Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  Her expression became indignant. She lowered her voice but repeated with even greater urgency, “He forced himself on me.” Then she made a gesture I had not seen for many years, and certainly never from an adult woman; I associated the gesture with junior high. The woman bent her right thumb and pointer finger into a circle and jabbed her left pointer finger three times through the circle’s hole.

  “I didn’t go to the police.” She pronounced it, as I’d heard other Arkansans do, po-leece. “I didn’t think anything would happen except embarrassment.” She looked intensely at me and said, “But I thought you’d want to know.”

  * * *

  —

  Bill and I spent that night in town, at my apartment, but he got in so late, well after midnight, that in spite of my distress, I’d fallen asleep. When I woke around five, he was lying on his back, breathing deeply in the still-dark dawn, and I felt almost certain that I wouldn’t say anything before the election. How could I, in the final forty hours, when he was barely sleeping, jubilant and dejected by turns depending on the minute?

  He woke at six, showered, and left for headquarters, and a few minutes later, I called Lyle Metcalf. Even though my understanding was that he arrived at his office this early, I still was surprised when he picked up. I said, “I need your advice about something extremely sensitive.” When he didn’t respond, I said, “It’s confidential.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  I had learned in my work for the National Children’s Initiative that painful topics were not improved upon by preemptive handwringing or by sugarcoating. I said, “A woman approached me in the parking lot of Chouteau’s Market last night and said Bill—these were her words—forced himself on her in April at the campaign headquarters. She wouldn’t tell me her name, and she said she didn’t go to the police, that she just thought I’d want to know.”

  Lyle was silent.

  I added, “I don’t think we should say anything to Bill before the election, but I just—”

  “Of course you shouldn’t say anything to Bill,” he said.

  “Obviously, she could have all kinds of motives, whether she’s acting on Hammerschmidt’s behalf or it’s extortion or she had a crush on Bill. She said she was a volunteer. My fear is that something could end up in the paper tomorrow, or after the election.”

  “It’s bullshit,” Lyle said. My relationship with him had never been warm, but for once, Lyle’s lack of emotion was reassuring.

  I said, “You don’t think there’s anything to do?”

  “It costs a person nothing to make an accusation, refuse to tell you who they are, and walk away.”

  * * *

  —

  The following night, Bill lost to Hammerschmidt by 6,000 votes out of 170,000. We watched the returns at campaign headquarters, and the torturous part was that for most of the night, Bill was in the lead and victory seemed possible. Even though we knew that Sebastian County would be the last to report, it was impossible not to hope. As the night wore on, two thirds of the original seventy or so people who’d crowded into the headquarters departed, and when the Sebastian County results came in around midnight, officially reelecting Hammerschmidt, Bill gave a speech about his appreciation for the energy and devotion of his supporters. He said this was just the beginning and his passion for helping people in Arkansas was undiminished. Like other supporters, Virginia and Roger both wept openly, though it was only from Virginia’s eyes that a profusion of mascara ran.

  I could feel how Bill’s graciousness was a limited resource, how I needed to get him out of there so he could vent and moan. I also could feel how eventually—probably not on this night, but at some point—he would need to point out that if not for my high-mindedness about the bag of money, he’d have won.

  * * *

  —

  Between November 6 and Thanksgiving, Bill hardly got out of bed. I had seen his moods fluctuate before, including when McGovern had lost, but this was an entirely different level of discouragement, a ruminating anger. He barely bathed, and, unprecedentedly, he didn’t initiate sex. Sometimes he made lists of things to do, sometimes he read, sometimes he listened to the radio. When I entered the bedroom, he’d speak forcefully, as if we’d been midconversation. He’d say, “People can say what they want about the hubris of running for Congress at the age of twenty-eight, but I’ll tell you what—unlike Hammerschmidt, I actually give a damn about the future of Arkansas.” He’d say, “It’s hard to believe so many voters are stupid enough to really think it was me sitting in that fucking tree.” Later, a large stash of Bill’s campaign postcards was found mildewing behind a post office, a development that might have set him back emotionally if he’d made any progress. About that, he said, “See, that’s the problem with playing clean when the other guy plays dirty.” This was as close as he’d yet come to censuring me, but still, I braced myself.

  Sometimes his dissatisfaction widened from his electoral results, showing a more generalized bitterness I hadn’t observed in him in almost four years together. He’d say, “It’s like my family just can’t catch a break. What woman besides Mother can you think of who’s lost three husbands by the age of fifty?” He wasn’t wrong that he and his family members had experienced inordinate loss, and I’d say, “I know, baby. I’m sorry.”

  To his complaints about the election, I tried to respond with logic. “You came so close. You got so many more votes than anyone could have expected. People here love you.”

  “The fact that I lost means you’re stuck here.” Was this a test on his part or an apology?

  “Well, I don’t feel stuck,” I said.

  * * *

  —

  It wasn’t exactly a decision, that first I hadn’t told Bill about the woman in Chouteau’s parking lot because I didn’t want to destabilize him before the election; then I hadn’t because he was devastated by losing; and after that I hadn’t because he was improving, but his improvement remained so tenuous.

  It also was the case that I hadn’t mentioned it because it was awful to consider. And because frankly her accusation seemed to matter far less than it would have if he’d won.

  * * *

  —

  We spent Christmas in Hot Springs, and after dinner on the twenty-sixth, a bunch of Bill’s elementary and high school friends came over and sat in Virginia’s living room, chatting boisterously. Bill told a long, high-spirited story about a voter he’d met in Springdale who he guessed was seventy years old and weighed four hundred pounds and who proudly told Bill that once a month, he ordered eleven roses from the florist in town and had them delivered to himself along with a card that read, You’re the twelfth. When the room exploded with laughter, including from Bill, I understood that he was mostly back to normal.

  That night, Virginia was in and out of the room, refilling glasses and the dishes of nuts and trays of cookies on the table. It was clear that she adored Bill’s friends and that the affection was mutual. In that moment of group laughter, she and I made eye contact, and we smiled at each other.

  Another sign of Bill’s improvement was that he wanted to have sex again, which I first welcomed and soon found burdensome. He’d consistently had a higher sex drive than I did, but in the past it hadn’t been difficult for him to get me interested. Maybe it was because I now feared he’d pout or revert to self-pity if I refused—maybe the feeling of obligation was an anti-aphrodisiac—but more than once in that late winter and spring, I found myself lying underneath him, his erection inside me and his scrotum bumping against the lowest part of my bottom, waiting for the episode to be finished; of course this either made it take longer or just feel like it was taking longer.

  On Valentine’s Day, his alarm went off, waking us both, and he turned toward me and said, “I don’t suppose you’d like to get married today?”

  I laughed. “I do want to but not today.” For a few seconds,
I was afraid he’d get angry, that the joke wasn’t a joke. I set one hand against his cheek. “I want my mother to be there,” I said.

  “Fair enough,” he said. He kissed my fingers. “When you change your mind, be sure to tell me.”

  * * *

  —

  Harriet Early, the brave student who’d told me my skirt was stuffed into my pantyhose, had ended up working for course credit at the legal aid clinic that I ran. Harriet was a bright and industrious twenty-two-year-old from Conway, Arkansas, and one afternoon at the clinic, which was in a room next door to the new student radio station, she and I were discussing a case involving a nineteen-year-old mother of two who’d filed for divorce from her violent forty-year-old husband.

  Harriet said, “When I meet with Brenda, I always wonder if there’d be a way to hold classes for young mothers who dropped out of high school. Not degree-granting but to give them practical skills, and at the same time, when they testify, they can refer to that.”

  I said, “I take it you’re envisioning classes that aren’t specifically prenatal.”

  “No, more like home ec—cooking, health, budgeting.”

  “And it’d be a one-time thing or ongoing?”

  “Ongoing. Maybe weekly?”

  “If it was on a Saturday, that would certainly increase the chances someone else could look after the women’s children.” I reached for a pen. “There’s a professor named Jacqueline Walsh in the College of Education, and I want to run this by her. I’d be curious if any education students would consider teaching it.”

  “A girl at my high school got pregnant when we were seniors, and they made her leave even though the baby didn’t come until the summer,” Harriet said. “It seemed like such a waste.”

  “Can you get numbers about how many girls under eighteen give birth every year in this county? I’ll check how many have been referred to us at the clinic.”

  “I just want to say—” Harriet smiled sheepishly. “It’s good you came to the law school, because I would have been embarrassed to bring this up with a man.”

  * * *

  —

  During spring break, Bill and I house-sat for Dick and Ginny, the law school dean and his wife, who lived in an immaculate Craftsman that had a hot tub on the deck. The weather was warming, but the nights were still cool, in the fifties, and it was a new pleasure to me to walk outside from the kitchen into the dark backyard in nothing but a towel, set it aside, and sink into the warm bubbling water. The first time we did this, Bill grinned and said, “It’s like we’re ingredients in a soup.” He kissed me on the lips and added, “Haven’t I always said how delicious you are?”

  When it quickly became apparent that we were about to have sex, I said, “Is this hygienic? And is it okay with the Richardses?”

  Bill laughed. “I’m sure they’d be disappointed if we didn’t.”

  We repeated the pattern every night for a week, except for Saturday, when we were joined by a few other young professors. On that night, we all drank a lot of beer, played charades, and wore swimsuits in the hot tub, though I’m sure Bill and several guests would have been just fine skinny-dipping. In the presence of our friends, I kept noticing, as I hadn’t for a while, how handsome Bill was; I kept thinking that it was fun to have guests but that I also wanted him to myself.

  It was well after midnight when they left, and we decided to clean up in the morning. We were sleeping in a guest room rather than in our boss’s bed, but the guest bed was still queen-sized and nicer than what either Bill or I owned. Under the covers, I snuggled against him, and I thought that, although I’d had my doubts, my life in Arkansas was rich and full and, because of Bill, adventurous. I liked that I was on a path I hadn’t predicted.

  “Baby,” I said, and Bill stirred. “You should run for attorney general.”

  There were two things about the AG race that differentiated it from Bill’s congressional race. The first thing was that the job meant being in the state of Arkansas full-time; indeed, it likely meant moving to Little Rock, which was three hours away. The second thing was that if he ran, Bill would probably win.

  * * *

  —

  In mid-April, my mother called to tell me that Maureen had given birth to a healthy baby boy and that they were naming him Stephen Andrew Rymarcsuk, Jr. I immediately purchased a Razorbacks plush toy from the university bookstore and mailed it off, along with a note of congratulations. When Maureen called a few days later and asked if I’d be the godmother, I was touched.

  “What’s motherhood like?” I asked.

  “More undignified than you can possibly imagine in your wildest dreams. For Stevie and for me.”

  “Are you exhausted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I do anything for you?”

  “Flatten my stomach, make my nipples stop dripping, and make this weird little creature stop crying.”

  “Oh, Maureen,” I said. “I don’t think this part lasts long.”

  The christening at which my godmother status would be made official would happen in late May, and a few days later, as I was dialing the number for Delta to make my reservation, it occurred to me that as long as I was getting on a plane, I ought to go to the East Coast, too. I’d received a postcard from an impeachment inquiry colleague mentioning that a group of attorneys were having a reunion dinner in Georgetown in early June. I hung up the phone without talking to a reservation agent and looked at the calendar that hung above my desk. First Chicago, I thought, then Washington, D.C., for the dinner, then maybe Boston to see Phyllis and her husband and New Haven to see Gwen and Richard. As I looked at the calendar grid for May 1975, I understood with a jolt that I was retracing my past in order to arrive at my future and that when I returned to Fayetteville, I would tell Bill I was ready to marry him. And once I told him, I thought, we wouldn’t wait long. What would the point be? We didn’t want a fancy ceremony; we were ready to get on with the rest of our lives. I thought of how happy he’d look—I knew just the expression he’d make, the slight smile broadening into a huge smile, that light and intelligence that was always in his eyes trained on me—and sitting there in my office, I teared up. Finally, enough time had passed, enough testing of the waters. Finally, I was sure.

  * * *

  —

  In Chicago, my father told me I looked good since I’d put on all that weight, my mother and I discussed Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things—she was taking another philosophy course—and my brother Hughie teased me that I’d developed a Southern accent. At the christening, Maureen’s son, Stevie, wore a white lace gown with a three-foot train and howled through the entire ceremony. Afterward, Maureen said, “Now that you seem so happy, I can tell you that I thought you were crazy moving to Fayetteville.”

  I laughed. “You weren’t the only one.”

  In Washington, the reunion dinner was loud and festive, and an attorney’s wife had made so-called Watergate salad, which featured pistachio pudding mix, crushed pineapple, and marshmallows. A lawyer I’d never known well said with obvious surprise, “You’re teaching at the University of Arkansas?”

  “I am,” I said. “And I’ve had a terrific first year.”

  “My sister just graduated from Harvard Law, and she told me most of the top law schools have a mandate to hire women professors,” he said. “She’s been recruited by a few places, including Northwestern. Aren’t you from Chicago?”

  I had wondered if I’d feel jealous of my former colleagues, almost all of whom were working on Capitol Hill or for big firms, and I didn’t. “I’m not looking for another job,” I said.

  In Boston, my Wellesley friend Nancy revealed that she was pregnant and due in October. She said, “Is it too much to ask you to get pregnant, too, so our kids can be friends?”

  “Nothing’s official yet,” I said, “but I don’t think it’ll be long f
or Bill and me.”

  In New Haven, Richard Greenberger requested that I demonstrate calling the hogs—I complied, and Otto and Marcus immediately began imitating me—and I had the feeling that Gwen had decided that if she didn’t have anything nice to say about Bill, she wouldn’t say anything. In their kitchen, we ate breakfast for dinner, pancakes and bacon and stewed apples. Otto took several bites of his pancake then pushed his plate toward me and said, “What state does it look like?”

  I scrutinized the remaining pancake before saying, “Idaho.”

  Gwen took off work on a Friday morning to drive me to the airport in Hartford. We were just a few minutes from the airport exit when she said with forced brightness, “How is the neck kisser?” She glanced at me, and I suspect I looked confused, because she quickly added, “Do you remember after your first date, when you asked me if it was unusual for a man to kiss you on the neck instead of the mouth? I always thought it was cute how worked up you were that night.”

  I made myself smile, and I said Bill was doing well, that he was popular with his students. I didn’t mention his AG run. But the uneasiness spreading inside me—I could barely conceal it for those last few minutes in Gwen’s car, or as I hugged her and entered the airport. I checked my suitcase and walked to my gate, and I was trembling and nauseated. In the last seven months, I hadn’t admitted it to myself; I had buried it, though, it turned out, not permanently. But I believed that something had happened between Bill and the woman in Chouteau’s parking lot. And the reason I believed it was that she’d said he’d kissed her neck.

  * * *

  —

  On the way to pick me up, Bill had passed a house on California Boulevard that he knew with such certainty we should buy that he used a pay phone inside the airport to call the real estate agent listed on the yard sign. After he’d hung up, he said, “She can show it to us in half an hour.”