Spoiled

by Caitlin Macy

  “Oh, I’m not worried about it, Annabel!” I said, picking up Sally and jiggling her in my arms. “Just have fun with her! Enjoy yourselves! Please!” I’m afraid I sounded rather hysterical in those confused days of inchoate motherhood. Marva helped me a lot. She would have a look at Sally when I was worried that she hadn’t reached some developmental milestone (“She’s five months, Marva, and she hasn’t rolled over!”) or when I was convinced she had contracted Coxsackie disease or was becoming strangely bowlegged, or when I thought she hadn’t gained enough weight, or was crawling in a funny way, and Marva would say, her hand on Sally’s forehead, or playing peekaboo to make her laugh, or holding Sally under the armpits so my daughter could stretch her legs and pretend to stand, “Ain’t nothing wrong with this child, Liz—you got to stop worrying,” and even though I usually kept up the protest for show, quoting one or another of my parenting books, I was secretly solaced by this woman of experience, who clearly took such good care of Annabel, who—despite having a mother who never saw her—seemed remarkably—really astonishingly well-adjusted. Of course Marva called me Liz, the same as I called her Marva. Asking your own nanny, much less someone else’s, to call you “Mrs.” would have been like putting her in a maid’s uniform or having her come into your apartment through the servants’ entrance—so unheard of, that when women posted such cases on the mommies’ website I spent far too much time perusing, you assumed they were apocryphal.

  The next few times I saw the pair of them, Annabel asked politely if she could play with Sally, looking up at me with her grave brown eyes. “Annabel, you don’t even have to ask,” I said. “If you see our stroller, you can just come over and join us, okay? You’re always welcome.” The suggestion seemed to make her uneasy, however, so I said, “It’s okay. If you feel more comfortable asking, just ask, okay?” This is how the women of my generation, in my circle of friends, talked to our children. If one of the toddlers misbehaved we never scolded her, “You naughty, naughty girl!” but rather, we knelt down on the child’s level and looked her in the eye and said calmly but emphatically, “I don’t like the way you’re acting, Hudson.” Or we’d say, calmly albeit a-grammatically: “Do we hurt people’s bodies in this family? Look at my face, Miles—is that something we do?” Our children had for the most part creative names like Miles or Milo or Bronwen, or they had classic names like Grace or Henry, or they had nineteenth-century servants’ names like Ruby or Stella. In fact there was a lot of variety, but the one thing you never heard were the big hits from public school in the seventies. You never heard Jennifer or Kristen or Kim. You never heard Angie, and even Michael was rare. Surnames were used for first names, such as Bennett and Crawford and Grady, whereas the firms our husbands worked for were, increasingly, called “Fresh Powder Capital” and “Dude, Gnarly Wave, LLC,” so you would hear grown men at cocktail parties saying with straight faces that they had left Morgan for Gnarly—but I digress.

  There was a lot of gossip in the park. Like all village life, ours fed on news of its denizens. The chase for information was spearheaded by Victoria and Marnie, best friends who lived at 48 West, and whose children—each had a pair of twins—were always being paraded into the park and then handed summarily off to the pair of specially trained twin nannies who attended them. They, and through them the rest of us, knew where everyone lived, whether the apartment was A-line (meaning park-view) or D-line (shaft-way), WEIK (windowed eat-in-kitchen), or just EIK; how many bedrooms and how many maids’. (The first time I heard this shorthand I thought the question was, “How many maids does she have?” and was titillated by the proximity to real privilege until someone added, “One of the ‘maids’ [rooms, that is] has been sacrificed to make an open kitchen.”) In any case, even if you had had a maid, you wouldn’t have called her a maid but rather, a cleaning woman, or, at the limit, a housekeeper. The same was true if you had a decorator: You referred to her as “this friend of mine who’s great with color,” for somewhere along the line, hiring a decorator had eclipsed couples therapy as the last taboo. There were seasonal topics, such as the size of the husbands’ bonuses or where people summered, not that you used that verb. And there was year-round fodder, such as which park mother coming back from postpartum lockup had found her six-month-old calling the nanny “Mama” and fired the woman on the spot sans severance; or who had a shit fit and threatened the big D when she found her husband had supported her mother-in-law’s feeding Carleton a banana (he was allowed only indigenous fruit). In short: the usual. Of course, the gossip often had an element of adjudication, and it wasn’t unusual for a story to end with the verdict of “Bitch” handed down. Or “Asshole.” Or “What a fucking shithead.” The exchange of information was freer about the families who didn’t show up at the park the day their news hit and freer still about the children whose mother and father, like Annabel’s, were never represented. In fact a bit of mystique developed about these children, whose parents clearly had better things to do than stand around exchanging specs on people’s apartments and discussing whether it was okay to allow juice at lunch.

  ONE DAY IN early spring—I remember it was April, because Sally’s first birthday was coming up and I was fretting about “spaces” and saying to Victoria and Marnie that over-my-dead-body would I hire an entertainer for a bunch of one-year-olds, why couldn’t we do it like our mothers had, with a bunch of balloons tied to the mailbox and a lopsided cake—Annabel came over to say hi, and Victoria, who was the more officious of Marnoria, as they were sometimes collectively known, called out to her, “Hello, Annabel! Is your mommy in town this week?”

  Annabel said no, and Victoria said, “Oh, she had to go to Chicago again?” Victoria was a tall, uncomfortably skinny woman made taller by the high heels she wore. There was literally not an ounce of fat on her. Her hip bones reminded me of the photo of a ski resort, where they show you the peaks overhanging the bowl. Her face was severely lined and she wore her hair in a ponytail.

  Now Marnie interjected, “Mommy’s a managing director at JPMorgan.” This was for my benefit, apparently. She was in similarly irreproachable shape—they both put me to shame with my halfhearted Level One yoga and the occasional self-hating jog—but Marnie’s body looked as if it had been relentlessly aerobicized into submission and might rebel at any minute with a twenty-pound gain. She had a big chest that made her look heavier than she was and she was touchingly open about the fact that she was always on a diet. “She has to work mighty hard, doesn’t she, Annabel—your mommy?”

  Annabel didn’t say anything, just looked curiously at them, as Victoria cried, “But then she can earn money and buy you all those beautiful clothes! You have beautiful clothes, Annabel, did you know that?”

  I was beginning to be embarrassed on behalf of my fellow park mothers, so I pretended not to listen, cooing to Sally, who was standing, holding on to the bench, having learned how to pull herself up.

  “Look at her coat,” Victoria went on. She leaned forward on the bench and took the tail of Annabel’s coat in her hand and rubbed the blue herringbone and silk lining between her fingers. “Isn’t this gorgeous?”

  “My dad bought me this,” Annabel said.

  “Oh, did he? Oh, that’s nice,” said Victoria. Her legs were crossed and the top foot, from which her stiletto heel was dangling, pumped vigorously. Marnie usually came to the park in a jacket over indie-label jeans, but Victoria’s outfits, which she must have spent a fortune on, were aggressively upmarket-nonconformist—slashed T-shirts and lace-up breeches; thigh-high boots. They seemed to scream, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know!” as if the moment she put on her clothes in the morning was the closest she came to the life in New York she’d imagined for herself. “Too bad your mom has to be away, huh? She travels an awful lot, doesn’t she?”

  “But Annabel gets to stay and have fun with Marva!” Marnie crowed. She usually played good cop in the bloodletting. “I bet you guys have a ball, huh? Girls’ slumber party, right? Hey,” she said,
when Annabel remained silent, “can I come? Can I be invited next time Mom’s away? You and me and Marva? Wouldn’t that be fun, Annabel?”

  Annabel gave a frown as if this had been said in a foreign language. “May I take Sally over to the fountain?” she asked me. “I want to show it to her now that it’s fixed.”

  “Of course, Annabel,” I said. I got up and helped Sally turn away from the bench, putting her little hands in Annabel’s. I can’t tell you how happy this made me—those truncated little walks Sally took with Annabel, the latter leaning solicitously over my golden-haired baby, carefully helping her to step along. They were the first times I really saw Sally as a person in her own right, who would one day have friends of her own. I glanced around for Marva and when I saw her on her usual bench, talking with her friend Sophie, I gave her a little wave and called, “She’s so sweet!”

  “That poor, poor kid,” Victoria said, when Annabel and Sally were a little distance away.

  Marnie folded her arms across her chest and shook her head in disgust. “I’m sorry, but she’s seriously out of control. It used to be—what?—once a month or so. Now she’s with the guy like every week. It’s just not right.”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  “What’s disgusting?” I said.

  “Uh—someone having an affair for like a year.”

  Marnie stared at me. “I can’t believe you didn’t know,” she said, and there was real ire in her voice. She elbowed Victoria. “She’s too good for the gossip, right?”

  “She met him through work,” Victoria informed me. “She flies to Chicago all the time for work—”

  “Her two big clients are out there—”

  “She brought him to New York last year—”

  “She only tried that once.”

  “Marva has seen the guy,” Victoria said in a stage whisper. “She called Annabel’s mother on it. Told her it made her uncomfortable.”

  “They were, like, fucking when Marva was in the apartment.”

  Victoria looked at Marnie with the happy satisfaction of having stumbled on an enormity to trump her lifetime of petty sins.

  “Can I say—I love Marva. I seriously love her.”

  “How many nannies would have the balls?” Victoria said and then she dropped into the peeved undertone she reserved for talking about her own nanny, “Certainly not ‘doormat Drianna’ …”

  The whole time I had been only half listening, watching Annabel’s and Sally’s progress across the gravel. Now I spoke up doubtfully, “You heard all this from Marva? She told you?” It was hard for me to imagine—not the situation itself, or that Marva might have felt compelled to confide in someone about it, but that she would have chosen Victoria and Marnie as her confessors. Frankly, I was a little surprised she hadn’t chosen me.

  The two of them looked uncomfortable. They always got defensive if someone tried to pin them down on their sources.

  “We can neither confirm nor deny,” said Victoria, and they both laughed like crazy.

  “Anyway, I thought Annabel’s mother was at Morgan Stanley,” I said after a minute.

  They shook their heads. “JPMorgan.”

  “Although she did actually get headhunted by Morgan Stanley,” Marnie said.

  “Oh, okay,” I said, and a black wave of depression seemed to cover my eyes. Here it was a beautiful afternoon in spring and the sun was shining down on my firstborn child, who was going to start walking by herself any day now, and I was sitting here talking with these two fools about which firm employed another child’s mother, a woman I had never met. I could just see us segueing into how Annabel’s mother liked her coffee, and which kind of hanger she preferred in her closets: dry cleaner’s metal, wood, or those satin-covered ones that never fill out the shoulders. To turn the conversation back on ourselves, I said assertively, “So, what are you guys doing this summer?”

  We talked about their various plans—they were both Hamptons people and I drew them out about the different towns. Annabel had reached the fountain with Sally. I craned my neck, but not to make sure they were all right. She was so loving with her, talking to Sally, explaining things, never losing her patience—it was a pleasure to watch.

  “So you and Win going to Nantucket again this year?” Marnie asked me.

  “Yes, we are,” I said, perking up, pleased, in spite of myself, that the Kimballs had proven worthy of gossip in the park.

  “Where’s your house?” said Marnie.

  For just a second I hesitated. It was tempting to let them believe the wrong thing, but it was just too pathetic, so I said as cheerfully and dismissively as I could, as if I really didn’t care, “Oh, it’s not our house.”

  “Oh, you’re just renting?” said Victoria, and when I said yes, there went the stiletto again, pumping like mad.

  “Uh-huh,” said Marnie. She sat forward and brushed a star magnolia petal off of her jeans. “That’s fine. That’s fine, obviously.”

  THAT NIGHT WHEN Win got home from work, despite Sally’s having gone straight to sleep after Pat the Bunny, and the Sancerre having been open three-quarters of an hour, I was itching for a fight. I started musing aloud over supper about going back to work—never a good sign. (Before Sally I had worked in fund-raising for a program that brought theater into the public schools.) This was a nonargument, as Win would have been all for it, but the truth of course was that I had turned out to be one of those overinvolved first-time mothers who have to have everything so perfect for Baby that any delegation is impossible, so a job was no more under serious consideration than a second child—I could barely cope with the exigencies of one. Nonetheless, I liked to suggest that the biggest obstacle to my returning to work was not my own maternal anxiety but the chaotic nature of our life in New York, due in part to the long hours of Win’s job, which, because it was by far the more lucrative, had taken precedence first in the short term and now clearly in the long over mine. During supper I got myself into a corner and was too proud to back down, so instead of being able to watch some cozy television afterward, I had to keep up the performance. I went haughtily into our bedroom and tried to read. But I had trouble concentrating and it came to me that I was spitting mad about the exchange in the park. It was the “just.” “Oh, you’re just renting?” was ever so different from being asked “Oh, you’re renting?” And then that bizarre reassurance from Marnie that it was “fine”? I slammed my book shut with the not very useful conclusion that Marnoria could go fuck themselves.

  THE NEXT DAY I kept Sally inside practicing baby sign language and the day after that, because it was so beautiful that staying in the apartment felt antisocial, I did bring her out, but a little later than usual. I took a real estate flyer with me, and I wore a straw hat and sunglasses, and I didn’t sit on the benches but pushed the stroller all the way down to the southwestern corner of the park, and camped out on a patch of grass in the shade of the plane tree. When I sensed someone approaching me I turned pointedly away from the footsteps, thinking it was Marnie or Victoria, and I held out Sally’s sippy cup to her, saying, “Here’s your water, Sally. Here’s your wa-wa!”

  “Excuse me,” said a small, polite voice with little expectation in it, and I turned with a rush of shame because it was Annabel. Embarrassed, I made a big effort with her, asking her to sit down on the grass with us and drawing her out about school and her family in a way I fancied both benign and disinterested. Of course I was trying very hard to avoid mentioning Annabel’s mother at all, and I wasn’t doing too badly when finally, holding Sally on her lap and playing with her hair, Annabel volunteered, “My mom’s away again this week.”

  “Is she?” I said.

  “She has to go to Chicago a lot.”

  “I’m sure you miss her.” I turned away to dig in my bag for a wipe. I was appalled at having come face-to-face with the sordid fact of her mother’s affair and the even further sordidness of my knowing this fact.

  Thank God Marva strolled over to join us then. She neve
r let Annabel play by herself too long, unlike some of the nannies you’d see, who practically had to be pried off the nanny bench and dragged over to their screaming charges when one of them fell or hit someone or had a temper tantrum over a shiny new all-terrain toddler vehicle having to be returned to its rightful owner.

  “I’m going to show Sally the crocuses,” Annabel announced, “if that’s all right. Come, Sally. Come Sally, come Sally, come little girl,” she said, coaxing her along. Once in a while when she spoke to Sally, Annabel had a Caribbean lilt in her voice, and hearing it, Marva and I looked at each other and laughed.

  “Well, that feel good,” said Marva, as I got up to talk to her. “I haven’t laugh all day.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “I’m sorry. Is everything all right?” I thought she might want to unburden herself—however obliquely—about the situation at home.

  “To tell you the truth, Liz, it not great.”

  I asked her if there was anything I could do to help.

  “It’s just”—she sighed—“I ask for a raise and my boss don’t want to raise me.”

  “Really?” I said. I was very surprised. “That’s terrible! You so deserve a raise.”

  Marva laughed. “Well … I think so!” She added, “I need to get two thousand saved.”

  “No, but seriously,” I said. “You’re such a good nanny. You’re head and shoulders above everyone else. You do everything for Annabel—everything. I should know—I mean I see you here all the time.”

  Marva smiled tolerantly, as I went on: “If you were my nanny, Marva, I’d give you a raise.”

  “Well, now, thank you,” said Marva. She seemed genuinely pleased by my hypothetical support, but it suddenly struck me as a foolish—nay, a total bullshit—thing to have said, the kind of crap we privileged white mothers were probably spewing all the time, because talk was so very cheap. I cast about for a way to show I was better than that and finally I said, “If it doesn’t work out with Annabel’s mother, you come work for me, okay? Seriously, Marva, Win and I have been thinking we could use some help and we’d love to hire you.”