In the early seventies I was an elevator operator in the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Its cramped offices were assigned mostly to junior and minority members of Congress. My shift was 5:30 P.M. to 1:30 A.M., and most members were gone by the time I came to work, but there were exceptions.

One well-known Republican senator, the apotheosis of moral rectitude, was then an up-and-coming young representative. He invariably entered the elevator with a retinue of pretty, doe-eyed interns hanging on his every word. A flamboyant Democrat from the Bronx who wore a pinkie ring and a Rolex watch would often show up around midnight with a beautiful woman on his arm. He eventually ended up in Sing Sing, but back then he was riding high.

I’m a liberal, but oddly enough my favorite members were all Republicans. Gene Snyder from Kentucky had the common touch. He knew me by name and treated me with genuine warmth and friendliness. And Pete McCloskey from California reminded me of my late father, working long hours and schlepping home an overstuffed briefcase every night. It was McCloskey who derailed Pat Robertson’s presidential ambitions by revealing that the future televangelist had avoided combat duty in Korea, thanks to intervention by his senator father. Mostly, though, the building was empty, and there was little for me to do. I read voluminously and smoked marijuana with my co-workers. (One security officer wanted to bust us, thinking it might get him a promotion, until his superior explained that their real job was to keep members safe from embarrassment.)

One co-worker and I even shared a joint on the Capitol steps in the early-morning hours of October 21, 1973. It was the height of the Watergate scandal, and President Nixon had just put the country on some kind of bogus security alert. We expected soon to see tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue and the onset of martial law. Occasionally, when my shift ended, I’d sit lotus style in the center of the Capitol Rotunda and pray for peace.

I quit that job after I was accepted to graduate school in California. When I told Representative Snyder, he was aghast. “You’re moving to Berkeley?” he said. “My God, you’ll become even more of a leftist!” Then he wished me well, adding, “Nothing better for our side than good competition.”

Steve Furrer
Santa Fe, New Mexico

At 11 P.M. the phone rings. My husband, Pete, and I are already in bed, but he answers it. It’s my sister Valerie. Naturally. This is the pattern: Valerie and her husband have a fight, he leaves, and she calls and asks me to come over. Sometimes I end up sleeping on her couch.

“Are you coming back this time or staying the night?” Pete asks with a frown as I get dressed.

“I’ll just stay an hour,” I tell him, irritated that he isn’t more sympathetic.

Before I leave, I put my son’s soccer gear in the foyer, just in case I’m not there in the morning.

As the older sister, I was taught to look out for Val. If someone teased her, I made sure they never did it a second time. If she got in trouble, I defended her. As we got older, I continued to rescue her: picking her up when she got a flat tire at the mall, lending her money, baby-sitting her kids, listening to her problems with men.

Tonight my sister falls asleep exhausted after three hours of talking about her marriage. I lie on the couch and make a mental note to take her trash out in the morning and set up a dental appointment for her daughter. It occurs to me that maybe I like being the responsible sister, the one who has her life together, the one who doesn’t need saving in the middle of the night.

Nancy D.
Redding, California

When I was twelve, I had an afternoon paper route. We lived in a poor neighborhood, but my memories of it are like a Norman Rockwell painting. I knew my forty-seven customers by heart, and as I pedaled my bicycle through the streets, kids would yell out my name, and adults would thank me and smile.

Then the paper switched from afternoon to morning publication. No more friendly salutations — I was the only one awake. Seven days a week, 365 days a year, I got up in the middle of the night, put on five layers of clothes, and hopped on my bicycle to deliver a bag of papers in the predawn chill. Monday’s papers were thin, but Sunday’s were big and heavy. The Thanksgiving paper was the size of a phone book.

In high school I sometimes stayed out late drinking cheap beer, and it was harder to get up for my route after those nights. Delivering papers with a hangover was murder. But I continued to do my job, if not always on time. Neither snow nor rain nor dry heaves could keep me from my appointed rounds.

Now, at thirty-five, I have a paper route again, and I love it (except on Sundays and holidays). As the want ad promised, I “earn extra income while getting paid to exercise.” I get up in the dark and cover my route the old-fashioned way, by bicycle, even when it is cold and raining. Sometimes it seems the whole country is shrouded in darkness. Maybe someday I’ll have better news to deliver.

Hobe S. Rubin
Eugene, Oregon

When I was five, I wanted a water bed. My parents had one, and so did my eight-year-old sister Susan. I asked my father again and again why I couldn’t have one, and he always gave the same answer: “Because we don’t want you to drown.” To get around this unfair rule, I often slept in my sister’s room. We would jump vigorously on the water-filled mattress and pretend we were walking on the moon.

One night Susan woke me and held a flashlight below her chin, giving her face an eerie look. “I have to tell you something,” she said. “Listen good.” She lowered the flashlight a bit, creating shadows around her eyes. “I’m an alien.”

“Shut up,” I said. “That’s not funny. Just go to sleep.”

“No, seriously. I’m an alien.”

“Stop kidding. I’m going to tell Mom and Dad.”

I took a deep breath, preparing to yell for my parents, but Susan put her hand over my mouth and whispered, “Don’t even bother. They’re aliens too. That’s why we sleep on water beds and you don’t.” Scared now, I ran to my room and hid in the closet. I heard footsteps approaching, and the closet door opened. “Get away from me, you stupid aliens!” I screamed at my dumbfounded parents. Then I saw my sister laughing quietly behind them and realized I’d been duped.

I didn’t talk to Susan all the next day. When we crossed paths in the bathroom before bed, she asked if I wanted to sleep in her water bed again that night. Hesitantly, I agreed. We pretended to walk on an alien-free moon for a while and then fell asleep.

Now I’m almost thirty and haven’t spoken to my sister in seven years. I wish grudges were still as easy to let go of as they were when we were kids.

Brian S.
Long Beach, California

When my cousin Lillian came to visit, she and I would pull down the shades in my room and turn out the lights. Then she’d switch on her toy planetarium, and dots of light would appear on the ceiling. Lillian introduced me to Andromeda the princess; Orion the hunter; Cygnus the swan; and Polaris, the North Star.

The summer Lillian turned fourteen and I turned ten, her parents got a divorce, and Lillian and her mother moved from New Jersey to California. For our last star show, Lillian splashed the Big Dipper on the ceiling — seven bright stars: three forming the handle and four forming the bowl. She explained that long ago, when Africans were kept as slaves in the South, many escaped in the middle of the night by following the Big Dipper north to freedom.

After Lillian left, I learned to conjure up the stars when my mother’s angry voice rang in my ears, or when my father’s face looked like it might never smile again, or when my stepfather’s hands moved like spiders across my body.

Lillian and I grew up and fell in love with men who had roving eyes and loved themselves more than they did us. On the few occasions when I saw my cousin, she drank Scotch and spoke in a quiet, controlled voice. Neither of us mentioned the stars. We lost track of each other after a while.

Last summer I went to the beach with a friend and her fifteen-year-old daughter. One night the daughter and another girl came running into the house to say that they’d been looking at the stars. I went outside to look with them. We stood under the sky, and they pointed to the Big Dipper — seven bright stars — and to Polaris in the north, which Lillian had said shone all year long. Feeling a familiar excitement, I walked toward them in the darkness.

S.H.
New York, New York

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