Poll Vibes

It’s Election Day and there’s suspense in the air. My poll-worker partner and I are waiting for her man’s Ex to walk through the front door, which could happen anytime. We’ve been assigned the role of greeters, which means we speak to every single person who walks into the midtown Kingston community center and look them up to direct them on how to vote. I’ve only recently moved to Kingston, 100 miles north of NYC, so I take it as an opportunity to observe the people I’ve chosen to live among.

“When she sees me here, she’s gonna go through the roof,” Jo says in a husky voice with the elongated vowels I always associated with Brooklyn, but I guess is just a New York thing. “She’s crazy. All women are crazy and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. But there are degrees. After six years you should step off, honey.” Jo is a powerful-looking woman in her late 50s; she wears boot-cut jeans and several layers of shirts, her frizzy graying hair is tied back from her face and her eyes feature heavy eyeliner, which she apologizes for, says she didn’t do it properly in the darkness of the early morning. We’ve been here since 5:15am and we’ll stay until after all the ballots are counted and sealed up around 9:30pm.

Jim Hunter, who wears a hunting cap, stops by our table to tell us that he has snacks. “Belvita bars, you ever had ‘em? You gotta try ‘em,” he says and insists on leaving some at our table. “I don’t eat this stuff,” Jo says and pushes them to me. I haven’t seen her consume anything besides coffee all day, while I, outrageously pregnant, have to eat every two hours or I start to feel sick.

A woman in head-to-toe black leather with a spike like an earth driller sticking up from her left shoulder approaches our table. “Oh my goddd!” she says. Jo jumps up to embrace her and after hugging, they exchange numbers. Jo turns to me after she leaves. “I haven’t seen her for 20 years. We went to high school together, her dad was my teacher. The last time I saw her she said she’d kill me. I said some stuff about her dad and she got real defensive…She hasn’t changed that much. The only difference is now she’s got long hair instead of a mohawk.”

“What’s the difference between toilet paper and curtains?”, asks a white-haired man in a jacket decorated with NRA patches. “I don’t know,” I say with the fake smile I’ve learned from service jobs. “So you’re the one!” he says and I’m thoroughly confused (it’s only worse when I look up the joke on Reddit later). A very old man and his wife have been making the world’s slowest journey back from the polls to the front door. “I just helped make history, if you know what I mean!”, he calls to us with a wink. “Does he know we’re not supposed to talk about that?” Jo whispers to me, but I can see that her eyes are as moist as mine. The next person is someone whose father, I learn, married Jo and her first husband. “Willow Church, right? How’s he doing?” Another guy literally skips up to the table and does a kind of jig. His T-shirt says, “I’m not short! I’m just compact & ridiculously adorable.” He is.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” Jo says to a woman with two teenage kids. My pulse quickens, eyebrows asking: Is that the Ex? After she leaves, Jo tells me, “You know, I’ve never gotten in trouble with the law, but the one time I got a DUI, I was in the car with my son, and then I ended up being incarcerated for a year. She was my CO [Corrections Officer].” Before I can say something inane like, That must have been tough, a woman approaches me with a sour expression on her face as if we’d just stepped on her puppy. “I’m here to, like, vote???,” she accuses me. I find her district for her.

Jo’s CO stops by again on her way out. “I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize you hon, how you doing?”, she asks. “Well, you know, I look different when I’m not wearing orange. I’m real good.” They chat and hug. I go pee for the 500th time. The break room is piled high with turkey wraps from the Italian deli, cardboard coffee jugs, Carr crackers, a Hannaford cheese selection, Werther’s caramels, and homemade gingersnaps, all donated by local businesses or individuals. I saw the lady who brought the gingersnaps: she looked like a child’s image of a witch. I try a cookie. It’s delicious — soft and spicy with just the slightest snap. I take another to bring back to my post.

Another couple is in the wrong polling location. Actually they live on my street. The woman tells me that the man’s father has been a resident for years and holds a green card and asks if he can vote. I say, no, unfortunately, only American citizens can vote.

“Well, how are those damn illegals doing it?”, she asks.

“They’re not,” I reply, my snap like the cookie I just bit.

“You know this for a fact?” “Yes.”

“You’re sure?” “Yes.”

“You’re positive?” “Yes.”

“You would swear on a thousand Bibles?” What would she do, I wonder, if I said, Actually only 800. “Yes.”

“Well, I don’t believe you anyway.”

“Have a nice day.”

At some point in the early afternoon, a teenage-looking blonde with an anatomically unreasonable waist comes up to my side of the table. Her voice is so low that I have to ask her to repeat her name. She clutches her bag with white-knuckled fists. After she leaves, I turn to see Jo staring at her back. “That was the daughter!” she hisses. Then we both notice an older woman peeking her head around the door to the outside. “That’s her, that’s her!” Jo jabs me on the arm. “She doesn’t have the balls to come in. Ha!” Hours later, Jo tells me that her car is still in the parking lot. “Dammit, you know when you think of the right thing to say too late. I shoulda said, ‘Hello Winky’ to the daughter. She woulda gone through the roof.”

“Man, you are evil,” Jim Hunter says pleasantly. He’s showing us photos of a buck his friend killed. “I would’ve been up in the mountains today if I wasn’t here. I take my ATV out two hours before sunrise. I feel all kinds of animals that early, they brush up right against me.” I ask him how he decides what to shoot. “Oh, you know, I don’t so much anymore. You do it for awhile, you start to learn what you need.”

“How are your teeth?” a woman with rainbow-dyed hair and a face like an elf is asking Jo, an hour before the polls close. “Aww, my insurance is shit, they didn’t do it, but I’m going tomorrow.” I try to interrupt the conversation because I’ve looked up her record and she needs to be at a different site. “Well, I’ll pray for you. You know, people say that - I’ll pray for you - but there’s this play where they sing…I’ll pray for youuuuuuuu!!!” And here the elven woman breaks into song and prances across the floor with her arm held out. “So that’s what I mean when I say it.” I cut in and tell her where she needs to be to vote and she leaves. “It’s okay,” Jo says. “She’s going over there anyway. There are these two banks near us and in between is a sort of alley and it’s got the best acoustics. So she goes there at night to sing.”

I’m away from my post, helping someone with an affidavit vote, when the Ex and her other daughter finally come through. Jo tells me they tried to sneak past the table but she caught them and looked up their district for them. She seems pleased enough with the encounter. But you know the real climax of this story, of course, which doesn’t happen at the polling place but sometime in the night. It’s in my phone when I open it the next morning. I’m shocked — but not that shocked — and deeply sad. I spend the next several days torn between wanting to be with people and stay in bed.

I watch AOC’s livestream, in which she speaks about sectarianism and solidarity. It’s hard for me to see my country’s votes as anything but an act of hatred. There is no possibility of solidarity with people who are so selfish and scared and so different from me. I wonder again about our decision to move from Brooklyn to upstate NY. I write a lot in this newsletter about community-building, but in NYC it’s easy to filter the people who make up that community. I’ve often thought of the city as existing in many topographical layers: we’re all on top of each other and bumping together on the subway, but the places and people that make up my map of NYC can be almost entirely non-overlapping with other New Yorkers who are a little different from me. In Kingston, there is one public high school, which is mostly Hispanic and white kids from low-income households. The county came in blue, but at the Hannaford my friends (Asian-American mom, dad, and kid) got yelled at for wearing masks.

I want to make my home here. I want to live somewhere where people don’t move all the time. I want long-term friends and maybe long-term enemies. I don’t want to live in a bubble of manufactured complacence, but neither do I want to listen to bullshit intended to make me angry.

I don’t have any answers. All I can say is that close-up, it’s easier to see people as people. Close-up, you see their frailties and their kindnesses. Someone told me recently that when people knock up against each other, it can make us smooth like river stones. I’ll try to practice that, with as few defenses as I can.

At the end of the night, Jo takes home two pizzas, which she’ll somehow strap to her bicycle. “There’s kids in my building, they’ll love em.” I’m not sure whether to go for a hug, but she sticks out a hand and shakes mine firmly. Our goodbye is warm. In the city, I’d be sure I’d never run into her again. Here, though, who knows?

What I’m Cooking

As we head into Thanksgiving, I’m focusing on North American indigenous foods, like wild rice. This rice pudding is a warm and crunchy dessert, but I made it with less maple syrup and we’ve been eating it for breakfast.