A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (23 page)

My father always said the definition of intelligence was the ability to adapt to your surroundings. I took this to heart. So far I had had to adapt to nothing more challenging than constituents who wanted to rant to someone. It turned out that if you listened to anybody long enough, you could find something you agreed with and work from there. Sometimes you had to listen a long time, though. (“I agree,” I would say, finally. “I do not think the government should take away all our guns so that they can do exactly what Hitler did, either. That seems like a bad plan, if anyone is doing that.”)

So surely I could adapt to this circumstance.

There was an udder. I gazed at it.

When you gaze into an udder, the udder gazes also into you.

•   •   •

The other person stationed at an udder was wearing some kind of ribbon to mark her as Fairest of the Fair or Most Eligible of the Farm Breakfast or something. She looked lean and efficient, like someone who’d been on nodding terms with an udder before.

Conceptually, I understood what was involved in milking a cow. I was supposed to squeeze the udder so that the milk would go into the bucket at my feet. It seemed deceptively straightforward. Like childbirth.

I settled on my stool.

Then came the command to milk.

I aimed for the bucket. I thought I aimed for the bucket. The milk went everywhere but the bucket. It got on my fleece. It got on my hands. It trickled up my arm. It was warm and milky.

Meanwhile the Fairest of the Fair was just getting warmed up. She was hitting her target with pinpoint precision. Soon, it looked like, she was going to need another bucket. Her cow seemed pleased
and sated. Mine didn’t move, but you got the feeling from the udder side of things that she knew I was no expert and felt a little embarrassed by the whole display.

By the time the other milker had handily won, I had finally figured out how to aim at the bucket.

Small victories.

•   •   •

Whenever I tried to talk to other congressional kids about the perks of being a congressional child, they gave me an odd look.

“Oh yeah,” I told them. “I get to walk on stilts in parades. And I got to visit the ‘Great Wall of China.’”

“In China?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “In Wisconsin, where they manufacture the toilets! It’s a wall at the Kohler plant in our district covered entirely in toilets.”

I knew life wasn’t normal, but I’d thought it was at least normal for Congress.

But there was that look again. Like I was visiting from space.

Maybe I wasn’t old enough yet. Maybe that was it.

The TV suggested that when I got to high school, the privileged circle of other Children of Congressmen would go around in black SUVs doing designer drugs and wrecking one another’s pool tables. Also we would spend a lot of time mocking the one girl at school whose dad was only Secretary of the Interior. “We don’t even know what the Interior IS!” we would yell, pelting her house with Fabergé eggs. “How does it feel not to come from the Halls of Power?”

But no. The most exciting thing that happened was that I was in a play with the son of the Senate Majority Leader. He played a giant baby. The son, that is. The Senate Majority Leader only played a giant baby during his TV appearances.

I did get to hobnob occasionally.

There is a picnic every summer for Congressional Families on the White House lawn. The Bush years had the best food. The Obama years had a dunk tank.

The Clinton years saw the lawn transformed into a carnival where you could win large bears stuffed with sawdust.

I shook hands with Bill.

“Wash your hands!” my mother hissed, afterward. “You don’t know where that hand has been!”

In her defense, this was at the height of the Lewinsky Scandal, which I mostly remember as That Time in Fifth Grade When My Mother Had to Give Me a Slow, Halting Explanation of Oral Sex. This was a time when no parent felt positively inclined towards the commander-in-chief.

Also, I got to go to the White House Christmas Party a couple of times. There, there are photo ops with the President and First Lady. Congressmen wait in a long penguin line of black suits and tuxedos and stand next to the First Couple while someone snaps a picture. Then it’s back to the long table of hors d’oeuvres, ham sandwiches, asparagus, the occasional fondue, desserts, and the champagne bar.

I always really enjoyed this. It was one of the few occasions when my actual experience of being a Congressional Family Member lined up with what everyone said it was supposed to be like. I stood under the paintings of Abraham Lincoln and John Quincy Adams, watching men hobnob in suits while waiters passed trays and a band played. “Ah, yes,” I thought, “here
there
is.”

I left reluctantly.

Outside, as we walked to the car, we’d see a line of limos with tinted windows disgorging men with headsets and BlackBerrys, yelling urgently at men with flag pins.

I had an awful thought. Maybe it wasn’t that TV was getting it wrong.

Maybe we were.

•   •   •

If my experience wasn’t quite what you picture, maybe it was because my dad wasn’t either.

He looked the part, of course. He was a tall man with gray hair and Allen Edmonds shoes. He’d been in the Peace Corps, gone to Harvard, walked all the way across the state for his first campaign.

He and my mother had met in a kind of cheese-ball romantic way that you never expect when your parents are the people in question. Her date for the evening stood her up and she wound up at a party her cousin was throwing. He was there. He went home and told his roommate, “I’ve just met the woman I’m going to marry! I’m going to call her and tell her!”

“Yikes,” his roommate said. “Don’t do that.”

Thanks to his roommate’s patient coaching, it took my mother years to discover how socially awkward my dad actually was, and by then they had already been married for a while and she had gotten attached.

When my mother was in labor, he hastened to the hospital with a big stack of
Economist
s to read in the waiting room. “That was probably better,” my mother said. “It gave him something to do besides offer verbal encouragement.”

He loved to read. When I was old enough he read me
The Hobbit
. Then
The Fellowship of the Ring
. Then
The Two Towers
. All of the Hardy Boys and most of Nancy Drew.

He wore suits to everything. Once, we were driving through Montana and got a flat tire and he sallied out to change it when a total stranger pulled up alongside. “Oh no,” the man said. “Don’t ruin your nice suit. I’ll do it.”

“Nice suit?” my dad asked, sounding baffled. “This is my most casual outfit.”

My father had the erroneous idea that he had grown up during the Great Depression. Sometimes we drove past a stand selling bags of potatoes for a dollar. “Dear, pull over!” he would shout to my mother. “This will feed us for a year!”

He often came home from Dollar Stores with bags full of SPAM, cases of expired shampoo, and other bulk items that we did not want. “All set for winter!”

He hoarded soaps from airplanes and hotels in a big basket in the bathroom. Whenever he flew, he would come home carrying the little single-serving pats of airplane butter in one pocket, partly melted.

It’s not that he didn’t spend money, though. Every so often he would find some large household item that nobody needed and buy it, no questions asked. Once, we came home and discovered that he had installed gutter covers because a salesman had pointed out that they would stop things from getting in the gutters. “Isn’t that the point of gutters?” we asked, timidly. But there was no reasoning with him.

Whenever my mother was out of town, the two of us went to a restaurant called Martin’s Tavern for dinner. We went there on 9/11 after he picked me up from school and drove slowly through an hours-long tangle of traffic with the horror blasting through the radio over and over again.

“If it’s the end of the world,” he said, “we might as well have lunch.”

Maybe he was doing it wrong.

•   •   •

Or maybe there’s never a there there. Maybe that’s the thing that is impossible to get people to believe. People expect that there’s a
Great Something past the gate, that you get admission to fancy restaurants and tickets to galas and your picture in the paper all the time.

You sit there with your family on your asteroid wondering whether you’re doing it right. The funny thing is that the fact that there is no “there” there in your particular case never quite stops you from believing that someone somewhere might have one. You just haven’t walked under the right velvet ropes yet.

All you can see is the pictures people send, and those always look so perfect. The family beams out of the Christmas card in color-coordinated ensembles. Your friends pose with celebrities or at the tops of photogenic rock formations or stand proudly in front of home-cooked latticework pies. You begin to worry that everyone else’s life is an endless procession of these moments, strung together like colored lights on their Instagram-ready Christmas trees.

“There” is like a stage set. It’s not a real place, but you can take pictures on it and send them home. You look at your own pictures and see: Well, that was the second before the cat got away, and the cake immediately collapsed, and those shoes were torture and none of us knew that old man standing in the back.

With other people’s pictures you can never tell. Maybe they’re doing it right. Maybe for them the cat stood still and the cake held up.

This shambolic reality always seems especially disappointing when it comes to politics. Politics is one of the last realms where the imagination runs free. Behind the curtain, you can conjure up whatever vision you like. Sinister puppet-masters, making deals, greasing palms, pulling strings. You want the people with whom you disagree to be hypocrites or idiots or monsters, a little less or more than real, so that you can hate them without guilt.

But that would be too easy.

Behind those curtains is just more of the same.

If I’ve learned one thing growing up like this it’s that conspiracy theorists are full of hooey. (If I’ve learned two things it’s that the best place to be in a parade is in front of the horses and behind the band.)

Spend even a little time behind the scenes and you realize that if something goes wrong, it’s almost always incompetence, never malice.

You can see why these theories catch on, though. There’s something incredibly reassuring about the idea that behind the scenes, all our awkward fumbling is being guided by an invisible hand, even if that hand is sinister and comes out of a long dark sleeve. Don’t worry. Top men in wood-paneled rooms have got things Under Control. Go to sleep. The lidless eye of the Illuminati will keep watch.

I once went to several days of hearings held by UFO enthusiasts who kept insisting that The Government Knew Things We Didn’t. They sounded upset, but, in a way, relieved. There were solutions to all the world’s problems—fossil fuels, the environment, sudden horrors that wipe out innocent people—it was just that the solutions came from alien technology that the government was Keeping from Us.

I tried to argue with a woman who was so eager to hear this news that she had trekked across the country and was sleeping on a stranger’s couch. “Look, I mean,” I said, “does this strike you as likely? I really—just”—I spluttered, then recovered—“you’ve met people in your life. Have they ever struck you as exceptionally competent at keeping secrets? Could they really have seen a thing like this and kept it to themselves?”

“Oh, no, they’re out there,” she said. “I’ve seen them myself. Out in the desert. There were lights moving in the sky.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Well. Good.”

We sat in silence for a brief time. Quite brief. Conspiracy theorists tend not to allow very long gaps in the conversation.

•   •   •

But we’ve all seen them, if not to that degree. The lights in the sky that we read to mean what we wanted them to mean. The picture where it looked like everything was under control.

I’m sorry to report that behind the small section of curtain I got to occupy there wasn’t much there, there. This was just the usual mess of a childhood, with parades and allegorical statues thrown in.

There were undeniable perks. I got to tour a cheese factory and meet a man whose ENTIRE job was tasting wheels of cheese after they came off the line to see if they passed muster.

I got to hear from a man in a clown costume who came pounding over in his big shoes to tell my father why Congress absolutely needed a backup plan against terrorism (why you would decide to share your policy preferences while still wearing full clown makeup and the shoes never quite made sense to me).

I got to sit in the corner at fund-raisers plinking away at a dinky electric piano.

I got to milk that cow.

My father put up a picture of me staring at the udder in his office, next to the toddlers in overalls and the family squinting and the cheese paraphernalia.

It wasn’t the greatest picture ever. No picture taken of you in eighth grade is. In the picture, if you squinted, it almost looked like I was doing it right.

You know how pictures are.

Many things are awkward, but one of the most awkward, in my book, is the advice they give to young ladies about Avoiding Trouble. Also, fairy tales.

To illustrate this point, I have combined the two. Here is what the crowd of advice givers and finger pointers and armchair quarterbacks would no doubt say the girls in these fairy tales should have done differently.

Snow White

What did I tell you? Never leave your apple unattended at a party.

Little Red Riding Hood

What were you wearing? Red? You should have known better than to go out in red like that. You know what red does to a wolf. You were basically a neon sign. A sign that said, “Eat Me and Then Eat My Grandmother.” He couldn’t help himself. That’s how wolves are. It’s a primal thing.

Sleeping Beauty

If you get in a position like that near a spindle, whose fault is it, really, if you fall into a sleep like death? You should have known better than to go upstairs with someone you didn’t know. And you were asking him to kiss you. Forest of thorn, guards, tower, dragon—try putting up some actual resistance next time.

Gretel

Kidnapped by a witch? Well, what did you think would happen when you started eating all those
carbs
? Gingerbread is a sometimes food, especially the kind you find in people’s walls. It’s full of the wrong kind of saturated fats. To be frank, the witch is really the least of your problems.

The Little Mermaid

You did good. You really get what appeals to men: legs, and a woman who can’t complain.

Rapunzel

Of course he climbed up your hair. What did you think would happen? That’s on you. You don’t want princes climbing your hair up to your tower, try not having hair. Or a tower, come to think of it. They seem to find their way there anyway.

Belle

What were you thinking? Why did you stay? If it’d been me, I’d have walked right out of there, you bet. Day one. He’s a monster, and furniture doesn’t talk.

Cinderella

You’re the one who left the shoe. What did you think would happen? A prince sees that, he sees an invitation to follow you to your house and force your family to try on footwear. Look, I didn’t make the rules. That’s just how the male brain works.