June 30, 2017Tennis Courts Aubrey dribbled the ball twice with her right hand, doing her best to maintain control, then brought it up quickly, pulling over her left hand to cradle it as she leapt a short distance into the air, fading backwards, and letting fly. The ball clacked against the rim, then the backboard, then the rim again before bouncing out to the right.
She shook her head, stepping over to rebound the large ball before it made its way off of the tennis court/basketball court/batting cage, a location where she was now spending an appreciable fraction of her time.
The form of it that she was using was a point of mild irritation to her husband. He had showed her, personally, the much-lauded functions of the pitching machine that was currently folded off in the corner, praising its qualities, and she had nodded along, used it a couple times, and then went back to the ball and hoop. His enthusiasm could be contagious, and she had certainly spent plenty of time on that particular game with him, but it still seemed to puzzle Cal that it was not, and had not become, her preference.
Not that this sport was her end-all be-all, as baseball was for Cal, she reflected, as a shot from the corner bounced sharply back at her off of the rim. But confined as she was within a gated compound that was itself within a city, it was the best she had on-hand.
The difficulties, or the complaints, were not really any different from what they had been through the first six months in the White House, and she was beginning to think herself something of a whiner, or perhaps a little incompetent. She still felt cooped up, she still didn't have a handle on what her 'job' was, and so the circle spun round and round. Efforts to break out of it had thus far flopped. Her WNN interview, while a bit of excitement, had generated approximately zero traction, her meeting with Roberts had stalled out before she got to the exciting part, and the would-be Chief of Staff that Denisevich had interviewed had suddenly developed other commitments.
She lobbed up another shot, again hitting the backboard off-centre, but corrected her cold streak with a quick pair of steps forward and a leap, rebounding and laying the ball back in in the same jump, collecting it and returning to a dribble upon landing. Physically, at least, she seemed to be doing pretty well. A cooped-up winter and cool spring had given her plenty of in-house exercise, and practicing this kind of sharpshooting was more physically engaging than pouring through the hundreds of rounds of ammunition a day that she would expend when training for trap and skeet. She felt an irritation over the thought of how little she had done to strengthen her skills in that discipline with nothing to maintain herself but occasional, well-loved trips to Camp David, which themselves often turned into hikes to enjoy the space and freedom instead of going through drills.
The biggest factor, of course, that she was now going through her longest span of time not being pregnant since she was married in two and a half years, since the first stretch after their wedding. That two-year period in which the majority of her time had been spent expecting was a fraction of her adult life, but had somehow become a new normal so quickly, one not long following the other, that the withdrawal felt more alien than it seemed a return to normal. Hormones, or something of that sort, perhaps, or maybe it was a proxy feeling, overemphasized as a counterpart to the new situation of being a First Lady in general. Regardless of the cause, the sensation was undeniably present, and apparently there for the long haul.
The girls had been wonderful, in between spates of being terrible. A surge of endorphins just seeing a child that she had carried and borne, interacting with a small creature still in wonder at the world, and then a bitterness over another night of broken sleep. The latter had become worrying, especially as her reactions seemed to have grown plainly more negative over the last half-year. That was something partially attributable to the girls themselves-Mia's temperament had been remarkably placid relative to Laura and Emma's-part of it, she fretted, was that she was being a bad mother to her children out of her own dissatisfaction.
She had felt guilt when she had to leave them behind with caretakers on the trip to Saudi Arabia, and she had felt a sense of freedom when she had slipped out alone to Connecticut, or in a stop at Camp David. There were moments of genuine emotion, real feelings that she was supposed to have and worries as well, over Mia's still not having taken her first steps, over any sign of bad health on the part of the twins-but the truth of the matter was that she felt that she was treating the children as a sidebar. Even in that thought she showed the same-the children, not her children.
Her little snap-back at Marlowe that long time back in that terrible interview, whatever showing she was trying to make lost between overwrought speeches and ill-thought comments, had come from a legitimate insecurity over whether her parenting had been up to par. The madness of the campaign, the preparation for Rio, the second pregnancy coming unexpected and then going through all of its complications-she hadn't had the time to worry about it before. A couple of months with Mia as a newborn, no other responsibilities, nothing else on her mind-those had been wonderful, and they had been all she had really had. The current combination of more time, a much more mixed slate of responsibilities, and a sharply reduced field of possibilities for spending the time that she had was giving her license to cash it in in sessions of worrying.
She shot again from behind the three-point line, bouncing it in off the backboard. What she needed was some kind of to-do list, a few actionable steps to take. As methodical as she often was, that sort of thing, formalizing actions, had never been something she had committed to. She trained as a shooter with the duration and effort that she did because she needed to get better, not because a list had told her to. The work she did in the RCMP was done because it had to be done, not as the result of a checklist. She had been perfectly fine running through life without an artificial order, because the tasks at hand were, if not easy, simple, and required effort, not direction. Irritating as it may have been, that was no longer the case.
She put up one final shot, the ball swishing through cleanly, and sighed to herself, pushing a few strands of hair back behind her, where it was slowly extending down her back, left uncut since the inauguration. She had her notebook in her jacket, left on the fence, and collected it, pulling on the jacket, unnecessary though it was in the warm early summer, and sitting herself down on the court surface, flipping open to an empty page and pondering just what to write.