From the Corner of the Oval

by Beck Dorey-Stein

Everyone keeps talking about the end, but I keep going back to the beginning.

I’m two Cape Codders deep and waiting for a third when a guy with a severe side part and a visible desperation to be his father sidles up next to me, introduces himself, and then casually asks, “So what do you do?”

I haven’t trusted the Internet since the sixth grade, when I was talking to Brian Littrell of the Backstreet Boys on AOL Instant Messenger and then found out it was some nine-year-old girl who only confessed her true identity after her mom threatened to cancel her birthday party.

If you’re a doctor, you want to sound like a doctor when you’re diagnosing a patient. If you’re a plumber, you’d better speak like a plumber when you’re explaining an estimate. If you’re a hairdresser, a fireman, a lawyer, a zookeeper, a principal, or a porn star, you want to sound as if you work in your line of work when you are, in fact, working. But nobody wants to sound like a politician, especially a politician.

ON NOVEMBER 6, 2012, POTUS wins reelection because he’s the baddest motherfucker in the game.

I see the ashen-faced Sandy Hook parents who, months from now, will find themselves at Chinese restaurants, in the frozen-foods section of a supermarket, in the parking lots of their therapists’ office buildings, and inevitably overhear other families laughing together because the world will have moved on.

That’s the tricky thing with quiet guys in D.C.—are they reserved or just not interested in talking to people lower on the totem pole?

We wait, but we don’t pray. By that I mean we don’t wait for a sign from any god, prophet, or spirit. Not with two terrorists on the loose and a twenty-four-hour news cycle. Not with a BlackBerry perpetually blinking red, perpetually in hand like an extra appendage. To pray is the privilege and the penalty for living outside this bubble. In a house underwater, on a shell-lined street in Chicago, in Baghdad, Crimea, or Homs—there you pray. But at the White House, when the sirens go off, officials are tasked with finding improbable solutions to impossible problems. Around the world, television screens get turned on and changed to the news as strategies at the White House are devised, passed up, knocked down. Over and over again. When first graders are shot to death, when families are blasted apart by a bomb, prayer alone will not prevent the next tragedy—but what will?

If we both know he’s a liar, doesn’t that make this thing between us honest?

“We just try to get our paragraph right.” Life is short and this world is big. Get your paragraph right.

It’s the one paragraph in a three-page letter that barely includes me. It’s all about him. Of course it’s his favorite.

I can only wonder at the speed of time passing, at the happenstance that dictates the direction of our lives.

What the hell are we doing? And was it always this bad? Was the world always on fire and I hadn’t been looking up?

Lifting knees, pumping arms, kicking up sand with our dirty feet, Amelia and I sprint as we chase the stars, the Seafood Shanty’s techno music fading behind us along with the strobe lights and Vineyard Vines and boat shoes. Now it’s just the salt air and inky sky and damp sand from high tide, the twinkling stars and sparkling souls of everyone who came before us. We are not where we expected, and we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be: the sea at midnight.

“You hide yourself away in more horcruxes than Voldemort,” I’d told him once. But Jason had never read Harry Potter and didn’t get the reference, which, let’s be honest, should have been the first sign.

Cynicism is fashionable these days. But I got to tell you, cynicism didn’t put a man on the moon. Cynicism did not create the opportunity for all our citizens to vote. Cynicism has never won a war, or cured a disease, or started a business, or fed young minds. I believe in optimism. I believe in hope…Don’t let the cynics get you down. Cynicism is a choice—and hope is a better choice.

Flirting with Jason is like playing chicken with the ocean. You should know you will never win, no matter how fast or how clever you think you are.

The ocean always wins, because the ocean never cares. But you, my dear, can drown in six inches of anything.

When I put pen to paper, people listen. It’s like I’m my own Pacific Ocean, only bigger.

It isn’t love when you have to lie to all your friends. It isn’t love when you go through bottles of Visine on the road because every time he leaves angry you cry yourself to sleep and wake up bloodshot. It isn’t love if he makes you hate yourself.

“Get in trouble: good trouble, necessary trouble.”

David Foster Wallace wrote that freedom means “being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

It’s a horrible question to ask—not unlike when you’re a college senior and every man, woman, and child wants to know if you have a job yet.

“Listen,” Layla says, “I swim in a shark tank of dicks all day, and if you were a guy, you’d say you were a writer, and that you were writing the next great American novel. If you write, you’re a writer, and you should be proud of yourself.”

I’m pleased to be living proof that being a cat lady and a desirable woman are, contrary to popular belief, not mutually exclusive.

Just like San Bernardino, Killeen, Fort Hood, Binghamton, the Washington Navy Yard, Newtown, Samson, Aurora, Roseburg, Charleston, Seal Beach, Manchester, Appomattox, Carthage, and Lafayette, the Pulse nightclub shooting happens on Obama’s watch. As he has done in the aftermath of every mass shooting, the president argues for gun reform. And as they have done in the aftermath of every mass shooting, Congress sits on their hands.

“Do you like them?” I ask her. “Do they seem fun to you? Do you think they’d make good friends?” She shakes her head violently and wipes away her tears. “Then they don’t matter,” I tell her.

I don’t need to breathe quietly; I’d rather shout for an encore.

The future is female because there’s a storm of kick-ass women on the rise who will remember to reach back with both hands to help others climb up with them.

For the scrappy ones