This Christmas

by Jane Green

  In the first frame, Isaac and I have our heads together, and Jason’s plastic hair is just visible in the bottom of the picture.

  In the second frame, I have been pushed aside, and Jason is gaping at the camera in demonic open-mouthed glee.

  In the third frame, I am strangling the dummy as Isaac looks on in horror.

  In the fourth, Isaac and I have our lips locked in a smooch, and Jason is completely out of the picture.

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  Once upon a time, Alison Bell was a Dallas debutante good girl who always followed the rules. Then her dad’s business went bust, her mom ran off with a jetsetter, and her high school boyfriend, Spence, was stolen just before prom by her arch nemesis, Pepper McClintock. Ten years later, the good girl routine is so tired. In debt up to her ears, dropped by all her rich friends, Alison lives for free outdoor concerts and two-for-one hamburger coupons. What she needs is a change. And then she gets her chance: a job as a live-in nanny for a Mr. & Mrs. Smith in New York City. Good-bye to humilitation, failure, and poverty; hello to…

  Pepper McClintock? Conniving, fake, boyfriend-stealing Pepper McClintock? With the kind of horrifying clarity usually reserved for trying on bikinis under fluorescent lighting, it comes to Alison: her new boss is no other than Mrs. Spence Smith—THAT Spence—and Alison is going to be working for the enemy and her dreamy husband. Now, caught up in the rarefied world of Park Avenue nannies, New York tabloids, Barney’s bags, and delicious dish on the rich and famous, Alison is learning a few new rules of survival.

  Rule #1: Sometimes, you have to take what you want…

  I never would have guessed how many people read a sleazy tabloid called New York Now! until a complete stranger spat on me. There I was, minding my own business, my arm stiffly extended with fingers snapping impatiently to flag down a cab, when an arc of saliva hit my cheek with a warm, sickening splat.

  “Slut!” a woman yelled. As if the warm slime on my cheek weren’t insult enough.

  She had obviously read the paper. Though how anyone could recognize me from the grainy picture that scurrilous rag printed, I’ll never know. I might not be Paris Hilton, but I usually have one chin, not five. The Post’s snap was much better—me looking heavy lidded and saucy in sable—but that didn’t appear till the day after the spit incident.

  Don’t write off my assailant as just your garden variety Manhattan lunatic, either. She was a fifty-year-old lady swathed in raw silk and a Hermès scarf and carrying a Bendel’s bag. When you’re labeled NAUGHTY NANNY! by a newspaper, even a crappy one, you attract high-end spitters.

  That was a difficult day. Even in New York, where weirder things than this happen on the street on an hourly basis, it’s hard to recover your dignity after wiping a glob of some stranger’s body fluids off your cheek. I was already jittery back then for a lot of different reasons—I think it’s fair to say I was going through a rough patch—but being used as a human spittoon just about nudged me over the edge.

  At any rate, anyone without a jot of empathy could understand how I ended up stealing an eighteen-thousand-dollar coat after that.

  Or maybe they couldn’t. It’s still hard for me even to understand.

  Sometimes, when I sit back and take a deep breath, it’s hard to figure out how any of this happened. What’s easy to figure out is when.

  The time: Six months ago.

  The place: A dentist’s office in Dallas.

  Not long before, I had been laid off from my job answering phones at a local travel magazine. Prior to that, I had been let go from another company where I was proofreading real estate ads. I was not setting the world on fire. At twenty-eight, I was still hovering in the cold and rubbing two sticks together.

  And wouldn’t you know. Everything seems bleak, and then you get a toothache.

  So there I was, installed in a dentist chair, waiting for a filling to set and fretfully flipping through the latest copy of that pointless glossy, Definitely Dallas. I was combing the want ads, hoping that there would be something available at the magazine itself. Though pointless, Definitely Dallas was a venerable city institution, available in every hotel room in town and as ubiquitous in doctors’ offices as Highlights. Surely someone there needed phones answered or something proofread?

  They didn’t, apparently, but one ad that caught my eye looked even better. In fact, it looked so good that at first I thought it must be a mirage.

  Live-in nanny needed. Dallas couple seeks caring female who loves children to help look after adorable girl, 3½. Must be dedicated, responsible, creative, flexible. Opportunity for relocation to NYC or London! Generous compensation! Excellent references req’d. Bilingual a plus. Call 555–0201.

  Quick like a bunny, I ripped off my bib, sprinted out of the dentist office, and called the number on my cell phone from my car. I didn’t even wait for the Novocain to wear off. The crunch was on. I’d been unemployed for two months and had my credit card refused at Safeway the night before while I was attempting to buy deodorant and a week’s supply of ramen noodles. Poverty had even forced me to downgrade from a porcelain filling to silver, and how I was going to afford that when the bill arrived, I had no idea.

  To be frank, my life wasn’t supposed to be like this. I had not been sufficiently prepped for financial woe.

  Here is my dirty little secret: I used to be rich. A daddy’s girl. A pampered only child. Even when my dad lost all his money after I graduated high school, I still had assumptions of forthcoming unmerited reward. When I graduated from college, I landed an incredible job and expected to be a millionairess by the time I was thirty-five. (In other words, I was naive.com.)

  Now I was twenty-eight, and the most money I’d ever made in a year was when I was twenty-three. I had netted more from my allowance when I was fourteen than I had working temp for the past three months. My income, with the exception of that one anomalously prosperous year, had been dropping precipitously from childhood forward, and now was in a total free fall. I was on the fast track of downward mobility.

  With money problems came other difficulties. I started suffering from insomnia. My social life had tapered off considerably. My best friend had moved to New York, and another friend had married, promptly produced a child, and become maternal and dictatorly. A few acquaintances I suspected were just avoiding me. I could hardly blame them. “Nobody wants you when you’re down and out,” sounds cruel, but it does have its logic. Too much bad news (and ramen noodles) makes people uncomfortable. The week before I had seen an old work acquaintance turn ill-at-ease when I sang the praises of a new salon I’d found that featured twelve-dollar haircuts.

  And of course there were acquaintances—the ones who had known me in my flush younger days—who I was careful not to put myself in the path of.

  So there I was. A poor friendless insomniac with bad hair. The kind of person I certainly would have avoided myself, had I been in any position to be choosy.

  What I really needed was a miraculous rescue. A new life.

  That classified ad was the change I needed. I felt it in my bones.

  Those two tantalizing words, generous compensation, lodged in my head, where they gamboled about like fat furry puppies. I wanted this job. I had to have it. It was perfect! I was so ready to be generously compensated. Creativity, of course, was a slam dunk for me. I had practically been the drama queen of my high school. (Now I pictured myself putting on festive puppet shows and throwing together prize-winning Halloween costumes.) Dedicated? Of course I was dedicated…or I was certain I could be, if I knew what the hell I was supposed to be dedicated to. And I was bilingual—almost trilingual, if you counted the smattering of Spanish I had learned off of Sesame Street when I was a kid. ¡El cielo es a
rriba!

  I was pumped. And frankly, it’s not in my personality to stay pumped for more than a few minutes, so I had to call right away, before I could think of the million and one reasons I would probably fail at being a nanny in the unlikely event anyone was demented enough to give me the job in the first place.

  “I’m calling about the nanny position,” I told the woman who picked up the phone. “My name is Alison Bell.”

  “Oh. Just a moment.” Over the line, I could hear the efficient shuffling of paper and the whir of office machines in the background. “Have you worked with children before?”

  “Yes, I have,” I said, not entirely lying. “I worked as a teacher for one school year.”

  Actually, I had only lasted a few months, having quickly learned that substitute teaching has nothing to do with teaching and everything to do with crowd control and extreme survival technique. (Attention TV moguls: Substitute teaching has major untapped reality-show potential.) Luckily, given the bureaucratic nightmare that was the Dallas Independent School District, I’m sure this woman would never be able to find out that I had been a total failure and barely escaped with my life. If she called DISD, they would probably only give her the date of the school year I worked. And who knows? I had never received a notice that my sub license had been terminated. The powers that be might even think I was still out there somewhere, standing in front of a class of hostile glassy-eyed adolescents, or running for my life down some long, long hallway.

  “Oh—excellent,” the woman piped in.

  I was encouraged. “Since that time, I have had a few jobs in publishing, but working with children is what I find most fulfilling.”

  “How old are you?”

  Could she ask me that? I had thought there was something about age discrimination. “Twenty-eight.”

  “Married?”

  “No, I’m single.”

  “That’s good. This is a live-in position, you know.”

  I’m so single, I wanted to say. Extremely single. Live-in position meant that, on top of generous compensation, I would have free rent. That thought alone made me dizzier than the prospect of a dream date with Mark Ruffalo.

  “You have a college degree, then?”

  “Yes. From North Texas State.”

  “And when would you be available—”

  “Any time! I could start tomorrow!”

  “—to meet Mrs. Smith?”

  I winced. Really should not cut off the interviewer, Al. “Mrs. Smith?”

  “The Smiths are the family you would be working for. Their little girl is named August.”

  “Oh. Then you’re…?” For some reason, I thought I had been speaking to my potential employer.

  “I am Mr. Smith’s secretary. I have been doing phone interviews, just to screen out entirely inappropriate candidates.”

  And here I was, slipping through the net!

  “You wouldn’t believe the number of calls we’ve received—and from some people with no qualifications whatsoever.”

  I clucked my tongue. The crust of some people—trying to get my generously compensated job.

  “I would be free to meet her at her convenience any time this week.” I took a breath, realizing that too much freedom just made me sound like a slacker queen. “Though mornings work best for me.” Employers always seemed to like those up-and-at-’em types. “I’m a morning person.”

  “Mrs. Smith can meet you tomorrow at eleven at her home.” She gave me the address and some basic directions, which I didn’t need. The Smiths lived in Highland Park, my old stomping ground.

  I practically floated the rest of the way home. This was my job. I knew it. In a few months I would be packing up to relocate to New York or London! My dream! It was all I could do not to pace around my dirty apartment pumping my fist in the air. I needed to high-five with someone, so I called my friend Jessica, who was living in New York.

  “I’ve done it,” I told her. “I found a way to get out of Dallas! New York, here I come!”

  “Excellent! What happened?”

  I told her about my nanny job. I had to go into details, because the details were so great.

  But really, I should have known better. Although Jessica has many wonderful traits, loyalty being tops among the many, she also happens to be one of those cautious types. Okay, paranoid. It’s not just that she sees a cloud behind every silver lining, she actually sees the puddle that cloud will create, which will freeze over outside the stoop of her apartment and that she will then have the bad fortune to step on. This, in turn, will be the cause of her spending a Saturday morning in the emergency room and stumping along on crutches for two months thereafter. She is my own personal Cassandra.

  Sometimes her fears can be useful. She grew up in Dallas and could tell you how to get practically anywhere in the city without having to make a left-hand turn.

  Jess, of course, had reservations about my new job. “Al, are you sure taking care of a three-and-a-half-year-old is for you?”

  I hadn’t really been thinking about the kid. I was too wrapped up in generous compensation. And relocating! “How hard can it be?”

  “Don’t you remember subbing? You hated that.”

  “I didn’t hate it.” Disliked it intensely, perhaps. Was rendered suicidal by.

  “You spent a month afraid to crawl out of your bed,” she reminded me. “And when you did finally manage to mentally tunnel out, you were a maniac. Remember jujitsu?”

  It’s true, during that period of my life I sort of snapped. I became obsessed with self-defense, until I read a story in the paper about a guy who was a black belt in karate, who got shot at a 7-Eleven. One of my less laudable characteristics is that I’m easily discouraged.

  But talking to Jessica, I was still feeling buoyant. “This is totally different. This is a tiny girl. Pre-hormonal. Her motor skills haven’t advanced to the point that she can handle heavy weaponry.”

  “Uh-huh. Did you ever babysit?”

  “No.”

  A snort. So much for high fives. I was beginning to feel a little uneasy.

  “Oprah ran a story a couple of months ago called ‘Kids Who Kill,’” she said. “Did you see that?”

  “They killed their nannies?”

  “I don’t remember anything about nannies, but I’m sure it could happen. Or think about all those grown-ups who go berserk. Mothers drowning babies in bathtubs…”

  Oh, Lord.

  “But I like kids,” I insisted, for once in my life refusing to yield to pessimism. To answer Jess’s skeptical guffaw, I added, “In theory, at least.”

  “This kid isn’t going to be a theory. Everybody loves adorable little kids in Jell-O ads, but real kids aren’t like that.”

  “Hello? I never said I was Bill Cosby.” I wasn’t ready to angst about nitpicky details, like how good with kids I was or wasn’t. “I’ll have money, and I’m going to be moving. Those are the important things.”

  “So you’ll move with this family, and then you’ll quit?”

  What kind of person did she think I was? “Of course not—not until I feel like I’ve earned my keep.”

  Then I would quit.

  “You’ll feel stuck,” she predicted, “like an indentured servant.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “We’ll see.”

  She didn’t sound convinced, so we moved on to pleasanter topics, like stuff we would do when we were finally living in the same town again. Or at least when she visited me in London. We had attended North Texas together and had been roommates for a year. Afterward, I had gravitated back to the city I knew best, while Jess had surprised everyone by taking off for the Big Apple, where she answered phones by day to pay the bills and played cello in a small group—the Hoboken String Quintet, or some such thing. It wasn’t the New York Philharmonic, but I envied her. She was happy where she was.

  Maybe I would be happy soon, too. After years in Dallas, most of them bad, not to mention sleepless, I really felt I neede
d a new start in a new town. New York or London would do me fine. I wasn’t going to be particular.

  That morning I woke up at two, as usual, to wrestle with insomnia. But on this night I was full of plans, not worries.

  I arrived at the Smith house ten minutes early and had to park down the street and wait in the car. I stared at the house, a hulking faux Tudor with a semidetached three-car garage and an immense front yard rolling away from it that was manicured within an inch of its life. The grass was so green and clipped so short it looked like artificial turf. (The Smiths’ monthly water bill was probably higher than my rent.) An old pecan tree leaned off to the side, but it was hard to imagine it actually producing pecans or doing anything so ill mannered as shedding leaves. No doubt there was a gardener on hand to scoop up the leaves the moment they sullied the ground.

  It was a gorgeous, luxurious house, but not out of place on the street, which was lined with homes in various architectural styles but all of equal size and inflated value. Highland Park was the section of Dallas where the rich rich folk traditionally lived. I had lived there back when my family still had money, when private schools and housekeepers and cars that cost enough to support a middleclass family for a year were things I took for granted. Now when I drove through places like this, I felt an unhealthy mixture of smug contempt—the waste of money!—and salivating envy. Was there anything more delicious than wasting money?

  Ever since college I had been avoiding this neighborhood, but now I felt like kissing the expensively landscaped ground. I was the prodigal daughter. Sure, I had suffered some bitter travails. I hadn’t been able to keep my Neiman’s charge, or stick to a decent manicure/pedicure regimen. In college I had denied my roots and refused to rush. But now I was coming back to my people.