Minding Ben (3 page)

“You see how the world small. I bet we know plenty same people.”

A little girl I hadn't noticed before said, “Miss Lady, I could try on your wings?”

Before I could shrug them off, the woman said, “Micky, what it is I tell you about talking to strangers. Lord help me.”

I laughed and put Hannah's wings on the girl's slender shoulders. She twirled and took off after her brother. “Just don't go past Nostrand, you hear me.” The woman and I chatted, and we figured out the people we both knew from home, and pretty soon I had told her my whole story about coming to America and my cousin not meeting me at the airport and working in New Jersey and being on my own. And when we were done, she told me her name was Sylvia and gave me her number.

“Here.” She passed me her telephone bill. “Tear off the number on the top. Whenever you see you want to come Brooklyn to lime, or if you need a place to stay, give me a call.”

I phoned Sylvia in January, and she welcomed me then, laughing when she saw the wings she remembered from Labor Day. Since then, she has repeatedly asked me to throw out the wings. To make space, she says. But I will not.

Now, almost two months later, here I was on hands and knees, reaching under her couch to find whatever else Derek might have misplaced, when Sylvia walked out of the bathroom. She stopped and looked down at me half buried under the couch. I turned and looked at her massive feet, ankles, calves. Then, drawing out too fast, I slammed the back of my head against the base of the stupid sofa.

I rubbed the sore spot, then looked over at Sylvia and froze. She was naked. At least I thought she was naked. She was definitely topless. Her huge breasts weighed down like two freshly slaughtered baby seals, dark noses still wet, that had been flung over her shoulders. A towel, hopelessly small, hung limp in her hand. She had no navel I could see.

“Wait till you make children and see what happen to you,” Sylvia said, trying to dry her back with that scrap of towel. “I used to be
maga
too.” She held out a breast and stropped the underside dry. “I going to see if my agency don't have any old people for me to mind. Watch Dame till I come back. You going anywhere?”

She knew full well I had noplace to go.

“Where it is you have to go, Grace?” she asked, voice rising, misunderstanding my nod.

“No, Sylvia. Yes, I'll watch him. I have to make calls this morning and wait to see if anybody call for me.”

“Just try not to tie up my phone for too long, Miss Grace. I might try and call you from outside.”

She walked off to the bedroom, and, still on my haunches, I stared in amazement at the flat, broad canvas, rippled at the edges and slit at the base, that was her back to her low-slung bottom.

AT TEN THE PHONE
rang.

“You placed the ad in
The Irish Echo
?”

“Yes, that was me. You looking for a babysitter?”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one,” I lied.

“How tall are you?”

“Five nine.”

“And how much do you weigh?”

“Pardon me?”

“My boy is big,” the man said a little breathlessly. “How much do you weigh?”

“About a hundred and twenty-five pounds.”

“You're twenty-one, five nine, and a hundred and twenty-five pounds?”

“Yes. How old is your son, sir?”

“And what size are your tits?” he asked, his breath coming faster.

I hung up the phone, not knowing if what had just happened was funny.

WITH BO STILL ASLEEP
, and Dame napping, I had some quiet time to make my calls. Ah, the fine balance of calling. First, not too too early to wake them; if you called them around eight, you could expect “Oh, could you please call back later, we're just heading out.” Later, the phone was busy. Busy. Busy. Or “Sorry, the answering system is full. Please try your call again later.” Sometimes, though, the phone rang and my heart leapt as I tried to compose myself. Usually the phone kept ringing. So I called later. Just not at five or at six. That's when they were coming in, making dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up after dinner. Finally! Finally I got through. “Oh, sorry, the position's been filled already.”

“When?” I always wanted to ask. “When between six o'clock this morning and now was the position filled? When did you take calls, set up interviews, interview, call references, debate with your husband the merits of the old sitter versus the younger, the Bajan over the Trinidadian, choose and call back?” How did I miss this every week?

The phone rang again at 11:45.

“Hi,” said a high-pitched voice, “may I please speak with Grace?”

“This is she.” I tried to match the beat of my voice to hers.

I told her about myself, lying about my age and trying to sound more experienced than I was. In truth, I had mostly played with Mora's children in New Jersey and by the end felt more like their older sister.

“You sound wonderful,” she said after I was done reminiscing about building forts and baking cookies and bedtime stories.

“Thank you, Mrs.—”

“Moira,” she said, “like your Mora, but with an
i
in the middle. Let me tell you what we're looking for.” The job she described sounded easy enough, and although I had never even held a newborn, I didn't think it could be all that hard.

Moira laughed like a little girl. “Silly me, I forgot to tell you the most important thing. We're paying three hundred dollars a week.”

I smiled because three hundred dollars was exactly one hundred and thirty-five dollars more than Mora had paid me.

“You're from the Caribbean, Grace?”

“Yes.”

“You're so articulate. And you have a green card?”

The End.

Every time.

However they phrased it—“Are you legal?” or “Can you work on the books?” or “So, you're authorized to work, right?” or “And, you have a green card?”—the question was always the end of my interview.

I took a breath. “Actually, no. I don't have my papers yet.”

“Do you have a social security number?”

I still wasn't sure what exactly that was. “No.”

“Oh, Grace, you sounded so perfect for baby Ezra. But Peter and I are both lawyers, and, ethically, you'd be a conundrum. We have to hire someone on the books. Oh.”

I felt the room shrink around me; the walls came in closer, and the old shag of the carpet grew like rainy-season mildew. I wanted more than anything to be back home on the island.

Dame sat on the couch, smiling at the TV. I felt bad making him watch with the sound off.

“Get me a job, Dame. Any job,” I said.

Bo came out of the bedroom, scratching his chest with both hands like a silverback gorilla.

He changed the TV from thirteen to eleven.

“Come on, Bo. Dame watching that.” I looked at my watch. “Wait ten more minutes, please.”

Without looking at Dame or me, he dropped heavily to the floor and rested his bare back against the couch's torn plastic. “Dame tell you he know what going on? I done tell Sylvia he retarded. Anything make him smile.” He turned up the volume.

The phone rang again at one. Dame was down for another nap and Bo for the count on the carpet.

“Hello?”

“Hello” came back a faint woman's voice. “Did you place the ad?”

“Yes, I'm Grace.”

She giggled. “I need a nanny after work, Gracie.”

I didn't understand. “So I work an evening shift then?”

“When I come home at five-thirty, I need you to undress me and give me my bubbly bath and help me into my jammies. I like my curls brushed for a long time and for you to sing to me and then feed me my bottle.”

I could not bring myself to end the call.

“Sometimes, like if I've had a really hard day, I might want to breast-feed—”

Horrified, I hung up the phone and laughed so hard I crashed against Sylvia's kitchen table.

“Grace, girl,” Bo yelled from his spot on the living room floor. “Stop making so much fucking noise in my head.”

BY FOUR DEREK AND
Micky were home and Dame was up. “And how was school today?” I asked, rooting around the fridge to find them a snack.

“Fine,” they answered together.

“What do you mean by
fine
? Tell me about your day. What'd you do who'd you see what'd you read who'd you play with? Details, please.”

Micky grinned. She had twined a pastel strand of sour candies around her wrist and cracked them loudly off the string. Derek got up from the table and went to his bag, coming back full speed with a painting. “Look, Grace, I draw home.”

I had to concede, it looked exactly like the island. A turquoise rectangle of seawater in the background, and a bright yellow sun in the clear sky, two tall coconut trees with spiky green fronds, and a little wooden shack with a smoking chimney. I could almost see my father sitting on the front steps.

“Who's that?” I pointed to the three stick figures holding hands in the foreground.

“Me, Micky, and Dame,” he answered.

“Micky, Damien, and
me
. So I'm not in your picture? I like home too.” And I missed home.

“Derek, I could see your picture?” Micky asked.

“I think we have to put this masterpiece on the fridge for everyone to see. Micky, go in the breakfront and bring the Scotch tape, please. Derek, pick a spot,” I said.

After, we lolled about in the living room, not an entirely unpleasant space when Sylvia was not around. I read on the couch. Micky did her homework, screwing up her face with every bite of sour candy. Derek practiced the running man in place. And Dame knelt on the warm radiator box, gazing through the childproofing bars on the window, picking at the flecks of paint and putting the salty scraps in his mouth.

By nine Derek and Micky were in bed. Sylvia snored on the couch as she watched her shows. I was half asleep in the old armchair that Derek told me used to be his father's favorite, going through
The Irish Echo
. I figured I might as well read about New York City's Irish. The Ancient Order of Hibernians was threatening to cancel this year's St. Patrick's Day parade if the homosexuals were allowed to march, the Irish homosexuals were planning a protest march this coming weekend, and the city was stockpiling dye to make the rivers run green. The phone rang. Sylvia twitched to. “Somebody answer that.”

I picked up.

“Sorry to be calling this late, but can I speak with Grace?”

“Who is that on the phone?” Sylvia demanded.

“For me, Sylvia.” To the woman on the phone I said, “This is Grace.”

“You placed the ad in the
Echo
?” She sounded like she had a cold.

“Yes, that was me. Are you looking for a sitter?”

She laughed. “I'm looking for more than that.”

“Okay.” I couldn't find any enthusiasm. This day had drained me.

“Before I waste your time and mine, I should tell you we can only pay two hundred dollars, and it's nonnegotiable.”

It was so much more money than I'd had in a long time. “Where do you live?”

“Near Union Square, in the city.”

Two hundred dollars for Manhattan? I'd heard that women working in the city came home with $450 to $500 a week.

“Are you interested?” She sounded wheezy.

“Yes. I'm sorry.”

“Good. My name is Mrs. Bruckner. I have a four-year-old son. Well, he's almost four, and we need someone to live in and take care of him full-time, Monday to Friday. Give him his meals, his baths, take him to the park and his activities and playdates. You have to come in on Sunday nights because my husband and I both work. You get off at seven on Fridays. One Friday a month you'll have to work late. You get paid extra for this, of course; five dollars an hour, but no cab fare. If it's too late for you to take the train, you can spend the night and go home on Saturday morning.”

She paused.

And then went on.

“And there's housework. I need someone to do laundry and keep the apartment clean. You'll have to mop the floors and keep on top of the dust and do the bathrooms. And we need someone to cook and to clean up after we finish eating. My husband gets in from work late some nights, so you have to make a plate and leave it in the microwave for him. I'd prefer for you to wash up after him before you go to bed. Our son wakes up about eight. You can either get up before he does, take your shower, and be ready for him, or, if you want, you can shower after you put him down for his afternoon nap. There's ironing, mostly my husband's shirts, but sometimes I might want you to iron a shirt or a pair of shorts for me. Does this sound like something you're interested in?”

No.

Sylvia shouted, “Grace, I find you staying too long on my fucking phone you know.”

“Yes,” I said to Mrs. Bruckner, who either did not or pretended not to hear Sylvia.

“Good. Do you have references? How old are you?”

“Twenty-one, and yes I have a reference. I worked in New Jersey for one year.”

“Only one year's experience?”

“It's not a long time, but when you talk to Mora I'm sure she'll have plenty good to say about me.”

Mrs. Bruckner interrupted me. “What's your accent?”

“Caribbean.”

“Very articulate. And can you read?”

“Yes.”

“Can you work on the books?”

I slumped against the wall, careful to avoid the smudged cockroach streaks. “No.”

“Well, that's okay. We're looking for someone to be part of the family, someone we can sponsor maybe. So shall we set up an interview?”

“You're willing to do a sponsorship?”

“For the right person. You want to come in for an interview?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, good. We're interviewing this Thursday, on Purim. Can you come in at ten?”