Rachel to the Rescue, page 1
BOOKS BY ELINOR LIPMAN
Into Love and Out Again
Then She Found Me
The Way Men Act
Isabel’s Bed
The Inn at Lake Devine
The Ladies’ Man
The Dearly Departed
The Pursuit of Alice
Thrift
My Latest Grievance
The Family Man
Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus
The View from Penthouse B
I Can’t Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays
On Turpentine Lane
Good Riddance
Published in 2020
by Lightning Books Ltd
Imprint of EyeStorm Media
312 Uxbridge Road
Rickmansworth
Hertfordshire
WD3 8YL
www.lightning-books.com
Copyright © Elinor Lipman 2020
Cover by Ifan Bates
The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
ISBN: 9781785632563
For Jonathan
The president’s unofficial ‘filing system’ involves tearing up documents into pieces, even when they’re supposed to be preserved… It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them
—Politico, June 2018
CONTENTS
1 THE BAD NEWS FIRST
2 VISITING HOURS
3 AM I VIRAL?
4 SOMETHING’S GOING ON
5 THE BUZZ
6 WHY ME?
7 WHOSE MOVE NOW?
8 I MEET DOUGIE
9 I RETURN
10 PASSING MUSTER
11 WHEN CAN YOU START?
12 I CAN DO THAT
13 HOW, WHEN, WHERE AND WITH WHOM?
14 I’M NEW AT THIS
15 OFFICE VISIT
16 I’M A JOURNALIST NOW
17 THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
18 SOME THINGS YOU’D RATHER NOT KNOW
19 THE AWKWARD REALM OF THE PERSONAL
20 NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS
21 THREE’S A CROWD
22 PERSONAL MATTERS
23 THE WRONG RACHEL KLEIN
24 BETWEEN THE LINES
25 TOWARDS A BETTER “BLIGHT”
26 SATURDAY NIGHT
27 MY FUTURE SANITY
28 INCREASINGLY UGLY
29 AN EXCELLENT IDEA
30 TABLE FOR SEVEN
31 STATE OF THE UNION
32 CALM DOWN, KLEIN
33 NEXT SHINY OBJECT
34 COME FOR DINNER
35 SHABBAT SHALOM
36 NONE OF MY BUSINESS, BUT
37 SHABBAT REDUX
38 LOVED ONES
39 WHO KNOWS WHEN?
40 LIKE AN EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1
the bad news first
Unless I amend it, my resume confirms that I truly did work for the forty-fifth president of the United States, if you can call my daily torture-task a job. Even when I hide behind my formal title (Assistant, White House Office of Records Management aka WHORM) I eventually confess that I spent my days taping back together every piece of paper that passed through the hands of Donald J. Trump.
How would a person end up in the administration’s most unnecessary office? Unemployed, I had searched every online job site, including USA.Jobs.com, where I typed in Washington, D.C., and for fun, under locations, “White House”. I rationalized it this way to my one-sided friends and family: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the People’s House. It doesn’t belong to any one man or woman or administration, so calm down.
I hadn’t worked on any campaign nor did I have family connections, but someone must’ve liked my professional qualifications, which I could claim as the personal assistant/typist/proofreader/errand-runner for a wealthy New Yorker who intended to self-publish a memoir after his parents were no longer alive to read and disown him. But he died, a fatal heart attack at the breakfast table, before he’d dictated anything beyond his freshman year at, of course, Yale. My White House security clearance sailed through, probably due to my bare-bones employment record, and bachelor’s degree from a college in a red state.
A distracted woman interviewed me for the entry-level job in slapdash fashion. She said my duties would involve a lot of reading; in fact nothing but. Well into the first term of the 45th president, I found myself in a cubicle, one of a dozen men and women of various ages reading incoming mail. There was the positive, the negative, the donors in search of favors; the dangerous, the hate letters and the love letters, the requests for pardons, for clemency, for commuted sentences, for loans, for business advice, for autographed photos; the macaroni paintings, the coffee mugs, the velour renditions of the president; the edibles. The wedding invitations addressed to President and Mrs. Trump were sent to the East Wing. Under the law, letters we would’ve tossed had to be kept — even those griping about service at Trump hotels and building supers in Trump residential buildings.
I didn’t complain about the brittle, discolored, sometimes crumbling paper that had been irradiated before delivery. I look back and wonder, did I stand out in some way in that entry-level correspondence job? Was my lateral move a reward or a punishment? Was I especially hard-working or just expendable? Whichever — someone must have noticed that I was a nimble restorer of paper in need of mending.
So, after only thirteen weeks in the Office of Correspondence, I moved to the Old Executive Office Building, upholding the Presidential Records Act. Unstated job description: tape tape tape. Did I get the easy ones, the rare memo that had been merely ripped down the middle? No. I got the confetti. Thankless task? How about an unnecessary one? How about the nagging reality that the leader of the free world was unteachable?
I knew from my days in Correspondence that the President didn’t actually read what the world wrote to him. So, it was no small irony that my very own email reached him, or someone with the power to hire and fire. I didn’t mean to send it; should not have composed it above a department-wide email about refrigerator courtesy. Just for fun, or so I believed, I described my daily grind in terms unflattering to the shredder-in-chief, addressed to my alleged best buddy in the office, whom I mistakenly thought — with the judgment one can have late at night after too many Cape Codders — he’d find amusing. I also wrote that I might as well be slaving away in Tehran because every day I identified with the Iranian student militia in “Argo”, who reassembled shredded documents. Probably not a smart reference, nor was my post-script that said, “It would be nice to have a president who had a learning curve.” And then my tanked-up finger hit “reply all”.
It was the epistolary equivalent of death by cop. I didn’t get past Security the day after I sent it. Though I do appreciate that my somewhat treasonous e-letter now resides in the National Archives, not one thing about my three long months on Team Scotch Tape is helping me make friends in 2020.
Luckily my health insurance was good till the end of the month. After being figuratively kicked to the curb, I wandered in something of a daze across 17th Street. Well, halfway across, at which point I was knocked unconscious by a big black car driven by what the newspapers would one day diplomatically refer to as “a personal friend of the president’s.”
2
visiting hours
A policewoman had figured out from the “mom & dad” listing on my phone, how to reach my next-of-kin. Almost a full day later, when I regained consciousness, they were at my bedside, trying to look chipper.
“You were hit by a car, sweetheart,” my mother said with a sob.
I asked if I was dying.
“No, no, not at all. Just some broken bones.”
“Do you know who we are?” my father asked.
“Bill and Hillary Clinton,” I said, managing to move one corner of my mouth into a half-smile, my inner actress floating up from the bottom of my mental swamp.
“She’s okay!” he crowed.
I tried to sit up, but got no farther than the first inch due to the pain in my midsection. I yowled.
“Just broken ribs, thank God,” said my mother.
I moaned, “Whaddya mean ‘thank God’?”
“It could be so much worse!”
“And there’s a concussion — either when you were hit or when you bounced off the car,” my father said.
“Who hit me? Did they stop?”
“On 17th Street, with the world watching? They had to,” my mother said.
A male doctor or intern or resident or nurse with a sha ved head was carefully, slowly buzzing my mattress up to a slight elevation. “Good morning! Nice to see you back in action.”
“Am I? Did you have to restart my heart or anything? With paddles? Was I technically dead?”
“What a question,” said my mother.
“No and no,” said the man, who turned out to be a nurse, and of the height and strength I would soon find out could lift a person from bed to wherever she needed to be next.
I asked where I was.
“Washington, D.C., hon,” said my mom.
“I know that. I meant what hospital.”
“G.W. Best in the biz,” said the nurse, pointing to the embroidered letters on his scrub.
“How’d you get here so fast?” I asked my parents. “Was it fast?”
“The accident was yesterday,” my mother said. “We got on the first Acela—”
“Faster than flying,” said my father. “Believe me, we checked.”
“Thank you for coming,” I said, my voice suddenly choked.
“Are you in pain?” my mother asked.
“Are you kidding? How about ‘agony’?”
“Your head or your middle?”
“Everywhere.”
“It was one of those big VWs,” said my mother.
“A Touareg,” said my dad.
“How did you find all this out?”
“We know what the police know.”
“Was I run over or just hit?”
“Hit. Bumped. Thrown up onto the car,” my mother said. “Then slid off when the driver slammed on her brakes.”
I asked if it had been my fault. Neither answered immediately. Finally, my father said, “You weren’t crossing at a pedestrian walkway.”
I don’t remember if I asked my next question out of hope or dread or too much handling of White House press releases. “Did this make the newspapers?”
“In a police report,” said my dad. “Location, driver, victim of course. There were lots of witnesses.”
“And, hon,” said my dad, “we now know that you were fired.”
For the first time, I staged fogginess. “I was?”
“You were seen being escorted out of the building, and the security guards knew you, so with a phone call or two up to your department, they learned you’d been…separated.”
I said, “Now I remember. I would’ve told you if I hadn’t been nearly killed.”
“She wasn’t almost killed, was she?” my mother asked the nurse.
“Not even close,” he said.
My dad asked me if I’d been promised a severance package, or two weeks’ notice? Or letters of reference?
I closed my eyes, prompting the nurse to say, “Maybe she needs a snooze.”
My mother said, “Aren’t you supposed to keep waking patients up every few hours if they had a concussion so they don’t slip into a coma?”
“We’re on it,” said the nurse.
I asked if I’d been cut and bleeding and needed stitches.
“Miraculously no,” said my mother.
“Give it to me straight,” I said.
“One black eye,” my mother said. “But not so bad. It’s already turning yellow. A little foundation will cover it.”
I asked if she had a mirror in her purse. She said too quickly, no, she didn’t.
“You know what the good news is?” my father said. “No damage to your spine! Everyone breaks a rib or two. I once broke a rib sneezing!”
I asked the nurse if it was okay to sleep, or was my mother right?
“Since you’re awake and carrying on a conversation and there’s no bleed, and your pupils aren’t dilated, you can sleep.”
“She was bleeding, though,” my mother said.
“Not that kind.” He touched his head. “Inside.”
“Now that we know she’s out of the woods, I could use a sandwich and a cup of coffee,” said my dad.
I asked what time it was and how long I’d been here.
“Almost noon,” said my mother. “The accident was early yesterday, during rush hour.”
That sounded right — sacked as I arrived for work.
“Call us if you need us,” my mother said. “I think your phone is with your backpack, somewhere.”
I said, “Go have lunch. I won’t need to call you.”
“She’s very alert,” my father said. “Sounds like the old Rachel.”
“Thank you for coming all this way,” I said.
“We’re not going anywhere — just to the cafeteria. Did you think we’re sending you home to that fourth-floor walk-up with a room-mate who’s never home?”
“Third floor,” I said.
Mom kissed me on the cheek, gingerly. Dad gave my closest, un-tubed hand a squeeze. “You’re doing great,” he said. “Can we bring you anything from the cafeteria?”
I said no thanks. And try to relax. I didn’t die.
“Don’t even say that!” my mother wailed.
They finally left, walking backwards, waving, but no relief visible in their strained smiles.
The nurse said, “Nice folks,” then asked about the pain. I said, “On a scale of one to ten? Nine and a half.”
“Ouch. Sorry.”
“Whatever you’re giving me for the pain, it’s not working.”
“We can give you some extra-strength Tylenol.”
“That’s it? How about morphine?”
What about that question made him smile? “Morphine isn’t for broken ribs, darlin’.”
“Opioids?”
“No and no. The pain tells us a lot. You don’t want to mask it.”
“Yes I do. Then what’s in the I.V.?”
“Nutrition.”
“You’re nice, too,” I said.
“I try.”
He left with a reminder that he was only a call-button away, here, practically in my hand. I lay there, wondering if it was okay to press my ribs diagnostically or if that would send a splintered one into an organ. Did the police still have my phone? My backpack? I was repeatedly moving my legs and wiggling my toes. Everything down there worked. I could feel socks on my feet and the blanket on my shins. How long does a concussion last, and does it fix itself?
Five minutes later? Fifteen? The nurse was back, leaning halfway into my room. “There’s someone here to see you.”
“Who?”
“A woman.”
“A doctor?”
“No. She has a big bunch of flowers.”
How bad could that be? Was it visiting hours? I said okay.
This visitor must have been at his elbow, because she walked right in, fur-coated, brief-cased, leather boots to her knees, carrying a giant arrangement of flowers.
I didn’t know this person. “Are you sure you’re in the right room?” I asked.
Her answer was, “I’m an attorney.”
“Seriously?” I said, meaning, Don’t tell me I’m being visited by a literal ambulance chaser?
“First of all, how are you?” she asked.
“Terrible. My entire ribcage is killing me. And I have a concussion.”
“I won’t be long. Thank you for agreeing to see me.”
Had I?
“I represent the driver whose car you ran in front of, and I hope you know that they weren’t at fault.”
My now-favorite nurse had stuck his head back in and asked, “Everything good here?”
“Could you get us a vase?” this visitor asked.
“She’s a lawyer,” I told him. “She represents the driver who ran over me.” If I’d been able to roll over to one side and turn my back on her as an act of dismissal, I would have. Instead, I closed my eyes and simulated wooziness.
“Rachel?” I heard her say — not in the whisper you’d use when addressing a patient who was drifting off to sleep, but a rebuke. “I have a few questions I’d like you to answer.”
I murmured, “I’d better not. My parents aren’t going to be thrilled that you barged in here.”
“Are your parents attorneys?”
Huh? No, they weren’t attorneys, but both were excellent diplomats. As owners of a paint and wallpaper store, they’d negotiated with customers who wanted their money back after the room had already been decorated or their kid’s scribbles hadn’t come off with Mister Clean’s Magic Eraser. I said, “No they aren’t attorneys" — adding a sarcastic twist to that word as if it were too pretentious for ordinary speech.
