Read Online Nothing Is Quite Forgotten in Brooklyn by Alice Mattison - Free Book Online

missed the toughening events: the muggings of the seventies; the eighties’ frenzy for real estate while homeless people lined the walls in Grand Central Station; Mayor Koch, much of Mayor Giuliani. But she’d been in New York for September 11, 2001. From the windows of her apartment, in the cold months she could see a scrap of the Manhattan skyline, which she now didn’t like looking at because the World Trade Center—which she’d never liked looking at—was gone.
    Con was no expert on sexual harassment in the workplace, whether such experts existed or not. At present she was a lawyer for a project that fought job discrimination against women. Just now, like almost everyone else in the office, Con spent her time on a big case against an insurance company. If the company’s employees were beaten up at home, they didn’t get time off to go to court, and seemed less likely to be promoted. Victims of domestic violence often became victims of sexual harassment in the workplace as well, and Con was studying that issue too. Both Joanna and Marlene had long taken an interest in Con’s work, but both seemed disappointed that she wasn’t more straightforwardly aggressive. “What did you do yesterday ?” Marlene might ask. On a typical day, Con spent time in the law library and attended two meetings. Marlene wanted her to swoop down on discriminatory offices, or at least on courthouses, but Constance was not a litigator. She was trying to find the perfect client.
    She sometimes wondered what her life would have been like if she and Jerry had lived in Brooklyn all along, if the store had always been on Flatbush Avenue, or if some member of the Elias family had moved it there. Would she still be married toJerry? Would the store be gone now—like the actual store—or would it be stalwartly selling lamps to schoolteachers from the Midwest, upwardly mobile Caribbean families, and stubborn Chasidim?
    On her way home, the cell phone rang again. “Forget I said he raped me.”
    â€œAll right, Jo.”
    â€œNow, can I get out of this? I mean, given the terms of my internship. Do I have to come back?”
    Con said, “If it’s sexual harassment, there’s lots you can do, starting with reporting him to the people who gave you the money.”
    â€œThey’d laugh. It happens every year. Each intern thinks she’s different.”
    â€œWell, still—”
    â€œLook, that’s not what I want. Forget what I said about rape. I just don’t want to go back to New York.”
    â€œBecause of Tim?” Tim was a photographer who earned his living taking portrait photographs of children. He’d be out at the moment—Sunday was his busiest day.
    â€œNo, not because of Tim. That’s a long story, too.”
    â€œWhen you say each one thinks she’s different,” Con said—she had reached her building and was feeling for the right key—“do you mean each one thinks he’ll leave her alone?”
    â€œOr that he’ll mean something by it. Or both. You’ve been a woman. Or maybe you haven’t.”
    â€œWatch it, Jo.”
    â€œSorry, I’m edgy. You’re not going to help me think this through, I can tell.”
    Con was getting into the elevator. “But what do you want ?” she said. The phone died. Often Joanna went too far. Once, she’d destroyed a wooden sculpture she’d made, just before a critique in art school. “I thought I was improving it,” she had said to Con. “When I started with the knife, I thought I was improving it.”
    Con didn’t want Joanna home right now—but even more, she didn’t want her to resign the internship, whatever had happened. If Joanna did come home, however, she’d have to be polite to Marlene. For a start, she’d need to vacuum around her sculptures, which tended to shed. If Joanna didn’t come, Con would have