by Carys Davies
THE TAKING OF BUNNY CLAY
NANCY LIKED THAT there were no fences between the houses, that everything was open.
Maybe when Bunny was older they would need to put something up, so he could play out, but for now she liked it the way it was—the wide, quiet, almost car-less avenue in front that ran down to the harbour and the town.
Sometimes at night, on the hot July evenings in the weeks before Bunny was born, she and Beecham used to walk down to the harbour and sit near the tethered boats, their tinkling masts, look out across the calm silvered water, and it was hard to believe they could be so close to any kind of city; that the moving lights in the distance beneath the canopy of stars belonged to the planes dropping down one after another into the airport, and weren’t the last gently cascading points of a ship’s flare way out in the middle of the ocean.
Into this unfenced and starlit world Cheryl had come, a recommendation from a neighbour of Nancy’s friend Mary-Katherine in New Rochelle.
‘Heavy but reliable’ was this neighbour’s description of Cheryl, which at the time had sounded to Nancy like faint praise, but in the event she’d fallen instantly and gratefully under the spell of the girl’s statuesque solidity, the calm and solemn expression that covered her broad mahogany-coloured face.
A European girl had arrived two weeks after Bunny was born but she’d been so volatile and unpredictable in her moods they’d sent her back. After that, Cheryl’s slow-moving steadiness, her absolute evenness of temper, had felt like a balm.
Beecham, too, was impressed and reassured by Cheryl’s stately bulk, the way she loomed, silent and impassive, at the door every weekday morning without fail at six forty-five. He was even a little fascinated by her appearance. She had the sturdiest, most powerful-looking legs he had ever seen on a woman. Her calf muscles were so large and firm they practically made a right angle above her ankles. Nancy, in her suit and pumps, looked like a twig next to her. On her bare feet, the girl wore a pair of floppy tan plastic sandals that made a sound like a soft broom sweeping sand across their polished oak floors. She radiated a kind of imperturbable peace. She hardly spoke. Very occasionally, when their paths crossed in the early mornings, Beecham Clay wondered what went on in her head, what she made of them. But for the most part, he didn’t give the girl a great deal of thought; she was Nancy’s to think about; she was there, in their house, for thirteen hours a day and Nancy seemed happy with the arrangement; her return to work, after all the anxiety over the European girl, had been easier than he’d expected.
How did she seem to you then, Beecham, this Cheryl?
Oh, heavy but reliable. That’s probably what Beecham Clay would say now about Cheryl Toussaint if you could ask him.
Maybe it was because Cheryl reminded Nancy so much of her mother’s maid, Iceline, that she took so strongly to her, right from the beginning. Even though Cheryl was nothing like Iceline to look at—Iceline had been much older, for a start, and very thin, almost dry-looking; and instead of the baggy over-washed T-shirts and wide gathered skirts Cheryl wore, Iceline had dressed every day in a pale grey uniform with a white apron; on her head, a small starched hat, like a paper boat. Iceline had been there in Nancy’s parents’ Chappaqua home, always. She’d been there before Nancy and her sister Barbara were born and had still been there when they’d left it; moving about the place, like a soft shadow, mopping and polishing and cooking and looking after Nancy and Barbara and keeping everything running smoothly with a stolid, wordless, uncomplaining proficiency. ‘That woman,’ Nancy’s father had been fond of saying (generally about once a week and always within earshot of his vague and dreamy wife), ‘is the only thing that stands between this family and Armageddon.’
Nancy, in ten short months, had come to feel the same way about Cheryl. Not that Nancy was vague and dreamy like her mother had been—oh no, certainly not—Nancy thought of everything, Nancy never (unlike her mother) misplaced important things, she was a list-maker, organized and efficient at home and in the office. Even so, she’d come to feel, almost from the first day, that she could never be without Cheryl. The thought of Cheryl ever leaving them was so dreadful she pushed it out of her head every time it popped in there. She loved coming home at the end of the day—always an hour before Beecham even though they worked in the same office building and went in together on the same 7:06 train in the morning, she always came back ahead of him on the 6:20 in the evening so she was home in time to put Bunny to bed—walking, almost running back from the station and leaving the car there for Beecham when he arrived later. She loved stepping into the hallway, everything so neat and clean, everywhere the bright sharp scent of Windex and Soft Scrub and Murphy’s Oil Soap, the two of them, Bunny and Cheryl, waiting: Bunny perched on Cheryl’s vast swaying hip, newly bathed, in fresh pyjamas, pink and delicious and with his corn-coloured hair parted smartly on the left-hand side so he almost looked like a little boy already instead of a baby still. It was true, it did prick her heart a little, the way he seemed to look older when she came home in the evening than when she’d left him that same morning—subtly different, as if he’d been slowly growing and changing minute by minute and hour by hour while she’d been away from him. But it gave her such joy too, coming back to him, her own boy, her greatest, most miraculous achievement, and such peace, knowing that all the time she was gone he was safe here at home with Cheryl. She couldn’t bear the idea of ever having to get someone else in; to have to make Bunny get used to a new girl. It appalled her, the prospect of ever having to limp along, even for a week or two like she’d had to do after the European girl didn’t work out and before Mary-Katherine’s neighbour had come up with Cheryl; the idea of an agency sitter—a different one each day—rocking up in some battered old Plymouth, Bunny screaming his head off the minute she stepped inside and chucked him under the chin with a curly spangled fingernail.
Which was why she didn’t mind that Cheryl didn’t do things exactly the way she asked her to do them. It was why she didn’t mind that Cheryl kept giving Bunny a bottle when every morning Nancy put out his red sippy cup next to the schedule she’d written out for the day for Cheryl to follow. Or that Cheryl put cereal in Bunny’s bottle with his formula. Or that she had the TV on sometimes when Nancy came home in the evening. It was why she turned a blind eye when Cheryl took their best teaspoons to the park to give Bunny his banana instead of the plastic ones that were always left out on the counter next to the fruit bowl in the morning. It was why she voiced no objection when Cheryl purchased Bunny a hideous silky emerald-green sport-shirt with her own money and sometimes dressed him in it instead of in one of the little pastel polo shirts which lay washed and ironed and folded and stacked in two neat piles by Cheryl herself in Bunny’s closet in accordance with Nancy’s instructions.
Any time Nancy felt herself getting annoyed by any of these things, she told herself that they were not important, not in the great scheme of things. Bunny was happy, Bunny was safe. With all her heart she felt sure of that; that Cheryl would never, ever let any harm come to Bunny, or do anything to make him sad. Cheryl was stubborn about small things, like the spoons and not using the sippy cup; stubborn about doing things her own way, and her English wasn’t great and probably she didn’t talk to him enough, not as much as you were supposed to talk to a one-year-old, but she was vigilant and careful and very gentle, just like Iceline had been, and when Nancy pictured the future, nothing about it felt to her in any way precarious and Cheryl, in her thin washed-out T-shirts and her bright skirts, was always in it.
Bunny was already sleeping, that last Monday when Nancy arrived home. He lay draped and stretched out like a starfish high up on Cheryl’s mountainous shoulder. He was newly-bathed and in his clean pyjamas with his fair hair smartly parted on one side the way it always was when Nancy walked in the door. Cheryl lifted him gently off her shoulder and placed him in Nancy’s outstretched arms and then, in her slow imperfect English, she asked if Bunny could go home with her that night and sleep
over with her. She’d bring him back in the morning.
Nancy was floored.
She’d never dreamed of Cheryl asking for such a thing.
Bunny, not be here? with them? for a whole night?
On the table in the hallway she saw that Cheryl had already got ready a supply of Bunny’s things to take with her—two clean empty bottles, a tin of formula, four diapers in a Ziploc baggie, a packet of oatmeal cereal, the emerald-green shirt.
Nancy didn’t know what to say.
She had a horror, a terror, of offending Cheryl, of making her think she wasn’t trusted, of upsetting her so much with a refusal that in the morning she’d announce that she was leaving, she’d found another family to work for, another Bunny to take care of.
Nancy flailed for some sort of practical objection. Where would he sleep? Did Cheryl have a spare bedroom at her place? Did she possess a crib?
A vague picture came into Nancy’s mind of a shabby apartment building, a corridor with a door at the end of it, and it occurred to her that she didn’t actually know where Cheryl lived. It had always been enough that Cheryl arrived every morning at 6:45 on their doorstep and Nancy was embarrassed now, in the middle of this awkward and unexpected conversation, to ask.
Cheryl said she would make a nest for Bunny on the floor next to her bed out of pillows and blankets.
‘Oh I don’t know, Cheryl,’ said Nancy.
Still holding onto Bunny, she smoothed his soft hair with the palm of her hand and touched his cheek with her finger. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I’m sorry, Cheryl, no.’
Cheryl’s response was impossible to read. Her broad black face looked the same as always: placid, inscrutable, almost blank.
It’s astonishing, really, the things Nancy and Beecham Clay never knew about their babysitter.
The things she never told them and the things they never felt the need to ask about—that her surname was Toussaint for example, and that she lived in a small dark room above the consignment store on Mamaroneck Avenue, and that she was twenty-five years old and had been born in 1975 in the Cité Soleil district of Port-au-Prince and that when she arrived in the United States in 1997 she’d left behind three children of her own.
In a general way of course they understood that Cheryl was here for the money, pure and simple. In a general way they knew this was how things were, and even if they didn’t dwell upon the details they probably had a fair idea that at the end of every week when she’d been paid, Cheryl walked out of their house and along Orienta Avenue and turned left onto the Post Road and walked the remaining hundred yards to the A&P where the Western Union counter was and dipped her hand into her cracked plastic purse and took out Nancy’s envelope with the dollar bills inside, kept back what she needed for her own rent, and sent the rest home.
That last morning, Nancy was nervy and pale. She’d hardly slept, thinking about Cheryl’s unexpected request, worrying about having refused it and yet still feeling she couldn’t possibly agree to it. She kept looking at Cheryl as she went round collecting her things for the day—papers, briefcase, laptop, purse, coat—trying to figure out if Cheryl was upset or sulking. It was impossible to tell. Cheryl looked the same as she always did. She looked calm. She looked stolid. She looked heavy and reliable. Nancy hadn’t said anything to Beecham about Cheryl wanting to borrow Bunny in case he got worked up about it, in case he said, ‘She asked you what?’ and brought the whole thing up in front of Cheryl while they were getting ready to leave for the station and Cheryl was giving Bunny his breakfast.
Nancy found herself lingering longer than usual, beyond their normal deadline for heading out of the house to the car. She checked and re-checked the contents of her briefcase, her purse. She re-applied her lipstick. She stood looking at Cheryl mashing up Bunny’s breakfast banana with a fork. Out in the driveway Beecham leaned on the horn and Nancy, feeling panicky and tearful and strange, wanted to say to Cheryl, ‘Please, Cheryl, don’t leave us.’
The names of Cheryl’s children were Stanley, Webster and Yolisha. Stanley was 8, Webster was 7 and Yolisha was 5 and Cheryl hadn’t seen them in four years because if she ever went back home to Haiti to visit them she’d never get back in through immigration again.
‘I can’t do this,’ she’d said to her grandmother on the phone when she first arrived—when she first started housekeeping for Mrs. Landis in New Rochelle.
‘How are we going to live, baby, if you don’t?’ said her grandmother.
In the beginning, when Stanley was 4 and Webster was 3 and Yolisha was 1, she’d talked to her children once a month on the phone, but after the first few months they’d grown too shy to speak to a stranger. All Cheryl could hear when her grandmother put them on the line was their soft breathing and after a time she’d let them be, it seemed too hard a thing for them all.
Which was how, after Mrs. Landis went to live in the retirement home in Phoenix and Cheryl came to work for the Clays, she’d fallen in love with Bunny.
Little by little, she’d started to love him and now she couldn’t stop. He had become essential to her. She had so much affection to bestow and her own children were there and Bunny was here and they’d forgotten her and Bunny hadn’t and it was such a comfort to have him close, to have him cry for her when she stepped out of the room just for a moment to fetch something and had to sing to him from wherever she was in the house so he could hear her voice and know she was there; that she hadn’t left him.
She couldn’t help wanting to do things for him the way she’d done them for her own children, like putting cereal in his bottle even though she knew Mrs Clay didn’t like it, or feeding him with the silver spoons from the velvet canteen in the dining room because they had a pattern of three small clubs like on a pack of cards and at home in Port-au-Prince they had a metal spoon that had just that same pattern on it that Stanley had liked to chew on when he had a tooth coming, the cold metal on his hot gums.
She couldn’t help wanting to dress Bunny in the soft green sport-shirt she’d bought him instead of in the collared cotton tops he was supposed to wear. It was what she’d have dressed him in if he’d been hers. She hated the collared cotton tops, it was like dressing him in a cardboard box. It made her feel guilty, the nine dollars she’d spent to buy Bunny the shirt instead of sending every last cent home to her grandmother and Stanley and Webster and Yolisha, but the truth was she felt like she loved Bunny now as much as she loved her own children and sometimes it seemed to her that she loved him even more than she loved them. It made her feel guilty but she couldn’t help it, and having lost her own children, it seemed to Cheryl that she could never, now, be made to give up Bunny. Having Bunny close did so much to fill up the big empty space in her heart that when 7:30 came round in the evening and Mrs. Clay came bursting in through the door and she had to hand Bunny over and say goodbye she could hardly stand it. He was the only thing that made it possible for her to do this, to live this way.
Out in the driveway Beecham leaned again on the horn and Nancy, finally, picked up her briefcase and her coat and her big leather purse. She kissed Bunny. She breathed in his sweet milky perfume and gave Cheryl her biggest warmest smile and told them both to have a great day and then she left.
In the kitchen, Cheryl put Bunny in his high chair with a rice cake and took out the trash. She emptied the coffee filter and wiped down the machine and put the butter and the milk and the big carton of juice back in the fridge and ran the dishes under warm water and placed them in the dishwasher. She wiped Bunny’s face and hands and lifted him up out of his highchair and tickled his belly and kissed his soft corn-coloured hair and tipped him upside-down till he chortled and squealed with pleasure and told him he was her Big Boy and then she took him onto the couch where they snuggled up to watch a little early morning television and then she took him upstairs for his morning nap. It always amazed her, how he could be so sleepy so soon after he woke up. None of her own children had ever been like that. Today it was barely nine thirty and Bun
ny was already sucking his thumb and drifting off.
She settled him in his crib, stood over him, singing and murmuring to him until his eyes closed and his wet thumb had fallen out of his mouth. She told herself not to think about yesterday and Mrs. Clay saying she couldn’t keep him for the night. Softly, she closed his door and came back downstairs and went into the basement and put on a load of laundry and came back up into the kitchen and ironed the bed linen that was waiting from yesterday and then she went back upstairs and made Nancy’s and Beecham’s bed and checked on Bunny and stood looking at him a while and then she came back down again and went into the den to tidy up and it was on the TV.
It was there the moment she went into the den, the silent puff-and-fall of the buildings. First one, then the other.
And after that, everything a strange kind of dream—
Mr. Clay’s brother Robert coming from Rhode Island and staying in the guest bedroom and going into the city every day and coming back in the evenings, grey dust in his hair and in his eyelashes. Mr. Clay’s brother Robert going back to Rhode Island. Mrs. Clay’s sister Barbara and her husband arriving from Madison, Wisconsin, Mrs. Clay’s sister hugging Cheryl, the two of them crying in each other’s arms.
All the packing. Mrs. Clay’s sister saying the journey back would take them sixteen hours.
Cheryl thinking that ‘them’ meant her too. Their big blue car, leaving. His golden head.