The Seven Year Bitch Page 5

  When I got home, I gave Duncan the Tylenol that had of course been right on the sink where I’d said it was and Russell scrambled to his desk in the living room, tripping over Humbert and bumping into strollers in his haste to get to work. I heated up a bottle of milk and Duncan fell right to sleep on my bed. I remembered when we’d first gotten Humbert and had taken him to the vet who’d said he had a terrible ear infection and I paid sixty dollars for drops that the vet said had to be refrigerated and when we got home Russell put the drops in the freezer and I had to go back to the vet a second time and buy the drops all over again.

  6

  By the time Shasthi showed up the next day, I was too tired of my careful list of questions to ask any of them. The minute she walked through the door, I knew she was the one I loved. The second I saw her, I knew I would be willing to give her two weeks’ paid vacation and breast-feed her children if necessary.

  “May I wash my hands?” she said.

  I stood stiffly in the living room, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom.

  She was beautiful. She had long reddish hair, the color of pure Indian henna, and dark skin to match. She wore gold jewelry like an Indian gypsy and an apple-green shirt with gold sequins on it. She had normal undecorated nails that wouldn’t hurt Duncan’s scalp when she gave him a shampoo.

  She had come all the way from the Bronx but had arrived right on time. I sat facing her on the couch feeling incredibly guilty for some reason. As far as I was concerned she was hired but I knew I should ask her some questions first. “Have a cookie?” was all I could think of to say.

  “Thank you,” she lilted, taking a mint Milano and nibbling on it reluctantly, making me feel a little like I had bullied her into eating it. I felt like a witch luring her into my gingerbread house. I felt grotesque next to her. She was at least six inches taller than me, but I felt like a giant. My lips were pale while hers were painted a shade of purple I had always loved. I always noticed, when I took Duncan to the pediatrician, how fresh and happy the nannies looked and how old and haggard the mothers did. And I wondered for a moment if that would be us. I was already thinking of us as us, I noticed.

  I wished I had cleaned my apartment. If she opened the refrigerator she would see an almost empty pizza box in it. When she went into the bathroom to wash her hands she would have found a clump of toothpaste in the sink. I now realized that she had flushed the toilet twice. I cringed, wondering if I’d forgotten to flush.

  “How old are you?” I asked and then felt terrible about it. It seemed like a much too personal question to ask, but that was the point of an interview, I tried to remind myself.

  Lately age was the only thing I understood about a person. It seemed to matter more than anything else.

  “Forty,” she said. Her voice was a few octaves too high but still nice. I felt really, really bad I had asked and forced her to admit something like that. No one wanted to have to go around saying they were forty.

  “I’m going to be thirty-nine,” I offered.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I started slowly nodding again, the way I had nodded at all the nannies. I was dreading mentioning the salary because I was suddenly sure it would be less than she wanted.

  “Do you have any children?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  For some reason my mind began to race with this information. No children suddenly seemed like an extremely good thing in a nanny, or anyone really. There would be no earaches to rush home to in the middle of the day. Or, if they were being raised far away by relatives, I wouldn’t have to wonder how she could care about Duncan and not resent him. Or judge her too harshly for it.

  I wondered where she was from. She spoke excellent English but I wasn’t going to fall into that trap again. She had an Indian name, and she looked Indian.

  “Are you from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh?” I asked, proud of how the Pakistan and Bangladesh showed off my knowledge of world geography.

  “I’m from Guyana,” she said.

  “Ghana?”

  “No, Guyana,” she said.

  “Is that in Spain?” I asked, cautiously.

  “Guyana, no. It’s a country bordering Brazil. But I’m of Indian descent.”

  “Oh,” I said, nodding. “Isn’t Guyana where Jim Jones killed all the members of his cult?”

  “Yes!” she said, pleased that I knew so much of her land.

  I showed her around the apartment, rambling about myself and my idea of what light cleaning entailed, which, when I articulated its many components, sounded an awful lot like heavy cleaning. I was feeling guiltier and guiltier. At Richman I’d been notorious for getting the secretaries coffee all the time. She was silent until we got to my bedroom. “I like your curtains,” she said, as if she suddenly felt at home.

  “So do I!” I said, relieved. “They’re made out of saris. From India.” The Queen of the Nannies was right—Shasthi was the one for me. “I would love to go to India,” I said.

  “Me too,” she said.

  “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? Paris? Rome?” I asked idiotically.

  “Home,” she said.

  “You can’t . . .”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not here legally.”

  “Can you start tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach, as if I had forced her to take the job. And if I hadn’t, life had. She needed work and I was offering it, so she had to take it, like a mute bride in an arranged marriage. The choice was mine, not hers, and I had made it.

  She took a tiny yellow Post-it out of her pants pocket. “Can I ask you some questions?” she said carefully.

  “Okay,” I said, bracing myself. None of the other nannies had questions.

  “Do I get paid for sick days?”

  “Yes,” I said even though I wasn’t sure about that. “And you get two weeks’ paid vacation.”

  “Do I have federal holidays off?” she said in barely a whisper, reading from the Post-it.

  I suddenly felt like crying, thinking of this girl writing this question on a Post-it and putting it carefully in her pants pocket and taking the subway all the way from the Bronx and arriving right on time. Thinking of this girl who was a year older than I was but seemed so much younger and was illegal but was concerned about federal holidays. I didn’t even know what a federal holiday was, I just took all holidays for granted and even expected presents for them, and didn’t cherish them at all. She wanted to go home, and she couldn’t. “Sure,” I said to the federal holidays. “Just tell me when they are.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “The girl I take care of now just turned thirteen. They don’t need me as much anymore. I’ve been hoping for a little one to take care of for a long time.”

  Feeling sneaky, I called the number she had given me to check her reference. It was just a formality, due diligence, because my mind was made up. I was just checking a reference, not going through her purse, but my heart was pounding. When the woman answered the phone I felt like I was introducing myself to my new sister-wife. We would be sharing Shasthi now. I’d have her thirty hours and she’d have her ten. The other woman—Rachel was her name—sounded cool, almost casual about it.

  “Yes, she’s always prompt, never calls in sick. She’s very cheerful,” Rachel said.

  What a fool, I thought. She was just handing Shasthi to me on a silver platter. Didn’t she know she should be worried? As soon as I got another job, for just a few dollars I could steal her away, have forty hours or even fifty, just for me. One word from me, I was sure, and we’d never have to hear about this Rachel again, or her newly teenaged daughter.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Rachel said.

  “Yes?” I asked, screwing up my face in concentration, anxious to hear this one more thing.

  “She seems to take great care with her appearance. I’m always impressed by how well she puts herself together.”

  Unde
rstatement of the year, I thought. She was beautiful.

  She’d worked for Rachel for ten years and I’d only known her for thirty minutes, but I already felt I had a deeper understanding of her than this other woman did. I saw so much more to her than her appearance. As I thanked her and got off the phone, I couldn’t help but think there should be more to the ceremony—we should have to sup from the same table or sip from the same cup—but that was it.

  “Thanks. Bye.”

  “Sure. Good luck.”

  And we had Shasthi.

  7

  In the night, Duncan cried and I went to him. I brought him to my bed and he curled into my lap and then put his lips on mine. I opened my mouth to say something comforting, when he suddenly vomited right into my open mouth. In my confusion, I accidentally swallowed it.

  Then he gave his father a merciless shove and Russell woke up the way parents always wake up: annoyed, worried, guilty, angry.

  “Your mother’s going to take you back to bed.”

  “I just swallowed vomit. Your father will take you.”

  After Russell settled Duncan down in Deirdre-Agnes’s crib and I brushed my teeth, Russell and I lay in bed. “I wonder why she doesn’t have children,” I said. “She’s forty, you know.”

  In my mind, I could see the number 40 in the age column on the birth-defects chart in the pregnancy book. I could see the number 35 and the statistics next to it, and the statistics getting significantly worse as the age increased, 36, 37, 38, 39, and then—and this number was printed in an alarming red—40. Down syndrome: one in three. Or maybe it was one in thirty. Either way it wasn’t good.

  “I know, you’ve told me ten times. You’ve been talking about this all night. What’s her name again?”

  “Shasthi. Try to remember it,” I said.

  “Why can’t she have a nice name like Myrtle?” Russell had an almost perverted fantasy of having a nanny who was fat and over the age of eighty.

  “But why do you think? I know she’s married. She said her husband was going to drive her home after the interview. Oh, and she said what he does. Construction. He’s one of those guys who hangs on the side of a building like a fly. But I wonder why she doesn’t have children. She seems to genuinely like them.”

  “Let’s get some sleep.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have a nanny at all,” I said. “Actually, I think if it’s part time you call her a babysitter. ʽSitter,’” I said, trying that out.

  “Stop feeling guilty. You’re probably going to find a new job. It’s not like we’ve never had a nanny.”

  I thought about the portfolio I was supposed to analyze for the man from the auction. I thought about leaving Duncan alone with a woman I had met for thirty minutes.

  “I should be the one with him.”

  “You can’t wait to get away from him half the time. I’ve gotta go to sleep. Stop being obsessed with the nanny.”

  “Sitter,” I said.

  I lay in bed trying to sleep but the A. A. Milne poem I had recited to Duncan that night kept playing itself over and over in my head. That sometimes happened to me with a song lyric or something when I was overtired.

  It was called Buckingham Palace and it was about Christopher Robin going to watch the changing of the guard with someone named Alice. The fact that Christopher Robin goes there with Alice is repeated over and over. Alice just babbles on about the soldier she is going to marry and what she thinks is going on inside the palace, talking to the little boy, and it suddenly hit me. Christopher Robin went down with Alice, not with him. A. A. Milne sat at his typewriter while his son was wandering around London with a virtual stranger—someone named Alice—just some girl involved in her own life, saying whatever she felt like to his son. I’d recited the poem a hundred times but I’d never realized before that it was about a nanny. Even the words “they’re changing guard” were about being replaced by a nanny. My eyes filled with tears thinking of the fact that I should be the one to show Duncan the changing of the guard.

  “You know A. A. Milne was as obsessed with his son’s nanny as I am with mine,” I told Russell.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I’m his mother,” I said, sitting up in bed, still tasting his vomit in my mouth.

  “You’re a hedge fund manager,” Russell mumbled, half asleep.

  That, in the end, was probably the real reason to be married, I thought. He still respected me as a hedge fund manager even though I had been wiped out in the blink of an eye. When he looked at me he still saw my unscarred prebirth body, the one I’d had when we met. He still got hard when I took off my clothes to get ready for bed.

  “ We’re really glad you’re here,” I said as soon as Shasthi came into the apartment.

  “It’s my pleasure,” she said. “Let me go to the bathroom to wash my hands.”

  A professional nanny, or sitter, I thought, silently congratulating myself for making such a good choice.

  I stood there and listened to her flush the toilet twice. When she came out Duncan cruised to her and took her hand.

  She picked him up in her arms and started toward his room. I followed after them. “You and your husband don’t want children?” I blurted.

  She looked surprised and swallowed, as if answering my questions was a part of the job she’d clearly have to endure like vacuuming. “Yes, we do. We’ve been trying for four years and nothing has happened.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?” I asked.

  “No, it costs too much money.”

  “No insurance?”

  Then I felt like an idiot. Of course she didn’t have insurance. She didn’t even have a green card. Going to someone like my Dr. Heiffowitz would cost two or three weeks’ salary just for the initial exam. A sonogram, day three blood work, progesterone series, a postcoital test to check the viability of her husband’s sperm would be out of the question.

  I saw the birth-defects age chart in my mind. I felt terrible. “I should get in the shower,” I said.

  Leaving my building, I felt relieved. I was free. Duncan was in great hands. With nothing better to do, I started walking up West Broadway and then MacDougal Street until I got to the southwest corner of Washington Square Park. I walked into the park a few feet, past the chess tables, but was suddenly blocked by a high chain-link fence. I walked, almost running, back out the way I came and up the south side of the park, which was completely fenced off. The only point of entry came after the Indian guy who sold dosas from a cart and I had to enter by the bathrooms. Once I was in the park, the fence blocked my way again, and I was forced to walk on an odd dirt path around the playground like a squirrel. I felt strangely infuriated, the way I did when a block I was walking on suddenly became a film set and some punk with a clipboard told me that I had to cross to the other side of the street or, even worse, wait.

  They were planning to move the fountain just a few feet so that it aligned perfectly with the arch, which seemed absurd to me, but I tried not to get too worked up about it. I hated people who lingered on things like that. My son was in great hands and I was free, despite the alarming chain-link fence.

  Then I saw a mother pushing a Bugaboo and guilt detonated inside me like it had been hiding in my chest in someone else’s luggage. I wanted to be that mother pushing her child in the Bugaboo. I wanted to rush over to her and tell her to take a hike, and take her place, pushing her child wherever they were going. But I was that mother, I told myself. All I had to do was go back home and pop my own child into my own Bugaboo. Instead I stood frozen staring at the dump trucks—and what kind of mother of a boy didn’t know the names of the different kinds of trucks!—as if I were standing there with Duncan.

  I felt guilty that I had a nanny when I was no longer working. I felt guilty that I wanted thirty hours a week to myself instead of enjoying my child enough to want to spend the whole 168 hours a week with him. I felt guilty that I had been fired even though I knew I had done nothing wrong. But when I thought of getting anoth
er job, I felt sick with guilt about the seventy hours a week it would require me to be away from Duncan. I felt guilty that I had hired an illegal immigrant as our nanny. Sitter. And the fact that she could never go home again and see her family, when I was free to flit all around the world, froze me with guilt. When I thought of what she must think of me, leaving Duncan with her when I went off to do nothing, I crumbled with guilt. She was in my home giving my child a bath.

  How many times a day, I thought, had I sat at my desk and wished I was home with him? And how many times had I stood pushing him in a swing on the weekend, wishing I was at work?

  I chose the way of the dirt path, and when I exited, I saw some old ladies from the senior center selling their wares—knitted scarves, crocheted baby blankets, and tiny booties.

  After I’d married Russell and before I’d gotten pregnant with Duncan, I’d had a miscarriage. I’d bought a pair of booties just like these. “I’m pregnant,” I’d said and handed them to him. “That’s terrible,” he had said. There was nothing worse, it seemed to me, than a reluctant father. I hadn’t counted on his ambivalence. But before I could think too much about it, I had lost the baby.

  I realized my problems with Russell had started when I’d handed him those booties.

  I held up a beautiful baby blanket.

  “That’s exquisite. Doris made that,” the one who was the leader said. She had soft white hair molded into a helmet and nice blue eyes. She wore a huge rhinestone pin on her lapel, a wasp or a bumblebee or something. “You have excellent taste.”

  Old ladies liked me. With the exception of my mother-in-law, I had never met a senior citizen I couldn’t befriend. As a child, I always wondered why Dorothy couldn’t win over the witch or why Snow White couldn’t just make the Queen something nice at her school.

  “How’s business?” I asked.

  “Doing nicely, thank you,” she said.

  I had started at five, selling Kool-Aid on the street, and I’d probably end up just like this, I thought. Actually I kind of liked the idea. I’d be ninety, selling my knitting, and the Grim Reaper would walk up and buy a scarf—black of course—and we’d do it on the steps of the senior center before he took me with him.