Swing State

Cara Schultz

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I should say that I much prefer this to the way it was before, all of us alone, bits of our lives on display for everyone else. Dry as this office is, at least we’re all here. There’s a poster of the Candidate, smiling her benevolent, knowing smile, a smile that says I know more than you, but not in a bad way. Just as a fact, really. I glance at it while the dialer dials.

It’s taking longer than it usually does, I suppose because it’s a Sunday and less people are here and less people are picking up. You would think, wouldn’t you, that more people would pick up, when they’re not at work or school. But I think it’s the opposite. I think most people don’t want to deal with strangers when they’re resting.

Oh, well. We’re doing something good. We’re making real and palpable change in the world. I suppose that’s more than enough to excuse being a bit annoying sometimes.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Ah, there it is. I’ll admit, I sometimes feel like a secret agent when the person’s information shows up on the page. It’s just their name, their address, and their closest polling location, but it feels like I should be doing more with the knowledge. Like I’ve been briefed! Soon enough I’ll be deployed on a mission. Soon enough I’ll know more than they do.

Fanciful and distracted musings from an old lady. There’s a voice - possibly coming from Brian House, who lives on 223 Kanmair Avenue, whose closest location is-

Well, that’s not right.

“I thought we were calling Florida!” I call out to Mark, my cubicle-mate. He’s a nice fellow, Mark. Calm even in the face of all of this, young enough that he knows how this technology actually works but old enough that I don’t feel like I’m being condescended to by a child.

“List changed,” Mark says abruptly, fiddling with his headset. “We’re doing Michigan now.”

“Ah.” Mark’s too preoccupied with his next caller - I can hear them yelling at him through the headset, tossing expletives at him like rocks, how there’s no goddamned Amy at this residence and won’t you get your heads out of your asses and stop CALLING ME OR I’M THROWING OUT MY PHONE - so I know he doesn’t see or hear my breath hitch. I don’t like how dry my lips get, how something lodges itself in my lungs. If they hadn’t eradicated it years ago I’d have thought I was somehow contracting the virus.

Instead I know it’s an entirely emotional response. Entirely my traitorous heart that unearths old, old memories. Memories coated, so it were, in cobwebs.

“Michigan,” I repeat, and Brian House from 223 Kanmair Avenue coughs. I’d forgotten he was on the line. “Hello!” I chirp before I forget him again.

“What?” he grunts. College boy, if I had to guess. Nearly ten million people in Michigan.

There’s no use dwelling over something that won’t happen.

“My name’s Maureen, I’m a representative of the Michigan Democratic Party.” It always feels a little dishonest, to say that part. I don’t live in Michigan. I haven’t been to Michigan in fifty years. There’s a good chance Brian House from 223 Kanmair Avenue’s parents were still teenagers themselves when I was last there, if they were alive at all. “My records show you-”

Boooooooop.

You can’t win them all, I suppose. I hit the next button, waiting for the name to change, waiting for the wheel to land me on the next person.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

At the beginning of the meeting, Mark had stood on a spinny chair with a megaphone in hand, even though there were only about thirty of us. We could’ve heard him fine. Must’ve been the appeal of it all, the grandeur.

“We’ve got something the other side doesn’t have,” he’d boomed, voice echoing around the little rented office space. “We’ve got passion!”

For the record, I’m not sure if that was true - it seemed the other side had plenty of passion to spare - but I admired his optimism.

“And that’s why,” he’d continued, putting a hand over the megaphone so that the room was deathly silent for a moment, “we’re going to win.”

It’s important, I won’t deny that. It’s also quite dull. I don’t feel quite so passionate when people are hanging up before I can get out the rest of my spiel, or snapping at me to take them off the list, as though I’ve got that sort of power.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Hello?”

And then my heart stops.

Bridget Peach. 307 Penrose Street. Lansing, Michigan.

There are a million Bridgets in the world, I’m sure. And Peach. Not the Keegan that’d rolled off my tongue so smoothly, millions of years ago, earning her a laugh when I clicked the K. Not the girl who had expanded my universe millions of miles beyond what I thought I could possibly reach. Not the only one who’d ever truly-

“Who’s there?”

The screen says that the people we call will have said hello before we were connected - something about how it helps filter out people who won’t pick up. Most people would have hung up by this point. I squeeze my eyes shut, willing the name on the screen to change, but it’s burned behind my lids. It’s so dry in here. I’ll need to put some Neutrogena on my hands later, when I get home.

“Hi there, I’m Maureen from the Michigan Democratic Party…”

“Oh, you folks again!” I know in an instant that it’s her. And it shouldn’t be her. Ten million people in Michigan. Fifty-some years behind us. I hadn’t even known for sure she’d be a Democrat.

“It is,” I continue, voice even, or as even as it can be. If I were holding a phone I’m certain my hands would be shaking so much I’d drop it. They’re not, though. They’re just folded in my lap. “We’re so close to the election, just calling to make sure you’ve made a plan to vote.” I wonder if she recognizes me, if her heart is constricted like mine is. Maybe the rasp brought on by life and also a period of smoking in the eighties is enough to disguise me.

Pah. Disguise. Again, like I’m a spy. Some spy I would make.

“I was actually wonderin’ if you could tell me some about the hours? At the polling place?” Her accent - vaguely Southern, entirely put on for the sake of entertainment - is the same. She wasn’t from Michigan.

She moved here - there, we’re not in Michigan anymore - her senior year of high school. The disorientation she felt was something we both understood, I think. Not to mention the general state of the world, which was also disorienting, in a different way. We gravitated towards each other in that natural way teen girls who understand so frequently do.

(I’ve heard Mark refer to it as “gaydar,” which is cruder than I’d put it, but it fits)

“Sure,” I say, moving the mouse to the little plus sign in the upper right-hand corner of the computer. It’s not like the one at my house, and it comes up with a bunch of options when I try to click on it. Though Bridget - Christ, it feels weird to think her name in the present - can’t see me, I know she’d have laughed at the way I’ve got my nose wrinkled up at it. She always laughed at my expressions, and I always laughed at hers. Both of us had our hearts on our sleeves. I think that was the other reason we gravitated towards each other, the lack of preamble. No dancing around our feelings after we’d identified them properly.

Ironically, that’s exactly what we’re doing right now.

I click the thing again and it takes me into a whole new window. For a second I’m afraid I’ve lost her.

“Bridget?”

“Still here. I’m votin’ at the high school down the street, right?” Everything was always a question, to her. I try to move the window out of the way to see if she’s right. It wasn’t our old high school - I’d have known that - and also I don’t think it was a high school at all, the place they had noted on the side of the screen. Something about my stubborn pride stops me from calling Mark over. He’s in the middle of an animated conversation with an octogenarian who thinks you can vote via Facebook, anyway. I wonder if that’ll be me, soon.

“One second.” It hurts me, not telling her who I am. I think it’d hurt more if she didn’t remember. I manage to get the window to move - finally - and squint at the polling place. It’s written in a smaller font than the rest of the page. I should’ve brought my reading glasses along. “Nope, it looks like your closest polling place is the Waanders Temple. You know where that is?”

“Could you get me the address?” It’s said in the same way she used to ask me for the salt, or a tampon, or anything else. I take another breath, open the other still-blank window, and type it into the Google bar.

“‘Waanders…Temple…’ there it is.” The page loads, telling me that the temple is on 118 Miller Way. “118 Miller Way,” I repeat to her. There’s a quick hmm on the other end. “Got it?”

“What?”

“118 Miller Way.” The temple is a nice building, I think, based on the photo on the Google. I don’t recognize it. It looks new, or at least renovated. Modern. Michigan is big. Nobody can see everything in it. For all I know the temple might’ve been there all along.

“Oh, Miller Way! That’s right down the street from the laundromat, right?”

“Ah, I’m not entirely sure…” The dishonesty from before, coming back to bite me in the bottom. “I don’t actually live in Michigan. We’re in New York, but since you’re in such a crucial swing state…” You’re the most important person in the world, I stop myself from saying, even though from an electoral standpoint it is technically true.

“It’s okay. I can get one of my grandkids to GPS it to me.”

“Grandkids?” I squeak out, before I can stop myself. Of course that’s what happens, when someone decides you’re not worth the trouble and moves halfway across the country to get rid of you.

And when the other person stays in Michigan and marries someone with the last name Peach and votes at the last possible minute at Waanders Temple.

I’m not proud of myself, or what I did. I’m not proud of running away. It’s one of those things that I thought would haunt me forever. And in many ways it has. But, you know, I found a way to muddle my way through it all. I made friends, I found a life. I’ve been working in these offices and we’ve progressed enough as a society that a woman of my age without a ring on her finger isn’t called a spinster anymore.

Maybe we could’ve made it work. But it is so much easier to be the one leaving than to be the one left behind. At least in that way you’ve some modicum of control. At least in that way you’re not spending the nights awake, wondering where you went wrong.

Is that what I doomed her to?

“Hello? Democrat?” Bridget says. She’s still on the line. I realize she’s forgotten my name already, and for some reason that makes me smile a little. Perhaps - and you’ll have to forgive me for being a tad selfish here - she isn’t still moping over me as I’d feared. Her and Mr. Peach (or Mrs. Peach?) and her grandkid (or many grandkids?) managed to make it work, without me. And that is fine.

“Oh, yes?”

“The hours? When should I get in line?”

“Right, the hours.” I click on the temple’s Web site. It’s a simple page, with a calendar and some photos on there. It seems nice. I think I’d have liked to go there, if I’d stayed. “As a general rule, you should get there as early as you can. The lines can get awfully long, and there still aren’t as many folks acting as poll workers, so you’d best prepare for a long wait.” This is the part I’m good at, the part that has absolutely nothing to do with ex-lovers and what-ifs. These are words I’ve rattled off a thousand times before, to a thousand strangers.

“Hmm.”

“But if you’re in line, even after the polls close, you have the legal right to stay in line. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Though, knowing Bridget, she’d have waited a million years. She had the patience of…well, the metaphor’s escaping me right now. Something very patient. A bull? Are bulls patient?

I don’t know what the years have done to her, though, not in the specifics. I suppose her boundless patience could’ve eroded with time, in the way my voice has. “But more specifically, the temple opens at seven in the morning, closes at eight P.M.” Another hmm from the other end. I don’t know how a voice can do that to someone, but even that noise - not even a word - has undone me.

I’m glad Mark isn’t looking at me. I don’t know what he’d see if he did.

“Central time,” I add, lamely, as if this Web site would be listing things in Eastern Standard Time instead, for some reason.

“118 Miller Way, Waanders Temple, seven to eight,” she repeats, dutifully. “That’s all?”

I could say it. I know I could. That’s all. The cowardly move would be to say it and hold some bizarre perverse knowledge of this strange encounter over her head forever. Not that she’d know it. They don’t show us the phone numbers on the page. And I think if I actually wrote down her address, tried to find her…

Well, no. Then I’d be, put simply, a terrible person. A stalker, a few degrees removed from - what was it they call it, cat fishing? - and certainly not someone I’d like to become.

“Bridget,” I exhale, and I haven’t touched the screen in long enough that it’s started to darken. My reflection’s looking back at me, these bulky headphones hoisted on my ears like…well, like an extra pair of ears, really. I look like a koala bear. We never took photos together. I remember her in flashes - auburn hair, freckles, a smile like a kitten’s. Always the type of thing to drive something sharp through my heart, though she wouldn’t have wanted me to remember her like that. But here she is, in the present. I should be dreaming.

“Yes?” Some kind of noise on the other end. Something scratchy. A pet? Just her breath? Could be the air conditioning. It’s why I’m glad we’re doing this in November. If it were warmer the thing would be so loud and creaky that the voters wouldn’t be able to hear us at all.

“It’s…it’s me.” She might not remember me, I realize that. I might have inflated my importance in her life, or she could have had some terrible accident. I feel like- no, I am going into uncharted territory, here.

Memories come back in flashes, before I continue. Us, naming the clouds.

Us, in her attic bedroom late at night, my heart thumping so loud it might as well have rattled the whole house.

Us, kissing in the places where nobody would ever find us. “It’s Maureen.”

Silence, then. I think this is what the poets meant, when they said your heart sinks in your chest. I think if I’m not careful mine will fall out through my feet and flop onto the grayed-out, fraying carpet. She could hang up. She’s got all the information she needs. And I sound like a stranger. And there must be a million Maureens. And I got over her once. I can do it again.

“I know,” she says, finally. My heart is suddenly back where it’s supposed to be, I know that, because it’s cracking open. I shouldn’t be tearing up at that. Two words.

“I should have told you before,” I add in a rush, before she has a chance to hang up. I know.

I can’t see her face, but I can’t look at myself, either, so I settle for the Candidate. Arms folded, not a hair out of place, power suit expertly tailored. I wonder if anything this astronomical has ever happened to her - aside from running for the highest office in the land, of course. I suppose this comes second in the list of most astronomical things to happen to someone.

“No, it’s alright. There are a lot of Bridgets, aren’t there?” she jokes, or at least it might be a joke. It might also be a simple statement of fact.

“Only one you.” I can’t picture myself saying anything else. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

“You could say that.” “You sound well.”

“Do I?” I don’t think I do.

“Well, you’re phonebankin’. That’s pretty nifty.”

“Thanks.” How do you make small talk with someone you loved half a century ago? I’m tempted to ask about the weather, but that would feel too much like…

I don’t know.

“I’d love to do something like that, but I’m so busy, you know.” I don’t know. I want to. “And I can never get that Macintosh to work. I mostly just use it to play Solitaire. Am I a stereotype, or what?” We both laugh at that. It feels nice. “What are the odds, though?” she continues.

“Ten million people in Michigan,” I murmur. “Or something around those numbers.” “Guess that’s what I get for waiting ‘till the last minute to vote, eh?”

“I shouldn’t have left you.”

“Yeah, probably not.” I picture her shrugging. I wonder if she does it with her whole body, like she used to, or if time has weighed down her shoulders like it’s weighed down the rest of us. “Not much that can be done about it now, though. Did you ever marry? I thought of you, when those decisions came out. I looked for you on the television, in City Hall.”

“No, never.” I can’t say anything other than that, lest I start crying. Then Mark - who is now starting and stopping his spiel in a way that tells me he’s run into a slew of hangups - would look at me and think I was losing it. “Just never got around to it. I’m not really the settling type.” I take another breath. There we go. “What about you, though? Peach.”

“Oh, that? You know, we’re all allowed to make mistakes in our youth. Anyway it gave me my son, so it’s not a total loss. And I liked the name, so I kept it. No laws against that.”

It’s impossible. I know it. I know it more than I’ve ever known anything else.

Still, something is budding in my chest. Ten million people in Michigan. The Candidate’s wisdom. Me, in this office in upstate New York. It’s got to mean something, right?

It’s got to.

“Find me,” I say, quietly enough that she won’t hear me if she doesn’t want to. “The next time I’m in Michigan, or you’re in New York. I’ll be there.”

“Took you long enough.” There’s a dry, throaty chuckle on the other side. I could listen to her laugh all day. “You could come and find me too, you know? Don’t put all the responsibility on me.”

“I won’t.” This feels like a promise. A proposal - something I’d have never dreamed of - or at least a commitment. There have been stranger happenings in these offices, I’m certain.

“Well, then. Don’t let me keep you from doin’ your patriotic duty. I’ll see you around, Maureen.”

“Goodbye, Bridget.” And it feels so, so good to have that name on my tongue again. There’s the telltale click and then the computer’s boop-boop that says she hung up. It tries to find the next person to call, a stranger I will never know and never meet.

Or someone else I love. There’s no way to know. I think that might be just fine.