Spoiled

by Caitlin Macy

  The thought that now, of course, it would have been different, mollifies Stacey a little. She would have at least been able to respond. (As it was, she never mentioned or acknowledged in any way Anita’s vicarious request.) She might now have made some little introduction that, while it would surely have come to nothing, would have satisfied her mother and Margery both. But then? When she was a complete outsider? How could she possibly have been expected to help?

  Remembering the innocence, as it were, of her guilt, Stacey shakes her head in anger. Yet when she opens her mouth to speak, her voice comes out hoarse with supplication, as if, in the five seconds before Renata really gets into her eulogy, she might eke out an absolution.

  “Helena?” she says.

  IT WAS HAPPENING again. They were in Bob’s Market buying ice cream, Stacey had taken the box out of the freezer and was herding Helena up the aisle to pay when the little girl planted her feet and yelled, “Vagina!”

  “Helena!” Stacey cried, the pretense of shock for the benefit of the boy minding the cash register.

  “PEE-nis! Vagina! Penis!” At the feral flash of the girl’s baby teeth Stacey’s nails found her palms. She’d had no idea children could have this effect on you, before she started the job. That mere restraint from physical violence would be a quotidian victory. She dropped to her knees now in front of the girl, the better to beg her to behave.

  “Penis! Vagina! Penis! Vagina!”

  “Helena,” she pleaded, then stopped herself and went on, more sternly: “Helena, I thought Bad Ghost wasn’t going to come out in public? ’Member? I thought he was going to stay in your bedroom—”

  “I want to play it,” Helena said coldly.

  “Okay! Okay! We can play it when we get home, but—” When Stacey hesitated, some part of her resisting total capitulation, Helena seized a chocolate bar off the candy shelf. “I’ll rip this!” she threatened.

  “Helena, please don’t! Please put it back!”

  Too late—she’d torn the wrapper right off. (And what incentive could there have been, Stacey thought disinterestedly, not to do it?)

  “I’ll play it!” Stacey cried. “I’ll play it, okay?” She was close to tears. “Let me just pay—let’s get out of here, okay?”

  “All day!” Helena demanded. “You have to play it all day!”

  “I’ll play it all day—that’s no problem, Helena,” Stacey said, getting to her feet. The fatuous tone she resorted to disgusted her. She sounded like a car salesman, as if her next promise might be to throw in AC.

  She and the boy at the cash register avoided each other’s eyes as she withdrew Margery’s money from her jeans pocket and handed it to him. She seized the plastic bag and hustled Helena out of the store.

  Outside, they were laying the new bit of road in front of the post office. The men in hard hats were standing by as the heavy roller smoothed the new tar, the smell of it heavy and pungent in the airless July day. It was a day for swimming in the pond, or sitting in the cool of the house with a book, or even condescending to help her mother by folding a load or two of laundry—things, Stacey could hardly bear to think about, she had been doing just two weeks ago. At the crosswalk in front of the post office she seized Helena’s hand. “Don’t forget to look both ways!”

  “I know that!” Helena shouted, yanking her hand away.

  Whenever Stacey used one of the admonitions that she’d picked up babysitting for other children in the last year and a half, Helena seemed to sense the tentativeness that entered her voice and to become incensed by it. At night Stacey would practice saying things in front of the bathroom mirror. “Excuse me—the bowl goes in the dishwasher, not on the floor, Helena. You know that!” But when she saw the child the next morning, she could feel herself avoiding the girl’s eyes and hear the quaver in her voice.

  “Why don’t you just make her behave?” Bev had asked her when Stacey hinted at the problem without, of course, admitting how bad it was. “You’re right,” Stacey said, picturing her friend, who shouted at the children she babysat for, shouted and wheedled and bribed with M&Ms and Rolos, bullying them into leaving her alone to make calls to friends—Stacey, or Rich, a guy she liked. The calls were an indulgence Bev wasn’t in the least embarrassed about, but which she considered her right as part of the job. It was as if, early on, someone had told Beverly she was in charge and that all the children would accept her authority. But Stacey had somehow missed getting her orders and so was left alternatively dithering, pale with hatred, remorseful, and apologetic—though in general, of the two of them, she got the easy families: the Larsen girls, Andrea and Alison, and Mrs. Thibeaud, whose baby, Madeleine, was always asleep when she came, while Bev ended up with the boisterous, pig-pile-on-the-babysitter types: the Kings, and Sampsons, and Nadia Chamberlain, Dulwich’s autistic girl, who had been known to go nuts and start smearing her shit on the walls.

  “That’s what I should do,” she’d said to Beverly on the phone, as if this were just the enlightening advice she’d lacked. “I’ve just got to make her behave.”

  TWO WEEKS EARLIER Beverly had gotten the request. Mrs. Purnick had heard from Mrs. Delacroix in the post office that Margery McIntyre Flood was looking for a babysitter for the month of July.

  “Oh yeah?” Stacey had said when Bev told her, as if she was really too distracted to digest the information. She was sitting dangling her feet in the Purnicks’ backyard pool; Beverly had just surfaced in the shallow end after swimming her one languorous lap. “Sounds like a good job,” Stacey added in the same bored tone. This past fall, she and Bev had started a babysitting “service.” All it really amounted to was a referral agreement, to keep the business their way, but in that limited sense it was successful.

  Bev got out of the pool and stood dripping, her long, freckly knees hyperextended at Stacey’s eye level. “Yeah, too bad I can’t do it,” she said. She tapped the side of her head in an exaggerated fashion to get the water out of her ear.

  “You can’t do it?” said Stacey, and she had to cough because her voice cracked. Now Bev was doing the other ear. Stacey scowled: It was a gesture she considered pretentious because she knew Bev did it in imitation of her older sister, Eileen.

  “Uh-uh—duh. We’re going to the Cape in two weeks.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Stacey said, turning as Bev took a gingerly seat on one of the plastic chaises longues that faced the long side of the pool. She must have laid on the gravitas a bit too thickly because Bev shielded her eyes from the sun and said, “Jesus, you sound like someone died! What’s your problem?”

  “No—no, I was just thinking: It’s too bad, that’s all.” Stacey got up and reclined, still in her shorts and T-shirt, in the chair next to Beverly’s. “Since you’re, like, a true fan of hers I mean. You’re the one who’s read all of her books.”

  “That is true.” Bev half grinned, half grimaced at Stacey. “I’d be scared, Stace! She’s, like, famous.”

  Stacey laughed aloud, because she didn’t know what to say. The idiocy of people amazed her. Or not the idiocy but the shortsightedness—the guilelessness; the fact that they didn’t lead their lives looking for an opening. She said she thought she could probably take the job herself, but she’d have to look at her schedule and see.

  At supper, when Stacey let slip to her parents the possibility of working for Margery McIntyre Flood, Anita stopped chewing what was in her mouth and looked at her. “Really, Stace?”

  “It’s not a big deal. Don’t act like it’s a big deal.”

  Beside her, Stacey’s father, Chris, stuck his hand out and snatched an uneaten piece of corn bread off of her plate, but when Stacey snapped her head around, he froze and made a poker face as if he hadn’t moved, and Stacey laughed.

  “I could drive you over,” Anita said, watching Stacey. “Why don’t I drive you over, Stace? For the interview, or whatever.”

  “There never was a man, was there?” Chris said to Anita, who ignored him. “As I recall, She alr
eady had the kid when she showed up in town, didn’t she?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Stacey. “I can walk.”

  “Is Margery Flood famous?” Stacey’s brother, Brian, asked, his mouth full of corn bread.

  “Why would you drive me somewhere that’s under a ten-minute walk?” Stacey asked impatiently when Anita didn’t say anything. “That’s completely stupid. It’s totally idiotic.”

  There was a long silence in which Stacey and her dad played another round of snatch-the-corn-bread. “Mom? Did you hear my question?”

  Getting up to clear, Anita said, in what was little more than a whisper, “I don’t know, Stace. You tell me.”

  And this was the voice Stacey could not—simply would not—tolerate. “But by the time the air-conditioning got going,” she said furiously, “we’d already be there!”

  “How much is she going to pay you?” piped up Stacey’s dad.

  “She’d do it for free,” Anita interrupted, pausing with the plates, scorn finally entering her voice. “Wouldn’t you, Stace? I mean, she could really help you.”

  “Ah, no, I would not babysit for free, Mother,” Stacey said, and she caught her father’s twinkling blue eyes with derision. “I’m not that desperate.”

  THE OTHER PEOPLE Stacey babysat for went out when she got there—often as quickly as they could, handbags on counters seized as soon as she assured the mother she remembered where the emergency list was; that the leftover lasagna would be fine for supper. She came in the evening and they went to dinner or the movies in Watford, or she came in the afternoon, and the mother left to go food shopping or to an exercise class—Mrs. Thibeaud was always going to a modern dance class at the Unitarian Church. It seemed to pay off, for she was young and sexy. Stacey admired her and wanted to be like her, although Stacey wouldn’t have used the word sexy then—happy, she probably would have called Mrs. Thibeaud.

  Working for Margery would be different, Stacey was told, when they spoke on the phone (Stacey a little disappointed that the woman doesn’t insist on meeting her in person), because Margery would be in the house writing. “I’m afraid I’m still making changes to the page proofs of Where Were You on Sunday? when I’m supposed to have finished outlining and writing five chapters of its sequel!” Margery tells her breathlessly. “Needless to say, my editor is not particularly sanguine about my meeting the Labor Day deadline!”

  Stacey, who was prepared for a test of some kind—a sussing out of her own intelligence, and interests perhaps—instead finds herself trying not to interrupt with irrelevancies, to interject a few ingratiating “Oh, wows” and “Sure, no problems” into Margery’s blast. At the end of the call she hangs up frustrated and flops down on the sofa, annoyed with herself—she had gotten the job after all. That is the important thing, isn’t it?

  MARGERY MCINTYRE FLOOD was an author—again, this is how Stacey would have put it at the time, the more urbane writer eluding her for several more years. She wrote novels about troubled teenagers, aimed at a section of the population that, Stacey had picked up—perhaps from the bookstore in the Watford mall—was referred to as “Young Adults.” Although Stacey had long known this and, like most people in Dulwich, could recognize Margery on the street (wide bottom, frizzy perm, drab-colored drapery-type clothes), until she started the job, Stacey had not read any of Margery’s books. Beverly, however, had read all of them, and she told Stacey how good they were—amazing, Bev said. “They’re so amazing.” And she always made Stacey promise to read whichever one she’d most recently finished, which Stacey would readily do. But then she would leave the book unopened on her bedside table, annoyed by its sensational cover—the angry mug of the teen in distress. And with another friend of hers—Becky Greer, whom Stacey knew from her advanced math class—she wrote ongoing spoofs of Margery McIntyre Flood–type YA novels: “Jessica turned on her heel and left,” she would write on a sheet of paper and pass to Becky as they reviewed quadratic equations for the millionth time. “A gamut of emotions crossed her face,” Becky would write, passing the paper back. “Her overweight, alcoholic stepmother shot her a withering glance.” And so on.

  Over the past winter, one of Margery’s books had been made into an After School Special, which Stacey and Bev had watched one afternoon on television, Bev excitedly, Stacey skeptically, but ultimately drawn in.

  After the show aired, Margery had come and spoken at an assembly at Addison, the combined middle school/junior high where Stacey and Bev were in their last year. With very little prompting from Bev (who herself lagged back, unwilling to make an overture) Stacey introduced herself to Margery afterward and, in the course of explaining that she wanted to be an author too, lied and said she’d really enjoyed reading You Can’t Do Anything Right, when of course she had only watched it on television.

  THE LIE PAINED Stacey now, starting the job, for she realized what an obvious one it was, and she wished that she had chosen a more obscure title—Mom’s Coffee Smells Like Gin, for instance, or the birth-control one—You Would if You Loved Me.

  (Pressing the small of her back into the hard auditorium chair so as to avoid looking at Helena, Stacey recalls with wonder the rude confidence with which she glided through the first few days of the job. It reminds her, now that she thinks about it, of the two disastrous post-college relationships she’s had, one in New York and one in LA. Those, too, had seemed to start off with a grace period: those initial couple of dates on which she had blithely, ignorantly been herself—harshly critical, impatient, funny—before the transformation into the slavish, would-be-long-term girlfriend she became so automatically it seemed the happy version of herself must have been the act. In any case, it never lasted long.)

  Nearly a week had passed by before Stacey noticed the books. She was coming back from the bathroom, stalling a little no doubt, having left Helena in the living room playing tea party, when she happened to catch sight of Margery’s own copies of her novels. There they all were all there, sitting on the hallway book-shelves, two or three rows of them, hardcover and paperback editions beside what were evidently their foreign translations, some in languages Stacey didn’t recognize. The shelves were a revelation to Stacey: It hadn’t occurred to her that authors would have copies of their own books. Here, then, was the segue she’d been looking for, the perfect jumping-off point for a discussion with Margery about writing, about her own ambitions. She had eased You Can’t Do Anything Right off the shelf and was deep into the third or fourth page when she finally registered that a smashing sound had come from the living room. It was as if she had heard it and not heard it, as if she had heard it and been so paralyzed by the idea of it that she just couldn’t react. “It’s pretty cool,” she called nervously into the room, “that your mother wrote these, isn’t it?” Then, fear in her heart, she raced down the hall.

  As usual today the furniture had been rearranged to make a fort—armchair dragged into place, piano bench yanked out and overturned. Except for Margery’s office upstairs, no room in the little eyebrow colonial was off-limits; no object forbidden to touch. On the first afternoon when Stacey had said, “Ooh, maybe we’d better not play with these,” indicating the collector’s tea cups in the corner whatnot, Helena had given her an obtuse look and replied, “Why?”