by Rachel Cline
The window of the downstairs Chinese Laundry still displays an illustrated ad for “Martinizing.” Inside, the ring-shaped, firefly-green lighting fixture is just as it was, although I don’t recognize the woman toiling beneath it. One of my earliest memories is of being left alone in there with her, the lady who didn’t smile. Her eyes met mine, but her gaze was like the bathtub drain—not enough of a force to suck me in, but a definite emptiness, a pull. She’d nodded when my mother had asked her whatever she’d asked her, but she hadn’t smiled then either. She stepped back from the steam-producing thing she had been operating and began tallying things on the abacus, glancing back and forth between it and the pile of clothes she’d just pressed, and occasionally over at me on the bench by the entrance.
The floor of the laundry is paved with black and white tiles like the ones in the bathroom at home: hexagons. My grandfather taught me that word. I focus on the smell—a powdery, incense-y smell that I think of as “rice,” though rice never tasted that way. The lady’s clacking continues as I begin to wonder if I am being punished for my behavior earlier in the afternoon when I refused the ponytail my mother wanted me to wear. She was angry. We were late, she said, though I had no idea what for. I look out the window to scan the street for her lavender coat. Instead, I see the deaf boy. He opens the door of the laundry and greets the lady with one of his strange roaring noises. Then he turns toward me and, with a knowing nod, roars again. I stare at the Band-Aid-colored box that nests in his shirt pocket. I imagine it sends him the awful noises he repeats as speech. “Deaf” is not something you get if you eat food off the floor or swim in a public pool; it’s more like Chinese or Catholic, something that is part of you. But unlike Chinese or Catholic, deaf is terrifying.
My mother stops and speaks to this boy at length sometimes, nodding at his answers as though she understands them. He is a neighborhood character, like Sal the butcher, or Anya the German babysitter, or Leopard Lady, who teeters around in high heels, dresses in wild-animal fabrics, and laughs a screeching laugh that makes me hide in the playground bathroom, even though it smells horrible. Once I saw a streak of blood on her stockinged calf. The deaf boy accepts a box of shirts from the laundress and nearly dances out of the store, winking at me as he goes. And as the jingling door shuts behind him I know that I have been sitting in the Chinese Laundry too long. The lady comes over and sits down next to me on the bench, bringing the rice smell with her. I want to hug her but her grim expression puts an end to that. What if my mother never comes back and I have to stay at the laundry forever, like some kind of store cat?
The lady’s bony brown hand creeps onto my knee. She just gives me a quick pat, more a tap than a pat, really. “Go to sleep,” she says in a tired voice. The afternoon sun is coming in from the shop window and it warms my shoulders like a tiny shawl. I lie down on the bench.
I hear the jangle of the door as it opens to admit my mother, a tiny slender woman whose cloud of Pre-Raphaelite hair and lavender velveteen coat give her the allure of a rare flower.
“Well, look at you, snug as a bug in a rug,” she says.
“Sleeping good,” says the lady.
Did that really happen? Did my mother leave me at the Chinese Hand Laundry so she could meet a man? I can’t believe that about “my mother,” but I can believe it about Adeline.
The problem of crossing Court Street brings me back to the present. There is a narrow ravine through the filthy snow and though its banks are hazardous, there are too many New Yorkers trying to cross here for anything as civilized as queuing to happen. I am teetering along over the ridge when gravity catches me for a moment and I almost fall, which is a sensation worse than actually falling: the rush of adrenaline, the sense of imminent disaster. Can a person be trapped by memories? Harmed?
I pick my way carefully across the ice-glazed flagstones in front of Borough Hall and down the uneven stairs that flank the courthouse till I am on the windswept shore of Adams Street, waiting for its interminable light. I crossed this street for fifty-something years without knowing its name—no one lives here. At the traffic island, I look over my left shoulder at the mirage-like Empire State Building in the distance. Hello, old friend.
In front of the tall building in which I work, a twenty-foot-tall inflated plastic rat has been placed to remind visitors that the building’s owners are hiring non-union electricians. When I was a freelancer I used to hesitate and worry before I crossed a rat-line (which is not exactly a picket). Now that I am a union member I blow right by, although I do still smile at the enormous ugliness of the thing: I think the person who invented the inflated rat was a genius.
In the elevator, I press 28 and unzip my coat. I am lucky I don’t have to work amid the ancient file cabinets and shrieking steam pipes of Livingston Street or in that 1970s dump on Court Street, where the forty-year-old vertical blinds make the windows look like they’re full of skeleton teeth. Our of fice has late-model Steelcase cubicles, clean bathrooms, and a wraparound view of the harbor. In Manhattan, an office with a comparable view would be housing a law firm or an investment bank (I temped at places like that, back when I could afford to not have health insurance). At the Education Department they buy off-brand Post-its that don’t stick, and the water coolers are usually dry, but I can see three bridges and the Statue of Liberty, not to mention New Jersey.
32
Nora
On my chair is one of those big interoffice envelopes that’s sealed by a piece of red string wound around a cardboard button. It contains a manila folder—a case file—with a typewritten label on its tab. The label says: Harold, Singer—a classic data-entry mistake. Clever Shonda Deville has had the perspicacity to check not just the name of the teacher I requested, but its inverse! I forgive her for her email stationery and cursive font.
The only things in the folder are a hearing decision from March 1999—a case I hadn’t known about till now—and a much-copied form indicating that the rest of the file’s contents have been removed under some subparagraph of the teachers’ union contract. The decision says that, in the case of Sarfati vs. NYCED, although Singer showed poor judgment, there was no evidence of sexual impropriety, and he had shown adequate remorse. His job and salary were restored to him.
I log into my computer and open my email. At the top is a message from Beth, from last night. “My client accepts your offer of immediate retirement plus fifty thousand dollars. Please prepare the stipulation for expedited handling.” I didn’t say fifty and she knows it, but still, it seems she must have thought we already had a deal when she came to meet me last night and I feel guilty about that. Then it comes back to me: that phone call. It must have been four in the morning— did that happen? Was that really her?
My heart is actually beating faster as I swivel back to the part of my desk that has been overtaken by paperwork. I start putting things in piles, trying to think through what my options are. Three strikes is not an argument, I realize, but finding out about this earlier case has re-re-re-convinced me that Singer should not be anywhere near a classroom. I call Beth.
“What about this case from 1999?” I say when she answers. She doesn’t miss a beat.
“That girl should never have been in public school. I think they just put her there so they could sue. You know they do that, right, the Orthodox?”
“Use their teenage daughters to entrap rapists? How would that even make sense?”
“Ask your coworkers in Special Ed.” (She means the families who sue the city for failure to provide special education services in Yiddish every year, and then fund their religious schools with the settlement monies, but this is the very definition of a red herring.)
“I know all about that. But it has nothing to do with this.”
“What did they ask for? Money. Not for the so-called rapist to be punished or removed from the classroom or anything rational. Just a half a million dollars. They should have been put in jail.”
This line of argument is so off-kilter
I don’t even know how to react. “You’re scaring me,” I hear myself say.
“Remember those people who chained their kid to the radiator, in the eighties? There are sicko Jews, too, Nora. No one likes to hear it, but it’s true.” Is she decompensating, falling apart, right now on the phone?
“I’m withdrawing our offer,” I say.
For a second or two she is silent, and when she says, “You can’t do that,” her voice is different, no longer outraged but scared. “That’s not how you do business!”
“This isn’t business. A girl was raped. Girls, I should say.”
“You’ll get written up—it’s not how this works.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, no, of course not.”
I wait for her to explain how “you’ll get written up” was not a threat. I’ve been at the ED long enough to know that a write-up is the beginning of the end. But when she resumes speaking, she’s back in her lawyer voice: “Obviously you’re on some mission for justice or something—wasn’t that your grandfather’s big poem? Anyway, you’re trying to settle old scores. I think you should recuse yourself.”
“Virtue, not justice. And maybe you should.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, Nora. I’ll just say that.”
“Like what?”
“We can talk about it when this is behind us.”
“If it’s related to the case, you’d better tell me now.”
“Yeah, well, right now it looks like I have to prepare for a hearing.”
She hangs up on me. It’s not the first time but I had forgotten how galling it feels and I want to call right back and tell her she’s behaving like a teenager. I stare at the phone.
She sounded completely crazy, and I realize I’m frightened—not of being fired, or of physical danger, but of losing her before I’ve even had a chance to find her. Not the Beth from last night, and certainly not the one from this morning, but the one in the picture from Daisy Kramer’s brother’s bar mitzvah in 1970—that girl. My first real friend.
33
Nora
Isend Jocelyn an email asking if she has a minute—she’s going to need to find someone to go to this hearing and argue with Beth because even if I wanted to do that, I wouldn’t stand a chance. Time is tight, so after waiting for a reply, I go over to her office, which is empty.
I don’t mean that she’s just not sitting in it, I mean most of her not-insignificant personal clutter is gone: the napkins, the framed photos. Two plastic wastebaskets are in front of the desk, crammed full of paper and folders. The bust of Elvis remains, holding open the door, but I never believed that was really hers in the first place.
“Weird, right?” says Ktanya, who sits with her back to Jocelyn’s door and sees me hovering.
“Yeah,” I say. “What happened?”
“No idea. About an hour ago, she came back from somewhere and slammed around for ten minutes and then she left. I heard her rustling around and stuff but I didn’t even realize she was gone gone till I turned around and looked.”
“Check New York One,” says Joe, a disembodied voice from the next cubicle. Ktanya turns back to her computer and opens the news website.
“I don’t see anything,” she says after a moment of scanning and scrolling.
“All the way at the bottom, on the right,” says Joe. “‘Education Dept. Officials Skim Funds.’”
“No way,” I say, aware that everyone within earshot is now following along. It’s weird how suddenly and silently we have united around this nugget of improbable gossip. “I can imagine a lot of things about Jocelyn, but stealing isn’t one of them.”
“Word,” says a voice down the row, maybe Khan.
“It doesn’t say anything about Jocelyn,” says Ktanya.
“Ray Landi?” says Joe. “That’s her boyfriend.”
“Oh, come on,” says Ktanya. “She’s a lesbian. Everyone knows that.”
Jocelyn the lesbian seems as unlikely to me as Jocelyn the thief. But I guess a single, childless woman over forty is an anomaly that people feel must be explained. I’d done it myself, to be honest—supplied her with an early avocation to the church, or a ravaging cancer, or a first marriage better left un-mentioned . . .
“I need someone to assign an attorney,” I announce. No one volunteers. Why would they?
I return to my desk, sit down, and stare passively at the computer. After a minute—or five—the Facebook message window pops up. Beth Winslow, it says. Who?
Nora, are you there?
I stare at the blinking box. I put my fingers on the keyboard and start to type Yes but then I back up. Winslow was her son’s name, I remember. Beth comments:
Nora is typing it says. So?
Finally, I type what I mean:
—All too weird.
—Let’s talk. I mean, as friends.
—I’m still on the case, aren’t you?
—Getting an adjournment.
This means it goes back into the queue, that someone else will catch it when a new hearing date is scheduled—mean-while, her guy’s payroll is still suspended and he’s clocking seven hours a day in the rubber room.
It makes the most sense, she writes. For both of us.
—Why?
I wait, but no text appears. Finally, I write: It makes sense for both of who?
You and me, obviously, she comes back.
OK, I type, and then click the X to make the window go away. I swivel away from the screen and look at my desk. What just happened? I had all the power and then I didn’t. What the fuck?
The piles of manila folders representing my eighty-five other open cases are still sitting there, untouched since yesterday morning, ready to bury me in their tedium. The news of Jocelyn’s disappearance has no doubt crackled through the whole office by now and I’m sure some of my coworkers have already given up any pretense of doing their jobs and are openly reading the gossip blogs, reviewing March Madness brackets, texting away on their cell phones . . .
I go back to Facebook and do what I was planning to do twenty minutes ago: look for old Beth. It doesn’t take me long to find those bar mitzvah pictures, square-format shots with the blues faded and signs of brittleness at the edges. The first one I stop at shows three girls seated at a round table littered with plates of cake and cans of Tab. Behind them, unlit but unmistakable because of the mirror-embroidered hippie dress that was almost identical to the one I had, is Beth—as much of a flower child as any twelve-year-old could have wanted to be, her dark bangs grazing her eyelashes, her dangly earrings glittering. I was so angry at her for getting that dress, for copying me. The next picture is of Daisy’s parents visiting a table with various Academy teachers and also members of the kitchen and maintenance staff—the Kramers were good liberals. Bob Rasmussen is there, too, as broad-shouldered and rabbity-faced as I remembered. And he is wearing a dashiki. What a fuckwad. I click forward, searching for the image that has stuck in my memory and, two shots later, there it is: the dance floor, with Beth well in frame, doing the shoulder-shivery Frug move that used to make me embarrassed for her.
The first time I saw this image online, it took me straight back to 1970. Beth was the first person I knew to begin converting her schoolgirl hair into a proper mane by bending forward from the waist and tossing it into high-volume disarray. It struck me then as a hideous affectation—so very not the act of “a natural woman.” Now, I realize that she had a vision of herself as a sexual being, even then, and that intimidated me. Like Rasmussen, she had complete certainty of her own allure and I hated both of them for it. My eye drifts to the photo’s caption and I notice that Beth has been tagged since I last was here: “Beth Winslow,” it says, in the blue color that means the link is clickable. I wonder why she thinks she needs a pseudonym. Of course, I click.
Her profile picture looks like it was taken outdoors by someone who loves her. It’s beautiful: her smile is an unself conscious blaze of gums and teeth and has the sense of
self that only comes from time. I wonder if I have ever looked that way—I must have but I’ve never really had a boyfriend who liked taking my picture. Maybe I’ve never much liked having my picture taken. I mean not the way Beth evidently does, and always has. Exploring her albums, I see what I always see on Facebook: beach vacation; fancy dinner of some kind; hiking, swathed in Gore-Tex; clowning around at the Piazza San Marco. I don’t see any kids, though, and the husband is apparently camera shy—he’s in the pictures as an arm, a shoulder, a partial face. There is only one of him and her together full-length, standing in front of a fireplace in what I take to be a nice restaurant or a fancy hotel—they are dressed up. He is tall, bald, and colorless, older than she is—a perfect dentist or insurance agent with his pretty wife in a black cocktail dress and sparkly necklace. The life she always wanted. Have I not met her at every dinner party or friend’s kid’s bar mitzvah/ graduation/wedding I’ve ever attended? How many of the other well-meaning lefty suburbanites I’ve known lead double lives as hookers, or pervert-defenders? The imaginary Beth I’ve been traveling with all these years was a pliable figure, a mental Barbie, but the new Beth is chimeric, confounding.