Clothed, Female Figure

by Kirstin Allio

  And suddenly it seemed to me that all my past successes as a nanny were thrown into relief, even exaggerated in the light of my new status. Leah had found me, and my good fortune seemed to radiate out so that any number of other human beings in the world were now also assured their reunions.

  I was so eager to write that I skipped drying the pans after dinner (wondering how I ever have the patience to do it) and went straight to the attic.

  It so happens that I am also taking care of two boys, I started. What are the ages of Roman and Felix? Mine are one and three, too young to travel to Italy!

  I stopped. I looked around my attic room as if I hoped to describe it. For Leah’s sake, was it a Grimm’s fairytale garret? The view over the street trees...I suddenly remembered the ring of lamplight on Leah’s squirrel-gray pate, the crown of a gentle princess.

  The single bed was too soft, a Goldilocks hammock. The walls were steep and ran right into the ceiling.

  The little boys here are very good, I began again, although now it was some time later.

  In the Soviet Union I might have become a prominent psychologist.

  I wrote, My present family is very demanding.

  Then I stopped for such a long time that I lost my train of thought, my intent, entirely.

  Several days passed, although I was composing all the while. I almost felt like my own biographer. I wasn’t so foolish as to flatter myself it was for my sake Leah found me, but even more, then, I felt a considerable pressure.

  Once, I started: The little boys here have plenty of spirit! In fact, these are my first children who receive medication.

  Or better this way? The little boys I take care of now can be very difficult.

  No. She’ll think I have allegiances, favorites, and she’ll wonder how she stacks up against them.

  Are you planning to major in sculpture?

  All the children I’ve ever cared for are good children, Leah.

  I laughed at myself harshly. Sometimes I dream they’ve been snatched—from the park, from the market, it’s like a parallel life, really, the fear of it—and then I realize, in the dream, that it is I myself who have vanished.

  Dear Natasha,

  If you sent me a letter at school, I missed it, so now you’ll have to spring for the stamps to Italy. My mother gave me a pack of condoms as a farewell present. Watch out for those Italians. Disturbing? Uh-huh. You know my mother. She’s all about fairness to the point of being blind to human nature!

  Emmie, my professor, says time zones are cathartic. We hope for rebirth when we travel. My God, we run ourselves straight into the knives of jet lag, whispers Emmie at takeoff.

  It’s probably obvious I have a crush on her. Ah! Not just her art but her whole life is talented. Her husband. And her children. Roman is three and Felix is one. Any tricks of the trade for me?

  I have never allowed the maudlin aspect, but suddenly I remembered Leah’s little sack of bones on my lap, her cinder hair beneath my nose, the Murphy bed latched high up on the wall above us.

  Emmie hasn’t bought a seat for Felix, so he’s tethered to me by an orange seatbelt looped to my seatbelt. Roman effortlessly unclicks his life or death and stands up to regard the folks in the row in back of us. I peek through the seat crack to see if the trio of passengers is receptive. A nine-year-old boy (I’m guessing) encased in electronics is flashing and flinching on some other planet. His mother has newly plucked eyebrows. She might have done it with unsterilized tweezers. She clings to her paperback like it’s one of the seat cushions that doubles as a life raft. She does a tiny wave at Roman and then closes her eyes against a death’s head. The third passenger is a business droid with a newspaper complexion and goggly eyes like a housefly under a microscope. He says, Do you like flying? Roman falls down as if he’s been shot. Are these flying types really ubiquitous or is it my own perception that lacks variety? Sometimes I really just hate growing up. Not just, oh, things used to be so simple, but things used to be so original. Now everything, absolutely everything, is a repeat.

  Which is why I find myself in Italy and not on the banks of the Hudson River.

  Rolls of gold straw, stubbly fields, combed and tufted pine trees line dirt roads off the highway. I look over and Emmie is closing her eyes at the wheel of the car we rented. The boys are bobbleheads in their car seats. For a long moment I think we will just lift off into the shiny sky which I’ve already decided is the essence of Italy. Then I realize that we are slowing down rather quickly and veering off the road rather dangerously.

  I am too shy to wake up my professor! I put my hands on the wheel where they won’t touch her hands. I don’t even know how to drive in America, let alone Italy. I let the car swerve off the highway and roll into a ditch gently. Then I don’t know what to do so I turn the keys out of the ignition. I tell myself the car can’t spring forward with the keys severed.

  How’s that for my first adventure?

  Oh, that’s very fine for an adventure, Leah. I don’t know how to drive, either. Perhaps you remember the way I scuttled you across the streets in a state of clinical panic. I don’t trust drivers. I close my eyes against them, my breathing choked, irregular, not trusting death, either.

  When we get to the compound (Emmie wakes up in the ditch and looks at me strangely; my mouth corkscrews instead of smiles), we are delirious. Felix begins vomiting. I stand back—surely this is Emmie’s department. Indeed, Emmie grabs my arm and says, Oh my God, I throw up when I see throw-up. She turns away and hurls.

  Did I mention that we’re joining Emmie’s two best friends from college? They’ve each brought their nanny. There’s one nanny, hanging out a fan of laundry. The other is a button-nosed eunuch (I decide, cruelly) from Thailand (Emmie’s friend Hedwig tells me). She turns the hose on the vomit in the courtyard before she’s even said hello to us.

  Hedwig, later: You’re Emmie’s student?

  I wilt like a zucchini flower on the end of its phallus.

  Certainly I was glad Virginia didn’t choose this moment to quake up the attic stairs with some scheduling conflict. I’ve always thought laughing was worse than crying because laughing, you have to pretend to be happy.

  I made my decision it was not appropriate to write back to Leah. There were a multitude of reasons. I owed it to myself to remain utterly free of children in my unpaid hours. There was never any joy for me, with children. Indeed, sleepless nights worrying over Leah left me distracted, even depressed with Jack and Colin.

  And yet when I received another letter...

  You should see the clear-skinned, glinty-eyed women, Natasha. And the dark gangly men with lovers’ names. I get why my mother provided me with condoms.

  We are invited to a dinner at midnight (I exaggerate the time but not the magic) and climb steep stairs, me carrying Felix, Emmie tugging Roman, to a sprawling red-tiled terrace furnished with monumental potted olives. Two cooks, three courses, faucets of wine in square juice glasses. All candlelight. Then Francesca, the hostess, a tycoon’s daughter, spies our children.

  The little ones aren’t tired?

  Emmie swoons into the lovely commotion even as her children are dismissed from the party. Crestfallen, I pull them inside the “apartment.”

  But the sun is healthy, the Italian language is organic, the cheese tastes like meat, and the milk tastes like flowers! Smooth brown haunches in tiny swimsuits. I look down at my tissue-paper skin, grayish white, tattooed with the soot of NY City. Perhaps having inferior skin consistency makes me try harder at conversation.

  Those other trees on the terrace are hazelnuts!

  I told myself that Leah’s letters were poetic, but not personal. I told myself that I was never more than a stand-in, a warm body, for any of my children, and so was not, categorically, entitled to any sense of guilt I might feel at not writing Leah.

  Emmie spends the mornings in a studio she rented. She comes back to the compound for lunch, upsets Roman and Felix with her managing of their diets, and then
calculates—as if, every time, it’s a special exception—if I could put the boys down while she takes a breather, a.k.a. four hours. After siesta, she runs three miles with Hedwig to a polo field where they nuzzle the horses like infatuated schoolgirls. Then they walk back, all art and relationships.

  Here’s how it started. Last semester I had an idea for a life-sized sculpture of a woman. The whole point was she would be clothed, suggesting the opposite of clothing. Like naked bodies are less sexy, actually, than bodies in bathing suits. Uh-huh, that’s my college for you. A clothed sculpture about nakedness, basically. Emmie was the one who drew me out, encouraged me. I told her about you, I admit, and I probably made you out to be some hammer-fisted, kerchiefed Stakhanovite. Emmie said my idea was very precocious. Then I had an idea that the body had to be yours, actually—I mean I became obsessed with likeness and proportion and even your particular wardrobe. I remembered, and it startled me, that you always looked as if you’d just stepped out of the collective closet of the Soviet Union. You looked as if you immigrated every day, to Chelsea.

  (Not that my mother’s wardrobe was ever up-to-date, but did she ever even offer to walk you down Hudson to the church thrift shop?)

  Emmie argued that the power of the work was that it was universal, you know. Woman’s lot and all that. I disagreed but didn’t know how to express myself. I just felt like it was mine. Even though it was yours, in a way, Natasha. Emmie said I didn’t understand art and I broke down in tears, knowing girlish capitulation was the only thing that would save the relationship. And here’s where the relationship has gotten me.

  I was holding Felix on my hip yesterday—he’s the quiet one, with an amazingly gourd-like forehead. Roman hurled himself at me, across the lawn—his love is so boisterous. All of a sudden I remembered how I could disarm you by running into your arms, because you were so shy, for a grownup, and going for a hug was so unlike me.

  I found myself wishing she’d return to the nanny on the lam, me, Natasha. I longed to laugh again imagining myself ducking some black market thugs, gumshoes wearing masks of Beria and Stalin. Admittedly, there was a hole in the logic of such letters—why did Leah write me? But I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t exalted. Emotions that would be embarrassingly simple in my psychology days, but now...well, I told myself, there was the possibility that I was a lonely old woman.

  I came to New York at twenty-six and married the first man I met, literally and proverbially. He stuck his head around the fire escape. “Hey,” he said. “Neighbor.”

  He had a loopy, charming grin and hard eyes the color of lapis. I had just brought home a pot of daisies (margaritka, in Russian), and I was setting them out on the little balcony. I wouldn’t have called it a fire escape. My English was good but not specific. He climbed over, still grinning, as if he were shy of my beauty but like a dog couldn’t help himself. He had long legs in tight jeans and white socks with holes in them. So already we were intimate. We had one son, Arturo, named after my husband’s father, the patriarch. The family business was Italian tiles. We were a mismatch from the beginning, although there were never any lighthearted fairies making fun of us.

  It didn’t take more than ten minutes for me to look through my papers for a picture of Leah. With the way I move around so much I don’t have much of anything. No. In those days it seemed more exaggerated, deliberate to take a picture, and I wouldn’t have wanted Ivy to get the wrong idea. As I said before, there was already some sense, among my previous families, that I could be too vigilant.

  I have not thought of the Hanauers, for example, in many years, but how clearly I recall Becky Hanauer, a quavery-faced woman who had a great deal subtracted from natural beauty, casting me from the servants’ quarters. “I just feel that you’re—overbearing in the household, Natasha.” I pointed out to her (I had nowhere else to live, but she didn’t know that) that most accidents happen in the presence of many adults because each individual adult assumes another is watching the children. Of course, a child can wander to the brink of an unattended swimming pool, I said, mistake the deep for the shallow, but more likely, it is when many mothers in oversized fashionable sunglasses like wasps at the nectar of gossip are present that a drowning actually happens.

  Becky had fallen completely silent.

  “Oh my, Natasha,” she said, several long seconds after I had finished. All of her lipstick had come off on her coffee cup and she looked both pale and lurid.

  It occurred to me she thought I was accusing her of the—well, the pre-death—of one of her children.

  “I am sorry, Becky,” I said somewhat woodenly.

  “It’s stressful being with children, Natasha,” she managed.

  My opinion was that, for her, it was, indeed, terribly “stressful.”

  “I think you should come in the mornings, you know, in the breakfast rush hour...” Half smiling, she indicated the warzone of toast and yogurt and mashed banana for the baby. “And then,” she continued, “well, go on home after the baby’s dinner.”

  I bowed my head until she said, “Natasha?”

  “Becky, it’s as you wish,” I said. “Now please allow me...” and I moved in on the crumbly carnage, and the baby, who had been watching alarmedly, began banging with her bottle.

  I came commuting in to Manhattan every morning by seven o’clock to get Leah to school by nine. Sometimes I volunteered in Leah’s classroom, divvying paint or helping at the scissors station. I used to stay there, in “Chelsea,” with Leah, until ten or eleven in the evening. A few times Ivy gave me cab fare but—I’m astonished at myself!—I categorically refused it.

  Once, only a little bit less than a year after I’d left Leah, I had an opportunity to walk slowly past the front of her school at the dismissal hour. Many of the children who indiscriminately bumped and jostled one another were as tall as I was. I couldn’t believe that had been the case when I used to pick up Leah. I felt a terrible clutching and sourness in my stomach: in anticipation of this very moment, I realized, I hadn’t eaten anything since I’d left Nyack at six o’clock that morning. Suddenly I knew I was not in the right frame of mind to greet Leah. In any case I had no right to see her, none at all, it would be a compromise of context; like time travel, it was simply not possible.

  I almost threw the next letter away as soon as I received it. I had intercepted it in the entrance hallway—Virginia need not creep up to the attic again, justified on her errand—and I stood beneath the chandelier that Jack had many times tried to leap for, holding the letter away from my body. I could see myself from above, too: I was very stilted and ridiculous in this action.

  Such a correspondence need not continue, I heard myself whisper, as if I were, indeed, acting. I had a moment to myself—the boys were napping.

  But what if I, Natasha, weren’t just an adolescent idea for a clothed, female figure? What if such a statue...took on a life of its own, like a guardian angel? I wouldn’t write back, that remained clear to me, but I must remain, somehow, open.

  Dear Natasha,

  Emmie’s other college roommate, Lorene, hired a real Italian grandmother to cook ragu that smells like it has a hundred ingredients. The sauce simmers, thickens, reduces, and the grandmother-cook sweeps the patio with one hand and picks herbs in terracotta with the other. Emmie’s all about: Don’t come near me, I am a ladysculptor. Molly and Eveline have urged me to let the boys watch TV with their boys. Do you know what? All the children are boys, future kings and princes, and all the grownups are women. I’m the only woman with any future to speak of.

  Lorene, actually, has just returned from a week of Ashtanga in the center of Italy. Emmie keeps teasing her about being strong and centered—obviously, Emmie wishes she were a svelte yogini. Lorene and Hedwig think it’s very cute that I’m the nanny. They tease Emmie that she must really trust Mark, Emmie’s husband. They tease Emmie that their nannies have to pick up the slack, like making the kids the lunchtime chopped ham and ketchuppy hotdogs.

  A rash and feve
r called sestina afflicts our Felix. The poetry of it! cries Emmie. Only in Italy!

  I guess that’s where we are: the space between the verses.

  Now it all makes sense. How he threw up upon our arrival, how he’s been so clingy, not his usual self, Emmie assures me. Hedwig is a biologist. She calls sestina one of the last remaining childhood illnesses. As if the illness itself were an endangered species! Free to burn, perhaps to purify, intones Hedwig. It occurs to me to ask Hedwig how she feels about death.

  Lorene is a fashion designer in Paris. She says, So did we approve of the spaghetti sauce? We did, didn’t we. She has a way of pulling her ribs up off her stomach, as if to make more room for spaghetti. Hedwig comes in from wherever she has been with her laptop, wearing a bikini and the gauzy Indian tunic that all the ladies are wearing—really, another kind of housedress. Emmie hands me the sestina.

  Mark’s arrival. The big personality. Everyone feels loved and it’s all worthwhile to be stranded in Italy. Yes, they’re already starting to complain about their vacation. Maybe we shouldn’t have listened to Francesca, maybe this isn’t the best spot. Maybe this is second-tier, maybe we’re missing the part where it’s going to show up in a glossy mag stateside. Mark heads down to the beach hours after everyone else has already departed. I know because I must stay in the tiled quarters with maladious Felix.

  I’m not really sure if I should talk to him. Only it makes me think of so many things to say when I don’t talk to him. Last night I was so bottled up that I ended up telling Hedwig about you, Natasha, how you flashed in my mind every day after school, after you left us, and how I’d have to catch myself before running out to meet you.

  All right, I’m beginning to recognize something of myself in Leah. I see how she’s making friends with those women, her professor and her professor’s girlfriends, by confession. She’s baring her wounds as a way to be accepted. Sure, she tells them about her daddy, how he left them for another woman; she tells them about her Russian nanny, who left them for a family in Nyack.