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.
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 s
naps 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 Economists 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.
A Field Guide to Awkward Silences Page 22
