The Question Authority. Rachel Cline

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СКАЧАТЬ 6 in Shiprock to watch girl-porn on my laptop like the disgusting old pervert my daughter believes me to be. I tell myself it will be easier to own up to my crimes tomorrow if I can gin up enough self-disgust tonight. But it’s always the same old problem—how much is enough? Long day, Peanut. Time to hit send.

      4

      Naomi Rasmussen

      (B. MARCH 1950, D. SEPTEMBER 1982)

      When I went by the Academy that first day in 1968, that was the first time I really saw how unlike the rest of them we were. I’d been just a kid myself, really, when we got to Brooklyn—when Bob was teaching at that public school where all the kids were black. Those people felt more like my people even though they were nothing like it. But waiting for him at the Academy, I saw how we looked to the mothers there—that we were from the wrong part of town, even though we lived around the corner. The Academy mommies wore their sunglasses on top of their heads like they had a second set of eyes up there, and they had no socks on with their tennis shoes. Back home, not wearing socks was like not wearing a bra—a sure sign that you come from filth and it won’t be long before you're back to it. In first grade, I had no socks and I won’t ever forget that feeling.

      The Academy building was just as hard to figure—a mansion, surely, but stuck between its neighbors shoulder to shoulder just like our brokedown brownstone around the corner, like all the houses in Brooklyn, it seemed like. And then there came Bob Rasmussen, such a show-off, with his cowboy boots and his blanket vest and his wavy red hair. . . . That’s my husband, I thought, and I was proud to stand there with Archer on my hip. We looked like freaks.

      We didn’t yet say that word to mean “hippies,” but still I was happy that we were different, and young, and free.

      Being dead gives a person a lot of leeway. No joy, but perspective. You girls may judge us now, but Bob depended on me and that made my life make sense. I was the keeper of keys and buyer of food; I paid the bills, kept gas in the camper van, did the cleaning, bookkeeping, writing out of mimeos, and filing of negatives. I kept track of your nicknames. I braided your hair. It was a role I knew how to play—watched my ma do it. I knew she wasn’t happy, but I saw how it was right for her anyway. Happy isn’t everything. And for a long time I didn’t even know what I’d got, that our life wasn’t just like every other life a girl might marry into, when all she cares about is getting away from where she was.

      5

      Nora

      On the way back to my cubicle from Jocelyn’s office I pass the backs of three of my coworkers—we are referred to as “paralegals” but are in fact “Special Clerical Associates (provisional)” in the eyes of the civil service, and thus paid like secretaries. The desks of my fellow Bartlebys are all half-buried in file folders. Their monitor screens are plastered with spreadsheets; their gray-beige cube walls peppered with evidence of girlfriends, boyfriends, children, vacations . . . I’ve been here for three months and have not decorated mine at all. What would I post, pictures of Tin Man? I’m sure no one around here wonders about my personal life, anyway. I suspect most of them don’t even know my name.

      I put the accordion file down next to my monitor, take my seat, and rattle my mouse. I realize I’m really upset. I am not usually very concerned with politics, or justice, or things like that (which I think is what makes me reasonably good at this job—or at any rate fast, as Jocelyn has observed) but this case is different. I assume the guy is guilty—I don’t have to read a word to make that leap. Sure, there could be a crazy girl making false accusations, or a jilted lover with a vendetta, or even a misinterpretation of clumsy but not criminal behavior, but these things are not nearly as likely as a middle-aged man thinking it might be fun to seduce a teenaged girl, which is probably a crime even older than prostitution, except that I don’t think we even started calling it a crime until . . . sometime after World War II? Am I wrong about that?

      A couple months ago I got an email from Trina Franklin, one of my former classmates at the Academy—the rare African American one. She said some of them were hiring a lawyer over what happened to us in eighth grade and did I want to join. They think they might get Gloria Allred. I said no, because I couldn’t picture complaining about the minor shit that Rasmussen did with me, but it made me wonder again about Beth. Did she ever look back on that experience as an episode of abuse rather than hot sex and wild adventure (as it seemed to her at thirteen)? But even in the Internet Age, a person named Beth Alice Cohen is hard to find, especially if you’re not sure what state she’s living in. And a person named Nora Falsington Buchbinder is a slam dunk, which means she’s never looked for me. In fact, she could dial my old ULster 5 phone number from back then and get my mother’s answering machine, even now. I haven’t had the heart to throw it away.

      6

      Nora

      Eighth grade: I’m staring out the window at the leaves on the tree outside. They are light green outlined in brown with just a tiny orange line between. The green is too bright and the orange next to it clashes. They look like the colors in one of those psychedelic posters from The Fillmore. Rasmussen is reading to us from Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday’s autobiography. He’s always reading to us about black people. Being read aloud to is a big part of our curriculum here, which seems like cheating to me but I am perfectly happy to sit here looking at the tree and picturing the Baltimore row houses where Billie scrubbed people’s stoops for a nickel each, with her own brush and can of Bon Ami. Since I grew up in the city, I can always picture the lives of the people we read about. I know what a city street looks like, and what a pimp is, and now I know that the group of men drinking out of brown paper bags near the bus stop is “the corner wine club,” that the guys in white robes on the subway are disciples of the prophet Elijah Muhammad. What I can’t picture are the country clubs and pep squads in the books I get from the Scholastic book club, or what Nancy Drew’s “powder-blue roadster” looks like. Where do kids play in places where there are no vacant lots, or fire stairs, or construction sites—where the roofs are not flat enough to run around on?

      I’ve bragged about Bob Rasmussen to my neighborhood friends—he’s incredibly cool and weird at the same time. He’s twenty-six, has a beard and wears cowboy boots and rides a motorcycle named “Babe the Blue Ox.” Kids hang around at his house after school and he lets us listen to his records and read his magazines and Naomi, his wife, sometimes does projects with little Doria and Archer that we can do, too. Like tie-dyeing. I don’t like little kids so I avoid that part. In fact, I avoid the whole Bob’s-house-as-hangout thing, but I brag about it anyway.

      I’m watching Beth, who sits across the U of desks from me—he doesn’t let us sit together anymore because we giggle too much. She is drawing in her notebook, or writing. She’s the worst speller I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I think she’s a lot stupider than I am but not because of how she is as a friend; just some of the things she’s interested in—like fashion designers—are stupid and she doesn’t really like to read. She’s also boy-crazy. She would never try to describe the leaves out the window. She doesn’t come from an artistic family. When I showed her the star charts painted on the ceiling in my grandfather’s library, she asked why you would put something so fancy in a place where no one would really see it.

      I am going to write a poem about that tree outside, and it’s also going to be about The Fillmore Auditorium and Billie Holiday singing in a whorehouse, and this crazy private school with only white girls in it reading her biography when there are race riots going on like a mile away. That’s why there are so many girls here from other neighborhoods—the public schools they were supposed to go to are too scary now.

      “Okay,” Bob says, getting up from his reading posture and stretching his arms over his head so that his T-shirt goes СКАЧАТЬ