Why We Lie

by Amy Impellizzeri

  On that morning after the campaign announcement, Mena had a copy of The Washington Truth on her desk, rotated to face me as I walked in. I had caught a glimpse on the newsstand at the Metro station on my way into the office, but hadn’t actually bought a copy. I worried that might look a little gauche. I wasn’t sure what the new rules were now that Jude’s campaign was officially begun.

  The front page story was about Jude’s campaign announcement, and the cover photo was Jude at the podium at the Freedom Art Loft Space looking handsome as ever, with me off to the side, looking a little broody. I didn’t remember feeling broody the night before, and I was surprised to see that the photographer had caught this apparently split second expression. Looking at myself flat on Philomena’s desk, I hoped no one else would focus on me, but would focus on the dashing Jude Birch instead.

  “Wow, I finally made it into the paper. Sorry it was with Jude, Mena, and not for Foundation business,” I reached for it, but stopped as Mena’s hand landed on the paper instead. I noticed something I hadn’t when I’d walked by the newsstand too quickly earlier that morning.

  Laila was in the shot as well. Not far from me. Closer still to Jude.

  Aha. Perhaps that explains the broodiness.

  Mena tapped the grainy page, and one of her long fingers landed directly on me in the photo. “You ok with all this attention, Aby?”

  Much to my dismay, Mena obviously was focusing on me in all my broodiness. And as her finger now covered me, the only ones I could see on the front page were Laila and Jude. I looked away as my breath caught.

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?” I challenged her.

  Mena raised a golden coffee mug with a Foundation logo that had been resting on the paper, leaving behind a muddy stain, and sipped her coffee without letting go of her gaze at me. I practiced the move in return, lifting my own Styrofoam Metro coffee cup to my lips.

  There was something compellingly earthy about the way Philomena Treese navigated her day and her world. The truth was, and is, I admired Philomena Treese—not because she was born wealthy and privileged—but because she never let that get in her way.

  “I’m wondering what you’ll do to stay above the fray, if you will. There are sacrifices to this kind of public life. I don’t want to be melodramatic or anything, but look, there are dangers to it as well.”

  Mena’s words spooked me. I tried shaking them off but I know it looked like a shudder to her.

  Her voice became gentler. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to scare you. It’s just that, Aby. I know you grew up around all this—but, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—it doesn’t seem like your world, you know what I mean?”

  I nodded. She was right. Sort of.

  “Thanks, Mena. I really appreciate your concern. I guess the way I see it is, if I want to be with Jude, I have to accept this. Just as he has to accept everything about me.” I picked up her coffee-stained copy of the paper, thanked her and left her office, heading down the hall to my own.

  I was proud of my job. So proud of my office with the glossy letters spelling out “Executive Director, Aby Boyle.” I had officially gotten the fellowship position a few weeks after meeting Jude, and I had been promoted from an entry level position within a few short months, after proving myself to be a worthwhile fundraiser and development steward for the Foundation. I had surprised everyone, including myself. I couldn’t help but think, despite the way I’d gotten the job, my mom would still have been proud.

  The truth was I loved the mission of the Foundation. Bringing arts programs, and more importantly writing programs for schools that had no equivalent? It felt life-saving to me. It felt important. I poured myself into it, and I was indeed good at it.

  When Mena had interviewed me for the initial fellowship position, I’d told her about my mother, and described her as a “pioneering mayor of a rural town in Pennsylvania.” My mother would have killed me to hear herself described that way. A small town outside of Harrisburg, I told Mena, with hardly a population worth mentioning. I was vague, too, about the name of the town for obvious reasons.

  I explained in only the vaguest of terms how there had been a scandal. About how my mom—who identified closely with single, working women—had continued to work hard for the low income populations in our area until she’d taken her own life, too overwhelmed by the conditions she was living in and observing all around her. These were details I’d left out of my discussions with Jude. Also for obvious reasons.

  In my interview, I told Mena, “I’ve grown up in politics and I’ve run away from politics. Admittedly not too far, as I’ve run away to Washington D.C.—a move some might have argued would have little other likely outcome than to land me right where it has. But I’m trying to shed all that, and I feel a connection to you. I feel like we’ve been on the same course. I mean yours has been on a much more public stage, but still. I feel as though we’re kindred spirits.”

  Mena waved my words away when I said the bit about the “public stage.” She was always self-deprecating to a fault. But something in her eyes changed at the “kindred spirits” part. It motivated me to keep going.

  “I admire you so much, Philomena. You’re the real deal in this town full of unauthentic people.”

  What happened next was not nearly as spontaneous as I made it sound. “You remind me of a friend of mine. Jude Birch.”

  “Jude Birch is your friend?” Mena had looked surprised, and I tried not to let it show how much that surprise bothered me.

  “He is, indeed. Do you know each other?” I tried to hide my nervousness. Had I overstepped? Had I misread things?

  But no.

  “Well, only the way everyone in this town knows him. A darling of the local political scene. Lots of rumors flying around. Not that I pay attention to rumors, but you know.”

  I nodded. Reassured that she didn’t really know Jude, I dove in headfirst. “Well, between you and me, Philomena, we’re seeing each other. But I’d appreciate your discretion.” I leaned in for emphasis.

  “Of course,” Mena said a bit too enthusiastically, glancing back down at my resume, which I knew now would matter very little to what was going to happen next.

  “I haven’t seen a whisper about it in the papers. Good for you. You know something, I think someone with your drive and connections, and your appreciation for being discreet and professional is exactly what we need around here. And please, call me, Mena. All my friends do.”

  Touchdown.

  She offered me the job that day, and I practically hugged myself on the way out, amazed at how beautifully everything had fallen together.

  True, I had only met Jude about a few weeks before that interview. And our relationship was brand new. I’d told him I worked for a “fledgling foundation” based solely on wishful thinking that I might soon score an interview with Philomena—make that Mena Treese. I was still working on my resume—had been for several months, along with some help, when I met Jude; I was aware, too, that my resume, once finalized, still would tell some very tall tales—and hide a great many truths—that I was going to have trouble backing up when and if I finally got to the interview. I knew if I ever got in the room with Philomena Treese, I’d need a connection to someone in this town to stay in that room.

  It had been a relief to distract Philomena from my resume. Pulling out the “Jude Birch” reference at just the right point of the interview had been a stroke of genius on my part. Hell, the whole meeting of Jude Birch and his friends outside Little Miss Whiskey’s shortly before the interview with Philomena, make that Mena, had been pretty fortuitous.

  Well, I guess that’s if you consider stalking Jude Birch’s public Facebook check-ins and waiting outside for him and his friends on several occasions with a knife and an innocent radiator hose, until it actually happened …“fortuitous.”

  Chapter 8

  Before the shooting, Mena and I used to take a yoga class together a few times a month at Mindful Me Studio on O Street in
Georgetown.

  She’d roped me into it pretty much from the first day I started working for her.

  “Aby, Do you yoga?”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t even sure that was a thing. Like, for anyone.

  “You have to try it. Come with me at lunchtime. We’ll start taking yoga together. I grabbed an extra mat by accident last time I was at the studio. It looked just like mine, only the lotus flower is a little less elaborate. You can have it.”

  And so it began.

  Usually “taking yoga together” consisted of me sitting on my pilfered yoga mat trying hard to focus on my breathing and my abdomen and my fingertips, but ending up only thinking about the unbearably skinny woman next to me who was making sort of grunting sounds as she was breathing.

  “Mena, please,” I always pleaded.

  And in response, she always opened one eye and winked at me.

  The thing you really should know is, I liked Mena Treese from the beginning. I wouldn’t have lied to her if I didn’t.

  At the time I interviewed for the position at Appletreese Foundation, I knew what the world knew about Philomena Treese. Which was everything.

  And nothing at all.

  I had moved to D.C. a few months after my mom’s funeral. Even though I was 22, I was, in fact, running away from home on some level, and I had pointed my Hundai south and driven until it ran out of gas.

  True story.

  I had my bright orange notebook, a fair amount of therapy under my belt, a new-found love of writing, and a small amount of insurance money that my mom had arranged for me to use to start a “new life.” When I got to D.C., I’d ended up answering one of those tear-off ads on a coffee shop bulletin board in Georgetown for a quiet, non-smoking, felony-free roommate (also a true story).

  I’d ripped off the ad on my way inside to interview for a job, which I got. Waiting tables was something I was pretty good at. The coffeeshop manager called my old diner boss back home and she had the kindness to give me a glowing recommendation. She’d left out the mud-slinging and slime. Probably more for my mother’s sake than mine, but still I was grateful. I also got the roommate gig. So it was a pretty successful first few days in D.C.

  Actually it was more than a successful few days, it was a successful year.

  My roommate thought I was a fellow co-ed and I didn’t let her think otherwise.

  No, I didn’t lie. But I didn’t correct her. My presumptuous roommate’s name was Sol and she was a grumpy but well-meaning Social Justice major who didn’t resemble her sunny name in either looks or disposition. She spent most of her time at her vegan boyfriend’s apartment, and only came home to secretly eat burgers a few times a week with her dark hair hanging in her face as if in shame, and I mostly found her to be a perfect roommate. In fact, she’s the one who really helped all the pieces come together in my application for the Appletreese Foundation. I mean, before Jude wrapped the whole thing up with a bow.

  It happened one Friday night when Sol came home from her vegan stud’s place and found me staring at a fellowship application for The Appletreese Foundation.

  “Really? You’re applying for that?”

  Sol thought I spent most of my time at class, punctuated by shifts at the coffee shop. In reality, I spent a lot of time at the coffee shop. There was no class for me to go to after all. And one thing I did a lot of at the coffee shop, was write. And read the news. And according to the news, it was reported that Philomena Treese’s fellowship program was expected to attract over 500 worthy candidates from inside Washington D.C. and beyond.

  Philomena Treese had started the Foundation because of her father. She insisted this in every media interview. Even though, to the outside observer, it appeared to be opposite of the truth.

  Dominic Treese—a self-made real estate mogul of modest origins in the Midwest—had moved East when he was 21 and proceeded to make the most of the 1980s real estate market while still somehow staying on the legitimate side of the housing market scandal when the whole thing tanked. By 2009, he was one of the only developers in Washington D.C. with any credibility and he had capitalized on his wealth, investing much of it in a trust fund for his most prized asset, daughter, Philomena, who inherited her work ethic from her father, and her beauty and shrewd sense of patience from her mother, Suzana.

  Suzana was a Croatian immigrant who had been a physician in her own country and a prominent activist for the Croatian Forest Research Institute, before meeting Dominic while he was traveling on vacation. Suzana had returned with Dominic to America after a whirlwind love affair and had found herself marginalized in her new country, unable to continue practicing medicine without beginning her education anew, a task she found impossible with a new baby on the way. Alone, without a family or friend support network, and a work-a-holic, largely absent husband, Suzana struggled to regain a sense of self. There were no forests to advocate for or against in her new concrete jungle home in America’s capital city.

  Suzana assumed a new position in her adopted country, penning a memoir that became an instant best-seller in 2002, Giving up the Forest for the Treese, before fading into the background of American immigrant literature.

  Unable, or perhaps unwilling (who could know the truth about a woman with a PR team that made some politicians’ teams look like a school bake sale committee), to pitch another successful book deal on the heels of the runaway hit of a memoir, Suzana became an ardent benefactor of the arts, working hard to bring a diverse schedule of theatre, author book signings, and traveling art exhibits to the Washington D.C. area. She was often photographed with the lovely Philomena at her side.

  In the waiting room at Appletreese Foundation, guests could peruse a coffee table book entitled Washington D.C. Champions of the Arts with exactly three photographs of Suzana and Philomena alone in front of traveling Croatian exhibits and one additional photograph of Suzana, Dominic, and Philomena, posing awkwardly in front of the National Gallery of Art in 2009.

  Of course, Philomena was photographed in a lot more places than the coffee table composition. By 2014, Philomena was a bit of a media darling, appearing on the society pages with her latest beaus and even once on the cover of Inc. Magazine as the newly anointed social media manager for an up and coming start-up company called Innovative Media that was blossoming both inside and outside the beltway. Innovative Media was heavily invested in by one Dominic Treese who was looking to diversify beyond the world of construction, and his connection to Innovative Media was a point that I later came to suspect Inc. Magazine had emphasized a bit too much for Mena’s liking.

  I knew all these things, as I had long been a student of all things Philomena Treese. The D.C. papers loved Philomena and I had a lot of time to read papers alongside my job at the Georgetown coffee café. Thus, I knew all too well that not long before I’d arrived in D.C., two pivotal things had happened in the Treese household.

  First, Dominic launched a short-lived campaign for a Maryland Senate seat. Maryland, because the Treese family—while Washington insiders—lived outside the Washington D.C. beltway in an upscale community near the Potomac River in a home handcrafted entirely of reclaimed wood as per Suzana’s insistence. Dominic was heard joking at many cocktail parties that while it might look as though Suzana had the final say in his house, the truth was he had built far too many steel buildings in Washington D.C. to actually live in one.

  Second, the only child of Dominic and Suzana Treese, Philomena, turned 25, and ceremoniously inherited her enormous trust fund.

  Which, in a decision that sidelined everyone, she promptly gave away.

  In a move both heralded and criticized by D.C. insiders and outsiders, Philomena Treese left her day job as social media manager for Innovative Media and doled out her new inheritance to various grassroots and community organizations throughout Washington D.C., keeping just $30,000, what she called a “reasonable, but admittedly still generous, salary for my first year as a true citizen of this world.”

  L
iving modestly in a loft apartment in Georgetown and sharing rent with several grad students from George Washington, throwing off all the trappings of her prior privileged life, Philomena spent her first year as a pauper, working studiously on a business plan and researching investors to support a new project she hoped to get off the ground by the following year: Appletreese Foundation. The buzz about Philomena’s project dwarfed the news that Dominic’s campaign stalled nearly as quickly as it had started. No one was talking about Dominic anymore, and many thought the reason for the campaign’s failure was that simple.

  When interviewed by ForbesWoman about why she hadn’t simply used her inheritance to start Appletreese Foundation—her labor of love—Philomena scoffed. “What good am I to the world, if I use my family’s money to buy a dream? Shouldn’t I learn the business from the ground up? Shouldn’t I work hard, and fail, and fall down, and live up to my name?”

  The Treese name is indeed a sturdy one, the ForbesWoman interviewer had said too quickly.

  Philomena had scoffed again. “No. That’s not what I mean. That is not my name. That is my father’s name, and now my mother’s, and I borrow it gratefully. My name is Philomena. It is my own. And at its root, it means strength.”

  It means strength.

  On my phone in the coffee shop.

  Late at night trying to falling asleep.

  On my earbuds while walking to work.

  I had listened to Philomena’s interview on YouTube countless times, enamored by the naivete and the brazen attitude. Philomena—Mena—had a grace and fortitude that seemed so genuine, so impenetrable, that I wanted to reach right through the screen and grab some of it. While lots of other women were fascinated with the Kardashians, studying what they wore, and trying to emulate them in many ways—swearing that band of young women had it all, I was studying and emulating Philomena Treese. For me, who had never really had anything, I wasn’t nearly as fascinated by the wealthy working-to-have-it all-Kardashian set, as I was with the woman who had it all from the beginning, and gave it away.