DC By the Book

Excerpt: The Crypt wasn’t a friendly room. It might be convenient, smack in the middle of the Capitol building with doorways leading everywhere. But it wasn’t a place that invited you stick around and make yourself comfortable. Stone floors and stone columns made it a cold place. During the day, it was crowded with school groups, kids wearing matching neon green tee shirts. Those kids ignored the tour guides and made fun of the exhibits. They never looked at the ancient wooden clock from the old House chamber. They walked right past the replica of the Magna Carta inside its giant plastic box.

Excerpt: The one thing [school kids] did like was the miniature model of the National Mall. It was one of the few things in the Capitol that you could touch without getting yelled at. Tiny white plastic versions of the Lincoln Memorial and the U.S. Capitol sat at opposite ends on top of a long table. In between, there were miniature memorials and monuments and museums on the Mall. . . . The table was just my height. I could look from one end of the Mall to the other without standing on tiptoe. . . . There was something weird about it. There were two Washington Monuments right in the middle. I don’t know why.

Excerpt: I started my search by circling the room, ignoring those Founding Fathers watching my every move. The Crypt was dark and echoey in the late afternoon. Strange shadows painted the arched ceiling. The ancient air conditioner wheezed as if it was about to die at any moment. The Crypt never felt scary in the middle of the day when tour guides in red jackets used their outside voices, warning kids not to lean on the display cases.

Excerpt: I didn’t breathe again until my hand touched the cold brass doorknob and pushed open the door. There was nothing scary about the Rules Committee room. It was the opposite of scary: it was boring. It looked like a fancy hotel lobby with boring paintings of boring trees. . . . The only interesting thing in the room was the chandelier. It looked like an upside down glass wedding cake. When all the talking was as boring as the paintings, I could count the arrow-shaped crystal pieces in the layers of the chandelier cake.

Excerpt: Papa found what he called “the perfect Washington house” on A Street SE. SE meant southeast. What a dumb name for a street: A Street SE. Couldn’t they come up with more interesting names than alphabet letters? . . . Our new house on the street with the dumb name was a few blocks behind the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. The brick sidewalks were all bumpy and pushed out of shape by ancient tree roots. . . . Houses on Capitol Hill were really old and super skinny. Papa called them “row houses.” Ours had black iron stairs that made a lot of noise when you clomped up to the blue front door. I don’t know why the door was blue. Papa said it was because it was a Democratic house, but I think he was joking. The house smelled like somebody else lived there. It didn’t stink, but it didn’t smell like home, either. It was filled with furniture that wasn’t ours.

Excerpt: “Gabby and I got to go inside the actual Supreme Court. You have to sit on hard benches way in the back behind all these bald lawyers, and it’s hard to see Justice Sotomayor because she sits over near the end. Papa said that’s because she’s one of the newer justices. Oh, but Abuelita! She wears jangly bracelets, just like me!”

Excerpt: The Speaker’s Lobby was another fancy room in the Capitol next to the House Floor. It had paintings of dead congressmen and a real fireplace and big leather chairs to wait in while Papa voted for bills. I sat around in those chairs a lot, waiting for Papa.

Excerpt: Papa didn’t have much seniority. He’s only been on Capitol Hill three years, so his office was a tiny space up on the fifth floor. Nobody wanted those offices because most of the elevators only went up to the fourth floor. Just a couple of elevators went all the way up to five. Papa said he didn’t mind since he spent most afternoons over in the Rules Committee room in the Capitol, but he felt bad for his staff. Twelve people were smushed together at twelve cubicles, filling up every square inch of floor space. Papa said it was so crowded in there, staffers could hear each other think.

Excerpt: Across the hall from Papa’s office, there was a storage room with no nameplate on the door, just the number “87.” A black metal cage took up half the storage room, filled with dusty file boxes stacked to the ceiling. The rest of the room was what Papa called my “girl cave.” He used it too, for meetings and when he wanted to get away from his crowded Cannon office for a few minutes. But after school, Room 87 was where I hung out to do my homework. It felt like a cave-quiet, with no windows, hidden away from the rest of Capitol Hill, with a slight smell of burnt coffee. There was a TV and a refrigerator and a couch perfect for stretching out on to read history assignments. Perfect, except when the TV set was turned to C-SPAN, which it almost always was.

Excerpt: That’s when the vote bells went off. You could hear them all over the House office buildings: two loud buzzers. There were like the ones at school that told you lunch was over, but these buzzers reminders members that it was time to head over to the Capitol to vote.

Excerpt: Voting in Congress was kind of crazy. First of all, there were no saved seats. You sat wherever you wanted to sit. But all the Democrats bunched up together on the left side of the House Floor and the Republicans always sat with other Republicans on the right side of the chamber. Lawmakers called “whips” ran around talking to people in their own party, making sure they would vote the way the party leaders wanted them to vote. It was the whip’s job to keep track of who was voting which way and make sure there were enough votes to pass the bill. . . . While the whips counted and the scoreboard on the back wall counted down the minutes left to vote, lawmakers hung out with their friends, talking in really loud voices about their families or the bumpy flight back to Washington or some new restaurant in town. It was like recess without the jump rope. Papa handed me his plastic voting card. “Go on,” he said. “Put it in the ‘yes’ machine.”

Excerpt: A door slammed somewhere. One of the Capitol policemen at the south entrance laughed. I felt chilly. It was cooler in the Crypt than anywhere else in the Capitol. The bench was hard. I shifted around to try to get more comfortable.

Excerpt: We slowly walked around the room. Senator Something sniffed carefully at the base of each statue. Satisfied, he led the way through the archway to the Senate side of the Capitol. The fancier side. Curved ceilings were decorated with turquoise diamond shapes and pink circles with gold daisies in the middle. There was a sparkly chandelier, but it was so high up in the ceiling that the hallway was kind of dim. A brass plaque hung on the wall, but it was too dark to read any of the small letters. All you could make out was the name: Samuel F. B. Morse, the inventor of Morse code. Senator Something started sniffing the floor over by the doorway that led to the old Supreme Court chamber. The floor over here was ancient concrete instead of stones. It was covered with stains and pockmarks . . .

Excerpt: “You remember where the Hart building is? The Senate office building with the big Calder sculpture?” I remembered the giant black mountain of metal art in the middle of the lobby.

Excerpt: Claudia took us straight to giant pandas, but there were too many tall people standing around the glass cage. When it was finally our turn in the front row, the pandas didn’t do much. They stripped the leaves off long sticks of bamboo and chomped down on the wood. After about one minute, that got really boring. The pandas weren’t even pretty. The white part of their fur was more dirty-brown than white.

Excerpt: After lunch, we walked over to see the sea lions and the bison and the flamingos. Gabby went back to see the snakes. My favorite were the tigers. The older ones looked angry and bored at the same time. It was clear they didn’t want to be here. I felt kind of sorry for them. But the twin Sumatra cubs, with their big blue eyes and little striped faces, didn’t care that they were stuck in a zoo with a bunch of humans watching them. They had a grand time, chasing each other round and round the moat.

Excerpt: Ron then marched us over to Statuary Hall, the half-moon shaped room where the cat with walnut shells ran around scaring the guards. The tour guide didn’t tell that story. Instead, he made us stand quietly on one side of the room while he whispered from the other side, “Can you hear me?” I rolled my eyes. Claudia had shown Gabby and me the same trick. The curved ceilings carried even a whisper over to the far side of the room. Every kid had to try it.

Excerpt: I took Senator Something with me to talk to the House historian. Finding his office, like everything else on Capitol Hill, was confusing. You had to walk through the security screening and then turn around and walk behind the Capitol policemen, then make a quick left turn down a mini hallway. Finally, I knocked on the historian’s door.

Excerpt: We walked to the smokers’ park where Senator Something did his usual poop business. He looked at me and then over the top of the concrete fountain and whined. He didn’t believe me when I told him there was no water. I told him what Papa said, that they turn off the water when it gets cold.

Excerpt: Senator Something had another idea. He yanked on the leash and pulled me down the street toward the Botanic Garden where there’s a fancy fountain with statues of ladies standing on seashells. Papa said the fountain was by Bartholdi, the same guy who built the Statue of Liberty.

Excerpt: We followed Papa to the elevator, down to the ground floor, past the X-ray machines at the Independence Avenue door and kept walking. “Where are we going?” Gabby complained. “I have geometry homework.” “You’ll see.” We crossed the street and hiked over the dying grass to the foot of Capitol Hill, near the statue of Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general who sat on his horse and seemed to be protecting the Capitol from any Confederate soldiers who might still be wandering around Washington.