makeup artist recently tried and failed to put false eyelashes on my mom before a
photo shoot, Barack tipped his head and laughed, exactly the way I knew he
would. And we had a new and entertaining baby in the house to talk about as
well—a seven-month-old, completely rambunctious Portuguese water dog we’d
named Bo, a gift to our family from Senator Ted Kennedy and a fulfillment of
the promise we’d made to the girls during the campaign. The girls had taken to
playing a hide-and-seek game with him on the South Lawn, crouching behind
trees and shouting his name as he scampered across the open grass, following their
voices. All of us loved Bo.
When we finally finished our meal and stood up to leave, the diners around
us rose to their feet and applauded, which struck me as both kind and
unnecessary. It’s possible that some of them were glad to see us go.
We were a nuisance, Barack and I, a disruption to any normal scene. There
was no getting around that fact. We felt it acutely as our motorcade zipped us up
Sixth Avenue and over toward Times Square, where hours earlier police had
cordoned off an entire block in front of the theater, where our fellow
theatergoers were now waiting in line to pass through metal detectors that
normally weren’t there and the performers would need to wait an extra forty-five
minutes to start the show due to the security checks.
The play, when it finally began, was marvelous—a drama by August Wilson
set inside a Pittsburgh boardinghouse during the Great Migration, when millions
of African Americans left the South and flooded into the Midwest, just as my
relatives on both sides had done. Sitting in the dark next to Barack, I was riveted,
a little emotional, and for a short while able to get lost in the performance and
the sense of quiet contentment that came with just being off duty and out in the
world.
As we flew back to Washington late that night, I already knew it would be a
long time before we did anything like this again. Barack’s political opponents
would criticize him for taking me to New York to see a show. The Republican
Party would put out a press release before we’d even gotten home, saying that
our date had been extravagant and costly to taxpayers, a message that would get
picked up and debated on cable news. Barack’s team would quietly reinforce the
point, urging us to be more mindful of the politics, making me feel guilty and
selfish for having stolen a rare moment out and alone with my husband.
But that wasn’t even it. The critics would always be there. The Republicans
would never let up. Optics would always rule our lives.