How to Party with an Infant

by Kaui Hart Hemmings

  “You haven’t heard anything from that babysitter, have you?” Mele asks.

  “No,” Annie says. “Looks like I’m in the clear.”

  “Jeez,” Mele says. “She sure riled you up.”

  “Exercise class. That’s all I really wanted. I wanted to have normal fun.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Sloppy Joes,” Mele says. “Everyone loves them. Embrace it. Be a Sloppy Joe.”

  “Are you trying to find something I inspire or that you think I need?”

  “Both.”

  Ellie runs up to them, her hand grasping her crotch. “I need to go potty.”

  “Are you sure?” Mele asks. She hates when Ellie needs to pee at the park, but during potty training you have to stop, drop, and pee on your child’s whim. Mele has caught on to the pee lies, a technique Ellie uses to get out of the gates and play in the disgusting bathroom, which usually has no toilet paper and a moaning homeless person. She sits on the potty forever while Mele stands in the cramped stall, arms crossed.

  Ellie wiggles and really digs in as her answer. “I do.”

  “Quickly,” Mele says.

  “Real fast. I’ll pee, pee, all fast.”

  “I’ll be back in five hours,” Mele says to Annie. “I’ll think about you and your babysitter.”

  She leaves her friend and notices her discomfort. There’s a group of mothers on the other end of the playground, all laughing at something Annie would probably think isn’t funny at all. Mele can at least blend a bit, but with tattooed arms and blue hair and a Porta Potti mouth, Annie can’t quite merge, despite the fact she is similar to them at the core. Mele catches her friend briefly smiling at the other moms while passing by with Max. Baby steps. Annie is trying.

  ANNIE’S FUN

  During an awkward employer-employee lull, Annie asked her son’s babysitter what she did for fun.

  “Um,” Jenny said. “Hang out with friends?”

  Jenny then asked Annie what she did for fun, and for some inane reason Annie has been thinking about the question ever since. It’s like the question was a firm shake, an inquiry not just into pastimes but into life itself. What did she do? What did she want? How long could she take her husband working so much? Why couldn’t she have a little fun without him? Who was she?

  Brian had been in Palo Alto for four nights in a row—last week it was three nights, in a trial representing Fletcher Webber IV—some hedge fund manager being sued for . . . something bad. Annie always tried to listen when Brian filled her in, but he had a low, monotone voice, and her mind always drifted—he was like a white-noise machine. Besides, his client’s name was Fletcher. Of course he was guilty, especially with the Roman numeral in his name. Warren Buffett said to give your kids enough to do something, but not so much that they could do nothing. Annie would add: “Don’t name your kid after yourself unless you want them to be a total douche.”

  But back to the fun. The fun! Where was it? At the time all she could think of was dessert. For fun she makes cookies, tarts, bars, muffins, and dense gooey hybrids—brownie puddings, pies with oatmeal cookie crusts. She’s especially fond of using alcohol in her recipes. It doesn’t do anything, buzz-wise, yet it gives her comfort knowing it’s there. What else? she wondered before answering Jenny. Wine, yoga, dishwashing . . . for a real treat, when Max is all squared away, she’ll smoke half a joint and read interior decorating magazines. Or whatever. Weed is insurance for anything. And so she gave the babysitter an honest answer, saying, “I bake,” though this seemed so unsatisfactory—was that all? Ever since she has been constantly foraging.

  “What do you do for fun?” she asks Mele, who has just strapped Ellie into Max’s high chair and given her a wafer to suck. She has stopped over for a walk that they probably won’t take. The sky looks inhospitable and their legs seem to prefer to be left unmoving. Plus, Jenny would be here, and Annie’s on a cleaning roll, eradicating crumbs, grounds, and things unseen.

  “I watch TV,” Mele says. “I eavesdrop.”

  “I can’t imagine what Jenny does. She’s a good girl.”

  “So what if she’s a good girl?” Mele says. “A mother wants a dork.”

  “But it’s awkward. It’s weird,” Annie says, thinking of Jenny, the Hello Kitty width of her face, her perfect painted nails, glassy white like grocery bags. She finds a new patch of counter to wipe with her killer sponge. She read about the sponge on a mom’s blog, thought the mom was getting a little hysterical over a cleaning product, vowed to never be a mom who cared about such things, and now feels she could be the sponge’s goddamn spokesperson.

  “What’s in this sponge?” she wonders aloud.

  “I don’t know, but you look like you’re on coke,” Mele says, which feels true. Annie wants to swipe new surfaces, find new things to clean, absolutely euphoric until the power runs out.

  “God, what a horrible drug,” Annie says. “I remember being in bars and snorting the stuff off of toilet lids, then going back out and having these involved conversations with idiots, rubbing up against boners, swigging straight gin like it was Juicy Juice. I must have been Jenny’s age.” She stops cleaning, finding this unfathomable. “She watches Lifetime,” Annie says, to prove a point. “While Max naps. I have TiVo, cable, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and still she watches Lifetime. And she can never sit for me Fridays. Ever, and that was part of the deal.”

  Max starts to baa—he alternates between sheep and horse sounds—and she takes him out of the ExerSaucer and sets him down on the floor. He leapfrogs on his butt toward the cupboard, still not crawling at twelve months. Instead he straddles his legs wide open and scoots himself across both soft and hard surfaces. He’s gotten so good and fast that it takes Annie by surprise when he flies past her. It’s like getting passed by a legless skier.

  “You should say something to her,” Mele says. “You’re clearly peeved. And you’re making me nervous. Sit down or something.”

  “She’ll be here any minute,” Annie says.

  “So? Give her the sponge. Give her a dustpan.”

  “She sits for Tabor Boyard,” Annie says. “Can you imagine going there, then coming here?” She looks around the kitchen, making sure she got everything. She has put away her Wu-Tang and Mos Def CDs. On the fridge she took down the coupon from a Korean restaurant for FREE MAN DOO. Frickin’ hilarious. In the bathroom off the kitchen she has a bottle of lotion that once said MOREY BUTTER until Brian rubbed out the y and the er, so that it says, MORE BUTT. She has remembered to turn the label toward the wall even though she loves seeing it. It makes her smile while she uses the toilet. God, she misses him. It’s not like he wants to be gone. He’s the one at work to pay for their needs: food, shelter, babysitters.

  Annie had always planned on being herself, but that got thrown out the window the moment she opened her door to an Asian girl dressed in jeans, an itchy-looking tight sweater, and little gold hoop earrings, most likely from Claire’s. She remembered a girl from the park the other day, a young babysitter with a raspy, I-had-such-a-killer-night voice, telling her charge: “Come on, homie, let’s cruise this-a-way.” Annie wanted a babysitter like that, but this girl was nothing like her.

  The girl took a step into her home as if entering a hot tub full of hippies. Annie immediately apologized for the mess and used exaggerated hand gestures to illustrate her hectic morning, tagging on an agghh for good measure. Girls like Jenny with their clean nails and outfits from Express made her feel loud, grubby, and gigantic. Jenny’s eyes kept darting around. Her smile twitched at half-mast. Annie wondered: Do I hug her? Shake her hand? Inquire about her hobbies?

  From the mother’s chat group she knew the questions she was supposed to ask: “Do you know CPR?” “Have you had chicken pox?” “Do you cook or clean?” But this seemed so nerdy, personal, and bitchy—in that order. Plus, Jenny was recommended by Tabor Boyard, whom Annie only virtually knows through posts on SFMC, yet through Tabor’s various postings and inquiries about personal shoppers, col
orists, nut-free preschools, and home organizers, Annie has gleaned enough information to feel that she knows her intimately.

  She knows that Tabor has a three-story home in Ashbury Heights (a necessary detail for the curtain consultant inquiry), a 1.5-year-old girl (preschool consultant inquiry), and brown roots (colorist reccs?). She also has a dog walker, a yoga teacher, and a personal organizer, whom she highly recommends: “She’s only eighty dollars an hour and now my spices are all in a row. She also organized my bathroom in such a way that I never dreamed possible. She put all of my makeup brushes in a labeled container.”

  Annie wanted to write back that she would have done that for a shot of Patrón.

  The woman has learned how to outsource her entire life, and while Annie has come to loathe her a tad (her heart rabbit-humps every time she sees a message from Tabe@hotmail.com), she has also come to trust the woman and value her opinions more than her own. And so, because of Tabor, Jenny was let off the hook—Annie didn’t need to know if the girl had a criminal record. She’d only be there for three hours on Tuesdays and Fridays anyway while Annie was in the house. She didn’t need to know about mumps or drug use. She just had to know how to keep her.

  That first day Annie put Max down so he could demonstrate his version of crawling. She expected the new babysitter to laugh and then they’d have something to talk about, but Jenny didn’t laugh and Annie didn’t know if her horrified look was in reaction to the way he moved or to him picking a cracker off of the floor.

  “Oh, no,” Jenny said. “That’s dirty, Max. Dirty.”

  Annie always let him eat from the floor, but this time she said, “Yucky,” and swooped in like a booby bird. “Yucky! Dirty! Mommy will put it in the rubbish.”

  She put the cracker in her pocket, then later in her mouth. From that first day she knew that this girl would require a cleaner act.

  * * *

  “You know how it is,” Annie says to Mele. “It’s like when you meet goody-goody mothers. You pretend to be goody-goody, too, and then you have to keep up the act, inserting your true self gently and slowly.”

  “Yes, but eventually, you have to put it out there,” Mele says. “See what happens. I know what you mean though.”

  “Oh God!” Annie sees the rolling papers she left on the counter of the office nook last night. She had gotten an eighth of Sour Diesel from a father at Max’s Little Bears Music class, and the stuff made her terribly forgetful and gave her delusions she mistook for creativity.

  “Can you imagine if she saw these?” She holds them up, then puts them in her pocket, contemplating a brief backyard hit, then remembering she has to drive Jenny to Tabor’s later this afternoon. She can drink and drive pretty well, but smoke and drive? Forget it.

  “So what if she saw those?” Mele says. “I’d be thrilled if I were a babysitter.”

  “She wouldn’t be. That’s what I’m trying to get across.”

  “You never know,” Mele says. “Remember we thought Barrett would be high-maintenance and I thought you were going to be psychotic?”

  Mele scoops Ellie out of Max’s high chair and kisses her on the head. She walks toward the front door.

  “It’s unfair,” Mele says. “In movies there’s always the eccentric crazy artist and his repressed secretary, nanny, or assistant—they learn from each other—she’s afraid, yet reverent, blah, blah, blah. But if the mom’s weird she just gets shunned or reported to Child Services. You shouldn’t have to put on such a show. She’s the babysitter, not a mom. Not Tabor. You don’t have to clean for her.”

  “I know,” Annie says, following them out. “But she worships Tabor. I’m Tabor’s opposite.”

  Annie thinks of things like fruit Jell-O molds and children’s cereal. Nothing about her feels real anymore. She is monoglycerides. She is cellulose gum.

  * * *

  Shortly after Mele leaves Annie hears the familiar knock. At least they’re settled into a routine now and the awkwardness of being an employer has lessened a bit.

  “Come in,” she yells and wipes the snot under Max’s nose, then wipes her hands on the dishcloth hanging from the oven. There. Her house and life are waxy like the bald head of Mr. Clean.

  Jenny walks into the kitchen holding her keys and phone, and a little faux Coach purse, which is evidently too small to hold her keys and phone.

  “Hi, Max!” she says.

  “Can you say ‘Hi’?” Annie says, and when he looks up and grins, pumping his arms as if trying to take flight, Annie feels stage-mother proud. They watch him flap, then look at one another and grin. Fuck, it’s still awkward, Annie thinks, then remembers a task she saved just so she’d have something to do during the babysitter-getting-settled time.

  “How are you?” Annie asks. She opens the fridge and takes out the snacks, which have been premade to make things convenient.

  “I’m good,” Jenny says. “Busy.”

  “This is just some apple and cottage cheese,” she says, holding up the purple container. “I got you some things, too.” She gestures to the energy bar, yogurt, fruit, soda. “Everything you need should be right here. There’s some strawberry tart here, too, that I made this morning.”

  “Oh, thanks!” Jenny says. “You didn’t need to get me anything.”

  Oh, but she did.

  “Should you provide food for the nanny?” a mom asked the chat group, and one of Tabor’s replies said, “an extra ten or fifteen bucks isn’t going to make a difference to us, but it affects the way they work for you dramatically.”

  There were other responses, too, ranging from angry: “Have you ever been given food on a job? I don’t think so. Let them fend for themselves” to empathetic: “We make our nanny rice because she’s Chinese,” but it was Tabor’s response that got her. She used the word, us, assuming that all the women in the group were like her, that an extra fifteen bucks a day, on top of babysitting money, was nothing to all of them and that every woman in San Francisco had the luxury of being so kind.

  And so: baked goods and energy bars with names like Max Out and Cheetah. This is what Annie can provide, and she hopes it’s enough.

  “They’re here if you need them,” she says as kindly as possible and then excuses herself to her office.

  “Work hard!” Jenny says.

  “I will!” Annie says.

  * * *

  Annie slouches in front of the computer. She holds a chunk of her hair under her nose and looks at her design of a new onesie with a baby on it, its thought bubble needing a thought. In the bubble she types: “Who’s My Daddy?”

  Is that funny? Is the reference to “Who’s Your Daddy?” too nineties? Maybe she should just leave the thought bubble blank—parents can fill it in for themselves, letting the world know who they are. They do that anyway—make statements via their children’s clothing. “I was once cool!” they insist with Ramones or Che Guevara onesies, even though back in the day they were probably about as punk rock as a science fair diorama.

  She clicks onto another window. All she wants to do is watch YouTube videos and read people’s stupid status updates. Georgia is wishing it were Friday! Barrett took a photo with Instagram! Maybe the blank thought bubble could work as a kind of baby status update. “Aiden just pooped in his cloth diaper!” parents could write in, or “Jaiden just got circumcised! Ho Snip!”

  She stares, hands poised on the keyboard. She goes back to smelling her hair again. Work just isn’t working, and she’s convinced it’s because Jenny needed to come on Fridays. She feels her most optimistic on Fridays, standing on the precipice of the weekend, those glorious lazy hours. That’s the upside to having a husband who works so much—on weekends she can drop Max onto his lap and say, “Your turn,” and then mothering becomes something thrilling and distant—a spectator sport, and she’s the owner of the team.

  This is the fourth week in a row where this Tabor lady obliterated her Friday morning plan to work a little and then enroll in the Bar Method, supposedly some diff
icult workout class that she’s in desperate need of, seeing that she has enough skin on her stomach to make drums for an African tribe and her breasts look the same as Barney Frank’s. She bets Tabor has one of those crazy MILF bodies every mother seems to have these days. Annie has sweatpants that say MILF on the butt, and it’s clearly a false advertisement. She’s not even a Mother I’d Like to Cuddle With. Brian treats her like a Mother I’d Like to Scratch My Ass in Front Of (a MILSMAFO?), and why should she have to primp when he doesn’t bother to? His body is pale and plush, his strong face beginning to sink inward like the middle of a bell pepper. His penis is reminding her more and more of the muppet Gonzo, and when he bends over naked to put on his boxers, it’s as though a bouquet of ferns were sprouting from his ass. And yet, every day she texts him: Home tonight!? His absence is most felt when she’s in bed and there’s something funny on television, her laughter echoing in the room, and she knows if he were there he’d be laughing, too. She pictures him in his hotel room just as alone.

  She pulls up the graphics of her mothers. All of them are fabulous, long-legged and angular, phones in hand, oversize sunglasses on head. One hand pushing a Bugaboo, the other hand holding a huge handbag or a martini glass filled with an icy pink or blue liquid, depending on the sex of the baby, who is always smiling. She gazes at her creations. If brought to life, these girls would travel in herds and use the word momtourage. They wouldn’t have husbands like Georgia’s, who yelled at her in public about the two-sheet rule (using no more than two squares of toilet paper per pee).

  They wouldn’t be single like Mele, and if they were it would be “fabulous,” and they’d write books about being cool and hip, single, hot moms. These women weren’t like Barrett, the ex-cheerleader who looks the part but whose mind keeps her from full immersion. Barrett is too funny, too judgmental, too independent and short. These moms perhaps resemble Henry’s wife, though his wife has to have some good qualities since she is married to Henry—that’s automatic points, like writing your name on the SATs.