Lemon Reef (2 page)

Bea McVee, the presiding judge of the family court, appeared in my doorway. She filled the frame, standing her full five feet eleven, with gray dreads falling around her soft brown face and past her narrow shoulders.

“Jenna.” She was already laughing about something, had apparently dropped in to tell me what it was. “Jenna?”

I lifted my face from my hands, watched her smile shrink and her dark-brown eyes narrow with bewilderment. “My friend died.” Swatting at the tears as one would an intrusive fly, I added, “My first love. She was my…” My throat closed.

Bea entered farther and took a seat across from me at my desk. I noticed the freckles that spotted her cheeks, a youthful detail on this near seventy-year-old face.

“Died how?”

“They think she had a heart attack. She was scuba diving.”

“I see.” Then Bea said, “Well, how old was she?”

“Thirty-one.” I shrugged, as if to say I had no idea how to explain it. “I'm thinking about going to the funeral.”

It wasn't easy asking for time off without any notice and being brand new, but Bea nodded expectantly, indicating that my newness wasn't a factor, emergencies happen. She was the reason I was in this position. I had clerked for Bea when I was in law school. I was twenty-two, queer, rageful, irrepressible. I fought with anyone who disagreed with me; dismissed out of hand people far more important than I; argued relentlessly for everyone to act as though things worked the way they ought to.

After the first week, Bea sat me down. “Jenna, you have considerable legal talent, but your demeanor leaves
much
to be desired. You have all the strengths of a young person who's done it on her own.” As Bea knew I had. “And,” she added, “all the blind spots.” In the end, my strengths won out. After I graduated, Bea lobbied to get me hired half-time as the staff attorney for the family court. “Wait until you see the salary before you thank me,” she had said. She wasn't kidding.

But there was nobody I would have rather worked for and nothing I would have rather done. I filled the other half of my time working as an attorney representing indigent families at a nonprofit in Oakland. When, seven years after I was first hired, the commissioner position came open, Bea McVee, along with several other judicial officers, encouraged me to apply. I was hesitant at first because I was young and inexperienced as commissioners go. A main concern of the hiring committee, which I shared, was whether I would be able to manage the attorneys over whose cases I presided. Now, three weeks into the position, we waited to see.

Bea said, “Just let me know if you decide to go to the funeral, so I can arrange for coverage for you.” I may have been staring off, or perhaps she was responding to something else about me, but she pressed her lips together, sat quietly, and watched me. When I finally met her gaze, she said, “Why do I get the feeling there's more to this?”

“More? No, I don't think so. It's just a funeral.”

“Mm, hmm.” She waited.

“Well, there's a little more to it.” I thought for a moment about how much to say. I was already late for my afternoon calendar. “She has a kid.” The thick glass and sinuate light mired my view of the Federal Building across the street. “A daughter.” As I said it, I noticed an ache, as if anesthesia was beginning to wear off, and I could feel the edges of a pain I knew to be much greater.

“How old?”

“Ten. She's ten now.”

“She's with her father?”

I pushed my lips out in a pucker and nodded. “He may not be the best person to raise her,” was what I said.
He's a fucking creep
, was what I thought.

Her quietness told me she was connecting the dots and drawing her own conclusions. “So, you're going to Miami to attend the funeral, right?” The question caught me by surprise. “What I mean is, do I need to worry about you?” When I didn't respond, she said, “Nobody makes commissioner by thirty, Jenna. You'll be a judge for sure, someday, if you keep your head about you.”

My clerk was at my door urging me to get started. I stood up, flattened my robe, and wiped my face.

“I should go. I'm keeping Alex Sanders waiting,” I said, referring to an attorney I often clashed with.

Bea scrunched her face in a way that was both curious and challenging.

“I'm too new to get a complaint.”

“By him? It would be a feather in your cap, as far as I'm concerned.”

As I was passing her to leave, Bea grabbed my hand, and I turned back to face her. “I'm serious, Jenna. Before you go taking on anyone in Florida, remember, you have a lot to lose.” Her eyes went to the photo of Madison and me.

“Remain seated,” the clerk announced. “The Superior Court of San Francisco, Department Ten, is called to order, August 9, 1999. Commissioner Jenna Ross presiding.”

I deliberately put the news of Del's death on hold and groped for the present. The tangible feeling of my chair as I trusted my weight to it grounded me, providing a softer landing than I expected. I looked out at the rows of faces watching me, waiting for me, my every movement feeling stilted and amplified, my every thought tilting me further and further into the present moment until I had it fully in focus.

I glanced at my computer screen for the next case. “Flint and Baxter,” I said in the direction of those in attendance.

“Alex Sanders representing the petitioner, Your Honor.”

From the other end of the courtroom, a woman, busy with two things at once, called out from her distractedness, “Margaret Todd for the respondent.”

*

Her too-large black suit showed her recent weight loss. A magenta blouse and black pumps finished off the classic attorney uniform. But her clothing was where Margaret Todd and anything like convention began and ended. She was in her mid-fifties now and had been an advocate against domestic violence for close to twenty-five years. I had read articles by her in law school and did briefly join her on the domestic-violence-death autopsy team, when I interned at the family court in my third year of law school. Our purpose then was to review the cases in which someone had died from domestic violence and to try to understand the psychological and social factors contributing to the death. The cases were so horrific; I barely stood it for the one year I'd signed up for. Margaret was a founding member of the team and in her tenth year as a participant.

What Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin had done to raise consciousness around rape and pornography, Margaret and others like her had done in the area of domestic violence. Many believe it was the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial that ushered in sweeping legislative changes in domestic violence law. But those changes would never have occurred without the groundwork laid by women's advocates for over two decades before the Simpson trial.

Among the more significant changes were things like what evidence was considered admissible. For example, in many states, tape-recording a person without consent was not only inadmissible, it was a crime. But new laws allowed for such tapes to be admissible if they were evidence of domestic violence. In the family court, domestic violence against a spouse in front of a child now constituted child abuse. And if a parent was found to have committed an act of domestic violence, there was a presumption against that parent having custody of a child.

As these new domestic violence laws were taking hold, many states were trying to encourage joint custody, and legislation made timeshare a factor in calculating child support. In other words, if a father spends more time with his child, then he pays less child support to the mother.

As a newly appointed commissioner, I could see how the two legislative intentions were colliding. On the one hand, parents who had never had anything to do with their kids were suddenly demanding custody in order to pay
less
support. On the other hand, it didn't take long for people to realize allegations of domestic violence were easy to assert, hard to disprove, and the fastest way to sole custody and
more
child support. With money and sole custody as possible motivations, claims of domestic violence were often met with skepticism.

Margaret Todd had been forged professionally in a time when protective laws—flawed as they may be—did not exist, and she had the battle scars and the undeniable horror stories to show for it. I had only known times since such laws were being drafted or had gone into effect, and I was far more aware of the ways in which those laws were vulnerable to corruption than I was of their origin and genuine purpose.

Margaret and I sometimes ended up on different sides of this issue. Just a year before, I had represented a father who was at risk of losing custody of his children after being accused and acquitted of drowning his stepson. Margaret represented the mother, who petitioned the family court for sole legal and physical custody of their children. If her husband hadn't killed her son, she argued, then he was unfit for allowing the boy to be close to the water without supervision. The family court denied the mother's petition, and it seemed Margaret hadn't trusted me since.

To Margaret, what I considered my objectivity represented all things wrong with the direction in which feminism was going. I—thirty years old, educated, white—at once benefited shamelessly and distanced myself from the backs that had been my bridge.

*

I turned to Mr. Sanders, who appeared to have more to say. He balanced his briefcase on the waist-high partition separating the audience from the participants and set his hands atop it. The case supported his considerable weight as he leaned in.

“Your Honor, we've been unable to come to an agreement.” His pink, fleshy jowls rippled as he spoke. “We have absolutely no faith in this mother's word that she will follow a court order.”

The attorneys entered the inner circle of the courtroom with their clients in tow.

“Ms. Todd,” I prompted matter-of-factly, inviting her to begin.

“Your Honor, my client has obtained a temporary restraining order and is now in a battered-women's shelter at an undisclosed location, where she is living in fear for her life. Since we've filed, her tires were cut, and she's received threatening phone messages from unidentified callers—”

“Your Honor,” Mr. Sanders said, cutting her off. “Evidence. What does any of this have to do with
my
client?”

My hand went up traffic-cop fashion. “Let her finish, please.”

Todd looked to Ms. Flint, the mother, who was sitting to her left. “We're requesting sole legal and physical custody of Angie, and for Mr. Baxter to have supervised visitation.”

Ms. Flint nodded in agreement. She was pallid in complexion, her black hair gathered in a bun at the back of her head.

Sanders came out of his chair. “This is unbelievable!”

Mr. Baxter, the father, sat to Sanders's right. His bald, dark-brown head caught the light and his brown eyes set on me.

I ignored the outburst. Sanders rolled his eyes and flung himself back into his seat.

Todd continued over him. “There is a long history of abuse in this case, and we feel Angie should not be with Mr. Baxter unsupervised. Not only is he a danger to Ms. Flint, he doesn't know the child. He hasn't spent any time with her.”

“Because she's not letting him.” Mr. Sanders began waving at me. “You're just going to let her go on this way?”

“Stop interrupting,” I said.

“I knew we should have asked for
a judge
to hear this case.” Under his breath, but loud enough for the room to hear him. And then with condescension thinly disguised as deference he added, “No offense, Your Honor.”

I ignored the remark, aware Alex Sanders had applied for the position which I now held. Any other day, Sanders's provocation might have worked to throw me off balance, pull me into a fight. I might have felt ashamed to be so easily dismissed by him, exposed as a fraud in this black robe, reminded that in the eyes of my colleagues it had been politics and brownnosing—or, perhaps, muff diving—that had gotten me here by the unheard of age of thirty.

I had overheard him saying it. “In San Francisco, gay judges promote gay lawyers. Being a fag these days is like being a member in an exclusive club, only anyone can join.” He had laughed at his own joke.

Not today. Today, I thought of Del's death, so far away from this place of my actually very hard-won and always-dubious power. Today, I violently rejected the futility of her strivings, and of my own, and railed against the ease with which the likes of Alex Sanders had always denied our achievements. Never mind having gone from dropping out of high school at the age of sixteen to graduating from law school at the age of twenty-three. Never mind the absurd salaries and benefits I had turned down to work sixty-plus hours a week over the past seven years for nominal wages in order to expand access to family court for families who couldn't afford an attorney. Never mind the half dozen articles I had published about improving and expanding legal representation for children living in poverty. Hard work and true devotion held no sway against the entitlements assumed every day by Alex Sanders and others like him.

I focused on Ms. Todd. “You were saying.”

“My client wants to work with her baby's father, but Mr. Baxter is verbally abusive and physically intimidating. It is not possible to cooperate with him.”

Wrestling with his wide body, twisting it to situate more comfortably in the chair, Sanders asked, “My turn now?” His tone was juvenile. I nodded. “Nine months. That's how long my client has been trying to see his daughter. Mr. Baxter has never been arrested. There were no police reports made during the marriage. He's been in his current job for ten years without incident. And
he
left
her
. The mother, Ms. Flint I mean, has made repeated false allegations. She has sought a restraining order three times in the last four months alone. Two were denied, one was dropped. We had an agreement for visitation after the baby was born. Mother never showed. This is our fourth time in court, because Ms. Flint there”—he pointed in her direction—“says she'll cooperate, and then she doesn't. She was ordered by Judge McVee six months ago to go to therapy, but she hasn't done that. Now she has relocated to an undisclosed location, and she is alleging that my client is following her at the exact time he can prove he's at work. This is about retaliation and child support.”