The Question Authority

by Rachel Cline

  “Where would I wear it?” I ask Beth.

  “Anywhere. It’s a casual look.”

  “Yeah, but not school, and it’s not like I go to the theater or out to dinner or anything.”

  “On a date.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  The woman standing closest to us, who is trying on a hideous red pantsuit, says, “You’re not getting any taller. You’ll have that in your wardrobe for years.”

  “Unlike the palazzo sailor outfit,” I add.

  “Exactly,” says the lady.

  For some reason, I act like I’m going to buy the dress. I carry it with me when we go back out into the fray, and I still have it when I follow Beth over to the line at the register. In my head I am debating whether to ask her if I can borrow the money and then wondering how I would ever pay it back. But when they finish ringing up Beth’s things (she also got a peasant top made out of crumpled-looking flowered chiffon and a purple Borsalino hat) she turns around and holds her hand out for my dress and I give it to her. She can see the look of panic in my eyes. “To my bat mitzvah, stupid,” she says.

  “You’re . . . ?” But she is back with the cashier, counting hundreds and fifties out of the envelope her mother gave her. It has her father’s return address: Stanley Cohen, MD. He’s a cardiologist. I’ve never met him because every time I’ve been at their house he’s been either at work or asleep in his Bar-calounger, in front of the TV.

  Beth hands me a brown paper shopping bag. This place doesn’t even have its name on the shopping bags—that is so weird. “March twelfth,” she says, “at the beach club in Margate.” I have never heard of Margate and I have no idea why you would have your big swinging party in a beach cabana in March but that’s not even the part that’s confusing me most.

  “So, don’t you have to go to Hebrew school and everything?”

  “I do go to Hebrew school.”

  “You do not.”

  “I do, too! What makes you think you know everything?”

  We’re standing inside waiting for her mother because it’s late November and suddenly cold out, but now she is pushing through the doors to the street. I follow.

  “Because you’re my best friend since fifth grade?”

  “Yeah, well, I guess you never asked what I was doing on Saturday mornings between nine and eleven.”

  That’s true. I assumed she was watching cartoons, like everyone else in the universe. “But you never even talk about it. I mean, don’t you have friends there? Aren’t there boys?”

  “Yes and yes.”

  “And you never even mentioned them?” She has stopped at the corner and is peering into the traffic coming down Flat-bush Avenue. We could basically walk to her house from here, or take the 41 bus.

  “I did so mention them. Where do you think I met David?” David was a guy that Beth had made out with over the summer. “Where do you think I learned to Frug, and to French kiss? Not in folk dancing class.”

  “Where’s your mom coming from?”

  “Tennis lesson.”

  “I’m freezing.”

  “The dress is on me.” Then she turns to me, giving me the Beth Eyeball. “In return for your sworn secrecy.”

  “You don’t have to buy me a dress to get me to keep a secret!”

  “Shut up and ask me what the secret is.” She is gleeful, but trying to hide it.

  “What’s the secret?”

  “I’m going to have sex with Rasmussen.”

  I look at her with all the “WHAT?” I can muster. She looks back without any sign of backing down. “Like, ‘someday’? Is that what you mean?”

  “Next Thursday.”

  The expression on my face must be hilarious, because she laughs at me, but I still want answers. “You have a date to lose your virginity with our teacher?”

  “No, I have a date to go over to his house after school and get help on my report. As soon as he shuts the door, I’m going to take off my shirt.”

  Beth does have breasts, it’s true. They stand up straight and high, like dog snouts—in a photograph, they would be more humorous than sexy—but she seems to think she will seduce him instantly.

  “Why?” I say, wishing Mrs. Cohen would show up already, because that would end this conversation.

  “Because I want to. I think about it constantly.”

  I watch two buses pass right behind one another. We could be on one of them. But no.

  “What about our pact?” I say, finally.

  “The pact was immature. I had no idea I was going to feel this way, obviously.”

  “I don’t think it was immature, I think it was sensible. I mean, he’s married, for one thing.”

  “We didn’t make the pact because he’s married, we made it because we thought he was gross. I don’t think that anymore.”

  I don’t have a counter to that one and anyway Beth’s mother’s car pulls up—a blue Ford station wagon with Gene McCarthy daisy stickers on the fake wood panel. Roberta is wearing huge sunglasses and has an unlit cigarette in her mouth. She reaches for the lighter before she turns to us and says, “Get in,” though we can’t really hear her through the window.

  “Remember, I bought you the dress,” says Beth, getting into the car. I get in beside her and look out the window as we drive. All I can think about is the down-pointing arrow of orange hair I can see on his belly when Rasmussen raises his arms and his T-shirt lifts up. I would rather think about anything in the world than our teacher’s naked body—concentration camps, nuclear war, anything.

  On Thursday afternoons we had “electives” at the Academy. You could take typing, music appreciation, or photography, which was taught by Bob Rasmussen. I’d gone for typing in the fall but in the spring my envy of the girls with cameras around their necks won out over my mistrust of our teacher. Had I seen the movie Blow-Up or just the photos of topless Vanessa Redgrave? In any case, I wanted to be her. The darkroom was in the attic of the Academy building—larger than a closet but quite small with twelve girls and a large adult man crammed into it. He showed us the procedures for loading and developing film as a group, then sent us out to document our lives. At first, I took a lot of pictures of fire hydrants and subway cars in order to appear gritty—my life seemed not worth documenting. But one day, scanning around my grandfather’s apartment, I realized that everything looked different through the lens; old clothes, piles of books, cracked paint on the windowsills, everything. The camera itself became a fetish object, the chunk sound of the shutter so satisfying! Like biting off pieces of life.

  When it came time to print my selects, Rasmussen provided individual instruction. Thus there was every legitimate reason for him to stand behind me and use both his hands to direct mine as I adjusted the size and focus of the enlarger’s projected image, and also as I set each fresh sheet of paper in the metal frame, then exposed it while counting aloud, and then slid it in and out of the three chemical baths with bamboo tongs. It made sense to stand that way, in the red safety light. And when he made me flinch with a quick tickle or nudge, he clearly demonstrated that my tension was silly— that I was being uptight.

  My desire came out of nowhere. Did I actually want him to touch me? Was leaning into me even really “touching” me? What about massaging my belly? That couldn’t have been okay. I told him to stop.

  “Why, doesn’t it feel good?”

  “No,” I said. I must have said no, because he stopped— and that was as strange or stranger than the smells of hypo and fixer, the alchemy of seeing the previous week’s glimpsed moments swimming back into view, becoming facts. I still wonder if I was the only girl who refused him or if there was something else that separated me at that point, that made me unlike the others. Sometimes it feels like my life took a turn at that moment, that the volume got cranked on my sense of what was at risk when a man touched me, or tried to, and it never really got turned back down. Obviously, that was the last time I went into the darkroom.

  13

 
Nora

  I’m looking at Facebook, which I shouldn’t be doing at work, but I am at a stuck place in the Singer case: I should make an offer now, but the reappearance of Beth has derailed my thinking. Instead, I scroll back and back in the Academy alumnae group and finally realize I need a better strategy to find what I’m looking for: the Rasmussen thread from last year, which I had then chosen to ignore— even after a group of my classmates formed in its aftermath, and Trina asked if I wanted to join their attempt at a lawsuit. I remembered thinking that Trina’s was one of the voices that ran through the whole thread—skein? hairball? (It had gone on for days.) The person I thought was Trina had an obviously made-up screen name, which I now can’t remember. So, who else was there? Daisy Kramer. I know she’s one of my “friends” because I remember combing through her brother’s bar mitzvah pictures from 1969 at some point. Luckily, Daisy is not much of a Facebooker, so I only have to go back a few pages to find what I’m looking for: “Daisy commented on a post in Academy Alumnae (Brooklyn Hts).” I click through.

  Her comment is in the first third of the thread—late on the first day—and says, in its entirety: What I learned in those days was to be very, extremely wary of leftish males with a cause.

  I scan the next few loosely connected comments:

  —Times were so different then, we thought free love was a political thing.

  —And a girl who liked sex was called a “nymphomaniac.” Remember that?

  —Daisy, I once heard you refer to Rasmussen as a male chauvinist pig and I think I was somewhere near awestruck.

  —I am sure there is an appropriate Woody Guthrie song that we should sing now.

  —But R was the one who taught us to hear the irony in those songs. Sometimes I think I’m the only person in America who doesn’t think This Land is Your Land is the same thing as Kum-baya.

  —He manipulated all of us! When I hear bullshit like, well, it was a small price to pay for learning to think independently (this, of course, only from the un-raped), I am speechless.

  When this was all going on—something like 250 comments—it seemed to break Facebook. Text started showing up doubled and fragmented and the conversation got very out of sync. What was even weirder was that, because the participants were all good Academy girls, while talking about rape and molestation they were also writing things like: You were the fastest runner in the school! and Say hi to your sister for me.

  I keep scrolling till get to the part I wanted to revisit: A girl who calls herself Zed says she believes Rasmussen must regret his deeds. Maybe watching Doria become a teenager, she theorizes, adding, After all, he wasn’t a monster to his kids. A girl named Patty Hearst says she wrote to him once and he wrote back and said he was sorry and “in recovery.” That one hits with a thunk. People apparently have a lot of mixed feelings about the language of twelve-step programs:

  —WTF is in recovery? Is he accepting responsibility or not?

  —You make it sound like he’s the one who was harmed.

  —Wait, there’s a program for being a child molester? Why don’t the cops just raid the meetings?

  A former Academy teacher shows up and offers her memories of “when it all first came out”: an emergency meeting of the school’s board of directors after the summer van trip went awry.

  —In answer to one of your questions above, there was no thought of calling the police. The girls’ parents didn’t want us to, and neither did the girls. One of them, Beth Cohen I think— Beth if you’re out there please chime in—she yelled her head off at the headmistress. None of us knew how to respond. Why we were influenced by the histrionics of an obviously distraught eighth grader, I don’t know. Now, that seems idiotic.

  Beth never chimed in. Neither did Naomi—who seemed voiceless back when we were kids but was a source of fascinated speculation in the Facebook thread: How did she live with herself? What did she tell her kids? Did she stay with him after the move to Vermont? After the kids were grown? No one had any information about Naomi, at all.

  In the late-night hours of the second day, between two and three a.m., Zed and Patty Hearst began carrying on a more intimate conversation, as though they were alone. Perhaps they were, at the time.

  —I didnt have birth control. U?

  —Were u pregnant??

  —Yea, I had no idea it was rape then.

  —Sometimes I forget I was her and feel like whatever and then I see his hands on me.

  —He bit his nails.

  —We made cookies after. In his house.

  —I feel like no one believes it was real.

  —I know. Like we imagined.

  —It took so long to even talk about it. Even my husband.

  —It’s good that u told him tho.

  —You have to tell the story until it can’t hurt you anymore.

  —Does that happen?

  —I don’t know.

  —He taught me to write. Sometimes it still feels like he’s in my head.

  In my own head there is a photograph of Zed—for some reason, I think she is Tamsin, the one Bob liked to call “Christmas.” Her long, wavy hair is obscuring most of her face and there is lamplight raking crosswise against the horizontal shadows of her ribs, making a kind of mesh pattern. He must have shown it to our whole class? Or maybe he showed it to me, that afternoon in the darkroom. In any case, it is the image that returns to me when I think of Rasmussen-as-rapist. It’s a picture of a girl enmeshed, trapped, but believing herself to be a willing volunteer.

  I open my home email account and hunt up last year’s email from Trina—the one I never responded to. It says:

  Hi, Nora,

  It’s been a while. I hope this email still works. Some of us are talking to a lawyer and we wondered if you wanted to be part of that. I know you didn’t think he harmed you, personally, last time we talked, but time changes things and anyway I thought you might want to share your story.

  I hit reply and write:

  Sorry it’s taken me so long to write back. I’m assuming you went ahead with the lawyer—and I’d be curious to know what’s happening, if you feel like telling me. But the real reason I’m writing is that I’m wondering if you ever got in touch with Beth Cohen, if she’s part of your suit. I don’t know if you remember but she was my best friend.

  Writing those last five words is strangely painful. I hit send.

  When I first got Trina’s email, I’d wanted to write back but I kept getting caught up in the argument inside my head about what actually happened to them, to me, to us, back at the Academy. I’ve never stopped wondering whether I should have blown the whistle somehow or prevented Beth from getting involved . . . or gone along on that van trip myself instead of chickening out at the last minute.

  I was still in college when there was that first big lawsuit at Yale Law School, but I never made a connection between what they were then calling “sexual harassment” and Rasmussen. The Yale women argued that there was an unequal power relationship, that their liaisons with their professors were coerced even if they seemed consensual—because the men had undue influence over their futures, their careers. At the Academy, we hadn’t gotten grades, and even if we had it was middle school—we had no notion of “careers” beyond the board game. And, I told my twenty-one-year-old self, Rasmussen had taught us things we would have never known otherwise—not just about sex but about music, and art, and writing, and politics. He hadn’t taken advantage of us; we’d each had a choice. Some of us had even said no.

  Then, in the mid-eighties I guess, there was another wave of stuff in the news and the concept of “harassment” got supplanted by the idea of “abuse”: the McMartin preschool, another one in Massachusetts, allegations of satanic rituals, animal sacrifice, ceremonial bloodletting—

  I read it all with deep fascination, as though the stories contained some key to understanding my own past, but they were about the rape of helpless children, not the seduction of teenagers. The girls in Rasmussen’s class had bee
n fully capable of desire and arousal. Fourteen is an age at which women have become wives and mothers for most of human history, after all. I’d been sexually active—at least in my head—since age six or eight: playing doctor with my friends, attempting to masturbate my cat, fantasizing about George Harrison . . . And on it went, the argument in my head. Stories continued to arise in the news, occasionally rumors would even surface about Rasmussen himself (that he was living in Vermont, that Naomi had left him), and I would return to the questions I couldn’t ever resolve, year after year. Was Rasmussen a criminal? Was I harmed? Was Beth? Men will always desire girls in that maddening stage of beauty, and girls at that age are always over-ready to leave their parents and get on with life—that much seemed proven over and over. In any case, I am fine, unharmed, normal. My decisions have been my own decisions: I’m single because it’s what I’ve chosen, not because I’m damaged. Then, my desk phone rings and my whole body jumps.

  “Buchbinder,” I answer.

  “I knew it was you!”

  It’s Beth. I know this without hesitation. It’s not like I was stalking her on Facebook but I guess in a way I was. Stalking our past. I am shaking.

  “This is so weird,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “Are you calling about the case?”

  “Let’s get it out of the way, shall we?”

  I’m relieved that she says this; I’m not sure I want to have the other conversation, the one about our lives since 1980. In comparison, the Singer case seems straightforward. I come out swinging:

  “How can you defend a pedophile?”

  “If he was a pervert, he’d be in jail by now, don’t you think? After ten years of teaching? Everyone in the school system is a mandated reporter.”

  “But what if he’s clever, like Rasmussen?”

  “Jesus, I knew you’d go there. Get over it. It’s a different world. You can’t get away with shit like that anymore.”

  Her voice is older, a bit shaded, but I feel like I’m still bickering with my best friend from eighth grade.