Walsh (D) |
Slaughter (R) |
Spread |
44 |
41 |
Walsh +3 |
Charlotte was hiding out in the bathroom of the campaign headquarters when she heard Leila scream for the first time in their nine years together.
It had been a mind-numbing morning of fundraising calls to potential big donors. It would have been easier and more efficient to just make a recording of Charlotte begging for cash. If she’d been a Humanity client, their team of engineers would have crafted voice-recognition software that would release perfect courteous requests on her behalf. Making the calls was somehow both boring and exhausting. Now the only quiet space in the entire office was the handicapped restroom, where she was free to devour a limp spinach salad with anemic carrots and shredded American cheese. Charlotte had balanced the salad on her knees and was about to refresh her browser to read a story on People magazine’s website about Reese Witherspoon really pulling off a denim kimono to clear her brain with a bit of harmless celebrity fashion news when she heard Leila shriek.
“That racist lying bastard!”
What had Ted Slaughter done now?
Leila never lost her cool. The ability to project outward composure was one of their shared virtues. When Charlotte told people Leila was the strongest person she’d ever met, she meant it. Early on in their time working together, Leila had told Charlotte a story about how her mother was held up at gunpoint at the intersection of Fairfax Avenue and Foothill Boulevard when she was seven months pregnant with her daughter. The robber, a fifteen-year-old kid, had pushed the cold barrel of the gun directly into her abdomen and kicked her in the kneecap, all for ten dollars and a bus pass. Leila’s mother claimed that her daughter punched back so hard from the womb that she had the strength to get up and chase the assailant down the street, knock him over, and take her money back. When Charlotte cringed at the story, Leila just laughed. “My mom’s sisters were beaten within an inch of their lives by soldiers who were supposed to protect them. Her brother was kidnapped and they never saw him again. I had a lot of reminders growing up that I never had the right to feel sorry for myself or whine because I didn’t get new Nikes or an American Girl doll.”
Charlotte sat on the toilet for a moment more before standing and slipping her phone into her pocket because she hated anyone knowing she’d brought her phone with her into a bathroom. She swiftly made her way to join Leila on the other side of the room, where she stood over one of their interns, a University of Scranton student who tracked Slaughter on weekends. It was so clear to Charlotte from the way he averted his eyes and picked at a pimple on the side of his face that he was afraid of Leila, and that she didn’t realize the power she wielded over him.
“What’s up?” Charlotte plucked a sweaty can of Diet Coke from Leila’s hand and took a gulp of it. In the past three weeks she’d begun supplementing her coffee with several cans of caffeinated soda. It began when Max started sleeping in the basement. “You’re up working all night,” he complained. “I can’t sleep with you typing.” His absence from their bed gave her license to stay awake most of the night reading policy papers. She was getting an average of three hours of sleep a night. Most days she didn’t even see Max in the morning. He ran while she got the girls dressed and fed before he took over for the rest of the day, shuttling the twins to camp, taking Annie to the playground; then she tried to make it back for bath time and bedtime stories. They were like soldiers on patrol, parceling out duties, going through the motions, doing their jobs.
When Leila looked at her Charlotte saw anger layered over genuine hurt and dismay. “Ted Slaughter has a nickname for me. Tell Charlotte the nickname, Michael.”
Poor Michael looked like he thought he was about to be spanked. He returned his hand to his lap, where he began to tap his index and middle fingers on his thigh like he was playing a scale on a piano. When he shook his head his sandy-brown hair flopped into his eyes like the fur of an ungroomed sheepdog. “I really don’t want to. Do I have to say it out loud again?”
Leila grunted. “I’ll say it out loud. Ted Slaughter, when he’s talking to his aides and to the press and sometimes even to voters, calls me Charlotte Walsh’s jihadi handmaid. But that’s not all. He let it slip in a private event with donors that he thought my mother might be an actual terrorist.”
Charlotte looked around for Josh because he would know exactly what to say, would make an off-color joke so heinous he would diffuse Slaughter’s disgusting remarks. But Josh was half a state away in a meeting with the governor in Harrisburg trying to secure an official endorsement. Harrisburg had been dragging their feet and Josh scheduled a face-to-face to figure out why. The governor’s lack of support made them nervous. He was up for reelection next year and his silence could mean he was worried about hitching his cart to a potential loser.
“Let’s take a walk.” Charlotte grabbed her chief of staff by the elbow and led her out of the office into Scranton’s muggy summer air.
Leila kicked a discarded can of grape soda down the middle of the sidewalk. “Jihadi? He called me a terrorist, Charlie.” Her face twitched with righteous fury. “He called my mother a terrorist. What if people come after her? What if this fucks with her visa? He’s a racist, lying old sonofabitch. He thinks all brown people are terrorists or gangsters. I’m American. My mother’s from Africa—that makes me African American, and Irish American, and I was baptized Catholic. I’m not a terrorist and I’m also not your minion.”
Leila needed to say the words out loud, because refuting Slaughter’s lies, even just to Charlotte, made a difference, made them more real and made him accountable in a world that had stopped holding him accountable.
“Your mom is going to be fine. She has a green card. She’s been here thirty years and no one has ever questioned her status.”
“He’s goddamned terrible. My mom might be fine. But what about her mom and her sisters?”
For the past ten years, Leila had spent a good portion of her salary to help her mother move her family from Khartoum to Oakland. Charlotte had encouraged her to use Humanity’s legal staff to wade through the bureaucratic nightmare of the asylum process, a quagmire that had only gotten worse in the past eighteen months.
“Men like him make decisions for millions of people. Men who look at me and think, ‘Just another little brown bitch, she’s the problem, she’s a threat to us.’ ”
Seeing Leila’s frustration swell forced Charlotte to be strong and cool. “Let’s sit somewhere. I need sugar.” Charlotte stayed silent as she led Leila to Mary’s Kitchen, their dingy corner diner where the campaign staff usually hung out eating egg burritos and disco fries at two in the morning. The waiter came quickly and Charlotte ordered a Caesar salad and a brownie sundae to split between the two of them while Leila groaned and rested her forehead on the linoleum table.
What surprised Charlotte the most about Leila’s reaction to Slaughter’s insult was the effect it had on her, how it brought out a protective instinct she’d previously only felt for her daughters. Leila turned her cheek and laid it on Charlotte’s hand like a small child, her emerald eyes widening.
“It’s just so fucking ignorant. It makes me want to give up. Or throw up. Or both.”
Charlotte stroked the back of her head the way she did the twins’ when they were sick. “It sucks. I know it sucks. I know how it feels.” For the past six months Charlotte had kept a list of the most ruthless and brutal insults leveled against her on television, the Internet, and social media in a text file on her phone. Late at night when she sat alone at the kitchen table, in the bathroom, or, more recently, in bed, she read them out loud to herself. It was an unhealthy form of verbal self-flagellation.
- Wicked Witch of the West Coast
- Harpy Walsh
- A stuttering slob
- Mommy Morebucks
- A hero to all stupid sluts
- A walking vagina with fangs
- Silicon Valley Satan
- Bitch girl
- An artisanal pig in lipstick
- Nasty new-money cunt
- A burr that sticks right in my asshole
That last one came from Ted Slaughter himself. Then the comments:
“She doesn’t know what the fuck she’s doing.
“You’re not fit to be a mother.”
“You should have been aborted.”
“I want to slice her tits off and send her to the gas chamber.”
“You will burn in hell.”
“I knew her in high school. She cheated on all her exams. That’s how she got into that preppy college.”
“Your children should be taken away from you.”
“God WILL take your children away from you.”
That wasn’t the worst of it. Someone had created horrific memes of her daughters being stabbed using photographs they’d taken from Charlotte’s Instagram account. There was the Reddit chain devoted to ways men would like to show her how they would be the boss of her that included acts so disgusting that Charlotte gagged the one and only time she read it. There was the elaborate hate mail that included pictures of men masturbating. It usually came in email form, but she’d gotten several letters to the office written in stilted capital letters, the envelopes containing clippings of pubic hair. She’d become a blank screen for the enraged and hopeless to project all of their anger upon.
When she read the insults, witnessed the hatred on the ground, and despaired at the incivility on the Internet, she sometimes wondered to herself, and only ever to herself, whether America got the president it deserved.
Leila sat up and swiped at the mascara pooling beneath her eyes before she slammed her hand down on the table.
“Fuck it!”
The few other diners, an elderly couple sharing a grilled cheese sandwich and a young mother trying to get her toddler to eat with a fork, turned to look in their direction.
“Keep your voice down,” Charlotte warned.
“I can’t. Did I tell you someone spit on me on the street the other day, a man, probably your age. He recognized me from pictures with you and he spit in my face and told me that we were what is wrong with this country.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You have other things to worry about. But there are days when I don’t know why I’m doing this, or why you’re doing this. I didn’t expect it to be like this.”
“Me neither.”
When the food arrived they ate in silence, trading bites of salad and ice cream.
“I’m used to eating my feelings, but these are some of the more delicious feelings I’ve taken down.” Charlotte attempted a joke. She just wanted Leila to smile once.
Leila pulled at a lock of hair that had escaped from one of the tortoiseshell combs she used to pin it back behind her ears. She straightened the curl and let go so that it bounced toward her cheek. When she finally spoke again, she’d regained a semblance of her typical determined and professional tone. “I know something. About Slaughter. I have something that can hurt him.”
Charlotte scraped the remaining whipped cream from the side of the sundae glass. “Something I don’t know about?”
“Yeah. I didn’t mention it because it’s one of those things that I heard and I was like, this isn’t right. This isn’t us. This isn’t what we do. I want us to be the good guys.”
“We are the good guys.”
“It came from a friend from college. He’s a producer on the local news in Pittsburgh. He got this tip during Slaughter’s last campaign and they never did anything with it, so he told me about it now and I didn’t mention it because it didn’t seem like something we’d do, but now . . . my feeling is that we should use it.”
Leila explained what she knew. Ted Slaughter’s wife, Bonnie, had had an abortion about a decade ago, less than a year before she’d married Ted. The kid had been Slaughter’s. It was an open secret that the two had had an affair well before his divorce was finalized. The doctor who performed the procedure wouldn’t go on record, but this television producer friend of Leila’s had secured confirmation on deep background from a nurse who worked in the clinic in the western suburbs of Pittsburgh. The woman claimed that Ted Slaughter paid for the abortion with a personal check.
“Why didn’t they run with the story?” Charlotte asked, motioning to the waiter for their bill.
“My friend thinks Slaughter helped the network’s executive producer get his daughter into Pittsburgh’s most competitive private school.”
Charlotte didn’t need to think hard about it. “We can’t do it.”
But Leila had the crazed look of someone who wouldn’t be easily dissuaded from seeking revenge. “Charlie, this isn’t just because of what he called me. Ted Slaughter is an enemy of women. You know that. He says birth control is a luxury good. He calls C-sections preexisting conditions and says abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest. He voted to defund Planned Parenthood at the national level. Clinics all over the country and the state have been shut down because of legislation he introduced. And he’s a goddamned liar. He’s a goddamned hypocrite and we can call him out on it.”
Charlotte placed her hand on top of Leila’s and told her she had every reason to want to do this before she told her why she couldn’t. “It’s not fair. Dragging his wife into this. What did she do to deserve to be attacked and humiliated?”
“She married an asshole, for a start,” Leila persisted.
Charlotte sighed. “That’s not her fault.”
“This is an attack on him and his disgusting hypocrisy. He gets up there and hisses about family values and how life begins at conception and I’ll bet he made her get rid of it because he knew he’d have to pay more in his divorce. He attacks me. He attacks you. He attacks women every single day. He deserves this and so much worse.” She gave Charlotte a pointed look. “We both know that sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to protect yourself.”
Charlotte turned and looked out the window for a second to ensure her voice stayed steady and assured. “We don’t have proof it was his.”
“Why do we need proof? Who has proof for anything anymore? They made up a story about you being pregnant! They call me a terrorist.”
Charlotte would have called it opportunistic if anyone but Leila had suggested doing this, but that was the last thing she wanted to think about Leila. Instead, she thought about why she didn’t want to do it. There was the fact that it was low, lower than anything they’d considered doing so far in this race. But she also understood why Bonnie Slaughter would want to keep her abortion a secret beyond the obvious reason that she was married to a man who made a career out of exploiting the pro-life right. The reason hit close to home. Charlotte hadn’t lied to Josh during their first meeting more than a year earlier when she told him she’d never had an aborition. But what she hadn’t said was that she’d been pregnant once before the twins. It had been in high school. The baby had been Jack’s. She never told her high school boyfriend she was pregnant. Charlotte had watched a teenage pregnancy derail Kara and Paul’s lives. She made the difficult decision on her own.
Pennsylvania required parental consent for a girl under eighteen to get an abortion. Charlotte told Marty Walsh about the pregnancy because telling her mentally ill mother wasn’t an option.
This was the version of Marty she remembered best. Charlotte confessed to him in their old Buick after Marty picked her up from volleyball practice. A Peter Cetera song about knights and love and honor played on the radio. Empty cans of Keystone Light rolled over her sneakers in the footwell. “Don’t be ashamed,” her dad whispered in a tone that was sad, but not sorry. “This is the rest of your life we’re talking about.”
Marty smoked a pack of Camels a day. He reached into the glove compartment for a new pack, drew two from the foil, and handed the second one to Charlotte. “Don’t tell your mother.” Charlotte wasn’t sure whether he meant the cigarette or the procedure. “You’re gonna be a woman with a big life,” her dad said, pulling the smoke into his lungs and wheezing on the word life. Marty booked an appointment at a clinic outside Philly because there wasn’t one in Scranton. Then the pregnancy ended on its own a few days later. She estimated she was maybe eight weeks along, and what came out of her looked like nothing more than a large blood clot. It was Marty who held her while she cried. Together they felt sadness and relief and never spoke about it ever again. Sometimes she allowed herself the possibility that Marty Walsh could have been a feminist if he’d been born in a different time and a different place. The memory was somehow both terrible and beautiful for her.
Now she felt like she was letting Leila down. “Bonnie Slaughter is the one who will be attacked. If we do this, then I’m no better than him. We aren’t releasing it.”
Leila folded her arms across her chest.
“Let me talk to Josh about it.”
This campaign had brought out the worst in both of them.
“This isn’t who you are. And don’t forget, I’m your boss, not Josh.”