Did any of us, in thirty years, ever look up the word? Temporary. As in: passing. As in: a thing the country agreed to do for a little while and then, presumably, agreed to stop. Monday the administration remembered. Several countries’ worth.
Sunday before the announcement, Eliza had done cassoulet. She is having a French winter, apparently — last month it was a tarte tatin nobody could quite finish, this month it was duck legs cured for three days in her second refrigerator. There were eight of us at the table when somebody’s phone went off with the news, screen-down, the way news arrives at a table that wishes it would not.
The bipartisan lobbyist — you know the one, I will not name him, he sits on three boards and finds all of them tedious in different accents — was first to bring it up, which is to say he was first to gesture at it sideways. “Well,” he said, examining his cufflink as though the cufflink had said something interesting. “It was always meant to be temporary. The word is right there in the title.”
Murmurs of assent, the way you murmur assent to a thing you do not particularly wish to be the second person to disagree with. Somebody refilled somebody’s glass. The designations being ended on Monday, for what it is worth, were issued in 1998, in 1999, in 2015. Nepal after the earthquake. Honduras after the hurricane. Children born here who are now old enough to have voted in the last election against the people about to deport their mothers.
My sister-in-law Judy has spent thirty-one years at the National Archives, and she has a theory about American paperwork. The adjective in the title, she says, is always the part the country lies about most. The Patriot Act. The Affordable Care Act. The Temporary Protected Status of Honduran nationals, in effect since the Clinton administration. “Watch the modifier,” Judy says. “The modifier is the tell.”
I asked the lobbyist, gently, because he was a guest and Eliza had worked for three days, what he thought temporary had been supposed to mean in 1999. He said it was a fair question. He said a lot of things were a fair question. He did not answer it. He asked instead if anyone had been to the new place on N Street.
And then we talked about the new place on N Street. We talked about somebody’s daughter’s gap year in Lyon, and the apartment her parents had quietly extended the lease on. We talked about whether the cassoulet would have been better with confit duck or whether Eliza had been right to do it her way. For the remaining hour and forty minutes of the dinner, we did not return to the subject of who was and was not, on Monday, going to be permitted to remain in the country in which the dinner was being eaten.
Eliza walked us to the door. The cassoulet, she said, had taken her three days, and we told her it was worth every minute, and we meant it. The word in the title had taken thirty years. Nobody at the table mentioned it again. We asked, on the way out, for the recipe.