The Woman in Our House

by Andrew Hart

  The car was a case in point. Josh had the ability to flaunt what he bought in a way that was assured—almost proud—but was also genuinely careless, as if the purchase of a particular high-end vehicle made perfect sense, but buying the next model up would be ridiculous. Other men at the firm tried to one-up each other on such things: cars, first and second homes, vacations, girlfriends, mistresses. Not Josh. When people tried to outshine him, only to get his slightly bewildered and absolutely genuine shrug, they immediately looked like they’d overstepped, exposing their shallowness.

  Not being an intensely self-analytical person—another part of his easy, comfortable version of manliness—Josh was only dimly aware of this. He saw it in the faces of his coworkers, but he never tried to engineer the effect. He didn’t have to. It seemed to him that his instincts, his tastes, were simply right. They didn’t need strategy. Very little at work did. The judgment calls, the client meetings, the stock assessments: 90 percent of it was just instinct. Yes, Josh had training and experience, but most of the time he did his job, and did it well, on instinct. As he had once remarked to Anna in a rare confessional moment, it barely felt like work at all.

  Anna was a different matter, not because he had to think about how to please her but because he really wanted to. Her opinion was—it had occurred to him with the kind of bemused shock he had once experienced when he woke up to his first earthquake in California—the only one in the world that actually mattered to him.

  Josh had never been very good with women. They liked him, or had in college, because he was decent-looking, athletic, and unselfconscious, so it had been a while before he realized that serious dating was the one area of his life he really didn’t understand at all. The stakes felt somehow thoroughly unimportant and impossibly high at the same time, and he never quite knew what he was supposed to offer. He wasn’t good at intimacy. Desire, yes. Play, yes. Friendship, yes. But he found the kind of secret closeness women seemed to want from him baffling. He didn’t know what it was they wanted or why. He tried, but not wanting anything similar from them, it felt like throwing darts in the dark: you had to turn the lights on to see if you had even hit the board.

  Then he had met Anna, and it had been bizarrely easy. He didn’t have to dig for the feelings other women had wanted him to articulate. He was still halting and tongue-tied compared to her, but at least he knew the emotions he couldn’t quite speak were there, and after a surprisingly short period, so did she. There were times he wished he had more to offer, knowing that a part of her would like more, but he also knew she wouldn’t want him to do it for her benefit, and she absolutely wouldn’t want him to fake it. He told her he loved her, maybe not daily, but he said it when the thought occurred to him, and she smiled, sometimes patting his hand indulgently, and said she knew.

  The only blot on their life that he didn’t know how to fix was what he privately thought of as her depression, though he never called it that aloud, because he knew it couldn’t be fixed with shrinks or pills. He was happy—in his family, in his love life, in his work—though that happiness was mostly a low, simmering contentment, not a laughing, manic joy. He was content. But contentment was not enough for Anna. She wanted the simmer turned up just a little higher, and however much she loved him and the kids, he knew that extra heat would have to come from work.

  So it was no wonder he had agreed to this nanny business so quickly. He would make it work, he thought, his fine shoes ringing on the concrete as he walked to the employee elevator. She deserved that and more. He might not say it, but there was nothing in the world more important to him than Anna’s happiness. Nothing. He wondered dimly if she knew that.

  Josh’s phone pinged. He pulled it out and glanced at it. A text from Vasquez, his division head. It read, My office. Soon as you get in. Bring the Doherty file.

  Josh stopped midstride, his heart racing.

  Chapter Four

  Mary Beth Wilson looked out of the window to the quiet street and scowled at the blossom-heavy crepe myrtles. She had the landscapers coming in an hour and needed to get her run in before they arrived. The fucking pollen count would be off the charts.

  Maybe she could skip the run and spend an extra hour in the gym tomorrow?

  It felt like a dodge, and the last thing she needed now was to let herself go. She’d seen Tammy Ward walking her runty-looking terrier last night, and that was a woman who had abandoned all self-esteem. The transformation was amazing. Admittedly, she’d had twins, but the rug rats had to be a year old by now. Six months at least. Or maybe they just had their second birthday party? She wasn’t sure and couldn’t tell from looking at them. She had no intention of having kids of her own and had zero interest in anyone else’s, though she’d learned not to advertise that fact—not to the neighbors, most of whom were veritable baby factories, and not to Kurt, her husband. He still liked the idea of being a dad, or claimed to. She couldn’t see it personally and thought the interest would fade pretty quickly as soon as any son of theirs turned out not to be interested in baseball, earlier if they had a girl. She’d seen that kind of parenting before and knew what it led to: the husband sitting on the couch yelling at the Panthers offensive line while the wife drove the kids to soccer practice and sleepovers and God knew what else.

  No, thanks.

  Easier to let Kurt pretend he liked the idea for a little longer, then tell him she was too old to try safely. In the long term, he’d be relieved. They were, in their own ways, selfish people, and they didn’t have room for kids. She knew that and had come to terms with it, shrugging off all the old bullshit that women were told about the destined joys of bringing life into the world, along with the sins and sorrows of living for yourself. Men did. They claimed not to, saying they were just doing what the world and their jobs demanded—the drinks meetings, sometimes at strip clubs; the endless hours of golf; the schmoozing and glad-handing at the country club. It was all part of the responsibilities of being a guy. Well, what’s good for the goose was good for the gander. Or she supposed, thinking vaguely that the gander was the male, the other way around.

  The street outside was quiet, but then the street was always quiet. Settle Road was one of those corners of Myers Park that had, until recently, gone unnoticed by the developers as areas elsewhere swelled in prestige. It wasn’t what they called gentrification because Myers Park had always been swanky, but in the past, it had been old-money swank: great plantation-style houses with white-columned porticoes and sprawling, manicured lawns. Between these islands of wealth nestled the little ranch-style two bedrooms where ordinary people had lived. As these salt-of-the-earth types had died off, their loving kids had found it worth considerably more to bulldoze Grandma’s place and erect a giant McMansion that pushed as close to the property line as local ordinances would allow. The result was that Settle Road was a permanent building site, vacant slabs awaiting developers’ eyes, empty shoebox houses awaiting demolition, and then the sprawling miniature castles—all vast open plans downstairs, with hardwood floors and granite counters—that had elbowed their way in and lorded it over the neighborhood.

  There were only three such houses on their street at the moment: Mary Beth and Kurt Wilson’s, Tammy and Tommy Ward’s (their names alone surely grounds for annulment), and then the most recent transplants from Yankeedom, Anna and Josh Klein. There were twice as many lots that were either vacant or under construction, so the neighborhood, which was well spaced and shaded by the massive trees characterizing this part of the city, felt oddly deserted, isolated. You could walk, cycle, or, in Mary Beth’s case, run, without the usual Charlotte fear of cars mowing you down, but you couldn’t actually go anywhere. You could walk around the neighborhood and into one or two more like it—more built up but otherwise similar—and if you felt like braving a few segments of road where the sidewalk gave up entirely, you might wander up to the local library, Queens University, and the Methodist church, which loomed over the intersection where Providence Road took a wacky hard tu
rn to the south. But stores, restaurants, bars, and other lively spots were all too far to reach without a car from their little corner.

  During the daylight hours, the area rang with god-awful Mexican music from the construction workers’ radios and sometimes with the laughter of the neighborhood’s kids, but it was mostly quiet, like now, and at night, it could feel weirdly woodsy. To the immediate north of the houses on Settle Road ran Briar Creek, a greenway with a dense line of trees along the bank that completely obscured the midtown skyscrapers, except in the middle of winter when the leafless branches showed the lights of Two Wells Fargo Center and the Bank of America tower. Two weeks ago, Mary Beth and Kurt had been woken by the howling of coyotes in that little strip of woods and had sat up in bed, transfixed by the eerie imminence of something that felt like it belonged in some mountain forest from a thousand years ago. Settle Road was in the city, but it didn’t feel like it, and a less possessed woman might have found it frightening.

  Mostly, Mary Beth found it tedious. But if life as the homemaker wife to a wealthy banker (and it seemed like every guy in the area was a banker) wasn’t quite the dream of success she’d seen in the brochures, it wasn’t going to be made better by stuffing her life full of lame people. Enter Anna and her new nanny.

  What in the name of all that was holy was she thinking?

  Turning their lives upside down—remodeling their damn house, no less—to make way for a woman whose picture made her look like a Soviet weight lifter and whose sole credential was her love for little people who couldn’t speak?

  Kill me now, thought Mary Beth. Was it not bad enough that her friends were all auditioning for Baby Factory of the Year without adding dollops of Mormon nanny into the mix?

  Christ.

  She needed a better class of friend; that was for damn sure. And the irony, of course, was that Anna had been the best of the bunch, and not just because she was originally a New Yorker. She had become a good deal less fun of late, but Mary Beth thought it was at least possible that, having the nanny to take on the feeding and burping of the little flesh blobs who had colonized her house, Anna would get more interesting again. The Kleins had been—cautiously, watchfully—a breath of fresh air when they’d moved in, before the pink parasites came along. Maybe they would be again.

  It was just possible, of course, that Anna’s desire to spend more time working was—bizarrely—real, and the nanny would make no difference. But surely, after all this time, the three years of constant pregnancy and nursing, it was time for her to kick back and open a bottle of chardonnay or two with her cool neighbor. Was that too much to ask?

  Chapter Five

  ANNA

  With the vetting already completed by Nurture’s rigorous hiring procedures, there wasn’t much for me to do except phone Oaklynn’s former employers just to make sure the references were solid. There were no surprises. In fact, in addition to singing her praises all over again, several of them seemed a little jealous, either that I was getting someone of her skills and temperament, or that I was living a period from which they had moved on only reluctantly. Mrs. Cavendish talked about her two girls as if they had grown up and moved away, but when I asked—part just making conversation and part checking that the dates lined up—she said, quite wistfully, “Twelve and thirteen now. How the time goes! I do miss Oaklynn.”

  I felt a little sad for her, and a little jealous. Whatever Jill Cavendish’s relationship with her infant children had been, it was surely better than mine with Veronica and Grace. But then, that was why we were getting Oaklynn, and for all I knew, it was the nanny who had made the Cavendish home so joyous that they wished time had stopped in those first years.

  I spoke to Oaklynn several times, both by phone and by Skype, calling from Josh’s ground-floor office because the handset in the bedroom was always cutting out. We worked out the specifics of her responsibilities and payment. Josh and I didn’t really want to mess with the nanny’s taxes, so we agreed we would write up an annual report of her income, and she would take responsibility for paying the taxes herself, probably quarterly to avoid penalties. She might not, of course, but that was her decision, and we could not be held accountable for it, in the unlikely event that she was audited.

  “That’s absolutely fine, Mrs. Klein,” said Oaklynn in that open, accepting way I had already come to associate with her.

  “Please,” I said. “Call me Anna.”

  The basement of the house had been only partly finished when we moved in, and one of our first priorities had been to make it a real living space with a self-contained guest bedroom and full bath. This now seemed prescient on our part, and as we geared up for Oaklynn’s arrival, I focused on some swift and homey decoration, determined to make the lowest level of the house as welcoming and livable as the two stories above it. It was a good-size area, almost as large as the New York apartment we had left behind, and its rear windows looked out across the backyard to the creek and the dense trees of the greenway, which insulated us from the rest of the city. I found myself anxious that our guest—which was how I was determined to think of her, even though we were paying for her labor—would feel at home there. I was concerned that the open stairwell would afford her no privacy unless she was in the bedroom itself, so I had Josh reach out to one of the local builders and have a contractor drop by to see if some kind of partition wall and door could be added. He said it could but not before she was due to arrive.

  “Does it matter?” asked Josh, reading my obvious deflation. “I don’t really think it needs doing at all. It can certainly wait a couple of months.”

  “I just wanted everything to be perfect when she got here,” I said.

  “You know she is working for us, right?” said Josh, grinning over his laptop. “Not the other way around.”

  “I just want her to be happy,” I said. “I don’t want her leaving halfway through her term. It wouldn’t be good for the girls.”

  He conceded that point, though it wasn’t really why I was anxious. I think I had taken to heart an idea that had emerged from a couple of Oaklynn’s Nurture references describing her as coming to feel like one of the family. They had made it sound like that was her achievement, and I got that, but it was also surely about the nature of the family itself. What if she didn’t like us? What if she hated the house? What if she didn’t want to become part of our family?

  Josh picked up something in my tone and gave me one of his shrewd, considering looks.

  “Is this really about the house?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you worried she won’t like the house, or are you worried she won’t like us? The girls?”

  I flushed and looked away, feeling transparent and guilty. Grace was still fussy and unpredictable, while Veronica, though a sweet, curious child, could be needy and insistent.

  “They’re great kids,” said Josh. He met my eyes and held them, making sure I heard, but he spoke kindly. “We are a great family. And if Oaklynn decides she wants a little more privacy, we can install the partition wall and door in the basement.” He still said her name as if it had quotation marks around it, sounding slightly ridiculous. “But maybe she won’t, and we can save ourselves the three grand or whatever it will cost to do the work.”

  I thought, then nodded. He was right, and the last thing I needed to do was make this whole experiment even more costly.

  So I went back to what Josh called my “cheap and cheerful” decorating: an accent mirror here, a noncontroversial piece of art there, and laid out the bathroom with color-coordinated hand towels and matching soaps. On impulse, one Saturday when Josh was watching the girls, I drove down to the Home Depot on Wendover and picked up a gallon of cornflower-blue paint with which, over the next three days, I completely repainted what I now thought of as Oaklynn’s room.

  “Pretty!” Veronica declared.

  “It is,” said Josh, snaking his arm around me. “Better on the walls than on your face, but yes. Pretty.”<
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  Veronica peered up at me, then pointed at the blue smears on my face and laughed with surprised delight.

  “You think?” I said to Josh.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It looks great. Really nice, Anna.”

  “Nice?”

  “Fresh. Inviting. Wholesome. Something like that. You’re the word lady. I’m just the banker. If she doesn’t like it, that’s her problem.”

  He was trying to be supportive, but the remark bothered me all the same, and he read it in my face. He squeezed me playfully. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get these windows open and go upstairs. I’m starving. What do you say I order us some gyoza and noodles from Yama?”

  My favorite little Japanese restaurant.

  “That would be perfect,” I said, meaning it.

  “It will be once I open a bottle of wine.”

  “Deal.”

  When I wasn’t frantically tidying and decorating, I was on the phone to Ramkins and Deale, figuring out how best to use the new time Oaklynn’s presence was going to give me. I was secretly thrilled by the prospect of taking trips to New York for meetings, conventions, and author events, but the bulk of my work time would be spent in Charlotte. Since renting office space, however modest, in the city was utterly unjustifiable, I had to make sure that my current home office felt like somewhere I could work. I already had a kind of study—the smallest bedroom in the house—in the corner tucked away from the noise of goings-on downstairs, and now I set out to strip it of anything that wasn’t work related. By the time I was done, apart from shelves groaning with books, there was only a desk, an office chair, a phone that worked better than the one in the bedroom, a table lamp, and a laptop. In one corner, hanging on the wall, I had a small tatami mat below a kanji scroll that had belonged to my grandfather. Everything else that might prove a distraction went, some of it migrating to the basement for Oaklynn’s use. Josh approved, if only because the purge meant that we could now claim the room as a home office for tax purposes, though to me it felt a little stark. The prospect of spending hours in there every day with the door closed struck me suddenly as daunting.