Becoming Read online

  * * *

  Back in Chicago, separated again from Barack, I still sometimes went to my old happy-hour gatherings, though I rarely stayed out late. Barack’s dedication to reading had brought out a new bookishness in me. I was now content to spend a Saturday night reading a good novel on the couch.

  When I got bored, I called up old friends. Even now that I had a serious boyfriend, my girlfriends were the ones who held me steady. Santita Jackson was now traveling the country as a backup singer for Roberta Flack, but we spoke when we could. A year or so earlier, I’d sat with my parents in their living room, bursting with pride as we watched Santita and her siblings introduce their father at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Reverend Jackson had made a respectable run for the presidency, winning about a dozen primaries before ceding the nomination to Michael Dukakis. Along the way, he’d filled households like ours with a new and profound level of hope and excitement, even if in our hearts we understood that he was a long shot’s long shot.

  I spoke regularly with Verna Williams, a close friend from law school, who until recently had been living in Cambridge. She’d met Barack a couple of times and liked him a lot but teased me that I’d let my insanely high standards slip, having allowed a smoker into my life. Angela Kennedy and I still laughed hard together, even though she was working as a teacher in New Jersey while also parenting a young son and trying to hold herself steady as her marriage slowly imploded. We’d known each other as goofy, half-mature college girls, and now we were adults, with adult lives and adult concerns. That idea alone sometimes struck us as hilarious.

  Suzanne, meanwhile, was the same free spirit she’d been when we roomed together at Princeton—flitting in and out of my life with varying predictability, continuing to measure the value of her days purely by whether they were pleasurable or not. We’d go long stretches without talking but then pick up the thread of our friendship with ease. As always, I called her Screwzy and she called me Miche. Our worlds continued to be as different as they’d been at school, when she was trekking off to eating-club parties and kicking her dirty laundry beneath the bed and I was color coding my Sociology 201 notes. Even then, Suzanne was like a sister whose life I could only track from afar, across the gulf of our inherent differences. She was maddening, charming, and always important to me. She’d ask my advice and then willfully ignore it. Would it be bad to date a philandering semi-famous pop star? Why, yes it would, but she’d do it anyway, because why not? Most galling to me was when she turned down an opportunity to go to an Ivy League business school after college, deciding that it would be too much work and therefore no fun. Instead, she got her MBA from a not-so-stressful program at a state school, which I viewed as kind of a lazy move.

  Suzanne’s choices sometimes seemed like an affront to my way of doing things, a vote in favor of easing up and striving less. I can say now that I judged her unfairly for them. At the time, though, I just thought I was right.

  Not long after I’d started dating Barack, I called Suzanne to gush about my feelings for him. She’d been thrilled to hear me so happy—happiness being her currency. She also had news of her own: She was ditching her job as a computer specialist at the Federal Reserve and going traveling—not for weeks, but for months. Suzanne and her mom were soon to head off on some round-the-world-style adventure. Because why not?

  I could never guess whether Suzanne knew unconsciously that something strange was happening in the cells of her body, that a silent hijacking was already under way. What I did know was that during the fall of 1989, while I wore patent leather pumps and sat through long, dull conference-room meetings at Sidley, Suzanne and her mother were trying not to spill curry on their sundresses in Cambodia and dancing at dawn on the grand walkways of the Taj Mahal. As I balanced my checkbook, picked up my dry cleaning, and watched the leaves wither and drop from the trees along Euclid Avenue, Suzanne was careening through hot, humid Bangkok in a tuk-tuk, hooting—as I imagined it—with joy. I don’t, in fact, know what any of her travels looked like or where she actually went, because she wasn’t one to send postcards or keep in touch. She was too busy living, stuffing herself full of what the world had to give.

  By the time she got home to Maryland and found a moment to reach out to me, the news was different—so clanging and dissonant from my image of her that I could hardly take it in.

  “I have cancer,” Suzanne told me, her voice husky with emotion. “A lot of it.”

  Her doctors had just diagnosed it, an aggressive form of lymphoma, already ravaging her organs. She described a plan for treatment, pegging some hope to what the results could be, but I was too overwhelmed to note the details. Before hanging up, she told me that in a cruel twist of fate her mother had fallen gravely ill as well.

  I’m not sure that I ever believed that life was fair, but I had always thought that you could work your way out of just about any problem. Suzanne’s cancer was the first real challenge to that notion, a sabotage of my ideals. Because even if I didn’t have the specifics nailed down yet, I did have ideas about the future. I had that agenda I’d been assiduously maintaining since freshman year of college, stemming from the neat line of boxes I was meant to check.

  For me and Suzanne, it was supposed to go like this: We’d be the maids of honor at each other’s weddings. Our husbands would be really different, of course, but they’d like each other a lot anyway. We’d have babies at the same time, take family beach trips to Jamaica, remain mildly critical of each other’s parenting techniques, and be favorite fun aunties to each other’s kids as they grew. I’d get her kids books for their birthdays; she’d get mine pogo sticks. We’d laugh and share secrets and roll our eyes at what we perceived as the other person’s ridiculous idiosyncrasies, until one day we’d realize we were two old ladies who’d been best friends forever, flummoxed suddenly by where the time had gone.

  That, for me, was the world as it should be.

  * * *

  What I find remarkable in hindsight is how, over the course of that winter and spring, I just did my job. I was a lawyer, and lawyers worked. We worked all the time. We were only as good as the hours we billed. There was no choice, I told myself. The work was important, I told myself. And so I kept showing up every morning in downtown Chicago, at the corporate ant mound known as One First National Plaza. I put my head down and billed my hours.

  Back in Maryland, Suzanne was living with her disease. She was coping with medical appointments and surgeries and at the same time trying to care for her mother, who was also fighting an aggressive cancer that was, the doctors insisted, completely unrelated to Suzanne’s. It was bad luck, bad fortune, freakish to the point of being too scary to contemplate. The rest of Suzanne’s family was not particularly close-knit, except for two of her favorite female cousins who helped her out as much as they could. Angela drove down from New Jersey to visit sometimes, but she was juggling both a toddler and a job. I enlisted Verna, my law school friend, to go by when she could, as a sort of proxy for me. Verna had met Suzanne a couple of times while we were at Harvard and by sheer coincidence was now living in Silver Spring, in a building just across the parking lot from Suzanne’s.

  It was a lot to ask of Verna, who’d recently lost her father and was wrestling with her own grief. But she was a true friend, a compassionate person. She phoned my office one day in May to relay the details of a visit.

  “I combed her hair,” she said.

  That Suzanne needed to have her hair combed should have told me everything, but I’d walled myself off from the truth. Some part of me still insisted this wasn’t happening. I held on to the idea that Suzanne’s health would turn around, even as the evidence against it stacked up.

  It was Angela, finally, who called me in June and got right to the point. “If you’re going to come, Miche,” she said, “you’d better get to it.”

  By then, Suzanne had been moved to a hospital. She was too weak to tal
k, slipping in and out of consciousness. There was nothing left to feed my denial. I hung up the phone and bought a plane ticket. I flew east, caught a taxi to the hospital, took the elevator to the right floor, walked the hallway to her room, and found her there, lying in bed as Angela and her cousin watched over her, everyone silent. Suzanne’s mother, it turned out, had died just a few days earlier, and now Suzanne was in a coma. Angela made room for me to perch on the side of her bed.

  I stared hard at Suzanne, at her perfect heart-shaped face and reddish-brown skin, feeling comforted somehow by the youthful smoothness of her cheeks and the girlish curve in her lips. She seemed oddly undiminished by the illness. Her dark hair was still lustrous and long; someone had put it in two ropy braids that reached almost to her waist. Her track runner’s legs lay hidden beneath the blankets. She looked young, like a sweet, beautiful twenty-six-year-old who was maybe in the middle of a nap.

  I regretted not coming earlier. I regretted the many times, over the course of our seesawing friendship, that I’d insisted she was making a wrong move, when possibly she’d been doing it right. I was suddenly glad for all the times she’d ignored my advice. I was glad that she hadn’t overworked herself to get some fancy business school degree. That she’d gone off for a lost weekend with a semi-famous pop star, just for fun. I was happy that she’d made it to the Taj Mahal to watch the sunrise with her mom. Suzanne had lived in ways that I had not.

  That day, I held her limp hand and watched as her breathing grew ragged, as eventually there were long pauses between her inhales. At some point, the nurse gave us a knowing nod. It was happening. Suzanne was leaving. My mind went dark. I had no deep thoughts. I had no revelations about life or loss. If anything, I was mad.

  To say that it was unfair that Suzanne got sick and died at twenty-six seems too simple a thing. But it was a fact, as cold and ugly as they come. What I was thinking as I finally left her body in that hospital room was this: She’s gone and I’m still here. Outside in the hallway, there were people wandering in hospital gowns who were far older and sicker looking than Suzanne, and they were still here. I would take a packed flight back to Chicago, drive along a busy highway, ride an elevator up to my office. I’d see all these people looking happy in their cars, walking the sidewalk in their summer clothes, sitting idly in cafés, and working at their desks, all of them oblivious to what happened to Suzanne—apparently unaware that they, too, could die at any moment. It felt perverse, how the world just carried on. How everyone was still here, except for my Suzanne.

  10

  That summer, I started keeping a journal. I bought myself a clothbound black book with purple flowers on the cover and kept it next to my bed. I took it with me when I went on business trips for Sidley & Austin. I was not a daily writer, or even a weekly writer: I picked up a pen only when I had the time and energy to sort through my jumbled feelings. I’d write a few entries in a single week and then lay the journal down for a month or sometimes more. I was not, by nature, especially introspective. The whole exercise of recording one’s thoughts was new to me—a habit I’d picked up in part, I suppose, from Barack, who viewed writing as therapeutic and clarifying and had kept journals on and off over the years.

  He’d come back to Chicago over his summer break from Harvard, this time skipping the sublet and moving directly into my apartment on Euclid Avenue. This meant not only that we were learning, in a real way, how to cohabit as a couple but also that Barack got to know my family in a more intimate way. He’d talk sports with my dad as he headed out for a shift at the water plant. He sometimes helped my mother carry her groceries in from the garage. It was a good feeling. Craig had already assessed Barack’s character in the most thorough and revealing way he could—by including him in a high-octane weekend basketball game with a bunch of his buddies, most of them former college players. He’d done this, actually, at my request. Craig’s opinion of Barack mattered to me, and my brother knew how to read people, especially in the context of a game. Barack had passed the test. He was smooth on the floor, my brother said, and knew when to make the right pass, but he also wasn’t afraid to shoot when he was open. “He’s no ball hog,” Craig said. “But he’s got guts.”

  Barack had accepted a summer-associate job with a downtown firm whose offices were close to Sidley’s, but his time in Chicago was short. He’d been elected president of the Harvard Law Review for the coming academic year, which meant he’d be responsible for turning out eight issues of about three hundred pages each and would need to get back to Cambridge early in order to get started. The competition to lead the Review was ferocious every year, involving rigorous vetting and a vote by eighty student editors. Being picked for the position was an enormous achievement for anyone. It turned out that Barack was also the first African American in the publication’s 103-year history to be selected—a milestone so huge that it had been written up in the New York Times, accompanied by a photo of Barack, smiling in a scarf and winter coat.

  My boyfriend, in other words, was a big deal. He could have landed any number of fat-salaried law firm jobs at that point, but instead he was thinking about practicing civil rights law once he got his degree, even if it would then take twice as long to pay off his student loans. Practically everyone he knew was urging him to follow the lead of many previous Review editors and apply for what would be a shoo-in clerkship with the Supreme Court. But Barack wasn’t interested. He wanted to live in Chicago. He had ideas for writing a book about race in America and planned, he said, to find work that aligned with his values, which most likely meant he wouldn’t end up in corporate law. He steered himself with a certainty I found astounding.

  All this inborn confidence was admirable, of course, but honestly, try living with it. For me, coexisting with Barack’s strong sense of purpose—sleeping in the same bed with it, sitting at the breakfast table with it—was something to which I had to adjust, not because he flaunted it, exactly, but because it was so alive. In the presence of his certainty, his notion that he could make some sort of difference in the world, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit lost by comparison. His sense of purpose seemed like an unwitting challenge to my own.

  Hence the journal. On the very first page, in careful handwriting, I spelled out my reasons for starting it:

  One, I feel very confused about where I want my life to go. What kind of person do I want to be? How do I want to contribute to the world?

  Two, I am getting very serious in my relationship with Barack and I feel that I need to get a better handle on myself.

  This little flowered book has now survived a couple of decades and multiple moves. It sat on a shelf in my dressing room at the White House for eight years, until very recently, when I pulled it out from a box in my new home to try to reacquaint myself with who I’d been as a young lawyer. I read those lines today and see exactly what I was trying to tell myself—what a no-nonsense female mentor might have said to me directly. Really, it was simple: The first thing was that I hated being a lawyer. I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it, even if I was plenty good at it. This was a distressing thing to admit, given how hard I’d worked and how in debt I was. In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.

  The second was that I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine. I saw it coming already, like a barreling wave with a mighty undertow. I wasn’t going to get out of its path—I was too committed to Barack by then, too in love—but I did need to quickly anchor myself on two feet.

  This meant finding a new profession, and what shook me most was that I had no concrete ideas about what I wanted to do. Somehow, in all my years of schooling, I hadn’t managed to think through my own passions and how they might match up with work I found meaningful. As a young person, I’d explored exactly nothing. Barack’s maturity, I realized, came in part f
rom the years he’d logged as a community organizer and even, prior to that, a decidedly unfulfilling year he’d spent as a researcher at a Manhattan business consulting firm immediately after college. He’d tried out some things, gotten to know all sorts of people, and learned his own priorities along the way. I, meanwhile, had been so afraid of floundering, so eager for respectability and a way to pay the bills, that I’d marched myself unthinkingly into the law.

  In the span of a year, I’d gained Barack and lost Suzanne, and the power of those two things together had left me spinning. Suzanne’s sudden death had awakened me to the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life. I couldn’t continue to live with my own complacency. I both credited and blamed Barack for the confusion. “If there were not a man in my life constantly questioning me about what drives me and what pains me,” I wrote in my journal, “would I be doing it on my own?”

  I mused about what I might do, what skills I might possibly have. Could I be a teacher? A college administrator? Could I run some sort of after-school program, a professionalized version of what I’d done for Czerny at Princeton? I was interested in possibly working for a foundation or a nonprofit. I was interested in helping underprivileged kids. I wondered if I could find a job that engaged my mind and still left me enough time to do volunteer work, or appreciate art, or have children. I wanted a life, basically. I wanted to feel whole. I made a list of issues that interested me: education, teen pregnancy, black self-esteem. A more virtuous job, I knew, would inevitably involve a pay cut. More sobering was my next list, this one of my essential expenses—what was left after I let go of the luxuries I’d allowed myself on a Sidley salary, things like my subscription wine service and health-club membership. I had a $600 monthly payment on my student loans, a $407 car payment, money spent on food, gas, and insurance, plus the roughly $500 a month I’d need for rent if I ever moved out of my parents’ house.