It might seem as if I had reason to be jealous, but I wasn’t. The biggest difference between Emory and me was the degree of our ambition, and I’d never been apologetic about the modesty of mine. I was thrilled that Wade and I had a large, handsome house. I was thrilled to have a handsome lover. I was also thrilled to have a job that demanded little and provided such luxurious free time. If I harbored any proper ambition it was for my older two children, whose genetic heritage, which I’d gone to a great deal of trouble to engineer, should have ensured a promising future, and now a quirk of ideological fashion was busy invalidating the very quality that once marked offspring like mine as destined for great things. But I’d never been a public person beyond my willingness to speak to a class, so I’d no reason to begrudge Emory her promotion at WVPA. I was sincerely excited for her that she’d finally quit interviewing second-rate locals for The Talent Show, which in a paroxysm of administrative anxiety had been renamed Everyone Is an Artist; had they opted instead for Everyone Thinks They’re an Artist, Emory and I might have gotten behind the rebranding one hundred percent.
Now moved to a substantial comment slot after the six p.m. news summary, Emory would enjoy a far higher profile and the more sizable commuter audience. As a testimony to my happiness on her account, for her debut broadcast the last week of October I gathered the whole family around my computer on the kitchen table before dinner, so that we could all listen to “Auntie Em,” as D&Z had dubbed her tongue in cheek. The kids adored her. She always seemed so much more glamorous than their mother, and I wasn’t offended by their ongoing crush. I was pleased that they responded to adult company, and providing them with a shrewd, quick-witted visitor both stimulated my children and indirectly reflected well on me.
“Shush!” I hushed my screaming, careening seven-year-old as the news concluded. “If you can’t keep quiet, please leave the room so the rest of us can hear.”
Emory has a low, seductive voice, and for her first line or two I was simply flushed with the same rush of pleasure I always felt when she greeted me in person:
I’ve never been wholly on board with the term “dog whistle” as a metaphor for wink-and-nod prejudice. Only dogs can hear dog whistles. By implication, only the intended audience for these coded signals can detect the latent hate-mongering. Supposedly, the rest of us sit there in our innocence as if no one has said anything the least untoward. But in my experience, so-called dog whistles register plainly to the ordinary human ear. Their messaging isn’t subtle. We can all hear what the speaker is really saying loud and clear.
Ever since the Mental Parity movement roiled our backward institutions and finally issued in a fairer, more decent, more respectful public protocol, we’ve all recognized that a host of snubs and put-downs have grown unacceptable. We know what those words are, and how savagely they’ve been used in the past to disparage and dehumanize. But all social progress is doomed to be halting. After our one step forward, too many of our contemporaries are shuffling two steps back.
Start paying attention to friends, coworkers, and even politicians who would never be caught dead using the kind of language that I’m hardly going to cite on this broadcast; NPR has strict guidelines that would prevent my doing so even if I were so recklessly inclined. But too many of our fellow Americans—seemingly biddable, seemingly polite, obedient to the strict letter of the cultural law—have meanwhile been developing a whole new secret code to convey exactly the prejudice we’re trying so strenuously to eliminate. Evasive, subtext-laden phrasing functions as a “get this!”—as a sharp but surreptitious elbow in the ribs.
I can’t count the times I’ve heard the people we now call “alternative processors” flagged up in conversation, but they’re always slyly identified as “unconventional,” “special,” “offbeat,” or “eccentric.” Folks also known as the “otherwise” may be described as having “exceptional” intelligence, by which the speaker really means, wink-wink, exceptionally low intelligence. True, this persecuted cast was once slandered outright, and a raft of flagrant insults having grown repugnant is cause for celebration. But I’ve encountered this crafty new language many times here at this very radio station. Nowadays, rather than be subjected to brazen ridicule, what the otherwise propose in the workplace is coyly characterized as “less than ideal,” “somewhat impractical,” “not for the best,” or “perhaps not wholly thought out.” What they write might be described as “not fully developed,” “a promising start,” “in need of another go-through,” or “just a little bit short of perfect.” What they say is gently dismissed as “a tad unclear,” “a touch garbled,” “reliant on weak logic,” “based on a dubious factual foundation,” or even—boldly, baldly—as “wrong.”
These aren’t dog whistles. They’re human whistles. We can all hear them. And sometimes the whistle is at its most shrill when no one says anything at all. There’s a look—a conspiratorial meeting of eyes between members of what was, until so recently, a spoiled, protected elect. This glance of shared exasperation often comes with a slight but detectable eye roll. It means “Oh, for pity’s sake.” It means “Not long ago, you and I would have been able to tell this inferior specimen to take a hike, and now, darn it, we can’t.” It means “We recognize each other. The rules may have superficially changed, but people like us are still in charge. We will continue to reap most of society’s rewards and have everything our own way.”
So I have a modest proposal. Let’s retire the expression “alternative processor,” which I think we could all agree has acquired a taint. I’m even lukewarm on “the otherwise,” which really just means “the wise,” and that refers to the whole human race. If you ask what term we should use instead, I say: let’s not nominate any term. Human brains are all the same. Wisdom is the preserve not of the few but of the multitude. If there’s no such thing as people with measurably deficient mental ability, then we don’t need a name for them at all.
In addition, it’s time to stop letting soft, indirect prejudice pass unaddressed. When colleagues brush off suggestions from certain people as “poorly reasoned” or “likely to have unintended consequences,” press them on what they really meant to imply. Don’t cooperate with wink-wink bigotry, but make an example of these dinosaurs, and so put everyone present on notice that even thinly disguised discrimination will not be tolerated. And if someone meets your eyes with that familiar look of frustration, which they imagine is mutual, don’t cooperate. Don’t flick your pupils upward, but glare back with a challenge: “What are you looking at me for? If you have some kind of problem with intellectual egalitarianism, you’ll find no quarter with me.”
When the broadcast moved on to an ominous weather report, the four of us continued to sit around the table in stupefied silence. Finally, Darwin said what we were all thinking: “I thought she thought MP was dumb.”
“I did, too,” I said leadenly.
“She’s been trying to get you and the kids to keep your heads down,” Wade said. “For your own good. She’s right there. But this is a little different.”
“It’s a lot different,” I said.
“Are you mad at Auntie Em?” Zanzibar asked.
“I’m not sure what I feel is mad,” I said. “I feel disappointed.”
“Are you and Auntie Em going to have a fight?” Zanzibar was a budding dramatist. She wanted to watch.
“Do you think she’s faking?” Wade wondered.
“How should I know?” I said. “If that was an act, she’s fucking good at it.”
“I think she’s giving her bosses at the radio station what they want,” Darwin said.
“Hit that nail on the head, kiddo,” I said.
“So maybe she doesn’t have any choice,” Darwin said hopefully.
“Honey, we always have a choice,” I said. “She could have talked about the election. Or the hurricane. She didn’t.”
“You’ll have to decide whether to take her on about this,” Wade said, “or roll with it.”
“And you think I should roll with it, of course,” I said. “The way I’m supposed to roll with every other absurdity that’s ruining my life. You’re such a handyman around the house that there’s no crack too big to paper over.”
“I didn’t say that, and you’re being unfair,” Wade said. “But she just staked out a position. I guess she’s going to keep recording these things. So the position is a done deal. Maybe I’m saying you don’t have to listen. Or shouldn’t listen. If you want to stay friends, that is. Slip in one of your old Pearl Jam CDs instead.”
“Pressing my hands over my ears won’t change the fact that her editorials are out there, and it won’t change the fact of what they say.”
“Why don’t we talk to her,” Darwin said. “We can explain it was way better when we had tests in school. When the students who couldn’t follow what the teacher was saying at least shut up. When we studied stuff that was hard or interesting—stuff I didn’t know already. You could tell her what it’s like at VU—”
“I already have, pal,” I said.
“But Auntie Em has all this time on the radio to tell people things,” Darwin said. “She could use it to convince people that everything should go back to the way it was.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “And instead she’s doing her small, diligent part in making everything worse.”
I didn’t subject friends to political purity tests. Least of all Emory, after twenty-five years together of going through divorce from my whole family, college and the repeated heartbreaks of our twenties, more than one abortion (including both of hers), our first desperate efforts to earn a living while pretending to be grown-ups, intrauterine insemination and my three pregnancies. We’d even successfully bridged what for many lifelong duos would have been an uncrossable chasm: one of us having found a hand to hold while the other hadn’t. Emory didn’t always seem to see the point of Wade, but she’d taken my newly settled status in stride. Having given motherhood a miss herself made it all the more commendable that she made such an effort with my kids and treated them like real people. Too much hung in the balance to allow the fickle winds of factionalism to blow us off course.
That said, I couldn’t remember having had a serious real-world disagreement with her before, so this was novel territory for me. I’d always assumed we didn’t have conflicts over issues of the day because we shared a set of underlying assumptions about the world and so naturally agreed with each other. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe in different company Emory claimed that fracking was simply marvelous.
As it happened, Hurricane Sandy was then powering up the East Coast, and Voltaire was far enough south in Pennsylvania to be next in line after the predicted landfall in New Jersey. Residents were warned to batten down the hatches, and the whole state was put on red alert. Once the full force of the storm arrived on the night of the twenty-ninth, those of us who lived in the whole southeastern swath of the state were advised to sleep in basements or cellars if possible. The last time we obeyed the same advisory in the run-up to another supposedly monster storm the year before, we’d woken the next morning with sore muscles from sleeping on the floor, only to greet the sun shining and the birds tweeting, dew glistening in the yard; it had barely even rained. But mindful of the carnage at the end of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, I tried to take the recommendation seriously. Moreover, Emory’s apartment building didn’t have nearly enough belowground shelter for its renters, and her flashy modern digs on the twenty-seventh floor had big plate-glass windows with a dubious safety record. Ordinarily, I’d have leaped at an excuse to organize a grown-up sleepover. Yet with the lines of her Loony Tunes editorial fresh in my head—“Human brains are all the same”; “Wisdom is the preserve not of the few but of the multitude”—I extended the invitation to bed down in our basement with unease.
That weekend, I laid in supplies like food and bottled water; most of our neighbors did the same, and many a grocery shelf was bare. I carted a double load of logs from the shed to feed our woodstove. Meanwhile, Wade had more work than he could handle, because homeowners were desperate to trim branches or cut down whole trees that might threaten their property in high winds—which, as my exhausted partner putting in fourteen-hour days pointed out, they’d only had the whole rest of the year to take care of as a matter of course.
That Monday morning, Obama declared a state of emergency for Pennsylvania, which would release federal funds for any cleanup. VU canceled classes. Public schools were shut, which back in the day at least Darwin and Zanzibar would have found frustrating—they used to like school—but now found a godsend. By about two p.m., the sky had grown dark enough for drivers to turn on their lights. Throughout the afternoon, gusts gathered and rain started to pelt, though I hadn’t yet made a distinction between “pelt” and “lash.” Zanzibar seemed to find the spectacle hypnotic. When the radio referred repeatedly to “Superstorm Sandy,” Darwin corrected with weary scorn, “Post-tropical cyclone.” As he followed the whirls of leaves, skittering litter, and flexing trees through the front window, I overheard my son mutter, “I hope it wrecks everything.” Uncertain whether to feel afraid or elated, Lucy raced through the house emitting an all-purpose squeal.
Pushing her timing, Emory showed up well after motorists had been advised to stay off the roads, and by the time I let her in early that evening the rain had indeed graduated from “pelt” to “lash.” After a twenty-foot walk from the drive to the side door, her parka and backpack were soaked. She bundled inside with multiple sacks of snacks and a three-liter box of merlot. Her jittery jabber could have been due to the weather, but it felt diversionary.
“I guess it’s perverse to hope your roof blows off,” she prattled, unbagging her corn chips, dips, trail mix, wheat crackers, Goldfish, carrot sticks, and radioactive cheese puffs. The overkill seemed designed to make up for more than her imposition on our basement. “But, gosh, I hope somebody’s roof blows off. That last hurricane-in-a-dress was such an anticlimax.”
“Maybe Irene was softening us up so we’d let our guard down,” I said. I might have said the same of Emory herself.
“Oh, and I brought my own sleeping bag and pillows. I had to go buy a nightgown, because ordinarily”—she wiggled her eyebrows at Darwin—“I never wear a stitch to bed.”
I put on some popcorn to keep myself occupied. We’d already had sandwiches for a skeletal dinner, anticipating a dive downstairs at short notice. Outside had started to hooo!, while at irregular intervals a gale hit the windows as if some lout were body-slamming the house. Yet paradoxically, so long as the forces of opposition don’t breach your defenses, being inside your own home while all hell breaks loose outdoors amplifies a sensation of safety.
Spreading her bounty on the kitchen table, Emory asked Darwin, “So, assuming the whole town isn’t flattened tonight, what are you going as for Halloween?”
“A mad scientist,” Darwin said.
“Hmm,” Emory said, prizing the lid off the bean dip. “Is that a good idea?”
The mad-scientist trope was frowned upon as supremacist, the clichéd white coat and wild hair often compared to the robes and peaked caps of the KKK. Back to the Future had disappeared from the late-night listings, along with a trove of 1950s sci-fi classics. Even lighthearted fare like The Nutty Professor, whose fat-suited Eddie Murphy hardly glorified the stereotype, had become cinematic traif.
“Some people won’t like it,” Darwin said warily. “That’s the point. So, yeah. For me, it’s totally a good idea.”
My son had been so beaten down this school year that I was relieved he was showing some spunk. Big on this blasphemous costume, I planned to buy dry ice for his beakers.
“If you get pelted with eggs,” Emory said, “don’t say I didn’t warn you. What about you, Zanzo? Please tell me you won’t be traipsing around in a dunce cap.”
“I’m going as the color blue,” Zanzibar said.
Emory guffawed. “You’re such a trip, sweetheart!” She turned to me at the stove as the popcorn’s drum solo reached its crescendo. “Where does she get this stuff?”
“Zanzibar thinks, as they say, outside the box,” I said. My daughter’s trick-or-treating as a color displayed an interesting neutrality. No one would pelt her with eggs. The abstraction was an opt-out.
“And what about you, Lucy?” Emory asked. “What will you dress up as?”
“I’m gonna be a MPC!” Lucy declared, jumping up and down.
“Mental Parity Champion,” Darwin reminded us grimly.
“And what does an ‘MPC’ look like?” Emory asked.
“Big and scary with a giant badge and a notebook!” Lucy said. “And I’m gonna report Suz-kutch-wun. She thinks she’s better than ever-body else, and she’s gonna be sorry.”
I delivered the popcorn, muttering, “Wouldn’t Mao be proud.”
“Hey, it looks like Biden has it in the bag,” Emory said.
Neither of us had any genuine desire to discuss the next week’s presidential election, but we had even less desire to discuss what we really needed to hash out. “Yes, but I wish he’d let up on the stutter. Earlier in his career, he played up having conquered a speech impediment. Now he plays up the speech impediment. I think he’s milking it. He sounds like Porky Pig.”
“He may be overdoing it,” Emory said, “but it’s a canny gambit.”
“It’s unnecessary. The GOP lost this election from go when they nominated Mitt Romney. If nothing else, he’s rich. By the dubious logic of the present, that puts him in the top one percent of the IQ distribution.”
“That Occupy slogan is so weird,” Emory said. “Chanting ‘We are the ninety-nine percent!’ is tantamount to advertising ‘We are the nitwits!’”
I cut a sideways glance at my friend. In allowing herself to say “nitwits,” Emory was trying to please. It wasn’t like Emory to try to please me, so I inferred that somewhere in that stylishly coiffed head of hers she felt guilty.
“I’m going to miss Obama,” I said. “And for the first black president to step down after one term is a bad historical look.”
“Nobody gives a crap anymore about his being a black president,” Emory said. “He’s a know-it-all president. It’s death. Even Romney has kept a foot on his own head—little words, Me, keep you more mun-neee . . . Obama just keeps spooling out elegantly subordinated sentences with that arch, amused, slightly despairing look on his face. He doesn’t get it.”
“He doesn’t want to get it.”
Wade had just come upstairs after fluffing out the sleeping bags for our slumber party. On discovering us pointlessly mired in electoral politics, he performed a strategic intervention. “Hey, Emory,” he said. “We all listened to your editorial on the radio.”
“Oh, you didn’t have to do that!” Emory said. “I’m not sure I’ve hit my stride yet.”
“I don’t know,” Wade said pleasantly. “Seemed like plenty of stride to me.”
“You’re too kind,” she said.
“No,” he said. “No, I’m not.”
“Kids,” I said. “You want to grab a bag or two of chips and head downstairs to claim your sleeping bags? You could take the iPad and watch that documentary about overfishing.”
“No thanks, I’d rather stay up here,” Darwin said, as Zanzibar also leaned back to watch the show. “Auntie Em? Did your boss like what you read?”
“It’s funny you should ask, Darwin, because the answer is no, not entirely. In fact, I meant to tell you about this, Pearson, because I knew you’d find it hilarious. Or depressing. Apparently my word choice was too highfalutin. Let’s see, what got circled in red . . . ? ‘Latent,’ believe it or not. ‘Flagrant.’ ‘Surreptitious.’ Oh, and ‘biddable’ was totally beyond the pale. Next time I’ll just count up the number of letters and find a monosyllabic synonym if I get to more than four.”
“But aside from the vocabulary,” I said, unable to look her in the eye, “your minders liked the message?”
“Sure,” she elided casually. “But Zanzo, you’ll love this, because you’re such a great performer yourself. I’d thought, Hey, I’m used to being on the radio, asking people questions? So recording a written-out text should be a cinch. Surpriiiiiise! I couldn’t believe how nervous I got. It went okay at first, but when I tripped over . . . I think it was ‘dog whistles,’ which was the whole flipping theme! I kept flattening the middle ‘S’ into sort of a ‘th’ sound. I sounded like a total retard! And once I started muffing up, the flubs got worse and worse. Recording a six-minute piece took me over an hour! The poor sound technicians were at their wits’ end!”
Check: she definitely felt guilty. Using “the R-word” wasn’t merely trying to please but was kissing my heathen ass. I looked away at the kitchen window, whistling now, while whooshing, thudding sounds gathered outside. “Maybe what you were tripping over was what your editorial said.”
“Okay, okay!” Emory held up her hands, now covered in cheese powder. “I had a feeling you’d give me grief. But this is a great break for me, which I can’t believe you’d begrudge me, because I’ve been waiting to scramble out of that graveyard arts slot for years. If I make a powerful impression, this could pave my route to TV. Which is all I’ve ever wanted, and you know it.”
“All you’ve ever wanted?”
“The main thing.”
“I thought maybe you had a point, when we debriefed after your pal Roger’s priggish grandstanding,” I said, rolling a piece of popcorn in my fingers as if it were fascinating. “About how this MP thing has gone so far and so fast that we can’t stop it, and we’re better off keeping our mouths shut and waiting it out. Your monologue was different. It was advocacy. And now all I hear from you as an excuse—”
“I never said I wanted an excuse—”
“Your only excuse is cynical opportunism.” I wasn’t shouting. I must have sounded pained, because that’s how I felt.
“I’d call it savvy.”
“I’d call it a sellout.” Sometimes Wade surprised me. His tone was mild; the term was not.
“That’s awfully harsh from someone who never has to take a stand because he only cuts down trees all day!”
“That’s right,” Wade said calmly. “I’ve ‘only’ cut trees from dawn to dusk for the last five days to keep you and your neighbors from getting clobbered. I didn’t choose an occupation that puts me in the way of other people’s bullshit. You did.”
“I’m just—baffled,” I said. “You and I have both despaired of this cognitive justice stuff from the very beginning. And now on the radio you sound just like one of them!”
“Pearson, you’re so naive. If I establish my bona fides as one of the MP faithful, I earn the right to take controversial positions on lots of other subjects. Then well down the line, I’ll have carved out the credibility to raise the question—delicately, sensitively, and cautiously—of what having eliminated admissions standards, testing, grades, and graduation requirements is doing to the quality of American education. At that point, maybe I’ll be able to get away with it. I’ll have primed the audience to trust me, and to believe I’m not some cerebral supremacist trying to cling to power.”
“This isn’t the old working for change from within routine, is it?” I asked caustically.
“I’m sorry, but I’m starting to feel ganged up on,” Emory objected. “I thought it might be fun to ride out Sandy together. I didn’t expect an inquisition. I’m feeling a little trapped here. Cornered.”
The side door thumped again. Rain volleyed against its windowpanes like flung gravel.
“Under the circumstances,” I said, “no, you can’t flounce from the house right now. But we hardly arranged for a hurricane to torture you at our leisure, like some newfangled form of waterboarding.”
“Look,” she said. “MP is a fad, a vogue, the way practically everyone thinks now, and there’s no telling whether it will blow over or if it’s a permanent realignment of reality. Either way, it’s not my fault, right? I didn’t invent it. So why are you blaming me? I’m simply managing—”
“No, you’re turning the situation to your advantage,” I said. “You said so yourself.”
“Shouldn’t someone benefit from this stuff? And if so, why not me?”
“Because you’re my friend, and I thought better of you.”
“Why is this so personal for you, Pearson? So maybe there’s such a thing as variable human intelligence, and maybe there isn’t. What does it matter? Most of all, why does it matter between you and me? When we’re only talking about positions I take on the radio, about which I don’t have a choice?”
“Mom says you always have a choice,” Darwin said.
“Your mother is wrong,” Emory said. “Why is that stupid editorial a betrayal, Pearson? Of you personally? If I told you I was voting for Mitt Romney, would that be the end of our friendship?”
“Of course not. And no one’s talking about ending our friendship.”
“Well, good,” she said. “Then what are we talking about?”
That’s when the lights went out.
“Oh, cool!” Darwin said, as Zanzibar joined in with “Wicked!” and Lucy cried, “Yay!” The kids were always exhilarated by a power failure, although historically what should have excited them was having electricity.
Wade and I used our phones to track down candles, matches, and candlesticks. I warned everyone not to open the fridge. With no certainty over whether the outage was for hours or days, I suggested reserving the remaining power in our phones and tablets for urgent matters, which meant, Darwin, no video games. I stoked the woodstove, since in these gales the house was rapidly growing colder. Wade offered to shepherd the kids to the bathroom to brush their teeth and bed them down in the basement, giving Emory and me a chance to speak plainly one-on-one.
When the two of us reconvened at the kitchen table, flickering yellow tapers cast a warm, forgiving glow on the ravaged bean dip. As sirens wailed in the background, I poured us another round of wine. The elements raging outside our fragile refuge underscored that we were all in this together, like it or not.
“I have a nagging feeling I should apologize,” I told Emory. “But I’m not sure for what. You know what I think about all this IQuit nonsense, and that’s not going to change. What’s also not going to change is that this kooky belief system is having catastrophic consequences for the whole country.”
“You’re always on some crusade—”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I don’t join activist groups or attend protests or circulate petitions. I haven’t adopted a revolutionary way of looking at the world that I’m intent on imposing on everyone else. Everyone else is imposing their revolution on me. All I’ve done is refuse to capitulate. I’ve stayed in the exact same place while the rest of the world has careened off to la-la land.”
“I mean you always have to be the maverick. The renegade. The contrarian. I’m obliged to display the same screw-the-lot-of-you pugnacity, then? So we can maintain our old solidarity and bemused disdain for other people? Never mind that my being contrary right now would demolish my professional prospects. Well, I’m sorry, but we can’t all be as brave and noble and principled as you are.” The adjectives weren’t complimentary.
“This has nothing to do with nobility. It’s about not being deranged.”
“Even if I had the appetite for pushback,” Emory said, “I don’t have the clout for it.”
“Come on, everybody adores you. They always have. If anyone could get away with talking a little sense, you’re it.”
“Flattering but misguided,” she said. “If I go rogue in an editorial, the scripts are prerecorded; no argument for prejudicially promoting ‘brainiacs’ would ever get on air. I’d just be sacked, and no one I know besides you guys would be remotely sympathetic. All sacrifice, no gain. That dog-whistle piece—it’s not going to be the last one. It can’t be, since I have to come up with a subject that seems timely and trenchant twice a week. If I avoided MP, it would be conspicuous; I’d seem either cowardly or subversive. So I guess I need some reassurance that every time I broadcast a point of view you find unpalatable you won’t fly into a fit. Because this is getting to be a pattern. I behave in a way calculated to protect my interest, and then I’m grilled within an inch of my life about all the terrible defects in my character.”
I objected, “I didn’t say—”
“You didn’t have to. Whether or not you regard my ‘joining the enemy’ as a personal betrayal—which you obviously do—you think it’s weak. Okay, maybe. I’m sorry if I’ve let you down. But it’s not my job to live up to some idea you have of me, when maybe I’m more ordinary than you think. I don’t know how you’re teaching at VU without making compromises up the ass yourself, and me, I’d never fault you for that. Never. We’re both navigating the same precarious landscape. Some weird new ethos hit both our lives out of the blue like an asteroid. But I refuse to allow that sociological bad luck to sink my career. You want to keep faith with the concept of intelligence? Well, not only surviving but using this turn of the wheel is intelligent.”
I sighed. “Maybe we just have to agree to differ. You obviously think becoming a mouthpiece for what I can’t bear is your only viable way forward at the station. All right, I question that. But I never meant to imply that your espousing MP, however insincerely, endangers our friendship. Which is pretty unconditional. We’ve known each other a long time, and you’re”—my voice caught a bit—“incredibly important to me.”
Emory reached out and clasped my hand. “Ditto, sister.”
Returned from the basement, Wade seemed to appraise his strategy of hothousing the two warring women as a success.
“Still, I for one haven’t given up on resistance,” I wrapped up. “Like, in my international literature survey course next semester, guess what we’re going to read? Dostoevsky.”
“You’re not,” Emory said.
“I am.”
“Don’t.”
“You would say that.”
“You would do that! Don’t.”
“What are you talking about?” Wade asked.
I didn’t say.
The upshot appeared to be that, yes, of course we would stay friends, and while clarifying that point was all to the good, as far as I was concerned the very existence of our relationship had never been in question; in fact, Emory’s thinking in such absolute terms was a tad ominous. But I had also, it seemed, effectively issued her permission to speak abominations on the radio while promising never to give her a hard time about it. I wasn’t quite sure how this amounted to progress. Once Wade and I finished brushing our teeth by candlelight upstairs, he said, “She’s not the first person to be ambitious without having any idea ambition-to-do-what.”
I spit out my mouthwash. “Ambition without content.”
“It’s ambition with content that’s the exception, sport.”
“Does your ambition have content?”
“You betcha,” he said, picking up the candlestick and kissing the top of my head. “I aim to make stacks of money in the next couple of weeks clearing fallen trees, and then we’re going to stockpile enough firewood for fifty years.”
Voltaire was a mess, but New York City and the Jersey Shore suffered far worse. The food in the fridge and freezer was already a write-off, so I was strangely disappointed when our power was restored that Friday. Like the kids, I’d relished the camping atmosphere of huddling around the woodstove to cook our improvisational meals; we threaded hot dogs on skewers, toasted marshmallows, boiled the kettle on the cast iron (which took forever), and grilled cheese sandwiches. Most of all, the ban on video games meant I got my son back for a whole four days.
The next week, I tried to keep the family fun going by gathering us all to watch the election returns. But the suspense being nonexistent, the kids filtered off to their devices. It was clear from exit polls that Biden would win handily, an outcome about which I was tepid. Oh, given my upbringing, voting for anyone still gave me a frisson of the forbidden, but what I really wanted was Obama’s second term—not because he was black but because he was funny.
The real drama was reserved for mid-December. The public had willingly sympathized with mass killers like Jared Loughner and James Holmes, who had lashed out after having been ridiculed for a subpar intelligence now summarily debunked as a scientific phantasm. But American compassion met a brick wall when the body count included twenty first-graders. So despite the dearth of evidence for this conclusion, commentators decided in unison that the unlikable anorexic weirdo in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, could only have been motivated to massacre twenty-eight people, including himself and his mother, by the prime source of evil nationwide: cerebral supremacy. After all, it was easy to project a warped sense of superiority onto an antisocial misfit whose chronic starvation made his cranium appear disproportionately large. Yet the popped eyes and narrow, elongated face evocative of Edvard Munch also underscored that the shrunken twenty-year-old who might have passed for a first-grader himself was insane. The association between claims to an elevated intellect and murderousness, moral turpitude, psychosis, and child abuse made Adam Lanza the Mental Parity movement’s ideal villain. Thus the young man’s incomprehensible rampage made isolated holdouts for the old cognitive order seem not only unpleasant and bigoted but dangerous: See, this is what happens when people no smarter than anyone else are allowed to indulge the “myth of IQ.”