A Woman First- First Woman

by Selina Meyer

  Of course, learning the innumerable minutiae that make up the corpus of knowledge of what constitutes civilized and ladylike behavior is but a small part of what one needs to know in order to be “popular.” One also needs to be on the lookout for more practical insights of the sort that can come from local “townie” girls, who have been admitted as a part of a well-intentioned effort at redressing social disequilibria. At all the schools I have attended, I have found that the awarding of scholarships is very much a two-way street when it comes to who benefits, which explains why I am such a strong supporter of creating greater education opportunities at private schools for poor and working-class students. While the school may offer the scholarship girl or boy an education that is far superior to his or her local public school, the scholarship student, having experienced life through a very different set of circumstances than their classmates, often has a great deal to teach in return. I think that’s all I’m going to say about that.

  To bring us back to the modern day, once word of the lawsuit (which was settled for a mere pittance, about $85,000) got out, enrollment plummeted and Miss Pakenham’s was forced to close. Its demise is a cautionary tale for other schools that may not have committed enough time and resources to teaching their students how to be sexy, as Deerfield and Hotchkiss have always done.

  From an early age, I was always a bit of a “nerd,” as you can probably tell from what I have written above about my love of reading. But just because I was a nerd, that doesn’t mean I was unpopular or antisocial or preoccupied with schoolwork and grades. To the contrary, my naturally gregarious personality, my athletic ability, and my freckle-faced good looks made me among the most popular girls at all my schools. To be clear, these things are a gift from Almighty God, and I am eternally grateful to Him for giving them to me.

  I prefer a different definition of the word “nerd,” one that incorporates the idea of being popular and attractive and well-groomed in addition to being a good student though not such a good student that being a good student defines one in some way. I appreciate that the idea of what a nerd is has changed a bit in recent years, so that it also includes being obsessed with science fiction and superheroes and elves and computer games and things like that, but I was never interested in any of those things and was, in fact, moderately disgusted by people who were. So when I redefine the word “nerd,” I am redefining the original, more narrow definition that has to do just with school and hygiene and wearing glasses, which I never did. (And I have always been scrupulous in matters of personal hygiene.)

  One of my few regrets from my presidency is that we never got around to putting into effect an initiative I had tentatively entitled “Nerd Nation,” which was intended to encourage American grade school and high school students to—in the words of the slogan some of the whiz kids at the Department of Education came up with—“Nerd It Up!” and celebrate the virtues of studiousness. Unfortunately, other than a terrific logo and some PSA announcements featuring successful athletes, actors, and supermodels, the enterprise fell victim to a particularly aggressive round of budget cutting as well as a somewhat mismanaged Congressional hearing featuring testimony from Derwerd the Fur Nerd, a nerd character we had had designed that looked a bit like a young, smaller, and much more green-colored Chewbacca, but with buck teeth and glasses. When it was first suggested by whoever it was who ultimately took the fall for it, I admit I thought Derwerd was an innovative idea and a great way to relate to young people on a level they could understand.

  Although the highlight reel of the Derwerd hearings currently has more than one hundred million views on YouTube, and Derwerd became a “meme” in many forms, this was not exactly the outcome we had intended. The mix-up occurred when a young Polish actor was hired to dress up in the Derwerd costume for the hearings by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. A highly skilled mime who had received many awards at arts festivals throughout Europe and Canada, Tadeusz’s English was just rudimentary. He understood a great deal but had difficulty responding with any sort of precision. Our intention was that he should respond in mime, which we thought would draw extra attention to what otherwise might have been rather dull and dry hearings. And he did respond in mime. The problem was that, unexpectedly, the questions he was asked were somewhat technical in nature about learning disabilities and regional deviations in educational outcomes and that sort of thing, and Derwerd’s attempts to respond in mime quickly devolved into an extended and extremely confusing game of charades. One by one, the senators drifted out until Derwerd was left alone by himself performing an answer to a question about the prevalence of four-year-college going in working class Hispanic communities by pretending to ride some sort of chariot or winged horse.

  One of the ironic aspects of the catastrophic Derwerd hearings was that Tadeusz was one of the most attractive men I’ve ever met in my life. Perfectly built with well-defined muscles but not musclebound, free of tattoos or other blemishes, with long, flowing hair and cheekbones sharp enough to cut glass, he was the very epitome of Slavic beauty. Slavs are unquestionably the most attractive of peoples, and Poles especially so.* Although no brighter than the rest of his countrymen, Tadeusz was just smart enough to understand that his appearance as Derwerd the Fur Nerd before the Senate’s HELP Committee had gone less than perfectly and felt terribly remorseful about it.

  I met with him a number of times afterward to make sure that he understood that the whole thing wasn’t really his fault and that, whenever he needed to be consoled, I felt I had a duty, as the person who had indirectly initiated the whole debacle, to console him. At any hour. Though the evenings were generally more convenient because people wouldn’t constantly be disturbing us with appointments and meetings and that sort of thing.

  More so than any other president before or after, I believe I took the responsibility of the president to be a role model extremely seriously. And as America’s first female president, I applied myself to the task of being a role model for America’s young women and girls especially seriously. As long as I have been in the public eye, I have hammered home one message, derived from my own life story: To all of those kids out there who feel that they are “different” and don’t “fit in” because they are more mature and sophisticated than their peers or more stylish or because they don’t “run with the pack” when it adopts some new crazy clothing or hairstyle, I have always proclaimed loudly, “You are not alone!” If being dedicated to my studies without, you know, overdoing it, if balancing schoolwork with ample leisure activities, if maintaining a healthy lifestyle in body as well as mind—even if it is by doing things like yoga rather than more needlessly competitive and time-consuming team sports—if all those things make me a “nerd” well then, I’m proud to say, “I am a nerd!”

  * I think people are sometimes surprised to discover that a president, who is charged with governing a whole country and therefore maintaining the, if you will, thirty-thousand-foot view, can also be as detail-oriented as I am, with this elucidation of the key points regarding prison education being a terrific example. Well, that’s me. That’s Selina Meyer in a nutshell: capable of seeing the big picture while simultaneously getting completely granular down to the microscopic or even electron-microscopic level. This freakish ability, not to mention the conscience-driven compulsion to apply my extremely rare talent to the great issues of our day, has been as much a curse as it has been a blessing—my cross to bear, if you will. But it is a cross that I bear happily, even jauntily, when the sacrifices I make are for the good of all mankind, especially American mankind.

  * As we all also know, they’re not the smartest knives in the drawer, but when they are as gorgeous as Tadeusz was, their national lack of intelligence is easy to overlook.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Greatest Night of My Life—The 1984 Baltimore Junior League Debutante Cotillion

  When I was growing up, there was a saying I sometimes used to hear at my mother’s bridge games or when my
father would go fly-fishing with friends while drinking. “Decent people,” this saying went, “should appear in the press just three times: when they are born, when they are married, and when they die.” This principle, known as “Hatch, Match, and Dispatch” is now sadly very much out of date in our era in which the only thing that is important to anyone is being famous.

  That a sort of dignified reticence was once considered a desirable trait is hard to imagine when today’s young people court one another by sending pictures of their vaginas back and forth on their telephones, and a certain kind of notoriety, sometimes having to do with these very same vagina pictures, masquerades as fame. I suppose that there have always been vagina-picture-senders among us, but until cell phones became ubiquitous, they were, one hopes, few and far between. In lieu of vagina pictures, generations of well-brought-up young women made a formal debut when they were presented—usually at a white-tie dance—to whatever constituted “society” in their city or region. The underlying notion is that these debutantes were now grown women and, in some sense, available to be courted by eligible young men, one or more of whom would be her escort to the ball, the enterprise nominally benefitting some charity or other.*

  Although it was perhaps a foregone conclusion, because my mother had come out there, a few months after my eighteenth birthday I received an invitation to make my debut at the Junior League Cotillion (unquestionably the most prestigious of Baltimore’s two Caucasian debutante balls) in the fall of 1985. Preparations were begun immediately on two fronts: a dress and a date. For the dress, my mother and I made a trip into Washington, DC, because my mother believed that Washington, with its large diplomatic corps and busy social schedule, was likely to have a larger selection of suitable gowns than provincial Baltimore. And indeed we were able to compromise on one that met my mother’s prime criterion, which was that the dress have a deep enough décolletage to show off my breasts in order, as she put it, “to trick some titty-crazed moron into marrying you and taking you off my hands.”

  Ironically, in light of later events, we found the gown at Nuefeld’s Department Store (long defunct) which was owned by the family of one of my most dedicated early backers, Sally Nuefeld, and also by the family of one of the many women Andrew cheated on me with, also Sally Neufeld. The visit to DC was also important for another reason, which was it was the first time I had visited Washington as an almost-adult and, I have to say, I liked what I saw. Something about the grand public buildings and vast open boulevards awakened a spark of latent ambition—a spark that would one day burst into the enormous conflagration that was the Selina Meyer presidency.

  How many girls my age, I wondered, visiting Washington in order to buy their debutante gown, looked at all the big white houses and, especially, the biggest and whitest one of all, the White House, and thought, “I could live there one day—as first lady or maybe even first lady president!”

  And thus the seed was planted.

  In the matter of a suitable escort, I was not given any choice, or even consulted. My mother let me know that my date for the evening would be Carlton Westerbrook, the son of a neighbor of ours and business associate of my father’s, whom I had known since we were children. Now, Carlton Westerbrook was handsome and athletic and his parents were, even by the standards of Centreville, loaded. He was also a psychopath and always had been. As a baby, he had been strangling stuffed animals and ripping their throats out with his teeth before he could walk.

  Lots of kids have interests and hobbies—things like gymnastics, Lego, or learning how to “play” the drums. In almost every instance, these enthusiasms are temporary and fleeting. Carlton was different. He had one main interest, which was raping animals and, eventually, people, and he never wavered in his zeal for it. Field trips to local aquariums, Boy Scout jamborees, Sunday school . . . all could end only one way if Carlton was there: with a sexual assault on a smaller and weaker girl or boy followed by a brief flare-up of scandal that was quickly hushed up by virtue of large cash handouts, a phalanx of scary lawyers, and nondisclosure agreements.

  While there has always been a mild sexual undertone to debutante cotillions (cotillii?) in the sense that girls who had come out were now regarded as “available,” bringing an incurable rapist as one’s date seemed to be taking things a bit far. When I pointed this out to my mother, she conceded that while Carlton had a reputation as “a bit handsy,” his parents were lovely people and, by longstanding tradition, a debutante’s date could expect, at least, to “get stinkfinger.”

  After all the local schools, private and public, had declared him incorrigible—as well as numerous run-ins with the police—Carlton was sent to Hillside Academy, a military school with a long tradition of educating Maryland’s juvenile delinquents. It was clear to anyone who knew him even slightly that Carlton was headed in one of only two possible directions in life: either to prison or, if his parents’ expensive lawyers prevailed, to some sort of mental institution. Before that, though, he would be my date to the Junior Assembly.

  Now I will admit that Carlton looked quite distinguished in his ersatz military uniform when he arrived at my house to escort me to the ball. I should explain for the uninitiated that a coming-out party is very different from a prom and miles apart from a garden-variety date of any kind. For starters, one’s parents are in attendance for the entire evening and act as the hosts of a table that includes the debutante and her escort, of course, but also close friends and relations. In my case, these were my mother’s divorced sister Aunt Lisa, accompanied for the occasion by her gay decorator friend Señor Luciano del Porto (who had been born Ralph Weiner in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and whose Italian accent proved fugitive during the course of the evening); our family lawyer, my beloved “Uncle” George and his wife, Maggie; Carlton’s father, Ordway Westerbrook (Carlton’s mother was an invalid of some unspecified type and rarely ventured beyond her bedroom); and Daddy’s business associate Count Pawlenski (who was a local car dealer) and the monoglot Countess, his wife.

  We made, in short, an especially glittering group amid the bejeweled ladies and distinguished gentlemen and bright young things who assembled at 7:30 that December evening in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel (now WeWork). But the most beautiful person in the whole room, bar none, was Daddy.

  Tailcoats had been out of fashion for more than half a century in 1985 and, frankly, good riddance, right? I mean most men look completely ridiculous in white tie unless they’re head waiters or orchestra conductors and sometimes even then. For the most part, the tuxedo has been a marvelous innovation bringing as much joy to humanity as the light bulb or laptop computer for the simple reason that almost all men look pretty good in one. And, don’t get me wrong, Daddy looked great in black tie also but he was one of those rare beings—one in a billion, maybe—who looked especially ravishing in tails.

  Daddy had always been a good-looking, well-groomed, immaculately dressed and shod male of the species. Some may have gone so far as to call him a dandy or peacock, but I think the care he took about his appearance was really an expression of the goodwill he felt for his fellow men. Daddy truly dressed as though he were his brother’s keeper. And what brother would not be proud to be kept by such an elegant keeper!

  From the time at which the planning began in earnest and the actual night of the event, I had always regarded my debut with a measure of ambivalence, even indifference. It was a foregone conclusion that I, like my mother before me, would come out. I had known that ever since I was old enough to read and enjoy the Social Register. But as the big night approached, I have to say I was dreading the whole thing a bit, especially, I suppose, the seeming inevitability of being sexually assaulted by Carlton Westerbrook. The only thing I was really looking forward to was spending an evening with Daddy, in white tie, where I would be the center of his attention.

  Carlton, like all the boys, got drunk early and got drunk hard. His duties—the formal ones, anyway—were minimal. He was expected to march with me in a sort of
structured dance-like thing when the debs and their beaux all paraded around and bowed to the assembled throng. And he managed that with only a few stumbles. He was also expected to dance with me and the other ladies at our table, but after a brief first dance when I rebuffed his attempts to pull my dress up so that he could slide his hand into my underpants, he devoted all his attention to my Aunt Lisa, who seemed more open to that sort of thing.

  Daddy, I noticed, seemed to be refilling Carlton’s drink frequently and, at one point, I thought I saw him ask Aunt Maggie for a small capsule which he broke open and dissolved into Carlton’s glass. Carlton’s father, who had described the entire event as “faggot nonsense,” had left early and offered my mother, whose work, she felt, had ended as soon as the evening began, a lift home, which she readily accepted. The other guests drifted away, including, eventually, Aunt Lisa and Carlton, who snuck out to have sex in the bushes, with Aunt Lisa returning alone about twenty minutes later covered in Carlton’s vomit. From long experience, Señor del Porto was a master of this sort of situation, and he quickly spirited her away, as well, leaving me alone with Daddy.