Election Diary, Pt. 1
The (phenomenal) ginger molasses cookies from Claire Saffitz’s new cookbook Dessert Person. The nice thing about stress-baking is that segues so naturally into stress-eating!
It’s Tuesday evening, and visible through the window behind me, the upper floors of the Bloomberg tower are lit up, bright blue with white lettering: VOTE. I’m writing this entry around 5:45 p.m., long before we know the outcome, because I would like to preserve these impressions without the narrativizing impulses of hindsight.
Here is how the day has gone. I woke up too early, maybe from jitters, maybe from the continuing hangover of daylight savings. I did my usual morning routine, a little meditation, drank coffee and read for a bit, went out for a run, dodging and weaving through the construction crews on Madison Avenue, who have been hammering plywood across the store windows for the past few days.
At a certain point, in the next few hours, we’ll turn the TV on. But until then, I’ve been doing my best to minimize my news intake. Andrew checks Twitter every so often and tells us what we need to know. This morning, he said, guess the first thing each candidate did this morning. “Trump phoned in to Fox & Friends,” he said. “Biden went to church.”
Biden went to church. I burst into tears. Five minutes later, we watched a video montage of Trump dancing at his rallies, set to the tune of “YMCA,” tweeted by Trump himself (does he know what “YMCA” is about?), and I started laughing with that kind of what-the-fuck-is-happening bafflement that has been a hallmark of the past four years. I’ve lost count of my emotions today.
Andrew had his meetings cancelled for the day. I gave myself the day off work, too. We ran a few errands. I took a nap after lunch, surprised by how hard I crashed. In the late afternoon, I went to our polling location, walking right in: there were maybe ten poll workers for every one person voting. In so many ways, today has felt like the opposite of four years ago. No celebratory selfies, no performative displays, no watch parties. Just the ballot, the booth, the quiet echo of the Park Avenue Armory. On my way out, a poll worker said: “Do you want a sticker?” And I said: “Yeah! Duh! The sticker is the best part!” Then I amended myself: “No, the sticker isn’t the best part. But maybe it’s the second-best part.”
When I was at Random House, I edited a book called Landslide. It’s brilliant in so many ways, but one of the best parts is how the author, Jonathan Darman, captures the sensation of actually living through a thing. The day that JFK was assassinated, for instance: we know in hindsight that there was a smooth transition of power, that the fabric of the nation held together. We know this so deeply that it becomes hard to un-know it. But the best writers, like Darman, can take us back to those pivotal moments, can keep us in the immediacy of those moments, and by erasing our knowledge of what came after, allow us to understand (more than that: allow us to feel) just how up-for-grabs it all was. That the fear was real, because there was never a guarantee that it would turn out okay.
**
It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m sitting in a study room at the library, optimistically thinking I might get some work done today. Last night we picked up pizza, opened a bottle of wine, and turned on the TV. Confession: despite the months of warnings, counsels for what to expect from the process, settle-in-for-the-long-haul, take-your-patience-pills, marathon-not-a-sprint, I fell grip to the fever dream in the last few days. What if it’s a blowout? What if Florida flips, or Texas flips, and we can go to bed on Tuesday night, and everything is hunky dory again? (Or, you know, hunky dory given…everything else.)
This is what amazes me about election night, or any moment of enormous anticipation. You carry the hope with you until the very end; it seems like such a tangible thing until it doesn’t. The possibility is right there, waiting for you; it’s like the perfect house, solid and visible, just waiting for you to move in. So it’s 7 p.m., you’re tuning in, and the minutes pass, and you’re feeling good, and the minutes keep adding up, and things start to change, and you get quieter and quieter, and at a certain point, you look back on yourself of two or three hours ago, and you think: why the hell did I ever think it was going to be easy peasy? Seriously, why? What was I smoking? The betting markets gradually turning against Biden. The needles edging into red. Shades of 2016. The sinking feeling in the stomach. The pattern repeating. Doom. Not again. Not again!
Around 11 p.m., I went to bed. When I woke up this morning, I felt a sense of resignation that was also a tiredness, the nerves draining from my body, not because we’d reached any conclusion, but because we had, at least, passed through the first stage. There is something to be said for that, the day coming and going with relative peace. I avoided my phone for a little while—again tried to meditate, tidied up the kitchen, washed last night’s wine glasses—and by that time Andrew was up too, and finally I looked at the news, and there it was: exactly what we’d been told to expect. It wasn’t over. The complex reality, equally joyful and terrifying. The hope, which isn’t an easy hope, but is hope nonetheless.
**
It’s Thursday morning, and I’m back in the library. On my walk here, I noticed that some of the boarded-up storefronts on Madison have started to reopen, pulling down enough plywood to open their doors. I hope that the coming days, whatever they hold, won’t prove this to be Pollyanna-ish, but honestly? These boarded-up stores strike me as absurd, as completely disproportionate. Maybe I’m wrong; maybe it’s a worthwhile precaution. But I can imagine myself, twenty or thirty years from now, looking back on these sunny November days, and thinking: how weird was that? These luxury boutiques battening down the hatches, like a hurricane was barreling through? In the last few days, the weather has been glorious, warm and spring-like, and the parks and outdoor restaurants have been bursting with life. I love this about New York, how much of the living takes place in public: the sidewalks, the subways, the neighbors visible across the courtyard. I love how New York has doubled down on these qualities during Covid: Central Park feeling like a collective backyard, date nights and birthday dinners and happy hours moving outside. The city opens her arms, because she knows that you weren’t meant to be alone in your apartment, because she knows that you need her. I guess that’s why these boarded-up stores leave a sour taste in my mouth. I understand that business owners need to protect their property; but this parade of plywood, this raising-of-the-drawbridge, it feels like a contradiction of what the city does best.
Over the last few days, I’ve noticed that when I spend too much time reading the news, my shoulders inch up toward my neck, tensing into uncomfortable knots. I can literally feel the muscles bunching up as I click back over to the New York Times. So I am trying to find ways to stay present. Taking walks and listening to podcasts that have nothing to do with the news; tinkering with my new novel; and especially, baking. Usually, my default after dinner is to plop on the couch and watch TV, but my shoulders can’t take any more news, so instead I’ve been retreating into the kitchen. Thank you, Claire Saffitz and Clarkson Potter, for giving us Dessert Person to get us through these times. So far I’ve made the chocolate chip cookies and ginger molasses cookies, and both were phenomenal, and truly, baking is the perfect distraction for these times, and the fact that there are so many more recipes to try, that there are seemingly infinite ways to combine butter and eggs and sugar and flour—well, I take this as proof that God loves us.
**
It’s Thursday evening, and though we still don’t know the outcome, I’m hitting Publish on this post. There was a good joke floating around Twitter this week, a take-off on T. S. Eliot: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a WI/MI/PA.” There has been something unexpectedly anti-climactic about the unfolding, the drip-drip-drip of results, state by state, county by county. Nothing like four years ago, where The Day After remains etched into my memory—and probably yours, too—the details as clear and permanent as scratches in crystal. Waking up that Wednesday morning after far too little sleep. Walking to work through Central Park, the morning eerie and foggy and gray. Squeezing into the conference room with the rest of the office, sitting on the floor, knees gathered to my chest, watching Hillary Clinton deliver her concession speech. In the afternoon, our editor-in-chief bought a big box of donuts, and we sat around the table, eating our feelings, sugared and shell-shocked. Already, we were beginning to tell our where-were-you-when stories, recounting our personal experiences of the previous night’s events. Each story was different; each story was the same. I think shock makes it harder to hang onto yourself. So you repeat the details, over and over, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when you realized that you were living inside a horror movie.
But this time around? I have a feeling I will forget much of this. (Maybe that’s why I’m writing it down.) And it strikes me as kind of … luxurious. It’s not normal, because nothing with the Moldy Cheetoh* is normal, but there is something comfortingly normal-ish about watching America’s electoral bureaucracy at work. Poll workers, secretaries of state, the mounting clarity of data. Human beings are storytelling types. We crave the emotional climax, the dramatic resolution, the cathartic release. I guess, on some level, that’s what I was expecting from this week. But it will be a long time until we can actually process what has happened (what is still happening) to this country, and while the story continues, the chapter might be ending, and maybe this is how it ends. Maybe bureaucracy is the best possible corrective to four years of insanity. Am I being too hopeful? We’ll see!
(*I wish I could take credit for this nickname. It came from a woman in North Carolina, whom Andrew talked to when he was phone-banking this week. “Hell yes I voted for the Democrats!” she replied. “We need to vote the Moldy Cheetoh out! That’s what my niece calls him. The Moldy Cheetoh!” Whoever you are, wonderful woman, I love you.)