Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “When is she due?”

  “I believe late September. She’s not quite to the end of the first trimester.”

  For a few seconds, I said nothing and neither did Barbara. I understood for the first time that when I’d driven away from Fayetteville, I hadn’t believed Bill and I were permanently ending our relationship. I had hoped we’d reconcile, once we were sufficiently transformed by time and distance. Our phone conversations and letters after my Arkansas departure—in some, he’d offered to come to Chicago and I’d declined—had seemed like a continuation of who we were; they had seemed too soon. But I’d thought, without clearly articulating it even to myself, that we’d wait, say, two years and then find each other again.

  At last, Barbara said, “Sarah Grace is a nice young woman, and I hope Bill can rise to the occasion. But I wouldn’t read too much into the timing, the quickness. I think when he understood that he’d never find another you, he decided to get on with it.”

  I was determined not to cry until I got off the phone, and my voice shook only a little as I asked, “The things he and I struggled with—do you think he still struggles with them?”

  “Oh, Bill will always struggle with that,” Barbara said.

  * * *

  —

  After Bill’s call about running for president and then my conversation with Maureen, I walked to my office. Though the main campus of Northwestern was in Evanston, the law school was downtown, just ten minutes from my apartment, and I arrived most days by eight-fifteen. On this summer morning, when I finally got to Levy Mayer Hall, I noted that the door to James’s office was closed even though it was after 10:00 A.M. Usually, he was there before I was, his door open except when he was on the phone, which there were no sounds of. Did his absence mean he was out of town, or perhaps he just had a dentist’s appointment? I wanted to discuss Clarence Thomas’s nomination with him, to tell him what Gwen had said.

  In spite of the distractions of Bill and keeping my eyes peeled for James, I managed to make progress on my casebook. That afternoon, before I left, I stopped in the department office to check my mailbox. I found a letter inviting me to speak at a conference on family law and the Fourteenth Amendment in January at the University of Texas; the latest issue of the Yale Law alumni magazine; a notice that the water in the building would be turned off on Friday; and a manila folder. Inside the folder was a microfiche printout of a black-and-white newspaper photo: a black woman in black heels and a stylish coat, and a tall mustachioed black man in a suit and coat, both of them striding forward with serious expressions. A cluster of other people walked to the man’s left, and in the background was a large and imposing-looking building with a row of columns. A Post-it note stuck to the top of the copied image read, Hillary, This is the picture I mentioned of Thurgood Marshall and Autherine Lucy that’s always stayed with me. Best, James.

  As I stood next to the cubby-style mailboxes, a few feet away from the desk of our department secretary, Sheila, a jolt of electricity passed through me; in examining the piece of paper, I felt almost as if I was doing something I ought to conceal. Today, of course, one could summon this photo by typing a few words into Google, but didn’t the photocopy imply that James had tracked it down in a library, that he’d gone to some effort? Which was exactly the sort of thing I would do for a person I had a crush on, though I’d long ago been convinced that this was not, for anyone else, a method of flirting. And, of course, he was a married man. Still, it was nice to know that a person I’d been thinking of had also been thinking of me.

  * * *

  —

  So frequently did I visit Maureen and Steve’s house in Skokie that, in the summer, I kept a bathing suit there, a navy-blue tank, as well as a striped linen coverup. When I changed in their downstairs bathroom, I was chagrined to realize that, as was often the case, I’d forgotten to shave my legs, and blond stubble dotted my calves. Oh, well, I thought. It wasn’t as if any member of the Rymarcsuk family hadn’t seen it before.

  When I joined Maureen on the patio, Meredith was in the pool; their dog, Alf, was sniffing frantically at the base of the fence that ran between their backyard and their neighbors’; and Maureen had poured a glass of wine for each of us from the bottle I’d brought. I stretched out on the lounge chair next to hers. The sky above us was cerulean, and the leaves on the trees were thick and green, rustling in the hot breeze. Yes, it was over ninety degrees, but still—it was heavenly.

  “This is really nice,” I said.

  “Except for my uncooperative children, my flatulent dog, and the squalid mess in my house.”

  “No,” I said. “Even with that.”

  “How are you feeling about Bill and the reporter stuff?”

  “I’m trying not to think about it.”

  “In that case, never mind. I have someone to set you up with, but here’s the wild part. I haven’t met the man, and it’s Steve’s idea. He’s a recently divorced colleague of Steve’s named Chuck.”

  “Does he have kids?”

  “I think two between the ages of Meredith and Johnny—middle school age?”

  I took a sip of wine. “Does Steve think we have something in common, or is this one of those situations where Chuck is single and I’m single and he’s part of the human species and I’m part of the human species?”

  Maureen laughed. “What if we invite him over for our Labor Day cookout? Isn’t that less pressure than a candlelit dinner?”

  At times, I was enthusiastic about being set up—particularly in January, if I’d made a New Year’s resolution—but I had come to see marriage as a possible rather than probable scenario. To my own surprise, I had between the ages of thirty and forty dated a fair number of men, at least a dozen, but usually for just a few months and only once for more than a year. My relationship with Bill had left me with both more and less confidence, as well as with a new recklessness or indifference. I didn’t care as much about these other men because they weren’t him; my not caring seemed to make me more attractive. Some of the men I dated were intelligent, some were interesting (usually less so as time passed), and some were handsome. But none were all three, and none were as intelligent, interesting, or handsome as Bill had been. None ever played the saxophone naked for me. I thought about marrying them only insofar as I wondered if it would be worth it to marry someone I wasn’t excited about in order to be a mother.

  The person I dated the longest, for fourteen months, was a futures trader named Larry whom I’d met through my brother Hughie. Larry’s build was the most like Bill’s of any man I went out with, and sometimes in the dark, if I’d had two glasses of wine, I could pretend. Although Larry and I didn’t stay together, I also found it endearing that he invested five thousand dollars of my money in natural gas and crude oil, and four years later, when the contracts expired, I received twenty-nine thousand dollars in return.

  Ultimately, I had experienced so much ambivalence about marriage and children that turning forty had come as a relief. Two weeks after my birthday, I ended a six-month relationship with Pranath, a partner at a large downtown law firm, because it simply seemed to have run its course. In the almost four years since then, I hadn’t gone on more than a few dates, nor had I felt much distress about it.

  “I’d be delighted to meet Chuck on Labor Day,” I said to Maureen. “Thank you.”

  “Mom and Hillary,” Meredith called. “Watch me!” She was on the diving board, wearing a bathing suit with an image of C-3PO, from Star Wars, on the front, and she raised her legs and grabbed them, cannonballing into the water. When she surfaced, she said, “Aren’t I great?”

  Even though her older brother was my godson, Meredith was my secret favorite; regularly during the summer, we had imaginary tea parties in the pool in which we both spoke in English accents.

  “You’re fantastic,” I said.

  * * *

  —

>   Greg Rheinfrank, my political strategist friend, called me at the office and said, “I want to plant an idea in your head, and don’t answer yet. Just give it some thought.”

  “Are we still on for dinner next week?” I asked.

  “Yes, but I’m telling you this now to give you a chance to mull it over. If Dixon votes for Clarence Thomas, you should run against him in the primary.”

  “I should run for U.S. Senate?”

  “I’m hearing rumors that the RNC is telling Dixon if he votes for Clarence Thomas, they’ll run a soft opponent against him in the general.”

  Alan Dixon was Illinois’s senior senator, a centrist Democrat I’d met at a few fundraisers over the years and didn’t find objectionable. In fact, he made himself so available to constituents that he was known as “Al the Pal.”

  “Who told you that?” I asked.

  “Hillary, you know I’m a man of discretion.”

  “Right,” I said. “And I’m a supermodel.”

  “I heard it from my friend Wallace in George Mitchell’s office.”

  “Obviously, I’ve given thought to running for office,” I said. “But aiming for the Senate in my first go-round—”

  “Can I lay out the reasons you should do it? One, you know everyone around here, and everyone respects you. Two, it’s fucking ridiculous that in the year 1991, there are a total of two women senators. Three, Dixon is about to pull a Benedict Arnold on the Democratic party.”

  “If Dixon really does vote to confirm Thomas, that’s one thing, but if he doesn’t, I can’t imagine a better way to make enemies.”

  “Agreed,” Greg said. “For now, just think about it.”

  * * *

  —

  James wasn’t in the office that day, either, and he didn’t appear for the rest of the week, which probably meant he was on vacation with his family. It was likely that Sheila knew his schedule, but asking her about it would have felt strange. What was the point?

  When I returned to my apartment after work that Wednesday, there was a message from Nick Chess, my Yale classmate who now did media work for Bill, saying he hoped I was great, he knew Bill and I had spoken recently, and he wanted to know if he could offer any assistance vis-à-vis what Bill and I had discussed or just be a sounding board. I liked Nick, but I didn’t want to be strong-armed. Though I copied down his number on the pad of paper I kept by my answering machine, I didn’t return his call.

  * * *

  —

  In my nest and on jogs that week, I thought about Greg’s suggestion. For starters, it was outrageous that Dixon might vote to confirm Clarence Thomas. Thomas would need the votes of every Republican and seven Democrats, but I could see no justification for Dixon being one of those Democrats.

  In general, I’d never had difficulty understanding why someone would run for office, but I felt less certain that I personally should. Changing legislation, improving people’s lives—both were hugely, indisputably important. But I wasn’t sure the public hustle of campaigning was for me, the glad-handing, the suffering of fools. Already, by the time Greg floated it, the possibility of my running had arisen twice, and both times, I’d decided against it.

  In February 1983, Harold Washington won Chicago’s Democratic mayoral primary, which under normal circumstances would have made him a shoo-in to win the general election less than two months later. But Washington was black, the city had never had a black mayor, and the backlash to his primary victory was swift and ugly not only among Republicans but among many white Democrats. Supporters of his Republican opponent, Bernie Epton, wore T-shirts that read VOTE WHITE, VOTE RIGHT and buttons that either featured a watermelon with a slash through it or were just plain white; leaflets were distributed that called Washington “Mr. Baboon”; and in neighborhoods on the West Side and the South Side, which had overwhelmingly black populations, anonymously funded billboards appeared with the words VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY in huge letters. Along with some of my Northwestern students, I reached out to a billboard company who, for free, posted signs in the same neighborhoods with a different message: HEY CHICAGO, VOTING IS A RIGHT, NOT A CRIME. Our counter-messaging garnered national media coverage, and I ended up giving dozens of interviews; the attention was reminiscent of the time after my Wellesley graduation speech, except amplified. That mayoral Election Day, April 12, was the first on which I worked as a legal responder—I was one of the in-the-field roving lawyers monitoring at-risk polling places and communicating what I saw back to the Washington campaign’s boiler room—and when Washington beat Epton by 3.7 percent of the votes, I was overjoyed.

  After this, a few people in both the state and national party suggested that I run for the Illinois General Assembly, but I wasn’t that tempted. I’d received tenure, and I was thirty-six years old and single. While once I’d moved to Fayetteville for Bill, believing we were starting our life together, I didn’t at this point want to spend half my time in a crummy apartment in Springfield, nor did I yearn to constantly make the four-hour drive between Springfield and Chicago.

  But one conversation did stay with me. A woman named Bitsy Sedgeman Corker, whom I’d previously met in passing, invited me to lunch. The Sedgemans were a large, multigenerational Chicago family who’d made a fortune in transportation equipment and railroads and had given millions of dollars to various progressive causes. Bitsy, who happened to have graduated from Wellesley six years before I had, was a major donor to Planned Parenthood. At lunch, she, too, encouraged me to run for the Illinois House or Senate—she said, “Down the line, you’d make a terrific governor”—and when I demurred, she said, “I’m curious if you know this. The vast majority of men run for election because they decide they want to, and the vast majority of women run only when someone else suggests it.”

  I said, “I didn’t know that, but I’m not surprised.”

  “Let’s keep in touch,” Bitsy said. She had dark hair and a pixie cut, and on this day in 1984, she wore a matching black-and-white polka dot blouse and pants. She said, “And please know that when I decide I’m supporting a candidate, the rest of the Sedgeman clan falls into line behind me, with the exception of crazy Republican Aunt Henrietta.”

  The second time I thought about running was six years later. The foster care organization I was on the board of worked with young adults who were about to or already had aged out of the system, trying to help them find stability because the population disproportionately ended up homeless, without a GED or a job. I worked with the offices of three state senators to draft proposed legislation to expunge the records of juveniles with criminal records in foster care, in order to increase the likelihood of their finding steady employment. My close contact with the senators and their aides, which culminated in testifying after the bill was introduced in Springfield, made me wonder if my earlier decision against running had been shortsighted. But even by the time I’d driven back to Chicago, the feeling had passed. It was an embarrassingly petty reason, but I really liked where I lived, both my apartment and my neighborhood.

  A part of me wanted to call Bill and get his advice about running for Senate, but surely this impulse arose only from our recent contact; I had almost completely outgrown the wish to discuss everything with him. The person I called instead was Gwen.

  “If you have even a chance at winning, then yes,” she said. “Do you?”

  “I’m sure I have a chance. Maybe not much more.”

  “Well,” she said, “why not try?”

  * * *

  —

  And then on Monday, as soon as I stepped off the elevator, I could see that James’s office door was open, and my heart began to beat more quickly. Which was ridiculous—he was my married colleague whom I hardly knew. I entered my office, and as I did all the things I normally did, I felt as if I were performing these gestures in a play no one was watching: setting my leather briefcase on the floor
by my desk, turning on my computer, radio, and single-serving coffee maker. I expected him to materialize in my doorway, an expectation that intensified as time passed without it happening. I tried to hear any small sounds coming from his office, but I couldn’t above the public radio. I worked on my casebook for about ninety minutes, then all at once I could take it no more, and I stood and walked the twelve feet from my desk to the doorway of his office. He looked up from his desk then immediately stood.

  “Hillary, how are you?”

  “Were you out of town?”

  “We were at Susie’s parents’ house up in Michigan. We always go the week after the Fourth.”

  “Oh, fun,” I said.

  There was a silence, then we both started to speak, then we both paused. “Please,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  “I was just going to say, where in Michigan?”

  “Petoskey. Are you familiar with the area?”

  “I’m not, though I’ve always heard it’s beautiful.” It wasn’t that any of the words either of us said were irregular, but somehow the energy in the air was unbearably awkward. Was this my fault or his?

  “You were in Washington, D.C.?” he said.

  “Yes, and my friend Gwen said she doesn’t think the NAACP will support Clarence Thomas.”

  James looked down at his desk as he said, “I apologize for putting that picture in your mailbox. You must have wondered what I was thinking.”

  Was this the source of the awkwardness, that he was embarrassed?

  “No, not at all,” I said. “It was interesting.”

  “I just thought since obviously you admire Justice Marshall—”

  “No, I liked it.”

  “It was silly,” he said.

  “Well, no matter what happens, it’s abundantly clear Clarence Thomas is no Thurgood Marshall.” Another silence descended, and I said, “I’ll let you get back to work.”