The List (6 page)

I threw myself onto my cashmere-blanket-covered bed and looked at the black-and-white
pictures hanging on the wall. Before I came home, my mother asked her interior designer
to spruce up the joint a little. To most people, that would mean add a bed, maybe
a simple Shaker-inspired chair, a fresh towel or two, and voilà! But not my mother.
She had removed the word
simple
from her vocabulary decades ago. The barn apartment, though nothing more than a few
small rooms and a poor excuse for a kitchen and a bathroom, now looked ready to host
Ralph Lauren and his entire sun-kissed family. There was a queen-size bed with a mahogany
wood frame covered in down comforters and navy and cream blankets, an oversize farm
table with hand-carved benches, a navy velvet couch with ten equestrian-themed throw
pillows, thick braided rugs, a wall covered in brown velvet riding hats, a candle-burning
chandelier, two fire extinguishers for said candle-burning chandelier, and a wall
of family photos. The last part sounds awfully quaint and sentimental, but it was
mostly glamour shots of my mother with slightly lifted eyes that screamed, “I’m watching
you!,” pictures of my
dad making judgmental faces, my Wellesley graduation photo, and a few snaps from high
school of me looking gangly and awkward while my sister Payton posed like a Swedish
supermodel. Those would have to go.

It’s not that I wasn’t well-rounded in high school; I was. I was yearbook editor,
co-captain of the field hockey team, took difficult classes, and had a series of cute
boyfriends with good abs, dreamy eyes, and SUVs. It’s just that Payton had already
done all that, but better, and by the time I got there, my golden sister had set an
impossibly high standard.

Payton was incredibly popular, in part because she was so pretty and mostly because
she was so scary. She was fantastic at sports, got great grades without trying, always
had a tan, and dated a very popular lacrosse player named Dean McLaughlin, who looked
like a man at seventeen and called her babe. He used to bench press Payton during
their lacrosse practices and even modeled for the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog his
summer between high school and college. I loved him. I made a collage of his Abercrombie
pictures and hid it behind my desk but Payton found it and presented it to Dean right
in front of me. I laughed it off, excused myself from the table, and cried until my
eyes looked like two fireballs stuck in my face.

At an age when most girls just wanted to be liked and asked out on a date or two,
Payton was running high school like a Fortune 500 company. Her senior year, she even
had a stalker. He was a junior on the wrestling team named Leo and chased Payton around
in a white Bronco very similar to O. J. Simpson’s. My father had to call his parents
and threaten legal action. It was the coolest thing ever.

The last summer before Payton left for college we both worked as counselors at a riding
camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was 80 percent girls but there was one rather
cute stable
hand named Trevor Mariani whom I ended up making out with behind the barn a few times.
When I refused to go skinny-dipping in the lake with him after a particularly hot
and heavy smooch fest, he told every other counselor that we’d had sex in the hayloft
“thoroughbred style.” I wanted to die. I was still rather petrified of male genitalia
at that stage and I was being accused of acts outlawed in much of the American South.

Naturally, I didn’t do anything but cry alone in the bathroom, but when the rumor
kept on growing after a few days, Payton walked up to him after our daily flag-raising
ceremony and, in front of everyone, slapped him across the face, paused for a few
seconds, and then muttered “loser,” for everyone to hear. She was kindly asked to
leave and stay far away from children, but for the rest of the summer, she was my
hero. When I awkwardly thanked her before she left for Columbia, she didn’t crack
a smile and said she did it because she was sick of spending her summer toiling in
Appalachia when all her friends were backpacking through Europe. I didn’t care. Payton
was happy to push my head under water, but she wouldn’t sit around and watch anyone
else do it.

Fine. I would keep the photos up there for now. I walked up to the wall and straightened
one of me flashing a particularly heinous set of turquoise braces.

I had an hour before I had to be asleep, so I lay back on my sleigh bed, picked up
my landline, called Elsa, and begged her to leave the District Saturday night and
spend the weekend with me in Middleburg. “I hate you,” she replied. “And I’ll see
you Saturday. You better buy me a present.”

Free of computers but with my BlackBerry nestled right next to my pillow, I got ready
to rack up six hours of sleep. But Julia woke me up with a text at midnight to see
if I was going to come back for day two. I told her I’d had an hour-and-a-half
commute back to my Middleburg barn to think about it and had decided yes. Definitely,
yes. It was the place to be right now. They—no,
we
—were leading political journalism and the new media empire. I was lucky to work there.

“Good,” Julia texted back. She added a P.S. two minutes later.

“You’re 28. It might be time to kiss the commute goodbye and move into the city. Living
with your parents is quaint and all, but you’re not a girl from Saudi Arabia waiting
for someone to propose.”

“That sounds racist,” I wrote.

“Well, living in a barn that your parents own sounds inbred.”

It kind of did.

I
t wasn’t that I didn’t like my job. It was just a whole lot of job. A month in, there
was no time for anything besides being a
Capitolist
reporter and getting a few hours of sleep. I never had sex, I never drank, and I
now communicated with my friends through short, impersonal, spam-like emails. They
probably thought I was trying to sell them cheap Viagra and steal their Social Security
numbers.

But I did get to interview a lot of celebrities. Perfect, glossy celebrities.

On a particularly cold Thursday in mid-November, when the oak and maple trees around
the city were losing their color, I had four do-gooder celebrities to trail on Capitol
Hill. Two were pretty B-list, so I had no interest in talking to them, but their crazy
communications directors called me with the persistence of my eighth-grade boyfriend
and gave me no choice but to say yes. The third was Chevy Chase, and the fourth was
January Jones, the woman who made wearing a pointy bra acceptable again. The morning
would be long. I would have to do a lot of fake smiling, but I was happy to escape
the newsroom and the mystical sounds of C-SPAN that filled it.

On the drive in from northern Virginia, I pulled up the
parking brake at a red light and began searching the car floor for my very serious
media credentials. They identified me, Adrienne Brown, as a hard-boiled reporter for
the
Capitolist
. I found them affixed with chewing gum to what looked like animal fur. Since I never
locked my car, I figured it must have been taken for a joyride by taxidermists. I
also found part of yesterday’s Chop’t salad, three empty cans of Diet Coke, a Canadian
penny, tiny red underwear printed with the words “thong-tha-thong-thong-thong,” and
enough Bobbi Brown bronzer to turn a family of Swedes into vacationing Brazilians.

Fascinated by the results of my excavation, at the next red light, I dug a little
more. I still had to find my House of Representatives and Senate credentials, which
should have been attached to each other but were more likely attached to a discarded
sandwich.

Many years before I started my gig at the
Capitolist,
I read an article in the
New York Post
about a woman who had gotten arrested for smoking a cigarette, making a call, and
shaving her bikini line while driving. I was hysterical. I folded myself into the
fetal position and laughed until my appendix hurt. I mean, who in their right mind
would shave their moneymaker while driving? But now that I was basically a serf, I
knew better. She probably didn’t have time to schedule a Brazilian wax because her
boss wanted her to work until her eyes popped out and shriveled up like raisins.

In Washington, fall meant Congress was still in session and a horrendous number of
school groups arrived with their history classes in hyperactive packs on the Mall.
It also meant there was a month left of crazy traffic before the holiday slowdown,
but I appreciated it. It was my only downtime. I flipped through e-books, sat in on
conference calls, spastically checked
my BlackBerry, tweeted, and read the style sections of two newspapers as I waited
for the mind-numbing rush hour traffic to carry me to the epicenter of the American
wonk.

I mopped some sticky caffeinated substance off the laminated ID passes I finally found,
popped them all around my neck, and looked for semilegal parking. It was time to head
to one of the marble House offices and act important. Or at least not lost.

My first three interviews were taking place in Cannon, one of the seven almost identical
House and Senate buildings flanking the Capitol. I sprayed my hair with hundred-dollar
hair glue, threw on a practical yet stylish Louis Vuitton capelet, and galloped toward
the building.

I put my bag through the X-ray machine, explained to the baby-faced security guards
why I had three cucumbers in my purse (South Beach diet, not perversion), and headed
down a hall lined by the heavy wooden doors that guard congressional offices. Girls
wearing sensible shoes raced toward their sensible jobs, and young men with good heads
of hair and a fondness for the missionary position looked at me as if I were a space
alien who had just ambled in.

Once I was in the building’s dramatic two-story rotunda complete with Corinthian columns
and a coffered dome, I waited around and watched the B-list celebs eagerly do Fox
and MSNBC interviews. I saw two girls, both from our print competition, both with
video crews, and closed my eyes. If they were here, it meant I had to file my articles
immediately because they would be trying to beat my time stamp.

I took out my second BlackBerry and texted Isabelle, “Jaycee Burke is here with a
fucking camera crew!!” My new BlackBerry was called the Torch and the tech department
promised me it would outlast BlackBerry number one, which lost half the keyboard keys
after two weeks of overuse.

“She has back hair,” Isabelle replied. “Not just fuzz, like genuine long fur.” Isabelle
was the most talented smack talker on the Style team, and the girl you wanted around
when spouting out insults about other Washington journalists. She was also the second
newest on the section, having only been at the
List
for a year, and still seemed to have a grasp on the outside world. Julia was my guide
at the paper, but Isabelle was my guide to the rest of the city.

“Did you know she’s leaving?” she added. “It sounds like you don’t. She got a job
with the
Wall Street Journal
. She’s going to be part of their election team. Can you believe it?” Isabelle wrote.

I guess the
Journal
didn’t discriminate against back hair.

“Who else is there?” asked Isabelle.

“Some girl with really short hair. Like Justin Bieber,” I wrote.

“Krista Gabriel. She’s with
Roll Call,
” Isabelle wrote back. “You don’t know her because no one pays attention to them.
They have a pay wall. Can you imagine? She once came up to me, kissed me on each check,
and said, ‘Oh, the competition’s here.’ I mean really? We’re national, she’s local,
and that’s really all that needs to be said. Don’t bother talking to her.”

“That nice guy from the
Daily Caller
is here, too,” I wrote. “The one with the shaved head.”

“Did you hear that the
Daily Caller
has a keg? Can you imagine Upton ever letting us have a keg? He would fill it with
liquid speed,” Isabelle wrote back. I liked Isabelle. And not just because she was
friends with Apolo Ohno. She was one of the only ones at the paper who dared to have
a life. Everyone else just sacrificed their friends and family to live permanently
in a
Capitolist
world.

Isabelle excused herself from BBM to go file an article, and I started eavesdropping
on two reporters I didn’t know.

“I heard you can’t even expense coffee with a source at the
Post
anymore,” said one of them, looking down at her hot Starbucks. “Can you imagine?
Who wants to talk to you if you can’t even buy them a latte?”

“It’s true,” said her friend. “An all-staff memo went out about it. It was forwarded
to me within five minutes. Why does anyone ever send out all-staff emails anymore?
They are made public immediately. It’s so stupid. Old people really don’t understand
how this world works. Nothing is private, especially not a staff-wide email that basically
reads, ‘we’re bleeding money, get out while you can.’”

I was very caught up in their conversation when the first almost-famous person approached
me. I shook her hand, grabbed a pen, and lobbed a handful of softballs at her. “If
you could dine with the president or John Boehner, who would you choose? Which dog
would you rather own—Champ Biden, a well-bred German shepherd, or Bo Obama, a Portuguese
water dog descended from the Kennedy family canine? And do you think Michele Bachmann
would rather guest star on
Teen Mom, Glee,
or
MTV Cribs
?”

Next up, Chevy Chase. He was in town because his wife was getting some sort of green
hippie award for eating only cardboard. Her actions were certainly noble, but of course
everyone wanted to interview her much more famous, much funnier husband.

I asked him about the delicate dance between comedy and politics, and he said the
words
fuck
and
George Bush
a lot. His affable wife chided him for speaking to a reporter that way. “He meant
all that off the record,” she offered, a last-ditch attempt to scrub my story of Republican
bashing and f-bombs.