The Senator's Children Read online

*

  Betsy wakes feeling sick. Not like she has the flu, something closer to the blahs, not just a sulky something but a deep fear in her stomach.

  “What’s wrong?” Cal says.

  “Just an upset stomach.”

  “Are you sure it’s nothing else?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she says.

  She knows what Cal is thinking—that this is about her father. As far as he’s concerned, everything about Betsy, including any issues in their relationship, can be traced back to her father.

  Betsy wants to cancel and almost says something, but they’ve canceled twice before—she has.

  An hour later, as they walk to the bakery, she worries about being recognized. Probably silly to worry, but every so often, especially here in Philadelphia, someone will say, “Aren’t you . . .” and then try to remember why her face seems familiar, but before the person can finish the question, she will say, “Yes, I am,” or, “No, you must be mistaken.” It doesn’t happen that often, but it’s something she doesn’t want to happen while she’s on her way to choose a wedding cake.

  By the time they arrive at the bakery, the feeling in her stomach is stronger. In the back, behind a glass partition, under dim lights, a woman wearing a white apron kneads dough. She looks around Betsy’s age. She sees them waiting and comes out. “You must be Cal and Betsy,” she says. Her name is Sara. She has curly blonde hair and brown eyes and a body similar to Betsy’s—extra weight in her belly and hips.

  Sara brings out six cupcakes on a tray, three for each of them. Cal, eight years older than Betsy, is good at delaying gratification. He will go for a long run first thing and have breakfast to look forward to. He will eat his toast before his oatmeal, because he enjoys oatmeal more than toast, and only then will he eat two hard-boiled egg whites, because he likes them best. He nibbles the tip of each egg, and as soon as he reaches the yolk he pops it out onto his plate and finishes the egg white. At the end of breakfast, two perfectly round yolks are all that remain on his otherwise clean plate. Meanwhile, long ago Betsy will have finished her own breakfast—scrambled eggs first because she likes them best, then yogurt because she likes it second best, and finally toast because she likes it the least.

  So it makes sense that Cal reaches first for the chocolate cupcake with chocolate icing, his least favorite, while Betsy tries the red velvet with buttercream icing, her favorite. “Happy Valentine’s Day,” Cal says. He taps his cupcake against Betsy’s as if clinking glasses during a toast. They each take a bite. “Hold on,” he says. “I can do better than that.” He puts down his cupcake, takes Betsy’s and sets it on the table, takes her hand, and kisses her engagement ring. “I’m glad we’re choosing a cake today,” he says, and she smiles and says, “Me too.”

  Betsy eats the entire cupcake; Cal takes only a few more bites. The yellow cupcake with lemon icing is fine, and the chocolate cupcake with chocolate icing is fine, but Betsy decides on red velvet for the cake. On Cal’s plate are three partly eaten cupcakes and on Betsy’s plate is nothing.

  Sara excuses herself to speak with another customer, and Cal excuses himself to use the restroom. By the time they return to the table, there are two empty plates, not a crumb of cupcake anywhere.

  Later, as they walk through the city, Betsy says, “I don’t know why I ate so much.”

  “I think you’re beautiful, you know, exactly as you are,” Cal says.

  She puts her arm around his waist. “Thank you.”

  “You don’t need to thank me for finding you beautiful.”

  That really stumps Betsy, and after a period of silence Cal says, “I want you to think you’re beautiful.”

  And to that Betsy can only think to say, “What’s beautiful?”

  *

  “Those girls might be the two most beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen.”

  Betsy’s talking about Cal’s nieces, his sister’s twins. She and Cal have taken them to a playground.

  Every time Betsy sees them she just wants to stare at them or touch their soft blonde hair or kiss their pouty lips. They are nice children too—well-behaved and polite—and just silly enough. They say the strange-creative-honest-intelligent-charming things precocious children tend to say but adults do not.

  If not for the feeling in her stomach and the panic in her chest, Betsy might be able to sit on the park bench watching Cal on the seesaw with the girls and think, That could be us, but instead she thinks: What’s wrong with me that I can’t look at this man I love and these pouty angels and imagine wanting something like this?

  The girls pull Betsy to a rainbow-colored spinning wheel, and Cal spins them so fast that the blah feeling spreads through Betsy’s body, to her head and fingers and toes, but not out, and when the wheel stops, the world does not. She tries to stand as still as possible but has to hold the wheel’s handle not to fall.

  Later, one of the twins—the one with a birthmark on the back of her hand—puts her hand on Betsy’s stomach and says, “Do you have a baby in your belly?”

  “Just cupcakes.”

  Betsy’s mention of cupcakes triggers a wave of nausea. She goes into the playground’s public restroom and stands in a stall and closes her eyes and takes deep breaths.

  Then suddenly that old feeling returns, the one she felt after Nick died, where she’s lost and needs to get home, except home isn’t home, there’s nowhere on the planet she can go to end this feeling, and the people she’s supposed to know, like Cal, are strangers. Even she’s a stranger. She’s lost inside her body and needs to get out.

  If I could throw up this lost feeling and flush it down the toilet, she thinks, that might be a step in the right direction. But it won’t come up, whatever this is, cupcakes but not really cupcakes.

  So she leaves.

  She walks away. Keeps walking. Then runs. Then, when she gets tired and feels sicker, she walks again. She keeps going with no idea where. She doesn’t look back. She doesn’t think anyone saw her go.

  On Walnut, a young woman wearing a faux-fur hat asks Betsy if she’s decided whom she’s voting for. As terrible as she feels, she doesn’t want to be rude, so she stops and pretends to listen as the woman tells her about someone running for something and hands her a flyer.

  She keeps walking, unsure what she’s looking for until she sees it: through a large glass window, a woman with her head inside a hood dryer. Betsy imagines that under the dryer, it is both extremely loud and utterly quiet. A good place, maybe the only place, to hide.

  The young man who cuts her hair talks and talks, mostly about himself and his boyfriend and his ex and a Weimaraner named Frisco that belonged to all of them at one time or another but started with the current boyfriend yet somehow ended up with the ex. Betsy can’t follow the logic of it, but his voice is a distraction—just as effective, she imagines, as the hood dryer. He talks so much that he never asks one thing about Betsy except what she wants him to do to her hair. She tells him he can do whatever he wants.

  She keeps her eyes closed as he cuts. “Don’t be scared, honey,” the man says.

  “I want to be surprised,” she says.

  Later, when she peeks, her hair is the shortest it’s been since she was a girl—bangs in front, to her shoulders in back. She thinks it makes her face look rounder.

  The dryer turns out to be just loud, and makes her internal voice that much louder to compete with it—worries about the wedding, and how many times her phone has vibrated in her pocket, how upset Cal will be, and what she might eat for lunch and dinner to make up for her cupcake gluttony—and there it is again, the feeling in her belly.

  She pushes the dryer up off her head and hurries to the restroom, where she kneels over the toilet, and finally it comes up in three great heaves.

  Someone knocks on the door and asks if she’s okay, and she puts on her best okay voice and says, “I’m fine.”

  When she emerges from the restroom, her hair still damp, she tells the young man who cut her hair that she’s sorry
but she has to leave. Her stomach feels better, but the anxiety is now in her chest, and she regrets that she walked away from Cal, didn’t answer his calls, worried him—again.

  Outside, she closes her eyes, tries to breathe in through her nose, out through her mouth. She’s teetering on the edge of the kind of panic attack she started to have last year in New York.

  She walks home slowly, occasionally stopping to look in storefront windows, wondering who’s staring back at her.

  *

  She’s not sure how she knows. She’s not sure why seeing Cal when she gets home makes her know. But she knows.

  And as soon as she knows—she doesn’t doubt it for a single beat of her heart—she starts to cry quietly.

  “Do you know how much you worried me?” Cal says. He keeps rubbing his hand over his buzz cut, what he does when he’s nervous.

  “I’m sorry. I’m kind of a mess.”

  “You’re not a mess.”

  “Please stop saying I’m not when I am.”

  “You’re just going through something,” he says.

  “I’m sorry I walked away,” she says. “I was having one of my things.”

  “An anxiety attack.”

  “Yes.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “I just needed to be alone.”

  “So you cut your hair.”

  “I didn’t cut it.”

  “Good,” Cal says. “If you did, I’d really be concerned.”

  “Do I still look like me?”

  Gently, with his hand on her chin, he makes her look at him. “Still you.”

  She lays her head on his shoulder, and he rubs her back. “Whatever this is,” he says, “it’s going to be okay.”

  She wants to tell him that it doesn’t feel okay, that she’s scared, that this feeling has gotten worse since they moved back into the house on Delancey where she grew up, and where her brother didn’t grow all the way up, and where her mother died.

  She wants to tell him what she now knows, about the baby inside her, but can’t say the words.

  *

  Avery should call her mother, she really should, but she and Peter Swann are kissing.

  It’s so not her to be doing this, and she would have guessed it was so not Peter Swann to be doing this, but people surprise you. Avery saw Peter at the library earlier—she was on her way in, he was on his way out—and when she asked where he was going, he said, “To give out free hugs.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t know about this?”

  “Should I?”

  “Apparently, it’s a Valentine’s Day tradition at Buchanan,” Peter told her. “It started years ago as a protest against the commercialization of love—something like that.”

  “I didn’t know you were such an activist,” Avery said.

  “Just for that, you’re coming with me.”

  “I don’t think so,” Avery said, but Peter took her by the arm and led her out of the library. She made a pretense of resisting.

  What Peter didn’t mention to Avery was that they’d be giving out hugs and kisses. Other students are stationed throughout campus; Avery and Peter are in front of the campus center. Some students they kiss on the cheek, some on the lips, mouths closed—friend kisses. Avery is kissing boys and girls. Peter is kissing girls. The boys he hugs—real hugs, not one-armed dude hugs. A few guys he knows well he gives the European kiss-kiss on both cheeks.

  It’s freezing, but the hugs and kisses help.

  During a lull, Peter turns to Avery and says, “Hey, I have an idea.”

  But before he says what his idea is, her phone rings.

  Even before she looks, she knows who it is.

  Her mother—again.

  She’s called three times since Peter and Avery have been out here. Avery hasn’t answered.

  Valentine’s Day has always been tough on her mother. It’s a reminder that she’s alone. It’s also the day, talk about irony, that started the whole mess.

  Actually, the mess began before that.

  Avery doesn’t answer—again.

  My mother, Avery thinks, should be the one here, not me. Her mother would be great at this—giving out hugs and kisses. It’s not that she’s generous, though she can be, but more that she’s kind of needy and love-starved. She’d probably give long hugs, and kiss people in places like their noses and eyes. Not in a creepy way. She’d mean it.

  Avery silences her phone and says to Peter, “So what’s your big idea?”

  *

  Avery knows Peter from a course she’s taking called Presidential Politics. This week they’ve been discussing the role of scandal in presidential elections. All anyone wants to talk about is Bill and Monica—the cigar, the stained blue dress, that stupid Nicholson Baker novel. As if they remember; as if they weren’t like five years old. Only Peter Swann, a tall, bookish guy with horn-rimmed glasses, has brought up the human side of the story—Chelsea walking between her parents, holding their hands. Peter says that was right out of the political playbook, but Avery believes it was genuine.

  People know about JFK and Marilyn, but Peter Swann knows about Angie Dickinson and Kim Novak and Blaze Starr and Mary Pinchot Meyer. The professor was impressed. Avery, intellectually competitive, brought up Meyer’s murder in 1964, less than a year after JFK was assassinated, and how she used to bring marijuana and LSD to the White House. Peter turned and gave her this look, and when class ended he said to her, “Who are you?”

  They got coffee and had a geek-off about political scandals. It’s unlike Avery to do something like that. Number one, she tends not to trust people, especially not boys. Number two, she tends not to talk politics. Not that they were talking politics. For her, it was more like talking literature, or what could make great literature if only people knew the smaller, private details.

  Peter knows too much, like her. It has to be personal, Avery thinks. People know things for a reason. His parents are divorced, one of the first things he told her, but he connected it to politics: “I remember the whole Monica thing because that was right when my parents divorced.” Peter knows about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. He knows about Grover Cleveland: how he allegedly raped and impregnated a woman named Maria Halpin, had her committed to an asylum, and arranged for the abduction of their child. He knows that Cleveland pretty much raised his future wife—the daughter of his late friend. He knows that Warren Harding had a long affair with Carrie Phillips, a married Germanophile who saved hundreds of his love letters. Her husband, a close friend of Harding’s, became an alcoholic and in later years walked the streets of Marion, Ohio, begging for money to buy drinks. Another Harding mistress, Nan Britton, thirty years his junior, had been obsessed with him when she was a girl, covering her bedroom walls with images of him from newspapers and magazines. In 1927 she published the first kiss-and-tell-all, The President’s Daughter, about how she and Harding had sex in a White House coat closet and had a daughter together. Harding’s family refused to support the daughter after his death. Peter Swann knows all this. So does Avery, though she pretends not to.

  *

  Peter’s big idea is to hug and kiss to keep warm. Smooth, Avery thinks. But it works, she has to admit. She wants campus to clear out, for everyone else to disappear. It’s not like they’re making out, just long hugs with close-mouthed lip-pecks. Anything more than that would be totally embarrassing PDA. But as long as they do to each other only what they’re doing to everyone else, they can call it practice.

  Avery assumes they’ll go back to her room, but when their shift ends, they go to D-hall for dinner and end up sitting with other people, and that breaks the spell, though Avery catches Peter looking at her, and this feels good to Avery—to share a secret.

  Her mother keeps calling, and late at night, alone in her room, Avery finally answers.

  “I started a Twitter account,” her mother says.

  Avery drops the phone and goes straight to her computer. Her mother’s first
tweet is a photo of herself wearing the blue tie. Well, not that blue tie—how would she ever have gotten it back—but she bought the same one and has kept it all these years.

  Avery picks up the phone, but her mother is gone. She calls her mother back, but no answer. She leaves a message: “Take. It. Down. Now.”

  She keeps checking the Twitter feed until she falls asleep.

  As soon as she wakes, just before midnight, she checks again. The photo is gone.

  In its place is another tweet: Happy V Day to the love of my life.

  Don’t start tweeting about him, Avery thinks. Please don’t start doing crazy shit.

  And then a new tweet appears: Was talking about my daughter by the way. Hugs and kisses baby.

  *

  She changed her name, a symbol of starting over, separating past from present, and yet secretly she wants to tell someone her story. She lies awake in her dorm room, periodically checking her mother’s Twitter feed. Nothing new—not yet. My mother probably wants to out me, she thinks. Payback for changing my name. She imagines telling David the whole story, but she knows that he wouldn’t understand. Then again, maybe that would make him the perfect audience: she would get to tell her story, and then it would be forgotten. She wonders, maybe because she spent part of the day with him, about Peter Swann, if she might tell him the truth someday, but as soon as she imagines beginning her story—she’s not sure where she’d begin, maybe with the photo of the man and the baby, still in her pocket, maybe with the blue tie, maybe with the files on her computer, the part of the story before she was born—she thinks: No way, I don’t trust anyone.

  MARCH 1, 2010

  Betsy doesn’t watch scary movies, never has, not like her brother with his Stephen King obsession, which drove their mother nuts, but she’s seen enough, usually through the spaces between her fingers, to know that when you hear noises in the night, and your fiancé is asleep beside you, you don’t get out of bed, certainly not alone, to investigate.

  But that’s what she does, just like those soon-dead fools in slasher films.

  In the hallway, she hears it again.