"I hear you," Mary Catherine said.
"But to answer your question, I was invited here for the debate."
"Debate?"
"Yes. Thursday night. After The Simpsons and before L.A. Law. All of the potential running mates are going to fight it out."
"He's considering you as a running mate?" Mary Catherine asked. She was embarrassed to have been so surprised. Eleanor was looking at her knowingly and indulgently. "I mean, don't get me wrong, you'd be great," Mary Catherine said. "You'd be fantastic. But I hadn't heard any of this."
"Honey, remember how this works," Eleanor said. "Neither your dad nor any other candidate is going to pick a black woman as a running mate anytime soon - and if they did, they'd never pick me. But he does get some brownie points - as it were - for putting one in the final four. And that's why I'm invited."
"Well, I'll definitely look forward to the debate."
"How about you? What's your role in all this?" Eleanor said, sweeping her hand across the smoking panorama of the barbecue.
Mary Catherine looked at the view and considered this question. She knew now why she had chosen to go on the boat ride: to get away, to stand back from things, to look at her life from a distance. The same impulse had probably struck most of the people on the boat. This conversation with Eleanor was just what she had been looking for.
She trusted Eleanor instinctively and wanted to tell her the truth: that something was wrong with her father. That during the last couple of months she had watched his every move, listened to his every utterance, used every scrap of her neurological training to piece together the puzzle of what was happening inside his brain. That she was spending a couple of hours a day with him in intensive, private therapy, trying to bring him back. And that the further she got into this thing, the lonelier she got, the more scared she became.
But she couldn't quite say that yet. So she had to play the airhead. "Who the hell knows?" she said.
Eleanor put one hand over her mouth, in a gesture that was incongruous and cute in a tough middle-aged woman, and laughed.
Mary Catherine continued, "My role is to be pretty, but not too pretty; smart, but not too; athletic, but not too. I think what they really wanted was a nice college girl. You know, the kind of girl who could go to college campuses in jeans and a sweater and sit cross-legged on the floor in dorm loungers and rap with her peers. They got a neurologist instead. And there's only so many AIDS babies I can kiss before that gets kind of old. So my life is on hold for a while until things settle down."
"Well, we all go through transitions," Eleanor said. "This sort of thing - a big campaign - is a kind of upheaval that can be useful."
"Useful how?"
"It shakes everything up. Everything's in flux for a moment, you have the chance to go off in new directions, fix old problems in your life. Believe me on this."
Mary Catherine smiled. "I believe you," she said.
Ever since the beginning of William A. Cozzano's National Town Meeting, the high-tech wristwatch strapped to Floyd Wayne Vishniak's arm had been flaring into action several times a day, confronting him with live coverage of the events that were taking place only a couple of hundred miles away. He welcomed the free entertainment, which took his mind off the stupid work he was doing.
He had lived for quite some time now on a meager unemployment check, and had long since given up trying to find himself a job. But now, Floyd Wayne Vishniak, by virtue of the PIPER watch on his arm, had become, in effect, a personal adviser to Governor Cozzano. It was a weighty responsibility. He was not going to sit around in his trailer drinking beer and acting like some kind of a buffoon. He was going to educate himself. He was going to start paying attention to the presidential campaign and learn about all of the candidates and the issues.
A week or two after he had first donned the PIPER watch, back in June, Vishniak had been in downtown Davenport to take care of a bit of business, and he had seen a cluster of newspaper machines on a street corner. In addition to the Quad Cities paper and The Des Moines Register, these included the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. As it happened, his pockets were heavy with quarters, and so he brought a copy of each, blowing two and a half dollars. He took them all back to his trailer and read them. There was some interesting stuff in there.
Since then it had become a habit. Two and a half bucks a day, six days a week, added up to fifteen bucks, plus an additional five bucks on Sunday made twenty bucks a week. Eighty dollars a month. On Floyd Wayne Vishniak's budget it was a lot of money. He had cut back on his beer consumption, and, as the summer wore on and the tassels began to sprout from the corn, he had taken a job detasseling.
Detasseling was a common practice in Iowa; it was the mass castration of corn plants by the forcible removal of their tassels. The actual yanking was done by hand, by individual detasselers walking up and down the rows, endlessly, beneath the hot August sun.
Floyd Wayne Vishniak would drive out to the fields early each morning to put in a couple of hours before the sun became hot, go back into Davenport to feed rolls of quarters into the newspaper machines, read the papers and drink Mountain Dew all day, then drive back out to the fields in the cool of the evening to continue his work. For the first couple of weeks of the detasseling season, the evening shift had been rather dull, but things perked up when Cozzano's National Town Meeting finally got started, and he began to get coverage two or three hours a night.
The Town Meeting had seemed a little bit hokey when they announced it, but in practice it turned out to be damn impressive. Some very important people were showing up at this thing. They had a couple of so-called surprise appearances every evening, as movie stars, ex-football heroes, captains of industry, and even a few renegade politicians began to show up at the Meeting and throw their support behind Cozzano.
By the third or fourth evening, a clear pattern emerged in the coverage. At seven p.m. the PIPER watch would come on, with the familiar logo and theme music. For fifteen minutes or so it would show an edited broadcast of that day's events at McCormick Place, Chicago's huge lakeside convention center, the site of the National Town Meeting. Then there would be fifteen minutes of analysis from a team of pundits, some pro-Cozzano, some anti-. Then half an hour of taped stuff, like a speech by Cozzano from earlier in the day. Then the program would cut to a hotel suite somewhere, a living-room-type environment, and Cozzano would sit down with various groups of Americans who wanted to bitch about their problems: unemployment, lack of heath insurance, shitty public schools, and so on. Cozzano would sit there and listen to them ventilate, jot down the occasional note, ask the occasional question, and then he would usually deliver some kind of a little sermon that was intended to calm them down and make them believe that he cared about their problems and would certainly do something about them at the White House.
The PIPER watch beamed out these little images as he made his way across a vast flat cornfield, completely alone, the only thing moving within several miles. His hands bobbed up and down rhythmically as he shuffled down the mile-long rows, reaching out with both arms to grip and yank the tassels, and when something especially interesting came on the screen - a surprise appearance by a major star, for example - he would stop for a minute and stand motionless, staring at his wrist. At the beginning of these evening shifts, the images on the little screen were pale and washed-out, but as he inched his way across the field, and the sun sank into the flat horizon, the light from the watch became brighter, its colors purer, until finally the moon and the stars came out and Vishniak was groping his way across the field in darkness, the images of the National Town Meeting radiating in pure intense colors as though the wristwatch were a bracelet of rubies, emeralds, and sapphires.