A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (22 page)

I could never make up my mind whether my dad was good at hobnobbing or not. He carried a pocketful of Packer schedules with his face on them, printed out in blue ink. He would sidle up to a fire truck.

“Rah rah!” he’d say, waving a fist.

“Hello, Congressman,” the fire truck driver would say.

“Looking good up there,” my dad would say. He would extend a hand with a Packer schedule in it. “Have a thing.”

Then we would walk away from the truck. He would turn to me, looking authoritative.

“I always find that if you say ‘Have a thing,’ they don’t know what it is, so they take it!”

I nodded, absorbing this information. I never said “Have a thing.” Sometimes I would say “There you go!” just to spice things up, but usually my spiel went, “Have a Packer schedule! Have a Packer football schedule! Have a Packer schedule! Have a Packer schedule from my dad!” I started adding “from my dad” because people tended not to yell at you as much if they knew you were personally connected to the politician peddling the schedules. Usually. The other trick was not to make it a question, because if you asked, people could say, “No.”

•   •   •

There were a lot of parades. A
lot
of parades. Parades with Shriners and Lions and Rotarians and Elks riding motor scooters in their little maroon fezzes, tassels floating in the wind. Parades with clubs dressed up as slightly dingy Peanuts characters. Parades where it rained. Parades where it didn’t. Parades where you were allowed to throw candy and parades where throwing candy was absolutely forbidden. Parades where everyone watching was drunk and had been so since approximately nine in the morning. Parades that went past convents at the tops of hills, where you could sit with the nuns in the shade.

Some parades had one guy dressed up in an inflatable suit to look like an ice-cream cone. It always rained on those parades. There is nothing sadder than a man dressed as a giant inflatable ice-cream cone walking slowly through the rain, deflating a little with every step.

Some parades had someone dressed in a plush pig suit, pushing a shopping cart, to represent Piggly Wiggly. The parades with the heaviest plush suits were always on the hottest days.

There were generally a couple of big floats—the county
Republicans, say, with a large plaster elephant statue on it—or a local church with all the Sunday school kids dressed up as animals who did or did not make it onto the Ark.

There was a dance team that was good. There was a dance team that was not so good, doing exuberant choreography to “Black Hole Sun” all the way home.

There were singers with microphones and speakers blasting country rock, riding behind a truck in a big cage.

There was a beer float playing “Spirit in the Sky” on loop.

There were bagpipers.

There was a long line of fire trucks with sirens going slow and loud, tossing handfuls of Tootsie Rolls out the window onto the hot sidewalk.

There was usually one float handing out sticks of flavored ice.

The best place to be, my dad informed me, was behind the band. The worst place was behind the horses. The horses left plenty of evidence of their opinion of the proceedings that was very easy to step in.

Often we were behind the fire trucks. Sometimes we were behind the vintage cars, honking and misfiring, with or without Fairests of the (County or State) Fair waving demurely from the backseats.

Once, my father reported with great excitement that we would be marching behind the “ballet dancers.”

Ballet dancers! I thought, in excitement. I took ballet! I was excited to see what they had in store for us. Wouldn’t they be afraid they’d ruin their shoes?

We heard a faint jingling in the distance as the dancers approached.

It turned out that my father had misheard, and that these were belly dancers. It was some sort of class from the local rec center.
They all wore bells on their feet and shook what their mothers had given them. (Their mothers had not been stingy.)

As I got older I started to play “Guess Who’s Leaving Town Immediately After High School Ends.” The only male member of the dance team, doggedly lip-syncing to P!nk on the back of a float? Probably a safe bet, given the fact that he was bracketed by floats embracing sentiments like “Noah Knew What to Do About Climate Change.” Maybe that guy dressed up as an ice-cream cone? It was difficult to tell whether he had dreams under the inflatable cone suit.

My role in the parades evolved as I aged. First my job was just to walk along holding my favorite stuffed animal and wave and be a blond six-year-old with curly hair who didn’t really understand what was going on but appreciated the applause.

Then I got a pair of stilts and my job was to walk through the parade on stilts, first small yellow ones, then a bigger pink pair. We finally stopped doing this after I had a growth spurt because when I stood up on the stilts I was taller than my dad.

Then my job was to hand out the Packer schedules.

Sometimes we had staff in the parade to drive the car while my mom and I passed out schedules and waved, but usually it was just the three of us. My mother drove. My father walked, waved, and handed out the occasional schedule. I ran down one side of the sidewalk frantically canvassing for all I was worth. Sometimes I canvassed too quickly and got tangled up with another candidate’s team, also handing out football schedules, and we had to rumble. “These are also MAGNETS!” I would shout, nearly toppling an old lady out of her lawn chair.

When you handed someone a Packer schedule, one of six things would happen. The person would either say, “Thanks,” and take it, say, “Thanks, and can I get one for my husband, too?” say, “Thanks! Tell him he’s doing good work!” say, “No, thanks, I’ve got one,” say,
“NOPE! He’s ruining the country!” or withdraw his hand as if burned and shout, “VIKINGS FAN! VIKINGS FAN!”

•   •   •

At the end of each parade, we pulled over to the side of the road in the midst of a ruck of sweaty marching band members holding their tall hats, took down the sign from the roof of the car, and got rapidly back on the highway to hit the next one. “Do you think that crowd liked us?” my mother would ask.

“They were fine,” I said.

“They said, ‘I don’t want your schedules!’”

“That was one guy,” I said. “And it was because he was a Vikings fan and had nothing to do with politics.”

•   •   •

I also had to help out at fund-raisers.

When you think of fund-raisers you probably picture some kind of large gala where a talented musician wails away on a sax and everyone is wearing floor-length gowns and there are dozens of Sinister Oilmen lurking about. The Congressman stands at the front of the room giving an eloquent speech about America and hinting at his larger national aspirations, and his wife and child stand within the spotlight and beam supportively.

My father did not employ a saxophonist.

Instead, I sat at an electric piano in the corner of a room with a big lunch buffet.

My services were very cheap, but you got what you paid for. In a far corner of the room, behind the flagpole, I played the electric keyboard as quietly as possible, because my mother began each fund-raiser by rushing over to turn the volume of the electric keyboard as low as it would go.

Then my father would come barreling over and turn the volume all the way up. “We can’t hear you on the other side of the room!”

A few moments later, my mother would come rushing back. “We can HEAR you on the OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM!”

They ping-ponged back and forth all afternoon until we sat down for lunch.

I played imperturbably throughout.

As the years went by, it seemed odder and odder that I was doing this. I had stopped taking lessons after the sixth grade. Why, the constituents probably wondered, was a seventeen-year-old sitting there playing “Joe’s New Haircut” by Nancy and Randall Faber, a piece that required only the black keys on one hand, concentrating with such intensity that her tongue protruded slightly from one corner of her mouth?

But they were too polite to say so. “How nice it sounds!” an old lady would tell me, very loudly.

“Thank you!” I would shout back.

“What?” she would say. “What’s that?”

“THANK YOU!” I yelled back, in all caps.

“MY HUSBAND USED TO PLAY LIKE THAT UNTIL HE DIED! IT IS A WONDERFUL GIFT!” the woman would yell, midway through my sentence.

People who could actually hear were a little less effusive in their praise.

•   •   •

We usually had other musical entertainment that was better than I was, though I set the bar pretty low. The high point was a guy with a guitar who had written a song about the town of Hazelhurst and its business professionals. “Mr. Smith will stuff your vulture/If you want taxi-der-my! Hazelhurst! Hazelhurst!” is an actual lyric from this song, which you can download online!

Maybe someone’s idea of a good time is listening to me play the piano badly; then hearing my mother tell rambling stories about
George Washington that were not exactly related to the speaker she was introducing; then eating some dubious-looking chicken with a red sauce on it.
Someone
must have thought this was a good idea, or we would not have done it exactly like this every year.

•   •   •

I kept trying to be helpful. One day in my father’s office I volunteered to answer the phone. It was a lot harder than I was expecting. People actually had serious concerns, and I was not sure what to tell them. Finally I decided to get around it by pretending I was the answering machine. “You have reached the office of Congressman Petri,” I said, hitting a button. “Beeeeep.” Then I wrote down everything that the person said afterward, as quickly as I could. I even caught the number! Sometimes.

There are six or eight people wandering around the district now who I really hope got the constituent services they wanted, and all I can say is, I’m sorry; I could not write fast enough. I hope you called back.

I also tried to help by double-checking all the phone numbers of DC landmarks that we gave to touring constituents. This was how we discovered that the number we had listed for the Newseum was a recorded advertisement for a sex hotline.

When I called it, a sexy recording answered in a low breathy voice. Did I want to TALK, she wanted to know. Because she certainly wanted to TALK to me. All I had to do was call the following 900-number. Could I please give her a long, hard talking-to?

I froze in terror and tried to back away. The phone had a cord, so my range was a little limited. It did not sound like the Newseum, exactly. But the woman said she wasn’t wearing pants, so maybe it was an allegory.

I handed the phone to an actual staffer. “I don’t think this is the Newseum,” I said.

She listened for a few moments. “Odd that no one’s complained.”

•   •   •

I also want to apologize to anyone I ever gave a tour of the Capitol to, constituent or otherwise.

That thing we stopped under on the way to the Old Senate Chamber was not the biggest chandelier in North America. Nor was it a chandelier that the architect of the Capitol “just happened to find at a garage sale and bought for a mere dollar.” Nor was it made of more pieces of glass than any other chandelier south of Canada. It was just an ordinary chandelier.

I’m sorry. It seemed like a good idea to say something.

I spent a lot of time on tours getting lost and having to fill the time with erroneous statements.

“This hallway here,” I would say, “is something special that not a lot of tourists get to see.” We would walk past several locked rooms to what I realized was a dead end, and I would have to turn us around. “But first, take a look at this plaque,” I would say, pointing to a piece of paper that certified the building was up to fire code. “Not a lot of people get to see this plaque. This was where Tip O’Neill would come when he needed to get some quiet thinking done.”

“He would crouch next to this filing cabinet?” the tourists would ask, sounding impressed but uncertain.

“Oh yeah. Sometimes Robert Byrd would join him. That was when Congress was Congress.”

One of the group would try to take a picture and I’d hurry us along so that she would not be able to post this online and label it “Tip O’Neill’s Thinking Spot.”

“Notice the hallway,” I would add. “This floor is real American linoleum. You will also see a lot of doorknobs as we walk and I invite you to think about those doorknobs. I think it was Will Rogers who said, ‘Never trust a representative whose doorknob don’t shine
like a well-worn buffalo nickel, because that means nobody’s been coming to pay him a call, boy howdy.’”

Finally we would get back on the beaten path, sometimes after several more wrong turns. If we got really off track we started to pass staffers going to and from the Remote Siberian Mailroom. Staffers would turn quizzical stares on the dutiful file of visitors marching along behind me, like ducklings who had made a horrible mistake when imprinting.

Then we would get back in sight of the Chandelier of Lies and I would suppress a sigh of relief. “Oh, here we are!” I would exclaim. “Just where I knew we would be all along, after I showed you Tip O’Neill’s thinking place. This here is the
Statue of Plenty
.”

“It looks like the
Statue of Freedom
.”

“Um, it is that also. In fact most people call it that. But its sculptor, Constantino Brumidi—”

“I thought you said he painted the rotunda before falling off a ladder to his death.”

“This was a different Constantino Brumidi.”

It was not quite that bad, but it was dang close.

•   •   •

I don’t want you thinking that I never got to do anything cool because of who my dad was. His job taught me a lot of cool vocabulary. One afternoon I was having difficulty distinguishing between “obdurate” (stubborn) and “obfuscate” (to make unclear).

“Just think of my colleagues,” my dad said. “Obdurate is what they are and obfuscate is what they do.”

I never had a problem again.

And I got admission to some pretty exclusive events—like for instance, when I was in the eighth grade and my dad entered me into a milking contest. It was at a Breakfast on the Farm event and the organizers had wanted him to compete. “My daughter will do
it,” he suggested, urging me forward. I went. It did not seem that hard.