Emma McLaughlin - Nanny Returns

CONTENTS

2008

Whatre we doing?

At the sound of my husbands voice I twist atop the ladder, where Im attempting to jerry-rig a curtain panel to an ancient nail. He stands in the doorway of the otherwise empty room, wiping his flushed face with the bottom half of his damp Harvard T-shirt. Hey, there, I say.

Three weeks of living in a construction site and Moms lost it already, Grace. Ryan addresses our twelve-year-old golden retriever as she tromps up the last few stairs to join us on the fourth floor of our new home. Beneath the stark light of the bulb jutting from the ceilings plaster rosette, we watch as she promptly drops her throw rope at his sneakers for a treat. Good girl. He ruffles her head and she saunters to the ladder to greet me, her paws grayed with the grit of Riverside Park.

Did ya have a fun jog with Daddy? I call as she trundles away to her water dish waiting in our bedroom next door. Loud lapping ensues.

Theyre opening a Starbucks on the spot where that bodega burned down. He tugs his feet out of his Nikes and walks over in his socks.

Then the drugstores, then the banks. Were ahead of the wave.

So. He nuzzles my bare thigh with his sweaty brown hair before turning to peel off his shirt. What are you doing?

I found the curtains!

So I see. He swipes up his sneakers on his way out.

I stretch to secure the other end of the cerulean linen fabric onto a second nail protruding from the fossilized wallpaper and, with a bracing hand on the cool metal, lean back to assess. Smoothing my palm along the crease from the last month the curtains have spent boxed, I remember scoring them at an Uppsala flea market two years ago to lift our flat from the Swedish winter blahs. Not that Im complaining. After Ryans position with the UN had relocated us from Haiti to southern Africa to northern Africa, I was just grateful to have seasons, even if three out of the four involved snow.

I adjust the cloth to hide the sea of sledgehammer dents where Steve, our contractor, investigated to see if it was feasible to install a window. Or if the openings had been bricked up sometime in the last century for a reason. Like the brownstones back wall will collapse.

Nan.

Check out my window. I clamber down as he reappears in the doorway with a towel around his waist. Im going to put Grandmas old red desk under it and its going to be my nook.

He comes over and wraps me in his arms, pulling me against his sweat-damp frame, the nubbly terry cloth brushing my legs. We have over three thousand crumbling square feet

Of potential.

of potential. You will have your nook and your window, and I have to ask if you are planning on wearing this to my parents closing? He slides up the sweater of his that I threw on in lieu of my still-missing robe. Because I, for one, will find that distracting.

I thought thats why I was coming, to distract you. I tug the towel free from his waist.

To support me. And were pushing the clock here. He grabs the towel back and snaps my ass as he strides out and down the short hallway to the one bathroom that functions in our over three thousand crumbling square feet. I promised my dad he wouldnt have to give this closing a second thought. So fifteen minutes and we need to be walking out the door.

Okay, but I need coffee first and the machine just conked, I update him from the doorway of my future office. Another fuse blew in the kitchen.

Bringing us to

Three: the hall, the bedroom, and the bathroom. Any sign of Steve out front?

Not yet.

Its almost nine. I should call him.

Youre stalling! You can call from the cab! I hear the protesting shriek of the hot water being summoned. And subtract five minutes for a pit stop if you want coffee!

I want a hit of the crack conveniently sold across the street! I yell back, but hes already underwater. As I enter the bedroom, Grace raises her head from where shes flopped across our mattress, and I face the wall of wardrobe boxes. Youd need crack, too, if he was making you go back to 721 Park.

A half hour later, the taxi jerks forward to traverse another halting increment of Park as all its lights turn green in unison, a municipal detail I always thought so perfectly fit the neighborhoods constricting moreseveryone on the avenue pressed to do the same thing at the same pace. I remember how much the unpropitious stop lights stressed me out when I worked here, now well over a decade ago. Placating some nap-deprived child squirming beside me on the backseat, Id be breaking into a cold sweat over whether wed be late for whatever the next bizarre assigned activity wasFlower Arranging for Four-Year-Olds or Tai Chi for Totsand wishing the subway I rode to and from work with the rest of humanity was deemed safe for little Elspeth.

Below Ninety-sixth Street the meridians are blooming with lushly packed Easter tulips and I remember accompanying my grandmother, trowel in hand, to help plant the bulbs when I was a child. But by the time I grew up to work in the buildings flanking these flower beds, my employers had long since outsourced the duty to others for whom English was a second language, as was their predilection for any task requiring them to drop to their knees. We pass a limestone building I nannied in my first year at NYU, the one where I discovered the teenage daughter had some guy from the shooting galleries Of Tompkins Square Park squatting in her walk-in closet. Yeah, seven years of babysitting, two summers au pairing, and three years of full-time nannying were more than enough. Im still amazed that after my last day of my last job, in the building were barreling toward, I managed to wait for Grace to get her shots so we could fly over the oceaninstead of running across itto shack up with Ryan in the Hague.

In the lower Seventies the cab halts yet again and my gaze lands on a black woman pushing a towheaded child, who has the glazed, contented look children assume in strollers (on a good day). Suddenly the childs face lights up. I strain to see a blonde standing at the corner in a lavender dress, smiling broadly, shopping-bag-laden arms outstretched as the two approach. The mother rushes toward the stroller, grin in placebypassing its passenger to hang her straining bags on the titanium handlesand with a few words to the pilot, she continues past unencumbered. The child erupts into a shocked wail, raising a tortured belly against the NASA-grade nylon straps restraining himand our cab inches onward into the Sixties. I feel myself starting to slide down in my seat.

Nan.

Yeah, babe, I answer, keeping my eyes on my BlackBerry as I scroll to my lone clients latest missive. Which I start to answer in a tone designed to entice copious referrals. Which will, God willing, multiply into an actual consulting business.

You look like were driving by a house you got caught TPing.

Uh-huh. I hit send and feel a firm grip on my bicep as Ryan lifts me from my near-horizontal slouch.

Youre thirty-three. He raises an eyebrow.

Yup, I concur as the cab pulls to the curb and I slip the device into my handbag.

You speak three languages.

True. We both reach for our wallets, but he gets to his first, tugging out a twenty to pay our fare.

So

So she was a very scary lady. I press my lips together to refresh my gloss.

But now you can be very scary. He touches his forehead against mine as he lifts to return his wallet to his back trouser pocket. It could be a scary-down.

Id prefer it be a nothing-down. I pivot to face the caped doorman as he opens the cab door and, against every instinct, step out under the shade of the pale gray awning. Then, as another doorman pushes back against the brass-encased glass to the somber dimness of the Xes lobby, I one-eighty to the departing cab like Grace entering a vets office.