The Seven Year Bitch (6 page)

“How is my wife?” the cook at the café said, putting a bowl of soup on the table in front of me and taking the seat across from me. His name was Said and I always pronounced it Sigheed, which I believed to be correct, even though everyone at the café seemed to say it many different ways, and he always called me “wife,” which was a little uncomfortable and off-putting, but I had never stopped him. Now that it had been about eighteen years, it seemed too late to try. It was especially awkward because he had a wife, a bleak, clunky Russian woman who had been his cleaning lady and was still his cleaning lady but now didn't get paid for it.

“I haven't seen you for a long time. No work today?” Said asked.

“No more job,” I said.

“This is shit!” he said. He had a thick Turkish accent and when he got excited, which was about half the time, I couldn't understand him at all, but that hadn't seemed to matter in all these years. I just smiled or laughed at what I hoped were the right times, or said, “Hilarious!” and that had always worked. My cell phone rang and I excused myself and answered it. It was Russell saying Duncan had a fever and he needed Tylenol. I told him the Tylenol was right on the bathroom sink and went back to my conversation with Said.

“Delicious,” I said about the soup even though it scared me a little. He always gave me free food in addition to whatever I ordered, and sometimes it was something he had improvised that wasn't on the menu.

“Those are meatballs,” he said. “You like?”

“
Ummm
, delicious,” I said.

“Why I am tired?” Said asked, reaching across the table to poke my shoulder.

I just nodded, unsure of what to say.

“I ask you, ʽWhy I am tired?'”

“You work hard,” I said.

“No, not work! The woman don't leave me alone.”

I laughed uncomfortably. “Right,” I said. “Hilarious!”

“I am be serious, Isolde. I spend the night with a woman. It is magic, this hotel. Fourteenth Street and the West Side Highway. One hundred dollars for three hours, Jacuzzi, beautiful, clean, magic.”

Again I laughed and said, “Hilarious.” We passed that hotel in the car on the way to the country. It would have to be magic to make that hotel clean and beautiful.

“I am not joking. You think I do nothing every year when Cecylia goes?”

His wife went to Russia to live with her mother every summer for four months. The rest of the year, whenever I stopped in she was sitting hunched over an Irish coffee with a very sad, bloated look on her face, saying things like “New York, she is so durr-ty, how can I stand this, Isolde? Tell me, I beg of you.” Each year, I couldn't wait for her to go away. And neither could Said apparently.

“You know Cecylia and me, we don't have nothing, no sex,” he said.

“
Hmmm
,” I said.

“She say I am too big. She told me when we have the sex it hurt her too much. She feel it in her throat.”

I had just taken a swallow of coffee as he said it and was about to clear my throat but forced myself not to. My cell phone rang. It was Russell again saying that the baby Tylenol was not on the bathroom sink.

“It has to be,” I said. I had given Duncan a dropperful the night before.

“I'm standing right here,” Russell said, “and there's no Tylenol.”

“I'm sure it's there.”

“You can look, look, look for yourself,” Russell stuttered. “I'm telling you, I don't know what you did with the fucking Tylenol.”

“Do you need me to come home?” I asked.

“No. Stay out. I'll keep looking.” He hung up on me in the middle of his own sentence and I went back to Said to hear more about how big he was, if that was in fact what he was talking about.

“I tell you because you are my friend and you would not tell Cecylia. I do this for ten years when she is away.”

I tried to look completely neutral, neither approving nor disapproving, which wasn't that difficult because it was pretty much how I felt. I was trying to be less judgmental in general and their marriage had always disgusted me anyway. I knew—because I had brought him food once when he was very sick and she was away in Russia—that they had two little bedrooms. He had one and she shared one with their six-year-old daughter.

“You don't know I do this?”

“What? No,” I said.

He let out a hearty foreign laugh and I had to slap his big rough hand five over the table. I had to stop coming to this café, I told myself. I was like an old mountain goat returning to the same patch of grass every day.

His cell phone rang. “It is the woman!” he said. “She wants more of me.”

I thought of Cecylia with her mother, sitting in the garden or cooking in the kitchen, while her husband fucked someone else in a hooker hotel. Their little bedrooms held less intimacy than cubicles in an office building. My cell phone rang. “I don't know what to do,” Russell said. “I've scoured the entire apartment.”

“I'm coming home,” I said, relieved to have an excuse to leave even though I had looked so forward to being able to sit in the café again. I paid the check and accepted the quart of chicken soup with rice that Said insisted I bring home to the baby.

When I got home, I gave Duncan the Tylenol that had of course been right on the sink where I'd said it was and Russell scrambled to his desk in the living room, tripping over Humbert and bumping into strollers in his haste to get to work. I heated up a bottle of milk and Duncan fell right to sleep on my bed. I remembered when we'd first gotten Humbert and had taken him to the vet who'd said he had a terrible ear infection and I paid sixty dollars for drops that the vet said had to be refrigerated and when we got home Russell put the drops in the freezer and I had to go back to the vet a second time and buy the drops all over again.

B
y the time Shasthi showed up the next day, I was too tired of my careful list of questions to ask any of them. The minute she walked through the door, I knew she was the one I loved. The second I saw her, I knew I would be willing to give her two weeks' paid vacation and breast-feed her children if necessary.

“May I wash my hands?” she said.

I stood stiffly in the living room, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom.

She was beautiful. She had long reddish hair, the color of pure Indian henna, and dark skin to match. She wore gold jewelry like an Indian gypsy and an apple-green shirt with gold sequins on it. She had normal undecorated nails that wouldn't hurt Duncan's scalp when she gave him a shampoo.

She had come all the way from the Bronx but had arrived right on time. I sat facing her on the couch feeling incredibly guilty for some reason. As far as I was concerned she was hired but I knew I should ask her some questions first. “Have a cookie?” was all I could think of to say.

“Thank you,” she lilted, taking a mint Milano and nibbling on it reluctantly, making me feel a little like I had bullied her into eating it. I felt like a witch luring her into my gingerbread house. I felt grotesque next to her. She was at least six inches taller than me, but I felt like a giant. My lips were pale while hers were painted a shade of purple I had always loved. I always noticed, when I took Duncan to the pediatrician, how fresh and happy the nannies looked and how old and haggard the mothers did. And I wondered for a moment if that would be us. I was already thinking of us as us, I noticed.

I wished I had cleaned my apartment. If she opened the refrigerator she would see an almost empty pizza box in it. When she went into the bathroom to wash her hands she would have found a clump of toothpaste in the sink. I now realized that she had flushed the toilet twice. I cringed, wondering if I'd forgotten to flush.

“How old are you?” I asked and then felt terrible about it. It seemed like a much too personal question to ask, but that was the point of an interview, I tried to remind myself.

Lately age was the only thing I understood about a person. It seemed to matter more than anything else.

“Forty,” she said. Her voice was a few octaves too high but still nice. I felt really, really bad I had asked and forced her to admit something like that. No one wanted to have to go around saying they were forty.

“I'm going to be thirty-nine,” I offered.

“Okay,” she said.

I started slowly nodding again, the way I had nodded at all the nannies. I was dreading mentioning the salary because I was suddenly sure it would be less than she wanted.

“Do you have any children?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

For some reason my mind began to race with this information. No children suddenly seemed like an extremely good thing in a nanny, or anyone really. There would be no earaches to rush home to in the middle of the day. Or, if they were being raised far away by relatives, I wouldn't have to wonder how she could care about Duncan and not resent him. Or judge her too harshly for it.

I wondered where she was from. She spoke excellent English but I wasn't going to fall into that trap again. She had an Indian name, and she looked Indian.

“Are you from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh?” I asked, proud of how the Pakistan and Bangladesh showed off my knowledge of world geography.

“I'm from Guyana,” she said.

“Ghana?”

“No, Guyana,” she said.

“Is that in Spain?” I asked, cautiously.

“Guyana, no. It's a country bordering Brazil. But I'm of Indian descent.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding. “Isn't Guyana where Jim Jones killed all the members of his cult?”

“Yes!” she said, pleased that I knew so much of her land.

I showed her around the apartment, rambling about myself and my idea of what light cleaning entailed, which, when I articulated its many components, sounded an awful lot like heavy cleaning. I was feeling guiltier and guiltier. At Richman I'd been notorious for getting the secretaries coffee all the time. She was silent until we got to my bedroom. “I like your curtains,” she said, as if she suddenly felt at home.

“So do I!” I said, relieved. “They're made out of saris. From India.” The Queen of the Nannies was right—Shasthi was the one for me. “I would love to go to India,” I said.

“Me too,” she said.

“If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go? Paris? Rome?” I asked idiotically.

“Home,” she said.

“You can't . . .”

“No,” she said. “I'm not here legally.”

“Can you start tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach, as if I had forced her to take the job. And if I hadn't, life had. She needed work and I was offering it, so she had to take it, like a mute bride in an arranged marriage. The choice was mine, not hers, and I had made it.

She took a tiny yellow Post-it out of her pants pocket. “Can I ask you some questions?” she said carefully.

“Okay,” I said, bracing myself. None of the other nannies had questions.

“Do I get paid for sick days?”

“Yes,” I said even though I wasn't sure about that. “And you get two weeks' paid vacation.”

“Do I have federal holidays off?” she said in barely a whisper, reading from the Post-it.

I suddenly felt like crying, thinking of this girl writing this question on a Post-it and putting it carefully in her pants pocket and taking the subway all the way from the Bronx and arriving right on time. Thinking of this girl who was a year older than I was but seemed so much younger and was illegal but was concerned about federal holidays. I didn't even know what a federal holiday was, I just took all holidays for granted and even expected presents for them, and didn't cherish them at all. She wanted to go home, and she couldn't. “Sure,” I said to the federal holidays. “Just tell me when they are.”

“Thank you,” she said. “The girl I take care of now just turned thirteen. They don't need me as much anymore. I've been hoping for a little one to take care of for a long time.”

 

 

Feeling sneaky, I called
the number she had given me to check her reference. It was just a formality, due diligence, because my mind was made up. I was just checking a reference, not going through her purse, but my heart was pounding. When the woman answered the phone I felt like I was introducing myself to my new sister-wife. We would be sharing Shasthi now. I'd have her thirty hours and she'd have her ten. The other woman—Rachel was her name—sounded cool, almost casual about it.

“Yes, she's always prompt, never calls in sick. She's very cheerful,” Rachel said.

What a fool, I thought. She was just handing Shasthi to me on a silver platter. Didn't she know she should be worried? As soon as I got another job, for just a few dollars I could steal her away, have forty hours or even fifty, just for me. One word from me, I was sure, and we'd never have to hear about this Rachel again, or her newly teenaged daughter.

“Oh, one more thing,” Rachel said.

“Yes?” I asked, screwing up my face in concentration, anxious to hear this one more thing.

“She seems to take great care with her appearance. I'm always impressed by how well she puts herself together.”

Understatement of the year, I thought. She was beautiful.

She'd worked for Rachel for ten years and I'd only known her for thirty minutes, but I already felt I had a deeper understanding of her than this other woman did. I saw so much more to her than her appearance. As I thanked her and got off the phone, I couldn't help but think there should be more to the ceremony—we should have to sup from the same table or sip from the same cup—but that was it.