Ten Minutes from Normal - Rilegato

The planning and organizing that had led to that moment had been years in the making. The past several months had been devoted almost entirely to building toward the convention, writing the speech, organizing the themes, planning every scripted moment of national television coverage. But then, before we were able to truly savor or absorb it all, it was over, and we were back on the trail, or in this case, the train track, always on to the next thing.

A presidential campaign is relentless. You win a straw poll, or a primary, or a debate, or the daily news headline, and wake up to people already talking and asking about the next one. You win in Iowa, lose in New Hampshire, and get back on track in South Carolina, only to lose in Michigan three days later and wonder yet again, “Are we missing something?” But you’re on a plane to California, where there’s a debate coming up, then flying cross-country for next week’s critical primary in Virginia. Once you start, the only way to stop is to lose—and that, of course, is not the way you want to get off this train.

The reporters on board were all restless. Through long stretches of rural Pennsylvania and across Ohio, their cell phones hadn’t worked much of the time.

“Al Gore could have dropped out of the race and we wouldn’t even know it,” one complained to me.

“We should be so lucky,” I countered.

The biggest excitement came when a woman mooned the train, causing a great stir and endless speculation about what, exactly, she was trying to say with her show.

By the second day, the sleepy routine had begun to feel a little more natural: long hours of rocking along the track, punctuated by brief rallies in small towns and waves off the back to small groups of people who gathered at crossings, bringing their children to witness a little piece of American political history. We were approaching a town in Illinois when the conductor came over the loudspeaker and proudly announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are ten minutes from Normal; ten minutes from Normal.”

“If I ever write a book, that’s the title,” I told my colleagues in the staff car. “Ten minutes from normal is exactly how I feel about this whole bizarre experience.”

I’ve always considered myself a very normal person who had led, at least until recently, a very normal life, with a normal family and normal friends, except, of course, I have a boss and friend who became the president. And though this is often thrilling and even sometimes still surprising, it is most definitely not normal.

At times, it still feels surreal when I’m standing backstage or out in the crowd and the band plays “Hail to the Chief.” I don’t hear the music that often because the president is a humble person, and tries to balance the grandeur and stature of the office with his desire not to inflate his own sense of self-importance. So when the trumpets sound, it’s a special occasion when he walks on stage, and I am amazed: that is the president of the United States, and I know him, and he knows me.

I know his wife and daughters; he knows my husband and son. We have had dinners together; I’ve even cooked some of them, and so has he. I know how he takes his coffee. He knows that I am tall—not big—because we have had that conversation. Women who are five foot ten and a half and wear size 12 shoes do not like to be called big. We prefer the statelier tall. My friend Condi Rice says it’s like sweating. Ladies do not sweat, especially if you grew up, as she did, in Birmingham, Alabama. Southern women only perspire. “Tall people in back,” the president says to me during the group photograph at last year’s senior staff Christmas dinner, winking to show he got it, he remembers.

I have a very normal family: a teenage son who thinks that I am totally annoying, especially when I ask intrusive questions like “How was your day?” or even try to talk to him when he gets in the car after school, because he’s “tired.” (Tired of talking? I wonder. How is that possible, since he doesn’t?) I have a husband who puts up with us all and only occasionally gets irritated when I ask him for the third time in a day whether he loves me, then refuse to be satisfied when he tells me yes, but it’s hard.

“It’s not that hard,” I protest.

“Not too hard,” he replies, agreeably, which of course is not the answer I want to hear.

I have a grown daughter, Leigh, who is a licensed vocational nurse. For the sake of complete accuracy, I should say Leigh is my stepdaughter—but my husband had custody of her, and we met when she was seven, and married when she was nine. She lived with us and I nursed her through chicken pox; besides, creating categories of children in a family always struck me as wrong, so I call her my daughter. And we have a daring and darling eight-year-old granddaughter, Lauren, who has inherited a strong will and streak of independence from all sides of our family.

We have an orange-and-white cat, Griffey, the only cat our family has ever had that actually comes when he is called. He would be an almost perfect pet, which my husband defines as not requiring much in the way of service, except for a terrible habit of getting sick only on the carpet instead of the tile floor, even if the tile floor is closer and he has to go to another room in midcough to find some soft, lovely, hard-to-clean carpet on which to deposit his most recent hairball.

I also live with an exuberant golden retriever, Breeze, a rambunctious, bouncy and eager dog that never has learned to keep all four feet on the ground or her tongue in and nose out of unwelcome places. She’s quite lovable, if a bit enthusiastic. That’s what I think, at least.

My husband and the dog have a strained relationship. Part of it dates to the time I let the dog spend the night in the house because it was cold outside in Washington. The first night, she was perfect, but the second night she chewed up a ballpoint pen, leaving a trail of blue ink all over the light beige carpet. But the tensions between my husband and my dog are deeper than that; Jerry didn’t want the dog in the first place. He only relented after I appealed to his sense of fairness: “Every child should have a dog. Leigh had a dog; it’s not right not to get one for Robert.”

“Robert won’t take care of it,” my husband had sighed, but finally acquiesced. Jerry ended up taking care of the last dog, Leigh’s dog, a ditzy cocker spaniel named Fritzi, who was sweet but kind of stupid. While I was fond of her, I never really bonded in the way that you bond with a real dog, a large and intelligent one.

“Your dog gets in the cat litter, how intelligent is that?” Jerry asks. Notice the pronoun. Not “our” dog, as in the family pet, but “your” dog, as in all mine. Jerry used to laugh when the media described me as a control freak or the person who “controlled” the White House message.

“Anyone who thinks she’s in control ought to come and meet our animals,” he would say.

Writing about the pets is oddly personal, and I realize that this story will involve the people close to me more than I initially understood, or wanted. “I’m going to have to write about you in my book,” I inform my husband, in between commercials for ER, one of the few shows we watch on television.

“I didn’t agree to that,” he protests, ever the lawyer.

“You agreed I should write this book,” I answer. “I can’t write a book about my life without writing about our family: it wouldn’t be true, it wouldn’t be honest,” I counter.

Jerry looks unconvinced. “This is supposed to be a book about your political life, your life at the White House,” he says.

“No, remember, it’s a book about a lot of things, how a normal person like me ended up working at the White House, what it was like. It’s not a typical political gossip book,” I sputter. “This book is about life and family and faith—important things—and I can’t write about what is important without writing about you and Robert and Leigh and our family.”

“You can mention us, but keep it brief,” he replies.

chapter 1

Tug-of-War

I still remember the moment I first said it out loud. My husband and I were standing at the sink in the kitchen of the beautiful house that wasn’t ours, talking as we cleaned up the dinner dishes.

“Maybe we should just move back home this summer,” I said, and the look of relief that immediately crossed his face confirmed what I had suspected, what my husband still denies, but that all our friends believe—that he deeply missed Texas and was ready to go home.

“Why do you say that?” he asked, cautiously, much more cautiously than in the usual after- dinner, after-eighteen-years-of-marriage conversation. This was uncharted territory, and only I - could venture there first.

“Robert’s unhappy; I’m not even relevant in his life anymore. He misses his friends; we miss Leigh and Lauren and all our friends. Everyone said it would take a year to adjust, but it’s been more than a year, and I don’t see signs that we’re making any progress,” I said, the months of frustration and worry about my family spilling out into the open yet again. “Robert doesn’t go out or have fun or have friends over or do anything except sit downstairs and watch TV and study. He’s never even had a single kid come to ou...