The Question Authority

by Rachel Cline

  I page back through her recent pictures. Now I see that what she is actually doing in the Piazza San Marco is the “exit, stage left” pose: one elbow cocked backward, the other hand leading out, both shoulders slightly raised. It was the tagline of a cartoon character from our childhood, a giant pink cat who lisped—Snagglepuss, a favorite of Rasmussen’s. I’m sure that was some poor girl’s nickname, eventually. It’s amazing that I can recognize this gesture, that it has survived all these years. I page back to the two of them, standing up in formal clothes; I look at his size and his shape instead of his face and coloring. He is a full foot taller than she is, which would make him six foot four, and he squares his shoulders in a suit coat the same way he did in a dashiki.

  It’s Rasmussen. Has he had her all along?

  34

  Nora

  On the blackboard, the stethoscope shape of the ovaries, uterus, and vagina is centered between a needlessly buxom pair of inverted parentheses representing a woman’s torso. Rasmussen is describing the relationship between the menstrual cycle and fertility from the point of view of when it’s okay or not okay to fuck. He doesn’t say “fuck,” he says “have sex,” of course. He is certainly the most reasonable-sounding person I have ever heard utter the word “vagina.” He is not trying to make trouble when he tells us, “You can actually tell when this happens, although the first few times you probably won’t know what it is,” but the whole situation is so unbearable to me that I can’t help but argue.

  “That’s impossible!” I call out, while he has his back to us. “We don’t have skin inside us so we don’t have nerves. Anyway, obviously we can’t feel a practically microscopic cell detaching. That would be like feeling an eyelash fall off.”

  But as soon as he turns away from the blackboard, I see the self-satisfied smirk on his face and I know I have only made things worse.

  “You say you can’t feel pain in your organs, Nora?”

  “I said it would be scientifically impossible to feel an ovum doing anything.”

  “Any one of you young ladies have personal experience here?” Bob asks the room. My classmates practically leap out of their seats with offense and righteous indignation (“Like we’d tell you!” “Out of bounds!” “Gross!”) but he loves nothing more than a fight.

  “I think ‘he who smelt it dealt it’ would be the operative principle here, Tiddlywinks,” he says, shooting a look at the screechiest screecher, who blushes ferociously. Then he sweeps the rest of us with his smug I’ve-got-you-exactly-where-I-want-you look. “In any case, I’m certain that most of you have firsthand experience with which you can enlighten Nora.” He returns to the board and starts drawing chromosomes.

  Relief. He’s not going to make an example of me.

  “Don’t worry, Nora, you’ll have a body worth looking at someday,” he adds. My classmates laugh at me. I want to fly across the room and stab him in the throat with my Flair pen.

  “Anyway, I’ll keep my back turned and on the count of three, I want any of you who’ve felt something like, I don’t know, pain? during your period to raise your hand so Nora can see.”

  The hands shoot up. Turns out it’s everyone in the damn room but me and Daisy. “Okay,” starts Bob. The hands shoot back down. He turns around and takes a step toward my desk, smirking for all he’s worth. “’Nuff said?” My stabbing fantasy resumes but it’s also ridiculous and I see that. I would be like a gnat on his giant carcass. And anyway the rest of them are all apparently women now, and I am some kind of null set, a firework that didn’t explode. And the worst part is there was something going on in my body from pretty much the instant he announced the topic of today’s lesson. His unsexy description of the mechanics, which assumed we would all soon be using this knowledge if we weren’t already, had set off all kinds of—not fantasies, not ideas—just seeds of thoughts, starting to feel watered and warmed, and that was probably why I had to yell out my objection in the first place. I had to stop the shoots. And now that feeling and the misery of having been wrong, the shame of being flat and sexless, and the rage that I know better than to express are all mixed up in my gut. I will never forgive him for this. I have been drawing in my notebook—angry squares inside of squares inside of squares made with lines so dark I have flattened the tip of my pen. When I finally look up again, everyone is fully absorbed in the lesson about dominant and recessive traits.

  35

  Nora

  Iwalk home from work, head into the wind, trying not to think about Beth and Bob together but it’s like trying not to think of an elephant. She married him. She sleeps in his bed. He didn’t die, or go to jail, or fall into a hole in the earth. And what’s more, he is loved. The ways Beth tried to manipulate me into settling the case this afternoon now seem diabolical instead of pathetic. She’s not just accidentally defending a bent teacher, she’s an accomplice. Singer and Ras-mussen and how many others? Was her story about being a hooker even true? The one about losing her son?

  I think again about that eerie phone call last night. The memory of her sobbing now has a different cast: just by being his willing partner, referring to him casually as “my husband,” she has behaved monstrously and she knows it. Him, I can’t even think about. Not really.

  How can it be that I wind up alone, and they get domesticity? This thought feels like it will bury me if I let it. I have to talk to someone else about this or I will go out of my mind. But the obvious person to talk to about it is Beth herself. Who else?

  My mother. But I don’t have one of those, either. And when I did, I hated her. Is this self-pity? I think of Mom’s last day— she was comatose but had a beautiful East River view seen only by myself and the nurses. The sight of her stricken figure, curled like a comma in that mechanical bed, filled my lungs, drowning me. All the things I’d never get to say, all the things I’d failed to explain, all the missed and broken connections that bound us to each other . . . It was too much for one person to mourn.

  Inside the apartment, I head straight to the master bathroom, start the multi-headed shower, and leave my clothes in a pile on the floor. Under the main showerhead, with all three horizontal jets pelting my torso, I focus on erasure—scrubbing with my coarse plastic sponge, getting behind my ears and between my toes, telling myself that I can scrape away all the residue if I put in enough effort. Because, what else? What now?

  In my bathrobe, I lie down on the library floor and look up at my grandfather’s mural. The constellation I see first is Cassiopeia and from her I can infer Perseus, Andromeda, and Ursa Minor. As a child I knew more of what those names represented but none of it has stayed with me, nor do I know how the shapes I see—the W, the square, and the saucepan—add up to a queen, a soldier, or the smaller of two bears. I grasp at the idea of order, of stories embedded in random patterns, of pictures that go on looking the same to the people standing on Earth despite eons of distance and oceans of time. I used to think if I lay here long enough thinking these thoughts I could go there: to mythological time, to deep space. I used to think there was a different world possible for me, and that getting there was just a matter of blurring my eyes in a certain way, or of saying certain words in Latin or Greek, or of taking one good picture. That was what I used to think.

  36

  Nora

  While I’m lying on the library floor, my cell phone rings. The display says “NYC Ed Dept,” which I think must mean Jocelyn. She’s the only person at work who has my cell number. I’m kind of afraid to answer it, but also grateful for an opportunity to get out of my own head.

  “Where are you?” says the woman’s voice on the other end. Not Jocelyn’s but it’s a noisy background and I don’t know who it is. “I think you have the wrong number,” I start to say, but the caller interrupts me:

  “Nora! Get over here! We’re at Morton’s!”

  Morton’s is next door to the office. “I don’t understand,” I say, although now I recognize that my caller is Gina.

  “We’re at the
bar. We’re celebrating . . .” She says something I don’t understand.

  “What?”

  “Jocelyn’s lottery win. She and Myra’s cousins won the Powerball! Ninety-three million!”

  “Who’s Myra?”

  “You know Myra, who cleans the bathroom? Isn’t that awesome? Anyway, I’ll let her tell it. One sec.”

  As I hear the phone thrust into the cacophony at the bar, I rewind my vision of Jocelyn-the-embezzler and restore the eccentric-nut-from-Catholic-school version of her I had previously been maintaining. I can hear Gina saying, “Joss! Talk to Nora!” but she is drowned out by a group of voices counting down from ten, which I conclude has to do with drinking shots. I hear Gina shrieking with laughter. The phone is forgotten and I hang up.

  I’m standing in front of my closet, unable to decide whether to put on clothes or pajamas when the phone rings again. Again, it’s the NYC Ed Dept.

  “Seriously, get over here,” says Gina. “It’s Friday night. You’re never going to see this woman again. Don’t you want to wish her well?”

  It’s impossible to say no to Gina.

  Despite the fact that it’s fifty paces from my office, ten minutes from my house, and offers six-dollar wine at happy hour, I’ve never been inside Morton’s. The double doors of the restaurant open into a plush reception area where not checking my coat feels like an act of aggression. I tell the seventeen-year-old hostess, “I’m going to the bar,” by way of an apology, but she seems oblivious and in I go. The place is packed with men in suits. I guess they are the lawyers and judges who work in the courts, because they are not the stockbrokers and media moguls of Brooklyn Heights. I elbow my way through the initial scrum. Then I see them, occupying a large high table arrayed with barstools—a surprising assortment of my coworkers that includes Ktanya, Joe, Myra, Gina, Jocelyn, Jessica, and three or four others I recognize but haven’t spoken to since being introduced on my first day. Edward, a silent, skinny guy with long hair, claps me on the shoulder and says, “Hey, what are you drinking?” I point at his beer glass and say thanks as Gina notices me and starts waving me over to where she and Jocelyn are sharing a stool. Jocelyn is almost unrecognizable: her hair’s in a ponytail and she’s wearing a red leather motorcycle jacket. Moreover, she looks dazed. When I get to her side, I say “Congratulations! I’m so happy for you!” and find that it’s true, I am.

  She says, “I’m going to learn to surf!”

  “That’s great,” I say. “It’s perfect!”

  “I grew up practically at Breezy Point, but my father wouldn’t let me. He said it was unladylike and a waste of time.”

  I nod.

  “So fuck him!” says Jocelyn, rather loudly and slams the rest of her drink. Various others echo her sentiment and knock back their drinks—including Myra, who says something I suppose to be the equivalent in Spanish. I wonder how many cousins she has. I’m sure I learned how to say “cousin” somewhere in my six years of Spanish but all I can come up with is “novio,” which I’m pretty sure means fiancé so I just smile at her and say “Congratulations!” She is still wearing her khaki shirt and chinos with the cleaning contractor’s company name over the breast pocket. At this point, Edward hands me my beer and Gina mimes a toast at me so I drink.

  “What’s your ‘fuck ’em,’ Nora?” Gina yells across the table.

  I don’t have a ready answer to this question—or maybe I have too many. “Fuck history,” I say finally, but this happens at a momentary gap in the background noise and my comment seems to hang there, gathering social unease like flies on a dead thing.

  “Fuck history!” says Gina, raising her glass as though this is a perfectly normal toast, and then mouths Awk-ward! at me. I shrug. She shrugs back.

  “Fuck that fucker most of all,” Jocelyn adds in a drunken slur, and we all drink again.

  37

  Nora

  Speaking of history, this is my grandfather’s famous poem, “The Pursuit of Virtue at Brooklyn Heights.” It’s about the abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, whose adulterous affair with a parishioner was a nationwide scandal in 1874.

  Wandering, I found my way

  Like any man of letters,

  Across the bridge, to Brooklyn’s quay—

  A free man, closely fettered.

  I came to see the place where once,

  A great man fell to circumstance.

  “I can’t abide his infamy.”

  So testified a neighbor.

  On Orange Street, at Plymouth Church

  The man of virtue wavered.

  He told the word of God on high.

  He lived the word of God—a lie.

  Pilgrim preacher, hypocrite.

  I see him cast in bronze,

  Freer of slaves! Transcendent wit!

  Yet, man of flesh and bone.

  What say you, sage? What will become

  Of men like thee? of anyone?

  And though I hear not human speech,

  His answer rends the air:

  “Three Godly things are all I’ve gleaned:

  A hand, a plow, a star!”

  And love? I ask him with my eyes,

  Love that comes in strange disguise?

  What say you then?

  “I say that it was ever thus.

  The ‘Heights’ of ours are depths, the same.

  Let men rejoice, who are not dust.

  As none have ever died of shame.”

  I, too, live at Brooklyn Heights,

  I planted—and a garden grew.

  Of fruits or weeds, I know not yet,

  Nor will I know. Nor ever knew.

  My daughter wakes, a child of ten,

  Her nightgown, mothlike in its sheen.

  She watches me in innocence.

  She watches me as in a dream.

  38

  Nora

  Iwake up on Saturday feeling lonely. I have never used that word to describe my own feelings before. Solitary maybe, or moody or introspective, but those were all ways of mitigating the underlying need and now I just feel the thing itself, as plain as hunger or thirst. I’ve always told myself this is what drives people to behave stupidly: to marry badly, to get pregnant when they can’t afford to have kids, to befriend people who wind up stealing from them, or who just suck them dry with their neediness—all the entanglements I have so successfully avoided.

  At fourteen, I thought Beth’s life was better than mine because it looked more normal: married parents, “interior decorating,” a place to go in the summer, new clothes in the fall. And, despite her sexual adventures and her “losing my mind” letter, I had always assumed that as an adult she would revert to type, that she was living in suburbia, having babies, doing all the things I would never do. That way, I could look at my own prickliness and solitude as choices, proof of my integrity and deep convictions. At least I’m not like Beth is a sentence I’ve been saying to myself all this time. I still want to say it, but the meaning is upside down now. Have I been the one doing things right?

  It isn’t that hard to track her down. There are hundreds of Elizabeth Cohens in Brooklyn, but only three Beth Winslows: one in the Heights, which I’m sure she would have mentioned; one in Williamsburg; and one on Eastern Parkway. The one in Williamsburg turns out to be in the Hasidic part and the one on Eastern Parkway is right across from the museum in a building a lot like this one: prewar, a dozen or so stories, green awning, brown doorman. I decide that I will go to the farmer’s market and then call her, saying I am in the neighborhood. If her husband is still out of town, I will go see her, and if he’s there, I won’t. I’m not scared of him—he’s an old man now anyway. But I don’t want to see him. What I want is her explanation.

  At Borough Hall, the 2 train comes right away and is nearly empty. There’s something almost pleasant about sitting in the middle of the long, gray bench with nothing across from me but my own reflection. Near the doors sits a black man with his young daughter, clearly kicking off child custod
y Saturday. The little girl has yellow tights on and is reading Harry Potter. Her dad is staring into his phone like it’s some kind of oracle.

  I get off at Grand Army Plaza and walk the semicircular maze to the park entrance in a stiff, cold wind. The park is always further from the subway than I remember and I still haven’t figured out the best way to navigate these intersections. It starts to sleet. I put up the hood of my coat. I pull out my phone and call Beth, turning away from the wind, or trying to. Then I realize I don’t have her number in my contacts. I also don’t have the internet—my phone isn’t smart and my down coat isn’t waterproof. I am getting pelted. The only thing I can think to do is head for her presumed building. At least I can take shelter in the lobby—I assume it will have couches, or something, but of course I am stopped there by the doorman, nicely. I say, “Beth Winslow?” and as he rings her he tells me, “10F,” and gestures toward the elevators, because of course I couldn’t look more harmless and I knew the codename. But on my way up in the elevator, I panic. I press the button for 6, but I’ve passed it, then for 8 but too late, and the car stops, the door opens on 10. I hold the Door Open button, hesitating: she will be expecting me, but what if he’s there?

  Well, what if he is?

  Beth is standing in her open doorway when I get there. She looks like she got dressed in a hurry—barefoot, jeans and a sweater, no makeup. “Not that I’m not glad to see you,” she says, “but you could have called.”

  “I was at the farmer’s market and it started sleeting,” I say.

  “How’d you get my address?”

  “Used my skills,” I say, embarrassed by the relentlessness of my pursuit. “I really wanted to talk to you. We left things so unsettled.”

  “Come in,” she says, and holds open the door. There are no lights on in the apartment and though there’s a wall of windows across the room, the place seems gloomy and lifeless.