Julia, dressed today like a circus clown, in green polka-dotted pants and a ruffled orange collar like crepe paper around a lime top, greets me loudly as soon as I enter the reception area.
“Last night on TV I saw you and that black dude who fried that poor kid,” she says, her tone almost respectful for the first time.
“None of the dudes on our floor who call themselves attorneys have ever even been in a commercial.
The phone’s been ringing off the wall for you, and it’s not even nine o’clock.”
I rest the box of junk I have picked up from Mays amp; Burton on the edge of the reception desk as I pick up my messages.
As crude as she is, Julia at least is honest. The receptionist at Mays amp; Burton, a young woman I had considered a friend, just treated me a few minutes ago as if I had joined a leper colony instead of having taken a client they never would have represented in the first place.
“Good for business, huh?” I say, fishing out four messages from my slot. Three are from women and one is from a guy at the county jail. Nothing beats free advertising.
She nods, unwrapping a stick of Juicy Fruit.
“Yeah,” she advises, and begins to work the gum vigorously as if it were a piece of candle wax.
“Listen, if you’re gonna be on TV, you gotta get some decent suits. Those pants yesterday were so shiny you could of signaled a cruise ship into dock with ‘em.”
From one clothes horse to another, I think, glancing down at her to see if she is serious. She smiles magnanimously, as if she had given me a sure tip on the ninth race at Oaklawn in Hot Springs.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I say.
“Maybe there’ll be enough money for both of us.”
A puzzled look comes over her face, making her mouth look like the dot at the bottom of a question mark.
“That woman’s here to see you,” she says, pointing with her pencil to the corner of the waiting room.
I follow her eraser. A slightly built young woman is eyeing me anxiously, “You’re Mr. Gideon Page,” she says, rising and coming toward me. She is in her late twenties, attired in baggy jeans, flip-flops that most people wear only around the house, and a black T-shirt that obscurely reads in script, “Let Being Be!”
Buoyed by the prospects of new clients and the absence of hostility from Julia, I want to say something really atrocious like “the one and only,” but manage instead, “And you are… ?”
“Mona Moneyhart,” she says, staring up at me with pale blue eyes the size of dinner plates. “My husband is suing for divorce. Can I talk to you right now? I have a summons.”
I mouth to Julia to hold my calls. Let being be? What the hell does that mean? Maybe this is how young, rich society matrons dress these days. Her last name sounds promising anyway.
“Nice to meet you,” I say, picking up my load.
“You want to follow me back to my office? We can talk there.”
Like a proud parent, Julia smiles happily as if she is seeing us go off on a first date. “Would you like some coffee, Ms.
Moneyhart?” she chirps.
I can’t believe my ears and don’t dare turn around. Julia offering to get coffee? Am I in the right office building?
“No, thanks,” my potential client says in a barely audible voice and then asks me shyly, “Would you like for me to get you some?”
“I’m fine,” I say, noticing Mrs. Moneyhart is no taller than a large child. How bad could she have been? And why divorce her? It might be easier to wait until she vanishes entirely.
“Thank you, Julia,” I call over my shoulder.
In my office she flips on my light switch for me and clears a spot on my desk. I’m tempted to ask her to fluff up my chair and take off my shoes.
“Have a seat,” I tell her, “while I read this.” This will be my first divorce case ever. At Mays amp; Burton the firm specialized in personal injury cases, and at the Public De fender’s Office, of course, we just had purely criminal cases, so I’m flying by the seat of my pants. I didn’t take domestic relations in law school; now, I wish I had. What courses did I take? Did I really go? I leaf through the complaint and summons and then force myself to go through it carefully. It looks straightforward enough: her husband wants custody of their three children, possession of the house, temporary child support, attorney’s fees, and court costs. Three children?
How can this woman have had one? Her pelvis is so narrow I can’t imagine how she could have given birth to even a credit card.
“I got the summons last week,” Mrs. Moneyhart says, still on her feet. She has edged around my desk and is hovering over me.
I put the papers down on my desk.
“I can read this better if you’ll just relax a little and sit down.”
Nervously patting her stringy brown hair, which is tied by a red ribbon behind her head, Mrs. Moneyhart whimpers apologetically in a wispy tone, “Sorry.” She sighs and flops back to the chair.
“I know you’re upset,” I say, wondering how to calm down this woman. She is beginning to get on my nerves.
Perched on the edge of her chair, Mrs. Moneyhart begins to cry.
“He wants a divorce because he thinks that I deliberately burned rats in the oven! That’s not fair!”
I put the papers down and rub my eyes. Is this really my first divorce client? She better have some cash. I lean back in my chair and try to keep from sighing audibly.”
“Did you,” I say, not believing I’m asking this question, “accidentally burn some rats in your oven?”
She pulls up the bottom edge of her tee shirt and wipes her eyes, revealing a milky-white waist no bigger than one of my thighs. For an instant I think she is going to pull her shirt over her head. I’ve got to get a box tissues for my desk, or I’ll end up being charged with some kind of sex crime.
She sniffs, “They must have started getting in through the back somehow. It was real cold this winter.”
I close my eyes. I don’t know much about ovens, but mine doesn’t have a special entrance for rodents. When I open my eyes again, Mrs. Moneyhart is on her feet once more, edging closer to my desk. I am beginning to feel claustrophobic.
“How could that possibly happen?”
Mrs. Moneyhart interlaces her fingers and holds them up in front of me.
“My theory is that this screw that held this metal strip around the base in the back came out,” she says, nicking her index finger at me, “and they worked in that way. Anyway, when I took out the pan there were these two humongous rats up to their necks in blueberry muffins, just cooking away. Steve said that was the last straw.”
I can imagine. If she gets any closer, I think I will start screaming.
“I don’t think,” I say honestly, “that I’m going to have the time to help you.” Nobody has that kind of time.
Abruptly, she pulls up her T-shirt again and snatches a wad of bills from under her bra, which I can’t help noticing is black. Her chest, already frail, visibly shrinks as she showers them on my desk. There must be a thousand dollars in fifties.
“I knew it was coming to this,” she says, her voice a shrill giggle, as she stands over me again, “so I cleaned out our cookie jar at the bank the day he moved out.”
I suppose she means her bank account. I think of the check I wrote on the Blazer this past weekend to Allstate Insurance.
No wonder they’re all smiling in their commercials. I’ve got to find some health insurance now, too.
“If you will just go take a seat,” I say, unable to take my eyes off the money, “I’ll check my calendar.”
An hour later I don’t know much more than I did to start, but. God forgive me, neither does my client. I don’t even own a set of Arkansas statutes yet, so I can’t do much more than listen and nod wisely. For his grounds for divorce, her husband’s complaint alleges only the barest legal conclusions, “general indignities,” as if his attorney, a man I’ve never even heard of, is too embarrassed to be more specific.
Try as she may, Mrs. Moneyhart, who has somewhat grudgingly consented to again trying to remain seated, can’t think of a single thing her husband has done to merit us filing a counterclaim. No affairs, no abuse, a good job, great in bed, her husband seems only guilty of bad judgment in having married a fruitcake.
Doodling on a yellow pad (since she has given me nothing to write), exasperated, I ask, “Can’t you think of anything bad about him? Doesn’t he have some annoying habit?”
Mrs. Moneyhart adjusts the ribbon holding her hair, tightening her skin in the process.
“Well, he’s started” she be gins to nod shrewdly “to complain a little about my cooking.”
After another fifteen minutes of mostly fruitless inquiry (she is happy to share custody of the children), I promise to call her the next day after I have contacted her husband’s attorney to see how serious they are. Actually, I need the time to look up the divorce statutes. As I stand beside her waiting for the elevators (I want to make certain she gets on), I have to ask, “What does your T-shirt mean?”
Carelessly, she looks down at the fading white script, which now that her money is gone, lies flat against her chest. In a voice obviously offended by my ignorance, she says, “Surely you’ve heard of Martin Heidegger?”
I stare at my client’s chest. I called a plumber once by the name of Marvin Heidelman, but the only thing he talked about was money.
“I guess I haven’t,” I say nervously, wondering if she is going to demand her money back.
“The philosopher, silly,” she says and reaches up to kiss my cheek as the elevator door slides open. Five men in business suits watch as Mrs. Moneyhart waves goodbye at me.
“I know you’ll rip his balls off for me!” she hollers as the door closes.
Sweating profusely from nervous exhaustion, I go back inside the glass doors, now remembering Heidegger’s name from an introductory course in college. My philosophy professor (he was probably quoting another professor) once said Heidegger spent his entire life meditating on the philosophical concept of Being. And now I know his conclusion after a life’s work: Let Being Be! I can live with that. Despite her T-shirt I don’t think Mrs. Moneyhart is going to be quite so tolerant. At her desk, Julia is holding up Mrs. Moneyhart’s file by two fingers. She must have been looking at it. She says solemnly, “We’ll call this one the rat-burner case.”
It is only mid-mo ming but I feel as if I have been at work a week. I can’t wait to start returning phone calls. A cattle-prod killer and a rat burner. I’m off to a great start.
“Mr. Page?”
I nod. The girl speaking to me must be one of Sarah’s dorm assistants. She is wearing a red T-shirt and looks serious and responsible. I have brought the Blazer around to the dorm to pick up Sarah and now am trying to find her in the crush of girls and their parents. I squint at the girl’s name tag. Jenny Lacey.
“I just wanted to say how much I like Sarah,” she says, smiling.
“She’s doing fine.” “I ‘m glad to hear it,” I tell this child as if she were Sarah’s physician instead of a college student somewhere. Actually, this news is not unappreciated. Since I have been up here on the campus of Hendrix College for the parents’ session to learn what Governor’s School is supposedly all about and to take her home for a three-day break, Sarah has been uncharacteristically anxious.
“It must be quite an experience,” I say, eager to confide in the girl in order to gain information about my daughter.
“She’s written some interesting letters.”
At the session this morning for parents, a panel of her teach ere stressed that they were not trying to break our children down! The man next to me leaned over and whispered that it was nice to know we haven’t sent them off to a concentration camp.
Jenny, whose dark eyes are magnified by lenses framed in red, says blandly, “It can be a real eye-opener. Sarah’s handling it pretty well though.”
I nod but look around for Sarah. Handling what? Have they told her she has terminal cancer? One of her social science teachers, a guy who teaches at Southern Arkansas University during the year, smugly told us that after three weeks many of the kids were beginning to learn how to justify their prejudices in a rational manner. As solemn as owls, the parents (myself included) eagerly moved our heads up and down in unison as if he had announced that a cure for AIDS was imminent. I wondered but did not have the courage to ask if there was some inconsistency in this statement. Can a prejudice be justified rationally? I got a C in a course in formal logic in college, so I kept my mouth shut.
I see Sarah by the door waving at me and I catch up with her as she says fervent goodbyes to friends she has known for three weeks at most. She will be back in three days, but she is behaving as if she is departing on a jungle expedition and is not expected to survive. She insists on driving but then falls silent until we are on the main drag in Conway.
“Did you get my letter?” she asks, checking the mirror. To judge Sarah by the clothes she wears, you would never suspect that she is stunningly beautiful. She is wearing cutoffs with a hole on the thigh, and a T-shirt that says “Lobotomy Beer.”
“I get it,” I say, pointing to her shirt.
“Is that what smart kids drink?”
Sarah glances down at the stitching and grins.
“We trade clothes a lot, I guess. I think one of the guys got it in Florida.”
Great. At their parties do they undress in front of each other and hand over their underwear, too? I am beginning to wonder if Governor’s School is getting out of hand. I fight down a desire to tell Sarah about my friend Amy Gilchrist.
Alcohol and sex have a way of ending up in the same bed.
“Your letter made it sound like you talk about some pretty heavy ideas,” I say, hoping that I have not used a hopelessly outdated expression.
Sarah tilts her head and instantly becomes distressed.
“I’m a real idiot. Even those kids from real small towns have thought about stuff I’ve never spent five minutes on.”
I clear my throat, apparently hoping to scrape up some wisdom. Instead all I get is a mouthful of phlegm. Reluctant to gross out my daughter in the first minute, I swallow it.
“Sarah, a lot of these kids are probably pretty shy and introverted and don’t do much but sit around and read all the time. You probably have a lot more friends.”
This is not the right thing to say. Sarah looks at me as if I’ve just voiced the most trivial concern ever uttered by a human being. She says crossly, “My friends at home and I don’t talk about anything but who likes who, and how mean our teachers are, and what we’re going to do on the weekend, which is nothing.”
I look out the window at downtown Conway and see two teenagers standing idly on the corner and resist the temptation to roll down the window and yell at them, “Which way to the public library?” Adults talk about the same things, and the world is still spinning, but I don’t say this. It would just confirm her worst suspicions. I offer, “People have been thinking deep thoughts for at least three thousand years and the world is still in a mess. I don’t think we’re going to be able to think our way out of it.” As Martin Heidegger allegedly said, but I don’t say. Let Being Be!
Sarah turns onto the street leading to the interstate. How would you know? her expression says. I wonder whether I should tell her that I was fired. I guess she was too busy thinking to see me on the tube the last couple of nights. I hate to worry her when she sounds so depressed.
“That’s the problem!” she says passionately.
“Nobody really thinks. They just shoot off their mouths, and if it’s glib enough, people go all to pieces like they’ve really heard something special.”
Glib? Not one of Sarah’s words. At least not around me.
One of her teachers? Or one of the words from a misunderstood small-town genius? Possibly the owner of a can of Lobotomy Beer? I’ll have to start doing a glibness check before I speak. As we pull onto 1-40 and head east, I say, “It’d be kind of quiet if people had to first figure out before they opened their mouths whether their words had a decent shot at immortality.”
Sarah laughs, the first sign of normality since I’ve seen her, but she says, “That’s exactly the kind of flip remark I’m good at. I can make people laugh, but that’s all. Nobody takes me seriously, and I don’t blame them.”
Her cheeks are red. If I weren’t in the car, she’d be crying.
This is absurd.
“You wouldn’t have been selected if they thought you were the village idiot,” I protest.
She shakes her head but does not take her eyes off the road.
“I got nominated partly because the teachers like me. Be sides, I probably count as a minority.”
I have thought this, too, but so what? No matter how you slice it, there’s more to success than just brains even in a so-called gifted and talented program. I have never really thought of Sarah as a member of a minority before. At the rate my career is going, I won’t care if she claims to be a full-blooded Hottentot if it will help her to get a scholarship to college. But maybe it bothers her.
“If that’s true,” I ask carefully, “does the minority part bother you?”
She clinches the steering wheel.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“I’ve never thought about what I am. I have Negro blood, don’t I?”
“Some,” I say.
“Is that a big deal?”
Sarah runs her right hand through her curly ebony hair.
She surprised me by getting it cut short before Governor’s School. Her haircut shows her ears and looks good. For fifty bucks it ought to. I wanted to choke her when she told me how much she had spent. But it was her own money. She got a job in the spring at Brad’s Health Shoppe as a checker bagger.
“Dad, there’s a camp I want to go to as soon as Governor’s School is out. It’s just a week. It’s sponsored by the Arkansas Conference of Christians and Jews. A lot of my friends from Governor’s School are going.”
I study my daughter’s profile. Her light-brown skin makes me wonder how much African blood actually flowed in her mother’s veins. Rosa said she thought her great-grandmother had been brought to Cartagena as a slave. I have never told Sarah, nor, to my knowledge, did Rosa.
“Where do you fit in?” I ask, knowing this is going to lead to religion. We might as well cover the waterfront while we’re on the big questions.
Sarah bites at a fingernail on her left hand. I notice for the first time her nails are not painted. What has happened? Be fore Governor’s School she wouldn’t leave the house unless they practically glowed in the dark.
“Thanks to you,” she says irritably, “I’m not sure.”
Shit. Guilt begins to seep into the car like carbon mon oxide. I look out the window at fields of soybeans and think back to Rosa’s agonizing death. If that was a part of some body’s divine plan, spare me the other details. If I’d been smart, I would have made Sarah attend Mass, and by now she would have been sick of it and quit. Most kids do. I did especially after being made to go off to a Catholic boarding school.
“You can go to Mass any time you like. It’s not like they have it just once a year,” I say defensively.
“They let people who are atheists go to Camp Anytown,” my daughter says.
“You don’t have to be religious.”
An atheist! That sounds so lonely. Sarah has been the sort of kid who hasn’t demanded that kind of clarity from life.
Events have turned on a narrow radius of school, boys, and friends. ” So you don’t believe God even exists?” I say, making certain she knows I’m taking her seriously. One false note from me, and the radio will come on. The radio! The absence of her music is surely a measure of the weightiness of this conversation.
“So you’re a deist?” she asks, turning on the blinker to pass a truck.
I haven’t really thought about this subject for ten minutes since I left Subiaco, but a deist sounds safe enough. God minding His business; humans minding ours. Let Being Be!
“Sort of, I guess. Thomas Jefferson was a deist,” I say, wanting to put myself in good company.
Sarah smiles at my old trick of clothing myself with authority.
“I think deism is a cop-out,” she says finally, taking a wide swing around a mud-caked moving van in front of us.
“What’s the point of believing anything if all you’re going to believe is that God created the world?”