. . . And His Lovely Wife (10 page)

Sherrod was quiet for a moment, still staring out the window.

“Thanks, guys,” he said.

Walter glanced over at him, flashed him a grin.

“Besides, boss,” he said, “you're going to win.”

Sherrod reached over and squeezed Walter's shoulder.

“Thanks,” he said.

He eased back into his seat, and for the rest of the drive, he just stared through the windshield, focused straight ahead.

six

April No Foolin'

I
N
M
ARCH, OUR CAMPAIGN NOT ONLY STARTED TO HUM, IT WAS
actually snapping its fingers a bit.

Public polls showed Sherrod steadily gaining on Mike DeWine, which was bad news for the two-term Republican senator and was constant fodder for political reporters, who loved covering the polls even if most of them still thought there was no way Sherrod could win.

John Ryan was stripping away every last penny of waste he could find in our budget, with the help of the newly hired Judy Zamore, who managed the campaign's finances as if they were her own. She became one tough compliance officer, forever scrutinizing office practices to make sure we obeyed every campaign finance law down to the last comma.

Sherrod started virtually every weekday by calling four to six radio stations around the state. Typically, he made the first call between six and six-thirty, and almost everyone put him on the air for at least a minute or two. If they didn't have any questions, he told them what they ought to be asking, and the interview rolled on.

Joanna and her team worked themselves ragged scheduling as many news conferences as she could cajole local television stations into covering—which turned out to be a lot. She is a dramatist at heart, which she claims comes from growing up in Los Angeles, and with the help of staff and volunteers, she was great at conjuring up compelling visuals. Sherrod would stand in front of a closed factory or a set of railroad tracks, surrounded by working men and women, and talk about how current trade policies had betrayed America's workers and crippled their communities. Or he'd stand behind a lectern set up in a nursing home or community health center, surrounded by nurses, doctors, and patients, and talk about the hundreds of thousands of Ohioans who have no health insurance.

I was initially skeptical of these press events, after having spent so many years in a newsroom full of journalists, including me, who groaned at even the mention of covering yet another staged news conference. The dramatic cut in staff at most local broadcast stations, though, made news conferences an easy hit for the evening's newscast. It was not unusual for two or three TV cameras to show up each time, often with reporters along. Some of them, feeling the pinch of cutbacks in their own newsrooms, occasionally whispered their support for Sherrod after the interview. One cameraman slapped a Sherrod Brown sticker on his camera.

We had so much going on in the campaign that our daily schedules were snapped into three-ring binders and color coordinated so that we could distinguish at a glance among fundraising events, news conferences, media interviews, rallies, Democratic Party dinners, and votes in Washington. We also had different colors assigned to my events and Sherrod's events, as distinct from our joint appearances, so that we could easily see when we'd be together and apart.

Sherrod insisted on having my schedule included with his because he always wanted to know where I was headed. Frequently, after looking at my schedule on the way to his own events, he would call on my cell phone to tell me a story about someone I was about to meet. Many times, he would give me a funny political story or a long-ago memory of an event in the region, making it possible for me to connect with the crowd and single out individuals who had known Sherrod for years.

So much to think about, but at 6:05 in the morning on April Fool's Day, Sherrod and I were about to illustrate why this was the perfect name, indeed, for the day that would launch Month Five of the Sherrod Brown Senate campaign.

We stood side by side in our bathroom, facing a day that would begin with an hour-and-a-half drive to a rally in my hometown of Ashtabula and then take us south along five hundred miles of highway before we ended up at yet another hotel right about midnight. Sherrod was scheduled to speak at two rallies, one news conference, and two dinners where we would welcome hundreds of people over chicken cordon bleu, heavy on the bleu.

We were also only days away from another major fundraising deadline, and we weren't sure that Sherrod would make his goal. At the same time, we were trying to caution staff and volunteers not to get too excited over the latest public polls that showed Sherrod either gaining on Mike DeWine (Rasmussen) or leading by 8.9 points (Zogby International). Our own private poll showed us gaining but still behind.

Prioritizing is so important in campaigns, and in that spirit we spent our few precious private moments as husband and wife focused on the most pressing issue of the day: We were arguing over how to use the toothpaste.

Sherrod would say
he
wasn't arguing but merely trying to show me “how to use a stupid tube of toothpaste,” and that it was I who took umbrage.

Imagine that: a forty-eight-year-old woman getting testy because her husband thought she needed a lesson on how to brush her teeth. Would his suffering never end?

“There is a reason,” he said, “that these tubes have snap tops.”

I could not have been less interested in this primer. I had reached the point in life where I was pretty settled on what I would and would not be open to when it came to expanding my horizons. The art of the snap top? I would leave that mountain unscaled.

“How old am I?” I asked.

“Chronologically?”

A male voice wafted up from the center hallway. “Um, I'm going to go start the car,” Walter yelled.

“See what you did?” I said, now aiming the tube directly at Ohio's Democratic nominee for Senate. “You embarrassed Walter.”

“Put the tube down.”

“Make me.”

“Connie.”

“Sher-rod.”

By my calculations, one good squeeze and I could nail him right between his narrowed eyes.

Then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror: nostrils flared, pupils dilated, face flushed fuchsia.

What was I doing?

This was
not
about toothpaste.

This was about control, and what little of it was left in our ever-contracting lives.

The night before, we had commiserated like two old people on a park bench, trying to figure out how it could be that we hired a bunch of staffers young enough to be our children who now thought they were the boss of us. They were directing our every move: how to speak and when, where to go and when to leave, what to wear and when to change it. We weren't even deciding anymore what music would be playing on the radio of our car, which we almost never drove anyway. And somehow we had been reduced to negotiating for the scant private time we had as a couple. Really, we were a knee-bend away from begging.

Sherrod and I looked each other in the eyes and suddenly it hit us. I set down the tube and he pulled me into his arms.

“This isn't about toothpaste,” I said.

“No,” he said, laughing. “It's about all these kids bossing us around.”

I sat down on the edge of the bathtub. “How did this happen to us?”

Sherrod shrugged his shoulders and grinned. “Welcome to the campaign.”

We left for the day declaring a toothpaste détente.

No staff intervened.

         

I
N RETROSPECT, OUR FIRST DAY IN
A
PRIL WAS PREMONITORY IN
small, and not so small, ways. The curtain over the window parted for just a moment, allowing us a peek at the road up ahead. Our rumble over a tube of toothpaste gave us a funny story, but also a warning that the only way to make sense of what you're feeling is to stop in your tracks every so often and take a good look at yourself. Mirrors help. So do old friends like Jackie, who took one look at an exhausted me on the evening news and left this message: “Constance. Saw you on TV. You look like hell. When's the last time you had a day off? Call me.”

My habit of note taking since Sherrod had announced his candidacy had turned into an obsession, as if writing it all down would ensure that parts of me would survive somewhere, if only on the page.

There were other glimpses out the window that day. We met men and women whose stories wove their way into our narrative for the rest of the campaign. And a rare moment with my father became his final act of heavy lifting that would carry me toward the finish line.

We didn't know any of this about that day when we were smack in the middle of it. At the time, it was like any other Saturday on the trail, if you didn't count our supreme “gotcha” moment with our April Fool's prank on campaign manager John Ryan regarding an imaginary crisis. He might have gotten angry at us, too, if he hadn't just pulled off a similar April Fool's stunt at the expense of Kimberly Wood. Other than these shenanigans, we seemed to be having a normal campaign day.

Our first event was a minimum-wage rally in Ashtabula, a small working-class town on the shores of Lake Erie, about an hour east of Cleveland. My father, my sister Toni, and my brother, Chuck, still lived there. My other sister, Leslie, lived in nearby Conneaut. Dad and Toni planned to attend their first Sherrod speech.

I can never drive to Ashtabula without remembering why I left. By the time I was nine or ten, I had already figured out it was the kind of town most folks passed through on their way to somewhere else. Small towns seem to grow two kinds of kids: those who can't imagine leaving, and those who can't imagine staying. I was the latter, and when I left for Kent State University—ninety minutes and a whole world away—I knew that for the rest of my life, I'd come back only to visit. It was the land of limitations to me, the place where the big dreams of childhood were crushed under the weight of grown-up life. As in most small towns, many of the kids in my high school were afraid to leave. I was afraid not to.

From an early age, I knew that my parents once had their own dreams that died slow, agonizing deaths at the hands of their own fears. Their lives started out hard and never got easier. My mother, Janey, was the oldest of four. When she was eight, her parents divorced, and her mother was declared unfit and allowed to keep only her mentally retarded son. My mother's father cherry-picked the children he wanted, winning custody of my mother's two younger sisters. His mother, my great-grandmother, raised my mom. While my mother adored her grandmother, she spent the rest of her life believing she was a consolation prize.

My father, Chuck, was the eleventh of twelve children in a family that ended up so fractured that I knew only one aunt and one uncle and a tiny handful of my dozens of cousins. Dad's beloved mother died when I was only two. My mother, not Dad's many sisters, cared for her to the end, and I don't know what happened among the siblings during her illness, but my father never forgave them for perceived wrongs. His father, by all accounts, was a demanding and brutal man.

My parents met when they were thirteen, and Dad was the only boyfriend my mother ever had. They graduated in 1955 from a tiny high school in rural Ashtabula County, where Mom was a cheerleader and homecoming queen and Dad was captain of the basketball team. Decades later, both of them still said their senior year in high school was the high point of their lives.

My mother wanted to be a nurse but was afraid she couldn't handle the science classes. My father, a superb athlete who was All-State in basketball, wanted to keep playing the game for a college but was afraid he wouldn't qualify for a scholarship. All they had was each other. There was not a single person in their lives who placed a gentle hand on their shoulders, pointed up, and said, “No, not down there. Look up, way over there. That's where you want to aim.”

They were engaged soon after graduating, but Mom's dream wedding, the one with bridesmaids and a dress so fluffy it would lift her like a float down the center aisle at Cherry Valley Methodist Church, died the day she found out she was pregnant with me. They eloped at age nineteen, and Dad got a union card a few weeks later, joining Local 270 of the Utility Workers of America after he was hired by the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. It was a factory job he hated every day of his thirty-six years at work, but that never stopped him from giving it his all. My daughter, now twenty, still remembers the advice he gave her after she told him about her first job:

“I always left the house forty-five minutes early,” he told her. “That way, if I got a flat tire, I still wouldn't be late for work.”

When I went to college, I was stunned to learn that not all kids knew what day their parents got paid. We knew that timetable by what was served for supper. Dad's payday was every other Thursday, and there were a lot of Tuesdays and Wednesdays in that second week when our main course was fried Spam, bread and gravy, or yet another round of Mom's goulash. By the middle of the second week, we knew even the pennies had run out if Mom didn't send me down the street to buy a Hostess pie for Dad's lunch pail. We also knew chances were good our parents would end up in another one of their fights that left us all exhausted. Sometimes the stress of too little was just too much.

Throughout my childhood, my dad vowed that none of us four kids would ever carry a lunch pail to work. We were going to have careers, not jobs.

I was the oldest, and by the time I was in high school it had become clear that even with all of Dad's overtime pay, my parents were never going to be able to send their kids to college or own a house unless Mom worked outside the home, too. So she took a job as a nurse's aide at Ashtabula General Hospital. I was a junior in high school when she started getting paid an hourly wage for all her hard work, and her meager salary allowed my parents to buy the first, and only, home they ever owned. We moved from a cramped three-bedroom rental house on busy U.S. 20 to a five-bedroom colonial on a tidy little side street off Main Avenue. It was the first time we had a house with wallpaper, two bathrooms, and a working doorbell, one that chimed “just like Big Ben in London,” my mom liked to say whenever her friends from the old neighborhood stopped by.

I was sixteen, and for the first time I had my own bedroom. My dad took me to Sears to pick out new furniture. I couldn't believe I could have a headboard that held a whole shelf of books, a chest of drawers, and a dresser with its own mirror—and all of it in real maple. I'd always had to stand on my parents' bed across from their dresser to get a good look at myself in the mirror, and that was a fussy undertaking because I had to take off my shoes first and then smooth the bedcovers after I hopped off. Now I had my own mirror and a nicer bedroom set than my parents'. After it was delivered, my mother ran her hand across the top of my dresser and said, “Well, a lot of responsibility comes with something as nice as this.”