Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

The feeling was a focused kind of anticipation, it was like a weight inside my chest, but it never exactly came from being nervous. I always had prepared, and I always knew I could do it. Thus the feeling was a sense of my own competence blended with the knowledge that I was about to pull off a feat most people thought, correctly or not, they couldn’t. And this knowledge contributed to the final aspect of the feeling, which was loneliness—the loneliness of being good at something.

“Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything. We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”

Yet I clearly remember that I felt the feeling: the focused anticipation, my competence, my loneliness.

The feeling was in the collapse, the simultaneity, of how I seemed to others and who I really was. In retrospect, I think what I felt in that moment—I’d felt it before, but never quite so brightly—was my own singular future.

Rule of Two: If I was unsure of a course of action but could think of two reasons for it, I’d do it. If I could think of two reasons against it, I wouldn’t.

“Classic example of the right guy having the wrong message. Joe grew up blue-collar, but he couldn’t convince factory workers he understood them.

The Greenbergers’ life and home charmed me—their many bookshelves, the fact that he sometimes cooked the meals, the way they joked around and fought for justice and were both dazzlingly yet casually brilliant. It was all so different from the way my parents interacted.

But Mr. Gurski’s remark was the sentiment’s clearest and most succinct expression in my life thus far and gave me, henceforth, a kind of shorthand understanding of the irritation and resentment I provoked in others.

Mr. 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.

The lesson was this: You will encounter boys and men with whom you think you enjoy chemistry. A boy or man will find you funny and interesting and smart, just as you find him funny and interesting and smart. The pleasure you take in each other’s company will be obvious, but, crucially, while this pleasure will make you feel as if you’re in love with him, it will not make him feel as if he’s in love with you. He might remark on how much he likes talking to you, but there will be girls he wants to kiss, and you will not be one of them.

But choosing the guy, liking the other person first, never worked for me; dating worked only when I let them choose me.

I often secretly experienced my own good fortune as slightly shameful and my impulses toward activism as a form of contrition, but what if I could lead a life that made me worthy of luck? What if getting what I wanted most could be a fuel for my own morality, and additive rather than unfairly advantageous?