I love this house. I think of it as mine, though it actually belongs to Willis. He bought it when we were married, six years ago. During his first marriage everything was owned jointly, and during his divorce he regretted it. This time, everything is in his name. I don’t care. I work for a foundation. I’ve never made much money and I never will. My first husband, Walter, was not generous, and the children and I went through some hard times when I was single. I am lucky to be married to someone who is generous, and I don’t care whose name the house is in. Willis gives us a good life, and I’m grateful, on any terms, because of Nicko and Belinda.
In past years, the children went to summer camp, and their father and I split the rest of their vacation time between us. But this year Nicko is sixteen and too old for camp, and Belinda is twelve and has discovered horses. Nicko found a job out here, and Belinda found a stable. Nicko is really too old for a babysitter, but he’s a lot too young to be left alone with Belinda all week in Bridgehampton. So I hired someone to be me—someone to buy the groceries, do the laundry, drive the children where they needed to go, and call the repairman when the dishwasher broke. I wasn’t worried about rules; my children aren’t rebellious. Nicko’s shy and hasn’t many friends. He’s never had a girlfriend; he’s never even had a date. Belinda hasn’t hit adolescence yet, and she loves everyone. So I didn’t want a policeman, I wanted a mother. I wanted someone who would keep the house sailing peacefully along before the wind, with Nicko and Belinda safely inside it.
I looked around the kitchen: it was clean and serene. The gray-and-white checkerboard floor was swept, the butcher-block counters were smooth and empty, the geraniums in the bay window had been watered. I felt a sense of great peace and relief: today was the start of my own vacation, and for the next two weeks I’d be here full-time. I felt as though I’d completed some arduous task and was receiving my reward.
I went to the back stairs and called up. “Nicko? Belinda?”
There was no answer, and the house felt empty. I went out to the tiny cottage where Arlette lives. This is just two small rooms, side by side, looking straight out onto the back lawn. It has no privacy, and I called, to let Arlette know I was coming. When I reached it she was standing at the screen door.
I had imagined very clearly the person I would find to look after the children: a woman in her thirties or forties, maybe a teacher, with the summer free. Maybe divorced, a little down on her luck. Someone like that would be appreciative of the job, even grateful to be there, and her gratitude would spill over onto my beloved children. Maybe she’d be plump and messy-haired, indifferent to appearances, someone with a great sense of humor and a great heart. Someone who would think it a pleasure to live in our pretty house in Bridgehampton, with my two wonderful children, for the summer.
I didn’t find anyone like that. For months I couldn’t find anyone at all, and by the time I found Arlette it was only two weeks before vacation began, and I was desperate. The idea of gratitude had somehow shifted, and it seemed by then as though she were doing me a favor.
Arlette is twenty-five and French. She has short dark hair, a pointed nose, and a heavy accent. She is thin, chic, and alarmingly cool. When she answers a question her eyebrows rise disdainfully, as though she can’t imagine why you had to ask. I find her unsettling, but she does everything I ask. The larder is always full, the laundry hamper always empty, the children are taken where they need to go. I can’t complain, but she wasn’t what I’d had in mind.
“’Ello, Jan, how was your trip?” asked Arlette politely. She was wearing two very thin gold bracelets and a bikini.
“Not too bad, actually,” I said. I was still in my office clothes, now hot and grubby after the drive. Arlette looked cool and sleek, as though she’d done nothing all week but lie out at the pool.
“Good,” Arlette said, and waited, her head cocked. She gives out nothing, Arlette, she answers only the question. This makes it hard for me to feel that we are friends.
“Well, what’s been going on all week,” I asked. “Did the repairman ever come?”
“The repairman came yesterday,” she said. “The deesh-washer works.”
“Amazing,” I said.
Arlette nodded. “Amazeeng, but true.”
I am never quite sure when Arlette is being funny. I smiled now, in case she was, and asked what I really wanted to know. “And where are the kids?”
“Belinda’s at the barn, an’ Nicko ’as gone to the ’ardware store wis Willis.”
“I’ll pick up Belinda,” I said. “What are Nick and Willis doing at the hardware store?”
“I seenk Willis want’ some new cleepers for the ’edge. I told him to take Nicko, Nicko would know which are the best.”
Nicko has been working at a garden center, so he ought to know about clippers. Still, Willis has never asked his advice about anything before. I tried to picture the two of them standing at the counter, companionably side by side, discussing heft and calibration, blades. I was pleased and touched to hear that it had been Arlette’s idea. Maybe I had misunderstood her, I thought, maybe I wasn’t giving her enough credit.
When you’re a single parent, you feel solely and wholly responsible for your children, as though you were refugees, making your way through a war-torn landscape. You feel protective in a fierce, constant way. A relentless vigilance lives in you like a heartbeat. You are never not aware of where your children are, or of the dangers that surround them. You feel that you are your children’s carapace, their shield against the world.
I’ve worked full-time ever since Nicko started school. And whatever the arrangements were, whoever was looking after him and Belinda, however carefully I’d planned, I’ve always worried, from the very beginning. How could you not? And when you come home and find your child happy, bathed, asleep, you feel awash with gratitude to the baby-sitter. You also feel, secretly and uncharitably, resentful of her for doing such a good job. For the better she is, the less he needs you. So, as you take the sleeping baby, you notice that his pajama top is on inside out, and you purse your lips in annoyance. You make a small noise of irritation to let her know about her mistake.
This response is unkind, but so are some of hers. Sometimes, when your son begins to whimper in your arms, the baby-sitter says ingenuously, “Oh, that’s the first time he’s cried all day.” You say nothing, but you hate her. She says, “Here, let me take him,” but you turn away, with him in your arms. Her words send a dagger deep into your heart, reminding you that you have been absent for your son, and perhaps your presence is no longer what he needs.
But if I had been absent, now I was back. The reign of Arlette was over, and my own had begun. I felt relieved and, now that I was taking the throne, magnanimous. I was ready to forgive Arlette her coolness, to believe I had misjudged her. I was happy, and in this mood I asked her to come to dinner with us that night.
“We’re taking the kids to Pete’s,” I said. “Would you like to come along?”
As I spoke, I wondered about Willis.
He has a horror of invasion, and at the start of the summer he had gloomily predicted that Arlette would appear at breakfast every morning full of loud Gallic chat, and a horde of her radio-playing friends would hang around our pool. So I had carefully explained the rules to Arlette: she was always welcome at the pool, but her friends were not. No loud radios, and so on. As it turned out, all that was unnecessary. In the mornings, when we were there, Arlette took her mug of breakfast coffee back out to her house. We saw very little of her, in any case: a large group of blond friends with sunglasses picked her up and brought her home from wherever it was they went.
I thought Willis wouldn’t mind, now—the danger of invasion was past. It was the end of the summer, and too late for anything to go wrong. And anyway, Arlette would probably refuse—she’d have plans with the blond people.
But to my surprise, she nodded composedly and said she’d love to ’ave deener wis us. I felt rather flattered that she would choose
us over the blonds.
I changed my clothes and went off to pick up Belinda. I found her in the deep summer gloom of the barn. She was standing on a box, brushing a big chestnut horse on cross-ties. Another girl was on the other side of the horse, brushing it too. I called out to Belinda. She stepped off the box, set it carefully by the wall, picked up her dusty black hard hat, and came out. She’s skinny, now, growing, with long spindly legs, and was wearing the tan jodhpurs she’s worn every day this summer. She has freckles, short brown hair, absolutely straight, and a quiet, abstracted manner.
“Hi, Bell,” I said, and kissed her. She let me, and smiled sweetly: she’s still unselfconscious, and I don’t embarrass her yet. I’m grateful for this.
Driving home I asked her how the week had been.
“Okay,” she said. “We did cavalletti today, which is so boring. And I still haven’t got my diagonals right. But Ann said I was doing much better at the canter.”
“Good,” I said equably. “And how about at home? With Arlette?”
“Okay,” said Belinda, looking out the window.
“Do you like her?” I asked baldly.
“She’s fine,” Belinda said, shrugging. “She’s kind of weird, actually.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. She’s just so, you know, like …” Belinda lost interest and trailed off.
“So what?” I said.
“Oh, fussy about everything. Everything has to be, like, just exact. And the way she talks! Nicko and I call her Lee Fwog.” She turned back to me. “Not in front of her,” she reassured me.
I laughed. It was what I had hoped would happen: Nicko and Bell had looked after each other, and Arlette had looked after the house. My children were safe, and I was happy. I was happy to be back, happy that Bell was doing better at the canter, and happy about Willis and Nicko.
Willis and I have been married for six years, but Willis and Nicko are not yet friends. One Saturday morning in June, Willis and I sat in the kitchen over coffee and the Times. In the silence, the first noises from upstairs were conspicuously audible: the creakings of the floorboards and the heavy footsteps overhead as Nicko got up. Finally he came thundering down the steep back stairs and appeared in the doorway. He was barefoot, in faded blue jeans with the inevitable rip across the knee. He had on a wrinkled football jersey, too big, from a school he does not attend. In spite of his noisy descent, he came into the kitchen quietly, his eyes covered by his dark-blond bangs, and his shoulders hunched. He moved gently, his eyes lowered, as though he were trying to escape attention.
“Good morning, Nicko,” I said, loud and cheerful. Partly, I wanted to establish the tone, and partly, I truly was delighted to see him. I am delighted every time that I see Nicko, now that his life is so divergent from ours, now that he has left home forever. They never really live at home again, after fourteen. First it’s boarding school, then it’s college, then it’s Life. So I treasure the times I have with Nicko, and each morning my heart lifts, the way it did years ago, when he was tiny.
In those years, I used to come in to Nicko’s room early, as soon as I woke up. I’d push the door open silently, in case he was still asleep. But Nicko was already awake, always, waiting for me to start his world. He’d be already up, standing in his crib in his pale-blue footed pajamas, his diapered rump plump and bunchy. He’d tiptoe bouncily along the mattress, talking earnestly to himself in rapid and fluent Baby, peering alertly around his room. When he caught sight of me, his face would light up. He’d lunge toward me, grab the crib railing, and give a long indrawn gurgle, a backwards crow, like a tiny exuberant cockerel. I’d feel the same way, a crowding excitement in my throat, at the sight of this creature whom, at that moment, I longed for physically, desperately, as though we had been separated for years.
Things were different now, of course.
“Morning, Mom, morning, Willis,” he said, not looking at us. He slid into a chair without pulling it out from the table, as though he were barely there. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and it fell back at once. Willis looked up from his paper and smiled majestically.
“Good morning, Nicholas,” he said. Willis is a splendid-looking man, with wide shoulders and a thatch of glossy dark brown hair, which is turning gray in a distinguished manner. He speaks slowly and very precisely, almost theatrically, carefully articulating each word. He looked at his watch. “Not quite the record, this morning,” he said. “But still in training, I see.”
Nicko smiled without looking up. He didn’t answer.
“Well, yes, we’re still working on it,” I said, sprightly, trying to counteract the edge in Willis’s voice. “We’re trying for a solid thirteen hours.” Actually, I don’t see why Nicko shouldn’t sleep late on weekends. “Now, what would you like, Nicko? Cereal? Eggs?” I went to the stove, ready to cook up a storm.
Willis spoke before Nicko answered. “What are your plans for the weekend, Nicholas?” he said, still with his calm half-smile. “Besides training for the Olympic Sleep-Ins? Any ‘job interviews’ lined up?” He put the words in quotes, as though this was an absurd concept.
“Actually, you do have an interview, don’t you?” I said to Nicko. He was silent, looking at his plate, so I turned to Willis. “He has an interview at the Green Thumb Nursery. They told him they need someone full-time, for the whole summer.”
“Ah,” said Willis. “Do they need someone on the electric guitar, or are we branching out into other fields of endeavor?”
“Not electric guitar,” I said quickly, putting butter into the frying pan. “I think they said they needed a bass, but Nicko’s really nearly as good on bass as he is on guitar, aren’t you, sweetheart?” There was a pause, and when I saw Nicko wasn’t going to answer, I said, “You do want eggs, don’t you, Nicko? Fried or scrambled?”
Nicko finally spoke. “Scrambled,” he said. He didn’t look at me.
I hope things will get better between them, and this summer I’ve been hoping it especially. Nicko is taller each weekend. He is taking on the height and the silhouette of a young man, but his fresh skin, his silky hair, his bashful sweetness, his awkwardness, all remind you where he still is: boyhood. He is on the edge of manhood, on the cusp, but he is not there yet. He is still tender and vulnerable, and I would like to protect him forever, from everything.
I can’t, of course, protect Nicko from much of anything, not from the edge in Willis’s voice, nor even from his own father. Nicko’s father, Walter, hasn’t spoken to him since February, when Nicko had lunch at Walter’s apartment. Walter has remarried, and he and his new wife, Marilyn, have a new baby. Nicko was excited about having another sister, and he smiled whenever he talked about Vanessa. The lunch was to celebrate her birthday, and he bought her a present. It was a bear in a flowered sundress, quite expensive, and he chose it himself, and paid for it. Belinda had gone to stay with a friend that weekend, and Nicko went to his father’s alone.
After the lunch, Nick came back earlier than I’d expected. I heard the front door slam, and I listened for him to come along the hall. I didn’t hear him so I called out.
“Nicko?” There was no answer, and I went to find him. He was in his room; he must have tiptoed past our door. He was on his bed with his shoes on, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling.
“Hi, Nicko. I didn’t hear you go by. How was the lunch?”
“Okay.” He didn’t look at me.
“What went on?” I asked cheerfully. “Was it a birthday party, with Vanessa’s friends? Or just the four of you?”
“Just the four of us.” He still didn’t look at me.
“And?” I said. “Was it fun?”
“No,” said Nicko. “It was shitty.”
I waited for a moment. “What happened?”
Nicko turned his face toward the wall and made his hand into a fist. He pressed his fist against the wall. “Just shitty.”
I waited again. Nicko is not a talker. “Want to tell me abou
t it?” I asked.
“No,” he said, pushing his fist against the wall again.
I waited, but he didn’t say anything more, so I said, “Well, I’m sorry,” and turned to go. When I was in the doorway, Nicko spoke.
“I guess I won’t be seeing Dad anymore.”
“You mean for a while? Why? Are they going away?”
“No. I mean I guess I won’t see him at all.”
This time I walked over to the bed and sat down. I didn’t say anything, I just waited. Nicko rolled over on his side, away from me, and began picking at the quilt, pulling at the tufts on it.
“At the beginning it was fine,” he said. “I got there, and Vanessa was running all over the place like crazy. She was all dressed up and she looked really cute. She had a pink ribbon tied in her hair, and it made her hair stand up like a little waterfall. When I came in she shouted ‘Nicko! Nicko!’ and she made this gurgling noise in her throat, she was so excited. I carried her around and we chased the cat. She liked that, and she waved her arms all around and laughed and yelled.” Nicko paused, pulling at the tufts.
“And how was Marilyn?” I asked.
“She was okay. She was nice when I was carrying Vanessa around. She was smiling a lot. But she doesn’t usually look at me. She looks at Dad, or she looks at Vanessa. She doesn’t look at me.”
I hated Marilyn for this. “So then what happened?”
“So then we had lunch. By then Vanessa was tired, I guess, and she started whining and kind of whimpering. She sat in her high chair and spat out her food and waved her hands like no, no, every time Marilyn tried to give her something. Marilyn stopped talking to anyone, she just kept wiping the spit off Vanessa’s chin and bringing the spoon up again with more, and Vanessa would start to cry and put her lips in a pout and spit it out again. The food was getting on her dress, even though she was wearing this bib.” Nicko paused again. Now he was stabbing at the quilt with his finger, over and over.
Asking for Love Page 16