Chambermaid

  “What does fifth-largest mean anyway and why is everyone obsessed by this fact? I mean, what’s the big deal?” No deal for me. He’d lost interest, ditched me on the stoop, and approached a middle-aged man in a silver Mercedes SUV stopped at the red light in front of us. Getting blown off by a homeless man seemed par for the course.

  I walked into my apartment, threw my purse on the floor, and nestled into my couch. It was at times like these that I wished I had a TV. The one I had in New York had belonged to my roommate, Jill, and I didn’t have enough money to buy one for myself.

  Well, you know what they say: If you don’t have a television, get yourself a meatball. I grabbed what was left of Sunday night’s dinner (take-out foot-long sub).

  “What are you looking at?” I sneered at my fridge. It was literally looking at me and I at it, each disgusted by the other. The thing was nasty. In fact, my whole apartment was nasty. I’d just moved in and already my place was a sty. I hadn’t cleaned a thing, hadn’t bothered to take out the trash. Now I was arguing with my kitchen. I really needed human interaction. Sanjay had been with patients all day and Puja in meetings. Unfortunately, James hadn’t gotten home from his first day of work and I didn’t know Kevin well enough for a bitch fest.

  “What am I going to do?” I said out loud, madly wagging my finger to nobody. “There’s no way I’m going to finish this memo on time.” I first noticed that I was saying things out loud to myself last Wednesday, when I was in the bathroom at work. “Lilac. My favorite,” I’d muttered to the soap dispenser. Had I just say that out loud? I had. For a minute, it scared me. Was I going crazy? Was I already crazy? But I succumbed to the sink, toilet, and trash can after Laura alerted me to her exit strategy. I surmised that Nelson Mandela had done his fair share of talking to objects while in jail, and he went on to become president of South Africa. Perhaps the private monologues weren’t a sign of insanity but instead a precursor to world leadership.

  The phone rang. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Sheila. You know what? Your father and I have decided that you really need to have a home telephone. I mean, just imagine if something happened to you and then what would you do? I mean, your cell phone sometimes just rings and rings and we can’t call you at work and—”

  “MOM!” I reminded her of who she was.

  “Oh, yes, anyway, how was your day? You know, I’m getting really worried. You just don’t sound like yourself.”

  “Well, I don’t particularly feel like myself. This hasn’t exactly turned out to be the dream job I thought it would be. And today, the judge told me that I was slow and a bad reader, which really—”

  “That woman will rot in hell. You’ve always been the smartest reader in your class. And I still can’t believe she won’t even let you use the phone to call your mother!” Amazing how my mother managed to make the worst part of my job about her.

  “Mom, I really don’t want to talk about this right now,” I lied. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree and I desperately wanted to talk about myself. “Anyway, everything will be fine. How are you?”

  “You” was all it took, and the next thing I knew was that Aunty Priya had screwed over Aunty Sudha (Sanjay’s mother) and how everyone at the Hindu center was taking sides. The Reston Aunty Posse never let you down. My mom was in the middle of explaining a particularly fascinating vindication (involving a sari heist) on the part of Aunty Radha (against Aunty Priya for said Sudha screw-over) when James came knocking. I managed to extricate myself from the subcontinental intrigue and let James in. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. Turned out, he’d spent the day with one. Well, an almost one.

  “Sheila,” he said, and plowed past me into the apartment and onto my couch, “this is awful. This is beyond awful. I don’t know what to do. For real.” His eyes got big. I’d never seen James so freaked out. Before I could ask any questions, he pulled a beer out of his pocket. Hidden booze wasn’t a good sign. He opened the bottle on the edge of my coffee table, took a long swig, and continued. “It’s, it’s unimaginable. The guy. My judge. [Swig.] He can’t walk. He’s got some heinous gout or something, and he can’t walk but refuses to retire. [Swig.] He gets around on an electric scooter. With a basket. And a horn. [Swig.]” OK, an old robed dude on an electric bike with a basket may have been more bizarre than a short, squat deranged old lady with a dancing bun.

  “James. Deep breaths. Was he sick when you interviewed with him? And what about Rebecca?” I asked, optimistically hoping that his coclerk could provide a silver lining.

  “Well, funny you ask. She is the worst. Get this. The judge has somebody who drops him off at the building. He then requires one of his clerks to retrieve him at the elevator with the scooter. THIS MEANS THAT I HAVE TO RIDE THE ELECTRIC SCOOTER FROM CHAMBERS TO THE ELEVATOR. Do you even know how embarrassing that is? Do you?!!!” The problem was I didn’t, only because I’d never seen, let alone ridden, an electric Huffy. But I could imagine. “Anyway, I assure you it sucks. This morning, I showed up. Looking spiffy in this new Hickey Freeman suit. After introducing myself to the secretary, I was introduced to Rebecca, who said, and I quote, ‘Um. Hi. The judge is waiting for you downstairs. There’s the scooter. You better go get him.’” I hate when guys mimick girls because it’s always the same nasal, bitchy voice and pouted lips. “Anyway, I will cut to the chase. I found myself riding this thing, having to lift the judge from his caretaker’s car—the caretaker is another story, for later—and place him into the scooter. There was a snafu. And I dropped him. I dropped the judge right on the ground. In front of the Camden courthouse.” (Chug.)

  I laughed out loud. I knew it was the wrong thing to do, but my mouth was tired of the open position it had taken since James’s arrival. The image of James carrying his judge was one thing, dropping him was another. James got up, grabbed another beer from his pocket, and continued.

  This was definitely as weird as Helga Friedman’s joint. James had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth and had worked at the Brookings Institute in Washington DC, where he hobnobbed with some of the premiere thinkers of our day before attending Columbia Law School, where he served as an editor on the Law Review. All of this, of course, in preparation for the biggest job of his life. It was a good thing he’d studied and worked his little pinstriped ass off for over a decade. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have been ready to bench-press a federal judge.

  “Sheila. Are you registering this? I dropped the judge. I dropped the judge. I thought that I may have killed him. He didn’t move for a whole minute, then simply ordered, ‘Hey Jim. Jimboy. Pick me up, kiddo. We have a very busy day.’ I don’t know how I did it, but the next thing I know is he was scooting himself into chambers, with me walking a few steps behind. Rebecca scowled and said, ‘I won’t be doing that. I’m a girl. You’re a boy. You’re strong. I’m not. Good luck with that.’”

  The trials and tribulations of my day seemed trivial in comparison.

  “Shit, Sheila, I’m going to have to start working out. I’m really scared I’m going to drop him everyday. Once may be OK, but I can’t drop a federal judge on a New Jersey sidewalk EVERY DAY. Shit. If I knew I was going to have to arm-curl an old person during my clerkship, I would have bagged Con Law Two in favor of the gym. Fuck.”

  One couldn’t argue with that.

  Chapter Six

  Brian took me up on my offer. He had e-mailed me about lunch no less than five times over the course of several weeks. What lawyers lacked in personality, they made up for in sheer determination.

  I tiptoed out of the clerks’ cave when the coast was clear (read: when Evan was in the bathroom). Evan had blossomed into a jewel of a jackass, one that I avoided at all costs. I’d learned of this the hard way.

  During the second week of work, in an attempt to bond, I suggested a group lunch to Evan and Matthew. I joined them in the cafeteria after a pit stop in the bathroom, arriving moments after war had broken out. Evan was leaning over the counter screaming at Ernie: “It’
s right there, can’t you see it!?”

  “I am a blind man—BLIND!!!” Ernie yelled, sticking him with a huge plate of deep-fried chicken livers.

  A few steps behind Evan, I carefully—and kindly—instructed Ernie to serve me the sweet potatoes and roasted chicken: “Hi, Ernie. How are you? Yes, the chicken, it’s to your right. Yes, thank you, Ernie.” Matthew followed my lead and walked away with exactly what he’d ordered.

  Incredibly, pissing off the entire cafeteria (just as I’d done a week earlier) didn’t hinder Evan from staining my ears worse than Aunty Nirmila at my cousin’s wedding. This was quite a feat considering Aunty Nirmila had cornered me for two full hours, shoving glossy head shots of Lakshman, her best friend Anjili’s single thirty-four-year-old son from Bangalore in front of me. “But he’s engineeeeeeeer, Sheila. Baby, please, you’ll make us all soooo happy if you come meet him. You’re not getting any younger.” I’d just celebrated my sweet sixteenth. And Lakshman couldn’t have gotten any grosser. Glossy after glossy revealed a short, squat man grinning like a dog in heat and the only thing he might have engineered was the patch of curly hair spilling out of his pimply ear. The one of Lakshman with tight white jeans on top of a miniature pony was the final straw. Evan’s lecture was worse.

  The moment we squeezed our way in between a pack of secretaries, Evan ditched his shame over openly ridiculing a blind man and dug right into the livers—then into Matthew and me.

  “So, you guys did go to Pepperdine’s Judicial Clerkship Institute, right? I mean, I don’t remember either of you, but I figure you had to have.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Matthew stated, nonplussed. From my end, I tried to move the conversation away from the horror camp.

  “So, how did you like living in Boston?” I said, eking out a feeble attempt at conversation change.

  “You guys!!! I cannot believe you didn’t go. It was only the most amazing, critical, experience for an incoming clerk,” Evan gasped, definitely not making me feel better.

  “I’ve just never heard of it. What is it?” Matthew implored. Evan sighed indignantly.

  “Well, like a dozen judges—all federal of course—mostly appeals judges from the ninth circuit come and tell you basically how to be an amazing clerk. You really should have gone. I can’t believe Columbia didn’t tell you about it. And Yale—what do they even teach you there? Harvard insists that its clerks—and most Harvard grads get the clerkship of their choice—go to the institute.” He smiled smugly, lending the air of having rested his case. It turned out to be his opening statement.

  “Well, I guess we’re screwed,” Matthew said, refusing to look up from his chicken wings.

  “Well, you aren’t necessarily screwed, but you’re definitely going to have trouble,” Evan diagnosed. “I mean, Professor Chemerinsky—the Chemerinsky—even taught a course called Troubleshooting—When Westlaw and Lexis Just Aren’t Cutting It!”

  “Chemerinsky isn’t all that,” Matthew replied. “Maybe I’d have gone if Professor Sunstein were there. Noah Feldman, perhaps. But Chemerinsky? No thanks.”

  What? I’d have gone if Owen Wilson were there. Luke Wilson perhaps.

  Undeterred, Evan proceeded to recite the CliffsNotes version of the institute. It was in between the Rationale Rodeo and Stare Decisis Swamp that I started feeling faint.

  Forty-five minutes later, Matthew was barely sitting up, staring numbly as if roofies had been involved. I wish I’d been roofied. That way I would have been able to black out this entire experience. Instead, I fell into a spiral, freshly convinced I’d fail at the clerkship. What was the best experience for everyone else would be the worst for me.

  From that day forward, I vowed never to break bread with Evan again. My resolve weakened a little, though, when I heard a muffled voice from around the corner while awaiting the elevator. Could it be Evan? Or worse—the judge? Sitting on the floor, in the dark, was Matthew whispering into his cell phone.

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” I said, backing away. Since our famed bonding lunch, Matthew and I had barely spoken a word to each other. This was due to apathy rather than dislike—he seemed to have exactly zero things to say.

  “No, no you didn’t interrupt. I was just squeezing in a call to my girlfriend,” he said, standing and following me to the elevator. “I was going to grab something to eat. Um, want to join me?”

  “Actually, I’m meeting some other clerks for lunch,” I replied. We both stepped into the elevator. “You’re more than welcome to come with us.”

  “Thanks, that’d be nice,” he said, nodding his head, smiling.

  The elevator opened into the courthouse lobby. Standing before our eyes were Brian and a grim gaggle of geeks. Ten of them. Matthew and I made a dozen neat. Never mind my name or how I was doing, each one of them instantly wanted to know: “Who do you clerk for?” At the speed of light, I’d been asked that very question by all ten of them. So fast, in fact, that I was unable to answer before being asked again. Dizzy Gillespie.

  Brian had made a reservation at the Continental, a Stephen Starr restaurant everyone in Philly raved about. In less than a decade, Mr. Starr had evolved into a local icon, with Ben Franklin his only real rival.

  Even the duck buses, filled with harems of duck-shaped whistle-blowing children and their parents, would pull up in front of Starr’s restaurants. Then a twenty-something with a crew cut and Tommy Hilfiger jeans would retrieve a megaphone (shaped like a duck bill) and scream: “This here is a Ste-VEN Starr restaurant.” Everyone on the bus would scan their map and blow their whistles in proud recognition. The Continental was Stephen Starr’s gem. A Pan-Asian restaurant with specialty martinis (how novel!).

  Within moments of having been seated, it became apparent that Evan wasn’t a statistical anomaly. Complex calculus wasn’t required to compute that Evan times ten was markedly worse than times one. Just about everyone there had attended Clerk Camp, where Evan was a B-list celebrity.

  “Why didn’t you bring Evan?” Anne from Stanford Law wanted to know.

  “I forgot Evan was clerking in Philadelphia. Awesome!” Jeff from Georgetown yelped gleefully like he’d just discovered King Tut’s tomb.

  “That’s so cool—Evan’s your coclerk! He’s so funny!” NYU Nathan raised his hand for a high five. Had he accidentally dropped the word looking after funny, or had he meant to imply that Evan had a sense of humor? Either way, it was nothing short of distressing that Evan was my entree into this bizarro world. Even more distressing, when the conversation turned away from Evan, it took a plunge.

  “Can you believe they granted cert? I think Bowers may be overturned!” Georgetown Jeff excitedly pulled out a printed sheet of all the cases the Supreme Court had decided to hear that term. Judging from the looks of unencumbered excitement, I knew it wasn’t a joke.

  “Frankly, I can just imagine what that would do to habeas!” Brian tipped his fedora for effect. Everyone was mesmerized. Was anyone going to point out the obvious—namely, that Brian was full of bull? While I was the first to believe that Bowers v. Hardwick, the notorious Supreme Court case upholding sodomy laws, should be overturned, I was unaware of anyone wasting away in prison on sodomy charges. After all, the writ of habeas corpus allowed courts to release prisoners who were being held in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Prisons were filled with drug dealers, not fashion-forward queens.

  “Actually, I doubt it’d do anything to habeas,” I blurted out, hoping that pragmatism was still worth something. From the looks of utter disgust all around, you would have thought I’d said I ate shit sandwiches for breakfast, which incidentally didn’t seem so bad compared to the Continental’s signature “Oriental Ginger Noodle Salad.”

  “Clearly, you don’t have a handle on habeas,” Brian sneered.

  “The Great Writ serves as a crucial check on constitutional rights. You are obviously not a scholar of Justice Brennan,” Georgetown Jeff added. Scalia was one thing, but why did he
drag dearly-departed Brennan into this? And had Brian actually used the words “the Great Writ”? This was definitely worse than the special two-hour Con Law class on public v. private nuisance (this crowd seemed to fall into both categories). I was speechless. Unfortunately, my silent astonishment lent support to the peanut gallery’s theory that I didn’t know what I was talking about.

  “I don’t think Sheila’s comment is a reflection of her understanding of habeas at all,” Matthew said. Everyone snapped to attention, as these were the first words Matthew had spoken. “I think that all she was saying is that sodomists are typically not in jail, meaning not many people actually get arrested and convicted for sodomy. As such, habeas wouldn’t apply to them,” Matthew explained methodically.

  “That’s exactly what I meant,” I followed up, shooting a grateful smile at Matthew, who quickly returned to his plate-stare position. “Actually, I was reading a New York Times article last week which said it took Lambda years to even find a test case to challenge Bowers.” This was the truth. Lambda, a nonprofit organization supporting gay/lesbian rights, had searched high and low for someone who’d been arrested for sodomy the minute Bowers came down. It had taken nearly a decade.

  “I should know about test cases. After all, I did work at the ACLU for a summer and will definitely be back this time next year,” Brian bragged. I felt sick. The first time Brian mentioned he’d worked at the ACLU, it never occurred to me that he’d actually want to return.

  Most law students complete their public interest stints during the summer after their first year in law school. Thereafter, most go on to big law firms. But anything cool (i.e., non-law-firm-related) requires a clerkship, (see chapter 2), and even then, places such as the ACLU, the Federal Public Defenders Office, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office still often require a couple years of litigation experience at a top firm. The long and the short of it, however, was that I’d foregone the big salary and packed it off to Pennsylvania in the hope of hopes that I’d be one of the lucky law clerks who could—and would—go straight to the ACLU. The problem was that the ACLU typically hired less than a handful of staff attorneys every year and the chances of two law clerks from the third circuit making the cut in the same year were slim to none. I’d never anticipated the intracircuit competition. Just my luck—Brian clerked for the most powerful judge on the bench. Chief Judge Fleck. The writing was on the wall. I was Flecked.