The Question Authority

by Rachel Cline

  We had an epic fight when I was fourteen or fifteen. I don’t know what it was about but we were screaming—standing in the hallway that runs the length of this apartment, the “alimentary canal,” she called it. I understand now, a little, how a teenager winds up shrieking the way I was (“You’re so oblivious! So helpless! It makes me sick to be seen with you!”) but not her adult parent—and Adeline was giving as good as she got (“What makes you think I like living with you? Do you think I have a choice?”). One of us was on her way out, late for something. In my memory, I am both of us it seems. Anyway, as we yelled and wept and threatened, our then-cat Anna came out of my mother’s bedroom, meowing in her most demanding voice: Feed me! Feed me now! But she did not head for the kitchen, she just sat at my feet and looked up, vocalizing. Her wailing cat-face is framed perfectly in my mind’s eye. And when even that didn’t stop us, she stood up on her hind legs and put her paws on my thigh. I can’t bear another second of this, she said in perfectly comprehensible terms. I will not stop my yowling until you do. I will not stop pretending to be human until you remember that we are a family.

  For a moment I forget that Tin Man is gone and I look for him. I am ready for sleep and for most of the past year he has lain next to me, in the crook of my naked body, at night. I would tell him that I loved him and that he was “the best cat in the world” and “my cat boyfriend.” But apparently even that is more than I get to have, right now. Stop it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Nora is what my mom would say.

  I’m in no condition to sleep, so I open my laptop. I find myself looking up the legal age of consent in New York State in the 1970s. I want to know what the law was back then, but this is not so easy to find and I get sidetracked reading a message board where men—among them admittedly registered pedophiles—research what’s legal in their states of residence, what they can get away with. And there, some comment cites a long thread on Reddit started by a user with the handle “iforgivemypedodad”:

  I was one of the last people he talked to. He was bawling, practically screaming, “Do you still love me?” And when I said I did, he said, “You’re just saying that because I’m your dad.” He was beyond shit-faced drunk. The next morning, he went to work but he never came home.

  This makes me start thinking about the Rasmussen kids, Archer and Doria, and without too much effort I find that Doria Rasmussen has a blog. From Ancient Grease, it’s called. The About Me section says: I am a married woman of faith living in a small city near the Rocky Mountains. I like to cook, sew, read, eat, write, and garden. My husband is blind. When I was little, I asked my mother where my name came from, and she told me it was from Ancient Greece but I had no idea what that meant.

  When I last saw Doria in person she was four or five, with Shirley Temple curls and a truculent stance—a bit of her daddy in miniature. But the last time I saw her was in a photograph in the New York Times. She was getting married, wearing what looked like a black negligee. She had an anchor tattooed on her right bicep with her husband’s name in it. I can’t help but wonder if that anchorman is her partner out there, and if his blindness was the result of some accident involving propellants and fire. Their wedding announcement appeared in the Vows column—my mother pointed it out to me, saying, “Look at this. Rasmussen. Same family?” as she lobbed the section across the library. And I remember being as amazed that my mother remembered Bob’s last name as that she apparently read the Style section (so lowbrow). But she read everything, really. If the New York Times was a roast chicken, there would have been nothing left to feed the cat.

  The page of Ancient Grease that I have landed on is from Thanksgiving 2007, right around the time my mom died. Doria writes:

  This was my first Thanksgiving without Mom and it was painful. Ray and I haven’t figured out any particular traditions of our own and, for various reasons having to do with who my husband is, the burden of inventing new ones is on me. You wouldn’t know it to see me but I grew up in something like a hippie commune in New York City. On Thanksgiving, my dad made us listen to a tape recording of Navajo prayers before we could start eating. Eventually, the cassette wore out—we could hear it fluttering and wowing before it broke. I think that was the last time I gave my brother a high five. The food we ate was normal enough. My mom grew up in West Virginia, “where men are angry, women are angrier, and food comes in cans.” She wasn’t up for vegetarianism or bean sprouts but she learned to make all kinds of things over the years. Four or five years ago, she started doing this onion tart that I may resurrect after she’s been gone a little longer. I still miss her too much to try.

  Naomi may be the one I have the most questions about—the one who could have explained Beth to me. She just vanished at some point, it seems like. But from Doria’s description it sounds like she’s dead. I resume reading:

  I talked to my dad for a few minutes. Since he got remarried, he always invites us to come visit for the holidays. After ten years of “no,” you think he’d get the picture but that’s not how he operates. If you want to draw a line with him you have to grab him and shout in his face—and his hearing is fine, that’s not the problem. From my point of view, it’s a miracle that I can even speak to him but he doesn’t believe in miracles. I think he does regret, maybe even repent, his sins, though. I’m the one who needs to learn to forgive. I am a slow learner. He always said that. He was joking but it wasn’t funny.

  You probably wouldn’t expect Ray to be an amazing cook, but he is. He likes me to read to him from Bon Appétit, and to describe the pictures in detail. He corrects me all over the place—my bad pronunciation of French words and also weird ingredient names I’ve never heard anyone say out loud: mire-poix, asafoetida, chiffonade. He also corrects my descriptions of the photos—which is so cool it’s almost creepy. Like when I say whipped cream and he knows it’s really meringue or I say pork roast and he says “loin.”And then I tease him and say, “Okay, pork loin roast,” and he says, “Roast pork loin,” and I say, “Let’s just call it Porky Pig in a pan,” and we think it’s hilarious.

  My husband is black. I don’t know why I add that. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned it here before. Believe it or not, it almost never comes up, even though where we live, an interracial couple could stop traffic. But his blindness seems to unblackify him for people here somehow. Anyway, everyone in our faith community knows us as us, and Ray has never complained about racism to me, ever. He likes to say I’m in charge of complaining for the family. Mom cried the first time she heard him say that—all three of us were on the phone and she went quiet. It took me a minute to realize what was happening but Ray was already gesturing at me—fist to the eye like a baby. I asked her what was wrong and she said she was embarrassed that she didn’t protect me enough when I was little. It surprised me but I saw how she got there—she was thinking my role as designated complainer was because I had a backlog of complaints, but that’s not what Ray means when he says it. It’s just that I’m the one who brings the dented cans back to the supermarket for a refund, or who gets the supervisor on the phone when there’s something wonky on our credit card bill. Mom had so much guilt but she was really the one who was the victim. I got bullied and humiliated but that’s part of childhood. Who was protecting her? I guess that’s why I can’t forgive my dad.

  Some Thanksgiving post. I meant to write about the fantastic meal that Ray made: duck with macerated cherries, potatoes and parsnips a la russe, roasted brussels sprouts with hazelnuts, and cornbread with anise seeds and cardamom. It was not the kind of food that kids like so it’s just as well we don’t have any. Afterwards we sang together at the piano. Some hymns and some show tunes—no Navajo chants. I felt blessed.

  Doria has posted some pictures—not of the meal but of herself and Ray on vacation, and of their wedding in some neutral American backyard. I can see that her curls and freckles are gone and her body is now cocooned in fat. Her husband looks genial and happy, with an afro larger than one generally sees these days and
a kind of Fu Manchu beard—I guess he is in charge of being beautiful for both of them the way she is in charge of complaining and reading recipes aloud.

  Even if her father never touched her, Doria’s second life makes a kind of sense to me. The only safe way to be around that guy, if you were female and under the age of twenty, was by being fat or ugly (or, in my case, mean) and she seems to have belatedly and willfully become both. I say “willfully” because this was not the case when I saw her picture in the New York Times. She was then aggressively sexy—I was shocked by the idea of it, getting married in a black slip, her hair a wild nimbus, her features outlined and exaggerated by makeup. It seemed politically regressive to me. Bad enough to sell your soul into marriage but to show up dressed like a cartoon hooker and have yourself branded like chattel? Tattoos were still unironic then.

  I browse the rightmost column of Ancient Grease, looking through the list of recommended blogs for anything that sounds like it might belong to a family member, but it’s a mix of craft stuff (A Dress A Day), political stuff (ye olde Talking Points Memo, The Washingtonienne), and religious stuff (I can’t even look). She may be a churchgoer but she has not abandoned politics. Further down the page are links to her past entries going back to February 2004, which is early in blogdom, I think. So that’s interesting, too. She married a blind black guy, retreated to Wyoming or Colorado or wherever she is, got fat, and became an internet geek. I tell myself I dodged that bullet, but it’s not even a bullet and there was never a point in my life where I could have made any one of those choices. And besides, she sounds happy.

  28

  Naomi

  She is happy. As happy as anyone is. It’s no small thing, that.

  29

  Nora

  One of our writing assignments in Rasmussen’s class was to compose a protest song. As an example, he provided us with a mimeo of a song written by a girl from a previous class. He didn’t name the author but I suppose we each deputized our own favorite of the older girls. The song was called “Freedom,” and it seemed to me then to be of Bob Dylan quality—not that I actually knew Dylan’s work very well when I was thirteen, but I was full of opinions. The chorus, which I can still sing, was:

  You say I got freedom, that I’m able to fly.

  But my baby’s at war, and I still don’t know why.

  There’s blood in the streets everywhere that I look.

  And what you call freedom’s just a word in a book.

  It mentioned her boyfriend’s draft number, his decision to not flee to Canada, how her letters aren’t replied to, and it even got around to the secret war in Cambodia (“Phnom Penh” rhymes with “lion’s den,” of course.) Anyway, it was pretty good for a kid, and unique in my experience not only for being from a girl’s point of view but for completely avoiding the weepy part of love. The singer sounds proud of her “baby,” and disgusted by her country at the same time—we discussed this. The “you” she’s addressing is America (or Amerika, as we liked to spell it then).

  The following week, after we’d all finished our own protest songs, Naomi came to school with her guitar and set some of our efforts to familiar folk tunes. And then the two of them sang “You Say I Got Freedom” as an encore and we applauded with delight. After that, maybe years after, I changed my theory and decided that “Freedom” was really Naomi’s song. Her handwriting was just too good for someone who didn’t also take pride in the words she wrote.

  Later, I was a counselor at the same summer camp I’d gone to as a kid—the campers were mostly rich Jewish kids from the suburbs. And though the camp was liberal-minded, it was not exactly integrated: most of the kitchen staff were black and everyone else was white, except for one counselor, Reggie, who was black but from Scarsdale—what we used to call an Oreo. Every night after dinner, he played basketball with the waiters, Tommy the cook, and two or three other counselors. It was a rowdy game with a lot of trash talk—mostly from the college kids. The basketball court was made of red clay, and it stuck to their sweaty clothes and made them look like that guy at the Columbia University protests who’d painted himself red to represent the blood of the Viet Cong.

  One night that summer, we had a campfire and, as usual, the guitar counselor started things off. After the kids had yelled their way through “There but for Fortune” and “Long Black Veil,” he announced something special and up came Reggie, grasping his own guitar by the neck. It was late in the summer and his afro had grown so long it flopped over into a side part, like an apple with a wedge removed. He flashed us a sly smile as he tuned up, and said, “This here’s one of my own.” The first words he sang were, “You say I got freedom, that I’m able to fly.” At first I was confused, but then I decided that his original composition would come later in his set and by the time the second verse came around I had chimed in, proud of myself for remembering so much of a song I’d only heard once. But as I sang out, heads around me turned and eyes glared. Afterward, another counselor hissed at me: “What were you trying to do to him?”

  “I thought I’d heard it before,” I said, lying even before I had decided to.

  She shook her head, disgusted. Apparently, she believed Reggie was the true author of the song (why wouldn’t she?) or, actually, what she seemed to think was that he really wasn’t the author and that he had stolen it—and therefore what I had done by singing along was call him out on that. It was the early days of political correctness. As outraged as I was by being falsely accused of racism (for this, really, was the charge), I also knew immediately and completely that I had nowhere to take my argument. Rasmussen baited me into this kind of thing all the time. So then I told myself another version to make myself feel better: Reggie really had written the song. And the girl from Rasmussen’s earlier class had stolen it from him—he had broken up with her at a different camp and she wanted revenge. Or, maybe she just heard him singing it in Washington Square Park and changed a few words on the subway home. Maybe the song was really an old song with many versions and this was just one stop on its journey. But I find I am attached to the idea that it was actually Naomi Rasmussen’s song. I want her to have had something of her own, that no one could force her to share or surrender, written in her own hand.

  30

  Nora

  Very late at night the phone rings. At first it rings in my sleep and then my mother’s voice comes on, echoing in the carpetless hallway. I wake up instantly, as though now is the moment of her dying, and only I can rescue her. Or am I thinking of Tin Man? In any case I rush to the phone and pick it up. On the other end I can hear breathing, or maybe sobbing. A woman’s voice says, “Nora?” and I say, “Yes?” and then it sounds like she has put the phone down. Her voice is far away and I don’t understand what she’s saying. “Endless” or “helpless”? “Sucker punch”? “I hate you,” is clear though, said in a lower register. I think it’s Beth but I also wholly reject the idea. For all her troubles, I don’t think she could be this person. But who is this person? A random stranger who knows my name? Whoever it is hangs up, and I go back to bed, badly shaken but soon asleep again.

  Friday February 20, 2009

  31

  Nora

  Iwake up late, feeling ruined, as though I have been running laps in my sleep, so I skip coffee, put on most of the same clothes I was wearing last night and run out the door still in a quasi-sleep state. It’s a brilliant clear day, the first in weeks, and when I step out of my building and see the brownstones across the street with their details etched by the river-reflected light, I am suddenly grateful for belonging here.

  I scan Montague Street avidly for signs of my missing cat as I walk. There are so many things along the way that seem to have been here my whole life: the polished brass water main, the dented and overpainted fire alarm call box, and the lost glove impaled on the cast-iron fence all echo back through time. Across Hicks Street, the Thai restaurant occupies the storefront where I used to gaze at Barbie outfits and molded plastic kits for manufactur
ing replicas of characters from The Mummy, The Bride of Frankenstein, etc. Back then, monsters were big business—and not human. When I look down at the pebbly surface of the sidewalk, I know how it felt when my roller skates encountered the smooth softness of bluestone after this aggregate, which is called “Cosmocrete” or maybe “Cementine.” (The brass badges that brand the pavement are still here, worn almost illegible, but I know what they say.) I must have been a happy kid at some point because these waves of nostalgia knock me sideways sometimes.

  In my head I see snapshots of the way Montague Street looked to me in 1971. Inside Ebinger’s Bakery, the women with white collars wrap boxes in red-ticked string fed from a device on the ceiling and cut with a special ring worn on their index fingers. In front of Bohack’s, a man unloads fruits and vegetables from a dark green truck, and across the street, the shoe repair guy in his blue apron smokes a stubby cigarette, awaiting customers. He frightens me but I don’t know why. Further up, after the intersection, is Prana, the newly arrived hippie store, which contains all the clothes in the world that I want but can’t have, as well as incense, posters, and—I suppose—drug paraphernalia. And past that is the store where we buy my Buster Brown T-shirts and underpants from the grumpy Italian woman who can tell my current size without measuring tape. Then there’s Meunier’s, where we buy presents—silver jewelry and onyx eggs, and, at Christmas, little brass candle holders whose flames cause silhouetted angels to spin and strike a tinny bell. All these experiences are linked by the elusive presence of my mother, whose scent I am following as she shops and browses and flirts. Once I saw her coming toward me and didn’t recognize her, in her fully lipsticked and coiffured state, on her way to meet a man— although she never told me that in so many words.