“Of course not,” Darryl says, as his eyes drink her in.
I can practically read a ticker tape of his thoughts running across his forehead. Maybe he was wrong about why Kathy kicked him out. Maybe it wasn’t because he didn’t make enough money. Maybe it was this: a terrible misunderstanding about his Trump vote.
“God, is that what you think? That I think we made a mistake? No. No. We were too young to have a baby. We did what we had to do. I don’t regret it. Don’t think that, Kathy.”
Darryl is practically thrumming with the possibility of reconciliation.
“So Mike didn’t make you vote for Trump. You didn’t decide that Trump’s bragging about pussy grabbing, that the accusations of assault, that they were all okay, so long as we made abortion illegal and sent women back into the back alleys.”
Darryl’s forehead knits in confusion, as if he suspects it’s a trick question. Tentatively, he says, “No, no, I didn’t.”
Kathy stares at him, something like grief playing behind her eyes. She asks, “Then why did you decide Trump’s pussy grabbing, his assaults—why did you decide they were okay?”
This is not where he expected the conversation to go.
“I’m not sexist, Kathy. You know that!” Darryl is surprised. More than surprised, he’s affronted.
“How would I know that?” she asks quietly.
“Because I love you. I never wanted to break up our family—you did that. I love you.”
“Wait, what? Are you saying that because you married a woman, that means you can’t be sexist? Harvey Weinstein is married! Donald Trump is married! That’s like saying, because you had a black teammate in high school, or because you could bring yourself to vote for Obama, you can’t be racist. Can’t you see how that makes no sense at all?”
“Christ, Kathy. I’m not racist: I don’t hate black people, and I’m not sexist: I love women.”
“Not hating black people, not wanting to lynch them, is not the same as treating blacks as equals. Liking, even loving women, is in no way the same as believing we’re equal to men. You’re like the guys that worked with Harvey Weinstein who think ’cause they themselves didn’t rape women, that makes them the good guys. They were complicit!”
“Jesus, Kathy. Okay, why don’t you tell me. What would prove to you that I’m not sexist?”
“Well, let’s see. For starters, all your support for my career over the years. Beginning with your support for me in going after the MD instead of a nursing degree. Oh, wait. That never happened. You didn’t want me to be a doctor. You didn’t even want me to go to UCLA for my bachelors.”
“Wait, I would have supported you going after an MD. You didn’t want to, Kathy—you thought it would be too hard, too stressful.”
Kathy’s face is halfway between incredulous and outraged.
“No, Darryl. You said it would be too hard. I wanted to try. You said it would be too risky, take too long, and be too expensive. You refused to spend the money, remember?”
Darryl’s eyes slip past Kathy’s shoulder, remembering, looking for evidence to make his case, to refute her accusations. What he manages is, “Well, by then the budget was really tight. I mean, because you were working, the childcare expenses were pretty bad. And you already had a nursing degree.”
“You were working, too, Darryl. The childcare expenses were bad because both of us were working.”
“Come on!” Darryl says. “It’s not like I wasn’t going to work!”
“No, you come on, Darryl. Why do you assume your job was the primary job? I make more money. Why shouldn’t we weigh childcare expenses against your salary?”
“Jesus. I knew that was what all this is about. Money.”
“No, Darryl, the only person who thinks this is about money is you. It’s not about money. It’s about partnership and support. Like all your support around the house, all your help with the baby. Like, when I got promoted? About you not being one of those guys who thinks he’s ‘helping’ when he puts just his coffee cup in the dishwasher but leaves the pile of stuff from the baby and breakfast and lunch festering in the sink. Oh, wait . . . you are that guy.
“Sometimes you’re even worse, sometimes you just add your filthy dishes to the pile, to wait until I get off shift at four in the morning! Even when I was working full time and getting my RN degree in the evening, you left all the dishes, all the laundry, every goddamned bit of housework for me!”
“That’s not fair!” Darryl looks like a guy who finds the rules have been changed on him halfway through the game. “It’s not like I’ve never done the dishes. I’ve done the dishes, Kathy!”
“What? Ever!?!? Yes, Darryl, you have ‘ever’ done the dishes. You have done them on Mother’s Day and you have done them on my birthday. In eleven long years of marriage, you’ve done them at least twenty times.”
The thought crosses my mind that I have stumbled into the middle of a potentially fatal domestic dispute. Nominally a dispute over dishes, but more likely a dispute that has been festering for a decade, replete with all the million ‘I’m sorrys’ and ‘I love yous’ that were left unsaid.
But that’s not right.
Because the dishes can’t account for Corey’s death. The dishes are just a symptom, or in Corey’s parlance, a symbol. A symbol for Kathy of the possibility of a marriage of equals. A symbol for Darryl of the service this capable woman owes him because she’s a woman and therefore the maid.
Mike Reed says, “Surely the issue of who does the dishes is not something we need firearms to settle.”
He says this to Kathy. Like somehow, it’s her fault Darryl is armed, probably because she bitched about the dishes.
She rounds on him.
“Mike, you little shit! I should let him shoot your shitty little sexist ass. You with your votes to defund Planned Parenthood, to eliminate access to cervical cancer screenings and mammograms. How about no coverage for prostate cancer? You fucking asshole. Get your sorry ass out of here before I shoot you myself.”
Reed’s eyes ricochet back and forth between Kathy and Darryl.
“I said get out of here!” This must be the voice Kathy uses on the hospital ward, her command-and-control voice.
Reed rises half out of his chair, his hands still raised in surrender, and when Darryl doesn’t react, gets up and scurries out.
“You, too,” says Kathy to me. “I don’t know what Imogen sees in you, but this is not your business.”
“No, not Iz,” says Darryl. “He’s my wing man.”
Kathy’s attack on Mike Reed and Reed’s exit have functioned as a reprieve for Darryl. He’s ready to assert himself again. I stay put.
Kathy and Darryl face off again.
“What do I have to do?” he asks finally.
“All you have to do is what everybody has to do. Stand up. Own what you’ve done. Do penance, so that we can move forward. You, and me, and Riley. So that we can move forward.”
Darryl gives a little half-laugh.
“You’re right, Kathy,” says Darryl, like something in his mouth tastes really bad. “Mike did not make me vote for Trump. I chose to vote for Trump.”
Darryl lets the arm holding the semiautomatic drop to his side and folds the arm holding the Ruger next to his body, gun pointing at the ceiling, and Kathy’s face relaxes just a touch.
“Why?” she asks. “Darryl, why did you do vote for Trump?”
He sighs, but now that he’s begun, it’s downhill.
“I voted for Donald Trump because I believed him when he said he’d bring back real man jobs—jobs a man can be proud to do, jobs you can raise a family on. I voted for Donald Trump because he said he’d make health care better, the he’d Make America Great Again . . .”
Darryl pauses and swallows.
“Make America Great Again for me. And the reason I believed was because he trashed Mexicans as rapists and Muslims as terrorists. I believed because he bragged about grabbing pussy. I believed because if he was again
st Mexicans and Chinese and blacks and Muslims and Women, well then, who could he be for? Who’s left? Is that what you want to hear, Kathy? Huh? Is it? I believed he’d take care of me ’cause he trashed everybody else, alright?”
Darryl judges the effect his words have on Kathy, who’s looking at him with a mixture of grief and contempt. The realization that this is not headed towards a reconciliation and a happy ending twists Darryl’s face.
Finally, finally, I hear sirens.
Kathy and Darryl don’t react, even as the sirens get louder and louder. They’re coming in fast and hard. And then the sirens bleep to a stop.
Darryl speaks into the silence.
“Kathy has always gotta be right. Why you always gotta be right? Huh, Kathy?” Darryl’s wrist bends, the gun touches his left temple. I’m half out of my chair, reaching for the gun, when the explosion rocks the room.
…
My ears are ringing and my hands are slathered in red with boogery blobs of gray.
A woman’s voice is crooning, “Oh baby, what did you do? Oh, baby.”
A man wearing a helmet and nearly covered in black padded gear with ‘Police’ stenciled in white across his chest is kneeling in front of me asking, “Are you hurt, sir? Where are you shot?” as he runs his hands over me, searching for the source of the gore on my hands.
Then there is a paramedic. I try to swat her away, tell her to help Darryl, that Darryl needs her help. She and another paramedic half carry, half walk me out the front of the building and get me cleaned up in the back of an ambulance.
Finally, Imogen is there. We’re not a touchy family, but her arm around my back is very comforting.
“God, Iz. You scared me.”
I watch all the police and paramedics and crime scene techs bustle into and out of Reed’s headquarters. Are they the same people who swarmed RAPAC this morning? Maybe gun violence, like campaigns, has spurred the growth of specialized employment sectors. What kind of world would we have if we got rid of guns and put those resources elsewhere?
Imogen’s talking again. “Why didn’t you leave, when Kathy told you to get out?”
I consider that.
“Because Darryl was right. I might not have been his wing man, exactly, but I was his enabler. Just like he was mine.”
Imogen dabs at my face with Kleenex, but my eyes keep leaking.
…
The story didn’t end there. Although Darryl was not there to see it, the sun came up the next morning. Inexorably, the election took place. As happens in democracies, the outcome of the election depended on you. Were you too busy to volunteer, too busy to get involved? Did life get in the way?
Epilogue 1
The Democracy You Deserve
The shooting made broadcast news about as fast as news trucks could get to the scene. Coverage was virtually nonstop through election day.
But we’ll probably never know if the shooting affected the outcome of the election. Crime, and concern about crime, usually favors the law-and-order vote—that is, it increases Republican turnout. It’s unclear whether that pattern was disrupted by the fact that both the murder victim and the suicide were Mike Reed supporters and the suicide took place at Reed’s campaign headquarters.
We’ll also probably never know the extent to which either Dangerous World or Save the White Man impacted the election. The LA Times/USC performed some exit polling, but none of it was specific to either Dangerous World or Save the White Man.
What we do know is that Mike Reed eked out the narrowest of victories, garnering 195,942 votes to Sylvia Delgado’s 192,062 votes. The Democrats failed to take back control of the House of Representatives.
Darryl’s funeral service was held two weeks after the election. Imogen and I, who had moved out of the Cypress Woods apartment a few days after the election and decamped back to Woodside, drove out for the funeral.
Sylvia Delgado was there, and Imogen took the opportunity to apologize about the billboard again. Delgado studied the two of us for a long, considered moment.
“You two think what elites spout through their various bought-and-paid-for channels determines election outcomes. But America is still a democracy. A flawed democracy, twisted by big money and gerrymandering, but a democracy still.
“And in a democracy, the citizens get the government they deserve.
“Democracy is not a spectator sport, and at least you two showed up for the game. You gave it your misguided all. You recognized that much had been given to you, and that much was required from you. Not everybody did.
“There are more registered Democrats in California’s 10th Congressional District than Republicans. But these citizens, who bitch and moan about Trump and his cronies, they chose not to vote. They didn’t bother to vote, which is the very least a citizen can do to fulfill the responsibilities of citizenship. Let alone registering other folks to vote and volunteering and protecting the vote. Folks complain about the Trump voter, the racist, sexist Trump voter. They should be looking in the mirror, asking themselves why they didn’t love their country enough to save it from Trump and his toadies by getting active, getting involved.”
…
Is that disappointing? For Imogen and me, it was devastating.
Did you think simply voting was all that your democracy required of you? Do you think that’s all that Tea Party activists do?
Of course, there was another possible outcome. One in which you found time for engagement and activism. One in which you registered folks to vote, canvassed, and made GOTV calls. Thank you. Thank you for your activism. You, your activism made possible an entirely different outcome.
Epilogue 2
The Democracy You Deserve
The shooting made broadcast news about as fast as news trucks could get to the scene. Coverage was virtually nonstop through election day.
But we’ll probably never know if the shooting affected the outcome of the election. We’ll also probably never know the extent to which either Dangerous World or Save the White Man impacted the election. The LA Times/USC performed some exit polling, but none of it was specific to either Dangerous World, Save the White Man, or the shootings.
What we do know is that Sylvia Delgado pulled off a stunning upset, garnering 232,802 votes to Mike Reed’s 155,201 votes. Her election was part of a Democratic tsunami, with Democrats winning back a net sixty-three House seats from Republicans and taking back control of the House. The tsunami also yielded two Senate seats, providing the narrowest Democratic majority in the Senate, as well as twelve additional governors’ mansions.
Darryl’s funeral service was held two weeks after the election. Imogen and I, who had moved out of the Cypress Woods apartment a few days after the election and decamped back to Woodside, drove out for the funeral.
It was held at the Unitarian church on Kiernan. The pastor at North Valley Covenant felt the need to stress the church’s prohibition against suicide when discussing funeral arrangements with Kathy Gniewek. Kathy decided no member of her family, living or dead, would cross the threshold of that institution again. Based on the service, the pastor at the Unitarian Universalist church was a man of significantly greater compassion.
After the service, we joined the line of mourners waiting to express condolences to Kathy Gniewek. She and Imogen exchanged a brief hug, and then it was my chance to apologize.
She brushed off my apology. “Darryl didn’t want to take responsibility for his vote for Trump, for the ugly reasons for his vote for Trump. He wanted to blame Corey and Mike. Darryl killed himself. He wanted to blame me for that. But Darryl is the one responsible for Darryl’s actions. You have plenty of your own to atone for.”
I considered the magnitude of my sins and found there was nothing to say to this. I nodded my acknowledgement and shook the hand she offered.
I caught up to Charlene outside the church. Crying had made a mess of her eye makeup, turning it into raccoon eyes. It was really good to see her, even if it was just for a moment. She
was late for her shift at the Branding Iron but paused to share a good, long hug.
Sylvia Delgado was also there, and Imogen took the opportunity to apologize about the billboard again. Delgado studied the two of us for a long, considered moment.
“You think your billboard was that important? You think your repulsive Dangerous World ads were that important? You two think what elites spout through their various bought-and-paid-for channels determines election outcomes. But America is still a democracy. A flawed democracy, twisted by big money and gerrymandering, but a democracy still.
“And in a democracy, the citizens get the government they deserve.
“I’ve been working on campaigns in one capacity or another for over a decade. And I have never seen the kind of energy we had here this year. This year, we lived up to the promise of our democracy. The folks who began 2017 knitting pink hats and taking to the streets turned up to register voters, knock on doors, and turn out the vote. They raised money, they raised awareness, and finally, on Election Day, they raised their voices at the ballot box.”
A young woman is at Delgado’s elbow, Delgado’s coat over her arm, her phone held up in entreaty. She’s Delgado’s aide, trying to keep Delgado to her schedule. Delgado acknowledges her with a raised hand, the universal just-a-moment signal.
“You two were misguided, seriously misguided. But democracy is not a spectator sport, and at least you two showed up for the game. You gave it your misguided all. You recognized that much had been given to you, and that much was required from you. Not everybody did.”
She leans forward and places a warm hand on each of our upper arms, making us a little circle. Her gaze is commanding.
“Next time, you’ll do better. You will listen to local leaders and activists and community members and you will heed them. Next time, you’ll remember that what is required of you is service.”
Rules of Resistance Page 23
