Finally Susanna got there and I walked out to meet her.
“How was everything?” she said.
“Good,” I said. “We had a pretty hard time with the homework.”
“It’ll get better,” she said. “He needs to get used to you.”
“I know,” I said, “but I was thinking that this might not be the best fit. By the time he gets used to me I’ll have to leave.”
“He’ll be fine,” she said. She started getting red.
“He was really upset with me,” I said. “Maybe it would be better if you looked for someone else.”
“Excuse me,” a woman called from the playground, “is this your daughter?” She was holding the hand of a little girl who was sobbing.
“No!” Susanna snapped. “I don’t even have a daughter!”
She turned back to me. “Well, we’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I said. My heart was thumping. I went to my car and pulled out of the parking lot. I realized she hadn’t paid me, and if I wanted any money at all, I would have to go back. On the way home Silas called and I ended up going to his apartment. I didn’t want to because I was tired and in a bad mood, but he said he would take care of me, and he did. He made me a double-decker peanut butter and banana sandwich for dinner, and asked me what happened. I didn’t feel like talking about it, so I just told him that I hated babysitting and I was going to quit. When we were done eating he came around behind me and took out my hearing aids and started rubbing my head and my neck. He couldn’t have known that wearing the hearing aids made me tired, but it did. He rubbed my head and my neck and the day started to go away, and then he took off my shirt and unhooked my bra.
• • •
The next day on the way to Timmy’s school, I made a plan. As soon as I picked him up I was going to tell him the schedule for the day, and I was going to get him to agree to it. He clearly needed structure. I had also brought a camera, my two and a quarter camera, thinking at worst I could distract him with it, and at best I could take some pictures.
Timmy didn’t seem unhappy to see me, and I wondered if he had forgotten I was a jerk and if the day would be fine after all. We drove to speech therapy, and when we got there we had half an hour to kill. We went to a grocery store to get a snack, and Timmy somehow disappeared in the aisles. I tried to call his name in a calm voice, and finally I found him holding two half gallons of chocolate milk. I helped him put them back and I paid for our apples and waters and we left. Timmy wanted to eat in the graveyard across the street. I wanted to say no but I couldn’t think of a reason why not, other than that I didn’t want to. He saw me thinking and said, “My other babysitter takes me.”
“Fine,” I said.
We ate on a bench and then walked around and read the grave markers. It seemed like he really had been there before, because he had favorite graves.
“Look.” He brought me to three graves, one little and two big. “This one was a baby. And this is her mom and dad. The dad lived to be ninety-nine.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Wow.”
“You know what you could do?” I said. I took a piece of paper and a pencil out of his backpack and showed him how to rub over the letters to copy them to the paper.
“Isn’t that cool?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to do that.”
“Okay,” I said.
When we got to speech, the therapist offered for me to come in, and said that Timmy’s other babysitters did, so they could help him at home. I explained that I was only going to be babysitting for a short time. I sat and read magazines in the waiting room. Susanna texted me to see if I could stay later. She said a work thing came up, and she would be so, so grateful if I could stay until nine thirty or ten. Bedtime would be easy, Timmy was good at it. I couldn’t decide what to do. It would ruin my plan to go straight to Silas’s to get fucked, but I was bad at saying no. Finally I texted her that I could stay but I had made plans to meet my boyfriend at eight thirty, and could he come hang out at their apartment with me. It felt wrong to say boyfriend, but I couldn’t really call him my rebound, or my animal sex.
Susanna wrote back that it was fine, and thank you so much. When speech therapy was over I drove Timmy home, and on the way I reminded him that he was going to have to do homework first thing.
“I know,” he said. “And then can I watch one show and then can we go to the playground again?”
“Sure,” I said. I was starting to feel bad about the day before. Now I thought that Timmy wasn’t so much of an asshole as a really stressed-out little kid. I could have done a better job with him if I’d been more prepared. But Susanna should have prepared me. Maybe she didn’t know to. Or maybe she decided not to, because there was no way I would have taken the job if she had.
Timmy did his homework peacefully and I warmed up his dinner and let him eat it in front of the TV. He sat on the floor with his face inches from the screen, and I wondered if that was just a bad habit, or if he could hear better that way. When I was a kid I could barely hear the TV, and then I got hearing aids and could hear more of it, and then I found out about closed captions and wondered why no one had ever mentioned or offered them before. It was amazing to read every word that everyone said.
“Do you ever watch with closed captions?” I said. “The words on the bottom of the screen?”
“I just like to listen,” he said.
I realized he probably couldn’t read fast enough for the captions, anyway.
I got my camera and took a picture of Timmy in front of the TV. The bottom left quarter of the frame was Timmy’s face and the bottom right quarter was the glowing TV, with only a thin line in between.
“Hey!” He whipped around when the shutter went off. I was surprised he heard it. He studied me and the camera and said, “Oh. That’s a big camera.”
“All cameras used to be this big,” I said. “Do you want to look through it? It makes square pictures.”
But he had already turned back to the TV. When the show ended we drove to the playground, and I let him play until the sun started to go down. On the way home we stopped to get ice cream, and in exchange I made Timmy promise that he was going to get right in the bath and then right into bed.
He did get right in the bath. He took his hearing aids off while I ran it for him, and then he got in and played. I waited for him to use soap and shampoo, and when he didn’t I realized I was going to have to write him a note. I went and got some paper and a marker and wrote WASH YOUR HAIR AND WASH EVERYWHERE WITH SOAP.
“Wash, your, hair, and, wash, every, where, with, soap,” he read, but he didn’t start washing anything.
He took the sign from me and submerged it in the water. He held it up. I rolled my eyes at him and held out my finger to say, “Wait.” I went and got my camera and he held the dripping sign in front of his face. I took the picture from the other side of the bathroom, with the whole tub and bar and shower curtain, and Timmy’s small wet chest and the bleeding letters.
I took the sign from him and threw it in the garbage. He grinned. I waited thirty seconds and wrote him a new note: HURRY UP!
I thought he was going to get mad but he read the words out loud again and smiled a goofy smile.
I poured him shampoo but he did nothing with it, so I scooped it out of his hand and washed his hair.
“Mm,” he said, leaning into my fingertips.
I rubbed his head a little longer and then rinsed his hair. I put a bar of soap in his hands and made washing motions under my arms and over my crotch. He thought this was hilarious.
I underlined HURRY UP! twice, and finally he washed himself. I got him out and dried his hair well and brought him his hearing aids. He put them on.
“Where are your pajamas?” I said.
“In my closet,” he said.
“Can you get them?” I said.
He went into his room and came out five seconds later. “I can’t see in ther
e,” he said.
“Let’s turn on the light,” I said.
“It’s broken,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go in.” I used my phone to light the way. I tried not to step on anything as I made my way to the closet, but it was impossible. The floor was covered with dark heaps of toys, books, and clothes. So was the bed, and I wondered if he ever slept there. In the closet I found hanging shelves with exactly one T-shirt and one pair of underwear on them, so I took those things and made my way back out.
Timmy put on the clothes and got into his mom’s bed. “Can we read books?” he said.
“One quick book,” I said.
He picked one out and I lay down next to him and read it. When I was done he handed me his hearing aids and asked me to tuck him in. I tucked him in and he closed his eyes. I took a picture of him, tiny and human at the top of the frame, with his hearing aids on the table next to him, and the rest of the picture the smooth white sheet. I turned out the light.
“Leave the door open!” he said, so I did.
I cleaned up the bathroom and put the wet sign and the dry sign in a plastic bag and in my backpack. I didn’t want his mom to find them, like I shouldn’t have had to write him notes in the bathtub or something. Then I took a few more pictures. I found a flashlight on the shelf in the kitchen and shone it into Timmy’s bedroom and took a picture. Then I took a picture of the contents of the fridge, which was full of what I guessed were mostly very old leftovers in take-out containers. There was no fresh juice or milk or anything. Finally I took a picture of the windows in the living room with the fallen curtain rod, and then sat down on the couch. I doubted that Susanna would want me to use the pictures of the apartment, but I wondered if she would really be able to prove it was her house. She would probably let me use the pictures of Timmy, because parents loved it when I took pictures of their kids. But the pictures of Timmy weren’t exactly portraits, and I wanted them in conjunction with the pictures of the apartment. I wondered if I could get a picture of Susanna, looking like she did when I first met her, maybe yelling to Timmy from the porch, or maybe lying next to him on top of the white sheet, sleeping. If I kept babysitting and I got them to like me, I could shoot a whole essay.
Silas got there and I let him in. He put his bike in the hallway and I gave him a tour. I used the flashlight to show him Timmy’s room.
“Whoa,” said Silas. “Is the kid in there somewhere?”
“Oh my god,” I said. “No.” I showed him Timmy in his mom’s bedroom. He was fast asleep.
“He doesn’t look so bad,” he said.
“He’s not,” I said.
“Can he hear us?” he said.
“Nope,” I said. “We could scream at the top of our lungs and he wouldn’t hear us.”
“Cool,” he said. “Is there any food?”
I showed him the inside of the fridge and he said, “That’s disgusting.”
We went back to the living room and sat on the couch. Silas started kissing my neck and I made him stop and turned on the TV. In all my years of babysitting I had never had a boy over to make out with after the kids were asleep, and now that I had the perfect candidate I didn’t even want to. I just wanted to go home.
We watched TV until we heard a car pull in. I gathered up my stuff and went to meet Susanna at the door.
“Hi,” she said. “How was it today?”
“Much better,” I said.
“Oh good,” she said.
She checked on Timmy and then came and stood in the doorway to the living room.
“This is Silas,” I said.
They said hi.
Susanna counted out the money for the two days and paid me. “It’s a few dollars short but I’ll pay you the rest next week.”
“Okay,” I said.
“So we’ll see you then?”
“Yup,” I said. “Unless you do find someone else.”
“Why would I find someone else?”
“Well, I mean, today was much better, but it still seems like it would be better to find someone that he can actually get used to.”
“I can’t find someone else by next week.”
“Okay, I understand.”
“You clearly don’t want to come back.”
“I can come back, it’s just like I said, it seems like it’s not a good fit.”
“I hired you for this job. You agreed to this job.”
“Okay. I just feel bad that I’m going to have to leave soon. And this isn’t my normal rate.”
“You agreed to this rate.”
“I just thought you were going to keep looking for someone else.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I thought you needed to find someone else for the fall anyway.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t. You know what, don’t come back.”
“I can if you don’t find anyone else.”
“No, now you lied to me.”
“What? I didn’t lie about anything.”
“Forget it, I’ll find someone else.”
I glanced over my shoulder to Silas, who was sitting and staring at the floor. I turned around and got my bag and said, “Come on.”
We walked toward the front door.
“I’m sorry, I think we had a misunderstanding,” I said.
“Please leave,” said Susanna.
Silas grabbed his bike and we left.
I got in the car and closed the door. Silas took off his front wheel, put his bike in the trunk, and got in the passenger seat. I backed out of the driveway.
“Oh shit, I think I forgot my phone,” he said.
My chest tightened. I took my foot off the gas and looked at him.
“You’re going back alone,” I said.
“Ha, just kidding.” He flashed me his phone.
“Oh my god.” I punched him in the arm.
He laughed again.
“Oh my god,” I said again. “I can’t even believe what happened in there.”
“Yeah,” said Silas.
“What did happen? Did I just get fired?”
“Yeah, you definitely got fired.”
“I didn’t lie to her. What would I have even lied to her about?”
“I don’t know,” said Silas.
“Are you serious? You think I lied to her?”
“No,” he said. “Maybe she was just mad that you didn’t like her kid.”
“I didn’t not like her kid,” I said. “I just thought that this babysitting job made no sense for anybody. Now I can’t even use those pictures. She’s not going to sign a release.”
“What pictures?”
“I took pictures of the kid and the apartment and stuff. I got this amazing shot of him in the bathtub.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”
“No, you can’t see anything.”
“Oh well,” said Silas.
“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Then I remembered about the money and got it out of my bag. “Count this.”
Silas flipped through the bills. “One thirty.”
“One thirty?” There was no way that was right. I did the math in my head—it was thirteen and a half hours, so it should have been like a hundred and sixty dollars. “Fuck,” I said. “She owes me thirty bucks.”
“Oh man,” said Silas. “We should get a case of eggs and go back there.”
I didn’t know if he was joking, or if he would actually do something like that.
“Yeah, that would solve all my problems,” I said.
We drove in silence until we got close to his apartment.
“Want to get food?” he said.
“I’m not really hungry,” I said.
He ordered Chinese, and when it came I ate all of the scallion pancakes. I sort of wanted Silas to take care of me like he had the night before, but I suspected that my body language was instructing him to steer clear. I wondered what I was going to tell my
dad’s girlfriend. She probably wasn’t going to get me any more babysitting jobs, but I was fine with that. I didn’t want her to think it was all my fault, but I wasn’t sure whose fault it was. Silas and I watched TV and the more I thought about Timmy and Susanna, the worse I felt. I thought maybe I should apologize either way, even if it was Susanna’s fault.
“You bummed about those pictures?” said Silas.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “And I feel bad about the kid.”
“Well,” said Silas. “Not all deaf people can be friends.”
We kept watching the TV. I couldn’t decide whether Silas was actually kind of wise, or a total fucking idiot.
“Okay what about this?” he said a little while later. “My friend’s landlord was a total dick and totally dicked him over, so before my friend moved out he superglued all the lightbulbs into the sockets.”
“What?”
“Get it? You can get the job back and then you can do that. They’ll never know it was you. They won’t even know anything happened until the lights start going out, probably in like months, maybe years, and their apartment will be fucked. That’s the definition of a perfect crime.”
I thought through what that would mean, and imagined Susanna in the dark, trying to change the light, the bulb bursting in her hand.
I got up and went into the bathroom and locked the door. I took a shower and put my underwear and tank top back on and got into bed. When Silas got in, I pretended I was asleep. It was the first night we weren’t going to have sex, and I didn’t think it would be the last. I let him spoon me, but when I felt his breathing slow and his body get heavy, I climbed over him to the far side of the bed and tried to fall asleep there. I couldn’t wait to leave the summer behind.
BARBARA THE SLUT
They called me Barbara the Slut. It started in eleventh grade, and they called me other names, too—ho, whore, skank, Barbara Lewinsky, sticky-fingers Murphy—but mostly they called me slut.
Maybe I wasn’t hard to get, but I did have standards. They were: good teeth and good skin and big hands. And I needed to know that boys were honest, which most of them were. Even the boys who thought they were tricking me were honest in bed. They were honest when they touched me, more honest when I made them come, and the most honest when they made me come.
Barbara the Slut and Other People Page 16
