Spoiled

by Caitlin Macy

  “We had to buy cigarettes,” says the friend, holding up a pack of Marlboros. “We got a day off.” She looks past Stacey at the milling, babbling crowd. “Gotta make the most of it, right?”

  Stacey gushes her agreement, asks where they both work.

  “I don’t work. I’ve got three kids at home.”

  “Oh, my God!” says Stacey. “Three?”—moving smoothly along from inane to asinine. “And where’s home for you?” she asks, as if she’s the kind of person who says things like that.

  “Portland,” Helena’s friend tells her, adding her name—Patty.

  “Portland, Maine, not Oregon, right, Helena?” Stacey says, but her former charge is still avoiding eye contact, standing uncomfortably, clearly, but not moving, as if she doesn’t want to give up her spot.

  “You guys want a refill?” Stacey asks, thinking perhaps they’re too shy to go up themselves.

  Patty holds out her cup. “Make mine a double!”

  “I mean—don’t let me corrupt you with my bad habits!” Stacey roars. “It’s five o’clock, after all, though, right? I think we deserve another, don’t you?”

  Evidently, she thinks, as she waits for the drinks—dejected, hating her outfit now, its smugness and vanity—although she hasn’t had to reach for it in a while, abject conciliation still suits her fine in a pinch. She gets three more white wines and, concentrating so as not to spill, manages to get them over to the girls. “Take mine?” Helena says to Patty, and Stacey sees that the young woman is holding something out to her—photographs. Her mouth twists ruefully, as if Stacey might reject her offering. As Stacey drains her third wine and examines the pictures, she has an epiphany. It’s nothing personal—Helena’s silence. Or rather, it is, as far as it has to do with Stacey’s clothes, her polished palaver, her ease in the setting. Helena is shy, stubborn, defensive because of all that and not because, Stacey posits hopefully, she’s been harboring some fifteen-year grudge against her old babysitter.

  The older of the two boys is cocky-looking, grinning through missing teeth, posed next to the flag in front of the sky-blue backdrop of an American public school. The other, who’s perhaps three, has soft, sandy hair like Helena’s and a sad, sweet ingratiating smile for the camera—mama’s boy, Stacey thinks, looking up, her face fixed into a strange mask in which she is trying both to simulate delight and hide how flattered she is that Helena has made this gesture. “Are they—?” she says noncommittally.

  “Five. Three.” Helena comes very close to Stacey as she says this—so close that Stacey can feel the warmth of her skin. It seems very un–New York to stand close to someone like this, and a childlike elation passes through Stacey as Helena points to each of the pictures as she says the boy’s age.

  “Wait—which one’s the five-year-old?” Stacey says vacuously, just to keep the conversation going.

  Helena points to the darker-haired boy again. “Jim. And Dylan’s my baby.”

  “They look just like you! The little one—what is it, Dylan?—especially.”

  “Doesn’t he—I mean, right?” agrees Patty affably. She takes a cigarette out of the pack and taps it against the box, as if she might light up right inside the theater.

  “Yeah, when he was born, everybody said it must’ve been the milkman ’cause you can’t see Harold in him at all,” Helena says in a burst of conversation, and then she keeps going, as if, like other shy people Stacey has known, she’s either fully off or fully on. “Although it’d be more like the doughnut drive-thru guy, wouldn’t it, Patty? We’re there like every day!”

  Patty sneers. “You are—you like that guy.”

  “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I can see why!” Stacey manages to curb herself as Renata Townsend appears at Helena’s side. The woman’s eyes rest briefly on Stacey, dismissing her. She clasps hands with Helena and murmurs, “Is it all right? How are you, dear? Are you having fun? It won’t be too much longer, and then we can go to the restaurant. A small group of Margery’s close friends are going to go on.”

  Helena shrugs. “Sure, okay.”

  “We’re starved!” says Patty.

  The editor gives Helena’s arm a proprietary squeeze before moving on to another group.

  “You know, your mother’s practically the reason I became a writer!” Stacey interjects, hoping Renata will hear her.

  A few short minutes later, she’s saying, “Well, it was great to see you, Helena,” viscerally longing to escape to the jumble and noise of Broadway. “Look me up if you’re in LA.!” But when she scribbles her e-mail on her program and hands it to Helena, the falseness of the gesture fills her with disgust. It’s not just that she knows Helena will never look her up; that sort of pretension is a given in today’s world. It’s that she knows Helena will never come to L.A. She knows it and pretends that she doesn’t.

  OUTSIDE, THE BREEZE has died, and the sidewalk, littered with newspaper inserts and plastic bags, looks blown out and abandoned. Stacey has had the bad luck to emerge just behind a group of publishing people who are looking pessimistically up the street for cabs. She sees that she’s going to have to walk to the train and sets off peeved, as if she’s been cheated of something that was rightfully hers.

  Fucking babysitting, she thinks, getting more upset as she walks rather than less, as if the dire awkwardness of the first few minutes of soliciting Helena are getting to her only now—now that they can, now that she doesn’t have to keep up the conversation, keep up the entertainment, the clown act. Earlier this afternoon, when Ryan, her agent, caught her on her cell phone as she was leaving the hotel, Stacey had said coyly, “Guess how I knew her?” after explaining about the memorial. (That he is still her agent, five career-making years later, Stacey likes to cite as proof of all sorts of capabilities she has—loyalty mainly; on occasion, love.) Ryan, like most people of their generation, had remembered Margery McIntyre Flood with a joke, and a botched title: Mom Puts Gin in Her Coffee!

  “Mom’s Coffee Smells Like Gin,” Stacey corrected him and when she told him how she met Margery, he said, “Oh, my God, you used to babysit? You hate kids!” Stacey had laughed in the moment but now, starting to wallow, she feels grievously slighted by Ryan’s remark.

  Beverly had quit jobs, Stacey remembers, smarting at the injustice; so why hadn’t she? Mrs. Purnick had marched Bev up to the front door of one of the boys she babysat for, had rung the doorbell, and had said, “Your son is stealing and my Beverly can’t be responsible for that.” Of course, Mrs. Purnick knew all about the Goren kid’s shoplifting from day one, whereas Stacey can’t recall ever having shared any salient details with her mother, ever having given Anita any real notion of what the job for Margery was like.

  What she can remember, however, she thinks, breaking into a run for a chance taxi, are the long, enjoyable conversations she and Anita had had about how spoiled Helena was. Stacey looked forward to the conversations all day—they got her through to five o’clock. She had relented on Anita’s picking her up in the car and at four-thirty would start to count down the minutes until Anita’s car would arrive. Sometimes she would excuse herself and go into the bathroom and sit on the toilet, staring at the peeling wallpaper and counting to one hundred—two hundred, if she dared—just to have a couple of minutes go by without having to be Bad Ghost, without having to berate or punish or be angry at anyone. At five on the dot she would look out Helena’s bedroom window to see the blue Chevrolet pulling up to the house. The rush of relief, of pure love, she felt when her mother’s car appeared—she had never loved Anita so well. It could send her running to Helena to pick her up and hug her and kiss her, the little girl outwardly happy, too, but in a muted way, as if she knew she was being duped.

  At first Anita had come in to say hi to Margery, whom she knew slightly from town, and was eager to get to know better, but then she and Stacey would get stuck there, listening to Margery pontificate, and so the two of them agreed that Anita would wait in the car instead.

  With the barrier of the c
ar safely separating them, Stacey would wave enthusiastically at Helena, who would watch them from the stoop as they backed away, the little girl motionless, poker-faced. Most days Margery stayed in the house but once in a while she came out and stood beside her daughter, a puzzled smile on her face, as if she hadn’t fully internalized the fact that Stacey left at the end of the day.

  Anita would back the car carefully out of the driveway onto the road. “So, how was it today?” she’d ask once they got on the way.

  Stacey would slip happily into the self-righteously beleaguered tone she’d started to use when discussing the situation with her mother. “Well, today I tried to get her to go outside and she said no. And she starts throwing a temper tantrum. And so I say, ‘Fine, we’ll play inside’—what do I care? I mean, what can I do?”

  “Nothing, Stace.” Anita’s answer is knee-jerk, condoning; her eyes are on the road.

  “I mean,” Stacey says, looking quickly at her mother’s profile, “I just don’t think it’s up to me to force her to go out. In the first place, I can’t. It’s not like I’m her mother, you know, Mom?”

  “Stace, you’re right. You can only do so much.”

  “I do the best I can, you know?”

  “I think you’re managing incredibly well.”

  Here Stacey might have squirmed a little in her seat. “Mom?” she might have said, thinking that today she would drop the pretense—give some small hint about what it was really like, which Anita might pick up on. And it was always on the tip of her tongue: “No, I’m not, Mom. I’m not managing at all. I’m the baddest babysitter you’ve ever met.”

  But Anita would be shaking her head—getting into it. “It’s just terrible for a child when the parents can’t set limits. The kids have all that control. They don’t know what to do. It’s really not good for their self-esteem. Not to mention what it does to their moral development.” Another shake of the head. “That surprises me about Margery—she’s such a smart lady. Writing all those books …”

  “Yeah, well, smart isn’t everything,” Stacey would say, enjoying quoting Mrs. Purnick, though it was a sentiment that her entire upbringing belied—the report cards plastered to the refrigerator, the compliments passed on from teacher, neighbor, dentist (“Dr. Villanova thinks you’re very bright”).

  She and Anita didn’t have that many things they could talk enjoyably about in those days, and to make the conversation go on a little longer, Stacey would say, “I mean, you’d agree with that, wouldn’t you, Mom? Smart isn’t everything?”

  But there was always a certain point in the conversation where Anita would fail to hold up her end. Where Stacey’s mother would lose interest in the topic and be ready to move on to something else. “So, did she talk to you about your writing at all today?” Anita would want to know. “Did you tell her about the Globe essay? You know, I was thinking you ought to just bring it in and show her. I mean, you were runner-up of over three hundred and fifty essays. Do you know how incredible that is? Do you know what the odds are?”

  Stacey wouldn’t have anything much to say to that, but Anita would go on. “I know Margery would love to read it. You know what? I’ll have Dad Xerox it at work, so you don’t have to worry about losing the copy.” At this point Anita would take her eyes off the road to give Stacey a quick darting glance. “Has she talked at all about … you know, helping you get started?”

  And Stacey would lie.

  She might say, “Well, she was really interested in what I thought about You Can’t Do Anything Right—did I tell you that? She wants to know if I’ll read Where Were You on Sunday? even though it’s not published yet and tell her if I think it would make a good after-school special, too.” Or maybe, “Margery asked me to bring her in a sample of my creative writing—that story I wrote last year about the two friends who have the fight—I guess she really wants to read it.” And later on: “Margery actually thinks I should try my hand at a YA novel. She’s going to talk to her editor because she basically thinks I’m ready. She wouldn’t be surprised if I published something as a teenager.”

  For this story, too, it seemed to Stacey, had to have a narrative arc to keep it interesting; or at least a daily trajectory

  Stacey gets to the cab before someone else can take it, and the small victory mollifies her. In a moment she’s relaxing against the black leather, heading toward blissfully canned hotel luxury, putting blocks and blocks and blocks between herself and Helena and Margery McIntyre Flood. It comes to her, thus comforted, that of course she was kidding herself. There was no chance she would ever have quit the job. She might have scoffed at it in the moment, but the truth was that she and Anita agreed on something fundamental: Stacey’s brilliant future. And what Stacey had reacted to so many years ago was not the truth of the remark—“She could really help you, couldn’t she, Stace?”—but the baldness of the statement. She shied away from the quid pro quo demarcation, holding out for a more elegant, a more subtle interpretation of her motives—her luxury, perhaps, as the talent, whereas her mother, agentlike, had to stay on message.

  STACEY HAD WORKED all summer for Margery, and on the last day, as a going-away present, Margery gave her a copy of Where Were You on Sunday? The book was still in its galleys, and this seemed to Stacey wildly desirable. She really was going away, too—she even fancied she was making a massive leap toward some kind of success, though it had nothing to do with Margery. Alison and Andrea Larsen’s mother had sought out Anita at the firemen’s muster on the Dulwich green in August and told her that they were moving and would be sad to lose Stacey as their sitter. They were moving so that Mr. Larsen, who taught chemistry, could take a job at the Downing School, a boarding school in New Hampshire, and Mrs. Larsen stammered a little and suggested that Stacey apply—there might be a last-minute spot, even a scholarship, for a bright girl like her. When she said good-bye in September, Stacey promised Helena she—and Bad Ghost, too, of course—would keep in touch, and she even wrote a letter to the girl on one of the first slow weekends away at school. She didn’t particularly expect to hear back and she did not. That would have required Margery’s sitting down with Helena to help her write a reply and that never would have happened. Stacey didn’t care—she had the special copy of the book, to show she knew Margery.

  As for Helena—Stacey bites her lip. She looks out the window and chokes convulsively on a sob. Hunched down in the cab, she presses a hand to her eyes. After all the years of glum shame, the tears have finally come. Couldn’t she, she asks herself, as her face goes wet and unseeing, couldn’t she have made a success of a simple fucking babysitting job? Couldn’t she have carried off this basic thing with a modicum of grace? Was that too much to ask? She’s bawling when her cell phone rings. She’s glad no one can see her, tear-stained, sobbing, and fumbling for it in her bag: the tragic lifelong remorse—that nevertheless permits one to check one’s caller ID. It’s Ryan—he called twice while she was inside the theater, wanting to finish their conversation—to hear more about the upfronts, bask a little in her enthusiasm and gratitude, as he likes to do from time to time, for all that he’s done for her. Shuddering, wiping her nose with the inside of her wrist, Stacey chokes it back. She gets control of her voice and answers the call. “Ryan?” She wasn’t the girl’s mother, after all. She could only do so much.

  Taroudant

  IT WAS A mistake. She woke grinding her teeth, with the idea that it had all been a huge, shockingly expensive mistake. They should not have come to Morocco. They certainly should not have come all the way to Taroudant on an offhand recommendation from Will’s old boss. Vanity had led them; the self-congratulatory notion that they could do better for themselves than Europe, as if they had seen half—one-tenth—of Paris or even London.

  No doubt they shouldn’t have gotten married, either, Lydia thought, turning in the bed, her back to Will, but the thought failed to compel her. Theoretical pronouncements were no help. She was of the type that cared more, cared ardently for the specifi
cs, for the seeming superficialities: a point on a map, a brochure listing room rates she would study as if evidential.

  Behind her Will stirred. The bed was comprised of two twin mattresses, separately made up, sharing a single frame. His right arm reached across the divide to wrap around her, and then, because she had removed his hand so frequently from that position, moved down to her hip bone. She detached it from there as well, rose, and put on his robe.

  She went to the bathroom and washed her face vigorously with the cedar soap. It wasn’t that she wanted to avoid sex, but that she wanted to avoid it at this hour. When the sun was shining into the room with the urgency of the day she could not help feeling trapped, would focus her gaze on the ceiling and her thoughts, peevishly, on what she had to get done.

  The problem now, she was beginning to discover, was that there was nothing to get done. It was something no one had warned her about, no one had seen fit to mention. She hadn’t pictured even an hour past the wedding reception. She had thought mainly being rid of her credit card debt, had pictured herself writing the check to pay them off—the surprise of the teller who managed her account, as if someone like that even existed. “Good for Lydia!” the woman would say, opening the payment envelope in Topeka or Tampa or wherever the company was based. “Darn, if she didn’t come through.”

  Lydia stood indecisively at the foot of the bed, listening to Will’s trusting, childlike breathing until the familiar panic rose in her. Then she picked up the telephone and ordered breakfast. “Oui, oui, Madame Norris, tout de suite.” She put up her hair and went out onto the terrace.