Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Just before I returned to Chicago at the end of my sophomore year, when Roy raised my conversion to Judaism as a precondition of our eventual marriage, I broke up with him. I had, all along, seen him as a kind of experiment, a test to determine whether ongoing involvement with a man I wasn’t initially infatuated with might create infatuation; and while a sample size of one wasn’t wholly revealing, the answer in Roy’s case was no. For a time, the novelty of sex had offset our boring conversations and lackluster physical compatibility, and then, eventually, it hadn’t.

  I was soon spending time with Daniel the Harvard Divinity graduate student, whom I’d met at a Vietnam protest in Harvard Yard. Though our campuses were just sixteen miles apart, we began corresponding by letter, which progressed after a month to meeting for tea on Saturday afternoons. During these get-togethers, which occurred in either the town of Wellesley or Harvard Square, we’d discuss Martin Luther and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold Niebuhr; we once spent three hours debating all the ways the word good could be interpreted in John Wesley’s dictum “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” Daniel was from Indianapolis, had attended Indiana University as an undergraduate, and was wiry and dark-haired, with black horn-rimmed glasses.

  One cold day in early March, we were walking along the Charles River, and I said, “I’m not sure how you feel about undergraduate activities, but there’s a mixer coming up at Wellesley a week from Saturday, and I’m wondering if you’d like to join me for it.” I had rehearsed this language. I also had decided to pat his upper arm as I issued the invitation, but my execution of the gesture was more halting and less carefree than I’d imagined.

  Daniel stopped walking and turned toward me, the river behind him. It was 4:00 P.M. and about twenty degrees, and parts of the Charles, especially near the shore, were still frozen. Really, it was a bit cold to be walking for pleasure, except that my crush on Daniel had ballooned to the point where I didn’t care about the temperature. And might not the banks of the Charles be a perfect place for our first kiss?

  “Hillary, I really enjoy discussing theology with you,” Daniel said, and I knew, after those eight words, that if we ever again spent time together, it would be only to prove to one or both of us that I wasn’t ending our friendship because he didn’t reciprocate my romantic interest. There were additional words he said then, with the river behind him, the cold air, the wintry afternoon light, but they didn’t matter. How many times, I wondered, would this pattern repeat itself and still surprise me? I was twenty-one, meaning absurdly young yet old enough to consider myself newly worldly and to see my limited experiences as conclusive.

  Back on the Wellesley campus, I cried while describing the conversation to my friends Nancy and Phyllis, though already it felt like the tears were for a general sense of romantic discouragement rather than a Daniel-specific lamentation. Nancy was a tall, extremely rich English major from Greenwich, Connecticut, and Phyllis was a short, working-class biology major from Baltimore, and they’d been roommates since our freshman year and were my closest friends.

  “I’m sorry, Hillary,” Nancy said. “But all that time you were talking about God and man, you should have been wearing a dress with a low neckline.” Nancy was sitting with her desk chair turned out toward the room, Phyllis was cross-legged on her bed, and I was on the floor with my back against Nancy’s bed frame.

  “It was fun talking about God and man,” I said, and they looked at each other and laughed.

  “Once a guy doesn’t think of you as someone to date, it’s hard to change that,” Phyllis said.

  “You need to flirt more,” Nancy said. “From the beginning, you need to make it unmistakable. Don’t be subtle.”

  “I gave him a biography of Reinhold Niebuhr,” I said.

  “Yes,” Nancy said. “That’s the problem.”

  “I realize that’s not the same as batting my eyelashes, but it showed that I was thinking about him when we weren’t together. And it was hardcover. It cost twelve dollars.”

  “I don’t think it matters what you do,” Phyllis said. “He’s paying more attention to how you react to what he does.”

  As it happened, Nancy had applied to the Peace Corps, and Phyllis had applied to medical school. That all of us believed in equal rights went without saying.

  “I don’t know if this sounds pathetic or conceited,” I said. “But I always hoped a man would fall in love with me for my brain.”

  Again, Phyllis and Nancy exchanged a glance. Phyllis’s voice was kind as she said, “Hillary, no man falls in love with a woman’s brain.”

  * * *

  —

  In the gallery courtyard, I was perched against the bronze sculpture—because the sculpture was an oversized human figure, I was essentially sitting in her lap—and Bill stood facing me, intermittently lifting his right leg and setting the sole of his shoe against the sculpture’s base, a few inches from my left thigh. Describing where I’d grown up, I said, “When I started at Wellesley, I’d have said that I was from a middle-class background. Meaning, compared to girls who rode horses and went to boarding school. Park Ridge is nice but not fancy. But the people I work with at the clinic and through the National Children’s Initiative—I’m sure my family would seem rich to them. My dad owns a drapery business that’s done well. My mom had a really hard childhood, though. She mostly wasn’t raised by her own parents, and she had to support herself from a young age. Ironically, it’s my dad who has more of a chip on his shoulder, even though he grew up in a regular family.”

  “You think your mom’s childhood is what drew you to the clinic?”

  “I’m sure. My mom doesn’t talk that much about her past, but she always thinks of other people, whether it’s my brothers and me or a child she hears about through our church who needs a winter coat.”

  “When my mother was pregnant with me, my father was killed in a car accident.”

  “Oh my goodness,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Her next husband died on her, too, though I can’t say I was entirely sorry to see him go. Daddy was a mean old drunk, and we had some ugly times with him, me and Mother and my brother, Roger. In fact, Mother divorced him once, but it didn’t stick.”

  “When did your stepfather pass away?”

  “In ’67, of cancer. Now Mother’s married to a fellow named Jeff, and we all love him. Admittedly, he’s colorful in his own right. Not a drinker like Daddy, but Jeff did do time.”

  “You mean in prison?” Rapidly, the chip on my father’s shoulder, and even the challenges of my mother’s childhood, were seeming like minor inconveniences.

  “Stock fraud, and he was in for less than a year,” Bill said. “This was long before he and Mother became an item. The real problem when they got together was that he was still married to someone else.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I can see how that would be a problem.”

  “Jeff and his wife were separated,” Bill said. “They just weren’t legally divorced. Personally, I’ve always had a soft spot for the guy. He adores Mother, which matters the most. Plus, Mother’s beauty regimen is very important to her, and he’s a hairdresser. Talk about mixing business and pleasure, huh?”

  Our conversation had for me taken on a careening quality—one rather shocking detail was following another and another, without leaving time to absorb them, even as we swerved between seriousness and levity. Then Bill said, “Does this all sound crazy to you? Does it sound like I have a terribly disreputable background?”

  Carefully, I said, “It sounds different from what I’m used to. But it makes me respect the fact that you’ve overcome challenges and made something of yourself.”

  “Remember how I told you that in high school, I spent a week in Washington through Bo
ys Nation?”

  I nodded.

  “There were two delegates from every state. We all stayed in a dorm at the University of Maryland, and it was the first time I’d been outside Arkansas. From the minute I started meeting the other boys, I could tell that some of them, especially the ones from bigger Northern cities, thought I was a hick. I had an accent, I was kind of fat, I talked a lot.” Bill smiled wryly. “I’m sure you haven’t noticed any of those things.”

  “You’re not fat,” I said.

  “I was then. In any case, I realized I could observe these other boys and emulate them, even if that meant concealing parts of who I was, or I could say fuck it and be myself. Let the chips fall where they may. Mother loves betting at the racetrack. She wears gobs of makeup. She’s been married four times to three men, one of whom was violent, and I’ve never even asked her about this, but a cousin of mine told me there was a rumor my real father, the one who died in the car crash, was already married when he married her. But Mother has a heart of gold, and so do so many people in my extended family and so many of our neighbors. I’ve met lots of wonderful people at Georgetown, at Oxford, here, but the people in Arkansas are something special. And I’m not just saying that because I plan to run for office there.” He paused. “I said fuck it and decided to be myself.”

  “I think you made the right choice.” I hesitated then added, “My father was never violent, but he’s a real asshole.” This wasn’t a way I’d ever previously described him, even to Phyllis and Nancy at Wellesley. “I assume he’s unhappy,” I continued, “but I never understood why he had to take out his unhappiness on us and especially on my mom. If we left the cap off the toothpaste, he’d throw it out the bathroom window and make us go get it, even if we were already in bed. He once made me go out in the snow in my bare feet. He also—” I took a deep breath. “He didn’t let my mom come to my college graduation. He’s very cheap, and he got angry at her because she bought the more expensive brand of chicken at the grocery store so he said he wasn’t paying for her to come to my graduation. Obviously, the chicken was just the excuse. But for him to do that—I guess you know from that Life article that I spoke at my graduation. And the fact that I even went to Wellesley, my mother would have loved to have that chance. She’d been sent to live in California when she was eight, and after she finished high school, her mother said she would pay for my mom to go to Northwestern if she came back to Chicago. But it was just a trick to make my mom come work as a housecleaner. Anyway, I think my father had to poison my graduation because it meant so much to her and me.”

  Bill’s brow was furrowed. “None of your family heard you make that speech?”

  “My dad flew in the night before, stayed at a hotel near the airport, took the T to Wellesley for the ceremony, then went back to the airport. I told people my mom couldn’t travel because she was on blood-thinning medication.” I glanced down, and then he was next to me—he had joined me in the sculpture’s lap. The sides of our torsos and legs touched, and when he set his arm around my back, I leaned into him. The odd part was that none of this seemed odd. We both were quiet.

  At last, after a minute or so, Bill said, “It’s beyond me how anyone could have you as a daughter and not be bursting with pride.”

  “My mother is proud,” I said. “So maybe it’s not a bad thing if my dad is critical. Midwesterners aren’t supposed to get swelled heads.”

  “You’re very forgiving.”

  “It depends on the situation.”

  “Well, I’m sure that speech was just the beginning. There are a lot more amazing things you’ll do, and your dad won’t be able to keep your mom from seeing them all.”

  “Thank you,” I said. True dark still hadn’t descended, but if I’d had a book, there would no longer have been enough light to read. Through my jeans, I could feel the cold of the sculpture contrasting with the pleasant warmth of Bill next to me, his bulk and closeness. Certainly there was nowhere else I wanted to be in this moment; there was no one whose company I’d have preferred. My heart spasmed a little, because of how significant the moment felt—it felt like a threshold between my youth and adulthood, or the exact instant of love coming into existence.

  It seemed he felt it, too, because he removed his arm from my shoulder and took my hand, my left with his right. In addition to being enormous, his hands were beautiful, his fingers long and slender. I could sense him turn his head toward me, and I knew that if I turned my head toward him, we’d kiss, and I wanted this to happen and also was overwhelmed and immobilized. A few more seconds passed, seconds that were silent and massive and terrifying and thrilling, and then his lips were against my neck. Softly but firmly, he kissed my neck over and over. It felt very good, and I was very happy. And eventually I could turn to him, our mouths could find each other, our lips and tongues, and then we were kissing fully.

  * * *

  —

  At some point in the courtyard, perhaps in our third hour together, it had fleetingly occurred to me that there was no longer enough time left to make chocolate chip cookies for the Greenbergers’ potluck, and I’d decided to instead pick up a bottle of wine. But then Bill and I had started kissing, and when we left the grounds of the gallery, I was already an hour late for dinner and still empty-handed. Bill wanted to walk me to the Greenbergers’ house, and in his company, my various breaches of etiquette seemed insignificant—how could a baked good or a bottle of wine compare to the sensation of Bill Clinton’s mouth on mine?—but the breaches seemed less so once I was standing in the dining room, facing eight people who were in the middle of dinner. Two of these people were law professors, one was my boss and mentor, one was a law professor’s wife, and the others were law students. John Coltrane was playing on the record player, and the Greenbergers’ twins, Otto and Marcus, were shouting and jumping in the living room. I had let myself in the front door, and I blurted out, “I’m so sorry. I fell asleep and completely lost track of time.”

  “I was worried,” Gwen said. “I’m glad you’re here.” She stood, and walked around the table to embrace me as Richard said cheerfully, “Better late than never.” The other professor, a man named Jeffrey Larson who taught criminal procedure, said, “The spicy goulash should wake you up.”

  Gwen led me into the kitchen, and as she scooped the meat and macaroni from the pan, I said, “I really am sorry.”

  She looked at me intently. “Are you sick?”

  “No. I just—” I didn’t like lying and especially not to Gwen. But to need to lie or else reveal my rudeness—these were not my usual choices. “I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”

  “I called your apartment a few minutes ago, but you must have just left.” She set the large wooden spoon back in the pan. “I have great news. My friend Ida’s nephew will be in Los Angeles this summer, and you can sublet his apartment in Berkeley. It’s furnished.”

  “Oh, that’s fantastic. Thank you.” It was Richard who had helped me secure the clerkship with a small firm, one of whose partners had been his Harvard Law classmate.

  Gwen said, “I can’t vouch for how nice the apartment is, but it’s near the campus, which should be convenient.”

  “Gwen, I didn’t bring any cookies,” I said.

  “Well, we have some ice cream,” she said, and then, breathlessly, I said, “I think I’m in love. Do you think it’s possible to fall in love with someone in four hours?”

  Her expression turned to one of amusement. “Who?”

  “Do you know who Bill Clinton is?”

  She shook her head.

  “He’s a first-year from Arkansas.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “He’s very, very good-looking.”

  “Well,” she said, “that never hurts.”

  “Did anyone ever kiss you on the neck the first time they kissed you? Instead of on the lips?” She looked confused, and I added, “I’m just wondering if th
at’s unusual or not unusual.”

  “Did you like it?”

  I nodded rapidly.

  A thud and the sound of crying came from the living room and Gwen called, “Boys, what did I say about jumping off the couch?” To me, she said, “I have about fifty questions, and I can’t ask any of them now. Don’t forget what you were going to say. But if both people like something, I’m not sure it matters whether or not it’s unusual.”

  As she went to attend to her children, I carried my plate into the dining room and took the open seat, which was between my classmates Herb Buchsbaum and Elman Deeks. A conversation was under way about whether the recent tenure denial of a law professor was due to his role in the protests the previous year in support of a Black Panther on trial for murder. Though both Elman and I had attended the trial as ACLU volunteers monitoring for possible government abuses, I was far too wound up to contribute. And I was certainly too wound up to eat more than a few bites of goulash.

  As Bill and I had stood on the sidewalk outside the Greenbergers’ house just a few minutes before, it had crossed my mind to invite him in, though I was relieved I hadn’t. It also had crossed my mind to skip the potluck and take him back to my apartment, but wouldn’t we end up in bed, and wouldn’t that be rash, even if it was 1971? Thus I’d said, “Thank you for the Arkansas magic today. I had a great time.” I’d stepped in and reached up to hug him, a gesture simultaneously bolder than what I’d normally initiate after such a brief time and less than what the situation seemed to call for. Very fleetingly, I was being embraced by Bill, and it really was like being embraced by a lion, or at least a fairy-tale version of a lion; he was enormous and tender and he subsumed me. Then the hug was finished, and I was taking a step backward.