it. I had added a third item to my unshakable-faith-in list: protect mom, God sucks, and Donna. The problem was, that last one seemed to call the former ones into question, a fact I was aware of then, and which I wrestle with still, and even more so since Leo died.
A million miles back on Earth, her mother asks, “Are you going to come to church with us?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic,” she notices.
“Well, I had hard enough time sitting through religious services when I believed in this stuff.”
“You don’t have to come. You could stay here, take a nap,” she suggests, and then adds in Donna’s same disarmingly sly way, “Let your brain regenerate the cells it lost listening to Roy and Dani.”
“Ha!” I laugh. “No, I want to come. I think it would be nice.”
She smiles at me. “I think it would be nice too.”
We are silent as we tend to the silverware. But after a moment of consideration, she offers me this advice. “Don’t pay attention to the particulars. Christmas isn’t a story about Christ or even religion really. It’s about the original Great Expectation, when people who were lost found guidance, God made a promise and people believed He delivered.”
She pauses and sets her sponge down; looks up, but past me. “What amazes me is how so many people- whole cultures even- miss the point of what God did. He promised the Jewish people a savior. But when the time arrived, he didn’t send someone with a sword or a thunderbolt. He didn’t break open the clouds or part the seas. He sent a baby. And not to a crowd of people, but to a woman and the man she loved. After being forced to leave their town, travelling across the country, cold, hungry, without a home, and all the pains of childbirth- in that manger, they found peace.”
Her proselytization has made her tear up, but it’s honest and I find it hard to look at. I’m also finding it hard to not be swept up in her homily, a roman a clef for me- my story and her own, which find their intersection in Donna’s precious life. “That’s the story, Josh. It’s not a Christian story. It is a human story.”
“Starring a nice Jewish boy and his wife,” I joke past the lump in my throat. “I’ll just imagine Woody Allen as Joseph trying to wield a hammer and fend off sheep in his wife’s time of need. It would make great dinner theatre.”
“I bet it would," she chuckles. "Anyway, I didn’t mean to preach to you. The story- Christmas- miracles, it just makes me- as a mother- just...” She loses the battles against her own emotions and takes a moment to cry. I never know what to do when people cry in front of me. To look away seems to deny or dismiss their feelings, but on the other hand, to coddle them seems to demean them as infantile. I’m not sure what I did for these sixty seconds, but it must have struck a balance because Mrs. Moss seems very grateful to me. “We almost lost her,” she utters, waving a hand across her face, “and now- the Chief of Staff to the First Lady!- and *you*-” She pats my arm. “What do I know about theology? All I know is that I have a lot to be thankful for.”
She returns her attention to the sink, picking up a wet rag and wiping down the now-clear counter area. I’m hit with the memory of how, on our first night in Hawaii, in the midst of the darkness and mingled hot breath, Donna wrapped her arms tightly around my neck and said, softly but resolutely in my ear, “I love you so much, Josh.”
It was the “Josh” that did it for me because.... well, you know. In politics, we lead grand lives on the national stage- there are few experiences that impress us, even fewer moments we save because they are so plentiful. But I’ll keep both of those moments with me always, forever.
“I have a lot to be thankful for too,” I voice quietly as I fold her dishtowel and place it carefully back on the dry rack. Mrs. Moss puts her hand over mine on the counter.
At this moment, Donna comes downstairs and in a weird transubstantiation sort of thing, takes the place of the ghost in the room.
“Is Daddy ready to leave?” Her mom smiles broadly, with no trace of the sadness.
“Yup, he’s warming up the car,” she answers. Donna surveys the kitchen and her mother tells her I was quite helpful. As we walk out to leave, I take her hand in mine and hold it all the way to church. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 17th, 2006|08:38 pm] |
20 Hours in Wisconsin
VIII: Unshakeables
December 24 | 11:45 PM CT
Hour: 4.5
I need to stop freaking out. It’s just the dishes.
That’s what I try to tell myself as her mom dons a pair of those yellow rubber gloves you see in commercials for Pine Sol and starts to wash. I pick up a towel, poised to dry. It’s the just the dishes, Josh.
But it’s not. It’s her mom and me, alone- both acutely aware of the last and only other time we were alone, in Germany, when she almost lost her only child and I almost lost the chance for all six (maybe) of mine.
Granted, by the time Mrs. Moss had arrived at Landstuhl, Donna had survived the embolism, but she hadn’t yet woken up. In the four hours she spent soaring in some morphine-induced space-time continuum, full of trippy lights and hazy thoughts, Mrs. Moss and I were suspended in our own horrible parallel universe: the World Without Her. Whenever I think about it, I can only recall the words of the men who returned from Vietnam and Toby’s unknown soldier- that you can’t know what it was like unless you were there, and while you may come back, you never come back unchanged.
I had a heads up she was coming, the White House had given her my number. When she arrived, I was keeping vigil in the plastic chair across from Donna’s bed. Colin was sprawled out, useless, in a chair outside her room in the ICU. I saw her through the window when she first walked up to the reception desk. I jumped up, wanting to head her off, because it didn’t seem right that she should have to see her without being prepared by a familiar face, someone who could really tell her what to expect. I was stunned when I saw Donna post-op- she didn’t look as bad as I expected when I first arrived, but after the embolism... it was then I realized she really could have, could still, die.
As I sat in the chair, I thought about my sister’s funeral. It was closed-casket, for obvious reasons, but there were pictures of her everywhere. Person after person stood up and made speeches about how she “had her whole life ahead of her,” but yet, whenever people came up to console my parents, they would say, “It was God’s plan, it was her time.”
A few nights after she was buried, I asked my father about it. “Which is it?” I demanded to know.
“What do you mean?”
“If God decided Joanie would live fourteen years with us, and then take her home to be with Him, then she didn’t have a whole life ahead of her. She was at the end of her life. God made the decision and nobody had a choice- right?”
I remember him telling me he didn’t have an answer for me. He said he would look into it, and told me please don’t ask your mother about that. That request, completely improvisational to a child’s question, was a defining moment for me. It was then I realized my childhood was over and that my life would never be the same. I was born into the world that day armed with only two concrete beliefs: I needed to protect my mother and God was full of crap.
When I saw Mrs. Moss outside, eyes bloodshot, face drawn, clinging helplessly to the cuff of an oversized, white cardigan sweater, I shot up and barred the door with my body. Colin, who had figured out who she was came up behind her. She looked between us, and having absolutely no clue who he was or why he was here, fell into me.
“How is she?” she asks, her voice raspy from exhaustion.
“She hasn’t woken up. The doctors removed the clot, but they don’t know any more.”
She looked directly into my eyes and asked me the one question I had really hoped to avoid. “You’ve seen her, you know her better than any- what do you think, Josh? Is she going to be okay?”
“Mrs. Moss, I don’t...” I looked over her head in an attempt to escape, only to lock into Colin’s face, staring at me, chiding me for even thinking to raise false hope in this mother’s heart.
I looked backed at Mrs. Moss and told her I believed Donna would make it. I had added a third item to my unshakable-faith-in list: protect mom, God sucks, and Donna. The problem was, that last one seemed to call the former ones into question, a fact I was aware of then, and which I wrestle with still, and even more so since Leo died.
A million miles back on Earth, her mother asks, “Are you going to come to church with us?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t sound too enthusiastic,” she notices.
“Well, I had hard enough time sitting through religious services when I believed in this stuff.”
“You don’t have to come. You could stay here, take a nap,” she suggests, and then adds in Donna’s same disarmingly sly way, “Let your brain regenerate the cells it lost listening to Roy and Dani.”
“Ha!” I laugh. “No, I want to come. I think it would be nice.”
She smiles at me. “I think it would be nice too.”
We are silent as we tend to the silverware. But after a moment of consideration, she offers me this advice. “Don’t pay attention to the particulars. Christmas isn’t a story about Christ or religion really. It’s about the original Great Expectation, when people who were lost found guidance, God made a promise and people believed He delivered.”
She pauses and sets her sponge down; looks up, but past me. “What amazes me is how so many people- cultures even- miss the point of what God did. He promised the Jewish people a savior. But when the time arrived, he didn’t send someone with a sword or a thunderbolt. He didn’t break open the clouds or part the seas. He sent a baby. And not to a crowd of people, but to a woman and the man she loved. After being forced to leave their town, travelling across the country, cold, hungry, without a home, and all the pains of childbirth- in that manger, they found peace.”
Her proselytization has made her tear up, but it’s honest and I find it hard to look at. I’m also finding it hard to not be swept up in her homily, a roman a clef for me- my story and her own, which find their intersection in Donna’s precious life. “That’s the story, Josh. It’s not a Christian story. It is a human story.”
“Starring a nice Jewish boy and his wife,” I joke pas the lump in my throat. “I’ll just imagine Woody Allen as Joseph trying to wield a hammer and fend off sheep in his wife’s time of need. It would make great dinner theatre.”
“I bet it would. Anyway, I didn’t mean to preach to you. The story- Christmas- miracles, it just makes me- as a mother- just...” She loses the battles against her own emotions and takes a moment to cry. I never know what to do when people cry in front of me. To look away seems to deny or dismiss their feelings, but on the other hand, to coddle them seems to demean them as infantile. I’m not sure what I did for these sixty seconds, but it must have struck a balance because Mrs. Moss seemed very grateful to me. “We almost lost her,” she utters, waving a hand across her face, “and now- the Chief of Staff to the First Lady!- and *you*-” She pats my arm. “What do I know about theology? All I know is that I have a lot to be thankful for.”
She returns her attention to the sink, picking up a wet rag and wiping down the now-clear counter area. I’m hit with the memory of how, on our first night in Hawaii, in the midst of the darkness and mingled hot breath, Donna wrapped her arms tightly around my neck and said, softly but resolutely in my ear, “I love you so much, Josh.”
It was the “Josh” that did it for me because.... well, you know. In politics, we lead grand lives on the national stage- there are few experiences that impress us, even fewer moments we save because they are so plentiful. But I’ll keep both of those moments with me always, forever.
“I have a lot to be thankful for too,” I voice quietly as I fold her dishtowel and place it carefully back on the dry rack. Mrs. Moss puts her hand over mind on the counter.
Donna comes downstairs and in a weird transubstantiation sort of thing, takes the place of the ghost in the room.
“Is Daddy ready to leave?” Her mom smiles broadly, with no trace of the sadness.
“Yup, he’s warming up the car,” she answers. Donna surveys the kitchen and her mother tells her I was quite helpful. As we walk out to leave, I take her hand in mine and hold it all the way to church. |
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