The Unfolding, page 3
Her mother has a drink on the plane.
“So early?” her father asks.
“You know I hate to fly. Did everything make it onto the plane?”
“Yes,” her father says. “And if it didn’t, that’s what stores are for.”
“Did you bring a dress?” her mother asks Meghan.
“Yes.”
“It’s good you’re tall; you don’t need heels. Young girls shouldn’t wear heels anyway, but some just have to.” She pauses. “Good gams go a long way.”
“Remind me what a gam is.”
“It’s a leg, a shapely leg.”
“Oh,” she says. And she doesn’t even want to begin to ask what her mother means.
“A nice ankle is also a plus,” her mother says. “Let me see your ankles.”
Meghan pulls up the legs of her pants; her ankles are covered in thick socks, not much to see. “As far as I know they’re good.”
Her mother makes a noise and goes back to doing the crossword puzzle. Her father reads the papers—all of them. And Meghan looks out the window and thinks about the events of the day.
The plane lands in Phoenix, and as they’re getting off, she asks her mother, “Have we been here before?”
“I have no idea. Have we?” her mother asks her father.
“You would know,” her father says, then turns to Meghan. “If I were younger, I’d take you on a cross-country road trip. Get a big old Caddy, and that’s what we’d do this summer. I still might, you never know. It was fun when we went to Dallas, wasn’t it? Did you like the soup? They’re famous for their soup.”
“Among other things,” her mother says.
Last year, during spring break, Meghan went to Dallas with her father on a business trip. While he was in meetings, the Russian driver took her to see where Kennedy was shot. “We’re getting close,” the driver said, as they were approaching the grassy knoll. “We’re there now,” he said, as the car slipped through the underpass. “It’s just there.”
“Really?” she asked. “The little hill? That was it?”
“Ya,” he said. “You want go around again?”
“Yes, please.” So they circled it again—and again. After the fourth time, the driver asked, “You have enough?” It’s less a question than a statement.
The grassy knoll is an example of the disappointment Meghan felt today. The grassy knoll is less of a hill or a mound, and more of a bump, or at this point in time—a blip? Is that true or has the scale of things changed? Does a place compact and get smaller over time? Does history shrink? She thinks about how a lot of her friends don’t know the names of any of the presidents from before they were born.
They are in a black car driving from the airport to town. The interior is puffy leather that feels like a thick marshmallow. The faster they go, the quieter everyone gets as though they were sucked in, as though it becomes harder to speak, to move, like there’s a force pushing them back—the mirage of the desert, the air, the day trapped between summer and winter. She glances over at her mother, whose eyes are closed, and her father in the front seat working his two devices. The driver catches her eye.
“Do you need more air?”
“I’m okay,” she says. She loves being in motion, suspended between places. “This road has a different hum to it, a different frequency.”
“It’s true,” the driver says. Later she will find out that this is actually true; the road was repaved with a mix that had recycled tires added in to quiet the sound and she will be pleased with herself for noticing.
When they pull up to the hotel, the car door opens and the seal is broken. There’s an immediate shift in air pressure and temperature.
The hotel concierge brings them up to their room, an enormous connecting suite. A cellophane-covered fruit basket, cheese platter, and bottles of wine are laid out. The connecting room has a big bed and also a crib with a teddy bear wearing a bathrobe and a matching child-size robe. Someone took them seriously when they said they were “traveling with a child.”
“I’ll have housekeeping remove the crib and bring a larger robe,” the man says.
“Honestly, this is perfect,” Meghan says, picking up the teddy bear. She always feels younger when she’s with her parents, imploded, her powers of speech and reasoning reduced. In the bathroom there is baby shampoo and elephant-shaped soap.
The family goes downstairs for lunch because her mother hates room service or, to be more specific, hates any room that smells like food for hours after it’s been consumed.
During lunch, various men and women stop at the table to say hello to her father. Her father sees them coming and whispers, “Incoming.” Some apologize for barging in; her father makes a show of putting down his knife and fork to shake their hands. They shake his hand, sometimes holding on too long, thanking him for his generosity. Each time her father blushes. “Trust me,” he says. “It’s not all about you; I have my own interests.”
They make a point of saying hello to her mother, who gives a little nod while making it clear that no further engagement is possible.
Meghan feels sent back in time, like a child who should be sitting on a phone book to reach the table. At the end of the meal, a surprise arrives, a banana split, confirmation of her youthful status. “On the house,” the waiter announces.
Her mother makes a face but then takes a taste. “Why is ice cream so good?”
Her father dabs chocolate sauce off Meghan’s nose and Meghan shows her parents that she’s learned to tie a cherry stem into a knot with her tongue.
“That’s disgusting,” her mother says definitively.
“Sorry,” she says, spitting the stem out.
“Even worse,” her mother says. “Use a napkin or better yet just swallow.” Her mother’s finishing school isn’t for the faint of heart.
If someone asked, “What’s your relationship with your mother like?” Meghan would say—good. She admires her mother, loves her deeply, but the relationship is prescribed. She sees how critical her mother can be. The disdain through which her mother views the world has grown over time, but it doesn’t apply to her; she is either exempt or immune.
She thinks of the letter she wrote years ago thanking her mother for coming to school to visit the class. “Dear Mrs. Hitchens,” she wrote, copying what was on the board for all thirty students to write. No one told her to change the salutation to Dear Mom. Her mother called the letter a classic and had it framed.
Once they’re back upstairs, her father sets himself up in the living room. He has two televisions on as well as his computer and his devices. She thinks it’s cool that he’s tech savvy despite his age and his thick fingers, which poke at the keyboard like stiff sticks of chalk.
Even though it is midafternoon, her mother has housekeeping pull the blackout curtains and lies down in the dark with her travel pillow, travel blanket, and eye mask. Her mother alternately says that she can sleep anywhere at the drop of a hat and that she never sleeps a wink. For the first time it occurs to Meghan that both could be true.
She sits with her father for a few minutes, and when he seems lost to this world, she announces that she’s going to the pool.
“Do you need money?”
“No.”
“Take a room key so you can come and go without waking Mother.”
She makes a tour of the hotel. Cops with sniffer dogs walk in laps around the perimeter. A bus pulls in and two dozen men in suits get out. At first, she thinks they are part of some kind of delegation but then notices they’re all wearing the same lapel pin and have transparent coiled earpieces going from under their jackets into their ears—Secret Service. She smiles; they don’t smile back. Trucks from CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS test their satellites and lay miles and miles of thick cable running in every direction.
She ends up in a restaurant by the pool called the Clubhouse, writing a draft of a paper that’s due in two days.
“If you looked any more serious, they’d put you on Mount Rushmore.” A man whose hair is too shaggy for his age is looking at her. “What are you writing about?”
“Termites.”
“Seriously?” he asks.
She nods. “And you?”
“History in the making,” he says, gesturing to the air around them.
“It’s like New Year’s Eve, waiting for the ball drop,” she says.
“Something like that.”
She looks at him. He’s too old to just be chatting her up. She realizes that just by virtue of the fact that she’s there, people must think she’s older than she is—there are very few young people who just happen to be in Phoenix at this hotel on this particular day.
“Where do you live when you’re not by the pool?” he asks.
“Virginia.”
“As in Washington, DC?”
She shrugs. “Something like that. Didn’t your parents teach you not to talk to strangers?”
“No,” he says. “In fact, that’s how they made a living.” He extends his hand. “Mark Eisner.”
“Did your father run Disney?”
“Same name, different family.”
“Too bad,” she says, sitting up. “What brings you to Phoenix on this balmy day?”
“The spirit moved me.”
She waits for more details.
“Actually, I’m writing a book, or more like taking notes hoping that they will magically turn into a book.”
“Have you written books before?” she asks.
“I have,” he says. “My most recent was Every Four Years We Begin Again. I don’t suppose you read it. I am a social historian.”
“Does that mean you go around talking to strangers at parties?”
“Sometimes.”
“The one you’re working on now, do you have a hypothesis?” Despite appearing older, she is an eighteen-year-old high school student; everything must have a hypothesis.
“I’m looking at the evolution of political speechmaking.”
What does one say?
The good news is she doesn’t have to say anything; Eisner just keeps talking. “My father was a speechwriter; I imagine he wanted to be president.”
“I hear it’s quite competitive,” Meghan says.
“I’m the black sheep.”
She notices that the people walking by all have the same quality—trying too hard. She can’t define it further except to say it’s like they’re waiting to be discovered.
“Why are they here? That’s what I want to know,” she says, pointing them out to Eisner. “Is it because they bought a kind of election ticket—if he wins, they win? They’ll get jobs, a free move to DC, and a fresh start in life? They’re definitely jazzed. That’s the word my mother uses for when people are hepped up, that’s the word my father uses. I just say cray cray. But whatever it is, everyone around here is acting a little cray cray like they have a case of premature Beatlemania. And by the way, who is the Beatle? Because this guy is a seventy-one-year-old politician, with what some would call a checkered history.”
“That’s good,” Eisner says. “ ‘Who is the Beatle?’ Can I use that?”
She shrugs. “It’s yours if you can give me something about termites.”
He pauses. “Termite walks into a bar, asks, ‘Is the bar tender?’ ”
“Try again.”
“Pinocchio goes to the doctor’s office and says, ‘I think my prostate is enlarged; I’m leaking.’ The doctor shakes his head. ‘Your prostate is fine, but you have termites.’ ”
“Gross but okay.” Meghan scribbles it down. “I can’t include it in my paper and I’m not even sure I can tell it to the teacher for extra credit. The word prostate might not be allowed on campus. Prostrate, now we’re talking.” She laughs at herself. “Girls’ school.”
The historian laughs too. “Okay then. Maybe I’ll see you later.”
He didn’t even ask her name.
There is no dinner, just a heavy snack at six p.m. from room service. Her mother, who never eats at cocktail parties, has a bowl of soup and a roll, with the excuse that she knows there will be drinking in excess, and while she doesn’t usually eat carbohydrates, sometimes they are “required.” Her father has shrimp cocktail because it reminds him of a time long ago when he had shrimp in this same hotel and they were the size of 45 records. She’s not sure what that means, but he seems fond of the memory until they arrive and he remembers that he hates shrimp. She orders a burger—better safe than sorry.
Her parents dress as though the evening to come were an event, like a wedding. A lot of effort goes into it: showers, colognes, perfumes, jewelry, etc. When her mother washes her face, she never uses water; she uses something from an unmarked bottle dabbed onto a cotton pad. “Tap water is too harsh,” she says. From the back, her mother looks like Nancy Reagan. She’s thin but not skeletal. She does a lot of exercises on account of having had scoliosis as a child and having spent a year in a body cast.
“Can you imagine,” she tells people, “a five-year-old entombed for an entire year. I was traumatized. I don’t think I’ve recovered yet.” When Meghan asked her mother whether she played sports at school, her mother told her, “We didn’t have sports; we just had horses.” She’s from a Texas oil family, and Meghan’s parents met through her mother’s father—Papa Willard. “It wasn’t exactly an arranged marriage,” she says. “But it was certainly encouraged.” “You were getting old,” her father says, laughing. “It wasn’t like I hadn’t been asked,” her mother says. “I turned down all the boys. I wanted a life of my own, but that was unheard of in my family. So I just held out until your father came along. And I thought he was all right.”
While her parents are abluting their way toward dusk, Meghan puts on her dress, brushes her hair, and sits on the edge of the bed watching the early coverage.
“Do you think he’s going to win?” she asks.
“I don’t want to think about it,” her mother says. “The professionals are not optimistic, but it’s our job to be positive.”
“Is it always like this?”
“Like what?” Her mother wants to know.
“Such a big deal?”
“Yes,” her father says. “It is a big deal. The president steers the ship. Keep in mind it doesn’t just affect us, it affects the whole country. Do you remember the dinner we went to for John and Cindy in Washington?”
“You took me as your date.”
“We had a good time, didn’t we?” Her father smiles.
“But what was the point of that dinner? It was a whole lot of people sucking up or trying to.”
“Exactly,” her mother says.
“You have to pull people in,” her father says. “And keep ’em close.” He turns to face them, pink-faced, his white hair neatly combed back.
“You look dapper.”
“Thank you. Are we ready?” he asks.
“You know, I wouldn’t mind just skipping the whole thing,” her mother says.
“Out. Out the door.” Her father ushers them through the door quickly before her mother decides not to go. It wouldn’t be the first time that she was overcome by social anxiety and had to lie down.
They take the elevator up two floors. Her father has a schedule of parties. It’s like trick-or-treating; you go from party to party and you see some of the same people from the last party at the next party, but as they progress, the snacks get fancier, the crowd gets smaller, the rooms get nicer, and the flower arrangements multiply.
At every stop, as soon as they’re through the door, her father launches in. “How the heck are you?” He’s shaking hands, smacking shoulders, working the room.
And at every stop, her mother heads for the bar. “Vodka with a splash of soda on the rocks.”
“Twist?”
“Lime, thank you.”
“Could I have cranberry and seltzer?” Meghan says.
“You remember what I told you about drinks at parties?”
“Never pick up a drink once you’ve put it down, always get a fresh one. And better yet, just bring your own bottle of water. You trained me well.”
Her mother scowls.
“Did you know that some people are working on making something like a little Popsicle stick that you can dip into a drink to see if it has drugs in it?”
“When I was your age,” her mother says, “the boys just tried to get us tipsy. Boys your age try to make you unconscious. You’ve never had anything happen, have you? If you did, you’d tell me?”
“Mother, I go to an all-girls school. The only thing that’s happened is that two girls got made fun of for practicing making out. Personally, I think they’re gay.”
“Well then, just steer clear.”
Meghan and her mother stand around—looking at the others.
She tells her mother what she knows about termites.
“I’m just so glad you’re not like me,” her mother says. “You seem so natural. After all these years and all these parties, I still don’t have it mastered. If anything, it’s gotten more difficult.”
“Is gerrymandering named after someone I should know, like a historical figure?” Meghan asks her mother.
“No clue.” Her mother takes a piece of celery from a crudité sculpture. “Have this, it’ll keep you occupied and away from the—”
“Penis nuts,” Meghan says.
Her mother smiles. Penis nuts. That’s what her mother calls communal bowls of nuts. There are things one teaches a young girl: never eat the penis nuts. Men don’t wash their hands after they use the facilities. They sink their paws into the nuts while they’re waiting for a drink. If you must eat, take something that’s sticking straight up, celery, a cheese stick, a carrot, but god forbid, don’t dip it into anything; that’s the other weak spot, double dippers.
The next party has someone stationed at the door with a check-in list and little photos of everyone. “No crashers in this crowd,” her father whispers.
“So early?” her father asks.
“You know I hate to fly. Did everything make it onto the plane?”
“Yes,” her father says. “And if it didn’t, that’s what stores are for.”
“Did you bring a dress?” her mother asks Meghan.
“Yes.”
“It’s good you’re tall; you don’t need heels. Young girls shouldn’t wear heels anyway, but some just have to.” She pauses. “Good gams go a long way.”
“Remind me what a gam is.”
“It’s a leg, a shapely leg.”
“Oh,” she says. And she doesn’t even want to begin to ask what her mother means.
“A nice ankle is also a plus,” her mother says. “Let me see your ankles.”
Meghan pulls up the legs of her pants; her ankles are covered in thick socks, not much to see. “As far as I know they’re good.”
Her mother makes a noise and goes back to doing the crossword puzzle. Her father reads the papers—all of them. And Meghan looks out the window and thinks about the events of the day.
The plane lands in Phoenix, and as they’re getting off, she asks her mother, “Have we been here before?”
“I have no idea. Have we?” her mother asks her father.
“You would know,” her father says, then turns to Meghan. “If I were younger, I’d take you on a cross-country road trip. Get a big old Caddy, and that’s what we’d do this summer. I still might, you never know. It was fun when we went to Dallas, wasn’t it? Did you like the soup? They’re famous for their soup.”
“Among other things,” her mother says.
Last year, during spring break, Meghan went to Dallas with her father on a business trip. While he was in meetings, the Russian driver took her to see where Kennedy was shot. “We’re getting close,” the driver said, as they were approaching the grassy knoll. “We’re there now,” he said, as the car slipped through the underpass. “It’s just there.”
“Really?” she asked. “The little hill? That was it?”
“Ya,” he said. “You want go around again?”
“Yes, please.” So they circled it again—and again. After the fourth time, the driver asked, “You have enough?” It’s less a question than a statement.
The grassy knoll is an example of the disappointment Meghan felt today. The grassy knoll is less of a hill or a mound, and more of a bump, or at this point in time—a blip? Is that true or has the scale of things changed? Does a place compact and get smaller over time? Does history shrink? She thinks about how a lot of her friends don’t know the names of any of the presidents from before they were born.
They are in a black car driving from the airport to town. The interior is puffy leather that feels like a thick marshmallow. The faster they go, the quieter everyone gets as though they were sucked in, as though it becomes harder to speak, to move, like there’s a force pushing them back—the mirage of the desert, the air, the day trapped between summer and winter. She glances over at her mother, whose eyes are closed, and her father in the front seat working his two devices. The driver catches her eye.
“Do you need more air?”
“I’m okay,” she says. She loves being in motion, suspended between places. “This road has a different hum to it, a different frequency.”
“It’s true,” the driver says. Later she will find out that this is actually true; the road was repaved with a mix that had recycled tires added in to quiet the sound and she will be pleased with herself for noticing.
When they pull up to the hotel, the car door opens and the seal is broken. There’s an immediate shift in air pressure and temperature.
The hotel concierge brings them up to their room, an enormous connecting suite. A cellophane-covered fruit basket, cheese platter, and bottles of wine are laid out. The connecting room has a big bed and also a crib with a teddy bear wearing a bathrobe and a matching child-size robe. Someone took them seriously when they said they were “traveling with a child.”
“I’ll have housekeeping remove the crib and bring a larger robe,” the man says.
“Honestly, this is perfect,” Meghan says, picking up the teddy bear. She always feels younger when she’s with her parents, imploded, her powers of speech and reasoning reduced. In the bathroom there is baby shampoo and elephant-shaped soap.
The family goes downstairs for lunch because her mother hates room service or, to be more specific, hates any room that smells like food for hours after it’s been consumed.
During lunch, various men and women stop at the table to say hello to her father. Her father sees them coming and whispers, “Incoming.” Some apologize for barging in; her father makes a show of putting down his knife and fork to shake their hands. They shake his hand, sometimes holding on too long, thanking him for his generosity. Each time her father blushes. “Trust me,” he says. “It’s not all about you; I have my own interests.”
They make a point of saying hello to her mother, who gives a little nod while making it clear that no further engagement is possible.
Meghan feels sent back in time, like a child who should be sitting on a phone book to reach the table. At the end of the meal, a surprise arrives, a banana split, confirmation of her youthful status. “On the house,” the waiter announces.
Her mother makes a face but then takes a taste. “Why is ice cream so good?”
Her father dabs chocolate sauce off Meghan’s nose and Meghan shows her parents that she’s learned to tie a cherry stem into a knot with her tongue.
“That’s disgusting,” her mother says definitively.
“Sorry,” she says, spitting the stem out.
“Even worse,” her mother says. “Use a napkin or better yet just swallow.” Her mother’s finishing school isn’t for the faint of heart.
If someone asked, “What’s your relationship with your mother like?” Meghan would say—good. She admires her mother, loves her deeply, but the relationship is prescribed. She sees how critical her mother can be. The disdain through which her mother views the world has grown over time, but it doesn’t apply to her; she is either exempt or immune.
She thinks of the letter she wrote years ago thanking her mother for coming to school to visit the class. “Dear Mrs. Hitchens,” she wrote, copying what was on the board for all thirty students to write. No one told her to change the salutation to Dear Mom. Her mother called the letter a classic and had it framed.
Once they’re back upstairs, her father sets himself up in the living room. He has two televisions on as well as his computer and his devices. She thinks it’s cool that he’s tech savvy despite his age and his thick fingers, which poke at the keyboard like stiff sticks of chalk.
Even though it is midafternoon, her mother has housekeeping pull the blackout curtains and lies down in the dark with her travel pillow, travel blanket, and eye mask. Her mother alternately says that she can sleep anywhere at the drop of a hat and that she never sleeps a wink. For the first time it occurs to Meghan that both could be true.
She sits with her father for a few minutes, and when he seems lost to this world, she announces that she’s going to the pool.
“Do you need money?”
“No.”
“Take a room key so you can come and go without waking Mother.”
She makes a tour of the hotel. Cops with sniffer dogs walk in laps around the perimeter. A bus pulls in and two dozen men in suits get out. At first, she thinks they are part of some kind of delegation but then notices they’re all wearing the same lapel pin and have transparent coiled earpieces going from under their jackets into their ears—Secret Service. She smiles; they don’t smile back. Trucks from CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS test their satellites and lay miles and miles of thick cable running in every direction.
She ends up in a restaurant by the pool called the Clubhouse, writing a draft of a paper that’s due in two days.
“If you looked any more serious, they’d put you on Mount Rushmore.” A man whose hair is too shaggy for his age is looking at her. “What are you writing about?”
“Termites.”
“Seriously?” he asks.
She nods. “And you?”
“History in the making,” he says, gesturing to the air around them.
“It’s like New Year’s Eve, waiting for the ball drop,” she says.
“Something like that.”
She looks at him. He’s too old to just be chatting her up. She realizes that just by virtue of the fact that she’s there, people must think she’s older than she is—there are very few young people who just happen to be in Phoenix at this hotel on this particular day.
“Where do you live when you’re not by the pool?” he asks.
“Virginia.”
“As in Washington, DC?”
She shrugs. “Something like that. Didn’t your parents teach you not to talk to strangers?”
“No,” he says. “In fact, that’s how they made a living.” He extends his hand. “Mark Eisner.”
“Did your father run Disney?”
“Same name, different family.”
“Too bad,” she says, sitting up. “What brings you to Phoenix on this balmy day?”
“The spirit moved me.”
She waits for more details.
“Actually, I’m writing a book, or more like taking notes hoping that they will magically turn into a book.”
“Have you written books before?” she asks.
“I have,” he says. “My most recent was Every Four Years We Begin Again. I don’t suppose you read it. I am a social historian.”
“Does that mean you go around talking to strangers at parties?”
“Sometimes.”
“The one you’re working on now, do you have a hypothesis?” Despite appearing older, she is an eighteen-year-old high school student; everything must have a hypothesis.
“I’m looking at the evolution of political speechmaking.”
What does one say?
The good news is she doesn’t have to say anything; Eisner just keeps talking. “My father was a speechwriter; I imagine he wanted to be president.”
“I hear it’s quite competitive,” Meghan says.
“I’m the black sheep.”
She notices that the people walking by all have the same quality—trying too hard. She can’t define it further except to say it’s like they’re waiting to be discovered.
“Why are they here? That’s what I want to know,” she says, pointing them out to Eisner. “Is it because they bought a kind of election ticket—if he wins, they win? They’ll get jobs, a free move to DC, and a fresh start in life? They’re definitely jazzed. That’s the word my mother uses for when people are hepped up, that’s the word my father uses. I just say cray cray. But whatever it is, everyone around here is acting a little cray cray like they have a case of premature Beatlemania. And by the way, who is the Beatle? Because this guy is a seventy-one-year-old politician, with what some would call a checkered history.”
“That’s good,” Eisner says. “ ‘Who is the Beatle?’ Can I use that?”
She shrugs. “It’s yours if you can give me something about termites.”
He pauses. “Termite walks into a bar, asks, ‘Is the bar tender?’ ”
“Try again.”
“Pinocchio goes to the doctor’s office and says, ‘I think my prostate is enlarged; I’m leaking.’ The doctor shakes his head. ‘Your prostate is fine, but you have termites.’ ”
“Gross but okay.” Meghan scribbles it down. “I can’t include it in my paper and I’m not even sure I can tell it to the teacher for extra credit. The word prostate might not be allowed on campus. Prostrate, now we’re talking.” She laughs at herself. “Girls’ school.”
The historian laughs too. “Okay then. Maybe I’ll see you later.”
He didn’t even ask her name.
There is no dinner, just a heavy snack at six p.m. from room service. Her mother, who never eats at cocktail parties, has a bowl of soup and a roll, with the excuse that she knows there will be drinking in excess, and while she doesn’t usually eat carbohydrates, sometimes they are “required.” Her father has shrimp cocktail because it reminds him of a time long ago when he had shrimp in this same hotel and they were the size of 45 records. She’s not sure what that means, but he seems fond of the memory until they arrive and he remembers that he hates shrimp. She orders a burger—better safe than sorry.
Her parents dress as though the evening to come were an event, like a wedding. A lot of effort goes into it: showers, colognes, perfumes, jewelry, etc. When her mother washes her face, she never uses water; she uses something from an unmarked bottle dabbed onto a cotton pad. “Tap water is too harsh,” she says. From the back, her mother looks like Nancy Reagan. She’s thin but not skeletal. She does a lot of exercises on account of having had scoliosis as a child and having spent a year in a body cast.
“Can you imagine,” she tells people, “a five-year-old entombed for an entire year. I was traumatized. I don’t think I’ve recovered yet.” When Meghan asked her mother whether she played sports at school, her mother told her, “We didn’t have sports; we just had horses.” She’s from a Texas oil family, and Meghan’s parents met through her mother’s father—Papa Willard. “It wasn’t exactly an arranged marriage,” she says. “But it was certainly encouraged.” “You were getting old,” her father says, laughing. “It wasn’t like I hadn’t been asked,” her mother says. “I turned down all the boys. I wanted a life of my own, but that was unheard of in my family. So I just held out until your father came along. And I thought he was all right.”
While her parents are abluting their way toward dusk, Meghan puts on her dress, brushes her hair, and sits on the edge of the bed watching the early coverage.
“Do you think he’s going to win?” she asks.
“I don’t want to think about it,” her mother says. “The professionals are not optimistic, but it’s our job to be positive.”
“Is it always like this?”
“Like what?” Her mother wants to know.
“Such a big deal?”
“Yes,” her father says. “It is a big deal. The president steers the ship. Keep in mind it doesn’t just affect us, it affects the whole country. Do you remember the dinner we went to for John and Cindy in Washington?”
“You took me as your date.”
“We had a good time, didn’t we?” Her father smiles.
“But what was the point of that dinner? It was a whole lot of people sucking up or trying to.”
“Exactly,” her mother says.
“You have to pull people in,” her father says. “And keep ’em close.” He turns to face them, pink-faced, his white hair neatly combed back.
“You look dapper.”
“Thank you. Are we ready?” he asks.
“You know, I wouldn’t mind just skipping the whole thing,” her mother says.
“Out. Out the door.” Her father ushers them through the door quickly before her mother decides not to go. It wouldn’t be the first time that she was overcome by social anxiety and had to lie down.
They take the elevator up two floors. Her father has a schedule of parties. It’s like trick-or-treating; you go from party to party and you see some of the same people from the last party at the next party, but as they progress, the snacks get fancier, the crowd gets smaller, the rooms get nicer, and the flower arrangements multiply.
At every stop, as soon as they’re through the door, her father launches in. “How the heck are you?” He’s shaking hands, smacking shoulders, working the room.
And at every stop, her mother heads for the bar. “Vodka with a splash of soda on the rocks.”
“Twist?”
“Lime, thank you.”
“Could I have cranberry and seltzer?” Meghan says.
“You remember what I told you about drinks at parties?”
“Never pick up a drink once you’ve put it down, always get a fresh one. And better yet, just bring your own bottle of water. You trained me well.”
Her mother scowls.
“Did you know that some people are working on making something like a little Popsicle stick that you can dip into a drink to see if it has drugs in it?”
“When I was your age,” her mother says, “the boys just tried to get us tipsy. Boys your age try to make you unconscious. You’ve never had anything happen, have you? If you did, you’d tell me?”
“Mother, I go to an all-girls school. The only thing that’s happened is that two girls got made fun of for practicing making out. Personally, I think they’re gay.”
“Well then, just steer clear.”
Meghan and her mother stand around—looking at the others.
She tells her mother what she knows about termites.
“I’m just so glad you’re not like me,” her mother says. “You seem so natural. After all these years and all these parties, I still don’t have it mastered. If anything, it’s gotten more difficult.”
“Is gerrymandering named after someone I should know, like a historical figure?” Meghan asks her mother.
“No clue.” Her mother takes a piece of celery from a crudité sculpture. “Have this, it’ll keep you occupied and away from the—”
“Penis nuts,” Meghan says.
Her mother smiles. Penis nuts. That’s what her mother calls communal bowls of nuts. There are things one teaches a young girl: never eat the penis nuts. Men don’t wash their hands after they use the facilities. They sink their paws into the nuts while they’re waiting for a drink. If you must eat, take something that’s sticking straight up, celery, a cheese stick, a carrot, but god forbid, don’t dip it into anything; that’s the other weak spot, double dippers.
The next party has someone stationed at the door with a check-in list and little photos of everyone. “No crashers in this crowd,” her father whispers.
