by Lydia Millet
“Tank oo,” said the toddler who had proffered the panda.
“You’re welcome, Douglas. Andy?”
“Dank oo,” said toddler number two.
“You’re welcome, Andy. William?”
“Buddy,” said William. “Buddy buddy bud.”
Mothers, keys jangling, heels churning up gravel as they crunched over the lot to the door, converged in the entryway.
“How was he?” Estée asked Caregiver Cindy.
“His linguistic abilities are stunted,” said the Caregiver. “For a two-year-old, he’s challenged. All he says is birdy. We think he may have had an early bird trauma.”
“Ha,” said Estée. “Ha ha. That’s a good one.”
“This place is a godsend,” stage-whispered a fat mother beside Estée. Douglas clung to her leg. “I was getting run ragged!”
“We try to instill the social tools they’ll need for kindergarten,” explained Caregiver Cindy. “Tomorrow the children will be playing noncompetitive games, including I’m Normal, You’re Normal: A Game of Discovery. It’s a popular favorite.”
“Wonderful,” said Douglas’s mother, and patted at the pancake makeup on her chin with a flowered Kleenex. “Stop it, Douglas. You stop it!” He was wiping his nose on her knee. She plied the Kleenex underneath his nostrils and he settled on the ground, sucking his thumb. William was face to face with him. As the mother fumbled through her purse and pulled out a mirrored compact, William reached out and poked Douglas on the chest. Estée watched as Douglas looked up slowly, removed his glistening thumb from his mouth, and then, with fluid grace, fell onto all fours in front of William. He scoured the floor with splayed, chubby fingers and was hastily eating dust when his mother clicked her compact shut, screeched, and swooped down to pick him up.
“Douglas! Filthy!” she chided. “It’s a relapse!” She pried open Douglas’s mouth and extracted a dust bunny. Douglas’s mouth hung slack, his rubbery lips manipulated by his mother as he kept his eyes trained on William. Douglas’s mother flapped her hand hysterically, trying to shake loose the debris. It clung first to her thumb, then to her forefinger, then back to the thumb. “Disgusting! Cindy, look! He hasn’t done this in months!”
“Remember the three S’s for productive parenting: support, straight talk, and swift punishment. It is the only way they learn,” rebuked Caregiver Cindy.
On the gravel of the parking lot, before Estée lifted William into the back of the van, she picked him up and looked into his eyes. He regarded her solemnly.
“William,” she whispered, “they didn’t hurt you, did they?”
“Famed fat man slims down by eating donuts,” said William. “Six-hundred-pound circus freak goes on a donut diet.”
“William! What a good boy!”
She loaded him in, dried grateful tears on her shirtsleeve, and drove home singing “Panis Angelicus,” while William leapt and swung happily on the limbs of his fiberglass tree.
The next day, with Little Bill remanded once more into Caregiver custody, she ambled from bush to bush snipping bulbous orchids off their stems and sticking them in vases, swam in the ocean, and played a halting tennis game with a one-armed ex-Marine in his sixties. Pete Magnus kept busy downing Singapore slings poolside with a tight-faced widow. In a moment of solitude, looking out her open bedroom window at a dying palm tree that reminded her of home, she thought she could hear a melody in the fronds. “As the tree grows,” it went, singsong, “so grows the branch.” In the pause that followed, a sea-scented breeze lifted the sheer drapes over the hardwood floor, the pregnant stomachs of long white women.
She vowed to enjoy her new leisure, but during a conversation about local cooking with a diet counselor from Santa Barbara, and later while she was floating her arms atop the surface of a bubbling Jacuzzi, she felt unease, like an itch in space, gone as soon as she turned to face it. It was the hair in a movie projector, trembling at the edge of the frame.
When she went to pick up William on his second day, Caregiver Lisa and Caregiver Cindy cornered her and delivered a sermon on bad behavior. “Little Bill’s disturbing the dynamics here,” said Caregiver Cindy.
“What do you mean?” asked Estée.
“William is a ringleader,” said Caregiver Lisa. “He excites the other toddlers and resists discipline. During I’m Normal he forced another boy to urinate on himself.”
“What can I do?” asked Estée.
“Talk to Caregiver Ann,” said Caregiver Cindy.
Caregiver Ann solicited a check. Hazard insurance.
On the third day, Caregiver Cindy took a leave of absence. Estée saw her limp across the parking lot to her Mazda, whose personalized plates said hotmama, with her right hand wrapped in gauze. Caregiver Ann informed Estée that it was William’s fault, but offered no further details. When Estée went to pick him up on day four, the toddlers were hunched around him in the pit, squatting, heads bowed. William, in his usual cross-legged stance, stared straight ahead, unmoving except for his chubby fists held in his lap, fingers twitching.
“They look like they’re behaving well to me,” she told Caregiver Kim.
“We were forced to inflict a group punishment,” said the Caregiver. “Look what they did to Lisa!”
Caregiver Lisa emerged from behind a file cabinet with her frizzy blond hair in disarray, sniffling and wiping her nose. Her blue eyeliner was smeared. On closer inspection Estée noticed a large bald patch on the side of her head. One earring hung from her left ear: a bright, bobbing Minnie Mouse head. The right ear was bloody.
“William did that?” she asked.
“No,” snapped Caregiver Kim. “They did it for him.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Estée.
“Talk to Caregiver Ann,” said Caregiver Kim.
“Four grand,” said Ann. “Pain and suffering for Lisa, and she’ll sign a waiver. Plus all her medical expenses, no questions asked. Those little bastards tore her earlobe open.”
“What does it have to do with William?”
“You can either pay up,” said Caregiver Ann, “or get him out of here right now.”
“William,” said Estée, opening the back doors of the van, “have you been bad?”
“One kidney saves two lives,” said William, and hopped into the sandbox. “Beat wrinkles by growing houseplants.”
“Bullshit,” opined Pete Magnus when she advised him of the situation. “They’re only little kids, how much damage can they do? Anyway, those gals are paid to take care of them. They’re responsible for the brats. Can’t prove a thing. They know you’re a soft touch Esty. Debbie Does Daytona is ripping us off.” He sat on his bed, unloading a shipment of Ferragamo loafers wholesale from the manufacturer as William pummeled a Power Ranger on the love seat.
“You’re responsible,” said Estée. “You forced me.”
“Damn right Esty. You were turning into a cavewoman. If things keep on going like this, we institutionalize the little shit when he turns one,” said Pete.
“Forget it.”
“All I’m saying,” said Pete, “is you have to operate from a power position. It’s extortion Esty. This is the tip of the iceberg. You can’t keep forking over money at the drop of a hat. We got a deal with these people.”
“The money’s not the point.”
“Yeah right,” said Pete, throwing down a shoe. He grabbed The Power of Positive Thinking off his nightstand and slammed the bathroom door behind him.
“Carnage in Bosnia!” hissed William, and hurled a loafer at the wall.
Caregiver Ann called later that night. If William were to continue under Debbie Does supervision, it would be in isolation. One of the pits could be converted to a holding cell, at Magnus expense, where William would pursue his solitary pleasures behind wire mesh as the other tots, in social interplay, cavorted a few feet away in the boundless air. A colorful partition would conceal the miniature penal colony from the eyes of more impressionable parents. One Caregiver would be a
ssigned to William’s pit every day, on rotation. “Think of the Caregiver as a bodyguard,” said Ann. Supplemental fees would of course be levied against Kraft-Magnus treasuries to cover the personalized service. Estée said she would sleep on it. She asked William what he thought of the scheme as she put him to bed.
“Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,” he told her nonchalantly. “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. Drink Bacardi.”
In his private enclosure, he behaved himself surprisingly well. Instead of leaping and tearing at the mesh, as Estée had feared he would, he burrowed into the foam and disappeared, coming up into the air only when he was thirsty. His private Caregiver’s only duty was to hand him his bottle through a latched hole in the chain link. The only signal that life lay under the netting, when Estée drove in to pick him up, was a ridge that rose in the yellowing heap, a row of brimming wake. William could be seen occasionally, the Caregivers reported, moving diagonally in the pit, crossing from one corner to another; for long periods he stayed humped under the foam against the pit wall and no movement was discernible.
Despite this apparent tranquility, the Caregivers drilled in defensive tactics. They lived in perpetual preparedness, donned sheaths of protective synthetic fabric over their body armor, and cultivated a bunker mentality. One morning, after locking William into his cage, Estée was looking for the bathroom when she found the locker room instead. Caregivers were dressing for duty. From behind a locker she peered in at them.
“Little Bill’s laying low,” guffawed Caregiver Kim, wearing a name tag bearing the chipper slogan A Well-Regulated Militia. She donned a goalie mask. “All quiet on the western front. Save the M-80s till war breaks out,” and she pulled on her combat boots. “Iwo Jima!” she joked, and slung a cartridge belt over her shoulder, which turned out, on closer inspection, to be a coil of skipping rope.
“Hand me the Mace,” said Caregiver Ann, whose name tag now read Shall Not Be Infringed, and snapped a shin guard closed at the ankle. “Lisa, you pack the shaving cream,” and Estée ducked back to beat a hasty retreat as they advanced.
“William, are you really okay here?” she asked him through the mesh before she left for the day.
“A generation gap in venture capital,” said William matter-of-factly. “Durable goods tumbled $6.5 billion.”
That afternoon she slept in her dim room, curtains drawn, her alarm clock ticking steadily on the nightstand. When the alarm went off she hit the snooze button again and again. Finally, waking in a panic, she left the alarm clock to sound relentlessly to an empty snarl of sheets and ran outside. Outside on the steps she was overcome by the whiteness of day, though the sun was low on the horizon. On the practice green, aging couples in canvas sun hats stood talking and swinging their glinting putters over the grass. She had forgotten to put on her sunglasses: the sky was too bright.
Guests on the lawn watched as an old bride and groom stood facing a black-clad minister under a weeping willow tree, in front of a makeshift wooden arch covered with a trellis of daffodils. They were blotches surrounded by a nimbus, blocked into separate shapes and then, as she squinted, connected by radiant bridges of light. The drone of the minister’s far-off voice was a swarming voyage of bees, rushing water.
“Honor and obey,” he said.
Someone passed her heading down the broad staircase, a man with no mass, a blurred knife of shadow in her peripheral vision, unrecognizable.
“Are you the responsible party?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “No. I am not.”
She left the crowds behind, walked to the van, and sat down in the driver’s seat, dizzy. Her vision was clouded, but she was only half blind. She could make reparations. She turned the key in the ignition and struck out for Debbie Does.
She was too late.
The door to the day care center stood open; two windows were broken. She crunched their glass underfoot as she entered. Lights were off. Silence. The smell of rotten eggs: sulfur. She began to jog, past the crayon drawings of sheep and clouds, coatracks and rows of Buster Brown shoes, past the water fountain and the lockers, until she got to the rec room.
It had been robbed of its fluorescent wattage, though light filtered in through the high, small windows, gray beams in the blue dark. Chaotic remains of foul play—dismembered Dinos, strips of padding, torn toddler rompers—were strewn across the carpet. “William?” she called. “Caregiver Kim?”
Bouncy Ponies lay on their sides, wide plastic eyes staring nowhere. Ponies with long eyelashes. She stepped over hockey masks and shredded diapers. Red and green body balls, laced with shaving cream, had rolled into the pits. William’s cage appeared to be intact until she noticed a toddler-sized hole in the pit wall. He’d burrowed underground, beneath the carpeting and the floorboards. There was a twin hole, smaller, in the side of the group pit. On the floor she found a can of Mace. She picked it up and shook it. Empty.
“William? William!”
She left the playroom behind her and ran through the back halls, yelling out names. The back door, like the front, stood ajar, but it was not until she tried the restroom that she saw anyone. Caregiver Kim was lying legs splayed on the tiles, her head propped against the toilet. Her mouth hung open, but her eyes were shut.
Estée knelt beside her and slapped her cheek gently. “Wake up!” She leaned over the toilet bowl, cupped her hands, and splashed water onto the Caregiver’s face. Eyeballs roaming beneath lids, flickers, and eureka. She groaned, sat up, and licked her lips with a tongue as dry as carpet. “Where are the toddlers?” asked Estée.
“Timeless elegance,” mumbled Caregiver Kim.
“What?”
“From Cartier.”
“Are you hurt? What’s wrong?”
“Give the gift of good taste,” said Caregiver Kim, smiling. “Diamonds, emeralds, aquamarines.”
“Excuse me,” said Estée. “Be right back.”
She went out the back door, calling his name as she ran. Past a corrugated metal shed, past a puddle in which a tiny tennis shoe floated, she entered a copse flanked by parking lots. She could hear nothing but the occasional Doppler swish of cars on the highway behind her, farther and farther away. The trees thinned and she was in a trailer park. An olive-green mobile home on hard-packed dirt, with an awning over its door, was the first in her path. She knocked. No answer. Deserted. There was no one to help her. She could be alone on the earth, left spinning slowly, arms outstretched. William was the only company she’d ever kept. He was the product of a long line of bad genes, but beggars could not choose.
“William?”
A warbling sigh, close to the ground.
“William!” She got down on hands and knees. In the shadows under the mobile home something moved. “Is that you?”
It was Caregiver Ann, in a fetal position.
“Come out,” said Estée. “Help me find them!”
“Mitsubishi,” whispered Caregiver Ann in dreamy tones. “Affordability, luxury—”
“Oh shut up,” said Estée, and stood.
Cars were parked outside Debbie Does; frantic parents milled around the wreckage of the rec room. The lights were on again. Two mothers were attempting to communicate with Caregiver Kim, who was lying on her back on a gym mat.
“What happened? Where are the kids?” asked Douglas’s mother, and jabbed the Caregiver on the shoulder.
“For the man who has everything,” said Kim eagerly.
“That woman is crazy. What the hell happened here?” asked a bull-faced father. “Where the fuck is my kid?”
Estée shook her head and pushed past him. From the Caregiving office she called Pete Magnus and told him to bring a search party. While she was talking she noticed color glinting on the floor beneath the desk and leaned down to pick it up: Minnie Mouse. In the rec room, Caregiver Kim was repeating her urgent message.
“Polo. By Ralph Lauren.”
Estée moved through the throng to kneel beside the Caregiver and patted her arm. “She
’s in shock.”
“For the man who has everything,” mused Kim. “But still wants more.”
“Jesus, this woman is crazy,” said the bull man to his wife. “Marilyn, Christ, I can’t believe you left Pammie with people like that. She’s on something. These people are clearly drug users. Did someone call the cops?”
“My husband is coming with a search party,” said Estée. The path of least resistance lay in soothing, rote responses. Pete was used to playacting spouse for the guests. “We’ll find them. If we call the police, the day care center could have its license revoked. Do you want that?” She couldn’t let the cops collar Little Bill.
“Shit yeah,” opined the bull man.
“I think we should wait, Junior,” said his wife. “They could sue us or something. This way we can sue them.”
“It won’t take the boys long to get here,” said Estée.
She located a Mr. Coffee on a file cabinet in the office, with a can of Folgers beside it. The parents stood around sipping, the bull man gibbering into a cellular phone as he paced around the playroom. Caregiver Kim was ignored: parents clustered near the front door, leaving her alone.
“Personally,” whispered Douglas’s mother to Estée, tipping nondairy creamer into her cup, “I was looking for a new service anyway. No offense, but my Dougie isn’t as dysfunctional as the other little ones.”
“Oh?” said Estée.
“On my family tree,” she confided, “there are two senators and an admiral.”
Estée was brewing the third pot of coffee when Pete stormed in with a cadre of resort employees. They carried walkie-talkies and wore windbreakers, a SWAT catering team.
“This is it Esty,” he said grimly, jaw clenched. “We find him, put him in a straitjacket, and ship him out. I got a reception back there, I got a sit-down dinner for forty with the goddamn golf-pro sponsor, and I got the IRS on my ass.”
“It was your idea. Just go find him. There are nine other kids and their parents are waiting.”
“Danny Boy, you stick with me, the rest spread out in pairs,” ordered Pete, powered by adrenaline and officious zeal. “Find ’em, light your flare, and bring ’em back here. That’s all she wrote. We’ll split up in back. Esty, you wanna sit in my car with the phone? You gotta be here when we bring our boy in. Keep you updated from my portable.”