“Tragic buffet table. Those hot dogs were in that slow cooker for at least a couple of days before we got there.” This is Arthur, Neale’s father, sitting in the front passenger seat, critiquing the food at the campaign office. Cate sits beside Neale, both of them slouched across the back seat of Arthur and Rose’s menacing Dodge Challenger. They are politically progressive and concerned about the environment, but they are also from Detroit, and have always driven union-made American muscle cars like it’s part of their belief system.
Cate sits behind Rose, noticing her long, salt-and-pepper hair tied in an elaborate knot at the back of her neck. She has worn it this way since Cate has known her. At one time she was pretty in a hippie way, like those small women folk singers who wielded big, acoustic guitars. Over time, particularly time spent trying to mend a broken world, her features have loosened. Her eyebrows, which used to be dramatic, are now caterpillars. The lid over her right eye now sags. When she was younger, Cate wished Rose could have been her mother. She was so not-Ricky. She was the first woman Cate knew who had tattoos. From where she sits, Cate can see the fading peace symbol on the side of her neck.
When she met Neale, Cate loved to go to her house after school. Rose would be there, ready with her stripped-down version of the mothering shown in TV commercials. She wouldn’t bake cookies, but she stocked rolls of Pillsbury dough in the fridge so the girls could bake their own. While they waited, she’d get out a globe so old several countries had to be redrawn or renamed with a marker. They went through the New York Times until they found a story. Indira Gandhi, assassinated. Why? It was Rose who gave Cate the idea of a larger world, and that even if she was only a teenager in a smug suburb, she was part of that world. Because of Rose, Cate has volunteered around elections since she was in high school.
They are heading back to Chicago after getting out the vote in a town in western Michigan. The town is really poor. A lot of the voters on the Democratic rolls there live in rural versions of projects—town houses with dirt front yards, nobody outside, not so much as a potted plant in any window. Cate isn’t sure if they are really going to make it to their polling place today. It’s hard to counter their apathy.
“Good cake, though,” Arthur says. “The poppy seed.”
Rose is driving in her usual limit-pushing gear. She has spent her entire adulthood fighting for civil rights, opportunities for women, justice for the wrongfully imprisoned, open arms for refugees. But once these humans are behind the wheels of other cars, they become, if not the enemy, at least the competition. They need to be tailgated out of the fast lane, encouraged with a quick, prompting honk just before the light changes, flipped the bird when they try to cut into the front of a line she feels they belong at the back of.
Cate settles into her portion of the back seat, which is to say a burrow she has made in a high drift of lawn signs and door-hanger cards whose usefulness has just expired. On the other side of this (now) litter, Neale is eating half a tuna sandwich she grabbed off the food table at the headquarters. Cate is playing Toon Blast, a game on her phone that has already sucked away months of her life when you add up all the bits of hours she has played, lured in by big rewards like a smashing-hammer icon, or a power-drill icon to destroy color cubes.
But although they are tired, none of them is worried. The outcome is in the bag, isn’t it? Other Democrats in less dispirited places will carry the day. Still, Cate is nagged by the subdued atmosphere in the campaign office.
They go to the apartment of Rose and Arthur’s friend Maury, where there’s to be a gathering of the faithful. Maury orders Thai, opens a bottle of wine. Five of their union-organizing friends arrive. Everyone settles in.
The returns are disturbing from the start.
“Red states,” Rose says, dismissing them.
“I think I’ll head out,” Cate says an hour later, when she has begun to get queasy. “I’m going to the pool. That trick worked for me the night the Cubs won the Series. Things weren’t looking good, but by the time I swam, then got back, they were on their way to the win.”
No one is listening to her. Everyone in the room is magnetized by the bad news flooding out of the TV. It’s as though the television is in meltdown, but of course it is actually the country.
The pool trick doesn’t work this time. She’s the only one in the water, sequestered for an hour, but driving home, the radio is a torrent of gloom. Sailor meets her at the door. Graham is in front of the TV in the living room, which is running but with the sound off. He’s on the floor, rolling and covering his head. He’s not saying anything, just rolling back and forth.
She crouches down beside him. She rubs her hand over his hair. She scratches Sailor’s chest. “Guys, I think I’m going to take an Ambien and go to sleep. I just can’t think about this anymore tonight.”
Maureen calls. She was at what was supposed to be a victory party, but everyone is just going home now. “Nobody even said good night. They were like miners going into their own private tunnels.”
“Let’s talk in the morning. I know waking up will be slamming into an abutment, but eight hours of whatever’s just happened will have passed.”
One of the happiest moments of Cate’s life was in front of another TV, eight years ago, waiting through another set of returns, when Barack took Ohio, and so the presidency. Now all that is about to be pulled inside out.
Even medicated, she can’t sleep. In the kitchen, Graham is still up.
“How will the world survive this?” he asks. It’s 4:30 a.m. He’s sitting at the island, hunched over, drinking coffee. His ponytail has come undone; his hair hangs Christlike to his shoulders; he’s in his own private Gethsemane. “The people who voted for him. I feel like I should have gone and talked with each of them. Brought charts, scientific articles, photos of melting glaciers, dying polar bears, shown the value of immigrants, how much better it is to consider races and genders equal. I should have told them coal mining isn’t making a comeback.”
“This is very bad, but a lot of it was mechanical malfunction. Too many things are wrong with the machinery. All the gerrymandering. The voter suppression, the low turnout. The obsolescence of the electoral college. Many more people voted for Hillary, but we’re going to have him for president. We need to sit with this for a while,” Cate says. “Then get to work turning it around. Get inside the wheelhouse and start pushing against the heavy wheel.”
“The surveillance is going to get much worse.”
“Let’s take a break. Let’s walk this dog.” Sailor concurs by swiping at the back of her shin. “When things get bad, he always worries it’s about him.”