things were different. Barack was flying back and forth to D.C. all the time now.
He had a Senate office and an apartment in a shabby building on Capitol Hill, a
little one-bedroom that was already cluttered with books and papers, his Hole
away from home. Anytime the girls and I came to visit, we didn’t even pretend
to want to stay there, booking a hotel room for the four of us instead.
I stuck to my routine in Chicago. Gym, work, home, repeat. Dishes in the
dishwasher. Swim lessons, soccer, ballet. I kept pace as I always had. Barack had a
life in Washington now, operating with some of the gravitas that came with
being a senator, but I was still me, living my same normal life. I was sitting one
day in my parked car at the shopping plaza on Clybourn Avenue, having some
Chipotle and a little me-time after a dash through BabyGap, when my secretary
at work called on my cell phone to ask if she could patch through a call. It was
from a woman in D.C.—someone I’d never met, the wife of a fellow senator—
who’d tried a few times already to reach me.
“Sure, put her through,” I said.
And on came the voice of this senator’s wife, pleasant and warm. “Well,
hello!” she said. “I’m so glad to finally talk to you!”
I told her that I was excited to talk to her, too.
“I’m just calling to welcome you,” she said, “and to let you know that we’d
like to invite you to join something very special.”
She’d called to ask me to be in some sort of private organization, a club that,
from what I gathered, was made up primarily of the wives of important people in
Washington. They got together regularly for luncheons and to discuss issues of
the day. “It’s a nice way to meet people, and I know that’s not always easy when
you’re new to town,” she said.
In my whole life, I’d never been asked to join a club. I’d watched friends in
high school go off on ski trips with their Jack and Jill groups. At Princeton, I’d
waited up sometimes for Suzanne to come home, buzzed and tittering, from her
eating-club parties. Half the lawyers at Sidley, it seemed, belonged to country
clubs. I’d visited plenty of those clubs over time, raising money for Public Allies,
raising money for Barack’s campaigns. You learned early on that clubs, in general,
were saturated with money. Belonging signified more than just belonging.
It was a kind offer she was making, coming from a genuine place, and yet I
was all too happy to turn it down.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s so nice of you to think of me. But actually, we’ve
made the decision I won’t be moving to Washington.” I let her know that we