her all the more for it. After years of feeling like the dutiful daughter, now I just felt like a complete shit. Clearly I’d missed the window of opportunity to make bad behavior seem glamorous or legendary. When you grow up and act badly, you just let people down.
But no amount of distance or silence could diminish the pull of my mother from the opposite coast, three thousand miles away. I felt it daily as though we were perched on two ends of a long balancing stick. Every night I knew we were each making dinner for ourselves, listening to the radio, starting in on a bottle of wine. I knew we were each thinking of the other, each negotiating our shared store of anxieties and sorrows, each sustained—or hoping to be sustained—by our careers of teaching, reading, and writing.
And now here we were, back in Michigan, walking to and from the courthouse day after day, each toting a legal pad. We take copious notes throughout the trial, as does Solly, Leiterman’s wife. My mother and I never speak to Solly, but we hold doors open for one another with a quiet civility, perhaps in tacit acknowledgment of the fact that we can each see that the other’s situation here is just a different version of hell. Each morning all three of us send our pads through the court’s X-ray machine, where the security guard, who has somehow gotten wind of the fact that I wrote a book about Jane, greets me daily as “the author.”
I hadn’t written on a legal pad for years. But now I was remembering that I started out writing many years ago on my father’s long yellow legal pads. After my parents’ divorce, my father occasionally found himself stuck with Emily and me on days when he had to go to work, and he would bring us with him “into the office”—a law firm perched atop a glorious skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. Once up there, to keep me busy, he would give me a legal pad and a pen. That way I could pretend that I, too, was hard at work. My job was to write down everything that happened in the room—my father’s hectic pacing, his wild gesticulations on the phone, visits from fellow lawyers, Emily’s annoying behavior, the view of the slate-gray harbor below.
After my day of work I would hand my legal pads over to my father for his perusal. He thought they were brilliant. Back in the day when people unthinkingly used their secretaries for terribly inappropriate tasks, he asked his to type them up so they would look more “official”—one long story, told in episodes, entitled A Day at the Office.
When I was nine or so this penchant for reportage swerved into an obsession with a tape recorder with which I attempted surreptitiously to record the conversations of my family and friends for about a year. This was before the dawn of the miniature age, the Age of the iPod, and my tape recorder was mammoth, about the size of a portable record player. I had to swaddle it in several blankets or jackets to make it “invisible.”
My most successful covert recording from this time captured a conversation during a car ride in which my father was taking me, my best friend Jeanne, Emily, and her best friend China to an ice skating rink. At one point on the tape we pass by a car that has been pulled over by the cops. The pigs sure are out tonight , says my father. From the backseat eleven-year-old China warns that you have to be careful with cops. She says she recently heard a story about some cops who came upon a woman being raped, and instead of stopping the rape, they helped.
They helped rape her , China clarifies.
Who told you that? Your mother? my father asks.
China’s mother was Grace Slick, of the Jefferson Airplane, by this point the Jefferson Starship.
China cackles, then snorts.
I can see it now, on your parents’ next album , my father says. “ Snorts by China.”
China snorts again.
Then I pipe in: Daddy, why don’t women rape men?
Good question , he muses. What do you think?
I don’t think women have the
But no amount of distance or silence could diminish the pull of my mother from the opposite coast, three thousand miles away. I felt it daily as though we were perched on two ends of a long balancing stick. Every night I knew we were each making dinner for ourselves, listening to the radio, starting in on a bottle of wine. I knew we were each thinking of the other, each negotiating our shared store of anxieties and sorrows, each sustained—or hoping to be sustained—by our careers of teaching, reading, and writing.
And now here we were, back in Michigan, walking to and from the courthouse day after day, each toting a legal pad. We take copious notes throughout the trial, as does Solly, Leiterman’s wife. My mother and I never speak to Solly, but we hold doors open for one another with a quiet civility, perhaps in tacit acknowledgment of the fact that we can each see that the other’s situation here is just a different version of hell. Each morning all three of us send our pads through the court’s X-ray machine, where the security guard, who has somehow gotten wind of the fact that I wrote a book about Jane, greets me daily as “the author.”
I hadn’t written on a legal pad for years. But now I was remembering that I started out writing many years ago on my father’s long yellow legal pads. After my parents’ divorce, my father occasionally found himself stuck with Emily and me on days when he had to go to work, and he would bring us with him “into the office”—a law firm perched atop a glorious skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. Once up there, to keep me busy, he would give me a legal pad and a pen. That way I could pretend that I, too, was hard at work. My job was to write down everything that happened in the room—my father’s hectic pacing, his wild gesticulations on the phone, visits from fellow lawyers, Emily’s annoying behavior, the view of the slate-gray harbor below.
After my day of work I would hand my legal pads over to my father for his perusal. He thought they were brilliant. Back in the day when people unthinkingly used their secretaries for terribly inappropriate tasks, he asked his to type them up so they would look more “official”—one long story, told in episodes, entitled A Day at the Office.
When I was nine or so this penchant for reportage swerved into an obsession with a tape recorder with which I attempted surreptitiously to record the conversations of my family and friends for about a year. This was before the dawn of the miniature age, the Age of the iPod, and my tape recorder was mammoth, about the size of a portable record player. I had to swaddle it in several blankets or jackets to make it “invisible.”
My most successful covert recording from this time captured a conversation during a car ride in which my father was taking me, my best friend Jeanne, Emily, and her best friend China to an ice skating rink. At one point on the tape we pass by a car that has been pulled over by the cops. The pigs sure are out tonight , says my father. From the backseat eleven-year-old China warns that you have to be careful with cops. She says she recently heard a story about some cops who came upon a woman being raped, and instead of stopping the rape, they helped.
They helped rape her , China clarifies.
Who told you that? Your mother? my father asks.
China’s mother was Grace Slick, of the Jefferson Airplane, by this point the Jefferson Starship.
China cackles, then snorts.
I can see it now, on your parents’ next album , my father says. “ Snorts by China.”
China snorts again.
Then I pipe in: Daddy, why don’t women rape men?
Good question , he muses. What do you think?
I don’t think women have the
Similar Books
