When we finally hung up, I poured myself more coffee and settled back on the couch. I wasn’t all that surprised that Colleen didn’t like Ash, and I wasn’t going to push for the two of them to be friends. We didn’t need to keep having them at the same dinner parties. Sometimes friends of friends just plain don’t like each other, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Ash refrained from saying much about Colleen for a while, but sometimes she’d bring up Colleen and Bruce and ask me what I thought it was like to have sex with someone so old and wrinkled.
I never told Colleen that she’d guessed right, that a lot of the things she’d said about Ash were pretty close to the truth. Ash was Evangelical, and often referred to the time when she was “saved.” Once, I went to church with her because she invited me and we were new friends and it seemed rude to turn her down. Her church was in a theater with a live band and a screen that dropped down for the sermon. There were padded chairs and stadium-style seating, and people sang and clapped and murmured “Amen,” and said, “Mmmm-hmmm,” loudly, when they agreed with something. As a Catholic, used to kneeling and subdued chanting, I felt wildly uncomfortable with all this, which Ash must have guessed because she never asked me to go to church with her again.
Colleen was right about the crafting too. Ash wasn’t a scrapbooker, but she was a stamper, something I didn’t know existed before I met her. She had hundreds of stamps, which she kept in a small room in their apartment. She used them on letters, and made her own wrapping paper and cards. After that dinner party, she’d sent a card made on thick white paper, with THANK YOU stamped out, each letter in a different color. There were a bunch of bumblebees on the card, little trails of dots behind them.
Ash and I were friends, but we were also so different. There were things she said that would have bothered me if she was anyone else, hobbies she had that I would normally find ridiculous. She was a grown woman who called her father Daddy. She was unlike any friend I’d ever had, and sometimes I couldn’t believe we got along like we did. There were certain things that we just didn’t talk about, because I think we both knew it would bring our differences to the surface, afraid that if we examined things too closely, we’d see that we weren’t really meant to be such great friends after all.
But it didn’t matter, really. For all the ways that we were different, it was our husbands who brought us together, who made us the same. We had them in common, and they were both chasing after something that neither of us totally understood. Only Ash knew how it felt to be bound to someone like that.
When I opened the envelope with Ash’s thank-you note after that dinner party, my first urge was to laugh (which I did later when I showed it to Matt). I pictured Ash carefully picking out colors, biting her bottom lip as she concentrated on stamping out the words. I hung it on the refrigerator, because I didn’t know what else to do with it — maybe because it was handmade, or maybe because I felt guilty for making fun of it, I could never bring myself to take it down. It stayed there for the rest of the time we lived in DC.
Washington, DC 2010
If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
Chapter 7
Because Jimmy was part of the advance team that staffed Obama, he and Ash spent Christmas and New Year’s in Hawaii. They were there for almost three weeks, during which time Ash posted daily pictures on Facebook of her polished toes in the sand, of piña coladas in the middle of the day, of Coronas in front of the ocean. In the meantime, Matt and I spent Christmas in Wisconsin eating lasagna with my parents while we listened to my aunt Bit (who watched a lot of Fox News) go on and on about death panels until my mom insisted that we change the subject.
There had been a brief moment in November when Matt tried to convince me that we should also go to Hawaii, saying that Jimmy thought he could get Matt a spot on the advance team. “The DCOS owes him a favor and they still need someone to do airport.” (Matt pronounced this “Dee-kos,” and I stared at him for a second, wondering if he was speaking in a different language or if I was having a stroke.)
“The who?” I asked. “The what?”
“The deputy chief of staff. Billy. You’ve met him, right? That’s what everyone calls him. The DCOS.”
“Oh, right,” I said, like this made any sense to me. “But you don’t even do advance.”
Matt looked so hopeful as he said, “But I could.”
It wasn’t that Hawaii didn’t sound great (because obviously it did), but I couldn’t bear the thought of canceling on my parents, of leaving them to celebrate alone. I already felt guilty enough that we had to alternate holidays with the Kellys — it seemed unfair because there were so many more of them and just the two of my parents. So we went to Wisconsin, which was nice and quiet as it always was. Matt didn’t mention Hawaii again (he understood why I couldn’t go), but I could tell that when we were sitting around the table talking with my parents about their cat, Snickers, or their bridge club he was thinking about it. My parents read a lot, watched several light mystery shows, and (if it was nice enough) went for daily walks — and so when we were with them, we did all of the same things, which I found sort of relaxing and was pretty sure that Matt found suffocating.
And Ash’s pictures kept popping up: a plate of French toast with the ocean in the background and a caption, “Breakfast with a view at the Surfrider!”; a picture of turtles about to be released into the ocean; a tower of sushi at Morimoto. I couldn’t mention them to Matt because I was the one who’d insisted we go to Wisconsin. And so I sat and shivered under a blanket in my parents’ house and flipped through Ash’s beach pictures, each one making me slightly crankier than the last.
—
We were back to DC for New Year’s and went to a party with all of the White House people we always saw — minus Ash and Jimmy, who were still in Hawaii, which made the whole night pretty boring. I figured we could leave right after midnight and I counted down the minutes until then. But as the ball dropped on the TV, Matt kissed me and said, “Happy New Year’s to my favorite wife,” and I thought how sweet he was, how he’d been in Wisconsin with me when he really wanted to be in Hawaii. So I smiled and stayed at the party with him until 3:00 a.m.
Ash called me the day they finally returned and I almost squealed on the phone when I heard her voice. “I feel like you guys have been gone forever,” I said.
“I know it,” she said. “It’s good to be back.”
We made plans to meet for dinner at La Tomate, an Italian place at the top of Dupont, and when we walked into the restaurant, Ash and Jimmy were already there, both so absurdly tan that it made me dizzy to look at them straight on. They stood to greet us, all of us embracing like we’d been apart for years. When we finally sat down, I turned to them and said, “So, clearly you spent some time in the sun. How was it?”
Jimmy got a serious look on his face and said, “You know, this was a different kind of trip. Normally we’re advancing the President for meetings with officials, for speeches, for official visits. But this was advancing him for a vacation — figuring out where he’s going to eat dinner and play golf. And usually, we didn’t know what he was going to do until the night before. You know, sometimes he’d want to play golf and then would decide at the last second to do a beach day with the family.”