The Question Authority

by Rachel Cline

“No, the school. My daughter’s in seventh grade. They’re doing Hamlet!”

  Okay, that makes sense. She isn’t seeing a show at the avant-garde theater; she has a gifted child at the school for gifted children (we did a lot of sneering at them in the playground when they deigned to appear there) and they are putting on a play about adultery, suicide, parricide, and the perfidy of remarriage. Brava! I say none of this, except “Wow.”

  The bartender comes by and Jill gazes at my drink, trying to determine whether one of the same is a good idea. I shake my head. “Vodka tonic,” she says.

  “Do you have kids?”

  This is almost always an aggressive question so I have learned not to elaborate on my one-word answer. I am not in charge of making my childlessness palatable to the child-ridden. I find I want to keep Jill Goldberg around, though, so I change the subject.

  “It’s funny, I’m actually meeting Beth Cohen in a few minutes—for like the first time in thirty years.”

  “You guys were inseparable!”

  “BFFs, give or take an F.”

  “Ha,” she says. “You’re funny.”

  “We’re forming a posse,” I say, surprising myself considerably.

  “A what?”

  “A vigilante mob. Want to join?”

  She looks at me hesitantly—but not as though my question is crazy, only as though asking, “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Because although she was too young to have had Rasmussen for eighth grade, she is not too old to be outraged by what he did to us.

  “What do you think?” I prompt.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

  Her drink arrives and she clinks it on mine but she is scowling, slightly. Maybe she is thinking about her own daughter, wondering how much of the TLC she’s getting at Saint Ann’s school is just as tainted. I look at my watch—Beth is fifteen minutes late. In other words, she should be walking through the door any minute now. Jill takes my distraction as an opportunity to escape.

  “I don’t want to horn in on your reunion,” she says, taking an immoderate gulp of her drink. She starts groping around in her purse, presumably for a business card. Over her shoulder, I see Beth walk in. We recognize each other instantly. Then Beth makes a qué pasa? face about Jill—the ice blonde in a black cashmere coat who’s stolen her seat. I return her look with what I believe to be no expression on my face and she comes toward us, surrounded by one of those postmodern fragrances: cinnamon, ink, some kind of metallic flower.

  “And who’s this?” she says.

  Jill has finally found her card and gives it hastily to me. She turns to Beth and offers a bony, beringed hand.

  “Jill Goldberg, Academy class of seventy-four,” she says.

  “Sorry to be late,” says Beth. “My husband’s away visiting family so I can shop without getting the third degree.” She jiggles the shopping bag she’s carrying from the fancy clothing store next door.

  The bartender returns. “Can I get you ladies anything?”

  “God I hate that, ‘ladies,’” says Beth, looking into the bartender’s eyes. “A Diet Coke.”

  Beth sits on my right and puts her shopping bag on the bar, effectively telling me, “I made you wait while I preened.” She is and is not beautiful. The nose job has brought her closer to the American ideal but her face doesn’t quite have enough structure to keep that illusion alive. Her hair is perfect, though: it looks like it was blow-dried ten seconds ago, and she acts like someone beautiful—the way she settles herself onto her barstool and rests her forearm on the bar, as though there is a camera at the entrance to Armando’s. We have not hugged or kissed—we never did as kids but it’s odd in contemporary female friendship terms.

  Her glass of soda arrives and she smiles a new and fascinating smile at the bartender, apologizing for her previous glare. Then she turns to us and says, “And you, Jill, were you also, shall we say, a friend of Bob’s?”

  Bizarre that this is the first thing she says. Are we still reading each other’s minds, after all?

  Jill shakes her head. “I had Zahler for eighth.”

  “Too young,” I say. “Wait, that came out wrong.”

  “Too young to be in with the in crowd is what you meant, I think,” says Jill.

  “Such a different time,” says Beth. “Even the way we talked.” She sounds like she’s narrating a PBS special.

  “We were kids,” I say.

  Jill looks at her watch. “Anyway, I was actually just leaving.”

  “Her daughter’s in a play at Saint Ann’s,” I tell Beth.

  “People love that school.” She rolls her eyes.

  “Sadie’s very happy there,” says Jill. “It’s changed a lot since we were kids.” She polishes off her drink with a zeal that indicates something rotten in her own Denmark. Then she puts a twenty on the bar—excessive, but I’m not about to argue.

  Beth smiles. “Nice to meet you,” she says.

  “See you around,” I say, though I doubt we will even greet each other if I do.

  After she leaves, Beth and I examine one another. It’s the kind of competitive analysis that women are programmed to do—even those (like me) raised by mothers who never once asked any of the subtextual questions aloud: Is she fatter than I am? Is her hair dyed? Does she have a spouse and is he worth having? Does she look old? Whoever of us speaks first will disclose her own deepest insecurity so I will not say, “Nice ring,” about the sapphire-and-diamond trophy she’s flashing. I do wish I’d put on a different shirt—the one I’m wearing came from the thrift store and though the color is great, the collar is too narrow to be contemporary and too nineties to be vintage. My pants are from Housing Works, too, but they are Escada and fit perfectly.

  “So when did your mother die?”

  “It was a year ago in August.”

  “You’re still in mourning,” she says, and pushes out her lower lip in a subtle recreation of a child’s pout. “I’m sorry. I really liked your mom.” Is she the first person I’ve talked to who actually knew my mother—the same woman I knew? “I know she wasn’t much of a mom, but she was kind of a hoot as a middle-aged lady. Right?”

  I suppose that’s true but it’s not one of the first ten things I would have said about her. “What about yours?” I ask Beth, to get the focus off my sickly little family tree.

  “Both dead since the eighties. It seemed like as soon as I left college they both dropped off but I guess it really took longer than that. My mom had uterine cancer. It took a while.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, it sucked.”

  “When did you come back to New York?”

  “Come back?”

  “From California?”

  “Oh, God. My first marriage—disaster. I came back after that.”

  “So that’s when you went to law school?”

  “No, didn’t get around to that until—long story. What about you?”

  “I’ve been here all along, more or less.” She looks sympathetic, as though I am admitting to something shameful, so I correct: “Not right here, but in the city. East Village, mostly. But tell me about your first marriage. I love a good disaster.”

  She wrinkles her nose. “I hated the suburbs. I felt stuck. No excitement. And things just . . .” She shrugs. “I had an addiction problem.”

  This is almost disappointingly banal. Who didn’t? Well, me—I’m just slow-motion, can’t-get-out-of-my-own-way self-destructive. “Did you go to AA?”

  “Sort of.” She makes a line with her lips, weighing how much to tell me. “You were always good with a secret,” she says. “But this is like a secret from yourself—like your work self. Know what I mean?”

  “Not only can I keep a secret, I am a black belt in keeping work and life separate.”

  “I was in the sex trade.” She waits for me to react.

  I’m not able to take this information in, really, until I realize I
am trying to put her in hot pants on Tenth Avenue and she was much more likely in cashmere at the . . . I don’t even know what fancy hotel bar. The idea of Beth getting paid for sex isn’t actually that shocking, because she was doing that in some form in high school—blowing guys in the bathroom at Xenon, getting taken on private planes to places I couldn’t even imagine. I’d never been out of the city then. I sometimes thought that she liked telling me about her exploits more than she liked having them.

  “Like, for money because you were broke?”

  “No. We had money. It was—‘for thrills’ sounds wrong. If you’ve never had an addiction it’s kind of hard to explain.”

  The bartender signals another round? and I nod, immediately. “Your husband understood?”

  She shakes her head. “I got roughed up one night—detached retina, broken rib—”

  “Then you stopped.”

  “After my ex took away my son I stopped.” I see her focus her eyes on the television set across the bar. Her face goes absolutely expressionless, sphinxlike.

  “You have a kid?”

  “Winslow,” she says.

  It takes me a moment to realize that’s not some secret password—it’s a name. I look at my own hands on the bar, always so much older-looking than expected. Winslow Homer? Winslow, Arizona? Win slow? Or is just one of those mock-cowboy names that doesn’t mean anything? “Is that why you became a lawyer? To get him back?”

  “I do that because I’m good at it.” She looks at me with a sly smile, proud.

  I nod. Fair enough. Most people’s motives are not as direct or clear as I want them to be. It’s not as though I can really explain my own path to the job I have or the life I’m living. And what about our perp, Harold Singer? Did he choose to become a teacher because he liked young girls or because he thought it would be more fun than working in an office?

  “Did you read that poem she wrote—the first girl your client molested? It's like something straight out of the Tis Bottle”.

  She looks back from the TV, confused by my leap. “No.”

  “I’m pretty sure she killed herself.”

  “That’s sad. But see, you’re blurring the line now.” She means between work and her past—our history.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Anyway,” she says, “it’s not like I think there’s no such thing as a sex crime, it’s just the way people think they’re entitled to some abstract justice, some consensus version of right and wrong. I mean, nobody ‘gets her story told.’” She makes air quotes. “A lawsuit doesn’t do that for you. You see that every day at the ED. Right? Remember how you used to make fun of your mother’s clients for thinking they could solve their problems by telling her about them? It’s the same thing. What happened, happened. You have to figure out how you’re going to live with it.”

  “And the perpetrators?”

  “If there really was a crime committed, that’s a different side of the street.”

  “What about Rasmussen?”

  “What about him?”

  “You don’t hold him responsible for anything? In your life?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I don’t know. It sounds like there might be a connection, don’t you think? Between being molested by your teacher as a fourteen-year-old and becoming a prostitute?”

  “Grow up, Nora. Do you blame him for making you an old maid?”

  Oh, yeah, I forgot. Beth could be really mean. Teenage Nora would have told her to go fuck herself but as an adult I am speechless. And though the comment was awful, the look on her face is instantly regretful. “You never wrote me back,” she says then.

  She must have emailed me this afternoon, after I left to go to Everett’s. “I left work early today. I had to run an errand.” In light of her last comment, I am not about to tell her about Tin Man.

  “I mean in nineteen seventy-whatever. When I was losing my mind at New Paltz,” she says. “You want me to blame Bob but you’re the one who broke my heart.” She stops drawing on the sweat of her glass with the edge of her perfectly painted, gray-beige fingernail and looks at me with unguarded eyes. I never knew her when she was that young—as young as the look in her eyes at this moment.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I just felt . . .” I can’t say “like I was better off without you,” which is what I did feel. “It was so long ago.” But I don’t have any trouble knowing what letter she’s talking about. I’ve felt guilty about not writing back for thirty years or whatever.

  “I forgive you,” she says, putting her hand on my forearm, just for a microsecond—we both notice instantly how odd it feels. As she pulls back, I see a glint of silver at her wrist that I at first mistake for the Indian silver bracelet she got from Bob, but she’s wearing a black suit and a mauve silk shirt and her hair is so perfectly blown out it shimmers, so it’s probably a Swiss watch or a Tiffany bracelet or something.

  “So anyway,” I say, pulling my shoulder bag off the hook under the bar and removing the Tis Bottle, in all its battered glory, “I thought you’d want to take a look at this.” She takes it from me cautiously and turns the first few pages with the flat of her palm, like a rare book. Her eyebrows are raised as she reads.

  “Naomi’s handwriting!” she says and then looks up at me. “This is such a blast! I can’t believe you held onto it.”

  “It was in my grandfather’s apartment,” I say.

  “You know, I bet I could get you out of that. Did I say that already?”

  But she’s distracted by something she’s found and begins to read, smiling to herself. “Remember this?” she says, and starts to read:

  “‘Here lies Nora Buchbinder, fifteen-year-old weisenheimer. Buchbinder was best known for her Sears and Roebuck wardrobe choices and her prowess in “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” . . .’”

  I vaguely remember the write-your-own-obit assignment— other people’s responses. Beth had imagined her future self a doctor; Trina was the first woman on the moon. But my decision to kill myself off as I was then strikes me now as creepy and disturbed. Beth seems to think it’s just funny. “You were such a card,” she says. I shrug. Then she closes the book, both hands flat on the cover. “I can almost smell it. The way the pages felt cold from the mimeograph when we first got them. The suspense about if my story would get picked.”

  “The obnoxious way he sang when he walked around the room handing out the pages,” I say.

  She laughs. “I’m sorry about what I said before. That was a cheap shot.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “We should stick together. Old friends. We had to sing that corny song in Girl Scouts but it’s actually true, it turns out. Right?”

  “I didn’t do Girl Scouts.”

  “Old rhymes with gold. Old friends.”

  I nod. I’ve finished my second drink and if I have another I will be a complete mess tomorrow. “I’m glad we did this,” I say, although I’m not sure it’s the truth.

  “Me too,” says Beth.

  24

  Peanut

  From: PBJ@nyc.rr.com

  To: bear@nyc.rr.com

  Date sent: Feb 19, 2009 11:15 PM

  Subject: WTF

  If you think I don’t remember August 1971, think again. I still call it the worst night of my life, in my head—though worse things have certainly happened. But since you asked, I’m writing it down. Maybe this is the right time for me to reconsider what happened to me then. Wouldn’t it be funny if I started claiming to be a victim, too? You can take that as a threat, if you want.

  In my version, it all starts with me boosting the bracelet. I have such a vivid memory of sitting in the front seat of the van, looking at it on my arm, thinking, I can help myself to whatever I want. Your disapproval really threw me for a loop, because I thought my intentions were obvious: I was staking my claim. You were worried about getting caught, I get that now, but I’m not even sure I was aware that we were breaking the law. I was such a dummy I thought
“statutory” had something to do with “statues,” that it meant that there was a Greek myth or something that was the original case of a man and a teenage girl doing it. Anyway, we were driving along and you saw the bracelet on my arm and yelled at me for ripping it off and I felt ashamed of myself, which was kind of a new feeling for me. My parents didn’t have much energy left for scolding by the time I came along. I guess I liked it.

  So we got to the campsite. I remember you made us call home and let our parents know we were changing the itinerary. Why did you do that? I remember the pay phones in a supermarket parking lot, waiting while the others took their turns. The place we wound up at was way, way down a dirt road with no hookups or showers or anything—on the reservation, I guess. It must have been. I don’t remember much else about the actual place. We pitched our tents and ate our beans or chili or hash and went in for the night but you stayed out by the fire and I fell asleep before you came in. I remember trying to stay awake—pinching myself, kicking Tiddlywinks when she snored. We hadn’t been on the road that long and there was still heavy competition about who you chose to sleep with, or next to. What I can’t remember now, and I guess that means I “blocked” it, was hearing you fuck the others, or even your wife. I only remember how it felt to be with you in the sleeping bag, in the tent—the way it smelled and how hard the ground was, how the stupid air mattress just got in the way, how big and warm your body felt—much bigger than it did in the waterbed or anywhere we did it standing up, or whatever. And at first I would be performing for the others a little, trying to make it sound as dirty as possible, and then I would forget all about them and just be in a world of you. I was a stupid little shit.

  I woke up to flashlights and yelling. “You there,” they kept saying. And none of us knew which “you” they meant—we all thought we were the one who was going to be interrogated and go to jail. The light shining in our eyes and mean men yelling—like a World War II movie. I didn’t realize the cops were Indians. To me they were just men in uniform, shouting—they were the pigs. You asked if they could point the light somewhere else so you could find some clothes to put on, but they wouldn’t, and in the end you had to go with them in nothing but your T-shirt. You were yelling stuff over their shoulders to Naomi—who to call, where to go—but I wasn’t listening. I was looking at your penis, which was suddenly tiny, like a boy’s, hiding under your white, white belly.