“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 Boys 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.”