DC By the Book

Excerpt: We hugged again before she left, more confidently than before, and she told me that I should come to her next improv show. I did, and that did it. There were, in those first weeks, afternoon coffees that ended with us on a bench near her office, her legs in my lap; there were mornings of having to unmake the bed to find our underwear; there was kissing good-bye on the Metro platform. By that first fall together we were spending almost every night at her apartment, reading next to each other in bed, having conversations between the shower and the bedroom. "So I guess this is what it feels like," she said once, when we were leaning forehead to forehead, the only two people on the long escalator in Union Station.

Excerpt: One night, while I was lying with my cheek pressed against the rug between the coffee table and the TV, thinking for whole minutes about things like weather I should roll over to reach for my water glass, I called Claire twenty-three times. At first I had urgent things to say, things I was sure would change her mind, but after half a dozen calls I couldn’t remember what they were, and if she’d picked up I would just have had to groan, like a cow whose legs have given out. Another night I stood outside her building say her name, first in an embarrassed bark, then louder and louder until I was bawling on U Street, promising myself that I would never again feel anything except sympathy for the people I saw ranting in front of the White House.

Excerpt: I felt, irritatingly, a desire to impress him, and on Thomas’s terms. I wished I’d prepared by reading a book about World War II, or by coming up with some intriguing questions about by stepdad’s new computer. His house turned out to be on one of the steep streets in Cleveland Park near the zoo. The sidewalks were broken up by huge gray roots and instead of lawns, these houses had ivy and terraces. These were the kinds of neighborhoods, I learned later, in which adults were always bragging about running into old secretaries of defense and directors of the OMB at the hardware store of the Chinese place.

Excerpt: On a Saturday a week or so after the tea with Anna, I took Nicholas and Teddy ice-skating in the Sculpture Garden at the National gallery. This was a dripping, dishrag-gray day, as I was feeling mildly poisoned not only because of the weather but because I thought I’d seen Claire in the crowd that afternoon at Metro Center. The changing room smelled like wet socks and dirty rubber. As I kneeled in front of a bench, trying Nicholas’s skates, he said, “You’re kind of like our dad now, huh?”

Excerpt: And I was happy, most of the time. My mom and Frank seemed to have more or less accepted that they didn’t need to bother me about whether I was going to be home for dinner or whether I wanted to with them to see Yo-Yo Ma at the Kennedy Center. I’d lost some quality of nose-drip-having, food-in-my-braces-ness that had clung to me in middle school; puberty, although it of course entailed occasional voice cracks and pimples in the middle of my chin, felt for me like being a malnourished animal finally given a balanced diet.

Excerpt: On a Saturday a week or so after the tea with Anna, I took Nicholas and Teddy ice-skating in the Sculpture Garden at the National gallery. This was a dripping, dishrag-gray day, as I was feeling mildly poisoned not only because of the weather but because I thought I’d seen Claire in the crowd that afternoon at Metro Center. The changing room smelled like wet socks and dirty rubber. As I kneeled in front of a bench, trying Nicholas’s skates, he said, “You’re kind of like our dad now, huh?”

Excerpt: But no matter how mad I got (and I did, in that conversation or another one, tell Thomas I hated him and that I was so sick of his fucking face that I never wanted to see him again), we were stuck together, closer, in a way, than we’d ever been before. My interactions with every other person in the world—the bizarrely sweet head counselor Carlotta at work; my mom, who would find me staring on the couch and ask if she could make me a sandwich; the homeless man who shivered all summer in his trench coat on the steps at the Friendship Heights Metro station—all of them took place on a stage, under lights, according to a script that couldn’t have had any less to do with what I actually felt than if I’d been playing Mary Poppins.

Excerpt: A Cleveland Park woman is in critical condition at Sibley Memorial Hospital after being struck by a car close to midnight on Thursday. Charles Lowe, 41, was cited after his vehicle struck Mira Batra, 22, who was attempting to cross Connecticut Avenue near Macomb Street.

Excerpt: That summer, between ninth and tenth grade, I worked, which is to say volunteered, at a camp in D.C. for “underprivileged children” (the phrase, which I don’t think struck me as weird at the time, came from the flyer in the Dupont guidance counselor’s offce). Just about everyone in the grade was either doing this sort of community service or a more extreme kind, where you’d go off to live in Vietnam or Ecuador for the summer and then come back with a deep tan and commemorative string bracelet and a transformed perspective that would last until Thanksgiving. Thomas had an actual job, or a semi-actual job, helping a friend of his dad’s with the research for a book on the history of the prison reform movement. A few times after a day at camp I took the Metro to meet Thomas at the Library of Congress.

Excerpt: Even at twelve, thirteen years old I understood: I wanted him to be my father. And he was, to an extent that couldn’t possibly have delighted me more, up for the job. Not just literally (he taught about the Civil War at Georgetown [University]) but is terms of temperament, inclinations. He knew things. He attracted disciples. I couldn’t talk to him for five minutes without learning some astonishing thing, some way of thinking, that I wouldn’t be able to wait to misquote as my own.