The Cave Dwellers, Christina McDowell [ap literature book list .TXT] 📗

CHAPTER FIFTY

Cate sits across from America’s presumed future first family, Doug, Betsy, Mackenzie, and Haley, in a blacked-out limousine. She glances at Betsy’s face, her tattooed eyeliner, her false lashes, her Botox and fillers, and hopes that one day she won’t feel the same, remembering what Doug told her once: My mother always told me to go for the pretty ones because they’re the ones with the lowest self-esteem. Thinking about what it must feel like to lose your beauty if that’s all you ever had—clinging to a man whose inherent value somehow becomes your own. But Cate doesn’t know how to climb out of the fishbowl she’s thrown herself into; her desire for power always seems to give her whole self away. The thoughts, in these moments on the way to Billy’s funeral, seem mostly abstract, but close enough for her to realize she doesn’t want them.

Doug’s cold withholding of affection, how quickly it left her, forces Cate to catch her breath. She swallows and lowers her sunglasses over her eyes and thinks about her father somewhere in a California prison, which is strange, because she never thinks about her father, not anymore. If she had been raised more like Bunny and less like herself, she wonders, would things have gone a different way for her? She thought she’d come to Washington to create herself, not find herself, and somehow she’s been caught in between the two. The violence in her head castrates her circular emotions: Aren’t I worthy of love? Will my strategy work? Stop being dramatic. Cate knows deep down that had she been given all of the harder things in life on a silver platter as Bunny was—the things she thought she needed to win—that her legacy alone would never be enough. People die, things change, it’s simple. And even with all of the glory and status, no matter how she looks at it, something inside of her knows it wouldn’t ever feel like enough.

Betsy looks at Doug, placing her hand over his. “Did I tell you we got accepted into the Washington Club?”

Doug, in a haze: “No, you didn’t mention it.”

“Well, we did.” Betsy smiles wide before she remembers they’re on their way to a dead boy’s funeral. She picks up the newspaper displayed next to the empty flute glasses of champagne:

A RECKONING OF SEXUAL MISCONDUCT FOR POWER PLAYERS IN WASHINGTON

Cate studies Betsy again, watching her read the article. Betsy squirms in her seat, cracks her window. “Hot flash, phew!” she says, fake-smiling, when she reaches the end of the article—Doug’s name absent among those of some of his oldest colleagues, whom Betsy knows quite well. Cate smiles in her direction for a moment as Betsy glances at her then quickly rolls up her window, a common unknowing of being inside a symptom of the patriarchy.

Doug turns back as motorcades blaze past them preparing to stop average pedestrians from getting in the way of government officials attending Billy’s funeral. Doug remembers his brother, Ken, and he hates himself. He adjusts his tie and clears his sore throat, a cold coming on, tries to flip his thoughts to his pending bill again. Someday I will be buried there, with the generals and the saints! Famous men.…

And just like that, Cate reaches into her pocket, scoops out her phone like one of her emotional rocks. She refuses to be painted as a victim under any man’s power. But she will do something to thrust herself into the spotlight if it makes her look like a hero.

She texts Anne from the Washington Post: … but I do have this… She uploads the recording of Doug’s racist monologue telling Mackenzie to break up with Marty. She hits Send.

By the end of the funeral, Cate’s life will have changed. Photographers and reporters will swarm her; she’ll be invited on every late-night political reporting news show and every panel. She’ll be famous. She’ll start her PR firm… she’ll move to New York. She’ll never look back.

Anne from the Washington Post: Holy. Shit.

Cate: You’re welcome.

Bunny sits in the breakfast nook wearing black. Numb and heavy, she stares out of the aged-glass window forming a distorted reality as though she were hallucinating—a stray black cat tiptoes along the porch, its tail like the arm of a ballerina, twirling around a white column. With salad tongs, Meredith places a boiled hot dog on a china plate in front of Bunny. “You have to eat,” she says. Away from the outside world, time stands still. Bunny has never felt more present inside of her own home before, inside of herself; she’s so uncomfortable she wants to peel her skin off. Looking at her mother sitting across from her, the way her throat moves when she clears it and raises her eyelids, her pupils pinned to a random point on the wall between the floor and the windowsill, Bunny thinks, Could I be brave like Billy suggested? Could I cut them off, could I run away? Could I survive?

“My high school boyfriend killed himself,” Meredith says.

The sentence lingers in the air between them for a long time. Bunny doesn’t try to fill the silence. It belongs to her mother. She looks down at her soggy hot dog and swallows.

Meredith’s eyes squint like she’s trying to will the memory back to her. “I knew he was going to do it because he called me twice with instructions on what to tell his father.” She picks up her fork and knife and begins to saw off a piece of her hot dog. “I remember my hair was wet.”

Bunny picks up her fork. Her hand begins to shake like Meredith’s.

Billy’s funeral is in an hour.

“He hung himself with his father’s favorite ties. He was a clever bastard.”

Bunny bites off a piece of her hot dog, breathing out of her nose, and chews.

Meredith breaks her gaze from the wall and looks directly at Bunny. “Did you know that the idea of