Parties in Congress (2 page)

“Perhaps because it includes your subjugation?”

“And neither does Mayor Denton,” Bijal said.

“Uh-huh. And does the mayor know you’re a lesbian?”

Bijal looked at the table in discomfort. “It didn’t come up at the interview, no.”

“But it certainly can’t hurt that you’re a woman
and
a minority, right?” Fran asked, dunking a piece of garlic bread into her marinara sauce.

Bijal feigned outrage. “Are you implying that I got the job because I’m Indian and
not
because the mayor knows my old boss? How
dare
you!”

Fran chuckled. “So who’s the mayor running against? Some old Dixiecrat with his hand in the till?”

“Actually, the incumbent is Congresswoman Colleen O’Bannon.”

Fran choked on Barbarella’s nectar. “
Openly gay
Congresswoman Colleen O’Bannon?”

“That’s the one.”

“You’re a disgrace to your people.”

Bijal shook her head slowly. “Which ones? As a triple minority, I have a lot of people who I can shame.”

Fran pushed the manicotti away from her. “I don’t know if I can continue to eat your celebratory food.”

“Why not?” Bijal asked, slightly hurt.

“With fewer than half a dozen openly gay members of Congress, you, a muff-loving homo, have chosen to work for someone running to unseat one of them?”

“Look, O’Bannon being a lesbian doesn’t automatically make her the best candidate. I’m sure she’s made plenty of questionable, corrupt decisions in her career that have nothing to do with her being gay. You’re generalizing.”

“Am I?”

“You absolutely are. Do you vote for every black candidate because you’re African American?”

“Do you really want an answer to that?”

“Are you
serious
? Why don’t you just vote for all female candidates who share your bra size?”

“Because, as far as I know, there’s no active discrimination against 34Cs.”

“So you have no problem boiling down a candidate to just their race? Their stance on issues doesn’t matter?”

Fran pulled the manicotti back to her and stabbed it, clearly frustrated. “Of course it matters. So does life experience.”

“And if Richard Nixon was black, you’d have voted for him?”

“In Bizarro World, you mean?”

Bijal goaded her impatiently. “Just answer the question.”

Fran looked at her smugly. “It wouldn’t have mattered, because a black Richard Nixon wouldn’t have been the 1968 Republican nominee, would he?”

“Aren’t you always arguing that being equal means having someone judge you on how well you do your job, and nothing else? Congresswoman O’Bannon’s sexual orientation has nothing to do with her ability to create and support effective legislation.”

“So if I understand you correctly, you’re betting that Mayor Denton has better ideas and is more ethical than the oppressed lesbian, so that proves we live in a post-homophobic society?”

“Fran, you need a job where you don’t spend all day with angry militant liberals at that nonprofit.”

“You aren’t kidding. They don’t pay for shit.”

“Hmph. I’d just like this election to bear no resemblance to O’Bannon’s last one.”

Fran swallowed loudly. “Refresh my memory.”

“Buddy Campbell?”

“Oh, shit!
He
was her opponent?”

“That’s the one,” Bijal replied. Everyone knew exactly who Buddy Campbell was. The Republican incumbent congressman had been doing just fine in the polls until his dirty secret was uncovered less than two weeks before Election Day—the ultimate October surprise. Campbell was a married father of four children and the co-sponsor of the failed Family Values bill, but he was also carrying on a surreptitious sexual relationship with his fifteen-year-old babysitter.

At first, he’d tried to deny it, but when incriminating e-mails, recorded phone calls, and text messages had emerged, it was clear to everyone that his was a lost cause. The Republican National Committee begged Campbell to drop out, even though the election was only days away and they couldn’t possibly get another Republican on the ballot. The party dictum was that having no one in the race was better than having a lying, adulterous, hypocritical pedophile, even if he somehow won. After all, how could they even celebrate that without looking skeevy?

But Campbell was deluded enough to think that his constituents loved him so much, no sex scandal was great enough to stand in the way of his reelection—especially since his Democratic opponent was a self-avowed lesbian with no political experience to speak of.

Sure enough, Campbell was the only one surprised when the ballots were tallied and O’Bannon was elected to Congress. But that shock would seem insignificant when stacked up against what came next for him—divorce and statutory rape charges.

Bijal poured herself a refill of champagne. “So hopefully Mayor Denton has been utilizing a little more…”

“Rectitude?”

Bijal nearly choked. “What about her rectum?”

Fran glared. “Rec-ti-tude,” she overenunciated.

“Oh, right. That.”

“So what else do you know about O’Bannon?”

Bijal wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. “Well, I haven’t had much time to look into her voting record, but she’s only been in one term, so there may not be much there.”

“I suppose you can go the ‘What has your congresswoman done for you?’ route.”

“Precisely.”

“Where’s the mayor’s election office? Is it way out there in East Lower Ballsack, Virginia?”

“Unfortunately, yes. It’s nearly an hour away. Though they did put it near the traffic light.”

Fran snorted. “Well, sure, you want to show off the town’s landmarks. I’m going to hazard a wild guess and say it’s also within a block of a restaurant that has the word ‘waffle’ in the name.”

“Wow, you really know your rural Virginia boondocks. You’re right. It’s across the street from the Waffle Nook, which is just down the street from the book depository and adjacent to the grassy knoll.”

“Sounds picturesque.”

Bijal had a fresh pang of self-doubt. “I just hope I can pull this off, Fran. This could be big.”

“I know, honey. Just try not to sell your soul in the process, okay?”

Bijal sat at her new desk, jotting down some highlights from Congresswoman O’Bannon’s website onto a yellow legal pad. Tallying up the time it took her to drive to the office, pick up her laptop from the office manager, and get situated, she already felt like she’d been working for an eternity. She glanced at her watch and was appalled to see that it was barely ten thirty in the morning. How could that be?

Donna Shoemaker, the mayor’s dour campaign manager, a thin, no-nonsense, dark-haired woman sporting a grim, intense expression, walked over to Bijal’s desk and perched her flat behind on the corner. If someone she’d known well had performed the gesture, it would have seemed intimate and friendly. But somehow coming from this woman, to whom Bijal had only been briefly introduced at the interview the day before, it seemed both ominous and inappropriate. “So, how’re you settling in, Ms.…is it Roo?”

“Rao,” Bijal said. “Rhymes with ‘cow.’ Bijal Rao.”

Donna’s brow furrowed ever so slightly, as she no doubt struggled to process the name to identify Bijal’s ethnicity. It sadly was an expression that Bijal recognized immediately at this point in her life and in this rather xenophobic social climate. “Where are your parents from?” Donna asked, rather transparently.

“Philadelphia,” she replied, being purposely obtuse. It amazed her that being born in the United States wasn’t really good enough for most people if you looked like you were from anywhere east of Baltimore. “And, yes, I’m settling in just fine. Thanks.” She forced a smile.

“I see you’ve already got your nose to the grindstone. Found anything useful?”

“Absolutely.”

Donna crossed her arms. “I’m all ears.” The way she said it definitely sounded like a challenge.

“Well, I’ve taken a look at the election results of this district over the last twenty years.”

“Yeah, a lot of this district is rural—which is part of the reason we feel so confident that the Republican Party can take back this seat in Congress. It’s a red pocket in a red state.”

“A red state that’s had a number of Democratic governors, where both U.S. senators and seven of the twelve congressional representatives are Democrats,” Bijal elaborated.

“Well, that’s true.”

“And a red state that went blue in the last presidential election.”

Donna looked irritated by the facts. “So then you see that we have our work cut out for us,” she snapped, her attitude suddenly shifting 180 degrees. “We need to stop the blue tide that’s coursing through Virginia, break their momentum. We only lost this seat in the first place because our candidate was a pedophile.”

“An insurmountable obstacle,” Bijal said with a nod. “But this district has been slowly trending blue for nearly a decade.”

“Really?” She sounded surprised.

Bijal pushed through a stack of papers on her desk and produced a graph that she handed Donna. “Really. It hasn’t been a radical swing, but a steady one nonetheless. Chalk most of it up to slow urban sprawl in the areas that aren’t rural, and the rest to the fact that the median age of residents is much lower than it used to be. Younger voters tend to be more liberal.”

“Do we know why they’ve gotten younger?”

Bijal glanced back to her legal pad. “Palmer College opened several years ago. The district now has several thousand new residents under thirty.”

Donna paused and seemed to turn this information over in her mind like compost. “This is good information,” she finally said.

“There’s more.”

“Oh?”

“Congresswoman O’Bannon is very helpful in that she publishes a daily schedule on her website. She definitely has someone tech savvy on her staff, and she seems very interested in transparency.”

Donna stood and started eying O’Bannon’s website over Bijal’s shoulder. “Hmm, that
is
good.”

“But after a fairly thorough search, I discovered she’s had a surprisingly blemish-free first term in office.”

“Here we go,” Donna said, rolling her eyes.

“She’s co-sponsored a couple pieces of legislature—both of which were very popular and passed easily. She’s bucked her own party more than a few times when she disagreed with either aspects of their bills or their questionable methods. I’ve found no allegations of corruption or impropriety. In fact, many members of both parties regard her quite highly.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard this sermon before.” Donna shifted closer to Bijal. “Let me share with you what I told your predecessor. Everyone, and I mean
every-fucking-one
, has dirt. And this woman is no different. We may just need to scratch a little deeper to find it.”

Bijal had a sinking feeling in her gut—not just from Donna’s inexplicable mood swing or even her disquieting use of profanity. But something in the words themselves seemed to hail back to what Fran had been telling her just the night before. “I’m assuming you don’t want to run against O’Bannon’s sexual orientation.”

“No, a large portion of moderates wouldn’t like us making that an issue. So you need to find an issue that we
can
use.”

“Um—”

“And whatever you do, don’t come back to me later and tell me O’Bannon has never misspoken, never made an error, or never supported a grossly liberal measure.”

“Because?”

“Because I’ll shitcan you like I did the asshole who sat at this desk before you.”

“Riiiight,” Bijal rasped incredulously. “Which is precisely why I’d never do that.”

“Well, not if you want any kind of career in politics, right?”

Bijal suddenly doubted what she really
did
want. Up until about a minute and a half ago, she’d thought she’d known. “I do, yes. And, on the outside chance this carries any weight with you, my landlord was kind of counting on my paycheck. He’s elderly.”

Donna straightened her jacket. “Then I’d say we’re all working toward the same goal, Roo.”

“To keep me gainfully employed?”

“And ensure you a job recommendation, yes—something free of public ridicule.”

This was becoming surreal. “Wow, I didn’t even realize that public ridicule was an option. Are there any other possibilities that I should know about? Caning? Stoning?”

Bijal’s nervous attempt at humor didn’t seem to remotely faze Donna. “Here’s my expectation, Roo. You’re to burrow yourself into the congresswoman like a tapeworm.”

Bijal began writing on her legal pad. “Let me just add latex gloves to my shopping list.”

“I want to know every person she’s misled, every math test she ever failed, and every goddamn check she’s bounced. I don’t care how insignificant it seems, just bring everything to me. I’ll judge what’s useful. Don’t stop digging until you hit pay dirt.”

“Or the digestive tract, apparently.”