by Nawaaz Ahmed
Nevada is the first state to shift from leaning McCain toward Obama, which is encouraging and gratifying. At Bill’s urging, they’ve agreed not to discuss election outcomes or their hopes and doubts. But as November approaches, and nationwide polls predict a blowout for Obama, it’s Bill who starts talking about post-November plans on their drives back from Reno.
“Would you mind moving here?” he says as they drive through Oakland, the lights of San Francisco twinkling across the bay.
He describes biking in his childhood neighborhood, down its potholed streets and past its stunted houses, with their stoops and small gardens and their multihued facades of burgundy, peacock blue, chocolate. “I’d like to buy a house here, before they all get torn down and replaced by huge-ass condos for yuppies from SF.”
Seema recalls the flaming-scarlet gulmohar tree in their compound in Chennai that she loved to climb. Would it grow in Oakland?
Bill says, “I never imagined that someday I might want a house with a garden. Or that one day I’d want children who’ll climb the trees in my backyard.”
Bill has been dropping hints all fall about children, which she has been ignoring. This is the first time he’s come out with it explicitly, and she knows she can’t ignore him much longer. “Whoa, children—in the plural, Bill? We haven’t talked about having one child yet!”
“We’re talking now. What do you say, Mama Seema?”
“I’m not sure this world is ready for our children, Bill. I’m not even sure I am ready.”
“Nobody thought America would be ready for a Black president. I never thought any of this would ever happen to me. As Obama says, we must learn to hope, and we must learn to trust.”
“Let’s not jinx the election, okay? Anything can happen in the next ten days. We agreed—you insisted—not to discuss these things until afterward.”
“Fair enough.”
Their conversation falters. A mile-long glow of red taillights greets them as they enter the Bay Bridge, and she’s reminded—a trail of blood petals—of the day she’d hidden in the gulmohar tree.
She sees it in Bill’s rigid grip on the steering wheel as the car swerves off the Bay Bridge onto the exit to their home: Bill is family, their home is her home, but as she well knows, even family is family only conditionally, a home may be home only temporarily. Is a child the next concession she must make?
But a child, unlike any previous compromise, is irreversible. A child is for life. The concession is a commitment for life.
A knot tightens within her, entangling her insides until even her voice sounds knotted as they drive up the dark hill toward their unlit home, indiscernible against the dark of the hillside.
23
Tuesday, November 4, 2008: Election day is a welcome lightening of the skies, after a tormenting night. Waking up in Reno alone, Bill sits glued to the TV until he sees Obama, accompanied by his wife and daughters, casting a ballot for himself in Chicago. Only then does the day begin to feel real.
The newscasters note how remarkably cool and detached Obama appears, despite the enormity of the stakes and his grandmother’s death the previous day. Bill wants to scream at them: Didn’t Obama shed tears while speaking about his grandmother at his rally last night? Obama had Bill sobbing like a baby. But now that it’s overwhelmingly clear that Obama is poised to win, everyone seems to have heightened their scrutiny, as if already no longer willing to give Obama any benefit of the doubt.
As had Seema. The memory of their previous evening’s fight clouds Bill’s morning. They had originally planned to return to San Francisco Sunday night as usual. But Bill couldn’t shake off the fear of some last-minute Republican shenanigans that would deliver the election to McCain. He has promised precinct captains that he’ll help clean up the final get-out-the-vote lists, targeting those who hadn’t voted yet—and he intends to stay, to see it through. Even if Seema must leave.
Besides, he wants to be able to observe in person the fruits of Obama’s (and his) labor and savor the moment of truth as America goes to the polls. Coffee and a list of polling stations in hand, he drives around Reno as voting begins at seven, stopping first at the one closest to the campaign headquarters, in the Latino section of Reno. The line circles the block, animated chatter reaching him as he pulls up and rolls down the windows.
He’d spent the night dreading that the expected Latino turnout, key to Obama’s victory in Nevada, would fail to turn up. He drives around the block relieved, exercising his meager Spanish in excited greetings and felicitations, until a policeman warns him against loitering. He flashes high fives and thumbs-ups at the campaign’s election monitors. The other polling stations, too, have decent turnouts, though some seem less than busy, to his returning anxiety. But that is surely expected, given the successful push for early voting that the surge of volunteers into Nevada enabled—what Seema has been doing the past few weekends.
He wishes Seema were with him now, as he’d been there for her in Iowa. But she’s decided that volunteering for No-On-Prop-8 is more important to her. She’d taken a flight back last night.
“What can you do about it in one day?” he’d asked.
“You know I wanted to stay in SF this weekend, Bill. You begged me, as if Obama would lose Nevada otherwise. You said we’d return Sunday night, that’s why I agreed. But if Prop 8 passes, your Obama will surely bear some of the blame.”
She’d been complaining about the missteps of the No-On-Prop-8 campaign that had made the referendum a toss-up in the last couple of weeks. The gays couldn’t pull their act together, and Obama is to blame. How can Obama risk coming out in support of same-sex marriages now, when it could cost him the election?
The campaign headquarters feels strangely empty and desolate—the volunteers are in the streets getting the vote out. He’d wanted to be here, rather than stewing at home, but there’s little for him to do. By midmorning there’s news of record turnout all over the country. There are some rumors of voting machines not working properly in poor and Black neighborhoods, of people waiting in line for hours to cast their vote, of some voters not being given provisional ballots, but no major disruption materializes. He should be able to breathe easier. But Seema has not been returning his calls or replying to his texts.
“You never intended to return on Sunday, did you? That’s why you wanted us to vote absentee,” Seema had said, her bags packed, waiting for the taxi to take her to the airport. “You do what you need to do, Bill. I’ll do what I need to do—”
“Why, you’ve become a lesbian again?”
“I—never—stopped—being—a—lesbian.” Each word sharp, distinct, as if challenging him to disagree with any part of her statement.
“So what are we doing together?” The two of them in a hotel room, the campaign office a mile away, the hills ringing the town.
“I never said I’d stop being lesbian. I married you, but that doesn’t change everything—”
“Have you slept with any woman since? Are you having an affair?” Both questions carry scorn, revulsion—he cannot make up his mind which one is more damning. “With Divya? Is that it?”
“No! I don’t need to sleep with anyone else to remember who I am.” She’s gone still now, watching him warily. “Bill, you know: I love you—”
“You’re a lesbian again.” He yanks the door of the room open, sending it slamming against the wall. “Just leave, Seema.”
Seema cringes, startled. They stare at each other for a few moments. Then she pulls out the handle of her suitcase and steps out into the corridor. He watches until she disappears into the elevator. He’s still shaking, as if he’d been impacted by the door.
Thankfully, something does come up to justify his having remained here. An unexpected setback: the national hotline that the volunteers are to call, to update the database with the people confirmed to have voted, is unable to handle the deluge and goes offline. This data has to be entered manually now, and the office scrambles as calls and text messag
es with voter codes begin to pour in. Bill is frenetic, trying to keep up with the incoming barrage of data.
But it’s joyless labor—this was to have been their day, a day together, a day of victory and celebration; he plods on, but soon he doesn’t have recourse to even that as the afternoon advances and voting slows down.
It’ll be four soon. He can still make it home tonight, to be there with Seema when the election is called. He looks around the office: it won’t be the same here. He feels foolish. He hands over the list to a staff member, hurrying through his instructions. “Go, we’ve got this, go,” he’s told.
He pumps the accelerator as he noses it through Reno, swearing at the late-afternoon traffic like he’s never done before, only the election coverage on the radio providing relief as voting closes in the eastern states. The first states are called, Kentucky for McCain and Vermont for Obama, and exit polls are trickling in.
He’s just gotten through the ragged mountain slopes of the Sierras when—Oh. My. God!—Pennsylvania is called for Obama, not thirty minutes after the polls closed there. They’d been expecting the swing state to be hard fought, called only after a long, nail-biting night. Obama must be doing much better than even they’d expected. Bill rolls down the glass and screams out the window, the screams whisked away by the wind, so he can barely hear himself. Still he continues to scream, to the air, to the countryside, to the road, to Seema: “Seema, we won Pennsylvania!”
Her empty seat beside him is a reproach. He recalls the tone of her voice—Bill, I love you—so different from their frequent casual affirmations, apprehensively solemn like their earliest declarations. How could he have doubted her?
He hunts around for news on Prop 8 but can’t find any radio coverage. He assumes she’s probably volunteering somewhere with Fiaz and gives him a call.
She isn’t. Fiaz doesn’t even know she’s back from Reno. He and Pierre have been knocking on doors in neighboring Alameda all day. He is despondent: turning out every “no” vote in the Bay Area has now become necessary, to counter their opponents’ lead in the rural parts of the state. There’s some fear that if an Obama win becomes inevitable too soon, many voters in San Francisco may not even bother to vote.
A sense of anxiety, of urgency, grips Bill. As if he needs to reach Seema now before polls close in California, to show her he is standing with her. She’d asked him: How is she to believe in all this “hopey-changey stuff”—as Palin calls it—when even Obama is still unwilling or unable—or both—to stand with everybody standing with him? He increases his speed, first seventy-five, then eighty, approaching even ninety in spots. Ordinarily he’d be worried about being stopped by cops, even when he’s driving just five over the limit, which is his max.
Ohio is called for Obama when Bill’s still an hour away from San Francisco. And with that, McCain effectively has no path to an electoral college majority, and the race is over even while California is still voting.
“Damn,” he swears. He’d hoped to be there with Seema for this. His initial disappointment pivots to uncontainable euphoria. He finds some release leaning on the horn and switching lanes, the car shrieking as he swerves from one lane to the other and back, amid a cacophony of blared warnings. He pictures Mame’s censures, Seema’s alarm. He laughs and whoops, ceasing the zigzagging, but continuing to pound on the horn.
Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!
Nobody else is going to get it, he thinks. But they do: first one car honks in reply, then another, and soon the entire stretch of highway slowing down through Fairfield becomes one long chorus, a rolling chant against the little town’s disbelief, its dazed lights blinking—
Yes! We! Can!
So Nevada didn’t matter. A twinge of regret: he should have gone to volunteer in Ohio after all. But who could have predicted such a blowout?
The evening deepens as he crosses into East Bay but seems brighter as the skies clear. I-80 swings toward the water, and he can finally see the faint lights of San Francisco beckoning across the bay. Already the landscape is rosier, dusk but also dawn. Only last week he and Seema were driving this same way, discussing what they’d do if Obama—if they—won:
A house. A tree. A child. The parameters of each are clearer: a house in Piedmont, not Oakland, if they’re going to give their child the best education, as Mame would have wanted; and it must be a girl—he pictures Obama’s younger daughter—with Seema’s eyes and smile; and the tree must be ready to bloom a canopy of scarlet by the time their daughter is old enough to climb it.
The traffic slows to a crawl near the Bay Bridge. Is it an accident? No, it’s the chaos of a street fair, a celebration anticipating the coming declaration: windows rolled down, the air rent with honks and shouts and thumping music, passengers whooping it up through open sunroofs, cars stranded empty, drivers dancing on hoods, leaping about, and exchanging high fives. The vehicles trying to get through are confounded, like lost ants, not the orderly crawl he’d been confident he’d make it through. He’s on the bridge nearing his exit when voting closes in California, and seconds later the election is called for Obama.
He drives home through a city that has poured out into the streets in ecstasy: thronging, dancing, music, firecrackers, whistles. He receives texts and calls from his friends in Reno, all jubilant and boisterous. He joins in their remote celebration, though unable to silence the little voice that keeps pointing out his screwup. He calls Seema, hoping she’ll at least pick up this time.
Their home stands dark. Seema’s car is not in the garage. The only other sign of her return is her suitcase in the bedroom. He switches on all the lights on the lower floor, then the lights upstairs as well, some semblance of brightness to match the festivity on TV.
Fiaz doesn’t know where Seema is either. He and Pierre are going to Union Square to join in the revelry and await the results of Prop 8. Does Bill want to join them?
No, he’ll wait at home for Seema. He stands on the balcony chilled, watching the city, streams of gamboling headlights jolting through its streets. He can hear the distant din of triumphant horns. He remembers their first night in the house officially living together, standing huddled here, awed by the view. He calls Seema’s phone periodically, checks his messages instantly—congratulations, felicitations—but none from her.
The president-elect is to make an address to the nation in a few minutes. On the screen, the tumultuous crowd gathered in Grant Park, Chicago, a block from the headquarters, anxiously awaits Obama, amid a sea of rippling red, white, and blue, a sparkle of flashes. Bill wishes he were there, or in the Reno headquarters, or even downtown with Fiaz and Pierre, where the moment would seem less unreal, less surreal, less virtual by virtue of the company of others who’d dreamed and labored for this moment.
The wait for Obama to take the stage in Grant Park seems interminable, and at the same time he wishes for Obama to be delayed till Seema comes home. He has poured out two glasses of sherry, he’s microwaved the two frozen slices of cake they’d saved from their wedding party.
A hush: Ladies and gentlemen, the next first family of the United States of America—
Barack Obama steps out from the wings, sober and dignified, leading his younger daughter by the hand, followed by his wife and elder daughter. They are dressed in shades of red and black, the white of Obama’s shirt dazzling in the blue haze of the stage. Obama’s smile, when he first smiles, is almost self-conscious, without his usual confidence. His wife and daughters, too, seem shy, suddenly unsure of themselves. How tiny and defenseless they look as they walk toward the front of the stage and stand there, holding hands, waving at the enormous crowd lapping hungrily at their feet.
Bill’s first instinct is to gather them in a huddle, form a protective shield around them. His second is to reach for Seema, except she isn’t here. When Obama bends down and whispers something in his younger daughter’s ear, and she laughs and skips, it catches Bill by surprise: the sudden collapse of his chest, as if he’ll never breathe
again, as if all the air in the room were insufficient to ease the strain on his lungs. The room is a blur, for there are tears in his eyes, of what seems almost like pain, and the noise from the TV is a befuddling roar in his ears.
Obama kisses both his daughters on their foreheads, then kisses his wife. His family turns and walks away, leaving him alone to face the crowd. “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible—” he begins. “Tonight is your answer.”
“Mame, this is for you,” Bill toasts, raising his glass of sherry. Forgive me, he texts Seema, please come home.
He downs the sherry but will put away the cake after the speech. For the rest of the night he will remain awake, watching the election results till the early hours of the morning, alert to every buzz or ring on his cell phone, the whine of every car winding its way up the dark and desolate road past their house.
24
At a private party in downtown San Francisco, Seema watches Obama speak, a glass of champagne in her hand.
“Because of what we did, on this date,” Obama says, “change has come to America.”
The on-screen audience, hungry for a line to applaud, laps it up. Seema wonders briefly what Bill is feeling—he surely must be watching somewhere—but she’s still too mad to dwell on him.
She’d been standing all day on the exit ramps of Highway 101, south of the city, with a straggling band of volunteers flashing reminders to commuters to not only vote for Obama but to vote no on Prop 8 as well. What can you do in one day? Bill had jeered, and he was right. She’d felt too ashamed, too guilty, to appeal to Fiaz for something to do that last day; instead, returning from Reno, she’d signed up to join others like her, last-minute actors jolted out of their complacency as Prop 8’s fortunes reversed.
