Our Little Racket

by Angelica Baker

  TWO

  The second she heard the SUV pull out of the garage, Lily returned to the kitchen. She sat down in the breakfast nook, just where Matteo had been, and put her head to the table.

  Isabel had reclaimed this wood from some farmhouse in western Massachusetts, a town they’d passed through on their way home from the partners’ retreat at someone’s Berkshires estate. She’d apparently all but yanked the wood from its heap in a field, saving it from its bonfire destiny. But of course he’d insisted they restore it, clean it up, resurface the tabletop to get rid of pesky, uneven planks that might upturn a little boy’s cereal bowl. And so by the time it was finished, just like the rest of the house, it had strayed a bit from Isabel’s original plan.

  This, at least, was the story Lily had heard from Isabel. Like the other stories about the construction of Bob’s envisioned home, Lily was mistrustful of this one. She worked for Bob and she worked for Isabel, but she had yet to see any evidence that he could strong-arm his wife into doing much of anything. Which seemed to Lily like a fair trade, for a razor-sharp woman who expressed placid disinterest in the intricacies and machinations of her husband’s career. It seemed only right that, in exchange, he accept the house as her domain.

  Still, the brute-force approach might have been helpful this morning, if he’d been here. Madison had been in the kitchen for only ten minutes, but Lily felt like taking a bow, then a nap. And she wasn’t usually wrung out like this before nine o’clock. There were a million balls in the air each day, yes, but Lily had kept this job for this long because she knew how to juggle. She wasn’t usually asked to lie to these kids, though; she wasn’t usually given enough information to make lying a viable course of action.

  It bothered her, to be already thinking along these lines. No one had asked her to lie. All that had happened was that Lily had walked through the rose garden and into the main house an hour ago to find Isabel awake and fully dressed, her drained espresso cup sitting on the precious wooden table. And Isabel had presented her employee with a plan that wasn’t so much a plan as a series of orders not to ask further questions.

  As if that would work with the kids, as if they wouldn’t balk at their mother suddenly driving them to school.

  Jesus, they were only a month into the school year, Lily thought now. Too much was already flying out of her hands. The early return from their summer vacation, and now this.

  She began loading the breakfast dishes into the enormous spacecraft this house classified as a dishwasher. This was the smaller one, not even the industrial one they used for the events that were too small to be catered, and still it felt like an enormous churning maw that might swallow her at any moment. All this kitchen for a woman who didn’t cook. But that wasn’t Lily’s business, obviously; judgment wasn’t her job. Her job had taken care of Lily’s parents, paid off her loans, built her grad school fund from mere scrimped money into something that actually deserved to be called “a fund.” Something that could even pay for one of the big ones, law school or something. It was too easy to forget, sometimes, to roll your eyes and start to feel like the fact that you were the one cooking in a kitchen actually made it yours.

  At what point did you have to stop saying you were “saving money for school”? If she never did it, never went back to school, never gave shape to her amorphous interest in child psychology, could she still say this job had served a purpose? In the past two years, she’d gradually withdrawn from anyone who might press her on this. Her old adviser from Columbia, who had gotten her this job in the first place because he trusted her to use it as a stepping-stone. (“These aren’t the kind of people to whom you don’t wish to be connected,” he had once told her, taking delight in the wordplay, as if cleverness would make it sound less like social climbing.) Her friends from her major, many of whom had already gotten their master’s degrees and were either mulling over or in the midst of Ph.D.s. And her father, who didn’t share her mother’s thrill at the sheer amounts of money she’d been able to earn.

  Her father who always said that anything you did that you felt good about, you wouldn’t feel any need to hide from anyone, no matter how noble the reasons for secrecy. Lily didn’t believe he thought this actually, didn’t believe any human adult could make it to his advanced age and still be spouting such inaccuracies, but still. He loved to say this when she was over for dinner, dodging his questions about when she’d quit her job and start “her next phase.” When they were eating the groceries she’d bought, sending the leftovers home with the handyman she’d paid. (She never pointed this out, and also never reminded her father that if his landlord ever forced him out to make way for the invading gentrifiers, it would also be Lily’s money he’d use to find another place.)

  Of course, Jackson was different. Her boyfriend was always telling her that he didn’t judge her for wanting to stay long enough to reap the benefits of all the work she’d put in. But you don’t want to get complacent, he always said. You don’t want to grow afraid of leaving; by then, it’s too late. You don’t want to fall for it. Start thinking you need them.

  Lily punched at the faucet, ducking her hands beneath the scalding jets of water. Nobody, not any of them, wanted to hear that she liked this job. She liked being the woman Isabel D’Amico, who needed no one, relied upon for help. And these kids; she loved these kids. She wasn’t in denial. She knew that eight years was at least five years too long for a girl with her options to remain a glorified nanny.

  (Isabel had never really settled on a job title for her, instead always referring to her as “Lily, who keeps the train on the tracks,” whenever her name was mentioned in discussions of logistics with other moms.)

  But Lily loved the twins so much that she’d postponed the natural conclusion to her time with the D’Amico family, removed the word “temporary” from her inner monologue. She’d been here long enough that she allowed herself to take pride in them as if she were responsible for the fact that they weren’t like other little boys. Which, quite frankly, they weren’t. This was a truth she often had to remind herself to keep internal, when she was sitting with the other nannies on the corrugated metal bleachers at the elementary school. She’d watch the other children eating grass, scratching and pawing at one another and throwing elbows like barbarians. While her twins stood together in close conference like two little robber barons, heads cocked to one side, considering the soccer field in front of them as if puzzled by all the ways it diverged from whatever they’d rather be doing. They looked so thoughtful out there, so peaceful and old.

  She did try to remember not to brag about them to the other nannies, though. You aren’t supposed to take the credit for children you’re paid to nurture; no one wants to see you form a true, unshakable bond with the angelic offspring of the man who signs your checks. The most jealous ones, actually, were usually the older nannies, the women born in Guatemala or Jamaica or the D.R. rather than on a safe, if unglamorous, block at the south end of Carroll Gardens. They couldn’t stand the fact that Lily, so much younger than they were, so inexperienced when she’d been given the job and already so spoiled by an Ivy League degree, was so good at it. Took it so seriously.

  She shut off the faucet and turned back to the table, leaning uncomfortably against the center island, the dishwasher buttons poking her lower back. Her phone erupted on the counter. She grabbed it, ignored it, and put it in the back pocket of her jeans.

  Why couldn’t it be research? That was the other thing all the men hassling her about this never wanted to hear, not even her old adviser. She wanted to work with children at some future stage. If she was considering a Ph.D. in East Asian History, would anyone argue against her spending five years, whatever, maybe even six or seven, in Japan? Would anyone criticize her for waiting to apply until she was fluent in the language, the people, all of it? No. The answer was no. But because her research meant caring for children, somehow she was stalling, putting her life on hold. Somehow it was unserious.

  And what
about the boys, their lives?

  She’d been plucked out of the city by Isabel only a month after graduation. Her thesis adviser had insisted she call this woman he knew a little bit, this was a Wall Street CEO’s wife, for God’s sake, Lily’s loans would be paid off within a few years and she’d be making more than she could make as a paralegal. Every trust-fund-baby Lit major at the school had heard the rumor about this job and was clamoring for it, but he would give her a personal introduction to the family. And so she’d given him a résumé that was polished to the point of fiction and waited for the call from Isabel’s then-assistant, a creamy-cheeked redhead who had blinked compulsively and conducted Lily’s entire interview, practically, in a frantic whisper, inspiring Lily to do the same for at least the first few months she’d lived out here.

  She smiled now, remembering the constant seasickness of those early days, never quite knowing her role. But she’d picked it up; she’d followed Isabel’s cues. She had a lifetime of experience as a mimic, after all, as the scholarship kid, as the girl surrounded by other girls who had grown up with more. It was that ear that helped her pick up the inflections of the other girls in her dorm freshman year, their specific emphases. How they had to live like paupers because they literally had like fifty dollars to their name right now, because they’d blown through more than a hundred dollars at an open bar, for fuck’s sake. And they couldn’t go to their dad, not again, to ask if he could do the deposit early this time, before the first of the month, please, Daddy. Just this once. I’ve learned my lesson. I swear.

  By the end of that first year of college, though, Lily had realized that the best thing she could do with her ability to sound like them was to turn it on its head. It felt like she could only disguise her own marvel at these girls, their exotic, careless lives, by playing up the very things that they found exotic in her. They’d chosen Columbia, often, for the city. It had been a choice. To them, she was interesting by virtue of her lifelong residence there. They’d come from mansions in Holmby Hills or Rye or the North Shore, and they just assumed she knew all the byways and shortcuts to the city. So, she embellished. She invented middle school muggings, drug deals in Prospect Park, older men who took her to loft parties in Williamsburg before Williamsburg was even a thing. She never again tried to sound like them.

  And she was proud of the fact that her early Greenwich whisper, that early fear, only ever really returned now when visitors came to the house. It had always come back with vigor when Isabel’s father was around, the expansive Mr. Berkeley. He was the clear source of the twins’ sun-drenched gene, that look of having spent one’s early years crawling across some dappled croquet lawn in Rhode Island or Massachusetts or wherever it had been. Lily had only actually spoken with him a few times, though she’d often laundered his golf khakis and even more often prepared his breakfast. She’d never been able to keep from jumping, startled, when he cornered her in some upstairs hallway, his piercing eyes a milky blue, like a cloud-skimmed sky.

  The boys looked more like Isabel’s side of the family, definitely. But when you saw them all together, the twins and their parents, something clicked. All of their mother’s light and beauty and yet none of the things that made her seem breakable, like some fragile glass bauble placed unwisely on a high shelf. The boys’ faces spread out broadly from their strong noses, their flushed cheeks, then gathered with animalistic intensity whenever they were busy with some task. And in those moments you saw Bob’s face floating over Luke’s or Matteo’s, like a menacing ghost.

  Madison was different; Madison was her father’s coarse energy poured over ice. She was her mother’s goddess features, infused with her father’s ceaseless certainty that he was right.

  The phone buzzed, again, in her back pocket. Lily dried her hands, took it out, silenced it, and left it on the counter. It was Jackson, again, she knew.

  He had always said she just needed something to shake things up for her, this job, so that other parts of the situation rose to the surface. And now he seemed to think that something had arrived. He was in Pennsylvania right now visiting his family, so it wasn’t a question of luring her into the city to see him. She knew why he was calling. He wanted information. He assumed she had it.

  She began loading the cereal bowls into the dishwasher. Bob spent plenty of nights in the city. He slept there all the time. This particular time had lasted longer, but that meant nothing. Isabel had chosen not to elaborate, and seeking the root causes of Isabel’s moods was not in Lily’s job description. Her job was to decipher those moods, to see how she could help the children to navigate around them, and then to withdraw.

  Having done every dish she could possibly do, she looked around the kitchen for a moment. She could go upstairs to gather the detritus the boys always left in their morning wake, their sweat-choked pajamas on the floor and the fine spray of toothpaste across the lower half of the bathroom mirror. She could also sit down with the various sports and academic calendars and type up the kids’ schedules from now until Christmas; Isabel would be thrilled if she had that all squared away this early. She was reluctant, though, to go upstairs. She opened the refrigerator and took stock of what she had. She decided to prep a marinade for flank steak; they could eat it tomorrow, for a late Saturday lunch. She took out the glass baking dish and began to chop the onion.

  It was true Madison had that tough coarseness, her father’s trademark, though she seemed powerless to apply it against her mother. But then Isabel was equally steel. When Isabel dictated the arrangements of the place settings for a dinner party, wasn’t she just providing Bob with the polish he’d always wanted, the things he’d married her for? His nickname hadn’t come from nowhere. He needed someone beside him who could transmogrify that noisiness, convince you it was dominance and not just a panicked tantrum.

  And that, that definitely was something Isabel could do.

  Lily hadn’t seen marriage in this way before this job, as a mutually beneficial merging of goods and services. But then, that wasn’t entirely fair. She saw the way Bob looked at his wife when she wore something backless, the near-ferocious blend on his face of aggression and pride and longing.

  Again Lily felt the brief recoil of guilt. The part of her mind hired to play cop admonished the other part, the part that allowed for fear. Already, any minor doubt felt like a punishable offense. As if it would be caught on tape, recorded somewhere within the walls of this house, and played back to her later as proof of her momentary disloyalty.

  Not that she’d actually understood much of what she’d read, the news all summer. Whenever Jackson mentioned it, either alone with her or on one of her nights in the city when she’d meet him and his J school friends at their favorite scummy bar beneath the BQE, she’d take that moment to visit the urine-coated, graffiti-mirrored bathroom. She was careful to keep her iPhone always locked around Madison, to conceal her periodic news checks throughout the afternoon.

  So what did she really know? The other women, the nannies and the wives and—she could only assume—the mistresses, talked about these guys like they were firefighters and nuclear scientists and the president rolled into one. Meanwhile, she was not a moron and was in fact a champion eavesdropper, and yet she had not a clue what it was Bob D’Amico actually did for a living. Whatever activities filled the corridors of his soaring glass building on Times Square were utterly foreign to her. So what did she know?

  She knew daily routines. She knew the unpredictable weather of summers in southern Connecticut, and she knew which layers of clothing that weather might call for at any given time. She knew favorite snacks and local shortcuts. She knew, in brief, his children.

  And Bob, in turn, got to feel cozy and validated for hiring such a well-educated nanny, and a young one to boot. She knew the other yummy mummies—Jackson’s nickname for the Greenwich contingent, a phrase that had unfortunately lodged itself in her brain—would never have stood for a recent graduate shuttling their children to and from soccer practice, a young tr
ophy-wife-in-training who might remind them of what they’d seen in the mirror only a few years earlier. No, most nannies around here were middle-aged and terrified of losing access to this world. Lily wasn’t exactly competition for Isabel, she was no nubile blonde. Still: Isabel had the confidence to hire someone young, a girl with an education who spoke three languages (this was another blurred detail on her résumé, but whatever), whose ass hadn’t spread yet.

  So, no, she hadn’t studied the canon at Columbia so she could clean up after the CEO of Weiss & Partners and his beautiful children. But no one had ever explained to her how this was any less valid than the amorphous digital-media analytics jobs her friends had signed up for in open-plan offices near the Flatiron. She was taking care of small people and helping them learn to negotiate the world around them. What was more useful than that? If she wasn’t here, their only available guides would have been their parents, who were so deeply ensconced that they couldn’t possibly give their children any real, accurate information about the world. And so the next step, her next step—she’d get to it when this job was done.

  They treated her well. Lily couldn’t speak for the others, the army of gardeners and landscapers or Lena the silent Ukrainian woman who arrived each day with her helpers at nine o’clock to scour the house, one room at a time. The truth was that the D’Amicos could have a lot more people working in that house every day, and probably would if Lily herself hadn’t negated the need for a personal assistant for Isabel. There was a girl in the city who exclusively handled the MoMA correspondence, sure, and that was the primary source of Isabel’s business from day to day. But out here, with the kids? Lily had made herself irreplaceable, without even realizing how important it was for her to do so. Eight years was an epoch unto itself when it came to nannies in Greenwich; it was leverage.