The Babysitter

by Liza Rodman

  Mom’s new motel, the Bayberry Bend Motel and Cottages, had seven rooms and eight cottages, all tucked by the side of Route 6A and across the street from the Royal Coachman. When we got there, the first thing she did was hang out the wooden VACANCY sign and tack a HELP WANTED sign in the front window. She was in business.

  The three of us moved into number nine, one of the small motel rooms next to the office. It had a double bed for Mom and bunk beds for me and Louisa, leaving just enough room for us to move between the beds if we scuttled sideways.

  One of Mom’s first hires was a chambermaid, Sally, a sixteen-year-old girl from Truro who along with cleaning rooms worked the front desk and looked after me and Louisa. In exchange for those added duties, Mom gave her free room and board, so number nine got even more crowded when Sally moved in with us. Louisa slept in Mom’s double bed with her, and Sally slept on the top bunk.

  During those years, and particularly those summers, Mom loved to go dancing at the clubs, as many nights as she could get away, except Sunday, because the blue laws made it illegal to dance in a bar on Sunday. Most nights, she’d come home in the early hours of the morning and I’d be wakened by her tiptoeing into our room, her shadow moving across the wall, her shoes and sometimes her clothes in her arms.

  One day, I asked her whom she danced with, and she said, “Whoever. There’s always somebody who wants to dance at the Pilgrim Club.” Then she hesitated and smiled at herself in the mirror as she applied her lipstick before adding, “With me.”

  On the weekends, Fat Al the Candy Man sometimes drove down from Boston, renting one of the cottages and watching television in his T-shirt all day until Mom was able to leave for the night. Louisa and I spent those weekend nights with Sally and her boyfriend at the Wellfleet Drive-In, where we’d see half of Provincetown in the line to get popcorn while The Parent Trap loomed on the big screen. (I loved Hayley Mills and, watching the film, wondered if I too could get my parents back together.)

  When Sally was busy or had the day off and Mom needed someone to keep an eye on us, she would ask one of the motel guests, Bob Stranger, to look after us in exchange for a slightly reduced rent. Bob, who rented cottage two for the entire summer, was a frail, pale little man who loved the place. He even brought his own piece of artwork he hung on the wall. It was a poster he’d found at one of the shops on Commercial Street of a fancy lace bra with the words I just bought a Living Bra and I don’t know what to feed it written under the cups. Bob had a Chihuahua named Duke, and he kept mostly to himself, rarely venturing beyond the grounds. He always seemed to be hiding from something, or someone, looking furtively over his shoulder or hurrying back to his cottage in little geisha steps whenever a car drove into the driveway. Every morning before it got too hot and the sun got too bright, he walked Duke around the motel’s tiny lawn, and the whole time Duke would bark as if being attacked by coyotes. Bob, smoking a really long, slim cigarette and wearing large, dark sunglasses reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy, a loosely tied white terry-cloth robe, and penny loafers with no socks, would mutter, “Cool it, Duke. Just cool it.” Mom had a rare soft spot for Bob, and every couple of weeks, she would return from the A&P and hand me a box of Kotex.

  “Take these to Bob.”

  “What does he need these for?” I asked the first time it happened, turning the box over in my hands.

  She laughed and said, “He likes to wear them. They make him feel more feminine,” as if that answered my question.

  I walked to his cottage with the blue box tucked under my arm and knocked on his door, embarrassed and worried that I might be interrupting something but not sure of what that something would be, maybe just his privacy, or a nap. With Duke scratching at the door and barking his ear-piercing bark, Bob came to the screen door and looked at me standing there with the box of Kotex in my hand. I don’t know who was more uncomfortable. Probably Bob. He didn’t say a word, just opened the door wide enough to reach out and take the box from me. He whispered, “Thank you, Honey,” gave me a little smile, pushed Duke out of the way with his foot, and shut the door quietly.

  Every time I saw Bob after that, I tried not to wonder if he was wearing a Kotex pad.

  * * *

  Even though Mom often stayed out late, she took the business of running Bayberry Bend very seriously and was always the first to wake up, getting out of bed at 5:00 a.m. like she’d pole-vaulted off the mattress. Whatever else she wasn’t, she was a hard worker, even at fifteen when she waitressed at the Howard Johnson’s off the old Route 6 in Buzzards Bay. She never actually made us breakfast; she poured cereal. But in running a motel, she was as good, sometimes better, than the help she hired. She could fix broken lamps, unplug clogged pipes, replace torn screens and cracked windowpanes, and did her fair share of scrubbing toilets, making beds, and mopping floors. By six in the morning, she was mowing the lawn or watering the bushes or brushing sand off the patio or deadheading the geraniums. Always something. Always moving. That’s what I remember most clearly: my mother in motion.

  The minute Louisa and I got out of bed, she’d put us to work. We got really good at tucking hospital corners on the beds, folding sheets and towels, scrubbing tile until it gleamed, and sweeping the sand out of the rooms and cottages. We would giggle whenever we found used condoms and gag when we had to clean pubic hair out of the drains. (It was very different from head hair and we knew what it was, even though we didn’t have any yet.) And when we cleaned the toilets, we fought for the one pair of rubber gloves without holes in them. Mom also showed us how to do some small repairs—like tighten screws in a door hinge or hammer down a loose floorboard. And then there was relighting the gas pilots.

  The cottages had little kitchens with old propane stoves that would constantly go out, spreading the smell of gas. Bob’s in particular seemed to go out all the time, and he’d stand at his cottage door and call, “Betty! Pilot’s out again!” and one of us would go over.

  “God knows what he’s doing in there,” Mom muttered. It happened that often.

  Bob was afraid to relight it himself, so Mom taught me how to do it. I’d lie flat on the floor, open the bottom drawer where the pilot was, reach in with a lit match, and relight it. When I did it right, there was a little poof as the gas reignited. I got pretty good at draining the line of gas before striking the match, but one time I screwed up and a pocket of gas exploded in my face. Bob, who had been standing at a safe distance with a yapping Duke in his arms, dropped the terrified dog and came rushing over.

  “Oh, Christ! Are you okay?” he said, helping me up. “Where’s your mom?”

  He brushed off my legs and inspected my face for any cuts, then took me outside for fresh air.

  Mom said she never heard a thing.

  25 TONY

  With the 1968 summer season and its jacked-up rents about to start, Avis once again packed up the three children and moved out of the cottage on Shank Painter Road and into an even more cramped apartment on Commercial Street. When David Raboy arrived at the cottages to get them ready for his summer clientele, he was surprised to see that a room had been built in the corner of the basement and the door had two padlocks on it, even though he hadn’t been asked permission for the construction. Looking around, he found a large screwdriver and broke off each lock, then opened the door. The room was empty. A thin beam of light filtered through the dust and shone on a rough table, built into the wall. Walking over, he saw that several papers had fallen behind it. He reached down and pulled up a 24-by-36-inch piece of poster board covered with what looked to be images cut from magazines. Peering closely, Raboy felt his stomach lurch when he recognized what he saw: female body parts, most of them breasts and genitalia, taped together in hideous caricatures of the human form. Disgusted and unaware that he was looking at potential evidence, he threw it in the garbage so that no one would have to “experience the same revulsion I did.”1

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Tony was as depressed and anxious as his friends had eve
r seen him. And along with getting high every day, he was also getting religion and would incessantly expound on his theological beliefs, writing one friend, “If the Apostle Paul had the willpower to live with a woman and refrain from sex, then everyone should have to.”2

  By early June, his malaise had morphed into irritation. Everywhere he went the police seemed to follow him. He’d be riding his bike through town or sitting on the Benches with a group of his “kid chicks,” and the police would approach him, asking questions about Sydney. When had he last seen her? Where were they driving when they’d been seen leaving town on Route 6? Did he have any idea where she might have gone? Her sister, Linda, said she had seen Sydney crying before she got in Tony’s car—what was that about?

  In the days after her disappearance, Tony kept to his story. How was he supposed to know what happened to Sydney Monzon? He barely knew the girl. And that’s what he told them, over and over, until he finally decided he needed to get out of town for a while. His job at the Crown & Anchor was done, and they needed him to move out so they could rent his room to tourists. Even if they hadn’t needed his room, they were ready to throw him out because he always seemed to have an unsavory group of teenagers hanging around, smoking dope, doing drugs, and coming and going at all hours causing a scene. The police had even shown up to search his room for drugs. The owner of the Crown & Anchor had had enough.

  One day while Tony was hanging out on the Benches, he met Sandy, a young woman whom everybody called Croakie. She had been encouraging him to clean up his act and get a real job. She thought him drop-dead gorgeous and a real charmer with a lot of potential, and she was determined to be the woman to get him on the straight and narrow.

  Tony was always looking for a way to get out of town and away from his obligations, but this time, he seemed a little more frantic about it because the cops were harassing him about Sydney’s disappearance. By mid-June, Avis observed “it seemed as if he had to stay stoned to remain calm.” She always knew when he was high because “when he wasn’t stoned he was just impossible to be around. For one thing, he had a bad temper. And he’d wring his hands and bite his fingernails. I don’t think he could stand to be around himself when he was straight. I’d say, ‘Jesus Christ, Tony, will you go get stoned? I can’t stand it; smoke or do something. Just go get stoned!’ ”3

  In early July, Croakie heard of a construction job with a company near where she worked in Dedham, a suburb south of Boston. Tony got the job, and before leaving Provincetown, he and a couple of friends robbed Bob Murray’s Pharmacy in Wellfleet, just to make sure he’d have the drugs he needed on the job while he was away from his usual haunts. While one friend drove the getaway car and another set fire to some brush by the side of the road to distract police, Tony easily picked the lock and walked away with another pillowcase full of narcotics and morphine substitutes, as well as a fat supply of hypodermic needles.4 By this point, Tony, by his own account, had begun to shoot up morphine and heroin.5

  He also bought a .22-caliber revolver from one of his young followers, Cory Devereaux, the same kid who five years before had most likely stood as an altar boy at Tony and Avis’s wedding. Cory had recently stolen the gun from his grandmother in West Virginia. Tony told Cory he needed it for protection after the Provincetown police had let it be known that he had been their snitch in the Jay Von Utter arrest in March. In addition to the police, Tony was increasingly paranoid that a so-called “organization” was after him for undercutting their drug-dealing business on Cape Cod. As always, Tony’s woes were somebody else’s fault.

  He felt he had a target on his back.

  26 LIZA

  Bayberry Bend sat on the far side of the road from the beach. The wrong side. It didn’t have a swimming pool, shuffleboard court, soda machine, or any of the other fun extras at the Royal Coachman. It also didn’t have Cecelia. So when Louisa and I weren’t cleaning rooms or helping with the laundry at Bayberry Bend, we’d wait around for Geoff or Gail to invite us to come over to play. Mom forbade us to go uninvited because, she said, “It wasn’t anyone else’s job to watch a bunch of kids.” But I was nine years old that summer and the oldest, and I didn’t feel like a kid anymore. When they didn’t call us over, Louisa and I would sit on the brick wall out front of the Bayberry Bend and count the cars coming down the RC driveway. When we saw someone we knew heading into town, we’d wave and ask them for a ride to Commercial Street. Once in town we’d go to the Penney Patch for candy or to a spin art place, where a machine splattered paint onto a T-shirt. Of course, my favorite ride into town was still with Tony.

  One day in the middle of June, Sally was busy cleaning a room, so I covered the front desk while Mom ran a quick errand. Someone had left a copy of the Provincetown Banner on the desk, and in big bold letters the headline read, MISSING EASTHAM GIRL, 19, REPORTED TO POLICE. Most times the Banner just reported on missing dogs, not missing girls, so I opened the paper and read the story about how a pretty young girl suddenly disappeared into thin air. I wondered how that happened. Where did she go? Why didn’t she tell her parents where she was? Why didn’t she just call from wherever she’d gone? And why did she leave her bike behind at the A&P? But mostly I wondered—If girls can just disappear into thin air, could it happen to me too?

  As I read the article a second time, a car pulled up, its tires scrunching across the crushed white seashells in the driveway. A tall man got out and came into the office. He jangled his car keys in one hand while he pushed his sunglasses onto his head. I didn’t like him. Right away I could see he was in a hurry and that was somehow my fault.

  “Can I help you?” I asked in my most grown-up voice.

  “Yeah. You got a room available?”

  I glanced at the clock on the wall: ten o’clock—too early for checking in. People were always stopping at the Bayberry Bend to look at the rooms, make a future reservation, or see if they could bargain Mom down in the price. Sitting at the south end of Provincetown, it was among the first cheap motels travelers came upon as they crossed the town line. Mom could spot the hagglers a mile away, but I was new to the game.

  I grabbed a key from the pegboard and walked the man down to number twelve, unlocked the door, and followed him into the room. Just as I thought, he was in a hurry. He walked into the room and checked out his unshaven face in the bathroom mirror, giving it a slow stroke along the jawline. He turned to me, showed his mouthful of dirty yellow teeth, and said, “I’ll take it.”

  I told him he’d have to wait for my mother to get back from town before he could check in but that it shouldn’t be more than a few minutes. Besides, I told him, it was still morning and long before check-ins were allowed anyway. He didn’t like that.

  “Forget it!” he said. “Who does business like that?”

  He pushed past me and slammed out the door, his shoes crunching across the driveway. He got in his car and gunned it onto Route 6A, oyster shells flying in his wake.

  Walking back to the office, I felt something I never had felt before in Provincetown—fear. Fear of this man and his noisy keys, fear for the pretty young girl who’d gone missing, and fear of Mom when she learned I’d let a customer get away.

  * * *

  On a really hot July day, Louisa and I were playing with our marbles in the Bayberry Bend parking lot when we saw Tony ride his bike up the Royal Coachman driveway and then head into the motel. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks, so I pocketed the marbles, quickly swiping one of Louisa’s favorites when she wasn’t looking, and went to the Bayberry office. Sally was sitting behind the front desk, her feet propped up on the counter and a portable fan blowing on her, reading a paperback—Valley of the Dolls. I tried to picture what an entire valley would look like covered in Barbies and baby dolls and why anyone would read a book about it.

  “Hey, Sally! Tony just rode up to the RC. Can we go over and see him?”

  “Okay,” she said, not looking up from the book. “Be careful crossing the street, and don’t be too
long. Your mom is due back in a couple hours.”

  I held Louisa’s hand waiting for the traffic on 6A to ease, then we ran across the road and found Tony out back at the dumpsters, loading up the truck.

  “Hey, Tony! Where you been?” I asked.

  “I got a job near Boston,” he said, throwing a bag of garbage in the truck. “I’m just down here to check on things and pick up some odd jobs here and there.”

  I didn’t really care where he had been, only that he was back and headed out in the truck. “You going to the dump? Can we go with you?” I said, hopping up and down with excitement.

  “Sure.” He reached in his pocket. “Here’s ten cents. Grab yourselves a couple of Popsicles before we head out.”

  I took the two nickels, and Louisa and I ran to the ice cream cooler by the pool. I saw Cecelia moving between rooms with an armload of towels and gave her a wave. She nodded and smiled and disappeared into one of the rooms. I put the money in the machine, reached in, and rooted around in the frosty air until I found two orange Popsicles, then slammed the lid shut. We both tore the paper off and started back to the truck, but we hadn’t gone ten feet when they were already melting down our hands and arms.