Losing Hillary
In September of 1992, I came home from catering a wedding in Long Island City. I was bone tired. I longed for a hot shower and a cold beer, not necessarily in that order. After I got out of the shower, I noticed my answering machine light was blinking. I pressed it. It was my father’s voice, sounding shaky and muffled. He said my mother had gone into cardiac arrest and died.
Wham! I felt as though I’d been kicked in the stomach. I sat on the couch, my mind spinning ... How? Why? No, it can’t be. I finally fell asleep but woke just a few hours later to the sound of pigeons canoodling outside my window. For a brief second, a smile started to form, and then WHAM! Punch in the stomach, I remembered she was gone.
In the days, weeks, months, years, since that terrible night, the pain has waned. It has distributed itself into the fabric of who I am, who I became.
On November 8, I went to the polls feeling profound pride. When had I ever felt so proud? I was about to vote for a woman for president of the United States. I lingered inside the voting booth as I stared at her name – Hillary Clinton – before filling in the tiny oval to vote for her. I could feel the tears well up in my eyes. Not only was I voting for a woman, but for a woman for whom I’d been rooting for 16 years.
That hugest glass ceiling was about to be broken, at long last.
As I walked to work with my “I VOTED” sticker on my coat, I thought back to my own journey. In the 2nd grade when I was 7 years old, my teacher Mrs. Hendricks asked everyone in class what they wanted to be when they grew up.
“A fireman!” shouted one boy.
“A nurse!” shouted a girl.
“I want to be president of the United States!” I announced.
“What?!” the kids yelled, laughing.
The fireman-wannabe said, “You can’t be president; you’re a girl!”
This was 1972. I’d seen my mother watching something on the news, so I shouted back.
“YES, I CAN! WOMEN’S LIB!”
I didn’t know what women’s lib meant exactly, but it made me feel good to say it.
“Why don’t you become a secretary?” Mrs. Hendricks suggested.
Mrs. Hendricks was famous among us kids as the meanest teacher in school. Later that year, after I got in trouble for beating up a boy, she called my mother and suggested she send me to a psychiatrist for gender confusion.
I wasn’t confused, and Mrs. Hendricks didn’t break me. Puberty did. It hit me like a Mack truck. At 12 years old, saddled with a C-cup bra that I hid under so many layers of clothes, I could hardly move, I lost every bit of my tomboy power. It took me two years to find my strength again, and even then, I never again announced that I wanted to be president.
In my 20s, when I looked for work as a bartender, I was told that only topless bars would hire a woman, and only if I worked in a one-piece leotard. When I finally did get a job, the higher-ups promoted only men. I watched as men I had trained became my bosses. I was sexually harassed on a daily basis, so much so that I stopped thinking of it as harassment. When I started cooking for a living, it was open season on me from the all-boys camp of professional cooking. They would do just about anything to make me quit.
Anyway, when I got to my commercial kitchen on November 8, I took out a piece of paper and wrote “I’m with her” on it, then taped it the front window.
Two passersby gave me the thumbs up.
That night, my girlfriend and I toasted our first lady president-to-be with cocktails, then crawled into bed to watch what we both thought was going to be one of the best nights of our lives unfold.
One by one, the states on the map turned red.
“Don’t worry, Honey, she’s going to win,” my girlfriend reassured.
How could she not? Any one of the offensive comments Donald Trump had made while campaigning would have ended the career of another politician.
The few people I knew who were voting for Trump were embarrassed about it and said things like, “I don’t trust him, but I think he’ll be good for business.”
He couldn’t possibly win; even the Republicans were speaking out against him.
As more states turned red, I wrote on Facebook, “Please, Lord, send her some love.”
Then fell asleep feeling hopeful. She’d just won California. I woke with a jolt at 2:30.
“Did she win?”
“I’m sorry honey,” my girlfriend said as gently as she could. “No, she didn’t.”
Wham! came that punch in my stomach.
“How? Why?”
On my Facebook that morning, a man had commented, “Stick a fork in her. She’s done.”
It felt as though he’d stuck a fork in me. Couldn’t he understand that I was experiencing a profound loss? How could he be so cruel? And why on earth was I Facebook friends with him?
On the way to work, everyone I passed looked stunned, as though they were fighting back tears. They made eye contact with me when I passed and smiled or nodded. New Yorkers never make eye contact. It’s not our thing.
I smiled back. The dragging feet, wet eyes; the only other time I’d experienced that was the day after September 11.
For weeks after my mother died, my eyes felt hard from too many tears pent up behind them. When I looked in the mirror, they looked like a layer of glass was over them. This was the same way my eyes looked and felt after election night, the same way most of the eyes I met looked, the same way Hillary’s eyes looked the morning of her concession speech.
“Hillary won the popular vote. Remember that,” more than a few people said to me, but it didn’t really make me feel better.
They didn’t understand that it wasn’t just my heart breaking; 7-year-old me was being told that I can’t be president because I’m a girl all over again. She and I had come so close, only to have it ripped away.
I spent a few days crying, and then I got a text message from my goddaughter.
My beautiful 19-year-old goddaughter Zee, so moved by her outrage, announced that she planned to run for president one day. Her mother, her best friend, her boyfriend, her college pals and her proud godmother will all vote for her. No one even considered saying it wasn’t possible for a girl. If they had, Zee would have kicked the crap out of them.