What Was Mine (8 page)

I offered to fly down to help her, but she was dead set against it, even after she got the baby back to New Jersey. Part of me was glad, I have to admit—leaving my own family wouldn't have been easy. The boys were in middle school and Mom was gone by then and I didn't have anybody but Doug to help out and he was busy, on the road a lot.

Looking back, maybe I should have suspected something. But I wrote off her refusal of my help as a simple matter of pride. Lucy is two years older than I am. You never ask an older sibling too many questions.

I'm just grateful our mother isn't still alive, to have to suffer the pain of knowing the truth about Lucy. Someone capable of such an act and such a deception. My sister is not who anyone thought her to be.

I
knew I had to go back to work. But I dreaded leaving Mia all day. I thought about quitting my job and going freelance. Freelancers commanded hefty day rates and could come and go at will. But I knew I couldn't depend on freelance to sustain the life I wanted for us. I needed the certainty of a biweekly paycheck, with health benefits.

I cast about in my mind for a profession that would let me stay home with a baby. But what profession would let me stay home with a baby while at the same time paying enough to support us? It was 1990. Telecommuting wasn't an option yet. My office was in midtown Manhattan. There were ad agencies in New Jersey I might have worked at instead, but none had the stature of Scali, McCabe, Sloves, which was one of the most creative shops on Madison Avenue, proven in part by the fact that it was no longer on Madison. I had a child to support for the next eighteen years. I couldn't afford to throw away my career.

I decided that if I was going to go back to my job, I had to move to the city. I had to be able to get to my baby from the office in a matter of minutes, had to be able to get to the hospital in case of emergency, which would be impossible if I had to depend on the vagaries of De Camp buses or PATH trains or traffic clogging the Lincoln Tunnel.

I began to scour the
New York Times
classifieds. I'd get up early
with the baby and retrieve the paper from my doormat, opening the door and shutting it quickly against the gray dawn, before neighbors were out. I read it while holding Mia on my lap at the kitchen table, sometimes letting her play with the red grease pencil from the office I used to circle
2BRS, DRMN
. I knew I wanted a doorman. Mia was just five months old, but already I was picturing the teenager she would become, returning home at night from a dance, lithe and long-haired, tiny-skirted and bare-legged. I didn't want her standing in a dark entrance, fumbling for keys. I wanted a brightly lit canopy and a doorman who would look out for her. A building close to a subway, which would mean a short walk home, short enough that muggers wouldn't have time to mug her. It was New York before Giuliani. There were still plenty of muggers.

I was nervous about seeing apartments with a real estate agent, baby in tow. What if one of them identified her, somehow, from the news? I was relieved not to have to sign up with an agency, after all. I learned of an apartment before it was listed. An account woman at the office took a job with a client in Düsseldorf. She put an ad in the Scali newsletter saying she was putting her co-op on the market. She gave me a good deal. And so I traded a light and airy 3 BR in Montclair for a rear 2 BR in Morningside Heights. It was a back apartment on the first floor. But it had a doorman. And a canopy entrance lit brightly at night, for safety. It was a short walk from the 110th Street stop. The apartment was dark, but I didn't mind. The dark suited me now, cloaking me in its protective veil.

One benefit I hadn't realized before taking the apartment was that it was across the street from a newly built playground in Riverside Park. I became grateful for this amenity as soon as I moved in.

The playground was a place I could take the baby, unafraid. No one knew I wasn't really a mother. No one glanced suspiciously my way. No one glanced at me, period, which was fine with me. I'd sit by the river in the fresh, wide air absorbing the baby-raising wisdom of
women around me, discussing answers to questions that flummoxed me then—what was the best formula, how to find a pediatrician, which were the good preschools and how to get into them?

Mia was six months old now, she could sit in a sandbox, and I perched on its wooden perimeter watching her play, learning all I needed to know to take care of her, rarely having to say a thing.

I learned about Mommy and Me classes given in a nearby church basement, and that if you weren't there to sign up at 7 a.m. on the day classes opened, you'd be shut out. I learned which kind of stroller was easiest to fold, for a bus or cab trip. And what to do for a baby's cold (humidifier). I learned about childproofing a house (no thumbtacks!) and what shade of poop meant a baby was sick, realizing how little I'd known about life, having been protected from its messiness by spending so much clean time in offices.

Once, guiding Mia down the chute of a slide, I overheard a woman on a bench behind me confess her guilt about having an affair. “I can't help myself,” she said, in a voice she didn't bother to lower. “The second I saw him, it was like I got carried away by a wave.” The listeners nodded, murmuring supportive comments, which surprised me, and made me feel suddenly piqued. Because if I told them of being similarly swept away by besottedness, I doubted they'd make the same allowances for me.

S
oon after Lucy got Mia, I did something I thought would be a nice surprise for her. I contacted an old school friend at our hometown paper and I got her to put in a baby announcement. When the announcement came out, I clipped it and mailed it to Lucy and got a call from her right away. I thought she was calling to thank me. But instead, she was angry! She shouted at me, accusing me of having overstepped bounds, invading her privacy. I had to pull the receiver away from my ear. I apologized, but couldn't understand her reaction, how such a small thing could provoke such vitriol in her. I chalked it up to her moving to New York City, where people like keeping their distance, preferring to live as strangers, I guess.

T
he hardest part of going back to work was hiring a sitter. How could I leave Mia? How could I abandon her as she'd been abandoned before? How could I leave her with someone who might whisk her away, beguiled by her as I had been? I had nightmares in which I'd return to a dark, empty apartment echoing with hollowness left in her wake. But I had to go back to work to support us. As the days of my maternity leave dwindled, I made myself look up nanny agencies in the phone book. I called the one with the most trustworthy name. Professional Nannies Institute. I liked the sound of it, the promise of the title, which implied that it dealt only with women for whom taking care of children was a profession. Surely they wouldn't jeopardize a career by making off with one of their charges. I called, imagining a pipeline direct from London through which Mary Poppins look-alikes would slide into this country. But though the woman who answered the phone had a reassuringly British accent, she told me that few nannies came from England anymore. The institute was a school in name only. The only course it gave was in getting a green card. The fees appalled me. I said I'd call her back and hung up.

Several mothers in the playground had found sitters by answering ads in the pages of the
Irish Echo
, a weekly paper in which classifieds were a kind of clearinghouse for babysitting jobs in New York.
But the prospects I interviewed were disappointments: a girl from Dublin who came for the interview carrying a big bag of pink candied popcorn—how could Mia acquire good eating habits from her?; a young woman from Trinidad who wanted to bring her infant son to the job, so she could babysit him, too—but if there were a fire, which baby would she rescue first?; a woman from Barbados who'd been Claudette Colbert's laundress—but how much would she know about taking care of a baby?

I realized I was looking for someone who was not only capable but like-minded. I began to fathom the commitment required for a mother-sitter relationship to work. It would be akin to a marriage. Indeed, some mothers at the playground saw more of their sitter than they did of their spouse.

A sitter would be someone who would wield great influence over my daughter, someone I'd have to trust to guide her development. A sitter could make my life miserable or wonderful. This imbued the decision with enormous weight. I began to get cold feet. I toyed again with the notion of finding a job that would let me stay home with my baby. I could start a business. A couple I knew had left advertising to start a catalog company selling baby clothes. The company had become successful—I sometimes saw people reading their catalogs on the subway—but that success had taken years. I didn't have years.

Then, one afternoon while pushing Mia in her stroller to the corner market, I saw a sign on a bus stop.
Babysitter—Mush Experience.
The sign was handwritten and I wondered if the “Mush” was intentional, meant to be ironic. The penmanship was Palmer Method, tight but graceful loops, the kind of writing that hasn't been taught for decades. I knew an older woman had written the notice. I was partial to hiring an older woman. An older woman would prove more responsible, I'd heard at the playground.

I called the number and spoke with someone with an accent, who wasn't
the babysitter. She said she was the babysitter's cousin. The babysitter wasn't home now, but she was a very good babysitter, the cousin said. The cousin had trusted her own son to her, but now she stayed home and didn't need a babysitter anymore. The babysitter had two interviews arranged for the next day, did I want an interview with her? Yes, I said, and we set a time. The woman on the phone offered to come with the babysitter. Because the babysitter's English wasn't too good, she said. This alarmed me. I didn't want someone taking care of my baby who couldn't speak English. I said I'd changed my mind about the appointment, but, apparently, there was confusion because the next day, at the appointed hour, the doorbell rang.

It was the babysitter. She'd come alone. She was a kind, gentle-looking Chinese woman about my age. She had dressed for the interview in an old-fashioned silk dress that reminded me of dresses my mother had worn. It would have been rude to turn her away.

She insisted she couldn't wear shoes into the apartment and, over my protests, slipped them off on the doormat. She was shorter without heels, and though I am not a big woman, I felt oversize as I led her, barefoot, down the hall to the living room, where Mia was playing in her jump seat. Mia had been wary of other sitters I'd interviewed, but she began to bounce happily when she saw this woman, as if they were already friends.

I gestured to a place on the sofa, and I settled myself opposite.

I asked her about her experience with babies. Her English wasn't as bad as it could be.

She said she'd taken care of her cousin's son. Also, she had a son herself, back in China. She reached for her purse and took out a plastic wallet and thumbed a photo out of its billfold. The boy wore a school tie and posed on a bicycle, one foot on a pedal, one on the ground.

“I raised him until twelve,” she said, gazing at the picture. Its serrated
edges were bent and she gently pressed them back into place. Now the boy was fourteen, she said, and lived with her husband and parents in Shanghai.

She slid the image carefully back into its sleeve and I thought of the sadness of having to leave your child in a different country on the other side of the world. I couldn't imagine it.

I
left my son to go to Meiguo. Beautiful country. That is the Chinese name for America. I left in 1988, when Lin was just twelve. Feng and I wanted a better life for him. We wanted a better life for our family. At this time, China is still very poor. Many people want to leave China, go to other countries to live and to work: America, Germany, Canada. America was first choice, a country so rich, it was said children drank milk there like water. In China, many things were still rationed. You needed
liangpiao
—coupons—to buy everything: meat, cooking oil, even rice. How much you could buy was according to how big your family. Except eggs. Two dozen eggs were allowed each family a month, no matter what size family you had.
Liangpiao
was like gold. When my mother died two years ago, we found
liangpiao
carefully wrapped in a handkerchief, in a box in her room, kept in case difficult times returned.

My cousin worked in New York City. He and his wife had a restaurant in Chinatown and they needed someone to care for their son. So our plan was for me to go to the U.S. first, then later, Feng can follow with Lin.

In the 1980s, it was very hard to get visa to go to U.S. You stood on long lines outside the embassy for days, your family bringing you food. The U.S. required you to have bank statement that showed equivalent of three thousand American dollars. We
borrowed money from my parents. Feng's parents also offered money, but we do not accept. Because we know that they do not let two spouses go abroad at the same time, too afraid they will stay. Once you are turned down, you can't apply again for six months.

I got a visa because of Feng's love of American jazz. It was illegal then to listen to American broadcasts in China. To do it, Feng built a shortwave radio in secret. This, too, was against the law. No one could know or he would be arrested. I didn't want him to have it, but he didn't listen to me. He turned it on low, late at night, after I went to sleep. This radio got American news, too.

The night before I went for my interview, we practiced what I should say. I almost could not get to sleep that night, rehearsing things in my head: how to hold myself, how fast to talk, when to look like I'm thinking, when to answer right away. But finally it is morning and Feng is shaking me.