When did we agree, as a city, that weather was a small-talk topic and not a policy one? I ask because on Tuesday it was 103 degrees in Washington, and at Eliza’s table that night, in a dining room where the central air was making a noise I have not heard a central air make before, we discussed the mango sorbet at considerable length and the planet not at all.
The sorbet was excellent. I want to say that. Eliza had done something with cardamom. The bipartisan lobbyist — you know the one, I will not name him, he sits on three boards and a fourth he prefers I not mention — complimented the texture twice and examined his cufflink between compliments. He has a tell, that cufflink. It comes out when a subject he would rather not address is approaching the table at speed.
The subject did not, in the end, arrive. We talked about the Outer Banks. We talked about whether the Whitfields were doing the lake again this year. We talked about a Senate staffer’s wedding in Charleston in August, which someone called “brave,” and everyone laughed, and nobody followed the laugh anywhere it might have led.
The District, for its part, had issued what it called a “Heat Emergency Cooling Advisory,” a phrase constructed entirely so that no single word in it would have to do any work. Cooling centers were opened. Buses were free after 4 p.m. A press release went out from somewhere on the Hill containing the word “resilience” three times and the word “emissions” zero. I counted. This is what I do now at dinner parties. I count.
My sister-in-law Judy, who has worked at the National Archives for twenty-six years and has opinions about humidity that would shame a climatologist, told me they sent everyone home Tuesday at one o’clock. They called it “weather leave.” Judy said the word “weather” the way a hostage reads a statement. The HVAC in the stacks, she said, is not designed for a 103-degree June, because nobody designing an HVAC system in 1994 was designing for a 103-degree June, because in 1994 a 103-degree June in Washington was the kind of thing you put in a novel to indicate the end of a civilization.
I mentioned this at the table. I said the word “1994” and the word “civilization” in the same sentence, which I will admit is a Margaret Thorne move, and Eliza said, very gently, “Margaret, please,” the way she says it when she would like the conversation to go back to where it was, which was the sorbet.
So the conversation went back to the sorbet. The bipartisan lobbyist said something diplomatic about the cardamom. A woman across the table whose husband does something at Treasury said her daughter’s camp had moved swim to 7 a.m. because the lake was “warm as a bath” by ten, and she said this the way you’d report a charming travel detail, not a data point. Somebody refilled a glass. Somebody opened a window, which on Tuesday in Washington was a gesture, not a strategy.
And here is the part I keep returning to. There is a version of this country, a version we used to claim to be, in which 103 degrees in the capital in June is a thing the capital has to answer for. There is a version in which the press release contains a verb. There is a version in which a dinner party of people who collectively know seven cabinet secretaries does not spend the cooling-advisory evening discussing whether the Whitfields are doing the lake.
We are not in that version. We are in the version where the air conditioner makes a sound and we turn up the music. We are in the version where the Archives close early and we call it weather leave. We are in the version where the lobbyist examines his cufflink and the sorbet is, genuinely, very good.
We called it the mango course. We asked for the recipe. Outside, on Tuesday, it was 103 degrees, and on Wednesday it was 104, and on Thursday the press release went out again, and the word it used was resilience.