The Seven Year Bitch Read online

  I’d forgotten how much advice these nannies liked to give. “I can tell you had a C-section,” one named Marlene said after she’d sized me up. “When they sew you up the air gets trapped in there and your stomach can never be flat again.” I crossed her off my list. I crossed off anyone who had a long story about why her bus was late. Or anyone who wasn’t the person I’d spoken to on the phone but her friend instead. One of them complained about her last employer, who had worked her too hard. “I was with this child night and day,” she said. “I don’t know why some people go and have children.” I crossed her off. Her children were in Haiti being raised by her parents. Almost all of them had children being taken care of by relatives. “What’s that?” one of them asked, pointing to Russell’s desk and the towers of boxes all around it. “My husband works at home,” I said cheerfully, but she just shook her head no and made a tsking sound I had become familiar with. If I ever went on vacation to Jamaica, I imagined I would hear that tsking sound like a sea of locusts when I got off the plane. I blamed Russell-working-at-home for the fact that we’d gone through three nannies in one year. The one who was supposed to be the other family’s loss but our gain never showed up.

  The last one had a bag of Doritos in her open purse. The last thing I needed was Duncan one day eating Doritos. I crossed her off even though I myself had eaten most of Russell’s Doritos the night before.

  The next day I took Duncan to his Baby Time class myself. I’d signed up for the class the last week of my maternity leave, so Careena had always been the one to take him, and I’d been too excited to sleep the night before because I was finally going to be the one to take him.

  “We’re going to school,” I told him as I ran, pushing the stroller like a plow.

  Sitting in a circle on a rubber mat, I asked all the mothers if they could recommend a nanny. “Be careful,” a mother named Dara said. “Our nanny got into an accident and we had no choice but to take in her baby and toddler and dog.”

  “And dog!” I said. I could not believe what I was hearing.

  “An Italian greyhound named Lightning. My husband walks her while I feed the children. I even breast-feed the little one.”

  “So you’re a wet nurse for your nanny!” I practically screamed.

  “Basically yes,” she said. “And we’re still paying her salary while she’s in the hospital. What could we do? It sounds terrible, but try not to get one with young children. Just think long and hard before you pick one.”

  “Excuse me, but I could not help hearing-over,” my friend Gerde said. She had moved from Germany to New York and we had become friends during my maternity leave and sometimes sat in the playground on the weekends with Duncan and her daughter, Minerva, asleep in their identical denim Bugaboo strollers. Having the same taste in strollers and children the same age was enough to make us eligible to be friends for life. And we had both shown up a week early for the first class and stood outside the locked door confused together. She had a short blond bob and dressed like a housewife from the fifties for some reason, in shirtdresses all the time. She was very particular about what she ate and read too many magazines, so when we got together we always had to walk a million miles to some terrible sandwich shop that had just opened up and wait on a long line for some kind of trendy open-faced thing or little tart. But there was nothing in this world like walking down the street with another mother, our strollers side by side, proudly pushing our cargo, feeling at once as powerful as a God and as small as a worker ant carrying a crumb. Raising children in tandem, even if it was only for an hour here and there, made me feel like the greatest mother, and therefore person, on earth. “Did you say you are wet nurse to your nanny?”

  “Well I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes,” Dara said.

  “I can not even believe it!” Gerde said in her heavy accent. “And you don’t mind to change her children’s diapers?”

  Gerde was the only mother I had ever seen who kept rubber gloves in her diaper bag and used them to change a diaper. Between the rubber gloves and the Purell, she turned museum bathrooms and park benches into some kind of a MASH unit. I was surprised there weren’t surgical masks tossed in with the Seventh Generation biodegradable.

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “Well, of course you had a choice,” said a mother I had taken an instant dislike to for no reason other than she was already pregnant with her second.

  “No, I really didn’t. She’s a single mother with a three-year-old and an eight-month-old. No family in this country. I don’t mind the diapers but I hate getting up at night with the baby. I haven’t sleep-trained him yet. And my husband and I can never go out anymore.”

  “Who took care of the kids while she was working?” a mother named Polly said, suspiciously. She had a look of pure outrage on her face.

  “Her sister, but she was deported right after the accident.”

  “But where are they now?” I asked, wondering if she had left them in the stroller parking area while she happily sang “Shake, shake, shake, your sillies out.” She was there with her own child, but where were the nanny’s kids?

  “My mother’s watching them,” she said. “Just be careful who you choose is all I’m saying.”

  “Well, I had a cleaning lady who vacuumed my father’s ashes out of his urn,” another mother said, changing the subject. “She said, ʽIt was so dirty in there, but don’t worry, I cleaned it.’ ”

  Afterward, Gerde asked me if I would like to go to lunch, and I felt euphoric again. I had been stuffing Duncan into his stroller, trying in a slightly hysterical way to put on his tiny blue suede shoe, and thinking up a plan to give him some kind of food.

  Gerde kept going on and on about the nanny.

  “Can you imagine something so entirely ridiculous? Changing another child’s dirty diaper? Dealing with another child’s shit? It is entirely disgusting. I think you should think entirely long and hard before you decide to have another nanny at all.”

  I could tell she was entirely disapproving of having a nanny at all.

  We looked down at our menus.

  “I will have the Manchego and honey panini, ja, and you will have the tuna and salted capers and we will share?”

  “Okay,” I said, because every fourteen-dollar thing listed sounded equally awful especially without a Diet Coke, which I felt too self-conscious to order because Gerde was entirely against Diet Coke. “Wait, Manchego and honey?”

  “It sounds delicious!” Gerde said, with childish enthusiasm, or maybe it was touristy enthusiasm, everything tasting so exotic when you were far from home. “They make the bread right here in those ovens.”

  If I were German I wouldn’t go around saying the word “ovens” in front of Jewish people. I suddenly remembered that one of the great things about going back to work after my maternity leave had been not spending so much time with Gerde. I had forgotten how entirely (her favorite word) bossy she was. It was always slightly terrifying being with her. I never felt more Jewish against her yellow-blond Aryan backdrop.

  “Rolph and I just take Minerva everywhere with us. Except sometimes at night.”

  “And what do you do then?” I asked.

  “Well, this is not very American but we leave her safe in her crib and go across the sidewalk to the Indian restaurant and then we take turns checking on her.”

  “That’s illegal,” I said.

  “Really?” she asked, pretending not to know, her voice going up several octaves.

  I actually had no idea if it was illegal or not, but it sounded like it should be. Drinking Diet Coke and hiring a nanny was amoral but leaving your baby to die in a fire was fine.

  We gossiped about Dara and the other mothers for a while and then Gerde had to go “start dinner,” which I never understood, since dinner, in New York, was everywhere. “Nice meeting you,” Gerde said. She always ended our time together like that. She meant “nice seeing you,” but I never corrected her because I liked her mistakes. Then w
e pointed our strollers in opposite directions and rolled off.

  I called my mother, who had gone on a date the night before. “I didn’t like him,” she said. She always sounded furious after a date, as if the man, simply by virtue of not being good enough for her, had actually committed a crime against her.

  My mother had divorced my father the year she turned fortynine, after twenty-four years of marriage, and hadn’t had luck since then, even though, no matter her age over the years, she always looked a lot younger than it. “He told me his whole financial situation,” she said. “When he was in the hospital with prostate cancer an inexperienced broker refused to sell and he lost everything.”

  When men got to be seventy you really saw who they were and what they had become, and not until then. They’d either won a Nobel Peace Prize or they hadn’t. All those big deals they were working on when they couldn’t get off the phone or look up from their Barron’s and treated you like shit on dates had either panned out or they hadn’t. You knew whether they’d won or lost, and the ones on J-Date, the Internet dating service my mother used, had usually lost.

  My mother and her friends had divorced their husbands with confidence, only to find themselves desperately trying to date men who were either exactly the same or so much worse than their husbands had been.

  “My shrink has someone who can find you a nanny,” my mother said.

  My mother always spent all of her therapy sessions talking about my problems instead of her own, and her shrink, I had to admit but not to my mother, actually did a pretty good job of analyzing my relationships, dreams, and problems. When my clothes didn’t fit after I had the baby, she sent me, via my mother, to a fantastic store in SoHo called Rosebud where I found great clothes. And when my back was constantly hurting, she sent me, via my mother, to an osteopath who cured me. And when I was feeling especially guilty about having so much babysitting at night, she assured me, via my mother, that there was absolutely nothing wrong with getting more help and I would be crazy not to.

  “You shouldn’t waste your therapy talking about me,” I said.

  “But you have so many problems,” my mother said. “My shrink gave me the number of a woman who she says is the queen of all the nannies. She can find someone for you. Apparently they all go to the same church.”

  Tchaikovsky was playing in the background and I could almost see her, the Nanny Queen, pirouetting in the center of all the nannies and one Italian greyhound in pink tulle.

  I called the Nanny Queen as soon as I got off the phone with my mother.

  “I have someone for you,” the Nanny Queen said. “Her name is Shasthi.”

  5

  That night, I sat on the toilet with Duncan on my lap, the shower running hot. He’d been stricken with croup, and was coughing like a seal, crying and gasping for air. He didn’t look like himself.

  Babies, when they’re sick, are actually blurry, as if their cells are so new to each other they haven’t figured out how to hold their shape.

  Holding his hot, limp body in my arms like that at three thirty in the morning was the closest I had ever come to nirvana. No matter what bad things were ever to come in my life, at least I had done that. I had taken care of him. Love had coursed through me, like I was standing under the showerhead being pelted with it. I had never felt love like that, like I was in the thick glass walls of a blender set on “chop.” I was almost sad when the moment had to end. My phone vibrated on the edge of the tub—it was the doctor returning my call—and I reached to answer it.

  And when Duncan finally stopped coughing, and fell asleep in my arms, and I put him in his crib, I was almost sorry he was better.

  I wished he would cough again and I could call the doctor, and run the shower, and hold him in my arms. Afterward, I lay in my bed with my ears pricked like a mother wolf’s, my heart pounding, just listening for him in the New York City silence.

  In the morning, Russell agreed to take care of Duncan for an hour or two and I walked all the way from our Tribeca apartment to the café I had been going to since business school. I had done all my studying there because it was a short walk from Stern and I loved the Moroccan tagines and couscous they served. I wrapped my hands around my cappuccino like a strangler. The morning news had warnings that tea tree oil shampoo, which I happened to have used to wash the baby’s hair every day for the last eight months at the doctor’s insistence, was found to cause breasts to grow in baby boys. Duncan didn’t have breasts yet, thank God, but I had taken the bottle right out to the garbage room on my way out of the apartment.

  “How is my wife?” the cook at the café said, putting a bowl of soup on the table in front of me and taking the seat across from me. His name was Said and I always pronounced it Sigheed, which I believed to be correct, even though everyone at the café seemed to say it many different ways, and he always called me “wife,” which was a little uncomfortable and off-putting, but I had never stopped him. Now that it had been about eighteen years, it seemed too late to try. It was especially awkward because he had a wife, a bleak, clunky Russian woman who had been his cleaning lady and was still his cleaning lady but now didn’t get paid for it.

  “I haven’t seen you for a long time. No work today?” Said asked.

  “No more job,” I said.

  “This is shit!” he said. He had a thick Turkish accent and when he got excited, which was about half the time, I couldn’t understand him at all, but that hadn’t seemed to matter in all these years. I just smiled or laughed at what I hoped were the right times, or said, “Hilarious!” and that had always worked. My cell phone rang and I excused myself and answered it. It was Russell saying Duncan had a fever and he needed Tylenol. I told him the Tylenol was right on the bathroom sink and went back to my conversation with Said.

  “Delicious,” I said about the soup even though it scared me a little. He always gave me free food in addition to whatever I ordered, and sometimes it was something he had improvised that wasn’t on the menu.

  “Those are meatballs,” he said. “You like?”

  “Ummm, delicious,” I said.

  “Why I am tired?” Said asked, reaching across the table to poke my shoulder.

  I just nodded, unsure of what to say.

  “I ask you, ʽWhy I am tired?’”

  “You work hard,” I said.

  “No, not work! The woman don’t leave me alone.”

  I laughed uncomfortably. “Right,” I said. “Hilarious!”

  “I am be serious, Isolde. I spend the night with a woman. It is magic, this hotel. Fourteenth Street and the West Side Highway. One hundred dollars for three hours, Jacuzzi, beautiful, clean, magic.”

  Again I laughed and said, “Hilarious.” We passed that hotel in the car on the way to the country. It would have to be magic to make that hotel clean and beautiful.

  “I am not joking. You think I do nothing every year when Cecylia goes?”

  His wife went to Russia to live with her mother every summer for four months. The rest of the year, whenever I stopped in she was sitting hunched over an Irish coffee with a very sad, bloated look on her face, saying things like “New York, she is so durr-ty, how can I stand this, Isolde? Tell me, I beg of you.” Each year, I couldn’t wait for her to go away. And neither could Said apparently.

  “You know Cecylia and me, we don’t have nothing, no sex,” he said.

  “Hmmm,” I said.

  “She say I am too big. She told me when we have the sex it hurt her too much. She feel it in her throat.”

  I had just taken a swallow of coffee as he said it and was about to clear my throat but forced myself not to. My cell phone rang. It was Russell again saying that the baby Tylenol was not on the bathroom sink.

  “It has to be,” I said. I had given Duncan a dropperful the night before.

  “I’m standing right here,” Russell said, “and there’s no Tylenol.”

  “I’m sure it’s there.”

  “You can look, look, look for yourself
,” Russell stuttered. “I’m telling you, I don’t know what you did with the fucking Tylenol.”

  “Do you need me to come home?” I asked.

  “No. Stay out. I’ll keep looking.” He hung up on me in the middle of his own sentence and I went back to Said to hear more about how big he was, if that was in fact what he was talking about.

  “I tell you because you are my friend and you would not tell Cecylia. I do this for ten years when she is away.”

  I tried to look completely neutral, neither approving nor disapproving, which wasn’t that difficult because it was pretty much how I felt. I was trying to be less judgmental in general and their marriage had always disgusted me anyway. I knew—because I had brought him food once when he was very sick and she was away in Russia—that they had two little bedrooms. He had one and she shared one with their six-year-old daughter.

  “You don’t know I do this?”

  “What? No,” I said.

  He let out a hearty foreign laugh and I had to slap his big rough hand five over the table. I had to stop coming to this café, I told myself. I was like an old mountain goat returning to the same patch of grass every day.

  His cell phone rang. “It is the woman!” he said. “She wants more of me.”

  I thought of Cecylia with her mother, sitting in the garden or cooking in the kitchen, while her husband fucked someone else in a hooker hotel. Their little bedrooms held less intimacy than cubicles in an office building. My cell phone rang. “I don’t know what to do,” Russell said. “I’ve scoured the entire apartment.”

  “I’m coming home,” I said, relieved to have an excuse to leave even though I had looked so forward to being able to sit in the café again. I paid the check and accepted the quart of chicken soup with rice that Said insisted I bring home to the baby.