What do we call a country that, at the stroke of midnight, resolves in one half to feed people a little better and in the other half to legislate who can use which sink? I ask because at Eliza’s on New Year’s Eve, nobody could.
Eliza had laid the long table the way she always does — the good silver, the chargers Judy disapproves of, two candles per four feet because Eliza believes that anything worth lighting is worth lighting twice. The bipartisan lobbyist arrived at 8:14, took the flute he was offered, and announced, before his coat was off, that this year the country was “recalibrating.” Recalibrating was his word. He used it three more times before the soup.
I asked, mildly, what was being recalibrated. He said wages, in some places. I said and in other places. He examined his cufflink. He said the federalism was working as designed.
The federalism, on January first, was working like this: in Washington and California and New York and Illinois the minimum wage went up, in some cases by a dollar, in some cases by sixty cents, and in Seattle, by the math my nephew the barista did on a napkin at Thanksgiving, by enough to almost cover the rent increase his building announced in November. In Tennessee and Idaho and a column of states I did not bother to list aloud, the new laws that took effect at midnight concerned bathrooms, sports rosters, the contents of school libraries, and, in one case I had to read twice, the legal definition of the word “woman.” Eliza said let’s not, and refilled.
Judy, my sister-in-law who has worked at the National Archives long enough to find most things funny, said the most honest thing said at the table all evening, which was that she had stopped tracking which state was doing which thing because the spreadsheet would not fit on her monitor. She has two monitors. She uses both for work she is not supposed to discuss.
The bipartisan lobbyist, who I will not name because he has paid clients in both camps and is what passes in this town for ecumenical, offered that the wage increases were, on balance, a victory for working families, and that the other measures were, on balance, a response to the concerns of working families, and that both could be true, and that this was the genius of the system. I asked him whether the same working family lived in both states. He said the lamb was extraordinary.
The lamb was extraordinary. Eliza had done it with the preserved lemons her cousin sends from somewhere I keep forgetting, and the room agreed, audibly and at length, that the lamb was the achievement of the evening. We agreed on the lamb. We agreed on the wine. At eleven fifty-eight we stood with our flutes raised toward a television none of us had turned on, and somebody — I think the lobbyist, but I will not swear to it — toasted to a year of common ground, and we drank to that, and at midnight twenty states became kinder to their cashiers and fifteen states became unkinder to their neighbors and we all kissed the people next to us and nobody asked which list their state was on.
On the cab ride home I tried to remember the last New Year’s I attended where someone at the table said, out loud, the thing the table was avoiding. I could not. We called it the lamb course. We asked Eliza for the recipe. She said she would email it. She has not.