35
I went to visit my father after work to tell him about our meeting with Helen. We’d had our first cooking lesson the week before, and I was pleasantly surprised to see chicken breasts marinating and the oven preheating.
He smiled bashfully as I praised his efforts in the kitchen, and I got to work showing him how to cook the spinach and asparagus I had picked up on my way over. I told him about our meeting—down to the detail of Michael giving the boy a dollar to “watch” the car. He grinned at the same memory I had thought of.
Dinner was on the table when I walked into my own house, and I felt guilty about my mother making my children dinner while I went and did the same for my father. But as much as it would be nice to have the house to myself once in a while, I remembered that I couldn’t do the work I was doing if she hadn’t moved in.
Helen’s words came back to me as the kids prattled on about their afternoon with Nancy’s kids. I didn’t know what would happen if Michael won. Larry would be out of work—and the reality was that I would be too. Robbie started kindergarten after Labor Day, but only in the mornings, and Debbie had two more years at home. Even if Michael wanted to keep me on staff, I didn’t think my mother would agree to that long of a time commitment, and I didn’t know that I wanted her to. I wanted to be home with my kids, experiencing their days with them instead of hearing about them after.
Walking away would be better for them.
But what about all the people whom Helen said Sam Gibson hadn’t helped?
Who was my responsibility to?
“Beverly,” my mother said, reprimanding me. “Robbie asked you a question.”
“I’m so sorry, darling,” I said to Robbie. “Mommy’s head was in the clouds. What was your question?”
Exhausted, I excused myself from television with my mother after the kids went to bed, then cleaned the kitchen and changed into my nightgown. I pulled back my lovely pink bedspread and admired the room before turning off the lights. It was strange how getting rid of Larry turned the house into more of a home. Then again, after six years of being Mrs. Diamond, being just Bev meant that I was the home.
Maybe it was the cup of coffee I accepted at my father’s house, but sleep didn’t want to come. And after I mentally created a shopping list for teaching my father how to make meatloaf, Michael’s words repeated in my brain. The Senate was designed to make voting more fair, and a lot of the time it does the opposite.
I should have asked my father what that meant. A glance at the radium dial on the alarm clock next to the bed told me it was too late to call him. He was in bed by 9:30 most nights. But Michael had said he was a night owl.
I flipped onto my other side. I should just ask him about it in the morning.
But now, tired as I was, I was wide awake. With a sigh, I turned on my bedside lamp, picked up the receiver, and dialed the operator to ask her to connect me to Michael Landau in Silver Spring.
As the phone rang once, twice, and then a third time, I debated hanging up. Then Michael’s voice came on the line. “Hello?”
“Hi—it’s Beverly.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Sorry—yes—I know it’s late. I just had a question.” I shouldn’t have called him, I thought. There was a rustling sound and then a click that sounded like a lamp. “You’re not in bed, are you?”
He chuckled. “I’m not.”
“Good,” I said, realizing there was something innately intimate about talking to him from my bed, even if he didn’t know that was where I was. Somehow if he had been in bed too, it would have been worse.
“What can I do for you?”
“I wanted to know what you meant earlier—about the Senate.”
“About the Senate?”
“You said it was meant to make things more fair but sometimes does the opposite?”
“Ah,” he said. “That. You know how the House is divvied up by population?”
I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me—which was a very good thing. “Yes.”
“So Maryland has fewer delegates than New York, California, and all the bigger states. But in the Senate, every state has two representatives.”
“Which makes all the states equal.”
“Exactly. But they created that system for the Southern states because they had smaller populations of people who were eligible to vote, and the South wanted more independence and didn’t want the North making decisions for them.”
“Which led to the Civil War.”
“Ostensibly,” Michael said. I knew what he meant there. “But giving each state—including those with sometimes millions fewer eligible voters—an equal say was designed to make the states equal.”
“I understand that—but how is that not fair?”
“People in different places have different needs.” That was true even just in our small state, as we saw earlier in the day. “And with voting regulations on the books that prevent certain populations from being able to vote easily, the senators in some places wind up representing the people who are keeping other groups down. And even where that isn’t the case, it disenfranchises people when it’s not ‘one man, one vote.’”
I thought back to 1960, when I went to vote and several women at the club asked me why I was bothering. Because it’s the right thing to do, I had said. Their responses surprised me when they said their votes didn’t matter. It was the opposite of what my father had taught me.
But what Michael was saying meant they were right.
“Then—you mean only local elections matter?”
“No, not at all,” he said quickly. “Local elections matter, of course, but when the House advances a bill, the Senate can kill it. And when it’s mostly just one demographic voting in large numbers, those minority voices get drowned out.”
It was a complicated concept, but I could see how the way it was going wasn’t benefiting people the way the Founders intended. Or maybe it was—they certainly wouldn’t have wanted me voting. And Helen’s mere existence had to have them rolling in their graves.
“Thank you for explaining,” I said. “I think I’ll be able to sleep now.”
I could hear the amusement in his voice. “So when you asked if I was in bed, it was because you were?”
“You can get your mind right out of that gutter,” I said primly.
Michael laughed. “I’m teasing. In my mind you are fully clothed at the kitchen table.”
He had , after all, seen my kitchen.
“I should go,” I said.
“Wait—before you do—thank you.”
“For what?”
“For whatever you said to Helen today. I’m not enough of a fool to think she was going to lend her support before that talk you two had.”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “She just wanted to know if you were honest or not.”
“And what did you tell her?”
I grinned. “That you’re as crooked as they come.”
“Perfect,” he said.
There was a long pause. “Good night, Michael.”
“Good night, Beverly. Thank you again.”
There was a creaking sound just before he hung up, and I wondered if he had been lying about being in bed.
“You can stop that right now,” I said out loud to the empty room.
“Stop what?” my mother asked, opening the door without knocking. “I was just getting changed for bed.”
I shook my head. “Nothing. I was talking to myself.”
“Sounded like an extended conversation,” she said.
“Good night, Mama,” I said pointedly.
“You’re a grown woman,” she said. “If you want to have a boyfriend over, I won’t stop you.”
“Mama!”
“What? I’ve been thinking I might dip a toe into the dating world myself.”
I put a pillow over my face and mimed suffocating myself.
“Women have needs too, Beverly,” she said as she closed the door behind her, and I debated whether using the pillow to put myself out of my misery was better than using it on her.
But inappropriately intimate conversations or not, I realized staying in the campaign was the best move for my children. Michael was going to make the world a better place for them if he won. They might not understand it, but that was worth the sacrifice now.
I just wished I could get the way he smiled when he told Helen about me demanding a job out of my head as I lay awake, trying to sleep.