LITMIR.BIZ

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Hillary agreed with Anna Quindlen’s characterization of the role of first lady as having to be “June Cleaver on her good days.”)

      I didn’t know then that Hillary hatred was already, as the author Garry Wills called it, “a large-scale psychic phenomenon.” Or that the RNC sold Hillary rag dolls that could be dismembered. Don Imus played “That’s Why the First Lady Is a Tramp” on his radio show. (“She won’t do housework because it makes her sick, doesn’t bake cookies like the rest of the chicks …”) But I knew my friends all hated her, which meant their parents must have hated her, too. I didn’t know why. She didn’t look scary to me.

      I made my way to the front of the hundred or so women and reached my hand out to shake Hillary’s. I hadn’t thought about what I’d say to the first lady, and all I could spit out was “I’ll be old enough to vote in September and I’m going to vote for your husband.” I may have let her speech drift in one ear and out the other, but I can hear myself so clearly say those first words I’d ever say to Hillary: your husband. Not Bill Clinton, not President Clinton. Your husband.

      Hillary shook my hand and held on for a while. She leaned down a little to meet eyes with me. She thanked me, and I hear her saying, “It’s terrific you’re already thinking about voting. We need you!” Then Hillary disappeared out a side door with a couple of Secret Service agents trailing behind.

      My mom asked how the afternoon went.

      “Fine,” I said, pulling ranch dip out of the fridge. “I shook Hillary’s hand.” Then my seventeen-year-old self said what Hillary the candidate would struggle and ultimately fail to make the country say: “She seemed nice.”

      That was it. My first astute political assessment of Hillary Clinton. She seemed nice.

      I AM A fifth-generation Texan Jew, the youngest of two daughters of a public school teacher from San Antonio and a self-employed attorney born and raised in the Baptist heartland of Waco. We were curiosities amid the megachurches and the Hobby Lobby stores and the fast-food restaurants with signs out front that say CLOSED ON SUNDAY FOR FAMILY AND WORSHIP. My friend Jenny gave me a silver cross with a dove in the middle hanging on a delicate chain by James Avery, a Hill Country craftsman who specialized in Christian-themed jewelry … for my bat mitzvah.

      Politics became inseparable from religion, from our otherness. Jews had big noses and frizzy hair, and everyone assumed, correctly or not, that we were—gasp—Democrats.

      I might as well have pulled on a skullcap and recited my haftorah when I told Mrs. Shepard’s fourth-grade class that I was supporting Dukakis. My parents took me to meet Ann Richards once. I remember her white bouffant and reaching my entire body over a heavy wooden desk to shake her hand. But I couldn’t have told you whether my parents were Democrats or Republicans. Politics wasn’t something that came up a lot in our house. If presidential politics reached our family at all, it was some homework assignment my dad helped us with or background noise on the TV as my exhausted mom got home from work, threw on jeans and a T-shirt, and tossed into the oven canned crescent rolls and chicken strips.

      Yet we couldn’t escape local politics.

      Sometime in the 1990s, the Texas legislature decided that public school kids, in addition to reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to both the American and Texas flags, should also begin each school day with “one minute of silence.” Everyone knew this meant Jesus. My parents told me to sit down quietly after the pledge and skip what teachers called the silent prayer. I decided to boycott the morning ritual altogether.

      Mid-prayer, Mr. Mack, a photography teacher and Vietnam vet, cracked one eye open, noticed me sitting down, and instructed me to “stand the hell up.” When I shook my head no, he kicked me out and gave me three days’ detention. I was shoving my notebook and Epson Luster paper into my JanSport with a lot of eye rolling and zero sense of urgency when a linebacker who sat across from me gave us all a civics lesson. “We’re a Christian country,” he said. “It’s called one nation under GOD.”

      BY THEN I’D grown out of what my sister Stefani called my giant dork stage, when I wore tortoiseshell glasses and had my head buried in books, Jack Kerouac and Oscar Wilde, years before I really understood them. I even saw myself in Chelsea then. We were about the same age, from neighboring Southern states, both avid readers and uncomfortable in our skin, with smiles full of braces, curls we couldn’t control, and frilly dresses with bubbly shoulder pads. I then graduated to my jock stage when I played varsity tennis and was a starting point guard with a reputation for excessive personal fouls. By the time I met Hillary, I was well into my stoner poet stage, during which I maintained an A average while spending most of my junior year in the parking lot of Rome’s Pizza hotboxing my friend Kate’s cherry-red VW Beetle while reciting Nikki Giovanni poetry.

      Years later, when I came across Hillary’s college letters to her own high school friend, I thought of these stages and our shared adolescent misanthropy. “Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals?” Hillary wrote to John Peavoy when she was a sophomore at Wellesley in 1967. “How about a compassionate misanthrope?”

      She wrote about the “opaque reality” of her own self and confessed “since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three-and-a-half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me,” including “alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”

      I didn’t care enough about anything to belong to the Young Democrats (if such a thing existed in my public school, I wasn’t aware) or the debate team. I didn’t pass around petitions to end the death penalty and didn’t have much of an opinion about the news of the day, even though my dad was from Waco and everyone wanted to ask me about the Branch Davidians and if I knew David Koresh. “That was outside of Waco,” I’d say.

      I decided, for no other reason than that it would piss off every football player who stood around the kegs of Shiner we’d set up in the middle of a field on Saturday nights, that I hated the Cowboys. I didn’t eat red meat. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of Texas and move to New York. I loved Bill Clinton … and, worst of all, I loved his wife.

      I THOUGHT THINGS would be different in Austin. I didn’t need ivy affixed to a sandstone library, and as my dad reminds us whenever Stef and I bemoan that we never really had a chance to go anywhere besides the University of Texas, “It wasn’t like Harvard was knocking our door down.” But I envisioned something artsy—conversations about Camus over absinthe, maybe—something more than dope bud, a Ben Harper show, and seven of us splitting the same bowl of queso at Magnolia Cafe.

      I had even more disdain for the sorority girls, the “debutantes,” than I did the druggies “expanding” their consciousness, as Hillary summed up both social castes in her college letters. I counted down the days until I could move to New York and become a writer.

      My closest friend, Barry Dale—who theorizes that we’d found each other in middle school and both wanted to move to New York because “I was the gay and you were the Jew”—had an assignment in his film class. He needed a model to sit in an empty diner in downtown Austin to re-create Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks.

      I wore a tight black tube dress with a deep V-neck from Bebe, fishnet hose, and a pair of shiny black heels I’d bought a couple of years earlier with my employee discount at Banana Republic. I sat cross-armed at a bar table as Barry stood on the sidewalk outside snapping photos through the glass.

      That’s the photo I think of from my college years. Not drunken spring break nights or fraternity toga parties or eating stale pizza on deadline in the basement of the Daily Texan. Me, in an almost deserted diner, wearing black, looking slightly slutty in a mall-bought dress, staring forward and down at nothing and everything. Barry got an A+. “I love the feel of the girl,” his professor wrote of the photo.

      It should’ve been titled the same woe-is-me sign-off that Hillary used to close her college letters.

      “Me (the world’s saddest word),” she wrote.

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