The Question Authority

by Rachel Cline

  I’ve never been to Loehmann’s but I know what it is, more or less. I have no money to spend and no excuse for buying any new clothes but I want to go where Beth goes.

  “How much money would I need?”

  “How should I know? It depends on what you buy.”

  “How much will you bring?”

  “Sometimes you’re such a blockhead. Obviously, my mother buys my clothes for me. I have no idea. Ask your mother.”

  I make an appropriate face—she remembers who my mother is.

  “Okay, bring a hundred dollars.”

  This would be almost funny except she doesn’t appear to be joking. I’ve never even seen a hundred dollars. That would be like five years’ worth of my allowance, and the most I’ve ever managed to save of that was enough to buy The White Album.

  For dessert there is prune whip, which no one would dare eat.

  7

  Naomi

  We were on the stoop with a bunch of the girls and I said one of them should come on upstairs; she looked like she needed to lie down. I think it was Amelia. Chicken pox was going around. I said it out loud, like it was normal, because to me it was, but Bob grabbed me by the arm and took me inside right then and roared at me in a voice I’d not ever heard before: What was I thinking? How could I be so naïve? I know now that I was threatening his whole world, his master plan, but at the time I was blindsided. “She needs to lie down,” I told him. “There’s clean sheets,” I said, thinking he was upset because I was going to let her see our slovenly ways.

  A year later, we had girls upstairs all the time. Girls getting their periods for the first time—I put them to bed with some whiskey and a hot water bottle like I was taught. Girls who were sleepy, or who needed a shower, and, eventually, girls who were going to get their picture taken, to “model.” There were so many reasons to go upstairs, after a while, it’s a wonder we ever sat in the kitchen. But we did that, too. One girl would be upstairs with Bob and I’d be downstairs with the others doing macramé or tie-dye, or baking cookies. They loved me because I never said much, and I told them they were beautiful, too.

  I didn’t even know what “ironic” meant then. Or maybe I did and I just let Bob tell me I didn’t. I preferred to let him tell me what was what, because then it couldn’t be all my fault. But in my heart I knew that it was: I’d given him the idea the day we met—before we mounted Babe the Blue Ox and rode off yonder. I myself was only fifteen years old when we sat behind Wilson’s Café and I told him how I grew up. And on that day, he listened so well.

  8

  Nora

  Ihave just begun to unpack the Singer folder when the wall of my cubicle speaks. “Your phone was ringing,” says invisible Ktanya, a fellow paralegal—if she’d gone to the Academy, she’d be a lawyer herself, but she went to Boys and Girls High so she’s a fantastically well-dressed clerical instead. She has never spoken directly to me before so I guess my visit to Jocelyn’s office has increased my social currency. For the first six weeks of my tenure, Ktanya’s desk belonged to creepy Arthur, who spent his whole day attempting to control his wife by phone, in a whisper that was fully audible to me: “Isn’t it time for you to get dressed?” “I told you not to go there.” “What were you doing at The Gap?” Ktanya is usually all business—dresses like a lawyer on a TV show, takes notes on a laptop, unfailingly begins and ends all her phone conversations with cordialities that sound almost nineteenth century to me. I know she has a husband and a young daughter, although there are never any personal phone calls over there. No messes of any kind. I ring my voicemail but there is no message waiting.

  The first thing I need to do with any new case is let opposing counsel know we are interested in settling. Although our group is called “Settlements,” this is not an actual lawsuit. I only settle complaints and disputes of the sort that can be decided by a hearing officer rather than a judge or jury. The standard of proof at these hearings is low—a “preponderance of evidence”—and the hearing officer is not even a lawyer let alone a judge. The outcome of such a proceeding is therefore unpredictable for all concerned. Anyway, the text of my letter to Singer’s lawyer is standard, saying, “I’m your contact point, let’s talk”—but in formalese. I just need a few key facts to customize it; the teacher’s name (Harold Singer) and the case number go in the subject line, but I have to unpack the various manila folders that are wedged into the accordion file for the rest. I’ve never heard of the law firm. It’s on Leonard Street in Tribeca so probably on the small side—not one of those places whose whole portfolio is suing the school system. The attorney’s name is Elizabeth Cohen—the number of Beth Cohens in the world approaches the infinite, I sometimes think. My Beth married a Silicon Valley guy in 1980-something, and certainly showed no signs of becoming a lawyer. Au contraire, Pierre, as we used to say.

  As Jocelyn mentioned, Harold Singer has been caught before but—like everything else at the ED—it’s not really that simple. Sorting through the contents of the accordion file, I find the earlier case: Singer was charged with sexual impropriety but the hearing officer found in his favor. The full decision is too boring to bother reading but I scan it and am struck by the name of the girl in question, Elodie Cascarelli, who is represented by a few choice quotes:

  I guess you could say he was “personal” with me.

  Yes, I saw him outside of school a few times. So what?

  He has a way of talking that lets you know you’re important to him.

  In the current case, my case, the victim isn’t even named. The only people who seem certain Singer’s done something wrong are one of his colleagues and another girl in the same classroom. There’s a letter of reference from one of his professors from Teachers College, who calls him “gifted” and “dedicated.” There’s also a Letter to File from a former colleague, who calls him “one of the most inspiring and inventive young teachers I have ever met.” His girlfriend? No, she says “in all my years of teaching”—so Singer is a charmer of middle-aged ladies, as well. Great.

  The summary report of the city’s special investigator is in all caps and exhausting to read—does he realize he’s screaming? The upshot is that the principal told Singer, in writing, that he was not to spend time alone with female students in any capacity, and he was subsequently written up three times for disobeying: He offered homework help (“I didn’t realize I was barred from helping my students”) and he walked a girl to the subway after dark (“It was on my way, and we were in the middle of a conversation about the book she was reading; it didn’t occur to me to cut her off mid-sentence”). The third incident involves such a grammatically tortured explanation of the configuration of the cafeteria entrance (somehow Singer and a student had been “alone” there) that I can’t even follow it, despite reading it twice. I wonder if its all-caps author gets paid the same shit salary as me.

  Anyway, Harold Singer is officially accused of insubordination—disobeying his principal—because there was no proof of sexual misconduct and the girl herself has not come forward. Nevertheless, if the hearing officer finds him guilty, he could lose not only his job but his pension—and for a teacher well into the third decade of his career, that’s serious money, not to mention health insurance, for life.

  In the absence of a photo of the guy, I find that I am picturing Bob Rasmussen whenever I read “Harold Singer.” Rasmussen also never failed to have an answer to every question—a logical (though sometimes invented) explanation— and he, too, was free with his righteous indignation. Not that I ever saw him accused of doing anything wrong by a grownup. Of course, in 1971 there was a lot more leeway for a guy like him, and at a school like the suffragette-founded Young Ladies’ Academy of Brooklyn (where we didn’t even have a dress code and sang “This Land is Your Land” instead of the national anthem every day) his colleagues seemed to view him as occasionally arrogant and irritating but nothing worse. I once heard our headmistress refer to him as “a lovable rake.”

  I hunt up the spreads
heet of comparable cases on our shared drive to find out exactly what facts I’ll need to feed it in order to generate a settlement offer. The column headings are: Respondent’s Age, Hire Date, Current Salary, Strength (which means “of our case”), and Severity (which must mean “of the offense”). How do I measure that? It’s not a legal matter; no one saw anything. Technically his offense was disobeying his principal. Big deal.

  This is typical of my job. There’s no real training; they just give you the regs to read and a bunch of cases that have been written up for law journals or whatever and because you’re smart and well-meaning—or were trained as an attorney in Kenya, or dropped out of law school—it is assumed that you will figure it out. And I do, but often the hard way.

  The basic facts should be in the paperwork—sometimes they are: there’s a cover sheet that someone is supposed to fill in before the case gets to the Settlement unit—but I can’t find one in the Singer accordion file. I should just be able to look up the guy’s personnel file somewhere on the computer network and get, for example, his hire date, but no, this requires a records request, a paper trail. I have to write a polite and correctly formatted email to a lady named Shonda Deville in the Manifest Records Unit, who replies with a polite, five-sentence email, the gist of which is: “Your request has been received.” She has a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King underneath her cursive-font signature. After a week (but not sooner) I can follow up with another email and, five days later, an apologetic phone call, but even then I never find out whether there are a hundred requests ahead of mine, or ten, or a thousand. When something is “on for hearing” in a few days like this case, I can add a boilerplate first paragraph requesting expedited handling but even then—what if Shonda is sick or on vacation? What if she has trouble finding the records—sometimes she has to resort to looking up paper files and must, herself, send a records request to the storage facility in Staten Island, and on and on. I write my request and set myself a reminder to follow up first thing in the morning. And although it is probably the least efficient way to find anything, I return to the accordion file and start to read.

  It surprises me that Singer went to Teachers College—in other words, he must have been smart and enthusiastic and all that once upon a time. TC is hard to get into, not to mention expensive. He could have gotten a job in a private school or out in the suburbs—so he is also an idealist of some sort. I guess he is the kind of pervert who thinks he is rescuing his victims from ignorance and poverty—but then how’d he end up at the Children’s City School in Murray Hill? It’s one of those school-within-a-schools that the ED started doing a few years ago—along with magnet schools, and outdoor schools, and charter schools, and anything else that might counter the overall impression of failure and despair. Anyway, Singer must be good at his job or they wouldn’t have hired him in the first place. Of course, there’s no reason a pedophile can’t also be a good teacher. I learned that from Rasmussen.

  9

  Nora

  Lunch is a confusing time of day for me. The apartment is a fifteen-minute walk, so clearly I should go home. No one here expects me to work through lunch, and even if I did, it wouldn’t count—I wouldn’t get paid for the time—but if I come back more than two minutes late, they dock my check and, after three lates, there’s some kind of probation or warning, so mostly I stay close. But all I can really get to eat in the immediate neighborhood is a burger, pizza, or “street meat.” Obviously, I should bring a sandwich and I have resolved to do this numerous times, but making myself lunch at eight in the morning is apparently beyond my capabilities as a human being. I’m sure that’s related to the fact that my mother never mastered that skill, either, and used to send me to grade school with atrocities like a jar of olives or a can of sardines—this was before the invention of the Lunchable. Maybe that’s part of why I wound up at the Academy. They served a hot lunch every day and every girl was expected to sit down and eat it.

  Anyway, it’s twelve thirty, I’m so hungry I could plotz, and I’m sitting immobile at my desk when my cell phone starts ringing in my bag, in the desk drawer. I don’t even keep it on my desk, because since moving back to Brooklyn and starting this job I have been as bad at keeping up my friendships as I have at making myself lunch. It’s an unfamiliar 718 number, but I’ve gone to the trouble of getting the thing out so I answer it.

  “Is this Eleanor?” says a male voice. No one has ever called me Eleanor. I can’t even imagine who would know that it’s my real name.

  “Yes,” I say, with some discomfort.

  “I think I have your cat,” he says. “I got your number from Sammy.”

  It takes me a second but I realize he means Sami, the man who owns Pets Emporium on Montague Street, and who knows everyone and everything in Brooklyn Heights. And because Sami lets me pay for cat food with checks that he often has to hold onto until payday, he has read my phone number off of one of them, along with the name printed above it, to this guy. I told Sami to keep an eye out for Tin Man when he first failed to come home.

  “Where are you?” I ask my caller.

  “Poplar Street,” he says. If Tin Man is in the neighborhood, he should have come home by now. He knows the way. So I am unbalanced by this news.

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine. A little skinny, but fine.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “The old playground on Columbia Heights.”

  “Squibb Park? But it’s closed. The entrance is all boarded up.”

  “Not to cats, obviously.”

  “And you were there looking for cats?” The old playground has not had playground equipment in it for some time, maybe since I was a kid when it had sprinklers and we would roller skate down the long ramp that led into the park, gathering speed until we thought we might careen right off the thing and into the river. Impossible, of course, but that’s my memory. Also, there were tough kids there—maybe from Farragut, the projects? But of course the adjoining neighborhood is no longer a wasteland, it’s DUMBO—full of wealthy white people living in converted industrial spaces.

  “I heard there was a cat down there so I went over the other night with some tuna.”

  He’s one of those cat-rescue people. I’m always surprised that there are men in that cohort. “Are you home now?” I ask. “Can I come get him?”

  This is a terrible idea because I can’t come back to the office with my cat, and anyway he’s heavy and I have no carrier, but now that I have taken in the possibility that he is alive, and nearby, I want him back desperately. In the past year, that cat has become my best friend, my boon companion. At times, I've slept holding his fucking paw.

  “I have to leave at four thirty,” he says. “Sixty Poplar. Apartment three.”

  “I’ll be there,” I say. “Probably not until four, but I’ll be there.”

  I hang up and realize I didn’t even get the guy’s name. He knows Sami, and he’s a cat rescuer so he’s probably not a murderer/rapist, but it hits me that I’ve just agreed to go alone to the apartment of a man I’ve never met at a time of day when, if I disappeared, no one would miss me until tomorrow morning at work. ( José the doorman doesn’t keep track of my comings and goings, although he does continue to ask after the cat—my mother must have been a good tipper.)

  I go down to the newsstand in the lobby and buy a Styro-foam bowl of Special K, a banana, and a mini milk, which I scarf down at my desk. I’ll still be ninety minutes short if I leave at three thirty, but if I can get this offer done before then, maybe Jocelyn will let me take it as sick leave or something. I trash the remains of my lunch and go back to the spreadsheet, but after staring at it for another minute or two, I decide to follow Jocelyn’s original instructions: just offer.

  I open my email and pull up the offer letter template. My normal procedure is to start with an obscenely low number and see what happens—the used-car-buying approach to justice. I take pleasure in typing the phrase “termination without severance or
other ensuing benefits”—I guess I really am a bureaucrat. But before I can save and send the thing, an email message arrives and the transparent box that previews its contents informs me that it’s from Elizabeth Cohen, the guy’s attorney, apparently responding to the “here I am” email I sent earlier. I’m about to read it when I realize someone is hovering at the entrance to my cube. Two people, actually: Jocelyn and one of the attorneys, a large woman in a tight, flowered dress. For some reason, I feel as though I have been caught in a guilty act. Both women say, “Hi,” simultaneously when I look up at them.

  Jocelyn says, “This is Alessandro, she works in appeals. She’s my go-to for kiddie sex stuff.”

  Alessandro, to my amazement, hoots with laughter while grabbing my boss’s arm—as though Jocelyn’s a normal human being!

  “You are too much!” she says, and then to me, “Hi, I’m Gina.”

  We shake hands.

  “Anyway,” says Jocelyn, “I realize I threw you in the dark end of the pool, deep end, whatever, shut up Alessandro, and this one can probably help you out. End of speech.” She turns and leaves after a strange, ceremonial nod. Gina steps inside my cube and leans her butt on the desktop.

  “Isn’t she a kick?” she says of Jocelyn.

  “It hadn’t occurred to me to view her as anything other than an authority figure,” I say, which is true, but sounds so stiff and schoolmarmish that I want immediately to start over. I like Gina, I realize. She’s funny. This place needs funny so badly it should be our motto: “New York City Education Department: Please tell us a joke!”

  “So tell me what you’ve got,” says Gina. I fill her in. She asks good questions. When I finish, I expect her to issue a solution of some sort but she just nods and waits.

  “What should I do?” I say, finally.

  “Sounds like you have a strategy,” she says. “Lowball, right? You don’t have time to really dig in and find your backup singers.”