The Question Authority

by Rachel Cline

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if I were taking this to hearing on Monday—which I couldn’t even if I wanted to—but if I was, what I’d need are witnesses. The other side’s going to have the guy’s mother and his sister and the homeless dude he gives dollars to all there to convince the hearing officer that he’s just a good guy who bends the rules a little. The only way to play that off is to have a parade of girls saying he’s a perv, even if he never touched them. So I would basically get all his class rosters and start calling.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Right, I don’t think you have access to that stuff. And even if you did, it takes forever to pull the records. And then, nine times out of ten, the family doesn’t want the girl to testify: they think they’re protecting her. Like even just talking about sex is dirty—and as though that pathetic little hearing room was open court. I don’t think anybody realizes till they get there that it’s more like a mechanic’s waiting room than bum-pum. Right?”

  I nod. It takes me a second to understand that the two-note sound bum-pum means the TV franchise Law and Order but when I do, I can’t help but smile. I find this woman so interesting—I’ve passed her in the halls dozens of times, and based entirely on the flowered dresses and her choice of profession, I’d assumed she was from a different planet than mine. Of course, I assume that about everyone—it’s something I need to work on.

  “I don’t know why people don’t see that getting your daughter on record against a real creep is keeping her safe, not to mention teaching her to stand up for herself. Nobody wants to consider how this stuff tends to come back and haunt you later on, and how crap the statute of limitations is in New York.”

  I remember this coming up on that Facebook thread about Rasmussen that appeared last year, but I never really took in the details. “How crap is it?”

  “If you don’t start proceedings by the time you’re twenty-three, tough luck.”

  I think about myself at twenty-three—I was still under multiple delusions about the transformative power of growing up. I don’t think I started really noticing how much the stuff with Rasmussen had affected me until I was in my forties.

  “I had a teacher like this guy,” I say to Gina.

  “He raped you?” she asks.

  “Some of my friends. I almost went on a camping trip where it probably would have been me, too, but I changed my mind at the last minute.”

  “Smart kid,” says Gina, but she looks at her watch and I realize she needs to go, and I need to get back on this thing.

  “Thanks so much,” I say. And she says, “Any time.”

  I have forgotten all about the email I was about to read, but when I wake up my monitor, there it is:

  Dear Ms. Buchbinder,

  Thank you for your correspondence in the matter of Harold Singer. As you know, the hearing is set for Monday so time is of the essence. The latest we can accept an offer for consideration would be tomorrow at noon.

  Sincerely,

  Elizabeth Cohen

  P.S. I knew a Nora Buchbinder a long time ago, in Brooklyn Heights. Is that you?

  10

  Nora

  At the end of the summer between seventh and eighth grades, Beth and I swore we would never, ever, ever become members of Rasmussen’s cult. (We didn’t have the concept of “cult” yet—this was pre-Moonies—but we knew that there was something more than nicknames that bound together the eighth-grade girls every year.) We were in Beth’s finished basement—a large wood-paneled room decorated with caricatures of her parents drawn at Grossinger’s Resort: giant-headed, tooth-heavy creatures skiing, golfing, riding on a speedboat. We sat at the bamboo-edged wet bar, a piece of sky-blue American Tourister hand luggage open on the counter between us. The case contained Beth’s mother’s castoff makeup collection and had a mirror mounted inside its lid. In my mind its contents present a perfect still life, a pile of very specific detritus that I can see as if it were a photograph.

  “Do you think they actually do stuff with him?” Beth asked me. I didn’t have to ask who “they” or “him” were, even though we’d been actively recapping our respective summer vacations until that very second. “Gross me out!” I’m sure I responded, and I’m sure we giggled, because that was what we mostly did together, in and out of school. Beth had orange lipstick on her teeth. I watched her prime a cake of eyeliner with spit. I remember the sensation of having my eyelids painted, knowing the cool slickness was saliva but not minding, really. “You should wear this to school,” she told me. I probably said, “When chickens have teeth,” because that was one of our running jokes—a reference to the time in sixth grade when Beth had attempted to comment on an overly obvious plot turn in Encyclopedia Brown by rhetorically asking, “I mean, is the Pope Jewish?” Then we played Would You Rather.

  Touch Bob Rasmussen’s penis or eat a raw hamburger?

  Let Bob Rasmussen put his tongue in your mouth or spend a day locked in the first-floor broom closet with Mrs. Cashin’s farts?

  Broom closet, I said, but it wasn’t necessarily true. The tongue thing would only last a second and I would kind of like to know what that feels like, although it would have to be over as soon as I said so. The closet would be hard for me, even fart-free. I get claustrophobic.

  Beth and I often argued. In retrospect, the subject seemed to have always been a version of the same thing: what was the truth and which one of us understood it? Once, in Beth’s recently redecorated bedroom (which featured an “Expressionist” painting that precisely matched the colors in the olive-, turquoise-, and navy-checkered bedspreads), I pointed out that her new wood paneling was not real. Beth would more readily have accepted that the earth was flat. I didn’t know the term “particle board,” but I could see that the wood grain pattern repeated itself, and was printed on the surface rather than integral to it—I have always looked at things a little too closely. Another time, we stopped speaking for two days over a magazine ad for blonde hair dye, which showed a woman beside a “candid” photo of her supposed younger self, with identical locks. Beth believed this to be a real childhood photo of the model as a young woman; I was outraged by her naïveté. Later, we had an ongoing debate over whether or not Rasmussen “came from money.” He’d told our class that his family had been on food stamps, to illustrate that people’s assumptions about who was on welfare were racist and misguided. Beth said this meant he was “working class.” I said that was impossible, because he freely admitted that he’d gone to boarding school; she said he could have been on scholarship. And so on.

  Later, the night of the pre-Rasmussen sleepover, lying in the twin beds in Beth’s bedroom with the lights out, we returned to the subject of our new teacher and our classmates and who would, and who wouldn’t, or might, and whether the girls from previous years really were having sex or just acting like they were.

  “I can imagine second base, maybe.”

  “I think further,” said Beth.

  “Why?”

  “How should I know why? I’m not doing it.”

  “I meant, why do you think that they go further?” I waited a really long time for her to answer. I could tell she had something to say if she could figure out how to say it.

  “I saw them in the art room once. Him and Tamsin. He had his hands in her pants.”

  “Both hands? Did they see you?”

  “No.”

  “That’s so barfy!”

  “Barfamatic!”

  “I would never even let him touch me on the arm,” I said.

  “Not even on the toe!”

  “And if he gives me a stupid nickname I’ll tell him to shove it.”

  “Did I ever tell you he was my teacher in third grade?”

  “What?” I looked at her with real horror. How could she have withheld this fact?

  “Mrs. Stark had her baby early and he subbed. Just for like a month.”

  “You never said that. That you knew him already.”

 
“It was third grade!”

  “So, have you been to his house?”

  “Yeah. Once.”

  “Does he really have a waterbed?”

  “Nora! I didn’t go in their bedroom! It was the whole class. We did folk singing.”

  “But you never would, would you? Go in his bedroom?”

  “You’re so gross. Of course not.”

  “Let’s make a pact.”

  “Okay, no blood though.”

  So it was a spit-swear—a step up from a double-dog-dare-you, but inviolable in my eyes. I still don’t really understand why I had to banish her so completely when she broke it, but banish her I did. And I guess I now have an opportunity to make up for that.

  11

  Bob

  From: bear@nyc.rr.com

  To: PBJ@nyc.rr.com

  Date sent: Feb 19 2009 12:45 PM MST

  Subject: Laramie

  Peanut,

  My daughter’s church is one of those yellow brick enormities. No one puts up buildings that crappy anymore, even on college campuses. At Antioch, my freshman dorm looked like that, but at least it didn’t have the sad, inevitable sign out front—the quote must have sounded better in Aramaic. It’s from Corinthians, abbreviated 1 COR: “Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?” Here I am, the unleavened lump, live and in person. I parked across the street like some stalker or surveillance expert. I got there at eight, even though the service started at nine, just in case they tried to give me the slip. Really, I had that thought. Last night was rough.

  I see them, because I see him. Doria I wouldn’t have recognized because she’s fat. I get out of the car and cross the street, waving. She doesn’t recognize me, either. I call out, “Pumpkin!” which I realize is all wrong the moment it escapes my lips. At eight, even ten, “Pumpkin” was adorable and round, but at forty-two it’s inappropriate and depressing. So I call her by her name and realize how long it’s been since I’ve done so. She turns stiffly, holding tight to Ray’s hand, and then waves back, and then freezes. As we meet at the curb, she nods and introduces her husband. We shake hands and arrange to meet at Shoney’s for breakfast. She gives me excellent directions.

  Things are awkward at the coffee shop. Doria fidgets with her silverware and seems self-conscious about ordering a Diet Coke. The waitress reminds her that it’s bottomless, which is I’m sure what she says to every customer but I flinch at the word as though it’s some kind of inside joke. Despite her new heft, Doria’s still wearing her hair in a long braid like the ones she and Naomi both had in the seventies. It looks wrong on her and even wronger when Ray holds onto the end of it while she’s talking, like a microphone he might decide to speak into at any moment. Not to disparage—he loves my daughter. He listens to everything she says with his whole body, as though it’s important to suck up every inference. He has the instant smile of a four-year-old. I desperately want him to leave us alone but, instead, Doria excuses herself. I watch the braid swaying against her turquoise sweatshirt as she trundles off. I can’t believe my little girl is in there somewhere.

  Then Ray says, “Are you sure your regrets are the same as hers?”

  “Say again?”

  “You’re here to ‘make amends’ right? But it’s except when to do so would injure them or others. I think the kindest thing you can do for Doria, now, is to follow her lead.”

  “I’m not really a step follower,” I say, defensively, as though it makes me some kind of maverick. He’s got a fuckload of nerve assuming he knows why I’m here, especially since he’s right. And I realize this is exactly why she married a blind black dude. His moral high ground is so far up that the oxygen masks are about to drop. All I can do is nod and put it all back in the box in my head: the fantasy of forgiveness, or even of just getting past Step Fucking Nine.

  When Doria gets back, she can tell the mood has changed so she starts prattling on about the jazz choir she’s in and how much I would appreciate their arrangement of “High Flyin’ Bird,” which is a song title I can’t even place until a hundred miles later, when I find myself singing it. Havens’s Mixed Bag was Naomi’s favorite record for a long time when the kids were little. Is that what she remembers? Anyway, after that she throws me a curveball: Have you seen Archer?

  “No.”

  “Well I have,” says Doria.

  “Did he know you?”

  “Hard to say. I don’t think so.” But what I hear is whether or not he can recognize us is beside the point, he’s your fucking son. I’m sure I look guilty as hell, because I am, and she sees that: “Remember when we used to go visit your dad in Connecticut? I used to say I was carsick, or allergic to the pillows, or afraid of the bunk beds . . . you never let me get away with any of it.”

  Of course, I start thinking that her fear of Percy was founded on something far worse. She sees me biting my nails and says, “That wasn’t why.” And I should hug her for reading my mind, for protecting her poor old dad from his own worst thoughts but those thoughts, once aroused, aren’t easily dismissed and while I’m supposed to be asking follow-up questions about my son, all I can think about is my father. Did he touch her? A feeling of rage and disgust overwhelms me and I’m afraid I will throw a chair, or roar like a beast, or tear the head off the first old white man I see—which would of course be my own self. I stare out the window at nothing, instead.

  “Really, Dad,” she says. “Nothing like that. I just disliked him. It’s not hereditary!”

  “What went wrong with your brother, then?”

  “There was no indication of that.” She is vehement.

  “I’d call trying to blow your own head off an indication,” I say, and Ray says, “More likely rage than guilt. Suicides want to hurt someone close.”

  “But there wasn’t anyone close to him to hurt,” I say, and they both face me in utter dismay. Ray, who doesn’t know how to mask his emotions, is actually showing me something closer to disgust. They don’t say Naomi’s name, but I hear it of course. She was so close she was right there. And then she wasn’t.

  Really only to change the subject, I get the name of the state hospital where Archer is now, outside Denver. Doria says she thinks it would be good for me to see him, and all I can think of is “Good for who?” because my son will never be twenty-one, or independent, or a man at the wheel of his own car, on this two-lane blacktop, going anywhere fast.

  I’m headed back to the badlands before noon, pedal to the metal, sobbing and drooling like an old man. The car’s due back in Phoenix but I can’t seem to point it in the right direction. I say out loud at one point, “Go home, you idiot,” but I don’t. And I call you and call you, Peanut, but you don’t answer your phone.

  12

  Nora

  Iread Beth’s email again. I google “Elizabeth Cohen, JD, NYC,” and there she is, on a “Who We Are” page. Her hair is blondish now and it looks like maybe she had a nose job, but it’s unmistakably my Beth. It’s like looking in some kind of funhouse mirror that compiles the past and the future—well, the present: this is the age we actually are now. I haven’t seen her since the year we went off to college—we’d stayed in touch through high school but she was at Packer and I was at Music & Art and our worlds were already diverging: she was disco and I was Grateful Dead. I heard from her when she got married—ridiculously early, it seemed to me then, ardent feminist that I was—and since then I’ve been storing mental pictures of her in Los Altos or Milpitas or wherever it was, entertaining in hostess pajamas and going to Little League games, married to her boring dude-with-money who I viewed with contempt in 1983 but now totally understand. I should have married a Wall Street guy—although in fifty-two years of New York City life, I’ve barely even met one.

  I read her bio and learn that she got her law degree in 2001—from Pace! She’s only been at the firm since 2003 and it doesn’t say what she did before. It’s not clear if she has a specialty. I wonder if she took Singer on for some reason other than being assigned
the case. Maybe he’s a friend? I mean, why else would she be defending a pedophile? But the whole thing is confusing—clearly she’s been back in New York since the nineties, at least. How many times have I passed her on the street or just missed her in the mammogram waiting room, the ticket-holders line at the Angelika? Clearly she never looked for me. I guess she stayed mad—for dropping her, which I did. She wrote me a desperate-sounding letter during our freshman year at college and I never wrote back. Her crisis might even have been about Rasmussen. Or maybe it wasn’t. I just remember that she seemed to be falling apart, and I didn’t know how to deal with it. In truth I was still mad at her for breaking our pact.

  At Loehmann's, Beth is trying on an outfit: palazzo pants (which are basically bell-bottoms so wide that they are not even pants anymore) and a matching middy blouse. What matches is the paisley trim around the edges and the tie around the neck, which are the same pattern as the pants. I think she looks ridiculous but she is enchanted with herself. She starts doing the Pony, and then that other weird shivering dance move that she does, which I think is supposed to make her tits ripple but just makes the pant legs start to undulate. I take a mental snapshot of her in mid-writhe.

  “Check it out!” she says. I hate it when she says that, because she picked it up from Bob.

  “Cool,” I say. I can hear that some of the other women in the communal dressing room have mixed feelings about the dancing teenager in their midst.

  “It’s between this and the purple mini-dress,” she says. “What about you, are you getting that?”

  I am wearing a short-sleeved white dress made out of the fattest-wale corduroy I have ever seen—it’s like velvet. I wouldn’t have expected it to look very good on me—I picked it out because of the fabric—but it does. Also, it has pockets, and when I look at myself in the mirror with my hands in them and my hair swept over one shoulder, I look like a model, for some reason. On the other hand, it costs seventy-five dollars.