"You are all just so annoying," Kathy told us in an exclusive tell-all on her way out of the Presidential Mansion. "Nancy [Pelosi] agrees."
She is exceptionally beautiful. Wide, wild eyes. Delicate facial features arranged where a sculptor might have lovingly coerced them from a block of marble. She is, like most powerful women, smarter than people suppose. ("Bill loves my big brain," she says, tapping her degree on the wall from Yale. Bill was not available for comment.) She has that ability to seamlessly blend into a crowd of white women—she was the eighth person I mistook for herself before I finally found her and the interview began. It's not just the hair and coquettish grin. It’s the way she can lower or raise an internal dimmer switch to dial the eyes and mouth along a spectrum from, like, taking credit for student and staff initiatives to sending out the most tone-deaf email you've read in your life. It permits her to work effectively as both a girlboss and a con-man.
"She's a chameleon," Nancy Pelosi, who's some other lady I don't know I'm short on time to pump out this article my boss is so mean, says. "Wait, I meant the one with no legs. That hisses."
Pelosi captivates and intrigues me. "Snake?" I email back. But this interview isn't about Nancy. And she does not reply.
In the Presidential Mansion, her Medford accent makes an appearance, peeking out through her media-trained responses. But her laughter is freewheeling and she can't help but start things off by saying precisely what she feels: "I hate Smith so fucking much!" Her Louboutin red bottoms slip on the un-Soy Sauced walkways, but she ignores it. I do too. The effect is something like an aging drag queen who must now tape the bottoms of her kitty heels so that she can return them to DSW at the end of the show: like maybe her prime is long past but you cannot help but buy what she's selling, if just for a night.
I ask if I can call her KMac. She gives me a withering look, as if I have aged her with my very words. I say just that, and she replies, "Perhaps Smith students have." She doesn't elaborate. Nor does she give me permission to call her Kathy.
We're walking through Smith College campus, at the shores of Paradise Pond. Not 20 minutes earlier, the plan had been for us to visit Bill in the basement, but she'd suddenly thought better of it. "He is just so sad and smelly since the divorce." She'd talked herself out of it, with a punctuating sigh.
Her career to this point has been shaped by a combination of talent, raw sexual appeal, luck, and stolen valor. The praise came quickly and the fame more so. The 65- or 66-year-old (her brief Wikipedia article waffles, uncertain) has seen a lifetime of accomplishment, flushed down the toilet into obscurity by her tenure as President of Smith College. "I debate a lot with myself the pros and cons of trying something new. I'll have entire conversations with myself about it on the phone before I realize that Nancy—my good friend Nancy—before I realize her assistant has hung up the phone. And then, at the end of it, just smoking a metric fuckton of salvia and being like: Ah, fuck it! I'll just be president of a historically women's college. That seems like the right move." McCartney chuckles to herself, shaking her head and catching snowflakes on her delicate blonde locks. The sun has begun to set, casting pinks and yellows and blues across the sky, framing the end of another day at Smith. Her laughter is infectious, like an airborne respiratory illness.
Her reputational swerve away from academia into an obsession with landscaping (Smith's grass is a reputed 3 inches tall on any given day at any hour at any location) had taken such a firm hold in recent years that Steven Heydemann, Director of Program in Smith's Middle East studies department (which McCartney invented), wasn't sure McCartney would even be interested in picking up her duties once more. But a little academic exposure, by way of taking credit for everything that ever happened at Smith while she also happened to be there, was just as deliberate a choice as turning away in the first place. Get into the mansion, build up a small fortune in silver, then charter a new voyage out into centering another Smith tradition around paying attention to her. It was a plan. "If only," she paused, "Smith students hadn't annoyed me into quitting before I unveiled 'Mountain Day 2: Wait on Kathleen Hand and Foot' edition. Those little bastards would've loved it." She pulls my tape recorder right up to her lips, a wild grin stretching out on her face like a cat in the sun. "They would've loved me."
As President of a college "full of bratty little SJW commies", McCartney is no stranger to scandals during her career, whether that be from her botched "All Lives Matter" email, copying Amherst College's Covid-19 response but forgetting to Command+F and replace "Amherst" with "Smith", or continuously inviting war criminals to speak at Commencement. McCartney is also no stranger to sandals during her career, as she masterfully diverts my attention to her open-toed shoes. "Shut the hell up about all that," she says, still holding onto my tape recorder. "Don't put that in." Unfortunately for her, I have a word count to meet. I take a moment to admire her Birkenstocks before wresting my tape recorder from her grasp.
Though the campus is moving into Green Mode, McCartney shudders as a Smith student we pass on the sidewalk sneezes, moving to shove her into the lake. I look away, the splash falling deaf against my ears.
As we approach Queer Rock, I ask McCartney what she plans to do in retirement. The sun is nearly done setting, casting us into darkness as we climb the cold metal rungs. The final light rays of the day bounce off the snow into my vision. She looks almost angelic, haloed by the campus that she has spent a decade terrorizing. I fall in love, if not just for a moment.
She bids me to look up at the stars, guiding me gently towards Cassiopeia, then the Big Dipper. Her grip on my throat is suffocating, like only a mother's touch can be. I can't tell if my vision is darkening or Smith students were right that we need more lighting on campus—she lets go before I can form my conclusion. A Campo car trundles by, the gentle hum of the incredibly expensive engine bringing me back to reality.
She is silent. "Kathleen?" I prod. She won't take her eyes off the sky.
"I don't like Smith students," she reminds me. I nod. I'm almost afraid to interrupt—the words seem caught in her throat. She opens her mouth, as if to speak, then shuts it. She glances at me, then her gaze is once again fixed to Cassiopeia. I tell myself the tears welling in her eyes are a trick of the non-existent light as I choke down my own, swallowing thickly.
I hear the weak beep of my dying tape recorder call out, as if tugging on my sleeve. "You have 30 seconds," it whispers in my ear. "Make them count."
I let the tape recorder slip through my fingers, watching as it tumbles into the water. Its strangled beeps grow muffled, fading into the chorus of the night beneath the gentle musings of the crickets, newly emerged in the false spring.
"I won't tell the Henshaw rental desk if you don't," she smiles tightly. She still won't look at me. She's afraid. I am too.
The tips of our fingers brush, then retreat into our respective pockets. In sync, like a dance choreographed by destiny. Written in the stars, one might say. Although—we seem to agree—some things are better left unsaid.
McCartney and I sit in silence, then begin our walk back to civilization. Along the path, I am reminded of a Robert Frost poem, but as I struggle to wrench the words up from my heart to my lips, the moment passes me by. In front of the Presidential Mansion, we say our goodbyes and part ways.
Her, to feed Bill his midnight kibble, and me, to run the stupidest club this campus has ever seen.
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