You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  A voice came into the room through a kind of speaker system. “I figured I’d wait till halftime,” it said. “I know when I can’t compete. But now that everybody’s in a good mood.” And a few people cheered.

  At first I thought somebody must have turned up the sound on the football game, but then I realized there was a guy with a microphone at the other end of the room. The office space ran the length of the factory floor, but the ceilings weren’t especially high, they had those panels you stare at from the dentist’s chair, and Gloria and I stood in exactly the wrong place, by the restroom doors. But then I felt her hand on my arm—Obama had come.

  We tried to push our way a little closer, but the party, which had been loud and spread out, was now quiet and packed in. A few people at the back stood on tables to get a view, but Gloria didn’t want to do that and in the end I managed to find her a chair. I climbed up next to her for a moment, holding her waist, and then stepped down again. This is what Obama looked like from fifty paces, a young Arab businessman. His head looked small and he seemed light on his feet.

  Walking with the microphone in hand, he said, “We got in, I don’t know, about eight a.m. this morning, and the first thing I said was, take me to these neighborhoods, take me to these streets, so we drove off, with about eighteen cars, one after the other, and by this point it was about nine thirty, and I knew we had got to the right place, because there were guys working, building, wearing those hard hats and dirty day-glo jackets, climbing on roofs and digging foundations, on Saturday morning, and the other half of the folks I saw were sitting in Joe Silver’s café drinking lattes.”

  People laughed, but at the time I didn’t hear all that, and only worked out from the Free Press website in the morning exactly what he said. Partly it was a problem with the acoustics. The office had been designed to cut out the flow of noise from one space to the next. There were also hecklers. Someone called out, “The United States of Detroit,” which didn’t mean much to me then and doesn’t now. But Obama stopped and started again.

  “Now I know there are folks here today who don’t agree with everything I do, and I don’t expect you to. But there are things we can agree on. That the American Experiment ain’t over yet. And that’s not because we’re sitting around on our butts, waiting for the results to come in. The people rebuilding Detroit, and some of you are in this room right now, are still tinkering with it, still adapting it, still moving forward. You have come here from Albuquerque and Chicago, from Queens and from Cleveland and from San Diego. You have come from Mexico and Poland and Sudan and from right here in Detroit. You have come because you lost your job or you couldn’t get a job or you had to work three jobs just to put food on the table. Because your health insurance ran out or your mortgage was worth more than your home. Because the school you sent your kids to couldn’t afford to buy books or because the part-time job you got in college turned out to be the best thing you could find after earning your degree. You have come because there was a voice in your head saying, You don’t have to live like this. There’s a better way to live. This voice has called people to America for over four hundred years. It calls to us now . . .” and so on. Eventually he said, “But stick around, I’m just the warm-up act. Am I right in thinking we got the Wrenfields coming next?”

  Afterwards, though, the men in dark suits closed down on him pretty quickly, and a few minutes later I saw the herd of SUVs in the parking lot filing out. Maybe they were worried about the snow—it sat lightly on the parked cars about six inches thick.

  I said to Gloria, “Did you get anything to eat? There were turkey burgers going around. I want to introduce you to Robert James.”

  We caught up with him shaking hands. There were maybe fifteen, twenty people who wanted his attention, and he stood there in his open-necked shirt, looking the part but not saying much. He looked tired, too, like he’d been wound up and was winding down. “I’ve got to get this stuff off my face,” he said at last and rubbed his palms against his cheeks and held them up. “I hate TV, please excuse me.” He headed for the exit, but I chased him into the concrete stairwell.

  “I want to introduce you to someone,” I said. But Gloria had got stuck somewhere. The stairwell was empty, and for a moment we just stood there, the two of us, almost embarrassed. Robert had his foot on the stair—he was giving me time.

  “We’re going over to my house for a party,” he said. “Obama’s already there.”

  “Let me just get her.”

  “Come, too, I can put you on the list. I’d drive you over but I need fifteen minutes alone.”

  “It’s been a good day for you,” I said.

  “It’s been a terrific day.”

  So I found Gloria and we went downstairs and collected our coats, then stepped outside. The afternoon felt warmer. Snow reflected the cloud-filtered sunlight, and there was a kind of cold glow in the air. Cars driving out had packed the snow down in two ruts and we walked in those.

  “It’s stupid, I should have brought my other shoes,” Gloria said.

  I turned on the ignition and let her sit in the car while I scraped the windows clear. When the snow came off I could see her again, looking ahead but not looking at me.

  There wasn’t much traffic but I concentrated on the road instead of talking. After a few minutes Gloria said, “I still don’t know what took you so long in there.”

  “I ran into Kurt Stangel. They had a camera set up, where people could tell their stories, and I listened to them for a while.” Then I said, “The truth is, I liked seeing you with Beatrice. I thought you would get along.”

  “I’m not really into that sister act she tried to pull. Did you go out with her?”

  “No. In college she went out with Robert James.”

  “Did you ever sleep with her?”

  “There’s a lot of things I could tell you about her but not like this.”

  “Like what?”

  The drive was too short to talk any of this out. Robert’s street was blocked off at both ends by security vehicles, so we had to park around the corner. It was a little after three o’clock in the afternoon and the street lamps came on while we sat in the car. They flickered and then burned, and the snow, which was still falling, made patterns against the rays of light.

  “I shouldn’t drink at lunch,” I said. “It makes me depressed.”

  But she was looking out the window at the sidewalk. “I’m really annoyed with myself I didn’t bring other shoes.”

  “I could carry you in. I said I could carry you in.”

  “I’m deciding if I want to be in a grouch. Okay, carry me.”

  So I stepped into the cold and opened the passenger door and she jumped into my arms. She put her legs around me. I could feel the strength in her thighs and managed to kick the door shut and get the key in while she hung on. Then I shuffled along through the snow—she weighed about as much as a ten-year-old kid. It just felt like an incredibly friendly thing to do, on both sides. She held her cheek against my hair, which had snow in it that melted against her skin and made her shiver.

  “Be nice to me,” she said, “when we get in. Don’t leave me.”

  19

  In fact, we soon got pulled in different directions, but it didn’t matter much. Obama was there—I mean, he was in the house, in one room or another, and from time to time you could see him, smiling sometimes and sometimes holding back smiles. Gloria kept looking out for him and then we ran into Clay Greene, who had sobered up a little.

  “This is Gloria Lambert,” I said. “She teaches art and computers at Kettridge High. She’s one of those teachers who wins prizes.”

  “Now I’d very much like to hear your views on something,” he said to her. “I’m working on an article about class and race and education. Maybe you can help me. Let me get you a glass of champagne.” And he picked one off a passing tray.

  I left them to it and edged into a group of people talking to Robert James. They were standing in front of the liv
ing room fireplace, with their backs against the heat.

  “May I use you as a fire screen?” I said to no one in particular. The conversation was about the mayoral election, which was a month old. The guy who lost used to work at Arthur Andersen. Some lady’s ex-husband had a weekly lunch date with him at the Yacht Club, oh, about twenty years ago, when people still lived like that. She couldn’t remember what his impressions were.

  “Have you seen Beatrice?” Robert said to me, when the circle broke up. “Apparently she’s working on a novel. She’s got an agent, Clay Greene’s agent. He’s here, too.”

  “Which one is he?”

  “Some English guy. Not that old.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Why should I mind?” he said.

  “Excuse me.”

  I felt a hand on my arm and it was the woman with the ex-husband. She was the underweight kind of elderly lady. Her skin bruised easily—I could see the marks on her wrists made by some of her bracelets. Also, she was drunk. Her head lay slightly lopsided on her neck.

  “Excuse me,” she said again. “Robert tells me you’re one of these terribly brave young men.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He said you moved into one of these houses, these run-down houses, on those streets that everyone moves out of. Aren’t you afraid?”

  “I’ve got a shotgun for the car, and a standard police-issue Smith & Wesson at home.”

  “But you don’t take it with you?”

  “If I need to. Where do you live?”

  “Oh, where we’ve always lived, in a little house, which needs such a lot of work, but I never got round to it, and now the children are away, and my ex-husband, of course, and there isn’t any point. Just off Lake Shore Road. But what I’ve never understood is this business with needles. I used to sometimes smoke a cigarette, a very long time ago, when I was practically a girl, but I just don’t believe that people would willingly put something into a needle and then—stick it in their arm. They must be very desperate to do that.”

  Beatrice came in, looking for somebody. She stood in the doorway in a black dress, which wasn’t what she wore at the factory party. In heels she stood tall enough she could look over people’s shoulders. I excused myself and went over to her. “What did you say to Gloria?”

  “She’s too nice for you.”

  “Is that what you said? You used to think I was too nice.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “If you’re looking for Robert, he just left.”

  “Thank you, I wasn’t.”

  “He says you’re writing a novel, he says you have an agent.”

  “Marny,” she said, changing her tune, “can I tell you something even Clay doesn’t know? He’s not just my agent; we’re seeing each other.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “He flew in a couple of months ago to see Clay and stayed the night. That’s when it started. He’s supposed to be showing up here, but I haven’t seen him.”

  “What’s he like? What’s this novel about?”

  “One of these English guys who live in New York and end up being more English than the English, you know, charming and offhand and polite. But he’s our age. His father’s a lord but not a real one—he got made. He went to Eton.”

  “What’s this novel about?”

  “Oh, I don’t care about that. That’s just one of David’s ideas. He thinks he can sell it.” After a minute, she added, “I like Gloria, by the way, I like her a lot. What are you shaking your head about?”

  “Nothing, I’m not. Is Walter here? Have you seen him? He was worried about Susie when I left. She’s starting to look pretty big; she wasn’t feeling too hot.”

  Beatrice hadn’t seen him.

  “I think I understand what it is about having kids,” I said. “They’ve got kids at their house all day, really small people. After a while, after you’ve been through your twenties and thirties, you want to have simple relations again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just something on my mind. This is the trouble with being a pioneer. You want a new life and you set up an outpost and soon it looks just like the life you left.”

  “I don’t think what you’ll have with Gloria is simple relations.”

  “Oh fuck off,” I said and went to find her.

  But I ran into Susie and Walter first, talking to Helen, Clay Greene’s wife. They were standing in the dining room; the big mahogany table had been stripped of leaves and pushed into a corner. Helen said, “Why don’t you sit down?” There were dining room chairs lined up against the wall. “No point in playing the hero.”

  “Everybody tells me to sit down. I don’t want to sit down. I’ve been lying down all afternoon, and poked and prodded.”

  “Did they find anything wrong?”

  “What they say is, it’s probably perfectly normal or maybe it’s not. I had a little spotting this morning. So I call up and they say, come in, we want to be safe. But then they can’t tell me if it’s safe or not.”

  “How many months are you?” Helen asked. I was standing just outside the conversation. I wanted to talk to Walter, but he was listening in, and I didn’t feel I could interrupt.

  “Seven months next week,” Susie said. Her belly was at the pillow stage, but she looked fatter also in the neck by the lines of her jaw. Her face had that animal placid cud-chewing pregnant look. She kept her hands on her hips and moved like she was carrying a full heavy pitcher of water.

  “You’ll be fine, everybody has one kind of worry or another. Believe me, it’s worse when they come out. Everybody tells you, just get through the first three months. My boys now are eight and three and I’m still waiting to get my life back.”

  It occurred to me that Helen didn’t like Susie very much, and this was her way of showing it. But maybe women her age can’t help themselves. They have to say something if they see somebody pregnant.

  Susie said, “Well, all I care about now is this little guy right here. I want to get a good look at him, I want to find out what he’s like.”

  Then Clay and Gloria came over.

  Around five o’clock she wanted to go home. She had seen the president, she had stood in the room with him, it was enough. So I went to find Robert and say thank you, good-bye. He was picking at the food in the kitchen, standing around with the chef and the waitstaff and some of the president’s entourage. Obama was there, too, trying to get a game of three-on-three together. “Where there’s a backboard there’s a ball.” He meant the Roof King backboard over the garage door. The snow had stopped, the evening was clearing up, Obama offered to do a little shoveling himself. He hadn’t done a thing all day but eat small portions of food, the kind of food you can hold in one hand while you talk a lot of crap. “Come on,” he said.

  The impression he made on me was very strong, his fame and his restlessness, which was partly physical and partly in the way he talked—he interrupted himself and made little appeals to people around him, not just people he knew but also one of the waiters, a six-foot white guy who used to play point guard for Aquinas College in Grand Rapids. “Sam wants a game,” Obama said. “Sam’s up for it, Sam wants to work off some of that gut you get in your twenties, when you work too hard and the rest of the time sit around on your butt.

  “Come on,” he said again. “Who’s in? I need some names.”

  Robert gave him a queer look. His shirt was unbuttoned at the top, his sleeves were rolled up. He kept himself in good shape. “The ball needs pumping up,” he said.

  “So pump up the ball.”

  Obama started pointing at each of us.

  “You in? . . . What’s your name? Introduce me.”

  “Marny’s more of a squash player.”

  “I’ll guard him then,” Obama said.

  About twenty minutes later, I found myself scraping a snow shovel up and down the concrete drive. We took it in turns. Robert had loaned me a college sweatshirt,
to pull over my undershirt, but I was still wearing slacks and leather-soled shoes. Then Obama took the shovel off my hands and pushed the last crumbs of snow into the pileups on either side of the drive.

  “How far is East Lansing from here?” he asked. “About two hours?”

  “A little less. An hour and a half,” Sam said.

  “Robert, Robert James,” Obama called. “Did you invite Magic Johnson to this thing?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “This is his kind of basketball weather. He told me once, he used to practice his jump shot with mittens on.”

  Then there was a ball bouncing among the six of us, middle-aged men, in dark pants and dress shoes, breathing smoke, as we shuffled around, passing and shooting and chasing the ball under the garage lights. About ten security guys stood along the spear-topped iron fence, watching us, and the house itself was lit up like a Christmas tree. People crowded into the window frames to get a look. But the court felt private enough.

  “I’m about as warm as I’m gonna get,” Obama said. “Come on, Reggie. Let’s get it on.”

  Reggie was his assistant, one of those friendly-faced black guys, about six and a half feet tall, and bald as a cantaloupe. About a foot taller than Bill Russo, who played, too. Bill still kept a set of workout clothes at Robert’s house and was the only one of us in rubber soles—he had on his wrestling shoes and started grabbing people by the waist and pushing.

  “Get off me, Bill,” Robert said.

  But Bill was having a good time; he didn’t give a shit about basketball. He guarded Robert, and Reggie guarded Sam, and the president guarded me. Mostly I tried to get out of his way. I didn’t want to injure anybody, and the ground was cold concrete and slippery with snow dust. Obama put up a jump shot and missed, and Reggie grabbed the rebound and kicked it back to him, and this time he knocked it down.

  “It’s raining on a snowy day,” Obama said. He had a quick, jerky left-handed stroke, which took a little getting used to. After each shot he held his hand out like a claw.