by Rachel Cline
“Six-month suspension,” she adds. “You know you’ve got no case.”
“If that’s true then he’ll be cleared at the hearing. Why are you so interested in settling?”
“He’s been five months already waiting for this hearing and it’s killing him. He’s done. That’s the whole point of the rubber room, right? To get people to quit rather than spend every day in a de facto psych ward? Harold’s a great teacher, an idealist. Did you read his evals?”
I’m still trying to figure out what I should say next when she ups her offer:
“Okay, one-year suspension and a penalty, ten thousand. Let’s just close it.”
“He needs to resign,” I say, but I alt-tab over to the spreadsheet, to see if her proposal is within the realm of possibility, and then it catches up with me—she’s just told me he’s guilty.
“Come on, he’s forty-five,” Beth says. “What’s he supposed to do?”
“That’s really not my problem. He doesn’t belong in a classroom.”
“Is that what the investigator found? I don’t think so.” She’s right: all the investigator really turned up were a few witnesses who saw him with the girl outside of school—no hotel rooms, no text messages.
I scan the spreadsheet of other settlements for one that might have been anything like this one—I filter for Severity of Offense (three) and Strength of our Case (one).
“He walks away now and we give him thirty thousand dollars in lieu of his pension,” I offer.
“That’s laughable, Nora.”
“That’s my offer.”
“I’ll take it to him, but I’m not optimistic,” she says.
“Good.”
“I’m sorry if I was brusque—I just want to get this out of the way, okay?”
“Me, too.”
“And then we’ll talk. Promise?”
“Okay,” I say.
But is it? Was Beth also on that Facebook thread, under some assumed name? It’s still open on my computer and I scan it again. Is she the one who went to visit him in Vermont and obtained an apology? The one half-defending him for teaching us to think critically, to Question Authority? (He wore that button all the time but I misinterpreted its meaning: that “question” was a verb never even occurred to me. I thought he’d dubbed himself the authority on all questions.) She could even have been Patty Hearst, the one who got pregnant and who still hears his voice in her head.
14
Naomi
There’s a saying that only the dead know Brooklyn. It’s also true of Facebook. You don’t know what haunting is until you’ve felt yourself sucked through the pneumatic tubes of that place—so many spirits summoned, so much unrest and churning. If I believed in such things, I’d say it was purgatory. That said, I find this particular tangle, the stories about Bob, to be the worst of the worst. I say “stories” like my ma used to: to mean anyone’s way of getting another person to listen. I am wrapped up in all those stories like a fly in a spiderweb.
Nora was a tough one, or had a tough mouth. He called her “Trouble,” but not to her face. When she didn’t come with us out west, I was glad for her, relieved. I’d gone from fearing her as brave enough to expose him, to worrying she’d become his particular dragon to slay, to wishing her safe and free. Not that I discussed these thoughts—my only confidant was my husband and our only secrets were his secrets. “Trouble” was not one of his better efforts—he needed to get to know her better so he could hit on the right one and that never happened. Carnal knowledge was not always enough. (Once upon a time I was only “Cousin Jane”—wasn’t till after a year of marriage he hit on “Juanita.”) Still, their session in the darkroom should have done the trick. I’d have called her “Persephone” for visiting the underworld and getting out. He told me all of it: that he’d “sampled the merchandise” and that “the merchandise had objected.” Well, they couldn’t all fall over so easily, now could they? Nora’s snub rolled off him like water off a duck, of course—it was only me that feared she’d say something, call someone. She seemed different.
But not one of them ever dropped the dime on him, not while they could still have a claim. Why not? Was the sisterhood that powerful? Even after we sent them home from Arizona, no one got the whole story. At least not out of any of the girls. They fell in with each other, refused to break ranks. And we wanted to get out of New York anyway, so that agreement with the Academy wasn’t hard to sign. Paranoia was the tune of the times then, even for us—the drug-free, all-natural, silly hippies of Willow Street.
I thought I was happy all those years, but I never had so much freedom as Nora, who said no.
15
Nora
To my amazement, Ktanya has come around the bend to my cube entrance and is looking at me with what appears to be concern. Did I raise my voice on the phone with Beth? Have I been talking to myself?
“What’s going on?”
“Jocelyn gave me this case—the hearing’s on Monday.”
“And?”
“The guy’s a pedophile.”
“That’s for definite?”
“Sort of. I mean no one’s ever caught him at it—they just gave him a bunch of Unsatisfactories and fined him but I can tell he’s not right. Still, our paper trail sucks. I just offered him thirty thousand bucks to stop teaching and I really don’t know if I can go up—it makes me too sick.”
Ktanya gives me a “Really?” look. I notice that her manicure matches her belt, red and black.
“You can’t take it personally.”
“But couldn’t I just let it go to hearing? Maybe we’ll win.”
She shakes her head but I can tell she’s also sympathetic. “Didn’t I hear Gina Alessandro offer to help you earlier?”
Of course I know that Ktanya can hear everything in my cube but I’m kind of surprised that she listens.
“C’mon,” she says.
So I follow her down the cubicle alleys to Gina’s cube, across the floor. It’s twice the size of my own, with higher walls, and more snapshots than anyone else’s that I’ve ever seen. Many of them appear to involve parties. Gina is simultaneously putting on her coat, sorting paperwork into her briefcase, and talking on the phone. Ktanya raps symbolically on the soft cubicle wall and Gina looks up at her, then smiles a genuine, brilliant smile. She mimes “one second,” and then “blah-blah-blah,” and then says out loud into the phone, “Look, I’ve gotta go. I’ve got a hearing in half an hour. Talk to you later, okay?” and hangs up.
“What’s up?” she says, in a way that makes it sound like we’re all going out for beers.
Ktanya says, “I think Nora was feeling shy.”
Embarrassed, I jump in: “I see you’re on your way out the door, I just—you said to ask you for help any time.”
Gina nods. “Tell me.”
“I want to let it go to hearing.”
“What’s that going to accomplish, if you’ve got no case?”
“I just talked to opposing counsel and she doubled her offer in like five minutes.”
Gina nods, acknowledging that this means something. “But you have an offer out. Are you saying you’re going to rescind it?”
Then there’s a silence, in which I realize that’s what I’m saying, and how far outside normal procedure that would be, and that what I’m really asking is for her to take the case herself, because I can already tell she likes to swim against the tide.
“I’m booked solid with appeals,” she says, as her eyes scan the surrounding cubicles, taking inventory. “Listen, ask Jessi ca. She owes me one. Tell her I’m calling it in. And it’s not like she’s never argued a case with no evidence before—I’ve seen her do it.”
“Who’s Jessica?”
“The tall one. Third cube down.”
We find Jessica regarding five piles of overfull manila folders with great intensity. She is indeed tall, and very pale, and she looks a little bit like a prairie dog. Maybe it’s just because of the way she is standing in her
cube, with her hands dangling and her neck long. Ktanya has said her name twice when I see that Jessica has headphones on so I tap her, gently, and she jumps about a foot, pulling at her earbuds as though they have attacked her.
“Hi,” I say, “Gina said you could help us. She said . . .”
“Slow down, Tiger,” whispers Ktanya, but not before I’ve said, “She says you owe her one.”
Jessica wrinkles her forehead. “I thought she’d forgotten that.”
“We need someone to take this case to hearing Monday morning. It’s a pervert teacher,” says Ktanya. I love the way she has taken this on—I want to hug her.
“Can we prove it?” Without waiting for an answer, she then asks, “Who’s opposing?”
“Beth—Elizabeth Cohen. At Rachman Weeks.”
She shakes her head. “Don’t know her.” She is very subtly bouncing her weight from one foot to the other as she stands there. I wonder if she is addicted to exercise. I’ve heard that’s a thing.
“Any witnesses, at all?”
“Not in this one.”
“There’s another one?”
“Five years ago, decided in his favor.”
“Get me one of them, then.”
“But we lost.”
“They might see things differently now. Right?”
I nod. She keeps talking: “I don’t have time to do the footwork but if you can find me a girl who’s willing to go on record, I’ll do it.”
“And if I can’t?”
She shakes her head. “I can’t afford another loss this quarter. I need my job, you know?”
I know. So does Ktanya. I look at my watch: it’s 3:20.
I go back to my desk and open up the folder for the earlier case. Beth was not representing him then—he had a regular teacher’s union attorney. There are at least a hundred pages of transcripts in the folder and the idea of reading through them is overwhelming. Even in a good case, transcripts are nothing like what’s in movies and TV. Most of the time the witnesses are just establishing that people really are who they say they are, or were where they said they were, and the important points never seem to catch my eye on a first pass. People say so much that isn’t relevant. I’ve already scanned this stuff once, but I didn’t take any notes because I was in a hurry, and so I can’t remember the girl’s name. All I can retrieve is the name of her school, Hilda Conkling, because Hilda Conkling was a correspondent of my grandfather’s—she was an eight- or nine-year-old poetess, briefly famous in the early twenties. Then she disappeared, or, as I found out one afternoon on the internet, turned into a reference librarian at Smith College where she lived in happy obscurity until her death. My grandfather, the famous poet, admired her “modernist tendencies,” although I suspect he also had a creepy old-man crush on her.
I sort through the other contents of the file: evaluations, letters from the principal, photocopies of time cards—and a stapled booklet. I’d assumed it was an employee handbook or something on my first pass, but now that I’ve got it in front of me I see it’s one of those compendiums of student writing that was (or maybe still is) the centerpiece of a certain approach to teaching middle school kids the mechanics of draft-revise-publish. On the cover is the title: “Can I Get a Witness?” and I notice that what looks at first like a drop shadow behind the “I” is actually a hieroglyphic representation of the twin towers—the booklet is from the 2001–2002 school year. These kids were like five blocks away from the Trade Center. They must have thought the world had ended. I thumb through the publication, scanning the names of the kids and the titles of their works. I do not read the prose piece titled “Lost Dogs of 9/11,” and also avoid the item titled “Lies from the EPA” because l don’t really want to know what’s in my epithelium. Then I get to a page that has the imprint of a ghostly paperclip and I realize this is why the thing is in the file, this is the evidence. It’s a poem—it’s called “You Told Me, You Said”:
Fourteen is old enough
You told me
You meant, to have an opinion,
Or maybe, to ride the subway alone.
You told me I saw clearly.
You told me my eyes were gold.
I collected the bits,
Burnt papers, lost letters
That scattered.
They just made me sadder.
Fourteen is old enough, you said.
I was producing the same palaver at that age—pages of it, though I never showed it to anyone. I was ashamed of my poetry the same way I was ashamed of my wrong-brand jeans, the apartment we lived in, my mother’s job (everyone knows psychologists’ kids are totally fucked up), my missing father, even my name: Eleanor. Did I say “fucked up” yet? Probably not. The poem in the Singer file is by a girl named Elodie Cascarelli. What a name; maybe her eyes were gold. Or maybe he meant her ability to see was a treasure. Or maybe he never said any of it. At Music & Art, I knew a girl who was always publishing poems in the literary magazine that made it sound like she was living in a Henry Miller novel but she was mousy and shy and had never even been on a date.
In eighth grade, our book of class writings was called the Tis Bottle. When handing out the new pages each week, Rasmussen liked to falsetto the refrain from Aretha’s “Rock Steady” with a downbeat emphasis that turned “what it is” into “what it TIS!” My mental picture of this still amuses me: a six-foot-four-inch red-haired man in a Mexican poncho, rolling his gait like a black dude—it never failed to make us giggle and love him. Even those of us who didn’t really love him at all.
Our class book was named after the following joke:
There was a man who spent his whole life searching for the Tis Bottle. He travels the seven continents and the seven seas. After thirty years, he finds himself at a temple in the Himalayas, where he is finally granted an audience with the head swami, the top lama. “Do you have it? Can I see it?” the man begs, even though he’s starving, hasn’t slept in weeks, and is nearly a hundred years old at this point. The holy man beckons him into a cave-like room completely filled with soda bottles—all different colors, brands, sizes, some full, some half-full, some empty. The sage blows gently across the rim of one of the bottles to sound a note, shuffles over to another and does the same to produce a new note, and on to a third. He offers the fourth bottle to the visitor, who cradles it in his hands, blows tremulously over its aperture, and promptly dies of happiness. The note he has produced corresponds to the third word in the sung phrase, “My Country 'Tis of Thee.”
He had a different joke every year, which provided a different you-had-to-be-in-on-it name for the class publication— Mel Famey (he walks a batter after drinking a beer: the beer that made Mel Famey walk us), Moogli! (a guy who thinks he’s avoided cannibalism and sexual assault by performing some heinous act, only to hear the headhunter chieftain announce, “Now, Moogli!”), and so on. There was no close textual analysis of the content—they were really all one joke, anyway, the lesson of which was “never assume anything,” which was the scaffold of Bob’s teaching philosophy. If he taught us nothing else, he taught us to doubt, to call bullshit.
I google “Elodie Cascarelli.” I find that for a while she kept a blog about urban beekeeping, BeeLoudGlade, but the last entry is two years old. I find ten Cascarellis with New York phone numbers, but not one of them answers the phone, and of the three with human voices on their outgoing messages, two are male and one is a woman with what sounds like a Russian accent. I leave voicemails with my office phone number on the first three; on the other two I include my cell number as well, because it’s really time to leave if I’m going to get my cat back.
Facebook has been sitting open in my browser this whole time and I finally realize I can look for Elodie there, and voila: she is a thin and oddly beautiful young woman with Pre-Raphaelite hair. She went to Oberlin. She likes The White Stripes. The most recent thing on her page is a beautiful picture of Elodie at a younger age, maybe nine or ten, with extremely short hair and freckles, apparent
ly perched in a tree. It was posted February 15, 2005. Underneath it are comments:
Zadie Collins Goodbye, dear Elodie. This is how I will always remember you.
Meredith Catniss Don’t say that, she’s not gone!
Zadie Collins I’ll never see her again. I’m allowed to mourn.
Meredith Catniss You will never see her, but you will see him!
Zadie Collins Obv
I puzzle over this for a bit, and conclude that Elodie is dead. I consider that she is just leaving the country or something, but her friend’s certainty that she’ll never be seen again weighs against that theory. I rustle around in my cache of papers until I find the hearing decision from her case against Singer, in which he was fined and suspended but not fired. Elodie didn’t testify. The decision was issued February 10, 2005. Did she kill herself because of this? Is Singer the “him” her friend mentions?
Under my own name, I leave a comment on her wall: I am investigating a teacher in the public school system regarding an open case. If any of Elodie’s friends would be willing to talk to me about this, please call me. I leave my work number.
I try to imagine how I would have reacted to losing a friend to suicide at that age—claiming my need to mourn in a public place would certainly not have been my style. It still isn’t. Anyway, if Elodie is dead, this is officially a blind alley. I am going to get my cat.
16
Nora
It feels good to be outside. I walk to Cadman Plaza by the post office, a landmark of my childhood, and decide I will cut through the park. Waiting for the light at Tillary Street, I find myself looking across the newly AstroTurfed playing field and remember how, in ninth grade, Beth and I used to smoke pot (me) and meet boys (her) behind the war monument. It always wound up with me making awkward conversation with the sidekick while she went off in the bushes to fool around with Tyrone or Sadiq. I can see myself and the other guy, sitting on the edge of the monument, chucking rocks at squirrels and pigeons while attempting to make conversation about our somewhat limited shared culture. No eye contact; we talked while facing outward. I did learn, from one of them, to distinguish between various types of ghetto headgear—Kangol, applejack, tam—and even how a dry cleaning bag was used to puff out the crown of the latter two items so as to balance out the afro underneath. I liked the idea of the tough kids I saw on the subway, primping their hats to get the look just right. I guess I also picked up some other useful knowledge during those sessions—what music was important at the moment, proper slang locutions, sneaker taxonomy . . . and how to give off some mysterious vibe that ensured no man ever made the first move on me—even when I wanted him to.