“Have you ever seen them talk at the same time?” Michelle asks.
Barack sets down his seventh almond of the evening with a pointed clink. “Michelle,” he says, “you need another project. I think you’re getting cabin fever.”
“I’ve never seen them talk at the same time,” Michelle says. “I’m just pointing it out.”
Michelle has started going to SoulCycle at odd hours, but it is no good. Every time she looks in the mirror she is aware of Ivanka behind her, cycling madly, blond ponytail bouncing. Something about it feels wrong.
When she gets off the bike she turns around to say hi, but Ivanka is not there.
“I hear you’re neighbors with Ivanka,” one of her SoulCycle friends says in the locker room.
Michelle nods.
“She made my purse,” her friend says, voice low and confidential. “I was going to boycott all Trump products, but—I think she’s one of us. And you can’t choose your family, can you?”
Michelle feels as though a cold hand has seized her by the wrist. For some reason her locker will not shut. When she looks more closely she sees that there is a stray shoe: a sleek, blue patent-leather flat, reasonably priced and beautifully crafted.
“Is this yours?” she asks.
“No,” the friend says. “But what a great shoe.”
Whenever they go out to friends’ houses, even friends who object to Donald, Michelle looks around the house and some-times she sees the shoes, two or three of them, peering out from under a chair or the bottom shelf in a closet.
She stares in the bathroom mirror that night getting ready for bed, thinks of mentioning it to her husband. But “I think Ivanka Trump’s shoes are following me” is not a thing a sane person would say.
She sees Donald Trump leave the house but she never sees him enter the house.
She tells this to one Secret Service agent and the agent nods and looks concerned but later she sees her talking to Barack when they think Michelle is out of earshot.
Ivanka invites her over for macarons and absentmindedly taps something on her phone. Michelle looks down at her own phone. Donald Trump has just tweeted.
“Just posting on Instagram,” Ivanka says smoothly. Her eyes are watchful. “I like your shoes!”
Michelle looks down and gasps. When she left the house she was wearing Louboutins. She knows this. But on her feet are delicate white leather kitten heels with a splattered floral pattern.
“Thank you,” she says.
When she gets home she tears them off and sits against the wall of the closet, panting. IT. Stephen King was right.
“Have we ever seen him tweet?”
Barack looks up from where he is slicing carrots. “Michelle.”
“Have we ever actually seen him tweet?”
Barack tries to massage her shoulders reassuringly but she pulls away.
She gets into a car with her Secret Service agent and asks him to drive her to a certain location in New York.
Bill Clinton is at home. She rolls the window down and yells. “Where’s Hillary?”
Bill shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “She’s taken to the woods.”
Michelle gets out of the car and continues on foot. Her heels slow her down. She does not think she was wearing heels when she left the house. She tears them off and runs.
Hillary sits in the forest surrounded by a circle of elegant white leather flats. Michelle throws them aside and Hillary looks up at her as if awaking for the first time.
“You knew,” Michelle says.
Hillary nods. “She had gotten to Chelsea by then. We never stood a chance.”
When she gets home, the Secret Service agent tells her that Barack has “gone to see the neighbors” and she walks down the block with a leaden sensation in her chest.
When she arrives there is no sign of him. Ivanka answers the door before she can ring the doorbell.
“Michelle!” Ivanka says. Her mouth smiles but her eyes don’t. Michelle is never sure what color her eyes are. “What a lovely surprise! Please, come in. I’m making macarons.”
“Barack?” Michelle calls. “Barack?” She walks inside. The door shuts behind her.
Ivanka walks to the kitchen. Michelle stands frozen, a sudden terrible certainty congealing within her. She opens Ivanka’s Instagram and scrolls and scrolls. There is no mention of politics anywhere. Every post is Ivanka, impeccably attired. Ivanka and her children. Ivanka at a podium. And the timing on the posts seems funny. Scheduled, even.
She hears footsteps: lovely robin’s-egg-blue heels, moving ever closer, clicking on the hardwood floor.
“Do you want a macaron?” Ivanka calls.
Michelle must get out of this beautiful house. She tries the doorknob but it doesn’t turn. If she weren’t extremely fit, she would be breathing hard.
“Everyone has two theories of Donald Trump, don’t they?” Ivanka calls, pleasantly. The heels start down the hallway. “One, that he is awful and the other, that he can’t be that bad, because—look at his family. Look at Ivanka.” The footsteps are closer. “All right. Look at his family.”
Michelle tries another doorknob. But none of the doors is the right door. The next door opens but it is a closet. On the floor lies something like a human skin. It is orange and topped with a curious tuft of hair. It looks like a pool inflatable from which all the air has been released. Its blue-gray eyes stare beseechingly up at her. It begins to puff up, slowly. “She exists to show them that they are safe,” its low, belching voice says. “But no one is safe.”
“It’s you,” Michelle shouts. “You are not a prisoner of this family. You are this family.”
Ivanka smiles. It is the same nice smile as ever. “Try getting them to believe you.”
The door at the end of the hallway is open and Michelle is running. But it keeps getting farther and farther away, and there are shoes in the way. So many beautiful shoes.
January 6, 2017
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