Chapter the Twenty-Seventh: In Which a Woman Learns to Change the Subject
A Meditation on the Particular Virtue of Not Making Things Uncomfortable
There is a period in most friendships, most family arrangements, most marriages between people of divergent political persuasion, when the principal survival skill is the swift redirect. A question arises. An election is mentioned. Someone’s bumper sticker is noticed in the driveway. And one of the parties to the relationship — always, it must be said, the same party — introduces a new subject. The weather. The children. The state of the dip.
This is not nothing. The redirect requires timing, tact, a kind of conversational athleticism that goes almost entirely unrecognized as labor. It is, however, labor. It has always been labor. And it has, for roughly two decades, been performed overwhelmingly by the same people.
The early years of this century were optimistic in a particular way. One believed — one was encouraged to believe — that the polite fiction of political neutrality could be maintained indefinitely. That a society sufficiently comfortable could treat its divisions as a garment one removes at the door. Politics was not discussed. This was presented as civility. It was understood by some as civility. It was experienced by others as the specific kind of civility that requires one party to act as though their own life is not on the table.
The women who understood this — who felt it in the way one feels a draft from a door that is not quite closed — mostly kept it to themselves. They were told they were being sensitive. They were told it was not personal. They were told, with great sincerity, that one could believe what one believed about a woman’s body, or a woman’s workplace, or a woman’s prospects in a room, and still love the woman in question quite separately from all that.
This is an interesting position. It is held with remarkable consistency by the people who do not experience the separation as particularly costly.
The years passed. The stakes clarified. What had been ambient — a general low-grade resistance to inconvenient ambitions — became explicit in the way that ambient things eventually do when someone decides to stop being indirect about them. Legislation arrived. Court decisions arrived. The language that had once lived in private conviction migrated, gradually, into public policy, and then into the news, and then into the conversation one was attempting to redirect at dinner.
The dinners continued.
There is something instructive about the dinners. The conversation remained smooth. The redirect remained operational. The person who felt most acutely that her circumstances had changed — that the map of the country had been quietly redrawn — was also the person most responsible for ensuring the table did not become uncomfortable. This is a classic arrangement. One has seen it before.
The one most affected by a thing is also the one most expected to absorb it gracefully.
By the middle of the decade, the redirect had become something closer to an endurance sport. Not because the political divergence had deepened — though it had — but because the divergence had become undeniable. One could no longer pretend that the person across the table had not seen what was happening. One could no longer quite maintain the theory that they were voting for concepts and not consequences, that the consequences would not land on the woman passing the bread.
They knew. One knew they knew. They knew one knew.
And so the redirect became not a social grace but a performance of social grace. One performed it anyway, because the performance was required to preserve something — a family gathering, a long friendship, a marriage that had survived other things and might survive this. These are not nothing. The things being preserved are real. The cost of preserving them is also real. What is remarkable is how rarely the second point is acknowledged by the people who do not bear it.
The particular genius of being told that politics should not define a relationship is that it applies exclusively in one direction. You are not asked to abandon the friend who voted against your healthcare. She is not asked to reconsider the friendship. You are asked to be the larger person — because being the larger person has, across the full span of this arrangement, been your assignment.
There is a name for the situation of someone who absorbs, redirects, and forgives indefinitely while the other party enjoys the results. It is not a name that flatters the people who designed the arrangement. It is, in fact, the name for what you call something when one party bears all of the maintenance and the other party calls the outcome harmony.
The women who have performed this work — who have changed the subject at Thanksgiving for twenty years, who have smiled at the brother-in-law, who have quietly rerouted every political conversation before it could arrive somewhere that required honesty — they are tired now in a specific way. Not the tiredness of someone who lost a fight. The tiredness of someone who spent twenty years pretending there was no fight, on the theory that pretending would prevent one.
It did not prevent one.
The woman who changes the subject is always described as gracious. She is, in fact, exhausted. These are frequently confused.