Clothed, Female Figure

by Kirstin Allio

  Several times I turned my duplicate key in the lock of the Fifth Avenue apartment and found Hillary Rice standing, stunned, in the foyer, wearing her gentlemanly plaid pajamas, at once gaunt and dissipated. “Pardon,” I said. “I’ll come back later.” Her shoulders went up in a cringe at the sight of me.

  One day she met me at the door dressed in a prune-colored pencil skirt and cropped black jacket. She flipped her bank of hair and blinked at me.

  “You again.” She had never before been loquacious. “It’s too bad we’re not best friends, isn’t it.” She blinked again, as if instead of laughing. “Do you think it’s paying off?” She waved her hand and we surveyed the stacks of catalogs.

  I didn’t say anything. I was waiting, just as I had with my mother, whose speech was so rare that even Setta McNamara (my employer had a point: Setta was in everyone’s business) had never heard it.

  I thought of my mother sweeping her gnarled hand across the bedside table. The hospital phone that charged a fortune just to get a dial tone, the stiff-legged get-well cards, Dixie cup of water.

  I couldn’t tell if my mother was reaching for something or if she meant to clear the little table. That was the way she had worked, too: sweeping the path clear so I could walk there. Reaching for a yellow rose behind a spreading buddleia, tipping into the air a dozen blue-cut butterflies.

  CLOTHED, FEMALE FIGURE

  It wasn’t my first family, and I don’t have “favorites,” but the apartment where they lived was closer to my old apartment than any other I’d worked in, and so I felt loosened, as if my whole body were the tongue of a sentimental drunk, susceptible to love and forgiveness. The mother, Ivy, was a civil rights lawyer, and the father, Wendell, was an artist. He was ten years younger than she—why should it matter? Because she wore the yolk of someone abused rather than amused by youth’s indulgences. She had a boyish build in contrast to her heavy harness, and from my position (I admit there is some dignity in distance), here was a mismatch with which mischievous fairies entertained one another.

  New Yorkers do not like to venture too far west or too far east, their compasses set to the moral equilibrium of Fifth Avenue. Ivy and Wendell’s building, a narrow brownstone washed down like a bar of soap, was far to the west, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues. Chelsea, Wendell insisted, which even I knew was an affect used to both mock and elevate his circumstances. From the roof, accessed by a hatch Pollocked in pigeon droppings, you could see the Hudson River. I had been able to see it from the roof of my own first apartment. A sense of hope never failed me, walking west, into the sunset...although when I arrived for work it was always ash-gray morning.

  Ivy and Wendell slept on a Murphy bed in the living room. It hinged precariously off the wall, reminding me of Russia: cheap construction and close quarters. Leah, age six, occupied the bedroom, with a ceiling as yellowed and cracked as heirloom china. She wore frocks that twisted around her pencil body and her ears pushed through her hair like snouts.

  She read to herself, poetry. By our Russian giantess, Anna Akhmatova, Leah had read “Evening”; she had also read Tsvetaeva and Emily Dickinson.

  “She read at three,” said Ivy, more dutifully than proudly, I noticed.

  “Should I tell you the first words my parents discovered me reading?”Leah quizzed me. She had an un-modulated voice, as high as a sopranino recorder. In my previous life in the Soviet Union, I would have characterized such a voice as anti-social.

  “Sorbitol,” she enunciated. “Hydrated silica.”

  I suppose I raised my eyebrows.

  “Toothpaste,” declared Leah.

  By that same first evening, I had read aloud half of the collected Grimm’s Fairy Tales, cross-legged on the floor of the living room. When she was sure I’d finished Leah rolled over and her belly flashed: hard, green, like a slice of raw potato. “Natasha!” she cried. “I love to listen to your accent!”

  Wendell did not like the modern children’s books, the ones where you could buy the lunchboxes. Fine with Leah. Besides poetry and Grimm’s, she loved lists of ingredients. She had something of a phobia—I use the term as a former professional—regarding compounds. She yearned for the simple.

  “Bread and water sounds like a good diet,” she said mournfully. “But do you know how many things they put in water?”

  There were no doors on the cabinets in the kitchen, due to a campaign against the bourgeois in that house, and Wendell’s trumpeted belief in the art of the everyday object. Mismatched student pottery was dustily webbed to dog-eared cereal boxes.

  The window in Leah’s room was on an airshaft with the diameter of a corpse. I considered all of this close to depravity...although in an unsettling way I wondered if I had brought it with me, imposed a film of sorrow and poverty with my very gaze upon Leah’s circumstances.

  It was true, she was my first only child. My research, in the Soviet Union, had for a time argued in favor of single-child families. In terms of allocation of resources, at our stage of civilization, a single focused beam of light, of calories, rather than the messy breadth of competition, followed by dissipation among siblings and favorites. Well, according to the posters that slickered my home city, there were no Soviet shortages—of heart or of health—whatsoever.

  Leah and I had walked down into the West Village, where she was to meet a friend in a slice of park between two angled, intersecting avenues. We both drew to a stop in front of the window of a florist. My English was excellent, but a bald spot in my vocabulary was botany. That spring Leah had found me out: I hadn’t known that ivy, her mother’s namesake, was that dark diamond creeper with tough stitches into cement and mortar.

  “Natasha!” cried Leah happily. “I’ll tell you everything!”

  “Leah Halloran,” I said. “Private tutor.”

  I saw her smiling down into her sweater, which was a habit she had, and sometimes she’d come back up sucking the collar.

  I stood at attention. We let a couple of young women bob past us.

  “Lilac,” Leah pointed. “And hyacinth.” Smugly, “I call them poodle flowers, Natasha.”

  Oh no, Leah Halloran was not a giggler. Her laugh was a serious matter, and as she pushed it out, now, I knew to remain silent.

  The window glass through which we looked was as shiny and cold as chrome. Or, of course, a mirror. There we were. A small woman with short dyed hair beneath a boxy white hat, a triangle of wool coat, and a string of girl coming just to the breast of the woman.

  Once Ivy said, testing the waters, “Did your mother work, Natasha?”

  I didn’t immediately answer, and so she added, needlessly, “Growing up in Russia?”

  No, Ivy was not curious about my personal childhood. I understood immediately that she was taking the measure of my judgment of her as a working mother.

  And, I suspected, she wanted to know what I knew about her daughter that she didn’t.

  But I simply winked. “Do I have any choice but to be a feminist in this apartment?”

  “Feminist!” She laughed. “It sounds so—the way you say it—May Day! Sputnik!” She hit the air with her fists for our relics.

  To wink, in those days, was my constant habit, if not directly, then atmospherically, or at an imaginary bystander, my alter ego, off in a corner.

  I winked again. Ivy looked around to see if Leah was in the doorway. No, Leah was fast asleep, the tape recorder resting on her pillow, tape like flypaper catching flecks of sound-dust, so that if she talked in her sleep she could listen to it in the morning.

  Before my employment, Wendell had stayed home with Leah, sacrificing his art, but leaving plenty of time to meet the drop-off mothers at Leah’s school in the West Village who had just rolled out of bed and into those American blue jeans, pulpy and white at the knees and buttocks.

  It was five flights up to Leah’s apartment at the top of the brownstone, and the stairs were made of solid black rubber. The walls were tiled, with a black border, and the lights were so dim I su
pposed they cost the landlord a negative number. Leah never touched the railing, descending or ascending, but pedaled in the air, or rather like a drum majorette marching to her own, hectic heartbeat. I had no difficulty imagining what she had been like as a baby: a root face, an early, succinct talker, a body like a tail, too thin, too expressive.

  Just as I don’t have “favorites,” I would say that I never become “close” to a child or a family. I have always suspected it’s a work ethic left over from my previous profession; also, I prefer families who refrain from using intimacy as a means to wheedle extra hours. I prefer families who wish—and are cognizant of this wish themselves—to remain a rather closed unit, penetrated only by the specific terms of my contract.

  And yet I would not characterize my particular style as “distant.” In fact I have been accused, in one mother’s fumbling manner, of “apocalyptic thinking,” and by another, giggly with reprobation, “your weather eye, Natasha.” Clearly, I’ve been, at times, overly concerned for the safety and well-being of my charges.

  I stayed three years, until Leah’s parents separated. I had begun to notice that Ivy seemed not so sad as tired, and I admired that, I thought to myself, a mother refusing sadness. I knew that money was tight, in fact Leah had told me, with a child’s candor, and I suggested they didn’t need me. Ivy said I was very intuitive and gracious. With Ivy’s excellent letter of reference, I was able to find employment almost immediately with a family in Nyack.

  It is true that over the years I thought of Leah. At first, it was practical: How would Ivy manage to take her to the museum class she loved so much on Wednesday evenings? Those lovely little leather sneakers—would they last through the season? Would she succeed in making friends with that laughing black girl at school she so admired? And once I even heard her voice, a rather comic announcement, “Whoever’s in charge of me pours my soy milk.” But then, of course, I had new sets of children to think about... and in my imagination the apartment between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues and my old, first apartment began to swirl together so that I had to think of both, or neither.

  I certainly never keep records; in some cases I can’t even remember all of the names of the family members. If there were previous marriages, children in college who visited their little half-siblings over long autumnal weekends... In one case, well, I can picture his two-seater sports car and the wrinkles on the seat of his suit jacket, but I simply cannot remember the name of the father. Why spend so much time on him? Why not his children? The boy, Harrison, wore a fireman’s hat for a year, even—and I suppose especially—in the bathtub; the girl, Kimball, collected pandas.

  In any case I don’t take solace looking back. I don’t take solace at all, and I take my coffee black, which is unusual for a nanny. Nannies are notorious for their sweet tooth, and while every Russian dreams of drinking coffee when he gets to America, he’s without fail stricken homesick and tea-addled upon arrival. I am the exception, in both groups I claim membership, to such material and sentimental happiness.

  It was last Saturday when I heard my employer’s appraising step along the attic hallway that leads to the little room that comes with my paycheck. I have calculated how much is subtracted in “rent,” but in this suburban neighborhood it is difficult to compete with the stream of au pairs from Thailand who accept a salary that assumes caring for children is as breezy as summer camp. They are accustomed to summer camp—back home, twelve little siblings are waiting.

  I rose to greet her. My defense, as always, is formality. My current employer is a female doctor. She is tall and forced to bow her neck beneath the attic roof, the suggestion being that her own house oppresses her. As a hobby, she figure skates, and I believe figure skating is her true nature. That it fails to bring her recognition...

  “Oh, Natasha!” Her surprise at finding me in my own private corner was unconvincing. “Here’s this—” and she held out a rather bulky letter, laden with small stamps, as if someone had a tedious math assignment. I had the impulse to snatch it up, but it seemed essential that I measure my response: that it be equal, exactly, to my employer’s.

  “Thank you, Virginia.” There was a pool of quiet around us.

  “It’s so quiet up here,” said Virginia, taking a breath of air distilled by the attic. I remained expressionless. The envelope passed between us.

  “Is Colin napping?” I inquired.

  “A miracle,” said Virginia. I nodded as if to excuse her.

  “Oh!” She paused to signal that what was coming was such an incidental request it had only just now occurred to her. “Would dinner at six be possible?”

  My day off was always cut short. If I pressed, I could get an evening to make up for it during the week, but I rarely bothered.

  “Or shortly before...” she added. She looked at me curiously. I was aware that it would have seemed more—normal—if I told her from whom I had received a letter. It was true: at this address, I had never before had mail.

  Very calmly I walked over to my desk with the letter. Of course I had scanned the return address. A woman in my position can’t afford not to. I placed it on my desk and turned back to my employer.

  She said, “Five forty-five-ish?” I nodded once, curtly.

  Dear Natasha,

  I’m writing you from college. Taking it for granted that you remember me, Leah Halloran? I would have written before but did you know that you are the invisible woman? I actually had to get a boy here to help me find you. He is the original computer geek, very sweet, will do anything because he is from Ohio.

  My college is one of those Vermont enclaves that used to be all women, with a name that sounds like high tea in Britain, so that now it’s not so much co-ed as college for the sensitive. I’ve given myself away—sensitive. An artist like my dad. My mom is still the only one who makes an honest buck in the family. I rent a room off campus, in the town, perched over a manmade waterfall. I look across the dam at the abandoned mill buildings from the 1800s. Sometimes I take pictures of townies from my windows. You know, girls with laundromat hair who walk like fat babies? Kind of voyeuristic, but what am I supposed to do, snap shots of trees and historic cottages? I impressed my photography professor, anyway, who is British. Gavin. He gets a lot of washings out of that accent.

  You can see my photos for yourself, anyway. I’m sticking a few in the envelope.

  I can only describe the sensation of reading Leah’s letter as a welling up—was it self-satisfaction? I had done nothing to deserve it, and it certainly wasn’t a feeling of completion. No. If anything, such a welling up (never would I have been so sloppy in my descriptions as a psychologist!) was a sensation of business unfinished.

  I do like my work, although I have been harsh, perhaps, in my description of Virginia. But I find it so demanding in its requirement of vigilance, that it would be unusual for me to allow a moment to feel “self-satisfaction.”

  What I felt was more like hope—already—that Leah would keep writing.

  I finished the letter, and read it all over. I’ve received Christmas cards from a few of my families, Happy Holidays, the Xs, no more, and I’ve never expected it. But now I was absurdly, uncontainably excited. How could I rush through time and space to reach Leah?

  All capital letters, slanting strongly toward the right-hand margin. Now I was almost sure I’d had a dream—Monday?—about Leah. Could I have predicted, or even willed the letter? How many dreams, I wondered, go unremembered if they are not fulfilled, somehow? How reliant are we on the world—I wondered, wildly, euphorically—to supply a coincidence to trigger our memory?

  I searched my dream and it seemed, perhaps obviously, that the dream Leah was not the child I remembered (whose dreams are photographic?), nor was she a sort of projection, one of those artist’s renderings of a kidnapped six-year-old, now grown up, and likely still tied up in a psychopath’s basement, of what I would, in a lucid state, think an eighteen-year-old Leah would look like...

  Perhaps I’m expressing m
yself clumsily.

  It’s one of the Russian poets who said this: Dreams ensoul lost love, for the fleeting lifespan of a flower.

  You know, Natasha. I was just thinking—this may sound strange—but you were my mother’s conscience. I don’t mean my mother felt guilty about you—that you were an immigrant, or underpaid (right?), or the whole women-riding-on-other-women’s-backs theory. I mean that she couldn’t do two things at once, so she split the one thing off for you, (me), and along with it, her conscience.

  Well no, she didn’t turn evil or something when you left us. She was bereaved. I guess you should know that.

  She’s more or less famous now, as in people recognize her in restaurants. Certain restaurants. She still won’t take my old bedroom.

  Apropos of nothing, I’m going to Italy with one of my professors and her family for the summer. My mother is really upset about it. She wanted us to hang out on the scenic Hudson for August. I almost couldn’t decide between Tuscany and Eleventh Avenue. My professor—sculpture—has two little boys, Roman and Felix. So I’m their nanny. Any advice for me, Natasha?

  How I wished she’d sent a picture. Although her black-and-white photographs of local Vermonters seemed to me perfectly proficient, I wanted to see Leah. Regardless of my dream, at eighteen she must be tall and skinny like her mother, veering around somewhat absentmindedly, peaked skull, an adolescent crone with arms all wrist, legs all ankle. I admit, I can’t imagine her beautiful. I always thought she was rather too shy to be a body. She used to have to hike up her saggy underpants. It galled me, the way it was constant, and that Ivy wouldn’t go out and buy her fresh white ones with new elastic. Is that what Leah means by her mother’s conscience?

  All afternoon I anticipated writing, and my little boys, Jack and Colin, were revivified by my anticipation. They sat at their little red table clubbing their pale chunks of dinner and I was overcome with tenderness. Colin, the baby, called me Nata. His father joked, Nada? I even laughed along with them.