Work for Hire

by Margo Karasek

  The best plan would be to find a vacant seat near the door. I could quietly slip in, with minimal commotion. Professor Johnson would hopefully appreciate the effort. Then, after class, I could humbly apologize and promise never to do it again.

  Yes, that seemed like a workable alternative. Unfortunately, my quick scan of the room revealed not a single vacant seat. No one else was stupid enough to challenge Professor Johnson’s attendance policy. So that only left my regular seat. But it was in the middle of the third row, ten students in, right in front of the lectern—and Professor Johnson.

  I bit my lower lip. I really couldn’t stand out in the corridor much longer. Each passing minute added insult to injury, and made the entrance that much harder.

  So I twisted the knob and gently pushed the door open.

  It squeaked. I winced.

  Every head in the room turned in my direction. I could almost hear the silent gasps of surprise, but the lull didn’t last. The rush of clicking keyboards became almost deafening. I winced again. There went the instant messages.

  I stepped into the room and glanced towards the front, to gauge the professor’s reaction. He stood at the lectern—in his navy blazer, khaki slacks and gold tie—seemingly unaware of my arrival. His silver hair gleamed under the room’s fluorescent lighting.

  I tiptoed to the third row, anxious to get to my seat before he really noticed me.

  “Excuse me,” I whispered to a classmate who had tipped his chair back and obstructed my entrance. He snapped his chair straight and scowled. I made a face at him. Didn’t he see me coming? I shimmied past two other classmates.

  “The United States Constitution is not a perfect document,” Professor Johnson droned in the background.

  Next to seat four, my foot became tangled in the strap of someone’s computer case. I lurched forward, and hit the occupant of seat five on the back of her head with my shoulder bag. She screeched.

  “I’m so sorry,” I mumbled, and moved on even faster.

  “But it is the best document we have,” Professor Johnson continued, seemingly undisturbed. “In fact, I would put forward, and you’ll probably agree, that it is the best Constitution out there.”

  A mound of bags by seat seven halted my progress.

  “Excuse me,” the woman one row back whispered as she tapped me on my arm. “Can you get out of the way? You’re obstructing my view.”

  “Sorry,” I snarled, turning to look at her. Did she think I was standing there for my own enjoyment? I leveraged my palm on her table and hopped over the mound, but in the process knocked a textbook off the table behind seat eight. It banged to the floor in front of me.

  “Nonetheless,” Professor Johnson labored on as I scooted down to retrieve the book, “if we were to rewrite the Constitution today, we would all probably propose some interesting changes.”

  I finally plopped in my seat, my face flushed despite the room’s central air.

  “Where have you been?” Markus, my neighbor in seat nine, whispered.

  Lauren, who occupied the seat immediately to the right, kicked me under the table and shook her head.

  “Later,” I mumbled back to both of them.

  “Yeah,” Ann whispered loudly from her seat directly behind me, “you’re almost twenty minutes late.”

  I refused to acknowledge her.

  “Some of these changes, however,” Professor Johnson droned on, now staring straight at me, “aren’t necessarily the wisest.”

  All the flushed color drained from my face. Tiny drops of cold sweat prickled my forehead. Professor Johnson rarely made direct eye contact with any one particular student.

  “Indeed, I would call them outright foolish,” he emphasized. He broke the stare and looked down at the lectern.

  Oh, God. He was obviously analyzing the seating chart, connecting person with name.

  “Two hundred years of hindsight, and most of you would still do no better than our Founding Fathers.”

  He reached for a briefcase on a desk next to the podium, removed papers from inside, flipped through them, pulled out one sheet and quickly scanned its content. Paper in hand, he stepped off the podium and leaned against the desk, his free fingers reaching for a gold cuff link.

  “By the way,” Markus whispered again, “you look very beautiful.”

  I scarcely registered the compliment, my eyes morbidly riveted on Professor Johnson’s twirling cuff link.

  “Isn’t that right, Miss Reznar?” Professor Johnson suddenly demanded.

  Time stopped. My vocal chords failed.

  Professor Johnson, however, didn’t suffer from the same affliction.

  “And I’m so glad you could finally find the time to join us.”

  All the heat that had drained from my face returned in full force. I could feel myself turning beet-red under his scrutiny.

  Professor Johnson pushed himself away from the desk and strolled back to the podium. Apparently, his daily dose of informal interaction with the students had come to an end. He was back to the formality of preaching from behind the lectern.

  “Yes,” he continued without waiting for a response from me, “I had the pleasure of reading through all your proposed changes to the Constitution and found them fascinating.”

  I squirmed in my seat as my mind raced to comprehend what he was talking about. Well, I guess there was that one short writing assignment he had posted prior to the start of the semester, but it wasn’t about proposed changes. It was about a proposed change. Singular. Professor Johnson had asked us to pick one thing we would revise in the Constitution and e-mail him a quick note describing our reasons. He hadn’t given us any written assignments since.

  “They were very fascinating,” Professor Johnson continued. “But not necessarily in a good way. Take Miss Reznar’s, for example.”

  He nodded in my direction. I wanted to slide out of my seat to hide under the table.

  “Out of all the things she could change in our great Constitution, she chose to focus on the fact that the United States president has to be a natural-born citizen. Isn’t that right, Miss Reznar?”

  “Uh, yes,” I mumbled.

  I vaguely recalled writing something about that clause being antiquated, that just because someone had been born outside the borders of the United States to non-citizen parents shouldn’t preclude her from the presidency, especially if she spent most of her natural life in the country. At the time, I thought my argument solid. After all, the founders included the clause only because they didn’t want a British sympathizer taking over the presidency. With more than two hundred years of history, I figured the danger had passed.

  Apparently not.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  I watched as Professor Johnson’s lips thinned. His nostrils flared. He looked ready to kill.

  “She wouldn’t alter the language that defined a black man as three-fifths of a human being, or insert a little clause that acknowledged women—her own sisters—as political entities. No, out of all the other vital issues, she would let immigrants—with potential dual allegiances—become president instead. Did I read your argument correctly, Miss Reznar?”

  “Well,” I hedged, slouching in my seat and glancing around me. My classmates, I noticed, looked straight ahead or smirked into their computer screens. No one was even daring a peek in my direction. I was on my own, the proverbial sacrificial lamb.

  Only Markus squeezed my knee under the table, as acknowledgement.

  “I figured that since the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution had already rightfully recognized a black man as equal to a white one, and the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the vote, you wanted us to focus on those issues that had yet to be addressed—like the natural citizen requirement.”

  Professor Johnson remained silent. His eyes hardly blinked.

  “And as for dual allegiances,” I continued, gaining a bit of confidence, “I figured the election process itself should weed out those who might sympathize with a country
of origin. The Constitution should never make categorical exclusions. It did so with women and slavery, and we all know how that turned out.”

  There. I knew what I was talking about. My lips tipped up for the first time since I got to class. Criticize that!

  “You figured, Miss Reznar?” Professor Johnson hissed. He leaned his body forward. The lectern cut into his stomach. His face turned white with anger, even under the Florida tan. I wrapped my hands around my own abdomen and slouched further in the seat. I guess I hadn’t done as well as I thought.

  “In the law, we do not figure, we argue,” Professor Johnson articulated, careful to emphasize each word as if it were a bullet shot out of a revolver aimed straight at me.

  “But you cannot do that, Miss Reznar, can you? Because in your busy schedule today, you could not be bothered to bring your book to class. And how can you argue without textual support? Precedent, Miss Reznar. In the law, it’s all about textual precedent. But you have none, Miss Reznar, do you?”

  I shook my head no.

  “You are unprepared, and wasting our time with your half-baked theories. Therefore,” Professor Johnson snarled, scanning the seating chart again, “we shall find someone who is a little more prepared. Perhaps his theories will be more intelligent, no?”

  I nodded quickly. Anything to make sure Professor Johnson was done with me.

  Professor Johnson raised his head straight and looked at the rest of the class. “Mr. Stein? Where are you, Mr. Stein?”

  “Here,” a male voice squeaked from the back.

  Professor Johnson shifted his body towards the sound. I wanted to collapse on the table, but the sheer knowledge that everyone would see my defeat held me up.

  “You did fine,” Markus whispered in my ear.

  I waved his words away, but his offer of sympathy made tears swim in my eyes. I did not do fine. My first time on call in Professor Johnson’s class, and I did absolutely awful. He would remember me the entire semester as the clumsy latecomer with the stupid answer and no book.

  “What did you propose to change in the Constitution, Mr. Stein?”

  Professor Johnson continued his relentless form of questioning, as if completely unconcerned with the carcass—my carcass—he had left behind.

  “Uh, uh, uh,” Mr. Stein stammered.

  Hey, he sounded worse than I did …

  “I proposed eliminating the three-fifths language.”

  What the … ? I perked up in my seat, the tears drying up. The lying twerp! He had used the professor’s own answer just now to score extra points. How unfair!

  “The Constitution should clearly state that those of African American origin are equal to any white man.”

  Professor Johnson banged his hand on the lectern. I jumped in my seat. Everyone else seemed to follow.

  “Mr. Stein,” Professor Johnson shrilled as his voice rose an octave, “have you not heard of the Fourteenth Amendment? It already did that for you. Can you not be more original? Mr. Stein, you’re even less articulate than Miss Reznar!”

  I winced. It seemed my fate was now to be a negative comparison.

  “Here.” Markus squeezed my knee again and pushed a piece of paper under my nose. “Take some notes,” he whispered, careful not to have the sound carry. “It’ll distract you. I’ll print you a copy of whatever you’ve missed after. Do you have a pen?”

  I took the paper he offered and nodded. I had nothing to write on, but before leaving for the Lamonts, I took a pen along with me, just in case. Sometimes, I marveled at my own logic.

  I dug the pen out of the pits of my shoulder bag, leaned an elbow on the table and attempted to concentrate on Professor Johnson’s words. But very little of the information filtered its way into my notes or brain.

  I rubbed my eyes. I knew I should’ve gone home and not entered the classroom. I could’ve avoided this entire fiasco.

  I looked at my wristwatch. The lecture was almost over, and I had little more than half a page of scribbled scratch that made no sense. I collected my bag and stuffed pen and paper inside, abandoning all pretense of paying attention; what was the use? In less than ten minutes I could beat a hasty retreat and pretend this day never happened.

  But then the bag in my lap screamed to life, with a stunningly loud electronic version of Beethoven’s Für Elise.

  Everyone in the room froze at the sound. Including Professor Johnson, who stopped mid-sentence.

  No, no, no.

  I hurled my bag to the floor, and then lunged after it.

  My cell phone. It was buried deep inside.

  With all the running around, I had completely forgotten to turn it off. And I never forgot. I hated people who did; it was my one pet peeve. Now, I was one of those people.

  I fumbled for the phone, hit the off switch and remained squatting under the table. I wasn’t coming up. I would stay there until class was over. It would just be five more minutes. No one would notice.

  Lauren’s shoe connected with my shin.

  “Get up,” she warned from above. “Johnson’s coming.”

  I popped back in the seat and squarely into Professor Johnson’s line of vision.

  “I’m so sorry,” I pleaded to his rigid face. “I thought I had turned it off. Really, I did,” I begged.

  “Miss Reznar,” Professor Johnson said, looking like a man who had just bit into a really sour citrus, “I see you are determined to disrupt this class at all costs. By all means, then, let us stop so you can answer your important phone call. Don’t let us interfere with your day.”

  “No, really,” I sputtered. “I’m very, very sorry. It’s off now. It won’t happen again. I promise.”

  “You’re right,” Professor Johnson agreed. “It won’t. Class is over. Ladies and gentlemen,” he addressed the room at large, “you may leave.”

  Chairs screeched and voices raised in volume as students grabbed their belongings and hurried for the exit.

  “Miss Reznar, I would like to see you before you leave,” Professor Johnson commanded as he walked back to the lectern.

  I stayed immobilized as Lauren scooted by me.

  “See you later,” she said, her words as rushed as she obviously was.

  “I’ll wait for you outside,” Markus called to me as he followed her. “And don’t worry. Everything will be okay.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  I stared after him until every other student departed. With the room eerily silent, I finally pushed my body out of the seat and trudged towards the front, towards the professor.

  “Professor Johnson, I really am sorry,” I said as I faced the podium. I hung my head low. “For being late, and the phone call. It’s just that I got detained and … ”

  “Miss Reznar,” Professor Johnson said as he cut me off, “I am not interested in any explanations. But I do want you to understand that I will not tolerate such behavior again. I know all about you, Miss Reznar, about Law Review and your first year grades. But know that an excellent first-year academic performance will not help you in this class. I’ve given you fair warning, Miss Reznar. As of today, you’re on thin ice. Don’t slip again.”

  He marched away from the podium, and me, and walked out the door. I was left alone in the room, gaping after him.

  “Well, shit!”

  My words resonated in the emptiness of the room. Resigned, I walked towards the exit myself but my cell phone beeped, indicating a message. I pulled it out of the bag and stared at its screen before dialing voicemail.

  Ms. Jacobs’s voice hummed in my ear.

  “Tekla, I just spoke to the Lamonts, and they loved you. Congratulations. You start on Monday.”

  As I deleted the message, I wondered if, somehow, Ms. Jacobs’s ill-timed phone call was a bad omen.

  CHAPTER 6

  COME ON … Open up!

  I pressed the doorbell to the Lamont house for what must have been the hundredth time, and, aside from a chorus of excited dog yelps on the other side, got no response. Again. />
  I banged my hand on the door and reached for my bag to look for a phone, ready to dial all the Lamont numbers now programmed into my cell. Hopefully, someone would answer and let me in. Soon.

  The September day was lovely; with its balmy temperature and clear skies, this day was a rarity for New York. But I didn’t fancy standing on the Lamont stoop indefinitely. Passing neighbors already looked at me askance. A girl in Levis jeans, a Banana Republic tee shirt and a faux Luis Vuitton bag—via Chinatown—didn’t exactly fit with the Lamonts’ usual Prada crowd. Obviously, I was no family or friend. And any household staff would surely have a key.

  Phone in hand, I turned away from the door and dialed the house line first.

  A woman in a Chanel suit walking a Yorkshire terrier paused by the Lamont gate, ostensibly to let the dog sniff a nearby patch of grass. I could’ve sworn this was her fourth trip around the block.

  The phone buzzed in my ear, unanswered.

  Shit. I tried Gemma’s cell next.

  You’d think one of the kids heard the doorbell, my banging, or at the very least the dogs, whose frantic barking hadn’t subsided since I first got to the door, and was so loud it could raise the deaf from their sleep—but, apparently, not the Lamont children. Granted, the townhouse was huge, with its four stories, and Gemma and Xander did have their rooms on the top two floors, but really, I always arrived for our tutoring sessions exactly at seven. I didn’t just materialize in their rooms out of thin air.

  Ms. Chanel Suit’s dog yanked at the leash, clearly ready to move on. She clearly was not.

  Phone plastered to chin and shoulder, I rummaged through my bag, pretending to look for a key until woman and dog finally strolled away, their heads turning back to me every few steps.

  I dialed Xander.

  This ritual by the door was fast becoming a regular routine. In the two weeks since I started tutoring the Lamont children, I had camped out on their stoop—interchangeably ringing the doorbell and all the Lamont telephones—every single day, until Vivienne the housekeeper returned from her evening errands and finally let me in. There was no more Julian happily greeting me at the door. I hadn’t seen him, or Mr. and Mrs. Lamont for that matter, since the interview. My only contact with my new employers was one terse call from Mrs. Lamont informing me Gemma would fill me in on all the details. Mrs. Lamont was in Los Angeles, working, and, with the exception of a dire emergency, was not to be disturbed. Period.