and on the night before our return to Wisconsin, we joined Cheryl for dinner at a wonderful and very festive Mexican restaurant; we weren’t supposed to drink, but Jadey sneaked a few sips of Cheryl’s margarita. Upon our arrival home, we kept calling each other to compare notes on how many compliments we’d received, how rested people said we looked from the fresh sea air. Of all the unfortunate facts about plastic surgery, perhaps the hardest to accept is this: If it’s done well, it works. Once you’ve had it, you realize how many other people must have also, and while there are plenty of inept examples where the surgery is obvious, there are many more women and men, especially in the public eye, about whom we haven’t a clue, even as we admire their healthy and youthful glow.
I had learned in the book I’d read that the benefits of a rhytidectomy, as it is formally called, tend to last for five to ten years, at which point a repeat performance is recommended. That means that even by the most optimistic calculation, my face-lift has expired. I don’t plan to have another, not because my vanity has disappeared but because now Jadey and I prefer Botox treatments, an option that didn’t exist in the late nineties. Every three months, she flies to Washington, and Charlie’s private physician, Dr. Subramanium, performs the treatments on us in the privacy of his White House office; the procedure takes ten minutes and involves no anesthesia. I would like to think that part of the reason I stick so assiduously to this routine is that it’s a source of bonding for Jadey and me, a way for us to maintain our closeness, but this is only partly true. I also do it because I don’t want bloggers and late-night talk-show hosts to make fun of the way I look. That I routinely submit to having poisonous bacterium injected into my face is flabbergasting to me, but no more flabbergasting than my marriage to the president of the United States, my residence in the White House, my ridiculous title of first lady. As far as I know, Debbie Bell has never had plastic surgery of any kind.
Back in 1998, after I returned to Madison from Naples, Ella came home for spring break a few weeks later, and I went to pick her up at the airport; though I had security detail as Wisconsin’s first lady, I still occasionally drove. Ella’s spring break was two weeks long, and she and a bunch of friends had spent the first half in Turks and Caicos, at the vacation home of a classmate named Alessandra Caterina Laroche de Fournier (she went by Alex). The trip had become a little boring by the end, Ella said; she’d felt self-indulgent, and this week, she wanted to drop by the soup kitchen where she had volunteered during high school. I’d cleared my schedule in anticipation of her being home, and I told her that if she wanted to see any movies, or if she needed to shop for clothes, especially for her upcoming summer internship at Microsoft, I was flexible. In a neutral tone, she said, “Yeah, maybe.”
We were back at the mansion, and I’d parked when she said, “Mom, by the way?”
I turned to look at her.
“Nice face-lift,” she said.
THEY LIVE ON the first floor of a house on Adelphia Street. With my heart thudding against my chest, I climb the porch steps and knock on the door, though knocking is a bit of a formality given that both their apartment and the one above it, accessed through a door next to theirs, have already been inspected by the Secret Service agents. An airconditioned coolness, infused with cigarette smoke, comes out to meet me from inside when Dena appears behind her screen door. She is a lean woman with a stringy neck and thin lips, her face lined, her once light brown hair now blondish-gray and dry-looking, still wavy but clipped just beneath her ears. She is old, Dena’s
We step into the living room, which holds a black leather couch and matching chair as well as a low coffee table, all facing an entertainment system—a triptych of shelves whose centerpiece is an enormous television set, flanked on one side by a stereo, speakers, and CD and DVD cases, and on the other side by several rows of propped-up collector plates featuring either horses (they gallop against the backdrop of western landscapes, their bodies at sharp sideways angles, their manes and tails blown fiercely by the wind) or else American Indians (a chieftain gripping a tomahawk with an eagle perched on his shoulder, a woman in long black braids and a fringed leather dress kneeling devotedly over a papoose). Has Dena’s taste changed, has mine, or have the times? Perhaps some combination. The walls of the living room are covered in wood paneling, the carpet is mauve, and a doorway leads to an overcast narrow hall at the end of which another doorway opens onto, from my vantage point, a strip of a sunny room with a black-and-white checker-board floor—the kitchen, I assume. The television is on, set to
“You thirsty?” Dena asks. “I’d offer you a real drink, but we quit years ago, so about the most interesting thing we have is Diet Coke.”
“That sounds perfect.” When she starts down the hall, I look around for tissue—there’s a box on an end table —and blow my nose. On the coffee table is a bowl of rose potpourri, an issue of
Dena carries two glasses, one with dark, fizzy liquid in it and one with water; she passes the Diet Coke to me, turns off the TV, sits in the chair, and gestures for me to sit on the couch. “I’ve gotta say, when the girl from your office called to announce you were on your way, I thought someone was playing a joke.” Dena’s tone is neither cold nor fawning but simply normal; for the second time today, I am not Alice Blackwell but Alice Lindgren. Or I am both, because she says, “So what’s it like being married to the president?”
In what I hope is a light voice, I say, “It depends on the day.”
Dena crosses one leg over the other. She’s wearing jeans and a sleeveless black V-necked shirt that shows her cleavage to such flattering effect, I can’t help wondering if she’s either wearing a padded bra or has had implants. She also wears dangly silver earrings, a silver chain necklace, and two silver rings, neither on the ring finger of her left hand: One, with a moonstone affixed to it, is on her left middle finger, and the other, a band imprinted with tiny peace signs, is on her right thumb. The peace signs give an extra weight to what she says next, or maybe it’s my imagination. She says, “I never knew you were a Republican.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Yeah?” She smiles. “How’s that worked out?”
We are quiet, and I say, “I’ve thought of you a lot over the years, Dena. I wish—”
But she says, “I know. I wish it, too.” She laughs a little. “I’d say I’ve thought of you, but it’s more like I’ve
