The Question Authority

by Rachel Cline

  I didn’t bring the fifteen cassettes of Moby-Dick with me this trip. I’ve got Jeremy Irons reading Lolita. He sounds like he wrote the thing, or lived it. But no one will ever pity Humbert, not even me.

  I was smart to give myself a good running start—plenty of highway for me to go all Woody Guthrie on, plenty of versions of small-town America to remind me of where I didn’t wind up: waves of grain, ribbons of highway, Tucson to Tucumcari, don’t forget Winona . . . I was so caught up in those images, that fantasy of escape. This is how I know I’ve changed: Nabokov's version is my version now, where bits of roadside refuse pose as flowers and the placidity of cows is a plea to be made into meat. I used to think I might write a novel someday, or at least a song. Nope. What I produced, all I produced are Archer and Doria and Naomi’s ghost.

  In a life overpopulated with uncalculated risks, gross oversights, and shithead moves, my kids’ pretentious names turned out to be whoppers. Archer was supposed to be a doer, a warrior in the world. I don’t have to connect the dots of that irony for you. And Doria was meant to be seaworthy, golden—only instead of Naomi’s beauty and my ego, she got the reverse and now she’s a ghost ship, sunk in the Great Plains somewhere, pretending to be an orphan. She never got over the loss of her mother, and I’m worthless since I didn’t show up at her wedding. I didn’t think she really wanted me there, but that’s a ratshit excuse, and I could have at least made an effort. I did send them that tandem bicycle—I thought that was kind of brilliant for a couple with one blind member, who live in a flat place, and one of whom could definitely use a little exercise. But I didn’t say any of that. I just wrote “Have fun, I love you.” Hell, what do you say to your thirty-five-year-old daughter who hates you on the occasion of her second marriage? What am I going to say to her tomorrow, more to the point? “I’m sorry,” is so old, and so out of character. I’ll say it, of course, but she’s not going to accept it. I’d turn around right now if I didn’t think you’d never speak to me again. It’s just that whenever I play the scene out in my head it goes south after about the third sentence—after I’m sorry but before I love you more than anything in the world. She won’t believe me; why should she?

  There’s a remedy for this line of thought—a fantasy that starts with that nail-bitten hand, which I casually cover with mine on the yellow Formica counter, and then look up to see the look on her face, if there’s a flicker. There is. I look away, out the window, and ask Catnip about herself. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? She smiles a little, but resists, says something sarcastic. Oh, a feisty one. I always like the feisty ones.

  I pulled over and called you—left a coded message: “Road trouble.” Then I tried Henry—that’s what sponsors are for, isn’t it? He picked up but, like you, he’s at work. He said I should work on my inventory while I’m driving. He said I’m still in denial, that I haven’t gone far enough. I still say that until I got caught I was just a horny young guy like any other. The remorse, regret, obsess, seduce, self-hate go-round didn’t kick in till I was in that holding cell in Window Rock, till Dad showed up. I’ve been meaning to ask you how much of all that you remember. We never talk about what happened that night, or after that, to you girls. Am I still allowed to give you a writing assignment?

  I just called Doria, thought I’d give her a heads-up, let myself off the hook a little, right? It didn’t go so well:

  “Tonight’s not good, Dad.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean tonight, obviously. I’ve got plans for tonight—” I don’t know why I lie about shit like that when it’s perfectly obvious I’m just covering up.

  “Tomorrow, after church, might work,” she said. “First Baptist. Anyone in town can tell you how to get there.”

  I was about to ask what time that is but she hung up. I guess anyone can also tell me when “after church” is, too. At least she said “after”; I don’t think I could have managed “at” or “in.” And maybe that means they’ll invite me over for donuts or whatever. My parents used to take us out for ice cream. But they were Episcopalians.

  Later:

  Checked into the Motel 6 in Shiprock to watch girl-porn on my laptop like the disgusting old pervert my daughter believes me to be. I tell myself it will be easier to own up to my crimes tomorrow if I can gin up enough self-disgust tonight. But it’s always the same old problem—how much is enough? Long day, Peanut. Time to hit send.

  4

  Naomi Rasmussen

  (B. MARCH 1950, D. SEPTEMBER 1982)

  When I went by the Academy that first day in 1968, that was the first time I really saw how unlike the rest of them we were. I’d been just a kid myself, really, when we got to Brooklyn—when Bob was teaching at that public school where all the kids were black. Those people felt more like my people even though they were nothing like it. But waiting for him at the Academy, I saw how we looked to the mothers there—that we were from the wrong part of town, even though we lived around the corner. The Academy mommies wore their sunglasses on top of their heads like they had a second set of eyes up there, and they had no socks on with their tennis shoes. Back home, not wearing socks was like not wearing a bra—a sure sign that you come from filth and it won’t be long before you're back to it. In first grade, I had no socks and I won’t ever forget that feeling.

  The Academy building was just as hard to figure—a mansion, surely, but stuck between its neighbors shoulder to shoulder just like our brokedown brownstone around the corner, like all the houses in Brooklyn, it seemed like. And then there came Bob Rasmussen, such a show-off, with his cowboy boots and his blanket vest and his wavy red hair. . . . That’s my husband, I thought, and I was proud to stand there with Archer on my hip. We looked like freaks.

  We didn’t yet say that word to mean “hippies,” but still I was happy that we were different, and young, and free.

  Being dead gives a person a lot of leeway. No joy, but perspective. You girls may judge us now, but Bob depended on me and that made my life make sense. I was the keeper of keys and buyer of food; I paid the bills, kept gas in the camper van, did the cleaning, bookkeeping, writing out of mimeos, and filing of negatives. I kept track of your nicknames. I braided your hair. It was a role I knew how to play—watched my ma do it. I knew she wasn’t happy, but I saw how it was right for her anyway. Happy isn’t everything. And for a long time I didn’t even know what I’d got, that our life wasn’t just like every other life a girl might marry into, when all she cares about is getting away from where she was.

  5

  Nora

  On the way back to my cubicle from Jocelyn’s office I pass the backs of three of my coworkers—we are referred to as “paralegals” but are in fact “Special Clerical Associates (provisional)” in the eyes of the civil service, and thus paid like secretaries. The desks of my fellow Bartlebys are all half-buried in file folders. Their monitor screens are plastered with spreadsheets; their gray-beige cube walls peppered with evidence of girlfriends, boyfriends, children, vacations . . . I’ve been here for three months and have not decorated mine at all. What would I post, pictures of Tin Man? I’m sure no one around here wonders about my personal life, anyway. I suspect most of them don’t even know my name.

  I put the accordion file down next to my monitor, take my seat, and rattle my mouse. I realize I’m really upset. I am not usually very concerned with politics, or justice, or things like that (which I think is what makes me reasonably good at this job—or at any rate fast, as Jocelyn has observed) but this case is different. I assume the guy is guilty—I don’t have to read a word to make that leap. Sure, there could be a crazy girl making false accusations, or a jilted lover with a vendetta, or even a misinterpretation of clumsy but not criminal behavior, but these things are not nearly as likely as a middle-aged man thinking it might be fun to seduce a teenaged girl, which is probably a crime even older than prostitution, except that I don’t think we even started calling it a crime until . . . sometime after World War II? Am I wrong abo
ut that?

  A couple months ago I got an email from Trina Franklin, one of my former classmates at the Academy—the rare African American one. She said some of them were hiring a lawyer over what happened to us in eighth grade and did I want to join. They think they might get Gloria Allred. I said no, because I couldn’t picture complaining about the minor shit that Rasmussen did with me, but it made me wonder again about Beth. Did she ever look back on that experience as an episode of abuse rather than hot sex and wild adventure (as it seemed to her at thirteen)? But even in the Internet Age, a person named Beth Alice Cohen is hard to find, especially if you’re not sure what state she’s living in. And a person named Nora Falsington Buchbinder is a slam dunk, which means she’s never looked for me. In fact, she could dial my old ULster 5 phone number from back then and get my mother’s answering machine, even now. I haven’t had the heart to throw it away.

  6

  Nora

  Eighth grade: I’m staring out the window at the leaves on the tree outside. They are light green outlined in brown with just a tiny orange line between. The green is too bright and the orange next to it clashes. They look like the colors in one of those psychedelic posters from The Fillmore. Rasmussen is reading to us from Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday’s autobiography. He’s always reading to us about black people. Being read aloud to is a big part of our curriculum here, which seems like cheating to me but I am perfectly happy to sit here looking at the tree and picturing the Baltimore row houses where Billie scrubbed people’s stoops for a nickel each, with her own brush and can of Bon Ami. Since I grew up in the city, I can always picture the lives of the people we read about. I know what a city street looks like, and what a pimp is, and now I know that the group of men drinking out of brown paper bags near the bus stop is “the corner wine club,” that the guys in white robes on the subway are disciples of the prophet Elijah Muhammad. What I can’t picture are the country clubs and pep squads in the books I get from the Scholastic book club, or what Nancy Drew’s “powder-blue roadster” looks like. Where do kids play in places where there are no vacant lots, or fire stairs, or construction sites—where the roofs are not flat enough to run around on?

  I’ve bragged about Bob Rasmussen to my neighborhood friends—he’s incredibly cool and weird at the same time. He’s twenty-six, has a beard and wears cowboy boots and rides a motorcycle named “Babe the Blue Ox.” Kids hang around at his house after school and he lets us listen to his records and read his magazines and Naomi, his wife, sometimes does projects with little Doria and Archer that we can do, too. Like tie-dyeing. I don’t like little kids so I avoid that part. In fact, I avoid the whole Bob’s-house-as-hangout thing, but I brag about it anyway.

  I’m watching Beth, who sits across the U of desks from me—he doesn’t let us sit together anymore because we giggle too much. She is drawing in her notebook, or writing. She’s the worst speller I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I think she’s a lot stupider than I am but not because of how she is as a friend; just some of the things she’s interested in—like fashion designers—are stupid and she doesn’t really like to read. She’s also boy-crazy. She would never try to describe the leaves out the window. She doesn’t come from an artistic family. When I showed her the star charts painted on the ceiling in my grandfather’s library, she asked why you would put something so fancy in a place where no one would really see it.

  I am going to write a poem about that tree outside, and it’s also going to be about The Fillmore Auditorium and Billie Holiday singing in a whorehouse, and this crazy private school with only white girls in it reading her biography when there are race riots going on like a mile away. That’s why there are so many girls here from other neighborhoods—the public schools they were supposed to go to are too scary now.

  “Okay,” Bob says, getting up from his reading posture and stretching his arms over his head so that his T-shirt goes up and shows the arrow of orange hair on his belly, which I can’t help but look at even though it’s totally repulsive. “It’s time for Rasmatazz.” While we are getting out our pencils and opening our notebooks, Beth asks, “Didn’t we just do one of these?”

  “You mean just last week? Yeah. We did. We’re going to keep doing it until you get it right.” He’s smirking when he says this, of course, and everyone laughs. “Anyone remember what we’re up to?”

  “Ninety seconds!” Trina Franklin announces, in a tone that sounds like, “It’s my birthday!” I knew the answer to that question, too, but would have gone through Chinese fingernail torture before letting him know I am interested in his experiment. I hated it at fifteen seconds and was in a rage at thirty.

  When he says “Go,” everyone else starts writing immediately—already conditioned like sheep. If we have nothing to say, we are supposed to just write our names over and over but I have never stooped to that. I’m not worried about having nothing to say, but his assumption that he has the right to read anything that happens to be going through my head at this moment really bothers me so I spend the first ten seconds or so coming up with something that I feel is Rasmussen-proof. The first time, all I wrote was “The End,” which I thought was pretty good. This time, I’m going to go with the tree outside— no emotions or opinions, just straight description:

  The leaves on the tree outside are ugly. Orange and green at the same time like the colors of a pop art poster. How does nature come up with this stuff? I hate the way people say “Mother Nature,” and picture a little old lady in a bonnet like Old Mother Hubbard. Nature is not a woman, first off, any more than boats or cars or anything else. And if it was a woman it would not be an old mother but someone more like Janis Joplin or Angela Davis. From now on, when someone says “Mother Nature,”I’m—

  “Time!” He walks around to collect our papers and smiles when he sees the block of text on my page, taking credit for it in some way, which I should have anticipated but I was thinking that I was writing something that he couldn’t even have an opinion about. Ha. He can have an opinion about anything. I sneer back at him.

  After the Rasmatazz, we go downstairs for lunch: chicken chow mein. It’s mostly celery, but no one minds because of the crunchy noodles they put out with it. Beth and I sit together and, after speed-eating for five minutes, she says to me, “I think he knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “About my condition.” She says this sooo dramatically, as though she’s a character in a soap opera, and then she cracks up. I laugh along but not full out. I can sense she’s about to reveal something I didn’t see coming, and that is my least favorite thing on earth.

  “But what?” I finally ask her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Let’s do a test. Look at what I’m wearing and see if you can figure it out.”

  Since when do I care what she’s wearing? For the record, it’s a white, man-tailored shirt that’s huge on her, and pink corduroy bell-bottoms. I see Beth every day and I’ve never seen the pants before but she gets a lot of new clothes so that’s not particularly weird. The pants are the kind with patch pockets on the front and back and a high waist—sailor bells—and I wish I had some like that but my wardrobe is only what I can order from Sears or find at A&S. It’s hard even finding blue jeans that fit me and I got stuck with Wranglers even though everyone else is wearing Levi’s or Lee Riders. Anyway, Beth is wearing pink pants. “New pants?”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s not the point. I guess he is kind of perceptive because he got it right away.”

  Now she’s openly baiting me. I scan the lunchroom, looking at what everyone else is wearing for some kind of clue.

  “HINT: It feels like rocks.”

  “Your period??” “It feels like rocks” is what Janie told Harriet in The Long Secret, which Beth gave me for my birthday in fifth grade and is still my second-favorite book of all time.

  “A-duh!” We both laugh because of the way Beth says that phrase. She makes her upper lip stick out and crosses her eyes. But while I’m laughing a weird
thought comes into my head out of nowhere: Beth’s naked body. She’s still a girl, not a woman, but with breasts and pubes and everything I don’t yet have. The thought embarrasses me.

  “My mother was so funny yesterday,” I say, even though my mother is never funny. “I was playing Laura Nyro and she was trying to dance along with ‘Stoned Soul Picnic.’ She doesn’t have a single ounce of natural rhythm.”

  Beth nods and continues her story. “He comes up behind me this morning and says, ‘Don’t worry, no one else can tell.’”

  “Ew!”

  “I know, but isn’t that kind of crazy? He deduced it that I was covering up the bulge with the long shirt, and the pink pants are in case I leak.”

  “What bulge?”

  “From the pad, stupid.”

  “You’re wearing a sanitary napkin?”

  “What else would I be wearing?”

  “My mother bought me Tampax,” I say, bragging. “She put them in my bathroom so we don’t even have to discuss it when it happens.” I thought this was extremely cool of her but Beth’s face is perplexed.

  “But you’re a virgin,” she says.

  “And you’re not?”

  “You can’t use tampons if you’re a virgin.”

  “You can too . . .” As soon as the words are out of my mouth I begin to doubt myself. What do I actually know about any of this? Thankfully, she changes the subject. “Do you want to come with me to Loehmann’s next weekend?”