“It’s usually not this cold here,” Alice said as she ushered me into her apartment. She said it as if it would warm me up, as if I should have been happy to know that my toes usually wouldn’t be frostbitten after waiting 30 minutes outside in the middle of a New Hampshire winter for an old lady who said she’d be home at 10:30 A.M. to actually get home so I could meet her. “It’s usually not this cold here,” she mumbled this time.
I had the letter in my hand, and I placed it on her counter so she’d see it and we could get this over with. David, my boss, was waiting for me back at the campaign headquarters, and I wanted to stay on his good side. Alice ignored my gesture and invited me to sit down. Her apartment reminded me of my dead grandmother’s-a cheap sofa, an ancient television, fading pictures of parents and grandparents and newer pictures of children and grandchildren. It even smelled of that same rusty mixture of dust, split pea soup, age and memories. “I wasn’t home,” Alice started, “because my hands are cracking.”
David had warned me that she might be a little senile. He had told me my mission as we both rushed out the door. “Go to Alice’s house and get her to sign this letter.” It was an endorsement letter he had written for her, explaining why she supported Howard Dean, our candidate, and why her neighbors should vote for him. “She was an important Congresswoman here and her neighbors will listen to her. She might’ve changed her mind, but whatever you do, don’t leave her house until she has signed this letter,” David said. So my task, I had realized while turning into her driveway, was to make this senile old lady sign a letter she didn’t write, whether she wanted to or not. This will be one of those when-I-was-an-intern stories I’ll be able to share with my kids, I thought, as I settled onto her sofa.
“So what can I do for you?” Alice said to me.
“I’m here with your endorsement letter for Howard Dean.”
“Who?”
“Howard Dean,” I said slowly and loudly, thinking she hadn’t heard me. She’d heard, though; she just couldn’t remember who Howard Dean was. “He’s running for president,” I said. “He’s from Vermont.”
“Oh, yes,” she smiled.
Alice looked at me and then down into her hands, which were cracking because of the awful winter weather that had recently hit her city. They were covered with parchment colored spots and she rubbed them slowly. “Oh yes, I like him. Would you like to see my pictures?” I remembered David’s order to do whatever I could to get her to sign the letter and smiled, saying, “Sure.” The album seemed ordinary enough, old and faded, but as she leafed through the yellowed pages, I realized it was anything but ordinary. “Here’s me with Kennedy,” she pointed out, “and here’s Clinton and me at the White House. He is such a good president,” she said.
“No, he’s not president anymore,” I chuckled, thinking she’d get the joke and chuckle too.
“Who is?” she asked.
“It’s George W. Bush,” I said.
“Oh,” she replied, quietly.
She flipped through more pages and told me stories of the other politicians we came across. Stories about dinners with presidents and phone calls from senators, the stories I would like to have at her age. This lady had done something spectacular with her life, starting out a mill worker’s daughter and ending up a Congresswoman. She told me about the decisions she had made in Washington, how she had made them and what she would have done differently.
Eventually the stories ended and we got to the letter. She signed it without hesitation. (Tramadol) I left and headed back to the campaign. In her lifetime, Alice had helped decide everything from where American troops would fight to how schools would be funded. As I walked away, I thought about Alice working on her first campaign. I wondered if she’d ever been an intern. I wondered if she had ever thought that after she ended her career as a politician, she’d end up living alone, with cracked hands, showing her photo albums to strangers.
Rob Anderson is a junior in the College and an Associate Editor of The Georgetown Voice. He believes very strongly in the importance of punctuality.
