The Other's Gold by Elizabeth Ames

Author:Elizabeth Ames
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

Alice got engaged next, to Kushi, on the night that Barack Obama won the 2008 election. Alice and Kushi watched the returns with some of her classmates and his fellow residents at the Back Bay apartment of one of the attendings from the hospital where they both worked. When CNN called it for Obama, Alice watched through her own tears as Kushi, whose observable emotions had so far run from riotous happiness to bemused frustration, wept. He was Canadian, the son of Pakistani immigrants, and couldn’t vote. But he’d gone to undergrad in Chicago, and been on the Obama train early, with an enthusiasm that, along with the charisma of Michelle Obama, had won Alice fully to Obama by the primaries, in spite of her girlhood dream to vote for—to become, really—Hillary Clinton.

The others were cheering, toasting with tequila shots, while Kushi, still seated, shook beside her. She put her arms around him, brought him close, felt tears from his face make her own cheeks wet. When she remembered this night in the future, it would be this moment that rose above all the others—how they drew near in the overwhelm, how she gave shelter—even the elation that preceded it, the surprise that followed, and the immense rush that came from feeling like America the beautiful, the one in the songs and stories, was possible; hope was real; and humans were good.

They sent sprees of exclamation points by text, called their parents and other friends, collected their signs and sweatshirts—emblazoned with that sunrise O, and silkscreened with Obama’s upturned, optimistic face—and then ran outside, joined the crowd in their impromptu parade to Copley Square.

Where had all this confetti come from? All these flags? Lainey had once observed that New York City was itself like a theater, always at the ready with any set and all the costumes, character actors for days, and Alice thought of this now as Boston, so dour in comparison, managed to send forth countless balloons from its own hidden trap doors, and the confetti that covered the sidewalk continued to rain down, the night sky a riot of red, white, blue, and gold.

“American Girl” began blasting from a boom box, and Alice shook her hips, did her finger-waggle shimmy invitation to Kushi to come dance with her.

“Alice, wait,” Kushi said, and pulled on her hand. He bent low and she thought he was tying one of what she teased were his schoolboy sneakers, decrepit New Balances with ratty laces that were forever coming loose. But he looked up at her with a kind of beseeching wonder that made everything around her recede. She could remember having had this sensation only once before, where she could hear the record scratch in her own life, where the rest of the world blurred and she became one of only two.

“This is one of the greatest nights of my life—of American history! But also of my life. And I want you beside me for all the future greatest days, too.

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