Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  Our entire staff was extremely proud of this. Our boss was demonstrating the very strength of character that had inspired us to work for her. We felt righteous. We felt privileged. We felt profoundly just.

  That is, until the HÄagen-Dazs lobby arrived.

  You didn’t know there was a HÄagen-Dazs lobby? Me neither. Apparently, it’s actually a lobby for dairy subsidies or sugar subsidies or some such thing, but I never learned exactly what because as soon as the lobbyists began wheeling little ice cream carts through the hallways of Longworth and happily handing out as many free chocolate-coated ice cream bars as anyone could carry, they were besieged by staffers. “Ice cream, ice cream!” legislative assistants shrieked to their colleagues. All along the corridors, you could hear staffers yelling, “Gotta go!” then hanging up on constituents in mid-sentence in order to dash out of their offices and chase after the ice cream cart. “OhmyGod. They have a flavor called Dark Belgian Chocolate,” somebody squealed.

  “Hey, I’ll trade someone Vanilla with Almonds for a Sorbet and Cream!”

  “Let me in! Coming through! I’m an ice cream specialist! This is an emergency!” yelled another, barreling into the fray.

  The scene was savage. It was hysterical. It brought a whole new level to the term “feeding frenzy.” And Kiran, Lee, Zachary, and I had every intention of joining it.

  “Not so fast,” said Vicki, bodily barring the door. “You know the policy. No freebies.”

  “But, IT’S ICE CREAM,” we fairly wailed.

  “I made a promise,” said Minnie matter-of-factly.

  “Have you no heart, woman?” cried Lee, as we watched the entire office across the hall load up on frozen novelties.

  “Minnie, for fuck’s sake,” cried Zachary. “For the love of God, let us eat an ice cream bar.”

  “Nothing doing,” chuckled Minnie.

  “But Minnie, think of it this way: If I was the average voter,” I said, “frankly, I’d be more inclined to vote for you if I knew you were bought and paid for by the ice cream industry.”

  “Nice try,” said Minnie, leaning against the door frame.

  “You know, this is a violation of our civil rights,” said Kiran. “What happened to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?”

  “What happened to you getting back to work?” said Vicki. “That’s it, people, move it upstairs.”

  Just then Bruce, my cohort from across the hall, came in with his arms full of ice cream bars. “Hey, guys?” he said. “You don’t happen to have any spare room in your freezer, do you? Ours is full-up.”

  Back in the annex, Zachary picked up a dictionary and hurled it against the wall.

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” he said. “Minnie hires her two best friends—a lesbian couple—pays them a combined salary that’s equal to her own—but won’t let her staff eat a free goddamn ice cream because she’s afraid that might cause a scandal back in the district? What kind of fucking drugs is she taking?”

  Salaries were increasingly becoming a sore point with us. When Minnie had been in the statehouse, she’d won people’s hearts by returning her pay raise to the taxpayers each month. Now, she hoped to score points with voters by returning most of her congressional budget to them as well. This required her to run her office as cheaply as possible.

  While attempts were made to limit our office supplies—often, it was easier to borrow a pen from another office than to requisition one from the politburo Edna had set up—the best way to trim costs, of course, was to pay the staff as little as possible.

  Hill salaries are notoriously low. They are also a matter of public record, published yearly in a dense little government book. After Zachary got ahold of a copy, we often took turns reading aloud from it to see where we stacked up. Virtually all our friends in other offices, we discovered, were earning more than we were in comparable positions.

  Worse yet, they knew this. Everybody on the Hill did. Because all the other staffers spent their lunch hours exactly like we did—looking up everybody else’s salaries to see how theirs compared and which poor bastards got paid the least. “You guys work for Minnie Glenn?” they’d hoot whenever they met us at Hill happy hours. “Our condolences. Please. Allow us to buy the next round.”

  What galled us most, however, was that while we were all paid on the low end for our positions, Vicki and Edna were paid roughly the average for theirs. Living together, they enjoyed a combined income equal to Minnie’s.

  Meanwhile, Kiran began house-painting with his cousins on weekends to make ends meet, while the newest legislative assistant, Tim, started deejaying at college parties after-hours. Ironically, any time my phone bills were higher than expected, I found myself trolling for freelance writing assignments all over again. To keep from defaulting on his student loans, Lee moved back in with his sister, agreeing to baby-sit her two kids in exchange for free rent, thereby earning himself the degrading new nickname around the office of “Nanny Man.”

  After putting in a full day on the Hill, almost all of us wound up working some sort of improvised “second shift.” Subsisting on five hours’ sleep, we’d then stumble back into the office each morning to help Minnie fight for all the hardworking, underpaid Americans she cared so much about.

  Occasionally, Edna, at a loss for something to do, would come upstairs to the annex, putter about, and describe to us the meals she and Vicki had eaten at their favorite four-star restaurant in Georgetown.

  “Really, you guys should treat yourselves to Citronelle,” she said. “If you order only appetizers and desserts, you can easily get away for under $75.”

  “You know,” Kiran remarked once she’d gone back downstairs, “it’s a good thing we all have such a great sense of humor. Otherwise, something like this could get really demoralizing.”

  That summer, Minnie was chosen by the party leadership to address the Democratic convention; her two-minute speech would be broadcast live during prime time. It was an enormous coup, and Tim, Lee, Zachary, and I went to Kiran’s house to watch it together on TV. The mood was festive—copious amounts of popcorn got tossed into the air—but when Minnie came on, we all became strangely silent. Minnie’s hair had been styled beautifully, her makeup had been professionally applied, and it was clear that some of the spin doctors had also gotten ahold of her, because she gave a rousing rah-rah speech far less critical and policy-oriented than the one she’d been preparing. But then, midway through, she lapsed into her own language, delivering catchphrases of hers that we were all so familiar with, we recited them along with her as she spoke.

  “Too many Americans work too hard for too little,” she declared before the cheering conventioneers. “Too many Americans are holding down two or three jobs just to make ends meet.”

  “Yeah,” Lee, Tim, and Kiran shouted mirthlessly at the screen. “Like your staff!”

  Growing up leftie, I’d been surrounded by friends and relatives who believed “the personal is political.” My friend Allison could barely buy a box of Raisin Bran without leafing through her copy of Shopping for a Better World to make sure she wasn’t inadvertently clubbing baby seals to death in the process. Stupidly, naively, I’d believed that a person with humane political views would be a humane person to work for—and that female bosses would treat women employees better in the workplace because we were all “in this together.”

  Yet it probably comes as a shock to no one but me that on Capitol Hill—as perhaps everywhere else—a huge disconnect exists between political ideology and personal conduct. A member of Congress could actually be a fantastic boss, despite the fact that he believed all welfare mothers should be sterilized—while working for someone like Minnie, who felt compassion for every spotted owl, transgendered teenager, and autoworker on the planet, could be an act of masochism. “Sisterhood,” I realized glumly, was often a myth, too. Vicki and Edna no doubt considered themselves feminists, yet virtually every young woman I knew who worked for them in D.C. left the office in tears. Edna r
outinely bad-mouthed them to the female office manager back in the district, while Vicki occasionally rounded up Zachary, Kiran, and Lee for chummy golf games, leaving me and Natasha, the new receptionist, to open the mail and answer the phones. “I’m not excluding you,” Vicki would say acerbically. “It’s not my fault you two don’t play softball or golf.”

  “Each congressional office is its very own dysfunctional family,” Bruce said when I came to his office enraged.

  And it was true. Word got around the Hill quickly about which congressional offices were a dream to work in and which ones were nightmares. Minnie’s was quickly earning a reputation as the latter. Bruce himself worked in a dream. His boss, a mellow Northern Californian, was perfectly in sync with his largely vegan, hemp-wearing district. Indeed, he won his House seat each term by something like 70 percent of the vote. Occasionally, a student from UC Santa Cruz might call the office and complain that the school’s mascot—a dancing cartoon Banana Slug—had frozen up on the congressman’s Web site again and couldn’t they possibly upgrade their software? But that was just about as disgruntled as his constituents ever got.

  In true California style, before Bruce’s boss hired anyone, he had them “hang” with him in the office for a few days to “test their dynamic” with the other staffers. As a result, his staff got along so well they often stayed late just for the fun of it and came in over the weekends to eat potlucks together. Every time I stopped by to borrow a pen or have a small nervous breakdown, they all seemed to be sitting on the congressman’s couch, brainstorming bipartisan environmental legislation while one of them idly strummed a guitar.

  “Oh, Susie, you’re just in time for our Arbor Day celebration,” the chief of staff would say cheerily, holding up a cake plate. “Care for a chocolate leaf cookie?”

  The four of us from the annex used any opportunity we could to stop in and linger awhile, soaking up all their positive good vibes and sunny, California energy before reluctantly returning to our gulag across the hall.

  It was an election year, and Minnie had begun spending more and more time back in her district. Whenever she returned to Washington, she was preoccupied and inaccessible. Rushing immediately into her chamber, she spent most of the day in closed-door meetings with Vicki and Edna. The atmosphere became increasingly exclusionary and punitive; it was like working for three cliquish seventh grade girls. Accordingly, the rest of us regressed. Whenever Minnie finally did emerge to mingle with the rest of the staff, we fawned around her like insecure children, making wisecracks and performing stupid tricks for her, vying for her attention and approval.

  One of my ambitions was fulfilled, however. For the first time in my life, people were impressed with me at cocktail parties. “Oh, look at the little gold eagle on your business card,” they squealed. But by then, it was only too apparent to me that the miseries of working for a congressperson were the same as any other job, if not worse. The same pettiness, poor morale, and lousy management existed on the Hill that existed in offices throughout America. In this way, I supposed, Congress was a truly democratic institution.

  I, of course, had done little to help myself, and my own situation quickly deteriorated. One day, Edna would announce I was to do nothing but log constituent mail into our database and double-check the punctuation in letters we sent out. Then Vicki would yell at me, “I thought you were supposed to be Minnie’s writer. Why aren’t you writing?”

  Edna went back to the district. Yet every time I faxed my work to her to approve, she claimed never to have received it. Although I could send it twelve times over the course of the day, and hold a dozen fax confirmations in my hand, Edna would insist, “Nope. Haven’t got it. Funny. Everybody else’s faxes have come through.”

  Then Vicki would plunk a stack of Congressional Quarterlys on my desk. “You’ve been here how many months and still don’t know the basics?” she said. “I’d advise you to start reading.” Two days later, she’d call me downstairs. “I’m not going to name names. But certain staffers are complaining that all you do is sit at your desk all day and read.”

  At my past jobs, I’d experienced a whole range of emotions. Paranoia, however, had never been one of them. Although I was pretty sure I was being set up to fail, my confidence had fallen so far below sea level I couldn’t trust my own judgment anymore, and so I spent a lot of time in a highly productive state of paralysis, staring out the window.

  “Oh yeah. Vicki and Edna are fucking with you, big-time,” Zachary confirmed. “They’ve been trying to sabotage you since the day you walked in here. They didn’t like that Minnie hired you without consulting them.” Had I been more experienced in office warfare, I might have strategized cunning ways to defend myself and retaliate. Instead, not throwing up each day soon became my idea of a major achievement. All my life, I’d read about other people’s professional successes in magazine articles entitled: “Who’da Thunk: My Boss Now Works for Me!” But where were all the stories about office fuck-ups, I wanted to know? About employees with sadistic and persecuting managers? Where was the advice for people like me, who developed acid reflux as soon as they arrived at their office each morning?

  A horrendous job is like a chronic illness, a rotting tooth. It infects everything in your life; your world constricts and collapses into the toxic, throbbing ache of it. You can’t go to a cafÉ, walk your dog, or go away for a weekend without a constant, low-grade sense of dread: Augh. Work. Soon, I was waking up every morning feeling poisoned. Hitching a ride to the Hill with another communications director named Jeannie, who was equally miserable, we practiced deep breathing together to subdue our churning stomachs. Then, after receiving either my daily chastisement from Vicki or silent treatment from Edna, I spent every free moment I had job hunting with Zachary, helping Kiran with his law school essays, and crying in the nurse’s office. So much for my moment of professional glory.

  The nurse, whom I secretly christened “The Angel,” put a cool compress on my head. “I have to tell you, I’ve been on Capitol Hill for years,” she said sympathetically. “It is an incredibly punishing place for young staffers. There is so much backstabbing and nastiness. Bright young people are just devastated all the time in this environment. To be honest, I’m grateful my own children don’t work here.”

  She wrote down an address and handed it to me. “People have been so traumatized working here that a special counseling office has been set up for Hill employees,” she said gently. “Why don’t you make an appointment?”

  The Hill counseling office was actually not on the Hill, but a good quarter of a mile away in a low-slung office building across a small field and a series of access roads. Had it been any farther away from the Capitol, it would’ve been in Virginia. Stranger still, there was no sign on the door; I half expected a little peephole to slide open and a voice demanding a password. Indeed, when I knocked, a panicked voice cried out, “Just a minute, please,” followed by a series of thumps. A moment later, a young woman answered the door breathlessly.

  “Sorry to make you wait,” she said, “but with each client, we have to clear out the waiting room in order to protect them.”

  Protect them? From what, I wanted to ask. Fallout? But then, I supposed, this was exactly right.

  Having grown up as I did, I couldn’t understand why most Americans regarded therapy as something to be embarrassed about. People often claim you’d have to have your head examined to live in New York City, and we New Yorkers tend to agree. In Manhattan, everybody is in therapy. In fact, we’re suspicious of people who aren’t. Whenever we’re dating someone who’s never been to a therapist, our friends invariably caution, “Uh Oh. Watch out. He’ll be carrying baggage.” Walking down the street in Manhattan—I kid you not—I have actually overheard somebody saying: “So I said to my therapist, ‘But what about my needs?’”

  In Washington, however, it’s generally assumed that if a politician—or if anyone who even works for a politician—has ever been in therapy, it is an enormou
s liability. No doubt, their enemies can use it against them to claim they’re mentally unfit. Only we Manhattanites, it seems, would probably be more likely to vote for a politician because they’d been on the couch. “Hey, I’ve been to a shrink,” candidates could brag to us. “It’s my opponent who still has issues.”

  On Capitol Hill, the one counseling service set up to help staffers was cloaked in secrecy and shame. Going there every week felt like visiting a speakeasy or back-alley abortionist.

  “That’s it,” I told my mother on the phone. “It’s one thing to drive people crazy. It’s another to make them ashamed of it. I’m outta there.”

  Minnie did win reelection, and two days passed before the staff back in Washington received e-mails thanking us for our hard work throughout the term. The next week, Vicki and Edna returned to the Capitol and sat me down alone in Minnie’s office. They handed me a job evaluation that made me sound only slightly less heinous than Saddam Hussein. It accused me of gross incompetence, lousy people skills, poor writing abilities, an abuse of phone privileges, and, of course, an “attitude problem.” While they insisted it was a standard congressional evaluation form, it looked to me like Edna had whipped it up on her computer the night before; I had to restrain myself from pointing out a typo.

  “You can resign if you’d like,” Vicki offered, “or finish out the year on probation.”

  “Any questions?” said Edna.

  “Yes,” I said. “This is the worst job evaluation I’ve ever seen in my life. Why aren’t you firing me?”

  Vicki and Edna looked at each other. After a moment, Vicki said grudgingly, “Well, Minnie doesn’t want to fire you. If nothing else, you’ve been loyal.”

  It suddenly occurred to me that it was likely Minnie hadn’t even seen the job evaluation at all.

  Vicki gave me a week to decide whether I wanted to stay “on probation” or resign. But by then, mercifully, my months of job hunting with Zachary had finally paid off; that same day, I was offered a job in the Communications Department at a trade association starting right after New Year’s. There, people earned decent salaries, promoted worthy causes, and nobody made you run the gauntlet for an extra ballpoint pen. It wasn’t nearly as sexy or glamorous as the Hill, but the atmosphere was exceedingly kind. This, I’d come to realize, was more important than anything else in a workplace.