The List (5 page)

I hadn’t spotted one single male I would consider swapping DNA with, but the three
chairs around Julia and me were still empty.

“Who sits here?” I asked, giving one a swirl.

“Chicks. All three. This is Style,” replied Julia, pointing to the nameplates I’d
missed.

She gestured toward the first desk. “That’s where Libby Barnesworth sits. She’s from
Kennebunkport, Maine, and went to Dartmouth, as you can tell from the mug.” Julia
pointed to a large green coffee cup. “She always smells like cinnamon. I think she
has one of those pine tree air fresheners sewn into her pants. She came here two years
ago from
Washingtonian
and has a vocabulary like John McEnroe, but she’s not so bad if you’re nice to her.
She’s very Georgetown. Hangs out with those preppy types, like Jenna Bush.”

“She knows Jenna Bush? Cool.”

“I didn’t say Jenna Bush. I said
like
Jenna Bush. Same hair color. Different fathers.”

She pointed to the even smaller desk next to Libby’s. It had a huge snow globe of
Aspen and a picture of very attractive blond people on it. “That’s Isabelle.” She
looked, clearly expecting some sign of recognition, but all I gave her was the look
of someone whose mind has just been erased with a magnet. “Everyone knows Isabelle.
She was in the Olympics. For the slalom.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not. I can’t believe you don’t know her.”

I couldn’t believe it, either. I was going to work with an Olympian? I needed to know
every single detail starting with the Olympic trials and ending with the closing ceremonies.
Was it Vancouver? Or maybe Turin? Nagano? I was crossing my fingers for Nagano. That
was my favorite. All those picturesque Japanese villages covered in snow and fiery
Olympic rings.

Before I started singing the national anthem, I caught myself and replied coolly,
“I’m more a summer Olympics type.” This was true. I still had a balance beam in my
parents’ basement and had grand plans to get my backflip back now that I was pushing
thirty. I mean, Jackie Chan could do, like, eight, and he was nearly sixty.

I looked at the stacks of papers and notepads on Isabelle’s desk. I didn’t see one
single medal or trophy. If I were an elite athlete, even a retired one, I would tie
my medal to my head and never ever take it off, even when going through airport security.
Those pirates at TSA would just have to give me a CAT scan.

“What is she doing at the
Capitolist
if she’s an Olympian?” I asked. “Shouldn’t she be coaching our next generation of
champions?”

She shrugged and gave one of Isabelle’s plastic bobbleheads a pat. “I have no idea.
I think they just liked the fact that she was a tall, blond Olympian from Aspen. She
came in tenth, but whatever. The Olympics is still kind of big-time. And she knows
everyone. Except you, apparently.”

Julia looked at her watch and logged onto her RSS reader. It showed 157 new stories
since we’d started talking.

“Crap,” she said, opening a new document. “I haven’t filed something in over an hour.
I need a piece or I’m going to get bitch-slapped.”

I assumed “bitch-slapped” was reporter speak for “lightly chided with a friendly hug”
and kept asking her questions.

“Wait, what about that one,” I asked, pointing to the last desk. Julia turned around
and looked at the third, mostly empty, desk.

“Oh, right. That’s Alison Lee. She’s sweet. Kind of down-homey. She’s from North Carolina,
like from a dune. And she wears a lot of pinstripes. Why does she wear all these pinstripes?
I’ve never had the heart to ask. Is she trying to tell someone that she’s a prisoner
in this office? Because I get that. Or is it because she watches too much
Law & Order
? I don’t know. But she wears them almost every day. She doesn’t reveal much about
herself, though—she’s the Mona Lisa of colleagues. And she’s pretty young, twenty-three,
I think. Basically, when I was driving, she was in the third grade.”

“Why is everyone in here so young?” I asked, looking around at the sea of intense
twenty-somethings.

“Because old people are not stupid enough to do these jobs,” replied Julia. “Nor do
they have enough energy. Think of us like sled dogs. They use the young ones who can
go the distance and
take the crack of a whip and when we’re tired they trade us out. But you can’t be
too resentful because everyone knows this is the best launching pad in journalism.”

Right. Launching pad. Perhaps my grand visions of being a
Capitolist
lifer were a little ridiculous. But if I had to go from
Capitolist
reporter to senior features writer at the
New York Times
in a handful of years, I could deal.

I wouldn’t meet the rest of my inner circle of colleagues that day. All three of them
were working from the Capitol, so all I saw was their bylines, magically appearing
again and again on the site. Meanwhile Julia and I looked for news and wrote it up
as fast as our fingers could move. It kind of made my eyes cross. I would have to
adapt.

After turning around two articles by the grace of my high society connections and
Julia’s charity, I understood what she meant by deep mental scars. There was clearly
only one thing to do: start spending all spare waking hours hobnobbing with the Hill
power players—or the people who kept their schedules.

“Chiefs of staff and press secretaries are like bouncers in the Meatpacking District
in New York,” explained Julia. “If you don’t win them over, you’ll get nothing.”

“Nothing” sounded bad. “Nothing” sounded like I would have to spend the rest of my
days reshelving books at Barnes & Noble. I resolved to woo these staffers like a playmate
in a crowd of sailors.

As the day wound down for the rest of the world, but just kept chugging along at the
Capitolist,
I convinced myself that, with a deep commitment to kissing political ass and a complete
annihilation of my personal life, I could succeed at the
List
. Then I received my first reader comment. It was on the Speaker article Julia had
helped me write.

I scrolled to the notification and clicked on it.

It came through our awkwardly formatted email system in small bold type.

Adrienne Brown has received a reader’s comment:

“Eat dick you fat Commi bitch whore!!!!!!!!”

Thank you,

The Capitolist

Trying not to cry, I showed it to Julia. Maybe this was just some sort of first-day
joke, like secret society hazing. In college I had to pluck a live chicken once. I
was sure that as soon as Julia read it, she would start laughing and hand me a pink
hair ribbon with my name on it.

She skimmed it over, smiled, and turned around in her ergonomic chair. I waited for
my hair ribbon, or for her to pick up the phone and report the inappropriate comment
to a higher power.

But nothing happened. When she could feel my eyes on her, she turned back around and
looked at my screen.

“That part is all formatted,” she said, pointing to the top and bottom of the email
with a bored finger. Dragging her thumb over the body of the email, she said, “The
only part the reader wrote was ‘Eat dick you fat Commi bitch whore.’ ”

“Right, understood,” I said shakily. “And a thank-you from the
Capitolist
to me for reading the comment. How thoughtful.”

“Be prepared,” Julia said as she shot her seventh story of the day to Rachel. “I get
them all the time. Some are so racist. They call Michelle Obama MoMo the gorilla.
They write things I thought only Klan members would dare type out. I have a folder
with over five hundred comments that I keep, just in case one of these people ever
tries to shoot the president or something.”

How wonderful. I had never corresponded with a band of
racists before. Now I would learn what it was like to have my soul eat itself.

“Should I write back when this happens? I mean, I have their email address, right?
Can I just write ‘thank you for your time, you depraved, racist lunatic. I look forward
to our future correspondence the way I look forward to a spinal tap’?”

Julia shook her head no. “No, no, never write back. You don’t want to anger the crazy
racists. They know your name, where you work. They could come over here and shoot
you with their homemade weapons. Better to just file them away to hand over to the
police one day. Plus, we signed neutrality agreements. Can’t express an opinion one
way or the other.”

Neutral. I could do that. I was the queen of neutrality. My mother might disagree,
based on an incident in 1998 when I tried to have my sister arrested for un-American
activities, but I had grown since then. I had skimmed the company policy demanding
that we just “shrug off the crazies and keep on typing” and clearly I had to obey.
I would just ignore these lunatics who took time out of their days to type me offensive
emails. I would stay the course. The quiet course.

For the next two hours, I ignored my hate mail and personally called every single
press secretary I could find outside of working hours on Capitol Hill. I made small
talk, I tried to arrange meet-and-greets, I grilled them about the stylish things
their bosses were doing. Then I reached out to three old socialites who still kind
of liked my mother and asked if I could take them to lunch. I figured that jumping
on the rich, arthritic crowd was a good place to start.

When I put down the phone and reclined in my chair, people looked at me like I was
sitting there enjoying a paid vacation. And when I got up to go to the bathroom, a
Web editor asked if I was lost.

Work was the only thing you were supposed to do inside the
Capitolist
walls, and if that meant typing while dehydrated, so be it. You only got ahead one
way in life, and that was working harder, longer, faster, and with less water than
everyone else.

At 8
P.M.
, I was happy to head back to Virginia and the “home” I shared with apolitical animals.
They were actual animals, but whatever. They weren’t going to tell me I had five minutes
to get two fresh quotes and twelve minutes to turn them into “something palatable.”
Before I left, I printed out the three articles I had written as well as my first
comment. My mother hadn’t added to my scrapbook since I broke an opponent’s nose at
field hockey camp in the late nineties, but I thought it might be time.

The drive home took an hour and a half. I thought about all the places I could have
flown in that time: Boston. Lexington. Charleston. Cleveland, perhaps? Instead I was
listening to the German-language CD I had purchased for my commute and was reciting
words related to the home.

At the end of my parents’ long stone driveway, I parked my car, changed into my Tod’s
loafers to save my shiny pin heels from the dirt of country living, passed the barn,
and went in search of human contact.

My mom was busy ruining store-bought beef bourguignon, but she paused in her destruction
to cluck at my appearance.

“Oh, good. You’re home. I thought for a second you’d either flown back to New York
or been abducted. I could think of no other options besides those two.” She gave me
a hug, fastened her arm around me, and pulled my face into the light that illuminated
the cooktop. “You look really pale . . . green, almost. Like a frog with streaky blond
hair and eyebrows,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t get out much today,” I said. She pinched my dry, pale skin and
swabbed at my face with olive oil.

“Your father can’t wait to see you,” she said, going back to
her stirring. “He’s busy spending a fortune on some prize horse in Argentina with
your sister. I knew I should never have let him watch
Secretariat
. But he’ll be back in a few weeks. They’ve got the best horse movers in that crazy
country driving the poor thing up here, but you know your dad, he’s along for the
ride.”

“Better him than me,” I said while my mother fluttered her blue eyes at me and bopped
me on the nose with a wooden spoon.

“Well, Payton and your father, they’re happiest when they’re riding. We’re the wordsmiths,
they’re the true horse people.”

That night, my mother gave me a free dinner, a heavy pour of Rémy Martin, and a speech
about the good old days of journalism. She asked why the
Capitolist
demanded so much work. Three stories on day one, she noted—did I want to lose the
ability to bend my hands in my later years?

“We used to have so much fun in the newsroom. Smoking pot in the stairwells before
staff meetings. It was like a big celebration of grass and words,” she said, sliding
a bowl of Kalamata olives toward me across the smooth wooden kitchen table.

“Sounds swell, Mom,” I answered, declining the pitted snack. “Like Woodstock with
pencils.”

She ignored me and kept telling her stories about the old days, more for her own benefit
than mine. As much as she appreciated not getting milk spilled on her head by crazed
housewives, I knew she missed the pace and the bylines sometimes.

“I’ll never forget the time when I stayed incredibly late, like eleven or something,
and I walked into the book room to grab the new Social Registry, and there were Clyde
and Sharon—you remember Sharon, she was the old food editor. She gave you that
Pasta Making for Kids
book you liked so much?”

I had no idea. But I clearly should hate this Sharon for making me a carb addict so
early on.

My mother was still talking. “Anyway. She and Clyde were
going at it like wild animals. Naked in the stacks. She was married at the time, of
course. I think her husband was a professor at Johns Hopkins. Ethnobotany, to be precise.”
Placing a pit into a monogrammed cocktail napkin, she said, “I saw them doing it in
the newsroom once, too, but that was after her second divorce. They didn’t give a
hoot who saw once it was kosher.”

I thought I would rather shave my eyebrows off and eat them than have sex in our newsroom.
I had to get away from her old-lady reminiscing. I made my excuses and skulked in
my loafers out to the barn, where I cracked one of the windows and listened to the
sounds of early fall. When the turning leaves all fell in a few weeks, I would be
able to see the Blue Ridge Mountains. Now I could see the moon shining down on the
manicured fields.