Her heels began to sink in the newly warm, moist earth of the Rose Garden. She had worn her prettiest, highest heels; a mistake. They were like lance points against the earth. She felt herself sinking, as if into quicksand. They would have to get a crane to pull her out, so deeply embedded were those stiletto heels. It would be mortifying. She would see it on national television — the crane was huge, and it was lifting her up, up, up, high into the air and out across Pennsylvania Avenue, and people were pointing and laughing.
She saw a familiar face. “Look, it’s Sandor Vanocur,” she whispered to the young man standing beside her.
“He’s around a lot,” Jay Broderick said. He was standing with his hand on his hip, his Nikon draped casually around his neck, as if it were nothing at all, being at the White House, waiting for President Kennedy to emerge. She envied his nonchalance. Each time she stole a sideways glance at the Secret Service men, with their hard, flat faces and watchful eyes, the muscles in her stomach quivered. It would not have surprised her in the least if one of them came over to her, took her firmly by the arm and led her away, saying, “We know you. You are Mary Elizabeth Springer, you are only the treasurer of the Class of 1956 at Belvedere High School, and you have no right to be here. Come with us.”
And they would take her away, to some dark, secret chamber in the bowels of the White House, where J. Edgar Hoover would beat her with a rubber hose. President Kennedy would walk by and say, “Edgar, aren’t you being a little rough?” and J. Edgar would reply, “You never read I Was a Communist for the FBI! They are everywhere. Even in Belvedere High School.” The president would nod sadly and say to her, “Sorry, kid, I tried.”
She shifted her weight, pulled one of her heels from the earth. Her apprehension turned to dismay. The dirt clung to the suede as if it had been coated with glue. Surely they were ruined, and they were brand new and cost her fourteen dollars. Thrift was bred into her bones; for an instant, she even forgot to be terrified.
Another face swam into view. It was pale and creased, but the eyes seemed young and alert. The man wore a striped dress shirt with what seemed to be an unusually high collar, which gave him an aspect that was distinctly not contemporary. He could, she thought, have been a gentleman from the nineteenth century.
“Eddie Folliard from The Washington Post,” Jay told her, and she said, “Oh,” letting her breath out a little. She had seen his byline often in the crisp, bold Bodoni type of the Post. Names in those bylines seemed like the names of gods. Occasionally, she would try to imagine her name in that Bodoni type, but she felt both guilty and a little apprehensive as she did it. Such hubris might bring down punishment from His Terrible Swift Sword. When she was a child, she’d had nightmares about that sword after the Reverend Mr. Swiggins’s Sunday sermons. It was a metaphor of which he was fond. The sword was huge and sharp and glittered in the air, and it cut down sinners in a single bloody stroke. After such dreams, she straightened her room and did not lie for a week.
She turned and saw, standing next to her, a youngish man with a bemused look on his face. He was so familiar that at first she wondered if someone else from Belvedere could possibly be there. But then she realized it was David Brinkley, wearing the same expression he wore on The Huntley-Brinkley Report each evening, one that said the world was certainly an odd and interesting place. That was how it was with television people. They weren’t like movie stars, remote and glorious. You saw them so often in your living room that it was easy to mistake them for the grocer or the man who sold you shoes.
“Hurry up and wait, it’s always like this around here,” Jay complained. He seemed so much older and sophisticated here — in a way that he did not back at the paper — that she stepped closer to him, to move into the circle of his nonchalance.
“Hi, Jay, how’s it hanging?” A reed-thin man, whom she judged to be in his early thirties, moved next to Jay.
“Jeez, I could use a sale. What’s AP buying these days? I got zilch the last stuff I sent.”
“The new guy likes tits. But respectable, no nipples. No bodies, unless it’s mob guys or coloreds.”
“I got one. Mob guy, twenty-seven bullet holes, had a sex change, grew up in Harlem.”
“Bullet holes in the tits?”
“Nope. Got her in the crotch.”
“Crop it at the waist and you’re golden,” the thin man said and walked away. Mary fairly hissed at Jay: “We’re in the Rose Garden at the White House!”
Jay chuckled. “Photographers would crap on the Taj Mahal. We’re not civilized.”
Just then the door to the Oval Office opened and out walked John Kennedy — followed, a few steps behind, by John Glenn and Alan Shepard. Her jaw dropped, unattractively. She hauled it up again. Her first time at the White House and she got the president and two astronauts. What a stroke of luck.
The members of the press corps surged forward and crowded around. Kennedy’s lips parted in the beginning of a mischievous grin. He liked surprises.
“A couple of servicemen dropped by. They’re not Navy, but we fed them anyway,” he said.
“What did you give them?” asked Reuters. Reuters, for some reason, had a thing for menus.
“C rations on the Eisenhower china,” Kennedy said. “Military all the way.”
The two astronauts grinned, and the reporters pounced; it was more than they had expected. The announced guests were a bunch of kids from Iowa who were giving the president a 4-H award, and a diplomat from Cameroon. The president stood like a proud papa displaying precocious children as the astronauts fielded questions.
Mary moved, carefully, so as not to attract attention, to the edge of the throng and found a spot where, if she wanted to, she could have reached out and touched the president. As she did so, an errant shaft of sunlight caught the president’s head, glinting from his brownish auburn hair. All Mary could think of was the haloed Christ praying in a beam of light in the garden of Gethsemane — a favorite piece of art of the Reverend Mr. Swiggins. She stood absolutely still, looking at him. He was, she realized, larger than his pictures made him seem, full in the shoulders and chest, the lines in his thickening neck quite visible, but his face tanned and young. He seemed so remarkable, standing in the beam of sunlight, that all she could do was stare. He must have somehow felt the intensity of her gaze because he turned his head to look at her, and for a moment those bright blue eyes looked directly into hers. Startled, she looked away. But then, since the other reporters seemed busy with the astronauts, she spoke. Afterwards she wondered how on earth she had ever gotten the nerve.
“Mr. President, can we really beat the Russians to the moon?”
He looked at her again, those blue eyes seeming to appraise her, and suddenly she was terrified once more, thinking that he must be about to say “What are you doing here? Somebody remove this person, it’s all a mistake, her being here.”
But he didn’t. She looked so absurdly young, and green, that he smiled and said, “Yes, it’s the new ocean, and these are the men who will sail it.”
She scribbled furiously in her notepad, making sure to get every word just exactly right, and UPI stepped in front of her and asked a technical question about the Russian lead in space. Then, very quickly it seemed, the president said he had to get the astronauts back home before taps, and they were gone, and the shaft of sunlight fell on the steps where they had been.
“We’d better get back,” Jay said. “I got something at four.”
With the rest of the reporters, they walked back through the corridor that led to the large foyer to which the small press cubbyholes were connected. She tried to walk as nonchalantly as the other reporters, not gaping at the pictures on the walls. She and Jay strolled out the door and down the driveway past the guard booth, out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, where Jay had found an illegal parking spot a block away. He ripped the ticket off the windshield and tossed it into the backseat of his battered 1955 Chevy. Mary climbed in and was able to maintain the aura of cool detachment until the Chevy hit 15th Street. Then she began to bounce up and down in the seat.
“He talked to me! Me! The President of the United States talked to me! Oh, my God!”
Jay looked at her and laughed. “See. I told you that nagging Charlie for a White House pass was a good idea.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t easy. I had to cut my thumb and let the blood drop on his desk while I swore I’d only go there on my days off or before working hours.”
“I got off easy. I promised him my firstborn.”
“Oh, Jay, it was so exciting. The astronauts! I almost wet my pants when the three of them came through the door. Is it always this exciting?”
He shook his head. “Mostly it’s boring. You just sit around the press room waiting for a photo op and you get two minutes with the prez and some ambassador from Lower Slobovia and you sit some more and you get a lid and that’s it, no more news.”
“Jay, I’ve got an exclusive quote. I don’t think anyone else was listening.” She told him what Kennedy had said.
“With my pictures, that’s a center spread for sure.”
“President Kennedy told the Belvedere Blade —”
He interrupted her, “Told Mary Springer and Jay Broderick from the Belvedere Blade.”
“Oh yeah, right. I took a lot of notes, I can do color about how the astronauts looked, and the Rose Garden. And the literate conversation about tits and coloreds.”
He laughed again. “That you’d better leave out.”
She smiled and thought, all of a sudden, about Mary Jane Jelke, the most stuck-up girl in Belvedere High, sipping her coffee, the bile rising in her throat when she read about Mary Springer chatting with the president. The nasty taste would climb all the way up her throat to her (once perfect, now fatty) cheeks and she would choke on it. Maybe she would gasp and die, her dirty bleached blond hair spreading out across the words By Maty Springer. Vengeance was indeed a dish best served cold.
She liked the taste of it. She smiled. Why settle for a tiny bite? She thought about the three girls she had envied most in high school.
Barbara Brownlee. She was the majorette for the Belvedere High School band, and she strutted down Main Street wearing skintight white short-shorts and a halter top with spangles, bewitching the crowd by wiggling her cute little butt at them while she threw her baton high into the air. She usually caught it. Once she missed, in the Fourth of July parade, and knocked one of the Worthy Matrons of the Eastern Star who was marching just ahead of the band momentarily senseless. The matron lay sprawled in the street, with her white parade dress hiked up over her rolled-up stockings and bulging thighs. Barbara didn’t usually miss. But that day, the town fathers were relieved that they had nixed the flame batons that Barbara liked to use. The Worthy Matron might have been immolated right there on Main Street, perhaps upsetting the children as they munched on their hot dogs.
Mary practiced to be Barbara, secretly, in her bedroom, with the baton she had bought from Kresge’s, wearing her underpants and a bra, trying to wiggle her ass the way Barbara did. She smashed two mirrors and a lamp before she realized that her hand-eye coordination left something to be desired. She tried wiggling her behind — which was cute and curvy — but it never seemed to come out right. She looked as if she were having a seizure, which, she concluded, was not very bewitching. If she led the parade, she’d wipe out a whole battalion of Worthy Matrons and get carried off by the paramedics to boot.
Mary fane Jelke, she of the pretty cheeks. She was, by Belvedere standards, rich, since her father owned several convenience stores. Mary Jane had her own convertible and an air of insolent disdain that comes from small-town money and the best clothes in school — in her case real angora sweaters, fourteen-karat gold pins to wear on her collars and a real alligator bag and shoes. Mary bought an angora sweater and turned out to be allergic to bunnies, bunny fur being the main ingredient of angora, and broke out in huge red hives. When she tried insolent disdain, the school nurse stopped her and asked if she were feeling unwell.
Becky Bellingrath. She was a tall, thin girl with smoky blond hair who described herself as a beatnik. She always carried a copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and she wore black turtlenecks and long black skirts and a black beret. She said she planned to die before she was thirty, and she wrote poems about sex and death, which she read aloud in English class, much to the befuddlement of Mr. Wattles, who was hard of hearing anyway. She would stand up and recite, in a deep, throaty voice:
In my grave I rot
My thighs turn to worm-riddled mush
My lover’s semen long dried
Upon them
The memory of his sex
Upon my lips, long dead,
My lips a pulp
Of dirt and slime.
Mr. Wattles would smile and say, “That’s very nice, Becky. Now, we will read ‘Hiawatha.’”
All the other girls regarded Becky with awe, and it was rumored that not only had she lost her virginity but she had Done It with a Negro jazz drummer. Officially, every girl in Belvedere High was a Virgin — those who weren’t didn’t talk about it. Even Barbara Brownlee, who spent more time in the backseats of cars than anyone, swore up and down that while the necking was hot and heavy, she was saving her pearl of great price for the man she would marry.
In Mary’s fantasy, somehow — it was not clear how such disparate personalities would get together — Barbara and Mary Jane and Becky had signed up for one of the public White House tours. Barbara was a chubby mother of four, her once bewitching hips stretching out a spandex size 16 girdle, her middle bulging under a cheap wool dress. Mary Jane, with her now-squirrelly cheeks, had come upon hard times when her father’s stores went bankrupt. Now she was wearing hand-me-downs from the Goodwill bin in Silver Spring, and her look of insolent disdain had long since faded to a dull-eyed glare. Becky Bellingrath had been knocked up by her Negro lover, had an illegal abortion and was now a drug addict. She still wore black, which did not go at all with her greenish skin tones. Anyway, one day the tour that included the three of them just happened to pass by the Rose Garden, where Mary, chic in a linen suit, matching pumps and perfect hairdo, was chatting with John F. Kennedy about his policy on Cuba. All of a sudden, Barbara shrieked, “Oh, my God, it’s Mary Elizabeth Springer, and she’s talking to the president!”
And Mary, her perfect hair not even ruffled by the faintest of breezes, turned and gave them a dismissive wave.
“Who are they?” President Kennedy asked.
“Oh, they’re nobody,” she said. “Nobody at all.”
“God,” she said to Jay, “just think about what it would be like, on the White House beat full-time. You’d get to travel with the president, all over the world, you’d meet generals and prime ministers and kings. No more Rotary lunches.”
“No more Rainbow Girls.”
“No more Worthy Matrons of the Eastern Star.”
“No more store owners cutting fucking ribbons when the new supermarket opens.”
“We’ve been in the Emerald City, and they’re sending us back to Kansas.” She sighed.
He chuckled. “Keep your ruby slippers packed, we’ll be back. Listen, I’d better call in, the desk may have something for me.” He stopped in front of a Peoples’ Drug in Silver Spring, and Mary waited while he used the phone. When he got back in the car he said, “I think we got a fatal. Plane crash. Can you handle it?”
“Oh, Christ, of course I can handle it.”
“Sorry, you’re new on Cityside.”
“I can fucking handle it, OK,” she said.
“All right, let’s go.”