The Woman in Our House

by Andrew Hart

  Tammy nodded thoughtfully. We were sitting in her vast, open-plan kitchen drinking coffee while her kids slept upstairs, and she was making a list in a round, childlike hand on a pad with clothed rabbits in the corner. Her scrawny terrier, Angus, came in periodically to yip at me, till she shooed it from the room in a voice so molasses sweet that it was impossible not to picture my other, and rather more acerbic neighbor, Mary Beth, miming throwing up.

  “How many hours a day?” Tammy asked.

  “I don’t know. Five? Six?”

  “Morning or afternoon?”

  “Well, it will probably vary. When Josh is out of town . . . I don’t know. Let’s come back to that.”

  “Skills and experience. You want her to have any special training?”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “A relevant degree, something in education, perhaps. First-aid training.”

  I bit my lip. This was all sounding suddenly quite daunting.

  “I guess so,” I said. “I hadn’t really thought about it.”

  “And how much are you prepared to pay?”

  She looked embarrassed by the question, but I shook it off.

  “Whatever it costs.”

  She looked vaguely impressed.

  “If money is no object . . .”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say . . .”

  “I mean, if you can afford it,” she said, looking at me, then tapping the list with her pen, “you might want to consider someone full-time.”

  I thought about this and nodded, glad that it had been she who’d suggested it.

  “And if you are thinking that this person will be spending a lot of time with your girls,” she added, “I don’t think you should confine yourself to local services. When we lived in Ballantine, I had two separate friends who got their nannies from a placement agency based out of Utah.”

  “Utah?”

  “Yep. Apparently, it’s a whole big thing out there. Mormons and all. A lot of them go into family-type employment. It’s a traditional-gender-role-type deal.”

  I could hear the quotation marks she placed around the words, but she wasn’t being snide. Tammy rarely was. I’d often suspected she was more politically conservative than I was, but in this case, that didn’t bother me.

  “Really?” I said.

  “I guess the women grow up being trained to look after the house, the kids. Maybe that’s a stereotype, but still. There must be some truth in it because there are a lot of Mormon nannies, at least till they have families of their own.”

  “Huh,” I said. “And your friends were satisfied with them?”

  “Over the moon. Best thing they ever did. Both of them said so. I can get you some agency names if you like.”

  “There’s more than one?”

  “Oh yes. But I’m sure they can help point you in the right direction.”

  “Right,” I said, feeling a tiny thrill of excitement. I was actually going to do this. “Great. Thanks.”

  “One thing, though,” Tammy cautioned. “They’ll have to live in.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “With you. In your house. These agencies send someone for six months, a year, or whatever, and they live with you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that. We’re pretty private people.”

  Tammy pursed her lips slightly, as if she knew as much and thought it a minor failing.

  “Would give you the flexibility you want, and would save you money in the long term,” she said. “Not paying an hourly rate, I mean.”

  “Right,” I said, nodding vaguely. “I guess so. I’ll have to think about it.”

  I relayed our conversation to Josh that evening.

  “Live with us? Really?” he asked. He was cagey, gauging my response.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Is it a terrible idea?”

  Josh blew a long breath out of the side of his mouth and stared off at nothing for a moment.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I hadn’t really thought it through like this. Live-in? Wouldn’t that feel . . . I don’t know. Intrusive?”

  “I thought so at first,” I replied.

  “But now?”

  “I just don’t know. Maybe we could try it for a while . . .”

  “Then what? Send her back to Utah if we don’t like the arrangement?”

  “Probably doesn’t work like that, huh?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then we shouldn’t do it,” I said. “We can’t possibly know it will work out. A complete stranger in our house for a year . . .”

  “Might be a bit much.”

  “Yeah. I mean, it would be great to have someone on call, as it were, around all the time, able to step in no matter what our jobs demanded, but I don’t think we could handle it.”

  “Probably not,” said Josh. “I mean, unless we really wanted to.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Where would she even sleep?”

  “In the basement, I guess,” I replied. “We’re not using the space, and there’s a bathroom down there.”

  “I suppose. Would give her some privacy. We’d have to have ground rules about where she could go and when.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And we’d need some time completely to ourselves,” he added.

  “For sure.”

  There was a thoughtful silence, and Josh’s frown shifted into a knowing half smile. It was a look he gave me whenever we made impulsive choices, and I returned it. This, crazy though it was, was very us. We waffle for ages on decisions—when and where to take holidays, whether or not we need a new car, even the discussion about moving to Charlotte. We circle the issue vaguely, noncommittally, and then all of a sudden, we reach a kind of critical mass and commit, just like that.

  “Are we thinking about this?” he said.

  I put my hands to my face, my fingers massaging my temples.

  “I think,” I said, then hesitated. “I think we might be.”

  I spent the next morning, while the girls were napping, searching online through a list of Salt Lake City agencies forwarded by Tammy’s Ballantine friends. I was drawn to a particularly slick and professional-looking site for a company called Nurture, which sent nannies all over the country. I clicked through their listings and read their policies, including their payment schedules. That gave me pause, not because we didn’t have the $600 to $1,000 a week that seemed to be the going rate—plus transportation costs from wherever the nanny was currently based—or the basement room that could be a self-contained apartment, but because the hard economics of it all raised key questions. What if we hired someone and didn’t like her? We could terminate the contract and send her home, but while Josh made enough to cover the cost, at least part of the logic of my working was that it would bring in more disposable income. If the experiment wound up costing us money and failed, I might not have the heart to press for a second attempt.

  Better get it right the first time, then, said the less flappable part of my brain.

  I made coffee and began sifting through the women’s profiles. They were all women, though I suppose that wasn’t a surprise. Some of them would be better described as girls, and a lot of those who were old enough to have been to college hadn’t been. They were also mainly white, and a good half of them were Mormon. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Neither Josh nor I was religious—he having been raised by a fiercely Catholic grandmother whose beliefs had soured him against the church, while I had grown up in a family where religion was simply a kind of hobby other people pursued. My immigrant parents kept their Japanese heritage largely to themselves, as if sharing too much of it with me might make me less American. When I was small, I would escort my father to the temple, where he would light incense and bow his head in a brief, loaded silence, but he never explained what he was doing or why. I learned the pattern of his devotion—if that was what it was—was keyed to certain dates, particularly the anniversaries of his own parents’ deaths.

&nb
sp; I wasn’t opposed to God, religion, or ritual observance, but it all made me uneasy, something I hadn’t really been aware of till we moved to Charlotte and had the bizarre experience of meeting neighbors who asked me what church I went to two minutes into our first conversation. I had no doubt that many religious people were good, caring members of society, but I also saw that a lot weren’t—thinking, saying, and doing monstrous things in the name of the God they professed to worship. I had nothing against religious people, but I didn’t assume that the fact that they went to church made them better suited to look after my children.

  But when I looked at other websites, they seemed either more local or less professional. One had a typo on its (not it’s) opening page, a stupid and irrelevant detail perhaps, but one that my literary eye could not ignore. One looked like it was aimed primarily at babysitters. Some were little more than help-wanted bulletin boards. None had the rigorous vetting process that Nurture’s site detailed.

  Within a half hour, I was back there, sorting through the smiling faces with their quirky Mormon names—I’d already seen a Tynslee, a Drakelle, a Kyzli, and an Alivian, which I thought sounded like a PMS drug. I skimmed their achievements, qualifications, and letters of reference, passing over the ones I thought of as au pairs, girls whom I guessed—based on nothing, really—were more likely to be nannying as a way of traveling and seeing the world. I wanted women who seemed more mature, women who had chosen nannying as a way of life because they loved it and were good at it. Some of them, even the older ones, were gorgeous in a fresh-faced midwestern kind of way. I tried not to hold that against them, but I found myself drawn more and more to the ones who seemed to have more substance, more strength in body and character, more experience. I imagined that the pretty ones didn’t make it beyond their midtwenties before being snatched away by boyfriends or husbands who didn’t want to share their beloveds with a strange family. That made sense. That the ones who interested me most were usually less pretty was unimportant.

  Probably.

  I checked in on the girls, still thinking about the strangeness of having an unfamiliar adult living in our house with us, and a conversation I had had with Mary Beth Wilson, who lived two doors down, popped into my head. She had been talking about the various small doings of the neighbors—the modifications to their kitchens, the Wards’ new car, the new construction on Queens Road—when she had slid into her favorite eye-rolling gossip about Tommy Ward and the leggy, blonde college girl who had been babysitting for him and his “clueless” wife, Tammy.

  “I mean,” she had exclaimed, “who would let a girl like that in your house for hours at a time, and then have your famously rampant husband drive her home? Have you seen her? Oh my God. I’m straighter than the inside of a cannon, and I think I might do her.”

  I had laughed because it was Mary Beth, the most delightfully and self-consciously outrageous friend I had in our sedate corner of sleepy Myers Park, but the point had been clear. Tammy was out of her mind for allowing her kids to be babysat by a girl that cute. If her husband strayed, it was practically her fault.

  It was an old and stupid argument, of course, a familiar device that somehow managed to blame women for what men did, but it came back to me now. I wondered if my prioritizing the frumpier candidates over the prettier ones suggested I was already enacting Mary Beth’s warning. It wasn’t necessary. I trusted Josh. I did.

  Still. Why risk it?

  I went back to the computer and pulled up three more profiles. The last was in her late thirties, with a warm, smiling face, slightly pink. Shoulder-length hair, prosaically styled. It generously might be called chestnut. Brown eyes. An ordinary face, a little fuller than the norm. But the smile was warm, spontaneous. It implied spirit.

  I reread her references and qualifications. The latter were few beyond high school but included certificates in first aid and CPR. The letters made her sound like an angel: warm, caring, dedicated to children. A joy to be around. Honest. Hardworking. Generous.

  I looked back at her picture and remembered how that last word had come to me simply by looking at her.

  Her name was Oaklynn Durst.

  “This one,” I said.

  Distantly, as if waking from a dream, I caught the climbing wail of Veronica starting to cry.

  Chapter Two

  Two months earlier

  “Tell me I’m not crazy for doing this,” said Oaklynn Durst, gazing at her friend with wide-eyed anticipation.

  Friend was perhaps overstating the case a little, but only a little, Oaklynn would have insisted, and only because she had known Nadine for five short months. Also because technically, Nadine was her employee.

  Her cleaner, to be precise.

  But having spent most of her life since adolescence doing not only her own cleaning but everyone else’s as well, Oaklynn still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of being, as Decken said, “the lady of the house.” In most respects, married life suited her, felt like the destiny she had been waiting for, and she often thought that she had strayed—guided surely by the hand of God—into a dream as close to heaven on earth as she could imagine. She knew that was in part the combination of honeymoon euphoria on top of their almost indecently brief engagement—six weeks! She had barely been able to keep her face straight when they had announced the news to her congregation. It inevitably would fade over time as they grew more accustomed to working together side by side, and Lord knew the world had trials enough to derail the lives of good Christian couples, but she didn’t care. She was happy. The relief of finding a good and willing husband so late in life—she was about to turn thirty-eight—had swept away all other concerns. She knew Decken still felt the loss of his first wife keenly, but she would heal that wound with patience and kindness and hard work. She felt complete in ways she had not realized she was missing, and life had come sharply into clear and satisfying focus.

  All that was missing were children, and that was only a matter of time.

  Oaklynn smiled at Nadine, loving and pitying her at the same time. Nadine was smart and warm and loving, but there was a hollowness Oaklynn sometimes caught in her face when she thought Oaklynn wasn’t watching. A loneliness.

  Nadine had blown into Salt Lake City on a Greyhound bus nine months earlier. She said she had come from Louisiana, but she didn’t like to talk about it, and Oaklynn knew there was a boyfriend in her past she didn’t want to find her. Carl, his name was. Think of that! Traveling halfway across the country just to get away from someone you once loved. Oaklynn had never been so far in her life, which was why the next few weeks held such joy and terror for her.

  “I think it’s good,” said Nadine. “A change of scenery, a chance to start your lives together doing what you love. It’s good.”

  Oaklynn beamed, relieved. She could always tell when Nadine was holding something back and when she was being utterly and openly honest, and this was definitely the latter. She made a girlish squee of delighted excitement, waggling her hands at the wrists, then threw her arms around her friend and squeezed their ample bosoms together.

  They were both biggish girls, both in their late thirties, and those were also reasons Oaklynn felt so fortunate in her sudden marriage, so blessed. She feared for Nadine, that for all her friend’s gifts, the world would not see her potential for goodness and beauty behind that slightly frumpy and aging exterior.

  “What still has to be done?” asked Nadine, ever the coolheaded organizer compared to Oaklynn, who was apt to get flustered by any of the pressures that didn’t involve cooking and cleaning and looking after other people, particularly kids.

  “Well, the movers come tomorrow,” said Oaklynn. “They say they won’t need help, but I’ll have to be here just, you know, for peace of mind. The boxes that are going with us have already shipped. The stuff that goes to the church is all stacked in the living room, so everything else is supposed to be going into storage.”

  “How long is your storage unit leased?”

 
“Two years, to start. Paid up front. Then, I guess, we decide if we’re coming back, or want stuff sent on or . . . I don’t know.”

  She ended with that familiar flicker of apprehension and sipped her lemonade. Oaklynn made excellent lemonade. Nadine put her large hands on hers and gave her an encouraging smile.

  “You can always come back if it doesn’t work out,” she said. “Or if you feel you’ve done all you can.”

  “Well,” said Oaklynn, returning the smile but tipping her head from side to side noncommittally, “that will really be up to Decken.”

  “I know,” said Nadine, “but he’s a good man. He wouldn’t make you do something you weren’t happy with.”

  That was true, thought Oaklynn, nodding. Decken was a good man. She was immensely lucky to have him. She leaned in and gave her friend another hug, urgent this time. Grateful. She didn’t know if she would have been able to go through all this without her.

  “What about credit cards? Bank accounts?” said Nadine.

  “I’m closing everything but the Mastercard,” said Oaklynn. “New joint bank account as Mrs. Burgraff.” The girlish glee bubbled over again.

  “He’s with Mountain America Credit Union?”

  “That’s right! How on earth did you know that?”

  “I’m the cleaner, remember?” said Nadine, grinning. “I pick your mail up and separate it into piles according to whom is the designated recipient.” She said it in a fancy voice, miming the action like she was some high-powered Madison Avenue secretary.

  “And very good you are at it, too,” said Oaklynn. “I wish I could bring you with me. Help me stay organized. Speaking of mail, you haven’t seen my replacement driver’s license, have you? I put it down a few days ago, and now . . .”

  Nadine shook her head and frowned. “Any chance you packed it?”

  “Not on purpose,” said Oaklynn. “Which doesn’t mean I didn’t. I’m so tired today. I don’t know why. Would you keep your eyes open for it?”