If you’re not familiar with A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote, then please enjoy this completely original work of fiction written by me, Kate.
Imagine a Christmas morning in late November 2016. Consider the kitchen of a sprawling, old White House. It’s all stainless steel counters and shiny, oversized appliances. In the center of the room there’s a cluster of pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, their bottoms blackened with use.
A man with shorn, graying hair is standing at the kitchen window. He is wearing brown shoes and a light tan suit that is a strange choice for late November. He is tall and lean, his face smooth except for the laugh lines at the corners of his mouth. He turns to me with a twinkle in his eye and says, “Are you fired up and ready to make fruitcakes?”
The person to whom he is speaking is myself. I am thirty-five; he is fifty-something. We are best friends. At least, he is my best friend. He says that his best friend is Richard Branson, but Richard Branson is too busy to bake 500 fruitcakes with him.
I call him Barry. He tells me to call him “Mr. President,” so I only call him Barry when he isn’t in the room. Or sometimes I just say it really quietly.
“I knew it as soon as I woke up this morning,” he says. “I could have told you then, but I decided to wait. Now go fetch our wheelbarrow from the shed, and help me find my coat. We’ve got 500 cakes to bake.”
–
The coat is found. It’s long and made of thick wool, leftover from an inauguration eight years ago. It’s only 55 degrees outside, but my friend is from Hawaii, and he hates the cold. Together we walk the thirty blocks to John Kerry’s house in Georgetown. We take turns pushing a wheelbarrow that we borrowed from a White House gardener. After circling the house to make sure no one is home, we climb over the fence and fill our wheelbarrow with pecans from the grove of pecan trees planted John Kerry’s backyard.
Every year, John Kerry says, “Where did all of my pecans go?” We shrug and hope that he doesn’t notice the wheelbarrow full of pecans hidden behind a curtain in the Oval Office. Sometimes John Kerry says, “Why is there a wheelbarrow behind that curtain?” and my friend has to distract him by asking him to explain the difference between Holland and the Netherlands again.
My friend and I stay up all night, shelling pecans by the light of the fireplace. My friend turns on ESPN, which I think kind of ruins the mood. “We musn’t eat any of the pecans,” he says. “We barely have enough for 500 fruitcakes as it is. And if we start eating pecans, we won’t be able to stop.” Then, after a moment he concedes: “OK, I would be able to stop.” And this is true. My friend has more self control than anyone I know. When he gets distracted by something on the TV, I sneakily eat a pecan.
–
The next day is my favorite: Shopping day. We need to buy cinnamon and nutmeg, cherries and big cans of pineapple rings, and loads of sugar, butter, and flour. Plus whatever else goes into a fruitcake. (You figure it out!)
Before we can go shopping, there is the question of money. Neither of us have any. My friend got a $2 million book advance a few years ago, but he says he already spent that on tan suits. So we have to get creative. In the spring, we hold a rummage sale with whatever we can find in the White House basement. It was very profitable the first year, but grew less profitable for each of the seven years after that, as we gradually ran out of Benjamin Harrison’s china. In the summer, we set up a stand outside the Russell Building and sell Chuck Schumer’s homemade jam to the summer interns. The same jam is available in the Capitol Hill gift shop for $5 cheaper, but by the time the interns figure that out, me and my friend will be long gone. But our most profitable enterprise was the year we charged $1,000 per ticket for people to come hear my friend sing one line of Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together.
We push our wheelbarrow all the way to the Safeway on 17th street. The first thing on our list is raisins, but the Safeway is out of raisins, so we buy dried cranberries instead. The second thing on our list is eggs, but the Safeway is out of eggs as well. I want to walk to a different Safeway to look for eggs, but my friend convinces me that applesauce will work just as well. The third thing on our list is dried apricots. The Safeway is out of dried apricots, so we decide to just skip them.
The most expensive ingredient on our list is whiskey. Safeway doesn’t sell whiskey, so we have to go to Cairo Wine & Liquor across the street. We walk right up to the counter, and my friend asks for a quart of their finest whiskey.
“Mr. President!” says the man behind the counter. “I didn’t know you were a whiskey drinker.”
“I’m not,” says my friend. “It’s for baking fruitcakes.”
“Oh,” says the man. “I also didn’t know that you baked fruitcakes.”
The man insists on giving the whiskey to us for free. “Just send me one of your delicious fruitcakes,” he says.
“What a nice guy,” says my friend, as we push the overfull wheelbarrow back down 17th street. “We’ll put an extra cup of raisins in his cake.” But then my friend remembers that we don’t have any raisins.
–
The White House kitchen has four ovens, but we’re only allowed to use two of them. The kitchen staff grumbles the whole time about how we’re getting in the way and making a mess. My friend and I just ignore them and busy ourselves with chopping dates and creaming butter and sugar. After six days, our work is done, and there are 536 fruitcakes cooling on the counters.
The next day we deliver the cakes to all 535 members of Congress, with one extra for the man at the liquor store. I want to give cakes just to the members of Congress we like, but my friend insists on giving everyone a cake. “When they go low, we go high,” he says. Then he says that people think his wife came up with that line, but really he said it first and she stole it from him. So we give a cake to Trey Gowdy, and we give a cake to Joe Wilson. We even give a cake to Mitch McConnell, but I make sure he gets the one that’s a little burnt on the bottom.
–
On Christmas morning, my friend and I exchange presents. I would love to buy him a new basketball, but we spent all of our money on fruitcake ingredients. So instead, I make him a homemade kite. He says that my kite is his favorite gift, even though the King of Saudi Arabia gave him a sword with a handle made out of gold, inside a sheath encrusted with rubies.
“The wind is blowing,” he says, looking out the window. Then he raises an eyebrow at me. In two minutes flat we are outside on the White House lawn, still in our pajamas, flying the kite. The wind is strong, and the kite whips about as if it’s trying to escape its tether. We lie down in the grass and watch the kite scamper across the sky. I feel as happy as if I’m back at the Apollo Theater, listening to my friend sing the first line of Let’s Stay Together.
This is our last Christmas together.
Those Who Know Best decide that my friend must leave the White House. They say that he has served his two terms, and that’s all he’s allowed, according to the Constitution. To tell you the truth, I think my friend is secretly happy to be leaving. Anyone can see that he is tired—that there isn’t the same lightness in his step that there used to be.
My friend moved to a house in Kalorama. He doesn’t bake fruitcakes at Christmas anymore. Instead he spends winter in the Caribbean, kitesurfing with Richard Branson.
I know I should be happy for my friend. But I can’t help but feel like a kite whose string has been severed, and I’m just flapping around aimlessly in the breeze. Other days I think that maybe Barack Obama is the kite, and I’m the person left on the ground—holding a limp string while I watch my kite zoom around in the sky, having fun without me.