by Kim Korson
“You can’t swim,” I said.
Paulette balled up her towel and threw it onto the dock. She dug into the sand to steady herself. “Not to worry, girlies. I’m just gonna stay right here in the shallow end.”
I knew Paulette couldn’t swim, didn’t even bring a bathing suit with her on weekends, but she was a grown-up, so if she said she was allowed to stand in the shallow end, we believed her. Sam and I didn’t want to be alone on the grass so we moved our operation one more time back to the dock. Paulette watched her sister treading water by the far rope—the one for intermediate and expert swimmers, if this had been a swim test at camp.
“She’s making!” Sam said. “She’s making!”
We hugged, we squealed, then ripped off the diaper to see if there was a poo. As we checked for evidence, another voice snapped the air.
“I’m swimming!” said Paulette. “Look at me! I’m swimming!”
The babysitter who was not fit for sea, the one who promised to stay ankle-deep, was now loose in the open water.
“I’m swimming!” Paulette kept insisting, but it no longer sounded like an achievement. Her voice was gurgly. Her head popped out of the water like a Whac-A-Mole at the fair. Carmen flutter-kicked herself over at high speed, trying to hold on to her sister while shouting, “Yes! Yes, you are!” But Carmen didn’t sound proud or happy about it. Both their heads were dipping, bodies tugged under as if the Loch Ness Monster had them in its clutches. I covered Baby Alive’s eyes so she didn’t see the wrestling or the splashing. Or when Carmen came up alone.
There was one unruffled second, a tick of calm.
Then Carmen propelled herself out of the lake. Instead of using the dock to get out of the water, like you were supposed to, she hopped up and over the small rock wall that lined the length of the Narveys’ property. Her mouth was open but no sound came out and Samantha moved closer to me, linking her fingers into the belt loop of my shorts. I squeezed the baby. Carmen ran in small circles, like Gucci chasing his tail, still not making a sound until she banged into the edge of the picnic table, flicking some sort of internal switch that caused strange animal howls to spew from the deepest part of her guts, weird cries that bounced around our ears and across the lake all the way to the neighbors’ houses, the ones we always had to be quiet for.
Halfway up the steep stairs to the house, Carmen changed her mind, darting back toward the lake, along the dock where Samantha and I stood. Not noticing we were still there, she plunged back into the water, only to hoist herself right back out and up the stairs again to the house, leaving us alone by the water that had just swallowed up the babysitter. In her frenzy, Carmen kicked Baby Alive’s spoon—the Special Spoon—into the lake and the Bitey Banana packet stuck to her ankle. This is when our parents returned, lazy with wine and hamburgers and laden with hockey gear. This is how they found us.
Marv Narvey and my father jumped into the lake with their jeans on, looking for the body. Samantha, scooped up by Marilyn, was now a rumpled heap on her mom’s lap, facing away from the action, being rocked and shushed and poor-baby-ed. The boys stood behind me, watching our fathers attempt superhero status, and I heard Neil say “Cool,” then Ace’s hockey glove thwacking Neil’s stomach, which made Neil say “Whaaat?” I stood alone, gripping the baby, tingly with the thought that a body might pop out of the lake at any moment. I wondered where my mother was.
When our dads came up with nothing, no one spoke. They just holed Sam and me up in the house for the next few hours. We were supposed to be resting in her room but we escaped into her parents’, pressing our faces against the wall of triangular windows at the tip-top of the A. There was a flashing blue light and a policeman asking questions of Carmen, who was wrapped in the sheet and shaking her head. I hoped the Mounties would come on horses wearing their tall hats, but it was just a regular old police cruiser like on The Rockford Files. I wondered if Marilyn Narvey knew that Paulette was dead in her very best swimsuit. It was orange.
“What do you think she looks like now?” I said, but Sam didn’t answer, hadn’t made a peep since the incident. Samantha liked to keep herself in a jar with the cap twisted on tight, but I handled my business differently. I wanted to spill my contents all over the floor to see what was in there, but we were at Samantha’s house, so it was Samantha’s rules. I knew no one would talk about it at my house either. Where was Paulette and what did she look like? All I could come up with was the time my nana made oatmeal cookies and had to soak the raisins in a cup of water for thirty minutes but left them in for two hours. I imagined bulgy, puckered raisins wearing orange bathing suits, floating along the water’s edge.
Neil heard me talking, so he opened the door and whipped backgammon pieces at us, then tattled that we were out of Sam’s room, so I had to go home and ended up missing the part where our neighbor landed his seaplane on the water to drag Paulette out. We never saw Carmen again. When they shipped Paulette’s body back to Trinidad, Carmen sat in first class.
For the next few days, as expected, no one was talking. But I had questions. Why go swimming if you didn’t know how? What actually was a “death wish,” because no matter how many times Neil offered that up, it never made sense. And would someone just please tell me if they saw the Special Spoon, because I didn’t know if the doll even worked without it. What would happen to the baby now that Sam couldn’t even look it in the eye? Probably get all crusty and the maggots would come. I’d bet anything that Samantha would just get a new one. She’d probably get a truckful of new stuff. As soon as word got out that her babysitter drowned she’d be special, branded as the one whose babysitter (“who really was part of the family”) died.
There was a reserve of attention and sympathy and tokens for victims like Samantha Narvey. There were select head tilts and looks of sorrow, the likes of which I’d never see. Samantha was about to be marked. If your goldfish dies or your cat has leukemia, the general public doesn’t really care. If your great-grandmother flatlines in a chair, people might say that she had a long, happy life (even if she didn’t), and then they’d carry on with their shopping. But when the real stuff happened, you hit the pity lottery. Conversely, if your babysitter’s sister drowns, your mom makes you stay in your room a lot, and if by accident you try out shouting the word fuck when sequestered in there, you don’t get any kind of pass, you just get your mouth washed out with a fresh bar of Irish Spring.
The Narveys left town, went to recuperate at their grandparents’ place in Palm Beach. I had nothing to do so I wandered the dirt road a lot, waiting for someone to be outside to offer up a head tilt or sad eyes or even a sorrowful tsk. I hung around the Melnicks’ driveway for a spell, hoping the grandmother might come out. She liked to walk the road with a giant stick and had crazy green eyes, intricate as marbles. Plus, she always had Kraft Caramels in her pocket.
Her grandson had killed himself, just like his mother before him, and so Mrs. Melnick knew a thing or two about hard times. It hit me that out of the ten houses on the road, tragedy had struck two of them, leaving me wondering if the street was cursed. But as I spent the next few weeks alone, waiting for someone to notice me, I knew full well who was probably cursed.
Some days, I’d end up at the Narveys’ front steps, making a snorkel mask of my hands and peering into their vestibule even though I knew they were poolside drinking Anita Bryant’s orange juice and getting presents, probably about to go to Disney World. But even though I knew Marilyn wasn’t in her walk-in closet selecting today’s caftan and Neil wasn’t trying to fry a toad with his magnifying glass and Samantha Narvey wasn’t at the table waiting for me to play Fuzzy Pumper Barber Shop any more than Paulette was vacuuming, causing Gucci to hide under the couch, I looked in a handful of times anyway, because you never knew. Plus, maybe there were clues or at least a pair of Paulette’s shoes. Something.
My father continued to take Ace to hockey camp, while my mother cranked up the
window unit and watched the Today show, then The $10,000 Pyramid, and then The Young and the Restless. One night when I was supposed to be sleeping I heard her tell my father that Marv Narvey was making the kids swim every day so they wouldn’t be scared of water for the rest of their lives. Ace was already scared of the water, just born that way. Not to mention that the following year he’d almost drown at summer camp during free swim and then, after that, Jaws would hit theaters, leaving my brother landlocked for the rest of his life.
I was scared of all kinds of things: my bedroom spontaneously going up in flames, pink strep throat medicine, riding my bike. I feared seeing people eating dinner alone, Sweetums from the Muppets, saying “I love you,” and birds. I was terrified of birds.
For a year after the babysitter sank, Samantha and I added a new game to our repertoire. We’d play it every time I was dropped off, and it would turn out to be my all-time favorite game. It was called Paulette. Sam and I would inevitably fight every time to see who’d get to be the star player, but in the end we decided we could each get a turn. On the bright side, if you weren’t the dead babysitter, you’d get a chance to be everyone else.
Eventually, we’d mess with the history, adding new characters that never even showed up that day, like Mrs. Melnick. Sometimes, I’d add accents. It all depended on my mood. If we’re being honest, my drowning was far superior to Samantha Narvey’s. I took my time going under and my gurgles were just that much more believable. If Sam was Paulette first, the game ended faster, leaving me ample time to take the stage and really do the drowning justice. Sometimes, just when you thought I was dead, I’d pop back up.
Sam’s bed would be the dock and we’d leap onto the grass green shag, yelling out the requisite I’m swimming! I’m swimming! I’d perfected the flailing arms overhead, doing it just like Kermit the Frog cheering. I could milk that scene for an hour. I wanted to be Rich Little when I grew up and this was a great way to hone my craft. Samantha played along, but she didn’t do the voices like I did. Her heart wasn’t in it.
Whenever we’d play, I’d make sure to include a mention of the Special Spoon in some creative way. Sam would raise her tiny blond eyebrows, but I knew deep down she was as mad about that spoon as I was, no matter what her eyebrows said. She swore her mother threw away Baby Alive after the drowning, but I wasn’t convinced. I would bet anything that she was stashed in a dresser somewhere, brown crusty death water sloshing around in her belly every time someone opened a drawer. I should have taken her home that day. Popped her head off and hung her outside to dry properly. I would have loved her even if she were filled with maggots. Sam never said another word about our baby and I never got over it, even when she got the fully poseable Bionic Woman Doll with Special Purse and the Bionic Beauty and Repair Station with Scenic Backdrop.
Months after Paulette died, I’d still see her arms thrashing around in my head before I fell asleep. I wanted to ask Ace if he saw anything in his mind at night, or if he thought Paulette swallowed half the lake water and rounded out like a giant balloon, but then I remembered lying in bed the night it happened, and how when I asked him if he saw the body pulled out by the seaplane, instead of answering me, he launched pellets from Neil’s target practice rifle at my head, assuring me that if they made contact, my bed would blow up instantly, and also did I hear that crunching outside, because it sounded an awful lot to him like Bigfoot loping around our window.
The Narveys got themselves a new babysitter from an agency. Elicia was also from Trinidad and had asthma so bad they had to keep an oxygen tank near Sam’s Barbie Dreamhouse in the basement, just in case there was an incident while vacuuming. She had a small color set in her room, and on Sunday mornings she’d let us watch church with her on TV. When Neil acted up, she’d pinch his neck skin with a maneuver she called the Clinch. I wondered if she swam.
The following year we got a sitter of our own to live full-time in the basement of our modest three-bedroom Spanish Tudor. Her name was Hortense. She was French-Canadian and wore this complicated hairdo, the likes of which I’d only see a few years later on Mrs. Garrett in The Facts of Life. Hortense was not winning any popularity contests with me, not only because she spoke in clipped bossy tones and didn’t like me, but also because she made me drink glasses of milk no matter how many times I tried to convince her it was against my religion.
Hortense didn’t believe in television and wore a dental-hygienist–blue uniform even though no one asked her to. Eight months into her stay, when the phone rang at three a.m., I bet my mother fumbled for her glasses just before she picked up the receiver to hear the news that Hortense’s sister had been murdered, somewhere near St. Joseph’s Oratory, a landmark Montrealers called the Shrine. There were no screams or seaplanes or first-class tickets to the Caribbean. Just a starched uniform left on the bed, like a police chalk outline of a housekeeper, and a call to the agency for a new sitter.
Latchkey
• • • • • •
It was happening all over the neighborhood. Street by street, mothers appeared in kitchens wearing slimming slacks, announcing their news over the crunch and smack of Melba toast and cottage cheese. I like to imagine that the mothers decided upon the changes at hand conspiratorially at an outdoor meeting that took place shortly after The Joker’s Wild. Weather permitting, they’d each show up wearing special garb, like zip-up jumpsuits or, even better, long black hooded robes. Sadly, we lived in a suburb heavily populated by Jews, not witches. There were no summits or secret convocations, but there was a leader. He spoke in dulcet tones and had a Muppety face. He called them to action and they got off the sofa. If I saw their captain today, I’d look him straight in the eye and say: “Fuck you, Phil Donahue.”
I was nine when it went down at my house. Up until then, I thought we were doing just fine with The Mike Douglas Show. The theme music was groovy, Mike was avuncular and sang to us daily, plus he didn’t boss his viewers around. But Phil Donahue was positioning himself as the latest craze and my mother liked to keep up with the times. Back when it was customary for women to stay home and keep house, you might find my mother perched on the chesterfield holding my brother as an infant, wearing a pencil skirt and a whipped-up lacquered beehive. As bras began to go up in flames, she made sure to have bell-bottom denims and long middle-parted hair the color of vanilla Jell-O instant pudding. And when Phil Donahue infiltrated our den, she remodeled her look once more. The hair shortened and pantsuits began filling the closet.
Women fought for equal rights and economic justice, and my mother joined NOW to get a lapel pin. Feminism was spreading through every ‘ville, town, and hamlet and there was nothing we could do about it. Phil Donahue murmured into his sticklike mic and women all over North America heard him.
Well, my mother mostly heard him. It’s quite possible she stepped out for a handful of Bugles during part of his tutorial. But these were the fundamental tenets of feminism, as presented in my house:
1. Wear pants.
2. Do not let a man open the door for you (and if he does, make throaty sounds of outrage and disgust).
3. Veto the kitchen.
4. Have other people watch your children, or—better—have them watch themselves.
5. Barbie: You are not welcome here.
Now, tenets 1 and 2 were my mother’s own business. If she wanted to practically knock my father over en route to the door, or dress like a fellow, fine with me. I think it was fine with my father, too. Actually, it was a boon to my father. All this business about my mother’s slacks afforded my father undivided freedom to become the Cher of the household.
My father enjoyed a costume change more than any lady I knew, plus he had an outfit for every occasion. I wasn’t exactly sure what occasion called for constricting banana-yellow jeans with matching shirt separated by a brown leather Gucci belt, but he had one at the ready, should the need arise. His closet was lined with deluxe cowboy boots he claim
ed he had to wear—something about high arches, which was in line with those girls at camp who were forced to get nose jobs due to their pesky deviated septums. The ultimate accessory in his wardrobe was a full-length raccoon fur coat he insisted was “really in right now.” My father’s 1970s look fell somewhere between European porn director and Jewish buckaroo.
Veto the kitchen, tenet 3, worked in my favor. Here, women everywhere relinquished their grandmothers’ recipes and jilted the avocado green Amana Radaranges they would have once been pleased to win on Let’s Make a Deal. This was dynamite news for my mother and, frankly, for the rest of us, seeing as her two specialties were meatloaf with hard-boiled eggs squished inside, and liver.
When my mother vetoed the kitchen, we traded our plates for compartmentalized aluminum trays. Out went homemade gray meats, in came Swanson’s Salisbury steak (with the superstar apple cobbler, which was the best dessert they had). If my mother was too tired to heat something up, heaping bowls of Technicolor cereals were served. Suburban nutrition in the seventies was a free-for-all. Health nuts existed, sure, but they were usually to the tune of your great-uncle grinding his own peanut butter or your weirdo art teacher trying to share the squares of carob she brought to school in waxed paper baggies. Most of the homes I went to considered SpaghettiOs to be a respectable dinner as long as you’d had your Flintstones Chewables that morning.
Cooking was not the only thing my mother was tickled to give up; forsaking the supermarket was a golden side effect of feminism as well. Since fresh peas and carrot pieces were lumped together in the TV dinner tray, she didn’t see the need to suffer all those aisles and push a cart in the name of fresh produce. Somehow, she found a tiny little deli-style market that delivered. Every Monday, a call would be made. We’d walk by and shout “Fruity Pebbles” at her, then she’d nod and bark it to the grocery guy. “Uch, no,” she’d say while placing the order, “that’s two bags of Doritos and one box of powdered donuts.” And our groceries would show up a few hours later in a small cardboard box.
