Walsh (D) |
Slaughter (R) |
Spread |
40 |
44 |
Slaughter +4 |
The trick was figuring out what to say to someone who’d just paid $50,000 to have dinner with you.
“You’re right. There’s such a bias against successful people in this country right now.” Charlotte agreed with the biggest real estate developer in eastern Pennsylvania over a white-tablecloth fundraising dinner of five courses donated by a James Beard–winning chef. It was hard not to feel like a high-end escort as she pandered to each of the twenty-five potential donors. Josh called it speed dating for money. Charlotte had run a company that made more money than anyone in the room, and yet she had no choice but to prostrate herself to each of them. They were all white. All men. Because their sizable checks bought them face time and access, Charlotte smiled when one man suggested he’d make an excellent ambassador to Switzerland, when another gave her a detailed description regarding how he could personally make the peace with North Korea, and even when one insisted the problem with America was all the “fucking Asians.” Charlotte gave them Leila’s email, showed some teeth, and asked them to stay in touch. For $50,000 a night, she never said no. She never laughed in their faces. She never showed her disgust.
The one time she came close was when a particularly intoxicated octogenarian attorney—the head of the Bar Association, she’d later learn—palmed her ass while they stood in line to get a drink at the bar. His fingers tickled the insides of her thighs while his wet whisper landed in her ear in a voice that was gruff and stale. “Let me help you get to the real money.” She shifted her elbow so that it jabbed him directly below the ribs, eliciting a grunt that could have been a cough to anyone listening. “I don’t want your fucking money,” she said in a barely audible whisper.
Against all of her better instincts that told her to scratch at his eyes and announce his impropriety to the room, she backed slowly away from the bald, yellow-skinned man with sloping shoulders and rheumy eyes, worried one cross word spoken any louder would ripple through the testosterone-filled room like a pebble disturbing an otherwise placid pond.
“You should have had that motherfucker thrown out of here for touching you like that,” Leila said with anger and outrage in her eyes as they washed their hands in the bathroom. “We don’t have to tolerate this anymore. Hashtag Me Too.” Charlotte’s reaction to the impropriety was more muted. Yes, she was disgusted, but she was from a generation of women who normalized bad behavior from men in power. Less than twenty years her junior, Leila would lead the battle against those kinds of men.
Charlotte looked in vain for paper towels and then shook her hands futilely beneath the dryer. “I handled it my way. When it happens to you, then you handle it yours.” She was exhausted.
Charlotte had been in the southern part of the state for one of the longest days of her life. She’d spent the morning in Section Eight housing on the edge of West Philly planning to speak about sentencing reform and then changed her tune when the women there wanted to talk about STEM education for young girls in PA public schools. “Black women voters are going to be key in this race,” Josh counseled her afterward. “One woman told me that if a girl like Leila worked for a woman like you then you had to be doing something good.”
Their next stop was the Muslim Women’s Association at Penn, where a young woman described having her head scarf ripped from her head on the subway while a group of otherwise innocuous students spat on her and called her a sand nigger.
In a meeting with the campus newspaper, the head of the editorial board, a short blonde with jaunty freckles wearing a BLACK LIVES MATTER pin the size of her head, grilled her. “As a cis hetero white lady who makes more than a million dollars a year, what do you know about the plight of the Latino immigrant?” Charlotte told her it was such an astute question and delivered the right kind of answer even as she inwardly rolled her eyes at a girl whose heart was in the right place but who had probably never ventured past the wrong side of Forty-Third Street. I’ll bet you’re from Connecticut. Your mom teaches Pilates and drives a Range Rover, your dad works at a hedge fund, and you once kissed a sorority sister after drinking too much grappa at the Sigma Chi formal. I see you.
She heard Leila murmur low enough that the young woman couldn’t hear. “Congrats on being so woke.”
Charlotte’s next stop was the local fire department, where she met the crew for lunch—bologna on white bread—and posed for a picture driving their fire truck. She stopped by a farmers’ market where she listened to complaints about everything from terrible cell phone reception in the state to the slow legalization of recreational marijuana. In the afternoon she shot a Facebook video at the Philadelphia Zoo with a three-legged baby giraffe that had recently been described in the Philadelphia Inquirer as a “paragon of the balance we should all strive for in challenging times.” Charlotte next made a grand show of eating cheesesteaks from both Pat’s and Geno’s, competing franchises in South Philadelphia with rabid fan bases. They were nearly identical, both covered in imitation cheese, fried onions, and peppers, and dripping grease onto her lap. She’d declared a tie between the two sandwiches. “Cheesesteak diplomacy,” Josh called it.
It was easier now to understand why and how Slaughter tailored his talking points to match the crowd. She often found herself doing something similar, and the awareness of it ate at her. There was such a fine line between pandering and tailoring her message. With people under thirty she talked about legalizing marijuana and eliminating student debt. With people over fifty she proposed expanding Medicare. With the lower and middle classes she promised jobs and job training. For the rich she promised tax breaks that would make the government less likely to expand Medicare and pay for job training. Charlotte needed the money from the wealthy voters, but she needed the minority voters in the urban areas like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to turn out on Election Day to secure a win.
They exited the fundraiser through the kitchen.
“We should always go through the kitchen, shake hands with the staff,” Josh insisted. “No matter how nice a place you’re in, always leave through the kitchen.” He talked to himself as much as to her, checking off the basics. “When you start ignoring the kitchens, you’ve lost touch.”
They took twenty minutes to wind through the large industrial kitchen. Most of the staff were pleased to steal a moment away from a blistering stove or sink piled high with wineglasses and coffee mugs. They were mostly Latino, some of them Chinese. More men than women.
They cheered when she walked in.
“They know me,” she whispered to Josh. “They know me better than the people out there.”
“Half of them are smiling because they don’t want to be deported. The other half are smiling because these people still believe a politician can help change their lives. They still believe in the American dream. No one dreams it harder than these guys. They aren’t jaded. It’s a shame only half of them can legally vote. Keep smiling. Keep shaking hands.” The men’s hands were strong, rough, and wrinkled from soaking in water all day long, their grins wide and honest. She thanked each of them enthusiastically and earnestly.
They didn’t begin the three-hour drive home to Elk Hollow until shortly after midnight. It was important to Charlotte to sleep in her own bed and be there when her girls woke up as often as possible. It wasn’t always possible. The state was wide, five hours from Philly to Pittsburgh. Humanity’s founders had eagerly offered her use of the company’s private jet, but when she’d mentioned it to Josh he’d given her a look as though she’d suggested they use the skin of puppies to fashion their yard signs.
Leila produced a bottle of Purell and an apple from her own purse. The skin on Charlotte’s palms had chapped and scabbed from hundreds of handshakes and reapplications of the hand sanitizer. Politicians on the campaign trail contracted nine times more colds than the average person. Long after the campaign ended, the smell of disinfectant would make Charlotte nauseous. The other night, on a similar drive, Leila had handed her a bottle of Ambien.
“I don’t need these.” Charlotte pushed them away.
“You need sleep.”
“I hate pills.”
“I hate you when you don’t sleep.”
Leila’s Mary Poppins purse also contained Band-Aids, Advil, nasal spray, a solar phone charger, a small flashlight, and gum.
“I want to be next to you in an earthquake,” Josh remarked the first time he saw its contents.
Leila wagged her head. “No, you don’t. Right now, I’m support staff. In an earthquake it’s every man for himself.”
On her way home Charlotte texted Max, but he didn’t answer.
She fell asleep somewhere near Allentown, the illuminated road signs blurring and burning into her dreams.
*
A crew had come by to clean the first floor of Charlotte’s house the day before, but it didn’t make much of a difference. By Saturday morning, the day of her Vanity Fair interview, the place had once again been hit by the tornado of three small girls—the carpet coated in a shroud of puzzle pieces, tiny white teacups, pink clip-in hair extensions, and Annie’s purple feather boa that shed a piece of itself everywhere it went. Charlotte straightened the cushions on the couch and swiped crumbs off the coffee table with the pinky edge of her palm.
Julia Schulz-Davies was due in an hour. Julia Schulz-Davies, who’d won a Pulitzer Prize last year for her investigation of labor abuses in smartphone factories, who’d once confronted the president on inaccurate unemployment statistics during an official White House dinner, who’d written a bestselling memoir about her two years covering the war in Afghanistan, during which time she’d almost been blown up by an IED on three occasions and had fallen in love with a marine and adopted an Afghan baby boy. Julia Schulz-Davies would be there any minute and Max was still out for his morning run, a run that had already taken over two hours.
Charlotte yawned and swallowed a long gulp of her coffee as Kara attempted to erase the violet circles beneath her eyes with a tool that resembled a sea sponge and smelled like a wet sock. Her presence made Charlotte feel anchored in the world. She needed Kara’s calming energy as much as she needed her concealer.
“How’d you get here?” Charlotte peered out the front window, hoping to see her husband huffing his way up the driveway.
“Paul dropped me and ran down the Acme to get an egg burrito. He’ll be back in a few.”
“When?”
“Wipe that look off your face, girl.” Kara placed her hands on her hips. “Don’t worry about him, Charlie. He’s gonna be good today.” Charlotte’s decision to include Paul in the interview hadn’t been made lightly, and if it had been up to her she’d have kept him out of it. But the reporter wanted to talk to her whole family for this story. A few days earlier she’d hired Paul as something called a “special advisor for local affairs,” giving him $2,000 a month out of her own pocket in the hopes that the money would keep him from behaving like an asshole.
“You know he’s only drinkin’ Thursday through Sunday now, and he laid off the sauce today so he could do this interview with you. He’s real excited. He got a tie.”
“I’m not worried,” Charlotte lied.
She heard the creak of the front door. Max continued to jog slowly as he made his way through the house. Seeing him in his absurdly tight high-performance running pants that left nothing to the imagination made Charlotte’s blood boil. It must be nice to have enough free time for a two-hour jog.
“Where were you?” Charlotte asked her husband.
“Running,” Max replied like she was stupid for asking. “Fastest time yet. I texted you my MapMyRun. I’m taking the quickest shower that’s ever been taken and I’ll be down here in ten minutes. I have plenty of time. You worry too much.”
True to his word, in less than five minutes Max was hovering over the stove frying bacon and onions.
“You can’t walk into a house that smells like bacon and be disappointed,” he remarked to no one in particular. “Unless you’re a vegetarian. Shit. Do you think the reporter might be a vegetarian?”
The sound of the doorbell brought Annie hurtling toward the door, stark naked, to greet their guests. When she realized it was a stranger she came to a halt, collected herself, and extended a formal handshake to the woman.
“I am peas to eat you,” Annie said to Julia Schulz-Davies. The twins erupted in giggles behind her.
The reporter was the tiniest woman Charlotte had ever seen. She had to be four foot eleven, but Charlotte imagined she told people, with certainty, that she was five foot one. Her movements were quick and rigid like those of a captive mongoose. She wore a severe black bob, black pants, a crisp white silk shirt, and chunky tortoiseshell glasses that magnified her little eyes and made her resemble one of those Japanese cartoon characters.
“I am peas to eat you, too,” she said kneeling to Annie’s level. Behind her a giant of a man in his fifties with a shock of gray hair and generous eyebrows to match struggled with an enormous camera bag, tripod, and light in the doorway. Ella held George Washington up toward the reporter.
“Would you like to kiss him? His beard is softer than you think.” The little girl pushed the lizard in the direction of the woman’s mouth. The reporter reached out her hand for a polite pat but made no attempt to put her lips on the bearded dragon.
When Julia stood back up, her forehead just reached Charlotte’s shoulders. “Ms. Walsh. Wonderful to meet you. I’m Julia Schulz-Davies. We spoke briefly on the phone. This is Jackson Strait. He’ll be shooting the pictures and some video for the digital version of the piece. It smells absolutely delicious in here.” The reporter flashed a charming smile.
“Max is making a late breakfast for everyone. He figured you’d be hungry after the trip down from New York.”
“That will be a wonderful shot. Max in the kitchen. Jackson, why don’t you get it now? Do some stills and get some b-roll.” She pivoted back to Charlotte so quickly it looked like a ballet pirouette. “Your daughters are beautiful. You don’t mind if we snap them?”
“We don’t mind at all,” Josh’s voice boomed from the living room. “Julia, so good to see you again.”
Charlotte thought she saw a cloud pass over the reporter’s face when she laid eyes on Josh, though it was quickly replaced with a professional smile.
“Josh. Lovely as always. Thank you for giving us such great access to the candidate. This will be a really special piece. You’re an inspiration to a lot of women, Ms. Walsh.”
“Please. Call me Charlotte. Sit down. This is Leila Kelly, my chief of staff. She came with me from Humanity. And my sister-in-law, Kara. We hired her to do my hair and makeup for most of my events. My brother should be here shortly. After this we can go down to campaign headquarters if you like and you can meet the rest of the team—fundraising, community outreach, et cetera.”
Julia waved her hand in the air, tracing a figure eight with her index finger.
“No need. This profile is about you as much as it is about the campaign. You’re the first woman who truly has a shot at a Pennsylvania Senate seat. And of course your work at Humanity is incredibly interesting to our readers, too.”
“Thank you,” Charlotte said, gesturing at Julia to take a seat on the couch. “I think so, too. We do have a real shot at this.”
Julia leaned back into the cushions and positioned a digital recorder on the table as she extracted a small blue notebook from her purse. “I like to take notes while I record. I don’t trust technology.” The reporter tapped on the recorder’s tiny microphone with skepticism before she continued. “I’m going to ask you the question everyone is asking you first, and I’ll probably ask it again in an hour or so and one more time before I leave. Why are you doing this? You’re one of the most powerful women in business today, certainly in Silicon Valley. You have three young children. Why enter this rat race?”
“Most people don’t ask men why they want to run for office or mention their children,” Charlotte countered.
A sly smile spread slowly over the reporter’s lips. This was the parry she’d come for.
“No. No, they wouldn’t, would they? Let’s stick to the first part of the question then. Why give up your big and important job in the most disruptive field in the country to essentially become middle management in a staggering bureaucracy that takes years to accomplish anything worthwhile?”
Charlotte liked her. “You have a bleak view of our federal government.”
“I prefer to think of it as realistic.”
Now she could give the answer she wanted to give. “I’m running because I can do a better job than the guy who has the job right now. I have three daughters. I want them to see more women who lead.”
“But you already lead. You may not be the CEO or president of Humanity, but you’re certainly one of the big bosses there. In fact, more people know your name than know those of the founders of that company. Your book was a bestseller. Every time a CEO position comes up out in Silicon Valley your name is on the very short list.”
Charlotte smiled and nodded in a way she hoped came across as humble. “I’m proud of those achievements. But I can do more. Let’s go back to what you said about Washington being a staggering bureaucracy where it’s difficult to accomplish anything. I’m an outsider to Washington and I think that’s a good thing. Americans don’t seem to give a shit about left and right anymore. They care about whether or not they’re one of the haves or the have-nots. I’ve been both. At Humanity we employ more than a hundred thousand full-time employees around the globe. We’ve figured out how to improve each and every single one of their lives in addition to improving the lives of our clients and our consumers. I’m used to getting things done, to fixing things. I can bring that to Washington.” She was getting more and more adept at saying a lot without actually saying anything at all.
“Why Pennsylvania?”
“I’m from here.”
“You haven’t lived here in nearly thirty years.”
“It’s my home. I grew up here and went to college here. It’s a state that needs my help right now more than California does.”
“So why not open a Humanity office here instead? Something with a lot of jobs?”
“We’ve already looked at moving an engineering hub to Pittsburgh near the Carnegie Mellon campus and a marketing office to Philadelphia instead of opening a new one in New York. Those things have been in the works for a couple of years now.”
“Who wants bacon?” Max waltzed into the room with a platter of sizzling meat.
Julia raised her hand like a schoolchild.
Balancing a plate of bacon and eggs on her knees, Julia turned her attention to Max. “Besides being a whiz in the kitchen, what else are you working on these days?” Josh had coached Max to tell reporters he was still consulting for Humanity while taking on full-time parenting duties. It suited both Max’s ego and a traditional media narrative of masculinity. In other words, he still had a job.
“I’m here to support Charlotte. That’s my number one priority right now.” He shot Julia a grin.
“You seem too good to be true.”
Charlotte had to remind herself that she wanted this woman to be charmed by her husband. “He is,” she said.
“Do you two fight?” Julia was smooth, knew when to flatter her subjects, when to befriend them, and when to blindside them with a question they weren’t prepared to answer.
Julia spoke in Max’s direction, but Charlotte answered first with an uneasy laugh. The question overwhelmed her more than she’d expected, and she began to wonder how much Julia knew about her marriage. “Every couple fights. We have three kids under six. That struggle is real. We both had high-stress jobs. We just uprooted our lives and moved across the country. There’s stress. But we don’t have big blowups.” The truth was that in the past week they’d fought about whether the girls should be allowed to be here for this interview, whether Max had time to fly back to California to run a half marathon to qualify for his stupid Ironman, and twice more over why they couldn’t hire a regular cleaning lady and nanny. The house had also been thick with new tensions Charlotte couldn’t figure out the source of, nor did she have the energy to sit her husband down and discuss everything that was bothering him.
Josh intervened. “Charlotte’s an open book. It’s part of what makes her so appealing. She doesn’t have that politician’s filter.” He cast a loaded glance down at her kids, who were building a fort in the corner out of discarded pizza boxes Max saved specifically for that purpose (“So sustainable!” Julia commented). Josh’s gaze at the children signaled that it was unsavory to ask more probing marital questions in reach of their delicate ears. Charlotte’s children once again became armor, protecting her from further inquiries about the state of her marriage.
Paul knocked and let himself in the front door. He was dressed in one of Max’s heavy Fair Isle sweaters that Charlotte had shrunk in the wash. She could see a red tie knotted in the collar of a blue oxford underneath. His hair was combed behind his ears.
“The NRA is a terrorist organization,” Charlotte insisted.
“It’s a terrorist organization that can get you votes and get you elected so you can take them down.”
“And what are your politics, Paul?” Julia asked, once Charlotte’s brother settled himself in the armchair.
“I’m a patriot.” It sounded like something he’d heard someone say on television or in a bar.
“And what does that mean in today’s world?”
Her brother squirmed in his seat like a child. He seemed completely focused one moment and twitchy and self-conscious the next. “Hell if I know.” That made Julia laugh out loud.
“Did you vote for Ted Slaughter?”
“Weren’t any better options.”
“Would you vote for him again if your sister weren’t running?”
“That’s a stupid question to ask, since she is.”
“Touché.” Julia smiled. “How about this: What was your sister like as a little girl?”
Paul shot Charlotte a look asking permission to speak. She nodded and flashed an encouraging smile.
“Brainy. You know, she was on the gifted track and all.” He didn’t use the words he used to use to describe her when she was a girl—bossy, know-it-all, eventually bitch. “Always readin’. The best shot in Lackawanna County.”
“Pardon?”
“Girl hit her first buck at age twelve. Eighteen-point whitetail in one shot.”
Charlotte had expected this, but it still made her uncomfortable. It was a setup. They’d practiced it. Josh had been adamant that she needed to find a way to appeal to voters who typically voted for Ted Slaughter, rural voters, blue-collar voters, farmers, hunters.
“I’m going to need you to shoot a gun,” he explained to her.
“Doing this doesn’t make sense. I support stricter gun control,” Charlotte countered.
“So do most reasonable people,” Josh said. “But you can’t make it happen if you don’t get elected. Get the votes, then change the law.”
“It’s a trick. We’re tricking people.”
“These voters won’t remember it as a trick if their kid doesn’t get shot up at school.”
“Maybe some of your fellow liberals will scoff at the thought of their candidate as a twelve-year-old girl wielding a Winchester, but it doesn’t matter. They’ll vote for you anyway. Guns and abortion are still the major wedge issues in Pennsylvania. These rural voters will drool. Pretty lady has a gun just like me.” He affected a dopey and slow and completely inaccurate interpretation of the northeastern Pennsylvania accent.
“You know they’re not stupid, Josh,” Charlotte shot back, more offended than she’d expected to be at his caricature. When she’d been a little girl her favorite thing to do had been to go hunting with her dad. She hadn’t talked about it in thirty years and soon the memory had faded as though it was something that had happened to someone else a long time ago. She used to love being in the woods with Marty, squishing through marshes of cattails and crunching through shrubs and groves of sturdy-trunked trees to reach the duck blind before five in the morning. Charlotte went there sometimes by herself. It was her favorite place to read and where she’d devoured all of the Laura Ingalls Wilder and Nancy Drew books. She reveled in the patience it took to be a serious hunter and still believed in the sport as long as people played by the rules and ate what they killed. When she was little, the Walsh household had had a winter’s worth of venison steaks in their freezer. There was a difference between owning a gun to hunt your food and owning a semiautomatic weapon that could kill a hundred people in the blink of an eye, and Charlotte had never understood why the two ideas couldn’t be separated by politicians to create reasonable gun control legislation.
Josh actually waggled his finger in her face during their discussion. “I’m not saying rural voters are any more stupid than liberals when it comes to voting on superficial characteristics. The left puts their own labels on you without thinking—woman, Ivy League, feminist, pro-choice. They think they know, without asking, that in your heart you believe in single-payer health care and free tuition at public colleges. Everyone is a simpleton when it comes to identity politics.”
Julia turned to Charlotte. “The best shot in Lackawanna County, huh?” the reporter repeated with an eager smile. “Now that’s something I’d like to see.”
They’d practiced this part, too.
“Charlie can show youse.” Paul gestured toward the backyard, perfectly playing the part of the hokey older brother. He was earning his two grand. “We’ve always got cans set up out back for target practice. Come out. You ever shot a gun before, Julia?”
“A time or two.”
Charlotte cleared her throat and pretended to protest.
Max hated this hunter narrative, and it had been the subject of another fight this week. “How do we explain this to the girls? They’re not old enough to discuss the cycle of life and death or that Mommy once killed Bambi.”
“We explain it to them the same way my dad explained it to me.” In northeastern Pennsylvania, hunting was a part of life. Kids wore blaze-orange jackets and camouflage pants as soon as they could walk.
Max snorted. “I’m sure that was eloquent.”
“It was. The same way your family explained it to you.”
“They didn’t. I just saw a bloody deer corpse on the top of my uncle’s car one day and was told to skin the bastard. There’s a reason I left this damn town, Charlie. I hate this shit.”
Charlotte grabbed a green canvas hunting coat that looked old, stained, and beaten, but had been purchased by Josh at Walmart only twenty-four hours earlier. The small deception brought Charlotte a twinge of shame. Her dad’s old Winchester was real enough, a rough-around-the-edges, no-frills, functional gun. Charlotte had been practicing with it for days and had been surprised to feel her muscle memory kick in alongside the sense of calm and immediate purpose she felt with the heavy wood in her hands, the acrid smell of ammonia and smoke clogging her nostrils.
“Get this on video,” Julia ordered her cameraman.
Max told Leila to keep the girls inside the house, but Ella raced into the backyard.
“Mommy’s got a gun!” Ella jumped up and down. “Mommy’s gonna shoot it!”
They led the reporter carefully away from a few bits of dog shit Max had forgotten to pick up. Charlotte squinted at the three cans of Keystone Light lined up on a two-by-four supported by cinder blocks. She widened her stance. She’d gone ten for twenty earlier in the week, but now she just needed to hit one. Preferably the first one and they could go inside and start talking about the minimum wage, eliminating student debt, and paid parental leave.
The gun cocked hard against Charlotte’s cheek. It would leave a mark. Her fault for not getting it settled before she took the shot. She was off, but not by much. She closed her eyes, visualized the target, the way her dad had taught her. He’d had no idea at the time that he was teaching her a way to meditate, to still herself in the most difficult of circumstances. It was a tool she’d used over and over as an adult. I forgot this was where it came from.
She always felt it in her bones when she nailed a shot. The second bullet sliced through the can, sending a spray of foam into the air.
“Your turn.” Paul turned to the reporter. If Julia Schulz-Davies knew this was a setup, she didn’t seem to care. The story was a good one. The pictures and videos would get a lot of traffic.
Julia raised her hand in protest. “Maybe next time.”
“Come on. Just one shot.” Charlotte’s brother was persistent. Julia took the gun reluctantly. When she rolled up her sleeves, Charlotte was both taken aback and delighted by an intricate black-and-white tattoo of a bald eagle spread across Julia’s forearm. She expertly nailed three cans in four shots.
As they walked back into the house Julia linked her arm through Charlotte’s. “It’s always nice to surprise people, isn’t it?”