Amy Chozick - Chasing Hillary

It was Hillary Clinton vs. my ovaries.

Doris and my mom worked together at a public school with half a dozen or so pregnant thirteen-year-olds and a vice principal who’d served in the Marines and once wrestled a gun away from a seventh grader. It was Doris who told my mom about her big plans for that weekend: the first lady was in town promoting her child-rearing book, It Takes a Village , and Doris was going to hear her speak.

I can see my mom in the staff room at Pat Neff Middle School, pulling an orange out of the brown paper bag she packed for herself and thinking about this concept of the village raising a child. That same year she would be diagnosed with, and later recover from, breast cancer. I’d bring her strawberry popsicles that stained her lips red during chemo. Most people in Texas adhered to Bob Dole’s belief that “it takes a family to raise a child” and saw the whole village thing as a commie concept from a radical, uppity first lady. The San Antonio Express-News would describe the women’s organization represented at the book event as “‘feminists’ (whatever that means).”

My mom must have told Doris that I had a budding interest in politics, or maybe Doris offered to take me to meet Hillary Clinton, but either way, Doris picked me up early Saturday morning in her white Cadillac DeVille coated in a layer of saffron-colored pollen. The interior smelled like cigarette smoke, and a dangling air freshener shaped like a cowboy boot hung from the rearview mirror. Doris wore her hair in a dyed-black beehive that practically rubbed against the car’s interior roof. She told me she was a psychic and predicted I’d write children’s books one day. She asked me about the tennis team. I told her I’d quit. She told me my mom was proud of me. I said nothing.

Doris signed herself in at the Hilton Hotel conference room overlooking the River Walk and grabbed us a bar table by the windows. She brought me a Coke. I looked at my Swatch watch. I had no idea that would be the first of hundreds (thousands?) of times I’d find myself waiting on Hillary. Clinton Time, I’d learn to call it. By the time Hillary arrived that afternoon at the Hilton, I’d been through four Cokes. Doris smiled, her caked-on makeup cracking around her eyes. She pulled my wrist and led me to the front of the room where Hillary took her place behind a microphone.

“Go! Get in there. Get close,” Doris said.

I don’t remember anything Hillary said that day. But I remember the feeling I had when I saw her, the caffeine and adrenaline, the rush of a real-life celebrity who was not Selena or a member of the Spurs, in my hometown. She was pretty. She wore some version of pink or blush, definitely pastel, and looked like the kind of woman who might have belonged to the Junior League. (I later learned 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.