Live Through This by Kristen McGuiness

Author:Kristen McGuiness
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rise Books
Published: 2023-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

The phone rings at four in the morning, buzzing along the coffee table. I try to grab it before it wakes Zoe. I’m not surprised to see it’s Yvette, the one person who would call me at this hour. I’m not sure how I would have navigated the last month without her. From the calls to the media to the daily reminder of the new landscape in which I live, Yvette has been my light. The night I found out about Lydia, she told me, “You know AA isn’t the only group in town. They have grief groups, too. Ones for PTSD.”

As I’ve learned, Yvette’s wife Diana was as impressive as her. Raised in a wealthy, WASP-y Long Island family who spent their weekends sailing boats and playing tennis at the club, Diana left to study medicine at Johns Hopkins before going to work in West Africa. Though from the pictures, Diana looked like she probably fit into her Glen Cove life, with her pressed button-downs and trim brown bob. And yet, she rejected her family’s expectations with aplomb.

“Her family never got it,” Yvette told me one night over the phone. “They didn’t get why she wouldn’t just marry the dick from the estate next door, and get her hair blown out every two days.”

Diana returned to America in the early nineties when Hillary Clinton was just beginning to champion healthcare reform. She got on the bus early, livid that her country would make it more difficult for people to access healthcare than in the developing nations where she had just been working.

“Di knew the words single payer before the rest of the world was talking about it,” Yvette said. “By the time she found me in that lesbian bar in the East Village, she was sowing the first seeds of what would later become the Affordable Care Act. This was years before it happened.” When the president began drafting a healthcare plan, Diana was one of his first calls. Over the next year, the president would come to know the doctor well, listening to her arguments for a single-payer system and, later, to her strategies for how his legislation might one day morph into the more egalitarian option.

“You can’t keep tossing grenades, Jane, just to disappear again back into your bunker,” Yvette lectures me one night. “It’s fucking white privilege to start a battle you don’t plan to fight.”

I nearly laugh. “You’re throwing white privilege at me now?”

“I’m not throwing it. I’m telling you that your voice is privileged because it’s the one the media is most willing to hear. It’s the one that they prioritize.”

“But isn’t that why they should hear someone else’s, Yves? I mean, I think back to that woman Gigi. The one at the urgent care. No one hears her story, no one is asking her to join Families United.”

“You don’t know that,” Yvette presses back.

“Then why isn’t she on TV?” I argue.

“Maybe she doesn’t want to be,” Yvette counters.

“Well, maybe I don’t want to be,” I say.

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