Chambermaid

by Saira Rao

  The line at Dunkin’ Donuts spilled out the door. Soaked and sorry, I took my place in the back. “I’ll have the large coffee with skim AND a glazed doughnut.” Blank stare. “Um. A glazed and my usual coffee.” I pointed to the donut.

  “Yah. You nevah get do-nuh.” Yes, I also had never shot up drugs but was considering joining the guys outside.

  “Um, yes, you’re right, I normally don’t get a doughnut. Today I want a glazed.” Patience was wearing thin. It was also wearing on the not-so-thin, wet UPS deliveryman behind me. Stares all around. “You know what, forget it. Just the coffee.” He forgot it. I couldn’t believe it. A kid twenty years younger than me put me on a diet at a doughnut shop filled with people three times my size.

  Coffee in hand, I breezed by Duane (“Hey, little lady! psst!”—I was wearing a knee-high plaid skirt) and headed to security. I recognized the girl in front of me as one of Kevin’s coclerks from a cell phone picture he’d furtively taken in chambers.

  “Hey, you’re one of Judge Adams’s clerks, right?” I ventured to ask.

  “Yeah, I’m Betsy. How did you know that? And I don’t mean to sound rude, but who are you?” She eyed me curiously.

  “Oh, I know Kevin, your coclerk, and my name is Sheila, Sheila Raj, and I clerk for Judge Friedman.”

  “PHONE IN THE BUCKET, PHONE IN THE BUCKET.” The security guard forced Betsy through, but she politely waited for me at the other end.

  “Wow. How’s that going?” Betsy asked excitedly.

  “It’s fine, just fine,” I fibbed again, “and I’m looking forward to our sitting. I have this one death penalty case that I’m really excited about.”

  “Ha! You’re working on the Dell Nelson–Peter Nussbaum one, huh? I am, too. But since we’re not supposed to be talking about cases, I should probably shut my trap.” She paused. “But we should have lunch after the sitting,” Betsy suggested cheerily.

  “Sure, that’d be great,” I said, getting off the elevator. Entering the secretaries’ den, there was Eddie hovering over Janet’s desk. Eddie was the chamber’s janitor, and aside from a predilection for cleaning the bathroom barefoot, Eddie was by all accounts a normal sweet guy. He loved his two teenage daughters, college football, and didn’t for a second seem perturbed that after a stint in the United States Army, he’d been relegated to a life of scrubbing toilets for old, mean people who treated him like he was lucky that he got to serve them. God bless America!

  But even Eddie wouldn’t talk to Medieval Roy, who was sedulously watering the judge’s plants. While the mere existence of Roy was depressing enough to make a chicken want to cut its own head off, there was something particularly sad about him watering the judge’s plants. It was inexplicably extraspecial demeaning.

  “Good morning, Roy.” I couldn’t mask my pity. He turned skittishly, knocking over an entire stack of briefs from decades ago. Janet jumped out of her seat, nearly decapitating one of the three Pound Puppies on top of her computer and cutting off whatever Eddie was saying to her midstream.

  “Roy! Roy! Can’t you do anything right?!”

  Roy started stuttering. The great medievalist. A few days earlier, Roy had proudly presided over a fifteenth-century feast, after which he had presumably had his way with thirteenth-century wenches from Jersey. Today, he stood over a pile of antiquated briefs, holding a pink water jug, madly batting his lashes at an angry, born-again Christian secretary. But, I couldn’t blame him. Janet scared the bejesus out of me, too.

  “Pick all of that up RIGHT now, Roy,” Janet said. “I will not be blamed for your stupidity!” Eddie and I just stood. I felt partially responsible. It was me, after all, who had said good morning. “Now, about your daughter”—Janet casually returned to her conversation with Eddie—“I will definitely pray for her this weekend,” she promised, smiling. I just stood.

  “Um, good morning, Eddie. Janet,” I said finally. Eddie smiled at me.

  “Hitheresheilahow’reyoui’mOKhoney.” That was the best part about Eddie. He anticipated your question and answered it before you could even ask. The whole string of words—incomprehensible. Janet? I’m not sure there was a best part about her.

  She resumed: “You do realize that for the sitting, you’ll have to get the judge together. Get her orange notebook. Xerox copies of the oral argument schedule. Give me and her an original and you people get the rest. Put her copy on her chair and the cases should go on the other chair in there.” She motioned inside. I nodded, pretending like I knew exactly what she was talking about.

  “Got it. Thanks, Janet.”

  She clenched her jaw. That was my cue to leave.

  Janet hadn’t warmed up a lick since my first day on the job. This was not for my lack of trying. I practically kissed her ass on a daily basis. She repaid me with assault and battery. At first, I had let it slide. After all, the judge treated Janet and Roy like crap. Friedman had once told me in passing that we—the law clerks—were never to eat lunch with them, because “they do not have JDs and will not be able to follow anything you say.” In addition to being societal lowlifes, according to the judge, Janet and Roy were also responsible for anything and everything that went wrong in terms of logistics, and never once did the judge reward them with kindness. The judge didn’t even say hello to them. Roy dealt with the abuse by incessantly surfing medieval Internet sites.

  Janet was different.

  She was strangely obsessed with pleasing the judge, like a battered wife who constantly wanted to make her violent husband proud. As for the rest of us—Janet treated us the way the judge treated her. With every passing potshot from the judge, Janet’s ego dropped below sea level, leaving her a seething piranha in search of a raw piece of meat to chew on. Her personal life didn’t seem to help matters. Thanks to her morning conversations with Eddie and my excellent eavesdropping skills, I was able to piece together one sad story. Janet was a devoutly religious Bible banger who spent Sundays passing around collection baskets at her church. She had moved into her parents’ house in the suburbs after a dicey divorce years earlier. While her parents were long gone, her brother was still there. Brother and Janet were in their fifties and both still single. I wondered if incest was banned by the Ten Commandments.

  She had two cats, which her brother hated. She enjoyed knitting sweaters for her cousins’ babies and broiling pork products. She loved children but had none of her own. She didn’t drink or smoke but did positively adore bright pink lipstick. And those Pound Puppies! All things considered, I couldn’t blame her for being mean and nasty. I’d probably be a seething bottom-feeder too if my brother kicked my cats and wanted to feel me up.

  Before I could say hello to Matthew, the elevator announced the judge’s arrival. Drats! I quickly fell into my chair and turned my computer on and lickety-split—the judge was before me. So was one greasy pony. The bun was down and in its stead was a long, stringy ponytail. It was like seeing the queen in her underwear.

  “I want to talk to you about the Niltin case. Your analysis is troubling, to say the least. With that, she turned and walked off. I, like a sick pony, followed.

  “Um, do you want to talk right now?” I ventured to ask. She kept walking, without so much as a half turn.

  “I am rilly busy. Not now!” She slammed her door. Troubling analysis! I’d put blood, sweat, and tears into the Dell Nelson bench memo. I had read and reread the briefs, trial transcript, and case law, even after office hours, to turn in what I thought was a stellar memo in a timely fashion. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a lawyer after all.

  “Pssst!” Matthew motioned to me. I tiptoed over.

  “Hey. I can’t seem to do anything right,” I whispered.

  “That’s not true, first of all,” he paused, turning greenish “but what I wanted to ask you was if you saw the judge’s hair? Has she not washed it in, well, a while?”

  “Yeah, it was definitely gross. Hey, would you rather wash her pony once a week for a whole year or live in a port-o-potty for a w
eek?” I asked without thinking, accidentally unleashing my favorite game—would you rather—on a colleague who’d barely said two words to me over the course of several weeks. I’d made the same error a few years earlier with the new kid in my study group. He switched groups shortly thereafter. I’d vowed to never repeat the mistake. Matthew looked much like that kid—panic-stricken.

  “Never mind. Just kidding,” I squeaked out, before returning to my desk. No sooner had I sat down did Matthew come over to my part of the woods. Standing behind my cubicle, he whispered: “Sorry, the question threw me. They’re both vile, but I think I’d live in the port-o-potty for a week.”

  At that moment, the most unusual thing happened. Matthew’s phone rang and he hightailed it back to his desk to answer before the judge could hear anything. I peered in his direction and noticed that he’d turned ashen white. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the judge heading in our direction. I jumped to head her off at the pass, but it was too late. The queen had spotted her meandering servant. She scurried over to Matthew’s cubicle and hovered above him. He continued to speak into the phone.

  “What! Do! You! Think! You! Are! Doing!” She seethed. I almost wet my pants. Matthew ignored her and kept listening to whomever it was talking on the other end. “I. Am. Talking. To. You. Math-You!” I could see her hands trembling through her folded arms. Get off the phone, Matthew. Save yourself, man.

  “OK. What do you want me to do?” Matthew asked into the phone. That was it. The judge leaned over and yanked the phone cord out of the jack. Just like that.

  “Maybe if you spent less time talking to your friends and more time working, you people wouldn’t make colossal mistakes!” she barked. Matthew stood up, towering over the judge and coming very close to her. He was the Leaning Tower of Pisa and she an awestruck tourist. He clenched his fist. She flinched. A modern showcase showdown. And then I saw a tear glide down Matthew’s face.

  Clearly restraining himself—from crying and violence—Matthew calmly stated: “Judge, that was my brother. My sister-in-law has been in a terrible car accident and might die. You just cut me off from my bro—”

  “I don’t care who’s dying. My husband is dying. Do you see me chitchatting all day?” I closed my eyes for a second hoping that when I opened them I would realize that I’d just imagined the whole thing. No dice.

  “Fuck you, Judge,” Matthew enunciated carefully, before shoving her out of his way, grabbing his duffel bag, and walking out the door. It was at that point that I did wet my pants. Peed right there in my chair. I wasn’t sure what it was. The fact that Matthew’s sister-in-law was on her deathbed, the fact that the judge exhibited a cruelty I’d never before witnessed from another human being, or the fact that Matthew had told the judge to fuck off. It could simply have been that I’d officially developed a bladder control problem.

  Whatever the case, the judge didn’t seem remotely affected by the cold hard facts—two law clerks down in less than two months. Surely that would have been a record even for her.

  Instead of processing this, she marched by my cubicle, told me to see her in her office in five minutes, returned to the torture chamber, and shut the door. I had five minutes to find new underpants, a futile task given that the cafeteria didn’t carry much in the way of clothing. I splashed water on my crotch and decided to tell anyone who asked that the sink had exploded on me.

  As I approached the torture chamber, Janet looked positively pleased. “Did they just have a fight?” she whispered, motioning to the clerks’ cave. I didn’t answer. Who needed enemies with friends like Janet? Inside the torture chamber, my knees felt like they were about to give out. That, coupled with my soaked ass, made me feel like a dysfunctional mermaid. Thankfully, the judge didn’t seem to notice (or smell) my wet pants. Instead, she just stood, clutching my bench memorandum.

  “Seems you gave short shrift to a crucial aspect of Nuddleton,” she sneered. It didn’t feel like the right time to remind her that the case was called Nelson.

  “I’m sorry, Judge. I’m confused. Maybe you disagree with me as to whether or not Nelson’s lawyer was ineffective but—”

  “You’re missing my point.” It was unclear how one could miss an unmade point. “Do you even understand AEDPA?” the judge asked giddily. AEDPA (pronounced: ED-pah) was short for the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a law which, according to the Supreme Court, “modified” the courts of appeals’ role in reviewing state prisoner habeas corpus applications. Modified was a nice way of saying “removed” the court of appeals role altogether, a euphemism for fucked, screwed, or game over for death row inmates. Sometimes even claims of actual innocence fell short of the standards required under AEDPA for prisoners to get relief on appeal. In short, AEDPA provided a procedural hurdle to hearing the substance of death penalty cases on appeal.

  “Um, I thought I understood the statute. I apologize, Judge, if I interpreted it wrong.” I silently kicked myself for apologizing to a woman who moments earlier had told Matthew she could care less if his sister-in-law died. A smile erupted on the judge’s small face, like lava from a formerly dormant volcano.

  “I thought I understood the statute,” she mimicked. “What do you think would happen if I wrote opinions based on thinking I understood the issues?” I quietly repented for each and every time I’d been sarcastic to my mother. “As a federal appeals court faced with a habeas petition, we are obligated to give profound deference to the Pennsylvania state court, which has already ruled that this Tip Arvents character wasn’t constitutionally ineffective. Deference, Sheila. Your bench memo barely even addresses this but waxes on about how we should overturn the state’s decision. It’s not that I disagree with you necessarily about giving this man a chance to be resentenced,” she said sternly, “but that I’m deeply troubled by how you brushed off a crucial aspect of how we arrive at that conclusion. It’s lazy. I expect more from my law clerks.”

  “Judge, I-I am pretty sure that I wrote several pages on, er, on AEDPA, and I thought that I said, on balance, we should rule in favor of the defend—”

  “Enough. I expected more from you, Sheila,” she said calmly.

  For some reason, her typical vitriol was easier on the nerves than her genuine disappointment in my legal reasoning. Robbing me of my backbone was one thing, but was the clerkship also making me a bad lawyer? I was sucking up what was turning out to be a hideous year for no other reason than to hone my legal skills for the ACLU. Was it actually all for naught? And had I lost my mind?—I could have sworn that I’d addressed AEDPA at length. Yikes! I’d given the Dell Nelson case 110 percent and it was insufficient. And if I couldn’t even write a proper bench memo, it was almost certain that I’d failed the bar exam.

  “I-I am sorry. Do you want me to rewrite that portion of the memo, Judge?” I offered meekly. She didn’t. She just wanted to make me feel as inadequate as she felt in the face of her dying husband. It worked. I felt helpless, hopeless.

  “I just want you to know that you need to THINK about every possible issue surrounding each case. You are here to think and to be thorough.”

  Then a near miracle happened. Her phone rang and she answered it immediately. “Hello, Mark. One second, please.” She looked up long enough to deliver one final blow. “Sheila, I want your November bench memo pronto. Now get out.”

  Mark was the judge’s son, her only child, whom she had “picked up in Namibia.” He lived in Gladwyne, a nearby suburb on the Main Line, with his wife (“the White”) and two small children (“the Mixed”). He never called. He never came by. She didn’t seem to care. After all, who had time for kids, grandchildren, and dying husbands when she had “so much to do!”?

  Early on, I learned never to inquire about Bob, Mark, or the grandkids, one of whom had been born only two months prior to my arrival. When I congratulated her on the newborn early on in the clerkship, she’d barked: “Why are you congratulating me?” It was one of her many talents, I’d come to learn
—making you feeling like a grade-A moron for asking a perfectly normal question. In the beginning I hadn’t caught on, so at that time I racked my mind for an answer. Didn’t people congratulate others when they became parents and grandparents? Even aunts and uncles got the occasional pat on the back.

  “Well, for Mark’s new baby?” It was an early lesson in doubting my entire universe of knowledge.

  “I had nothing to do with that,” she flatly stated. Technically, I guessed she hadn’t. “And I can’t stand babies until they are at least two. That baby has absolutely nothing interesting to say. Nothing at all.” And that was that. For the first time, I’d come face-to-face with a seventy-two-year-old woman who thought her grandchildren were dull.

  Leaving the torture chamber, I considered jumping out of the window. My life was effectively over anyway. Why not just end it? I hadn’t even opened the first brief for my next case, let alone started writing a word of the bench memo. She was going to flip her bun when she realized she’d have to wait at least a week for it.

  The best case scenario would be getting fired. This, of course, would mean no ACLU. Then again, considering that (a) Judge Friedman just told me I had poor legal skills and (b) the Brian situation, the ACLU was probably out anyway. I’d heard back from Anika, the ACLU’s director of human resources, but her e-mail had been curt (or was it?), and she’d not addressed my suggestion that we get together for coffee one weekend in New York. I’d lied and said that I was there frequently, which I wished I were. But I simply couldn’t fork over the dough for the Amtrak train, and the 2.5-hour Jersey Transit–SEPTA ride proved too trying after such trying work weeks. My lie didn’t seem to matter to Anika, who coldly bullet-pointed everything I’d need to include in my application.

  Despite my mother’s and Puja’s insistence to the contrary, I knew Brian was hijinxing my chances at doing good for humankind. It even crossed my mind that perhaps he was sleeping with Anika on the side, in which case I could always hire someone to take secret pictures of him riding Jana in his fedora. I nevertheless applied, planning to wait out the rejection, which at least wouldn’t come for several months. March was the earliest they’d respond to any and all applications (at least that’s what Anika had said. Was she lying to me?). Considering rejection was a certainty, getting axed by the judge wouldn’t make a lick of difference. But the alternative was even worse. Helga Friedman could just keep me around as a whipping post, like Roy. Spiral, spiral, spiral. Even worse, what if I was relegated to being Roy’s bitch?