The List Read online

  I looked at the stacks of papers and notepads on Isabelle’s desk. I didn’t see one single medal or trophy. If I were an elite athlete, even a retired one, I would tie my medal to my head and never ever take it off, even when going through airport security. Those pirates at TSA would just have to give me a CAT scan.

  “What is she doing at the Capitolist if she’s an Olympian?” I asked. “Shouldn’t she be coaching our next generation of champions?”

  She shrugged and gave one of Isabelle’s plastic bobbleheads a pat. “I have no idea. I think they just liked the fact that she was a tall, blond Olympian from Aspen. She came in tenth, but whatever. The Olympics is still kind of big-time. And she knows everyone. Except you, apparently.”

  Julia looked at her watch and logged onto her RSS reader. It showed 157 new stories since we’d started talking.

  “Crap,” she said, opening a new document. “I haven’t filed something in over an hour. I need a piece or I’m going to get bitch-slapped.”

  I assumed “bitch-slapped” was reporter speak for “lightly chided with a friendly hug” and kept asking her questions.

  “Wait, what about that one,” I asked, pointing to the last desk. Julia turned around and looked at the third, mostly empty, desk.

  “Oh, right. That’s Alison Lee. She’s sweet. Kind of down-homey. She’s from North Carolina, like from a dune. And she wears a lot of pinstripes. Why does she wear all these pinstripes? I’ve never had the heart to ask. Is she trying to tell someone that she’s a prisoner in this office? Because I get that. Or is it because she watches too much Law & Order? I don’t know. But she wears them almost every day. She doesn’t reveal much about herself, though—she’s the Mona Lisa of colleagues. And she’s pretty young, twenty-three, I think. Basically, when I was driving, she was in the third grade.”

  “Why is everyone in here so young?” I asked, looking around at the sea of intense twenty-somethings.

  “Because old people are not stupid enough to do these jobs,” replied Julia. “Nor do they have enough energy. Think of us like sled dogs. They use the young ones who can go the distance and take the crack of a whip and when we’re tired they trade us out. But you can’t be too resentful because everyone knows this is the best launching pad in journalism.”

  Right. Launching pad. Perhaps my grand visions of being a Capitolist lifer were a little ridiculous. But if I had to go from Capitolist reporter to senior features writer at the New York Times in a handful of years, I could deal.

  I wouldn’t meet the rest of my inner circle of colleagues that day. All three of them were working from the Capitol, so all I saw was their bylines, magically appearing again and again on the site. Meanwhile Julia and I looked for news and wrote it up as fast as our fingers could move. It kind of made my eyes cross. I would have to adapt.

  After turning around two articles by the grace of my high society connections and Julia’s charity, I understood what she meant by deep mental scars. There was clearly only one thing to do: start spending all spare waking hours hobnobbing with the Hill power players—or the people who kept their schedules.

  “Chiefs of staff and press secretaries are like bouncers in the Meatpacking District in New York,” explained Julia. “If you don’t win them over, you’ll get nothing.”

  “Nothing” sounded bad. “Nothing” sounded like I would have to spend the rest of my days reshelving books at Barnes & Noble. I resolved to woo these staffers like a playmate in a crowd of sailors.

  As the day wound down for the rest of the world, but just kept chugging along at the Capitolist, I convinced myself that, with a deep commitment to kissing political ass and a complete annihilation of my personal life, I could succeed at the List. Then I received my first reader comment. It was on the Speaker article Julia had helped me write.

  I scrolled to the notification and clicked on it.

  It came through our awkwardly formatted email system in small bold type.

  Adrienne Brown has received a reader’s comment:

  “Eat dick you fat Commi bitch whore!!!!!!!!”

  Thank you,

  The Capitolist

  Trying not to cry, I showed it to Julia. Maybe this was just some sort of first-day joke, like secret society hazing. In college I had to pluck a live chicken once. I was sure that as soon as Julia read it, she would start laughing and hand me a pink hair ribbon with my name on it.

  She skimmed it over, smiled, and turned around in her ergonomic chair. I waited for my hair ribbon, or for her to pick up the phone and report the inappropriate comment to a higher power.

  But nothing happened. When she could feel my eyes on her, she turned back around and looked at my screen.

  “That part is all formatted,” she said, pointing to the top and bottom of the email with a bored finger. Dragging her thumb over the body of the email, she said, “The only part the reader wrote was ‘Eat dick you fat Commi bitch whore.’ ”

  “Right, understood,” I said shakily. “And a thank-you from the Capitolist to me for reading the comment. How thoughtful.”

  “Be prepared,” Julia said as she shot her seventh story of the day to Rachel. “I get them all the time. Some are so racist. They call Michelle Obama MoMo the gorilla. They write things I thought only Klan members would dare type out. I have a folder with over five hundred comments that I keep, just in case one of these people ever tries to shoot the president or something.”

  How wonderful. I had never corresponded with a band of racists before. Now I would learn what it was like to have my soul eat itself.

  “Should I write back when this happens? I mean, I have their email address, right? Can I just write ‘thank you for your time, you depraved, racist lunatic. I look forward to our future correspondence the way I look forward to a spinal tap’?”

  Julia shook her head no. “No, no, never write back. You don’t want to anger the crazy racists. They know your name, where you work. They could come over here and shoot you with their homemade weapons. Better to just file them away to hand over to the police one day. Plus, we signed neutrality agreements. Can’t express an opinion one way or the other.”

  Neutral. I could do that. I was the queen of neutrality. My mother might disagree, based on an incident in 1998 when I tried to have my sister arrested for un-American activities, but I had grown since then. I had skimmed the company policy demanding that we just “shrug off the crazies and keep on typing” and clearly I had to obey. I would just ignore these lunatics who took time out of their days to type me offensive emails. I would stay the course. The quiet course.

  For the next two hours, I ignored my hate mail and personally called every single press secretary I could find outside of working hours on Capitol Hill. I made small talk, I tried to arrange meet-and-greets, I grilled them about the stylish things their bosses were doing. Then I reached out to three old socialites who still kind of liked my mother and asked if I could take them to lunch. I figured that jumping on the rich, arthritic crowd was a good place to start.

  When I put down the phone and reclined in my chair, people looked at me like I was sitting there enjoying a paid vacation. And when I got up to go to the bathroom, a Web editor asked if I was lost.

  Work was the only thing you were supposed to do inside the Capitolist walls, and if that meant typing while dehydrated, so be it. You only got ahead one way in life, and that was working harder, longer, faster, and with less water than everyone else.

  At 8 P.M., I was happy to head back to Virginia and the “home” I shared with apolitical animals. They were actual animals, but whatever. They weren’t going to tell me I had five minutes to get two fresh quotes and twelve minutes to turn them into “something palatable.” Before I left, I printed out the three articles I had written as well as my first comment. My mother hadn’t added to my scrapbook since I broke an opponent’s nose at field hockey camp in the late nineties, but I thought it might be time.

  The drive home took an hour and a half. I thought about all t
he places I could have flown in that time: Boston. Lexington. Charleston. Cleveland, perhaps? Instead I was listening to the German-language CD I had purchased for my commute and was reciting words related to the home.

  At the end of my parents’ long stone driveway, I parked my car, changed into my Tod’s loafers to save my shiny pin heels from the dirt of country living, passed the barn, and went in search of human contact.

  My mom was busy ruining store-bought beef bourguignon, but she paused in her destruction to cluck at my appearance.

  “Oh, good. You’re home. I thought for a second you’d either flown back to New York or been abducted. I could think of no other options besides those two.” She gave me a hug, fastened her arm around me, and pulled my face into the light that illuminated the cooktop. “You look really pale . . . green, almost. Like a frog with streaky blond hair and eyebrows,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t get out much today,” I said. She pinched my dry, pale skin and swabbed at my face with olive oil.

  “Your father can’t wait to see you,” she said, going back to her stirring. “He’s busy spending a fortune on some prize horse in Argentina with your sister. I knew I should never have let him watch Secretariat. But he’ll be back in a few weeks. They’ve got the best horse movers in that crazy country driving the poor thing up here, but you know your dad, he’s along for the ride.”

  “Better him than me,” I said while my mother fluttered her blue eyes at me and bopped me on the nose with a wooden spoon.

  “Well, Payton and your father, they’re happiest when they’re riding. We’re the wordsmiths, they’re the true horse people.”

  That night, my mother gave me a free dinner, a heavy pour of Rémy Martin, and a speech about the good old days of journalism. She asked why the Capitolist demanded so much work. Three stories on day one, she noted—did I want to lose the ability to bend my hands in my later years?

  “We used to have so much fun in the newsroom. Smoking pot in the stairwells before staff meetings. It was like a big celebration of grass and words,” she said, sliding a bowl of Kalamata olives toward me across the smooth wooden kitchen table.

  “Sounds swell, Mom,” I answered, declining the pitted snack. “Like Woodstock with pencils.”

  She ignored me and kept telling her stories about the old days, more for her own benefit than mine. As much as she appreciated not getting milk spilled on her head by crazed housewives, I knew she missed the pace and the bylines sometimes.

  “I’ll never forget the time when I stayed incredibly late, like eleven or something, and I walked into the book room to grab the new Social Registry, and there were Clyde and Sharon—you remember Sharon, she was the old food editor. She gave you that Pasta Making for Kids book you liked so much?”

  I had no idea. But I clearly should hate this Sharon for making me a carb addict so early on.

  My mother was still talking. “Anyway. She and Clyde were going at it like wild animals. Naked in the stacks. She was married at the time, of course. I think her husband was a professor at Johns Hopkins. Ethnobotany, to be precise.” Placing a pit into a monogrammed cocktail napkin, she said, “I saw them doing it in the newsroom once, too, but that was after her second divorce. They didn’t give a hoot who saw once it was kosher.”

  I thought I would rather shave my eyebrows off and eat them than have sex in our newsroom. I had to get away from her old-lady reminiscing. I made my excuses and skulked in my loafers out to the barn, where I cracked one of the windows and listened to the sounds of early fall. When the turning leaves all fell in a few weeks, I would be able to see the Blue Ridge Mountains. Now I could see the moon shining down on the manicured fields.

  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 be
tter 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.

  CHAPTER 3

  It 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.