The Cave Dwellers

by Christina McDowell

  “I’m in a horror film,” Bunny says.

  “What’s that, dear?” Meredith asks, placing a roll of bread for Chuck on his side plate like we’ve time-traveled to the 1950s. Meredith’s hair is short and white around her forehead line. It’s angled toward her chin, giving her a regal edge, sharpening her jawline.

  One might think Bunny, at only seventeen, is emotionally intelligent, but it isn’t that at all; she is simply becoming awake to the way things are in her inner circle—her pedigree—her whiteness. She isn’t special; she is just paying attention. Her mother is a Democrat, for God’s sake! And her father, an “old-school” Republican, is, as they say, “fiscally conservative.” Meredith still has an Obama bumper sticker on the back of her 1998 Volvo station wagon, which she refuses to give up for sentimental as well as practical reasons. They just couldn’t be racist! Though the Bartholomews belong to the most exclusive clubs in town, they most certainly are not considered greedy or flashy by any means, but rather understated, classy—old money, if you will, and Bunny is starting to pick up on this.

  “I said I’m hungry.” Bunny takes a sip of water, not ready to confront her parents for their unintentional racism. Ever since her grandmother died, the matriarch of the family, Elizabeth Spencer Morrison (Bunny’s namesake), Meredith has become increasingly fragile and obsessed with contacting her mother’s spirit, convinced she hears her banging on her headboard at night. “Do you ever experience that?” she’ll ask Bunny, clicking her mouse back and forth on different psychic medium websites while in her study. Bunny doesn’t have the heart to tell her that she doesn’t believe in past lives or future ones, that when we die, it’s just a vast black of nothingness for eternity.

  What Meredith is having trouble with is the slow disintegration of power the Morrison and Bartholomew families are experiencing. Both Meredith’s and Chuck’s lineage traces back to the beginning of Washington—the bishops, the mayors, the colonels, whoever “built” the city, families whose names no one’s ever heard of because they don’t need any public notoriety, so they say. Meredith’s family money comes from supplying half of the gunpowder used by the Union Army in the Civil War and more than five billion pounds of explosives for World War II. Chuck’s grandfather helped create the atomic bomb, the family fortune built on nuclear energy and then later on chemicals used to manufacture heat-resistant products, waterproof clothing, etc.—things no one ever thinks about. Theirs was an arranged marriage of fortunes simply built on weaponry and war.

  A Black server with the name tag LANCE comes to the table to take their order.

  “Lance! Honey, how are you?” Meredith asks. She’s so nice. She shakes his hand for so long, enthusiastically asking about his family: his mother’s health, his brother who’s studying law at Howard University. Bunny notices this. It irks her. It feels phony: her mother’s wide smile, her veneered teeth.

  Meredith has always believed that true equality is unattainable; it does not and will not ever exist. She appears to be in acceptance of this—how easy it is for her. Her grandfather, whom she knew as a young girl, always instilled a great pride in the ideologies of capitalism, putting the interests of their family first because of a deep-seated fear of communism. And yet, after the death of her mother, something inside of Meredith is beginning to unravel.

  “And what can I get for you this evening, Mrs. Bartholomew?” Lance asks.

  “I will have the Cobb salad. Honey, thank you.”

  Bunny looks at Lance, doesn’t smile, her usual self. “I’ll get the cheeseburger and fries. Medium, please.”

  “And for you, sir?”

  Chuck folds his menu and whips it in Lance’s direction without looking at him. “I’ll have the chicken piccata.”

  As Lance turns away, Meredith remembers Cate.

  “Oh! Lance, honey, we forgot Cate’s order, she’s meeting us, she should be here any minute.” She turns to Chuck. “Did she text you her order?”

  Chuck looks at his Samsung. “Cobb salad with blue cheese.”

  “I’ll get those right in for you all.”

  Meredith leans over and reaches for Lance’s arm, again. “Thank you, honey,” and if words were just sounds you might think she was saying, “I’m sorry, honey.” Meredith had been to a Black Lives Matter rally with an old friend from Yale University, her alma mater, earlier this week.

  Cate gallops into the dining room, out of breath, holding her jacket—black pencil skirt, hair in a disheveled bun. With clothes on, she’s almost unrecognizable to us, except that the back of her pink thong is hiked above the waist of her skirt, her blouse aggressively tucked into it. Bunny notices this as Cate takes the seat next to Chuck, but doesn’t say anything.

  “Hi, guys, sorry, the Red Line derailed again. No one got hurt, thank God.” Cate throws her hand-me-down-from-Meredith Burberry plaid jacket over the back of the chair.

  Chuck shakes his head. “See, what did I tell you about the infrastructure problem.”

  “Honey, you should really think about getting a car here,” Meredith says, concerned. She’s only ridden the Metro once—to get to the Women’s March a year earlier.

  “I don’t know, I kind of like not having a carbon footprint.”

  “Hey, now, I thought you were a Republican,” Chuck says.

  “Uncle Chuck. I believe in global warming.”

  “Millennials…” Chuck downs the last gulp of wine in his glass.

  Cate clears her throat and puts the white cloth napkin in her lap. “I’m assuming you all heard about the horrific shooting at the Midlands music festival.”

  “What’s that?/Where’s that?” Meredith and Chuck say simultaneously.

  “Missouri,” Bunny says, scrolling through her phone; she’s in the vortex.

  Meredith plays with her gold bangles and sips her wine, feigning interest. “No, honey, I didn’t see that.”

  Chuck nods with pursed lips. “Ah yes, I saw something about that tonight.”

  “Honey, do you feel safe at school?” Meredith asks Bunny.

  “There’s secret service at my school, Mom,” Bunny reminds her, scrolling through her phone. This sort of thing will never be a by-product of her kind of upbringing.

  “Oh, right.” Meredith sets down her glass.

  “I think I’ll be promoted soon.” Cate takes a large sip of water.

  “That’s great, honey,” Meredith replies.

  Chuck turns to Cate, folds his hands on the table. “I’m confident you will do a great job, but listen to me carefully. As you climb the political ladder, remember to always remain a private person, as much as you can, so you can live as you want—free—rather than create expectations in others that you feel compelled to meet.”

  Cate thinks on this for a moment. But isn’t she supposed to meet the expectations of others in politics?

  “Always put your own interests first,” Chuck says, pointing his finger at her.

  Cate listens to Chuck like a good girl. She knows this, but she also knows that today fame is what you need to succeed in politics. A high profile, not a low one. Chuck is dead wrong about privacy. Cate smiles with her hands folded in her lap, looking around the room, scoffing in her head at the professors, the partisan journalists, the old political wonks and their dopey-looking wives. Fame is a necessity if you want to win. And Cate wants to win.

  Lance arrives at the table carrying a massive tray of food; a busboy probably about Bunny’s age trails behind him and hurries to unfold the stand on which the tray will be placed.

  “Thank you.” Meredith leans over, piercing the young boy with her well-intentioned eyes, and slips him a twenty-dollar bill, then winks.

  Embassy Row

  In the early twentieth century, Massachusetts Avenue between the vice president’s mansion and Sheridan Circle was known as Millionaires’ Row, housing the nation’s elite in gilded mansions.I But when the Great Depression hit, it forced many to put their mansions up for sale. Soon after, social institutions (exclusiv
e clubs) and diplomats started moving in. For example, the British Embassy was built in 1930 and the Japanese Embassy by 1931, and by the 1940s the area was dubbed Embassy Row.

  Today diplomats and their families who live in Washington are protected by something called diplomatic immunity.II It means the sons and daughters of ambassadors (and the ambassadors themselves) are not susceptible to lawsuits, arrest, or prosecution under American law. For example, rumors circulated around town that there was a fraternity thrown out by American University (reasons unclear). But the fraternity still continued admitting members, becoming the frat for many international students. Around 2014, after a pledge decided to drop, three frat members assaulted him in a garage. One assailant, the son of a diplomat, served no jail time and fled to his home country, while the two others each served 120 days in jail and 100 hours of community service.

  I. Scott Harris, “Ten Facts You May Not Know About DuPont Circle,” DCist (website), January 30, 2017, https://dcist.com/story/17/01/30/you-know-it-as-one/.

  II. United States Department of State, Office of Foreign Missions, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/2018-DipConImm_v5_Web.pdf.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  From her bedroom window, Bunny watches Chuck pull in the trash cans. She listens to the familiar rhythm of the wheels rolling along their cobblestone driveway. The redbrick mansion across the street, once home to then General Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, is twinkling with lights, revived by a tech billionaire from Silicon Valley. Bunny’s been spying on the new family of late, no details to report yet, other than that they own a Cavalier King Charles named Steve Jobs that the maid walks every morning.

  Bunny turns around to close her bedroom door, a Feel the Bern poster glued to the back of it. She hears Cate giggling on the telephone with a friend from California in the guest bedroom across the hall. She waits for the beep beep beep beep of Chuck setting the house alarm for the night—007 with an extra 0 is the code. Her backpack is zipped and filled with Bernie Sanders rolling papers and condoms she took from a trip to Planned Parenthood. Once the alarm is set, Bunny flips the lever of the lock from left to right, then slowly pulls the top half of the window open, chucking her backpack so it lands in the boxwood bushes below before climbing out. Last year when her parents were on a golfing trip to Ireland, Bunny discovered a loophole in the alarm system: pull open the top half of the window and the alarm won’t sound.

  Bunny rides her bike down the uneven brick sidewalk along R Street, passing Katharine Graham’s abandoned estate on her right, Oak Hill Cemetery on her left, its black wrought iron gates chained and locked, protecting the ghosts of Washington royalty from unworthy intruders. Rats scurry behind trash cans and raccoons into the alleyways beneath the old gas streetlamps of Georgetown.

  When Bunny stops at the light before Sheridan Circle, the intersection of Kalorama, Dupont, and Georgetown, she peers up at the statue of the Civil War general atop his horse posturing before it bucks, his arm stretched out behind him, an invisible sword ready to defeat the enemy—a hero before he slaughtered the Indians in the Great Plains! Bunny waits as the metropolitan police blast sirens at all exits of the circle. The vice president’s motorcade comes barreling through, one police car after another, the caravan of black Suburbans, the black limousine, American flags stuck to each side of the vehicle waving in the wind before the bomb squad trails behind them. She’s accustomed to this kind of interruption.

  Kalorama is the wealthiest neighborhood in the district, the milieu of politicians (Trumps, Obamas, Clintons, Tafts, Roosevelts) who have lived or currently live there, along with Supreme Court justices, media moguls, and international royalty. It is an old neighborhood with clustered colonial mansions sitting almost on top of each other—Embassy Row is just behind it. France is twenty feet to the right. England: twenty feet to the left. Afghanistan: make a right up Wyoming Avenue. When Bunny was little, she and her friends would joke that if one of them were from, say, Albania, and committed a murder, they could run to the embassy for protection and never get arrested as long as they stayed on the foreign property. Kind of dark for eleven-year-olds to think about, but normal in Washington. Kalorama is not the kind of neighborhood where one strolls across the street to ask a neighbor to borrow some milk, not if their people committed genocide against your people just a few decades ago.

  The secret service is parked on either side of the street, barricading the entrance where the former president resides. Family members of the current president reside on the block behind it, so close that a baseball could be thrown between the two homes to shatter a window. In fact, most political veterans (both Democrat and Republican) share the same neighborhood. Always have. Always will. Always remember that.

  Flags with Arabic symbols and colors blow in the icy wind; the smell of burning wood lingers from some mansion nearby. Only the occasional clanking of metal can be heard as Bunny chains her bike to the green fence behind the mosque. The vice president’s mansion is a few blocks up the street. Surveillance cameras are hidden in stoplights, in trees, on the corners of nearby embassies pointing in every direction, pointed like guns. Bunny whips her backpack over her shoulder, throws her hoodie over her head, and marches toward her boyfriend’s house. Maneuvering through a minefield of government cameras doesn’t make sneaking out of the house easy. She and her friends learned their lesson last year when sophomore Teddy Rasmussen tried to throw a party but was quickly shut down by the security officers of Uzbekistan. The kinds of problems facing the offspring of the Washingtonian elite are unprecedented compared to those of children throughout the rest of the world. Only in the days to come will Bunny begin to question the lot in life she’s been so freely given.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Edward Montgomery, stands between the Doric columns of his home, an old colonial schoolhouse along Massachusetts Avenue converted into a live-in mansion. A towering figure, he stands six feet four with wide shoulders, though age has curled them. Known for fighting in the Persian Gulf War, the Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan, he has more decorations than any other general in America and is now in charge of the most powerful military in the world. Even at home with his youngest son, Billy, he speaks in military jargon: affirmative, negative, copy that. He expects beds to be made with crisp hospital corners, rooms to be tidy, shirts to be tucked in, and never a hat worn at the dinner table—or any other place, really, except for a baseball field. In addition, it is always yes sir, no sir, when one is spoken to. The general comes from an extraordinarily humble and religious upbringing in coal-mining Virginia where the divide between the haves and the have-nots widens every day. The military provided a way out for the general, which he credits with giving him the abundant life of service he leads today; it’s only as of the last several years that the Montgomery family has grown accustomed to power and wealth.

  Several government SUVs line the semicircular driveway, blocking cameras and any passerby from seeing something that might appear suspicious. Bunny watches, hidden across the street behind the hedges of the Haitian Embassy, waiting to sneak around the side to the service entrance where Billy awaits her.

  The general shakes the hands of the unknown men in black suits. They climb back in their government SUVs, and General Montgomery stands in the cold air watching as they disappear down Massachusetts Avenue, his breath visible as he exhales, his shoulders reaching toward his ears. He looks up to the bright, round moon, then turns around, steps inside the house, and slams the door behind him.

  * * *

  Carol, the general’s wife, sits in the kitchen nook folding laundry. On the television screen in front of her, BREAKING NEWS interrupts Fox News’s already-breaking coverage of the mass shooting. White House Chief of Staff is accused of domestic violence. No comments yet from POTUS.… scrolls across the screen.

  Carol is composed, easy-breezy as she folds the next towel. She’s known for weeks this was coming, but hasn’t said a
word to anyone except when discussing the matter with her husband. The general can rage, but he’s never hit Carol before. He’s hit his sons, but never Carol. Carol is still dressed in her tweed blazer, red reading glasses left atop her head of silver hair. She spends most days volunteering at the public library, helping recovering vets use the free computers and Internet. She loves a good Danielle Steel novel, but she’ll never tell you that; she keeps them hidden upstairs in the guest bedroom. A devout Catholic from a small town in Connecticut, she spent her after-school hours bagging groceries for her dad, who owned the local grocery store. Carol doesn’t fit in with the elites of Washington, nor does she care to. She can’t wait for the day her husband retires and they can move back out to Virginia, where they recently purchased a farm—an old corn-mill plantation built before the Civil War.

  Hot Fox News reporter Chris Williams’s face appears: “The White House accumulates more chaos. Just in, we have a photograph of the White House chief of staff’s wife from the police report filed several weeks ago.” An image appears of the woman with no makeup on, a swollen blue and brown circle around her right eye, a split lip, and bruises around her neck.

  “Jesus,” Carol says under her breath, throwing the last towel in the pile next to her. She gets up to turn the television off just as the general walks into the kitchen. He stands in the doorway. Carol turns to face him, terrified of what he is about to tell her.

  * * *

  “Get in, quick.” Billy ushers Bunny into the old service elevator in the basement. “Shhh.” He puts his fingers over her mouth. The elevator wobbles when he shoves the gate closed and presses the fourth-floor button.

  “If this breaks down, it means we have to get married,” he whispers.

  Bunny giggles and tries to put her hand up Billy’s sweatshirt. “Show it to me,” she says. Billy’s hair is light brown and tousled up at the front; he has a baseball player’s body: tall and lean. He pitches for the high school team and was MVP last year. He’ll never show it, but Billy is remarkably sensitive, given who his father is.