Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

the loneliness of being good at something.

Gurski was about thirty-five at the time of Maureen’s tenth birthday, which seemed to me rather old for putting a grade school girl in her place. I hadn’t yet learned this is an impulse some men never outgrow.

In my youth, I had respected my father’s intelligence, not recognizing how much sharper my mother’s was because hers was concealed by being pleasant and female. In the last six years, I’d undergone a slow but nearly complete shift from taking his opinions seriously to disregarding them, which had had the strange effect of making me more deferential. I no longer saw arguing with him as worth the effort.

Us staying together is good for me and bad for you.”

I adored Maureen. But I was struck, not for the first time, by how casually and authoritatively dismissive of marriage married women were, except when they weren’t.

Sometimes I think I’ve made so few mistakes that the public can remember all of them, in contrast to certain male politicians whose multitude of gaffes and transgressions gets jumbled in the collective imagination, either negated by one another or forgotten in the onslaught. The less you screw up, the more clearly the public keeps track of each error.

I sometimes envisioned the events that unfolded in a day or a week or a season as a wave washing over me. The water wasn’t nothing. But it also was only water. Even if it knocked me down, I could stand again. I was always still myself, and resilient.