The Question Authority. Rachel Cline

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СКАЧАТЬ and this one can probably help you out. End of speech.” She turns and leaves after a strange, ceremonial nod. Gina steps inside my cube and leans her butt on the desktop.

      “Isn’t she a kick?” she says of Jocelyn.

      “It hadn’t occurred to me to view her as anything other than an authority figure,” I say, which is true, but sounds so stiff and schoolmarmish that I want immediately to start over. I like Gina, I realize. She’s funny. This place needs funny so badly it should be our motto: “New York City Education Department: Please tell us a joke!”

      “So tell me what you’ve got,” says Gina. I fill her in. She asks good questions. When I finish, I expect her to issue a solution of some sort but she just nods and waits.

      “What should I do?” I say, finally.

      “Sounds like you have a strategy,” she says. “Lowball, right? You don’t have time to really dig in and find your backup singers.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Well, if I were taking this to hearing on Monday—which I couldn’t even if I wanted to—but if I was, what I’d need are witnesses. The other side’s going to have the guy’s mother and his sister and the homeless dude he gives dollars to all there to convince the hearing officer that he’s just a good guy who bends the rules a little. The only way to play that off is to have a parade of girls saying he’s a perv, even if he never touched them. So I would basically get all his class rosters and start calling.”

      “You can do that?”

      “Right, I don’t think you have access to that stuff. And even if you did, it takes forever to pull the records. And then, nine times out of ten, the family doesn’t want the girl to testify: they think they’re protecting her. Like even just talking about sex is dirty—and as though that pathetic little hearing room was open court. I don’t think anybody realizes till they get there that it’s more like a mechanic’s waiting room than bum-pum. Right?”

      I nod. It takes me a second to understand that the two-note sound bum-pum means the TV franchise Law and Order but when I do, I can’t help but smile. I find this woman so interesting—I’ve passed her in the halls dozens of times, and based entirely on the flowered dresses and her choice of profession, I’d assumed she was from a different planet than mine. Of course, I assume that about everyone—it’s something I need to work on.

      “I don’t know why people don’t see that getting your daughter on record against a real creep is keeping her safe, not to mention teaching her to stand up for herself. Nobody wants to consider how this stuff tends to come back and haunt you later on, and how crap the statute of limitations is in New York.”

      I remember this coming up on that Facebook thread about Rasmussen that appeared last year, but I never really took in the details. “How crap is it?”

      “If you don’t start proceedings by the time you’re twenty-three, tough luck.”

      I think about myself at twenty-three—I was still under multiple delusions about the transformative power of growing up. I don’t think I started really noticing how much the stuff with Rasmussen had affected me until I was in my forties.

      “I had a teacher like this guy,” I say to Gina.

      “He raped you?” she asks.

      “Some of my friends. I almost went on a camping trip where it probably would have been me, too, but I changed my mind at the last minute.”

      “Smart kid,” says Gina, but she looks at her watch and I realize she needs to go, and I need to get back on this thing.

      “Thanks so much,” I say. And she says, “Any time.”

      I have forgotten all about the email I was about to read, but when I wake up my monitor, there it is:

      Dear Ms. Buchbinder,

      Thank you for your correspondence in the matter of Harold Singer. As you know, the hearing is set for Monday so time is of the essence. The latest we can accept an offer for consideration would be tomorrow at noon.

      Sincerely,

      Elizabeth Cohen

      P.S. I knew a Nora Buchbinder a long time ago, in Brooklyn Heights. Is that you?

      10

      Nora

      At the end of the summer between seventh and eighth grades, Beth and I swore we would never, ever, ever become members of Rasmussen’s cult. (We didn’t have the concept of “cult” yet—this was pre-Moonies—but we knew that there was something more than nicknames that bound together the eighth-grade girls every year.) We were in Beth’s finished basement—a large wood-paneled room decorated with caricatures of her parents drawn at Grossinger’s Resort: giant-headed, tooth-heavy creatures skiing, golfing, riding on a speedboat. We sat at the bamboo-edged wet bar, a piece of sky-blue American Tourister hand luggage open on the counter between us. The case contained Beth’s mother’s castoff makeup collection and had a mirror mounted inside its lid. In my mind its contents present a perfect still life, a pile of very specific detritus that I can see as if it were a photograph.

      “Do you think they actually do stuff with him?” Beth asked me. I didn’t have to ask who “they” or “him” were, even though we’d been actively recapping our respective summer vacations until that very second. “Gross me out!” I’m sure I responded, and I’m sure we giggled, because that was what we mostly did together, in and out of school. Beth had orange lipstick on her teeth. I watched her prime a cake of eyeliner with spit. I remember the sensation of having my eyelids painted, knowing the cool slickness was saliva but not minding, really. “You should wear this to school,” she told me. I probably said, “When chickens have teeth,” because that was one of our running jokes—a reference to the time in sixth grade when Beth had attempted to comment on an overly obvious plot turn in Encyclopedia Brown by rhetorically asking, “I mean, is the Pope Jewish?” Then we played Would You Rather.

       Touch Bob Rasmussen’s penis or eat a raw hamburger?

       Let Bob Rasmussen put his tongue in your mouth or spend a day locked in the first-floor broom closet with Mrs. Cashin’s farts?

      Broom closet, I said, but it wasn’t necessarily true. The tongue thing would only last a second and I would kind of like to know what that feels like, although it would have to be over as soon as I said so. The closet would be hard for me, even fart-free. I get claustrophobic.

      Beth and I often argued. In retrospect, the subject seemed to have always been a version of the same thing: what was the truth and which one of us understood it? Once, in Beth’s recently redecorated bedroom (which featured an “Expressionist” painting that precisely matched the colors in the olive-, turquoise-, and navy-checkered bedspreads), I pointed out that her new wood paneling was not real. Beth would more readily have accepted that the earth was flat. I didn’t know the term “particle board,” but I could see that the wood grain pattern repeated itself, and was printed on the surface rather than integral to it—I have always looked at things a little too closely. Another time, we stopped speaking for two days over a magazine ad for blonde hair dye, which showed a woman beside a “candid” photo of her supposed younger self, with identical locks. Beth believed this to be a real childhood photo of the model as a young СКАЧАТЬ