Brownie Points

by Jennifer Coburn

  Walking us into his home, Wax apologized that he no longer had an office, but I could not have been more thrilled to visit his museum of modern eclecticism.

  Logan’s eyes scanned the room, drinking in its beauty too. “This place is amazing,” he said. “Did you use a decorator?”

  “You really have quite an eye,” I said.

  Maya was also taking in the surroundings, but Jason seemed unimpressed. His most important requirements for a home were that it had comfortable chairs, good insulation and a toilet that flushed easily.

  Maya’s eyes lit up as she saw an African mask placed on a display of polished black stone. “Is that a Kumasi?” she asked. Jason and I shot each other a curious glance as Wax confirmed, impressed. “Tribal chiefs used to wear these during victory celebrations.”

  “Vera good, young lady,” he said. “This was a very special gift given to me at a victory celebration.” He smiled modestly in his flannel lumberjack shirt and jeans.

  “Was it when you sued the Klan?” Maya asked.

  “The White Aryan Resistance,” he said.

  To Jason, Maya began to sell Wax’s resume. “Wax has sued practically every hate group in the country, so now every time some racist sends money to support their work, it goes to victims of hate crimes. Isn’t that cool?”

  “It is, Maya,” Jason said flatly. “I’m not quite ready to call Girl Scouts of America a hate group.”

  Though I didn’t like the idea of Logan suing, I didn’t want to seem ungracious in front of Oliver Waxman, so I tried to change the subject back to his art collection. “It looks like you’re a real fan of Kate Parr.”

  He chuckled. “Suffice it to say that next to my wife, I’m Kate Parr’s biggest fan.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I challenged. “I took an entire semester on her in college. I love how radical she is. That woman is afraid of no one.” I explained to the kids that Kate Parr caused a huge stir in the eighties when she painted The Last Breakfast, in which Jesus served silver dollar pancakes and Mary Magdalene poured coffee.

  Wax smiled broadly and told me, “Some people said she was serving Bloody Mary.”

  “Which is ridiculous because it was completely brown and steam was rising from the cups,” I said, both Wax’s and my enthusiasm levels rising. “Plus there was Coffee-mate right there on the table next to Peter.”

  Jason scanned the room, picking up framed pictures of Wax with civil rights heroes, presidents, members of Congress, and hip-hop stars. I could tell Jason wished he was meeting this icon under any other circumstances than these. Jason had too much respect for Wax to lead him on. “Wax, I gotta be honest with you, I’m surprised you’re interested in Logan’s case,” he said. “I mean, does the kid even have a case? Why can’t Girl Scouts say ‘no boys’?”

  “Have a seat,” Wax said to Jason and me. Then to the kids, he asked, “Do you mind if I speak to your parents alone, kids?” At home, they would have debated, protested and argued, but here they were compliant, accepting Wax’s invitation to go into his family room and watch TV.

  When we were alone, Wax continued. “You want to know what appeals to me about this case?” Jason and I nodded. We couldn’t imagine what would make him come out of his brief retirement to take on a trivial case like this. “I’ve done a lot of good work on behalf of a lot of good people who’ve faced nasty discrimination in their lives, and I’m proud of that, but I’ve always wanted to take on a landmark gay rights case.”

  “Gay rights?” Jason asked.

  “Girl Scouts is going to say that Logan has an equal opportunity through Boy Scouts, but that isn’t the case because of their policy of discriminating against homosexuals.”

  “So your real beef is with the Boy Scouts?” I asked.

  Wax laughed. “Well, the Girl Scouts certainly aren’t excluding any lesbians.” He explained that ideally Logan would have come to him wanting to join the Boy Scouts and been turned away. “But I like this case. It’s got a nice twist, and there are some land use issues I’m looking into that could make it even more interesting.”

  Jason and I sat silent, looking for ways out. “Our very good friend Michelle is the Girl Scout troop leader. We’d feel terribly if —”

  “Mrs. Brennan?” Wax asked. “Oh, she’s in our corner. She’s a real sweetheart. Plus, we’re not suing the local troop. We’d be suing Girl Scouts of America.”

  “We don’t have the money for a big legal battle,” Jason said. Good. Good one, honey.

  “It wouldn’t cost you anything. My time is pro bono, and the other costs are picked up by the Equality Law Center. It’s a foundation I helped set up so people can afford to pursue precedent-setting cases like this one.”

  Jason and I stared at each other in disbelief. Were we seriously having a conversation about suing the Girl Scouts?

  Sensing our apprehension, and also realizing that Jason was the greater obstacle, Wax asked, “Mr. Taylor, you’re the first African-American firefighter in Los Corderos County. That’s quite an accomplishment.”

  Cautiously, Jason thanked him.

  “Now, I am absolutely certain that you deserve that position based on your merit, skill and good looks,” Wax said, smiling. “But let’s make no bones about it, you got the right to earn that position because someone before you had the guts to fight for it.”

  “This is different, Wax. I don’t want to waste your time, but the kids wouldn’t let up till we met with you,” Jason said.

  “How is it different?” Wax asked.

  “It just is,” Jason said.

  “How?”

  Jason sighed, knowing he would lose a battle of wits with Oliver Waxman. “Will anyone know he’s gay? The kid’s only thirteen.”

  “Fourteen,” I reminded Jason. “Their birthday’s next week.”

  “Right,” he said. “He’s a kid. My son’s got to be able to come out when he’s ready, not from our newspaper running a story about it.”

  “I’ll file as a John Doe and request a closed courtroom since he’s a minor,” Wax assured us. “No one will know he’s gay unless he tells them.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It seems so … litigious.”

  “Litigation tends to be that way,” Wax said.

  “What if we don’t sue?” Jason asked.

  “Then Logan doesn’t join the Girl Scouts,” Wax explained.

  The conversation went on for another hour, with Jason and I voicing our concerns about indulging a child’s every whim. “Is it the worst thing in the world if Logan doesn’t get what he wants every now and then?” I asked.

  “It is if what he wants is equal rights,” Wax said.

  To this day, I don’t know what went through Jason’s head that day at Wax’s house, but suddenly, after sighing, tapping his pen and nodding his head for another twenty minutes, he blurted, “Okay, we’re in.”

  “We are?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Jason confirmed. “Where do we sign?”

  Later that night, I asked him what flipped the switch for him, but he said he didn’t know. “It made sense,” Jason said with a shrug of his shoulders. “I don’t know, but all of a sudden, it was, like, I got it.”

  But why? Did this man have no desire for introspection? When I posed this, he laughed and asked me if I was ever willing to be happy. “Baby, I’ve accepted that our son is gay, and I’m standing behind him on this case. Now you need me to explain why? I don’t know. I just do, okay? Let it go.”

  Naturally, the kids were elated when we told them the news. We didn’t actually tell them as much as they burst out of Wax’s family room cheering once Jason said the magic words.

  As we stood in Wax’s foyer getting ready to leave that day, Wax said he had someone he wanted to introduce me to. “I didn’t want you to think I was using her as my trump card,” he said. Then he shouted upstairs, “Kate! Katie, darlin’, come on downstairs. I got some folks I want you to meet.”

  Chapter Nineteen

 
The lawsuit against Girl Scouts eclipsed everything else in our lives in January, including the kids’ fourteenth birthday. Maya wanted a “Black Power” party that condensed highlights from African-American history, including hiring an entertainer to recreate Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Jason and I both thought that was a bit crass, so Maya settled for a joint party with Logan at the local Benihana that weekend.

  While Logan’s sexuality was like a layer of skin, Maya wore her blackness like a new jacket. That is, Maya was trying on her black heritage for the first time, an endeavor that comes with some degree of self-consciousness. She would interject facts wherever she could. She’d borrow expressions and opinions from black people she had seen on television and in the news. She always looked for an opportunity to let the world know that she was, in fact, African-American.

  That weekend we had a family dinner in San Francisco, which didn’t get us back to Utopia until ten that night. Before we could turn into our driveway, though, we heard the persistent honking of someone trying to get our attention. Jason pulled over in front of the house and rolled down his window. It was Olivia, looking a little less than her usual polished self. She had no lipstick on and her hair was a mess. Still, her scowl was working overtime. “Is it true you’re suing Girl Scouts?” she snapped.

  “Top of the evening to you too, Mrs. McDoyle,” Jason said, trying to lighten the mood.

  She looked at Jason as if he were out of his mind. Then she shook her head in disgust and repeated the question slowly. “Is. It. True?”

  “Listen, Olivia, we’re all really tired so if you don’t mind —” I began, hoping to spare my kids this woman’s evil tirade.

  “I do mind, Lisa,” she said. “I mind very much since you’re asking. What I mind is that every nitwit in this country files a lawsuit every time they don’t get what they want. It’s destroying our society.” Then going off on a complete tangent, she started shaking her head, “Good doctors are being sued every time there’s the slightest complication.”

  Huh?

  “Listen, Olivia, I’d love to chat with you about the state of medical malpractice litigation some other time, but I’ve got to get the kids to sleep.”

  Logan and Maya wanted anything but resolution. They were enjoying the entertainment.

  “If you cared a bit about those children —”

  “Enough, Olivia!” Jason snapped.

  “Like I’m going to listen to a man who can’t even control his own family.”

  “Oh no she di’int,” gasped Logan, now joining Maya’s jeering section.

  Maya shouted to Jason, “You tell her she will not keep a brother down.”

  Jason smiled in the rearview mirror, but rejected the prompt from Cyrano de Berge-black. Instead he said something that frazzled her even more. “Olivia, why is your shirt on inside out?”

  “What?” she asked, looking down. “Oh, I must have been in a rush leaving the gym. I need to get home now, but we are not through with this discussion.”

  As we drove away, Logan snorted. “Is it really a discussion if she’s the only one talking?”

  Maya leaned into her brother affectionately and teased. “Wow, what a philosopher. You deep, dawg.”

  ™˜

  Wax told our family that his wife Kate had been an integral part of several cases. Her specialty was guerilla art. While he explained this, Maya and Logan nodded their heads in complete agreement. Maya wore a Mos Def sweatshirt that Ashley had given her as a birthday gift.

  “Did you know that Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus was planned?” Maya asked us. “I always thought she was just tired after a long day of work, but turns out the NAACP asked her to do it.”

  Wax smiled and shrugged. “It certainly lit the fuse for the Montgomery Bus Boycott.”

  Three days later I was sitting in a converted horse stable talking to the Kate Parr about how to raise public awareness of Logan’s case. Every few minutes I had to remind myself to breathe.

  “We need something that says, ‘Fuck you, Girl Scouts of America!’” Kate shook a fist emphatically. A few years younger than Wax, Kate had flawless porcelain skin and a white blunt haircut that she wrapped in a green bandana, gangsta-style. Both times I’d seen her, she wore a white button-down top, paint-splattered denim overalls, and Converse high tops that matched her bandana. “We need something bold that’ll really scare the shit out of the Girl Scouts.”

  I knit my brow, trying to look as though I was considering what Kate was saying. I even nodded as if it made sense, but then had to gingerly voice my opinion. “Kate, I definitely hear what you’re saying, and I think you make a great point, but Logan loves Girl Scouts. He doesn’t want to say ‘fuck you’ to them.”

  Kate grimaced and reconsidered. “Up your ass?”

  “No, he really doesn’t want to say that either.”

  She shook her head, disgusted with my timidity. “What the hell does he want to say? The kid’s suing them. The time for love songs and chocolates is over.”

  I was torn. On one hand, I desperately wanted to seem hip and edgy in the eyes of Kate Parr. On the other, Logan was my priority. I couldn’t have Kate display a billboard with a nude of herself standing above a tagline reading, “Girl Scouts of America: Eat my cookies.”

  Weakly, I said, “Logan really just wants to say please accept me, Girl Scouts.”

  She waved a hand dismissively. “Lame. Think bold.”

  I didn’t want her to write me off as another mousy Utopian housewife, so I tried again. “Girl Scouts of America, tear down this wall!” Actually, I kind of liked that. Tear down the wall between the genders. It was a bit self-important to compare our battle to that of a divided Germany, but what the hell. If ever there was a place for hyperbole, it was art.

  Kate stood perfectly still as she absorbed my words, then formed the slightest smile. “Brilliant,” she said. “I know just what we’re going to do with it.”

  “You do?”

  “I do.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Over the next few days, Kate and I spent our days building a Berlin style wall made from Girl Scout cookie boxes that we would erect at the very back of the Waxman property, which faced the main street of Los Corderos. The plan was that we would erect the ten-foot wall in three stages, also using the billboard that sat blank on the Waxman property. I had to wonder if it was just good luck that the Waxman estate came with these amenities, or if these two hadn’t specifically eyed a home just like this one.

  On the first day, we would place three feet of the wall facing the busiest intersection of Los Corderos. The billboard would simply tease, “Girl Scouts of American …” Most people would see the fence-height cookie wall and think it must be cookie season once again. A few days later, however, we’d add another three feet in height and stretch the footprint to twenty feet. The billboard would now read, “Girl Scouts of American … Tear Down …”

  Kate explained this to Wax and me as we sat in her studio on our first day working together. Her workspace was sparsely decorated with a table made from a barn door and a few stools she made from barrels. In the corner were rolls of canvas, long pieces of wood, a small saw and a vise. Her paint tubes and brushes were tossed haphazardly into colorful children’s beach buckets beside her other supplies. “Then when people are good and curious about what this cookie wall means, we’re going to completely fuck with them,” Kate told us. Wax urged her to go on. “We’re going to leave it alone for a week until people are going out of their minds waiting for the next installment.”

  I didn’t want to burst her bubble, but I couldn’t see anyone caring that much about our wall. She disagreed. “Lisa, you can’t get to a supermarket, Pilates studio or dog salon without seeing that thing. I guarantee you, it’s going to be talked about,” she said.

  “So then we’ll put up the last four feet of the wall and finish the billboard,” Kate said. With dramatic flair, she swooshed her hand overhead. “Girl Scou
ts of America … Tear down this wall.” She laughed. “I never thought I’d be quoting Ronald Reagan.”

  Wax gave his wife a sympathetic pat on the back. “You’re bastardizing, not quoting.”

  She sighed, relieved. “You’re right, dear.”

  “You guys were smart to buy a home where you’re free to do what you want,” I said. “We’ve got a CC&Rs Enforcement Committee that will issue a warrant for your arrest if there’s a dead marigold in the yard.”

  Wax looked baffled. “CC&Rs Enforcement Committee? That’s weird.”

  “I know,” I said with a laugh. “Utopia is beyond weird. I’m not even allowed to work in my own garage unless the door is closed.”

  “Why don’t you work here?” Kate asked, gesturing with her arm that there was plenty of room.

  “Are you kidding?” I asked, elated.

  “Yeah, I’m kidding,” Kate said. “I thought it would be fun to jerk y’round a bit. You stay put in that closed garage of yours.” She laughed. “Of course, Lisa. Bring your stuff over this afternoon. I’d love the company.”

  ™˜

  Kate didn’t say much while we worked, instead preferring to hum along to Beatles albums she played on a record player plugged in to a thick orange extension cord that tethered us to the main house. I made several attempts to start conversations, but Kate always responded with a polite grunt that seemed to mean “that’s interesting.” When I asked her questions, she was often so absorbed in her work that she didn’t hear me. When she did hear me, she gave one-word responses. She never opened a dialog with me.

  As Kate and I were finishing our project, Wax came into his wife’s studio holding several sheets of paper in his famous leathery hands. “Morning, Lisa,” he greeted me. “Girl Scouts filed a demurrer to Logan’s complaint.”