We needed a plumber, and my contractor sat on the edge of my dining room table staining my telephone with sauce from his late-afternoon sub, nodding, yep, nope. “He’s out,” he said above the mouthpiece.
Then I walked outside and saw Iris, and Thea quit.
Actually, I’d been planning to talk about a transition in a few weeks, after things settled down with the house, to say perhaps it was time to change our arrangement. Perhaps it was time for me to try a day care after all, or to call the service again, didn’t she need more time with her family? Only I’d felt squeamish and reliant. It wasn’t ever going to be firing her, exactly, more like relinquishing her. Perhaps it was just because Malena was my child, my first child, that I couldn’t completely trust her, but I couldn’t imagine trusting anyone more. I was guilty of taking up her time, her mothering energy, taking advantage of her cookies and her home, and I felt beholden and embarrassed. Don’t reprimand my daughter, she’d snapped at me, as if I was an ogre. As if I didn’t entrust her with the most important person I’d ever met, my own, my Malena. Standing outside watching her tote her daughter back inside, I noticed how she moved like a spider, her legs and arms too long.
I suppose I had still thought Thea was my friend, in a marginal capacity, anyway. She had agreed to this job in my time of need. She loved Malena, though Malena was easy to love, but she also fed her honey, honey of all things, which could contain harmful bacteria—if you read anything in any pediatrician’s waiting room you’d know that. And she was often late picking up in the morning so sometimes I missed my train. But she picked up. She did that for me. She’d washed my clothes and brought me juice boxes, and she’d given me so many things when I needed them that even though I knew things weren’t working out—she didn’t want to tell me what had really happened in my daughter’s day, she was preoccupied, she’d let Malena go too long without changing so her bottom was pink and prickly with diaper rash—I felt obligated to keep her. Maybe I was an overprotective, guilty, first-time mom; I surely wasn’t the first one. Underneath my criticism, I knew I’d been lucky, and I was afraid I’d never find someone else half as good for my daughter.
The next morning, it felt great to wear sweats. It felt great not to hand over my baby. Not to race for the train. For a few minutes, anyway. While I nursed Malena in the freezing bedroom with the door closed and a chair blocking any “accidental” entry on Jeb’s part (I heard him guffawing downstairs, though there was no one with him), I called my boss, Neethi. She hadn’t called me back after I left a message telling her I needed a few days of emergency leave. I left a message for our assistant, asking her to FedEx the dinosaur galleys and the middle-grade novel manuscript on my desk, just revised by the author. Honestly, I didn’t care if neither arrived, but I needed to make a show of dedication.
“You know, Amanda,” Neethi started, with an enormous sigh. “We have a lot of deadlines. I have to know you’re committed. I don’t want to lose you, but I’ve given Jessica the Smithe book. Walter says we can’t miss deadline again.”
“It was just galleys,” I said, feeling my defenses rise. My checks heated, fight or flight. Malena, who’d been completely asleep in our bed, started to fuss.
“I know you have commitments,” said Neethi. “And I’ll keep your office open as long as I can—What? Oh, I’m sorry, production meeting’s starting.”
“Neethi? It’s just a few days. I’m interviewing nannies, after all.”
Neethi had children, too, but they were all driving. Two were voting. She couldn’t possibly understand. She’d had a live-in nanny, she’d told me, it was the best. She still had a live-in nanny, though mostly Katia just helped with housekeeping and dinner prep. Dinner prep. For me that meant reviewing delivery menus.
“Neethi takes two-hour lunches,” said Rosanna when I called her next. “She’s either having an affair or getting deeply involved in off-track betting.”
I laughed. Rosanna could always make me laugh.
“And you are the best editor they have, so I wouldn’t worry.”
“I’m worried.”
“Did I tell you John-John in marketing made a pass at me? He must be all of twenty-two.”
I hadn’t even met the man, a new assistant. I let her tell me, hummed my feigned interest, but I was turning pages of the fax from the nanny agency all the while.
Part of me was afraid of losing my job. Part of me would be relieved. Those two parts inhabited the same sleep-deprived, itchy-skinned, still-baby-baggy body. I was hiding in my bedroom like an upper-middle-class refugee.
“They won’t fire you,” said Aaron that night. I had bought out Home Depot, and we now had three space heaters on high, since the electricity was the only thing working again. We drank bottled water, and I was planning to use baby wipes in lieu of a shower. Of course Aaron could shower at work. And it was warm there, too. He wore his winter coat inside the house, along with pink fluffy earmuffs my sister had given me as a joke and a black cashmere scarf. He was rubbing his hands over the Heat Master 2000 like a man at a campfire.
“No promises,” I said. “Any chance you could take a few days?” Even as I asked him I knew the answer. There were new downtown clients who took him to important dinners twice a week and whose billable hours were more in a week than a whole client list would bill in some firms.
Aaron sighed. “I know it’s not fair, Panda. I’ll see what I can do.” Which meant no. I felt like a petulant child. Diminished by his lack of flexibility, diminished by my own. Trapped and deeply in love with Malena at the same time.
I interviewed two women who came early and interrupted nursing and a nap, respectively. I sat by the heater in the living room trying to talk to twentysomething Terefa, who had brittle blond hair and frosty pink lipstick and answered her cell phone twice while we spoke. “All my friends are making twenty an hour,” she said. “I’d have to know there’d be a raise in a few weeks.”
“I lost my last job because my boss was a snob,” said Xandra, who smelled unmistakably of pot. “She wanted me to wear shoes in the house. She didn’t like my friends coming over. I can give you references, but don’t call them, okay? They were snobs. Could I start in two weeks?”
Barbara had excellent references (“She’s wonderful! I was so sorry we couldn’t keep her, but Rebecca is twelve and I lost my job!”) and she dressed neatly and had a green card and two grown sons. She came promptly and shook my hand—her own hand was soft and mildly fragrant. Jasmine. She spoke clearly and was respectful and I was awed. But nervous. Aaron and I went over my notes from the interview and agonized, and I worried the paper until it tore in my hands. I imagined it all night, Barbara at our frozen house in two days with Malena, this woman I’d only met one time. The smell of jasmine on my daughter’s skin. Then I thought about the work I could get back to, I thought about walking into the office and telling Neethi I had a new nanny. I thought of spring with Barbara walking in our neighborhood, taking Malena out of our newly repaired house in her stroller to see the daffodils and watch our resident groundhog grazing like a cow on the lawn. I called her at the decent hour of nine-thirty and she respectfully told me she’d taken another position, with triplets, in a town much closer to her own. I was tempted to beg, but instead I hung up and tried to relinquish the images I’d invented as I dialed the agency again.
Next I interviewed Star, who’d gone to Yale and dropped out because of depression. Her hair was almost white, naturally, and I could see the pink of her scalp, which made her look vulnerable. She wore a dozen silver bangles and a thick silver nose ring, which fascinated Malena. I was considering her; she was soft-spoken, she was clearly intelligent, she wore neat clothes, and she had worked in three day cares that gave her reasonable references. I thought I ought to call her sooner rather than later. But when I went to tip the delivery guy from the Greek restaurant who knew our front door too well, I realized Star had taken all the cash from my wallet. I was not being paranoid. The wallet had been on the desk; I’d go
ne into the bathroom to throw away Malena’s diaper, and now the three twenties and six ones I’d had right before the interview were gone. I looked around the room as if I might find the missing money, but I knew I wasn’t at the end of my search. My black beaded sweater was also missing from the back of the couch, though I wasn’t sure how she could’ve pocketed that as well. Star was not the one.
The fabulous Red Ruth came with weird recommendations, half enamored, half afraid, but I decided to interview her anyway. She had a grand sense of herself and her skills, and when I spoke to her on the phone, I was somehow lulled by her gravelly voice and her passionate claims about her deep and spiritual connection with children. She smoked. I could tell from her smell and the horrible rattly breaths between her words, but when I asked point-blank, “Do you smoke?” she said, “Not anymore.” I felt like I shouldn’t discriminate. Not anymore since the drive over? Ah, but I felt desperate.
I knew better than to call my mother after interviewing an entirely unacceptable nanny, but I needed to talk to someone, and I realized I couldn’t talk to anyone from work, because that was dangerous. I couldn’t tell my sister, because she wouldn’t understand, and I couldn’t call Thea…because. Remembering how I’d held that first round of interviews in her living room gave me a twinge not unlike an upset stomach.
“Hi, Mom,” I said. The phone pipped a few times and my mother rustled around, clearly driving with her cell phone again.
“Is this okay?” she asked, the phone on speaker mode. “I have a headset, too.”
“Headset, please,” I said.
“Oh, it’s you! I didn’t look at the caller ID. I’m on the Mass Pike. There’s this alumni dinner—oh, I won’t bore you with it, but since it’s you, I won’t put on the headset. It’s horrible against the earrings. They’re crystal. Can you hear me okay?”
I could, but it was annoying and grainy.
“Sort of,” I said. “I wanted to tell you about this awful interview.”
“Oh, darling, are you on the market again? They’re giving me an award or something, you know, that’s why I don’t want to take out my earrings. I’ll forget them. I didn’t realize you were getting out there again. Still publishing, or are you spreading your wings?”
“Mom,”—I winced, picking at an uneven edge of my fingernail—“I’m in the market, not on the market. I need a new nanny. Thea quit.”
“She quit? Oh, darling. She was very good. But that’s probably why. She probably got something better. You really were quite lucky you know. Damn! I should’ve taken Storrow Drive.”
“No, she didn’t get something else, she wasn’t a professional nanny. She was mad at me—I don’t really understand why. She was really good, but there were a few things…” I knew I was trying to console myself. “I mean, the day she quit, her daughter ran away and she left the baby with her little kids—well, her teenager, but still—and she gave her honey—”
“Oh, honey, that’s not good, botulism, you know. Doesn’t affect adults, but it can be serious—”
“I know, Mom. I know. I was just trying to tell you about this nanny I interviewed. She was scary, she had this dark, rattly voice, and she stank of cigarettes. And you won’t believe this: She put on a clown mask, which of course made Malena cry. It almost made me cry. And she made this big deal about how great she was with kids, but I couldn’t imagine her alone with a baby! She had a huge sharp chrome necklace like a barbed-wire fence and Day-Glo pink lips and a wig! A red wig! She told me the feng shui of our living room was horrible, and she scraped at a smudge on my sweater and pulled the thread and her nails were a thousand miles long—” The phone clicked. “Mom? Mom?” Two more clicks, and I got the “If you want to make a call…” recording.
“Argh,” I said, when my mom picked up again.
“Oh, sorry, darling. I heard you say something about Thea and honey—honey just isn’t safe for babies, you know—and then I had to go through a tunnel. The Big Dig is such a disaster!”
“Never mind.”
“Never mind? Offer her more money. You should get her back. Wasn’t she the one who thought women shouldn’t work outside the home? Oh, I love that phrase, it’s so old-fashioned. No gardening for you, missy!”
My mother sounded so perky, I knew she must be a little nervous about the dinner. But I’d wanted to confide, to tell her all about what had gone wrong with my day and that I was worried about my job, and here she’d gone and made me worry about her. Again.
“Yeah. That was her. She just quit point-blank, and she was mad at me.”
“Well, my dear, all’s fair.”
I waited for the rest. “All’s fair?”
“You know.” The phone was clicking again.
“So do you mean it’s love, or war?” I touched my mouth.
“I’m losing you,” she said. “I’ll call you later!”
And then all it took was one person and two days: we hired Carole. She had folded her hands in her lap on our couch, answering my questions, not worrying her wrists or fingers, just calm. She was a mom, she’d worked as a nanny, she was very neat, she didn’t mind the workmen, and she adored being with babies. She knew not to give them honey. She’d start in two days. Just a weekend stood between me and a new beginning.
On Sunday morning, Aaron had to stop by Thea’s house. He’d left his brown belt there all this time and didn’t think my idea, just get another fucking belt, was practical. But when he came home, he acted as if he’d had to go behind enemy lines.
“He was there,” he said. “Can you believe it—he said something about how we’d damaged the paint in the basement. That was two months ago. Such a lawyer.”
“You’re the lawyer,” I said. “He’s a management consultant.”
Aaron scoffed.
“Was she there?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “He was drinking. At noon on a Sunday.”
Caius had never been bothersome. Caius had been gracious; he’d welcomed us and helped us put our things in the car when we left: a box of breast pads, Caius’s own old French blue button-down, which had become mine when I’d stained it past ordinary usefulness, little packets of formula, what seemed to be an endless supply of Aaron’s work socks. Intimate things. Caius hadn’t quit on me.
“He was kind to us,” I said. “It was just her.” I wasn’t angry, exactly; I was embarrassed thinking about her, almost as if I’d done something wrong. Had I kissed her, really?
“They were kind to us,” he said, “but they were never really our friends.” Then, because it was what confused me most, I almost told him that Thea and I had kissed. I almost told him that she was my friend, just very different from me, but he was angry in a calm, organized way, as if he’d spent months collecting evidence against them.
“She was kind—” I started.
“Really?” he said, having none of it. “No matter how tired she was, we paid her, and she was working for us. She could’ve given appropriate notice. She should have. It was wrong of her. That’s the only wrong here. There’s nothing else. They helped us, we thanked them; she worked for us, she did something inappropriate. And very inconvenient.” He sighed and put his arm around my waist. I didn’t like my waist lately, but I pretended to. “That’s all. Game over. New game.”
Suddenly the shower upstairs and the kitchen faucet started simultaneously, hissing and banging like dying submarines.
“I guess we have water,” said Aaron. “I’ll call Jeb.”
Malena, who had startled at the sound, started to babble, telling me very important syllables about nothing.
March
17
Thea
I’d been sketching lately, now that I had slivers of time formerly taken up by a baby. I drew the dead songbird—a thrush—I’d found on my porch the day after Amanda’s late night, only I drew it alive, in a dozen poses, willing spring into my charcoal. Iris liked my drawings and I let her make her own on the good sketch pad, flush with patience. She smu
dged charcoal on her mouth and hands and smeared my sketches with her animated fingers, but it was easy to forgive her.
“That bird’s lonely!” she told me. “She needs babies!”
I didn’t tell her my inspiration had been cat kill; I just let the story become our shared entertainment.
Of course I thought about Malena. And Amanda. But I felt a thousand times more peaceful knowing I didn’t have drop-offs and pickups, disruptions every day. I didn’t have to love a baby I couldn’t keep.
“I guess I’d be angry if I were her,” I told Caius one evening after everyone was sleeping. I believed it, I worried it, I carried it in my pocket like a small stone. I’d be angry—not just angry, irate, confused, maybe bitter. I’d quit so abruptly, and I’d avoided really telling her why, the way friends might tell each other, even the way an employee might respectfully depart. But there hadn’t been any choice. Quitting was choosing not to make any more mistakes.
“Did you know he came by to get his belt?”
“Aaron?” I was trying to get comfortable in the bed, but the sheets felt sandy.
“I told him about that scratched paint in the basement. Figured he ought to know we noticed.”
“You told them? I just mentioned it to you; I wasn’t trying to pick a fight with them or anything.” Sand between my toes. Sand under my legs. Where had all this sand come from?
“Maybe that’s the problem,” said Caius. He leaned in to kiss me, but I gave him my cheek, feeling patronized.
“Maybe you were a little too nice to them,” he finished.
I couldn’t help it; I thought about kissing her. Had that been nice? Had that been the single time we agreed on something?
The Other Mother Page 18