Lauren Takes Leave (5 page)

“Yeah,” the guy from the waiting room agrees. “To get out
of a case, I plan on being a total
ist
,” he confides.

“An
ist
?” several of us echo back.

“You know.” He gestures, his right hand raised, pushing
against the air for emphasis. “Racist, sexist, communist, whatever it takes. I’m
goin’ in as a total asshole.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” the woman with short hair sings
under her breath.

“What was that, sweetheart?” he asks, moving toward us as
the elevator doors open. He’s a stocky guy, wearing ripped jeans splattered
with paint. Seven hundred keys jangle from his hip as he pushes through the crowd.

I turn and smile. “Oh, it was nothing! She just hopes that
strategy works for you!”

“
Sweetheart!
” she adds. We power walk to keep up
with the bailiff as he takes us down a long hallway.

“By the way, I’m Lauren.”

“Carrie. Glad to meet you.” She makes a little wave in the
air as we are ushered into a big room with modern windows. A few rows of white
folding chairs are neatly lined up in the center of the room, but the bailiff
instructs us to sit in other chairs around the perimeter of the room for now.

Entering behind the bailiff are two men in suits. One is
tall with sandy hair and the other is short, with jet-black, slicked-back hair
and a goatee. Right away, I don’t like him.

I’m so impartial.

Think like a juror, become a juror.
This little
mantra enters my mind and I hold fast to it.
Think like a juror, become a
juror.
No one is guilty until proven so. No, wait. That’s wrong. Put it in
the positive. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

The tall guy speaks first. “Ladies and gentlemen, good
morning. I am Mr. John Silvan, and to my right is Mr. Thomas Parnell. We are
the lawyers on this case. We are here to speak with you this morning because we
need to assemble a jury.”

“And we need to do it quickly,” Parnell adds.

Silvan nods his head. They both clutch clipboards with
little pieces of paper attached to them. I feel like I’m in
CSI: Alden
. That’s
why, in my head, I’ve decided to call everyone by their last names. I am
imagining the crisp television theme music playing in the background as these
guys speak.

“This is a civil case in which a mother is suing a daycare
for neglecting her child,” Silvan explains.

Oh shit. Really? I sink back in my chair, instantly
deflated. Of all the voir dires in all the world, I have to walk into this one.
Child neglect! I bet when the lawyers sat down this morning to imagine an ideal
jury, they were like,
You know, what we really need to balance out this jury
will be a mother of two who is also a teacher. Someone really on the inside,
with lots of experience and bias.
As soon as I open my mouth, I am so
getting kicked out of here.

Parnell picks up where Silvan left off. “Now, whether the
accused did or did not do this, and to what extent the law is in the daycare’s
favor or the working mother’s favor, is what you will decide if you are placed
on this case. For this trial, you will merely look at the facts, hear from
several witnesses, and examine the law to decide if the facility and its owners
are at all guilty of any wrongdoing.”

“Now, I am going to call forward a few of you to sit here,
in the twelve seats in the center of the room,” Silvan says.

I’m the fourth one called. Carrie is also called, as is
Sweetheart. Before long, there are twelve of us seated, two rows of six, with a
circle of others looking on.

There are a lot of people here trying to get
out
of
jury duty, but I am not one of them. I take a furtive look around the room to
size up the competition.

There’s one. She’s a gray-haired black woman actually
knitting
in the corner. She’s got all the markings of your typical juror—old, domestic,
with time on her hands—and I scowl at her, trying to will her away. She looks
up through her bifocals, probably having felt my death stare. I turn away just
in time.

Today she’s going down.

Because I have to get put on this case.

I have to get a leave of absence from my life.

“Please raise your hand if you have children.” Up goes my
hand.

“Please raise a hand if you have ever spent time away from
your child or children. Perhaps you have traveled overnight on a business trip,
or taken a vacation without them. Perhaps, like the defense in this case, you
are a working parent who has put his or her child in daycare or preschool.” Not
all of the people with children raise their hands, but several do. Including
me.

This is kinda fun.

“Please raise your hand if you work full-time, outside of
your home.” Two women do not raise their hands, but the rest of us do.
Stay-at-home
moms
, I think.

Just for the fun of it, I wiggle my fingers around in the
air, like the A-plus students in my classes do, so that I can really be seen
and remembered.

But, instead of noticing me, the lawyers start asking
those women questions. Things like: “Do you work from home?” “Do you work
part-time?” and “What is your primary occupation?” As I expected, both are
stay-at-home moms. They are so off the case. I picture them walking out of the
courtroom together a few minutes into the future, honking good-bye to each
other from identical minivans.

Sayonara
, I think.

“Please raise your hand if you work with children,”
Parnell asks, and suddenly, it’s show time. I will make this work to my
advantage. I push my hair from my face, raise my hand, and meet his eyes.

“Ms.…” Parnell scans his clipboard for my name.

“Worthing,” we say simultaneously.

“Yes, Ms. Worthing. Could you tell me what exactly it is
you do?”

“I try to teach eleven-year-olds where to put their
commas,” I say. Good-natured laughs are sprinkled around the room. Parnell
joins in, sport that he is.

“Yes, well. And for how long have you been…teaching
English, I presume?”

“Fifteen years,” I say, shaking my head at the
ridiculousness of it, at the way time has passed, at the fact that my students
have moved on, growing and changing, while I am still in that same classroom
year after year, the same
Harry Potter
posters clinging to the walls,
without anything but a Teacher of the Year plaque from the last century and a
trophy of a golden apple to show for it.

“Ms. Worthing, are you all right?”

“Oh, great!” I shout, too loudly for the cramped room
packed with hostile potential jurors.
Keep it together, Lauren,
I
chastise myself.
Keep your eyes on the prize.

“I was just wondering…how are those commas coming these
days?”

“Great! Love ’em!” I say.

“Really?” he asks.

I sigh and think about the last pathetic quiz I gave. I
know that I should be upbeat and firm about my commitment to education if I
want to get a coveted spot in the jury box, but I just can’t muster the energy
to lie like that. Martin and Martha already took all the lying I could dish out.

But I really need this case.

Don’t I?

I look around the room and into the eyes of these two
lawyers in their cheap suits, and I just feel tired. All these people get up
each day and do their work and come home and fight with their kids and make
love to their spouses and fall asleep only to do it all again the next day.

Life is boring, predictable. And no amount of jury duty is
really going to change that. Not in the long run, anyway.

I open my mouth. What comes out is the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but.

“No one knows where to put the commas. Ever. Did you know
that there’s something like eleven uses for them in the English language, and
that sixth graders can’t think of more than three? And the great irony is that
just when you’ve actually taught the children all the uses of commas, it’s June
and they leave you, only to be replaced by children
who do not know where to
put their commas
! My life is like a broken record, playing the same verse
over and over again. I’m Sisyphus!”

I notice the hush that has fallen over the room.

Parnell gives Sylvan a look. The he approaches me. “So, Ms.
Worthing, would you say that overworked teachers—good, decent people like
yourself—might not always be recognized and appreciated for all they do? Might,
in fact, require mental-health breaks from time to time?”

Voir dire. To speak the truth.

I sigh. “In fact, that’s why I’m hoping to stay here, to
get put on a jury. For a little break. From grammar. And…my husband, my
kids…other stuff. I’d kind of like to volunteer for service.” I’m so fucked.

“Jury duty as a break from life…” Parnell looks up at the
crowd. “Now,
that’s
a new one!”

Suddenly, the guy’s a comedian. This is the jolliest voir
dire on record at the Alden County Courthouse. Everyone’s slapping their knees
and wiping their eyes, it’s all so funny.

To everyone but me.
Hey, people,
I want to call
out,
this is my life. I have to use jury duty as an excuse to get a little
me time! You should all be sobbing at my feet, it’s so pathetic.

After asking a few more questions, the lawyers take a
five-minute conference break, absenting themselves from the room. I stand and
look around, preparing to move back to my seat by the window, and possibly to
the parking lot, since I’m sure to be dismissed. But then the bailiff is asking
us to sit again and Parnell and Silvan are back.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to do just one more thing
here with the twelve of you before moving on.”

The lawyers call out some of our names and have us rearrange
ourselves accordingly. “Yes, Mrs. Worthing, please take the fourth seat right
there. And Mr. Grady, seat five, and Mrs. Anglisse, yes, right there…” He scans
the seats in front of him before finishing his thought. “And that makes ten of
you, correct?”

Parnell looks at the two rows of us, and we look back at
him. The two stay-at-home moms have been ousted and are fidgeting awkwardly in
the corner, like the last ones picked for kickball.

“That’s it. Eight jurors and two alternates. Ladies and
gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and patience. We have our jury.”

Okay, maybe it is a little bit funny.

Actually, hysterical is more like it. It’s 12:30 on
Monday and we’ve been dismissed for the day. “Report back to the courthouse
tomorrow morning at nine thirty sharp,” the bailiff tells us, handing out our
special parking passes. “Place these on your dash and you’ll get in to our
jurors’ lot. It’s located directly under this building, where the spots are not
metered. No need for quarters!”

“Great!” I exclaim.

Carrie is not amused. “I’m on a case. I knew it. This
sucks.”

“Indeed!” I add. “Wanna go shopping? Get some lunch?”

She studies me hard before responding. I meet her eyes,
which are rimmed in too much black eyeliner. She’s older than me, by about a
decade, perhaps. End of her forties. “Lauren, I gotta get back to work. If this
case is going to go on for a full week like they say, then I need to use this
time to get set in the office.”

“Oh, of course!” I nod in agreement. “I just thought, you
know, something quick before heading
back
to work.” I look at my watch. “I
guess I should just go now, too. If I hurry, I can be there in time for sixth
period.”

We head down in the elevator together, Carrie checking her
watch and me pushing back some cuticles on my right hand.

In the glossy marble hallway on the first floor, we part
ways. “Well, see ya tomorrow, I guess,” Carrie says with a nod, half-distracted
by thoughts of work.

“Yeah…see you then.” I wave, turning the other way and
pushing through the heavy glass doors of the modern high-rise.

The crisp sun surprises me, and I look up to see that the
clouds have disappeared.

My mind knows that I should return to work, to the overachieving
students in my sixth-period honors class, all of whom read more than I assign,
even though I ask them not to. Do you know what it’s like to read the rumble
scene of
The Outsiders
aloud to an audience that has heard it all
before?

It’s a drag.

I find my minivan, drop some more quarters into the meter,
and keep on walking.

Bye-bye, sixth period. So long, Ponyboy. It’s a beautiful
day indeed, I think, as I head down the street in search of a salon and a
deluxe mani-pedi.

“No, you did not!” Kat screams in my ear.

“Yes, I so did!” I scream back. The ladies in the nail
salon are shooting me dirty looks, so I cradle my cell phone under my ear,
collect my stuff, and head outside. “I got on a civil case. For an entire
week.”

“I hate you.”

“I know. I would hate me, too, if I were you, stuck in school.
Kat, you were
so right
.”

“Now, that’s a shocker.”

“They also selected jurors for a criminal case today,
manslaughter or something, and that one’s supposed to go on for like two or
three weeks, but, you know, the one I got on is still pretty good.”

“Manslaughter.” Kat sighs. “What a beautiful word.” There
is silence on both ends as we let this sink in. “So, where are you now? At the
courthouse?”

“Nope. Salon! Got out at twelve thirty,” I say, finding my
way back to the parking lot behind the county office buildings.

“Will you come visit me in my prison cell later, like you
said you would? I’ve really got something to tell you.”

“Why so mysterious?” Gingerly, I reach into my bag for my
car keys, trying not to smudge my nails.

“Because the Oompa Loompas are on their way back from
art.”

“Catchy. You should use that term at the open house next
year.”