Girls In White Dresses (20 page)

Lauren started to say something, but Shannon spoke first. “Do I have a minute for the Candidate?” she asked. The boy nodded and smiled and Shannon felt heat rush into her eyes. The dog sniffed the boy’s leg and stood very still.

“Yes,” he said. “If you have just a minute for me, I can tell you about how you can help—”

“Do I have a
minute
for the Candidate? Do I? Have a minute? For the Candidate?” The boy nodded again, but now he looked nervous. “Let me tell you something,” Shannon said. “I have given the Candidate weeks—no, months—of my life. No, I don’t have a minute for him. You want to know why? My boyfriend has left to travel around with him. He quit his job to work for the campaign, and I haven’t seen him in a month. A month! I’m not sure if he’s ever coming back, and the thing is, he doesn’t even care! He doesn’t care because all he wants is to work on this godforsaken campaign that is just so important. More important than anything else, including me!”

The boy began to back away. “Okay, then,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

“You didn’t mean to what? Interrupt my walk? Stop me on a cold night and make me listen to you tell me how amazing this Candidate is? Yes, you did. And I’ve heard it. I hear it all the time. From my boyfriend, from everyone. I get it. He’s amazing.”

“Yes, he is,” the boy said quietly. Shannon narrowed her eyes. Lauren tried to pull her arm and make her walk away, but Shannon stayed right where she was.

“Why are you even here?” she asked.

“To inform people about the change we want to see in the world,” he said.

“No,” Shannon said. “Why are you
here
?” she pointed to the sidewalk. “Why are you in New York? You think you need to convince people here to vote for him? Let me give you a heads-up, buddy. He’s got New York, okay? We got it. We’re Democrats here. And you’re on the Upper West Side, of all places. For God’s sake. Don’t waste your time. Go somewhere else! It doesn’t even matter if I vote. I might not even bother. Did you hear that? I might not vote!”

The boy kept walking backward and then turned and ran down the street, clutching his clipboard to his chest. He kept glancing back to see if Shannon was chasing after him. A few people stood on the sidewalk and stared, and Lauren took five steps to the right, trying to pretend that she didn’t know Shannon.

“Every vote counts,” an old lady said to Shannon. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Oh, fuck you,” she said. The dog hung his head. He looked embarrassed. Shannon started to walk down the sidewalk toward her apartment. She walked quickly, and Lauren had to jog to keep up.

“Are you okay?” Lauren asked.

Shannon stopped. “Yeah. I guess maybe I’m not handling this whole thing as well as I thought.”

“Really?” Lauren said. “Do you think?”

“Whatever,” Shannon said.

“Hey, I get it,” Lauren said. “If you want to go back and push down that old lady, I’m all for it.”

“Maybe later,” Shannon said. “Drinks first.”

On Election Day, Shannon slept in. She got coffee and took her time walking to the public school where she would vote. Everyone at work would be late because of voting, and she might as well take advantage of it. She at least deserved that much.

Shannon had butterflies in her stomach as she walked, but they weren’t from excitement. She’d been counting down to this day for months, and now that it was here she didn’t quite know how she felt about it.

As Shannon turned on Ninetieth, she saw that the line stretched all the way down the block. People were laughing and waving to their neighbors. Moms from the school were selling baked goods and hot chocolate. “All the proceeds are going to the school,” they kept saying. The group at the front was rowdy and slaphappy from standing in line for so long, and they started cheering as people came out of the building. “Whoo!” they yelled. “You made a difference! Good for you!”

Everyone was acting like this was some strange election-themed street fair. Shannon debated going back to bed and not voting at all. She could just tell everyone she had. What was the difference? In the end, she stayed put, but she put on her sunglasses and refused to smile at anyone around her.

Shannon saw a guy she knew from work walking down the line. “Hey!” he said to her. He held up his hand for a high five and Shannon gave him a weak slap. “What a day, huh?” he asked. He turned his face to the sun and smiled. Like it was Christmas. Like there was a miracle to observe.

“Yep,” Shannon said. “What a day. Where did you come from? Were you in the front of the line?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I gave my place to an elderly lady. I told her I’d go to the back of the line, you know? It’s the least I can do.”

This wasn’t the New York that Shannon loved. These weren’t the people who normally lived here. Everyone had gone crazy. Dan was gone and maybe he was never coming back. Shannon thought, as she waited in line, that she was crazy too, that she should have never waited for Dan in the first place. She should have made him choose: “Me or the Candidate,” she should have said.

Shannon thought this as she stood in line and as she voted. What had she done? Why had she chosen to stand by and support Dan as he’d left her? When she came out of the building, the group of people waiting to get in smiled and waited for Shannon to smile back. She didn’t. Finally, one of the women said, “I hope you made the right choice.” Shannon just looked at her and said, “Me too.”

That night, Shannon sat in a bar with her friends to watch the returns. Everyone was anxious, and they drank quickly. “So, our feeling is hopeful but cautious, right?” Mary said.

“Sure,” Shannon said. She was drinking faster than any of them. Vodka went down like water. No one really noticed until she fell off her stool.

“Whoa,” Isabella said. “Are you okay?”

“Maybe we need some chicken fingers,” Lauren said. She held up her hand for the bartender.

“She’s just really excited,” Shannon heard Mary telling someone at the bar. “Her boyfriend’s been working on the campaign and now he’ll finally come home.”

“He’s not coming home,” Shannon tried to say. But it didn’t come out right and no one seemed to understand her.

When the Candidate gave his speech that night, Shannon cried, of course. Everyone did. The whole bar watched in tears because it was amazing and inspiring and they were all relieved. But Shannon didn’t cry like the rest of them. She didn’t have little tears dripping out. No, Shannon had flared nostrils and she heaved and hyperventilated and her face turned red. It was the way she used to cry when she was little, when her mom used to say, “You need to calm down” and would send her upstairs to do just that. Shannon sat in the middle of everyone and cried like a red hog.

All of her friends sat around her, taking turns patting her on the back. Finally, Lauren took her home and made sure she got into bed and took some Advil.

“Just go to bed,” Lauren said. “You’ll feel better tomorrow.”

“Nothing will ever be the same,” Shannon said.

“That’s right,” Lauren said, misunderstanding. “It’s all different now.”

Dan was offered a job in D.C. shortly after. Shannon cried and they fought, and he took the job and moved there. They tried to make it work for a while. She took the train to visit him, and he drove up to New York on free weekends. But it wasn’t working. Shannon couldn’t shake the feeling that she was his second choice, that Dan had chosen someone else over her. She couldn’t forgive that.

One of the last times Shannon visited Dan, she ran into an old friend from college. He was sitting in a bar, drinking beers with a friend. He told her that his longtime girlfriend had joined the campaign and then gotten a job with the administration. She was in charge of finding hotels for the president and his staff and was currently in Germany. “I haven’t seen her in two months,” he said.

“Are you still together?” Shannon asked. He shrugged and took a long drink.

“How can you be with someone if you never see them?” he finally responded.

“That,” Shannon said, “is a great question.”

Dan and Shannon broke up over the phone about two weeks after that. She blamed the Candidate for their breakup. (She didn’t call him the president, like everyone else. To her, he would always be the Candidate.) When Shannon thought about it, the Candidate was probably responsible for all sorts of breakups. She and Dan were just the tip of the iceberg. All over America, boyfriends and girlfriends had been ripped apart in the name of Hope.

Shannon was angry that no one was covering this news story. People were talking about health care, but no one was talking about the Relationship Misery Phenomenon that the Candidate had caused. She started writing an op-ed for the
New York Times
but she didn’t get very far. She couldn’t put into words what had happened.

Shannon stopped reading the newspapers. She stopped watching
CNN
and
MSNBC
. Every day that she woke up seemed to matter less. It was Tuesday or Monday or Friday or Wednesday. What difference did it make? She didn’t care who the president was or what changes he was going to make to the country. She was alone and that was all she had room to think about.

Her friends tried to cheer her up. “Come on,” they said. “Come out. Forget about Dan.” But Shannon refused.

“You know,” Lauren said, “you were too good for him anyway.”

“That’s just something people say,” Shannon said.

“Shannon,” Lauren said, “the guy wore two BlackBerrys on his belt. He wasn’t perfect.” But this only made Shannon cry.

In her darkest moments, Shannon wished it had gone another way. Lying in bed at night, with her head under the covers, she wished that the Candidate had lost. She never admitted this to anyone, and she wasn’t sure that she really meant it. But maybe she did. She felt reckless when she had these late-night thoughts. She was a lifetime Democrat and here she was wishing that the Republicans had squeaked out another one. Sometimes she laughed by herself, feeling giddy, the same way she’d felt when she’d stolen a candy bar in the fourth grade. How ashamed her parents would have been if they’d known. How ashamed she was of herself when she looked in the mirror in the morning.

She thought of calling Dan just so she could say, “I wish he’d lost,” and then hanging up. But she couldn’t do it. She was afraid it would only reaffirm his belief that he was right to choose the Candidate over her, that it was the smartest thing he’d ever done.

Shannon wished that she were a stronger person, a more selfless soul that would be happy to put the needs of her country ahead of her own. But maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was nothing more than a weak and selfish brat who wanted what she wanted. Oh yes, she was ashamed.

She started watching a lot of reality TV. She watched it for hours at a time, surprised when she looked up at the clock and found that a whole day had slipped by. It soothed her to see people eat bugs and search for love in rose ceremonies. It gave her peace.

Shannon used to judge people who watched these shows, this trash TV. Now it was all she could stand to do. She watched whatever was on—dysfunctional famous families, snotty teenagers at reform camp, even a couple with a litter of in vitro babies that squabbled and screamed. But her favorite one of all, the one she waited all week to watch, was a weight-loss show where morbidly obese people were sent to a ranch and forced to exercise and starve themselves to a healthy weight.

These people cried and fought. They fell down on the gym floor and begged not to be sent home. They tried to undo all of the bad choices they’d made. Shannon watched in her bed, curled up under the blankets, bawling at the big people as they struggled to break out of their giant bodies. She wept along with them as they ran on treadmills and lifted weights. She cried for their struggle and the goals they wanted to reach. She understood them, after all. All they wanted was a new beginning. All they wanted was some hope.

I
sabella and Harrison were going to Boston. Harrison wanted to get on the road early, and set the alarm clock for five a.m. “This isn’t early,” Isabella told him when the alarm clock started buzzing. “It’s the middle of the night.” All morning, Harrison told Isabella to hurry, which made her want to get back into bed. Finally, at eight-fifteen, they were in the car and heading out of the city. Isabella asked if they could stop for coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts and Harrison wrinkled his nose and said, “Dunkin’ Donuts? Really?” But he pulled over and went inside to get it for her.

“Here,” he said, handing her the big Styrofoam cup. He sniffed.

“You don’t want any?” she asked.

“I’ll wait,” he said.

They were going to Boston to see Harrison’s friends Brinkley and Coco. Brinkley and Coco had had a baby a few months ago and kept insisting that they come visit. Isabella had heard the names Brinkley and Coco so much during the past week, she’d thought it was going to push her over the edge. All of Harrison’s friends had names that reminded her of cartoon animals. These names used to be funny to Isabella. Now they were just annoying.

“What’s the baby’s name again?” she asked, even though she knew. “Bitsy?”

“Elizabeth.”

“Right.”

Isabella sipped her coffee and stared out the window. She was excited about going to Boston, even if she didn’t care about seeing these people or meeting their baby. It was October and Isabella felt like she should be going somewhere. Fall always did that to her. It made her restless, like she was late getting back to school; like she should be registering for classes, and buying pencils and notebooks and folders that matched.

She’d bought a pink outfit for the child with little polka dots on the feet. She’d shown it to Harrison before she wrapped it. He nodded and said, “Nice.” She also bought a little pink bunny to go with it, but at the last moment left it out of the package. It was soft and worried-looking and Isabella had a feeling that the baby wouldn’t appreciate it. She pictured it lost among a shelf of bigger animals, and so she shoved it into a drawer in her bedside table and continued wrapping the present.

Harrison had gone to college in Boston too, and Isabella often wondered if they’d ever run into each other on the street or brushed shoulders at a bar. She’d asked him this once when they had just started dating and it seemed romantic to think that they might have been in the same place years ago.