Remy reaches over and squeezes her hand.
“Good day?” he says.
“You know—” she says, meaning there’s too much to say about the weight of the world in this place, at this time.
He nods, takes a lollipop from his pocket, unwraps it. Remy has a low blood sugar affliction—not diabetes but diabetes adjacent. Rather than seek medical supervision, he has devised a self-care plan that seems sketchy at best, something people on the internet swear by. Margot doesn’t like it, but part of marriage is looking the other way when your spouse engages in patterns of questionable behavior, so as to accept the other person for who he is.
They came separately, she and Remy—Margot from the courthouse and he from home, giving himself time to stop for a much-needed cup of coffee. Before leaving the apartment on Pineapple Street, he did the OCD pat—wallet, keys, phone—and then, slinging his semi-masculine baby bag over his shoulder, he stepped out into the early-fall chill, lugging Hadrian’s rear-facing car seat and snapping it into the Nordic stroller, hearing that satisfying mechanical clatch.
Together they headed out past the playground and the promenade, working their way south on Henry. Remy waited for the light at Atlantic Avenue, even as others jaywalked, aware that he is a Black man pushing a $1200 stroller in an affluent white neighborhood. Light-skinned, but still—a Black man on foot in the Heights.
The baby, on the other hand, was dark skinned enough at birth to have given Remy pause. A wild thought went through his head in the hospital nursery—did my wife have an affair with a Black guy?—before realizing that the Black guy was, in fact, him and that his son’s coloring must have been a recessive gene passed down from his mother’s side. At that moment, a seed of worry was planted inside him, a worry unfamiliar to white parents. Because, though there is a Black man in the White House these days, it doesn’t make his son safe. The signs read HOPE, after all. Not EXPECT or DEMAND. As if the promise of a better world could still be discussed only in the language of dreams.
In the auditorium, Remy pulls the blanket up over the baby and tucks it into the corners of the space-age pod. He is still getting used to this. To being a husband, a father, a stepfather, still getting used to being a federal judge’s spouse, a position that arrived with background checks and routine threat briefings. If you asked him what he does, he would say he is a writer, working on a book about William F. Buckley, father of modern conservatism. But the truth is, he is a stay-at-home dad with a writing problem.
They belong to the party of Lincoln, he and Margot. She a Stanford grad and he a product of George Washington University, raised by a union plumber and a registered nurse, both believers in the struggle, supporters of a safety net. And yet something about the community he grew up in felt aggrieved and self-pitying, this constant lamenting about how the man was keeping a brother down. Remy wanted his street to be safer, his classmates to be more respectful. Opportunity, wealth, prestige, these were his ideals. He rejected the burden of history he was told he had to shoulder, replacing it with the mythos of personal achievement. Today Remy believes that his success is a product of individual effort. He made good choices. He worked hard. Everything else is just an excuse.
In the center aisle, a family of three arrives late, sidestepping the row to their seats. Remy plays pickup basketball with the husband a couple of times a week, and they nod to each other the way men do. The crowd is at fever pitch now, a white noise of voices—child sopranos laughing and sharing screens, investment banker father’s whiskey-sweating through their shirts, engaged in a denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance spiral with their cell phones, the younger kids running and playing, deaf to the worry on their parents’ faces.
The lights flash, signaling the event is about to get underway. People move to take their seats. A group of unvaccinated third graders clamber down the aisle to join their renegade families. They are biologically unprepared for mumps or measles, chicken pox or rubella, but anecdotally free from the whispered threat of autism.
Everybody has a theory, Judge Nadir has come to believe. A conviction, dogged and tenacious, which they refuse to surrender. This is the American way. We have home remedies we swear by, superstitions we will not renounce. We are optimists or pessimists, trusting or suspicious. We confirm our theories online. The internet, invented to “democratize information,” has turned out, instead, to be a tool of self-affirmation. Whether you believe you’re suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome or that 9/11 was an inside job, the World Wide Web exists to tell you you’re right.