I read aloud for a long time; it seemed to me I was reading forever, but I only got as far as the Republican National Convention in Detroit, where Reagan was first nominated for president. I told Em it was her turn to read when she was swearing over Reagan’s acceptance speech. It was 1980, when Reagan exhorted us to “recapture our destiny.” Nora would have said that destiny was just a bullshit synonym for greatness. At that point, we weren’t even halfway through the undying obit. Em was getting angry, all over again; she was shouting her way through Reagan’s opposition to government financing of abortions for poor women, and his pushing for a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortion. There was more heavy breathing when Em read about Reagan’s call for “a return of God to the classroom”—this meant bringing back prayer in schools. And Reagan was against limitations on buying and owning guns. As tedious as it was to read Reagan’s obituary, Em and I were reminded of the reasons we’d disliked him; we thought the Times had left no stone unturned. The four short paragraphs about the botched assassination attempt were enough; after all, not much had come of it. We tolerated how much there was about “Reaganomics,” considering it was just another name for the standard Republican policy of lowering taxes on the rich. Em didn’t make it past the start of President Reagan’s second term, when the Gipper said the nation was “poised for greatness.” I knew Em—she’d had it with America’s greatness. I knew I would be the reader for all the rest. I was dreading the Iran-Contra scandal, and the back and forth with Gorbachev; I had to get through Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Wall business. Em made more coffee and tea; we needed caffeine to make it to the end of the obit.
There was spontaneous cheering only once, when I read what Tip O’Neill said about Reagan—“he was an actor reading lines,” the former Speaker of the House had said. O’Neill was a Democrat from Massachusetts. Tip O’Neill also said “it was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became president”—prompting a moment of sadness between Em and me, because Tip O’Neill had died a decade before.
Near the end of Reagan’s obituary, The New York Times quoted a college professor who said “the Reagan presidency was lacking in moral leadership, an essential quality for greatness.” The obit ended strangely. Reagan just talked about himself; a journalist had asked him how he thought history would remember him, an uninspired question.
“That’s it—that’s all there is?” Em asked me.
“That’s it,” I said.
“What about AIDS—did you skip the AIDS part?” Em asked. I’d skipped nothing; maybe Em had missed the AIDS part, when it was her turn to read. We’d blown most of the morning, reading the ceaseless minutiae of that obituary to each other; now we had to reread the whole thing. “How could we have missed the AIDS part?” Em kept asking me. But we hadn’t missed it. For those of us who knew the writing mattered, The New York Times had left out the AIDS part. There was no mention of it in Reagan’s obit.
“Holy crap,” I could hear Em saying. She was in the bedroom, rummaging around—more shirt cardboards were coming. The GOOD RIDDANCE sign would stay put—GOOD RIDDANCE wasn’t good enough. This was a writing matter.
“I don’t give a shit that the Gipper is gone! Do you?” Em was screaming in the bedroom. I just guessed this meant the writing was the only thing that mattered.
I thought Em’s first protest sign missed the mark; out of context, it might have been misunderstood.
WHAT ABOUT AIDS,
YOU ASSHOLES?
In Times Square, if we were carrying that sign on the sidewalk, no one would know which assholes we meant. You may remember that The New York Times used to be in an eighteen-story, neo-Gothic building on West Forty-third Street—dark and gloomy.
FUCK ALL THE NEWS
THAT’S FIT TO PRINT
Well, okay—that one was more clear. But I didn’t see us getting that one past the revolving glass doors at 229 West Forty-third Street—that one was strictly a sidewalk sign. I went into the bedroom to put on my running shoes. I was feeling fatalistic about protesting. Either the writing mattered or it didn’t. You have to be truthful to time and place; you can’t leave out anything important. Lies of omission count as lies, I was thinking, when I heard Em tearing up the shirt cardboards in the kitchen. “Holy crap,” she was saying softly—just in resignation. “More damn déjà vu, kiddo,” she said sadly, when I found her at the kitchen table with her head on her arms. The pointlessness of our protesting The New York Times in Times Square was apparent. It’s not easy to hold lies of omission accountable.
That was when Em started singing in her sleep again—only humming, at first, just the tune. I didn’t recognize “O Canada”; I just knew it wasn’t “Goin’ Back to Great Falls.” The lyrics would come later. When Em was just humming in her sleep, I didn’t realize she was still learning the lyrics. I didn’t know the significance of the song.
52. THE LESBIANS’ CHILDREN
In 2004, when Ronald Reagan died at ninety-three, Molly would have been eighty-three or eighty-four. Working part-time, mostly as a ski instructor, had not served to broaden the old patroller’s interests. More than ever, with my mom gone, Molly’s whole world was Bromley Mountain. At Bromley, the Sun Mountain Express Quad had replaced the old Number One chairlift in 1997, but Molly still called the new lift “Number One.”
I tried to explain to the old patroller that this wasn’t the same as what Em and I meant by the damn déjà vu we found so depressing, politically speaking.
“It sounds the same to me, Kid,” Molly said. “The new lift takes you to the same old place. It’s the same trip, just a faster ride—it’s no more or less depressing than it ever was,” she added.
I was confused by Molly’s response to my telling her how the obituary in The New York Times let Reagan off the hook for AIDS. The old patroller just didn’t get it. Em said it could be challenging to talk about a political matter with Molly—not to mention a writing matter.
Since she’d learned the lyrics, it was clear Em was singing the Canadian national anthem in her sleep. I don’t know why I didn’t recognize the tune. About the only things I’d watched on TV in Toronto were hockey and baseball games, but I wasn’t familiar with “O Canada” when I was in bed—with Em’s arm, or her leg, thrown over me—as I heard her sing:
O Canada! Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all of us command.
I got the feeling Em wasn’t actually asleep when she was singing; the grinding of her hips against me was not meant in a patriotic way. I was the one who was asleep. Em was singing to me in my sleep.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,