The Babysitter

Before I got my first real job––as a check-out girl two evenings a week and all-day Saturday in the Big Apple supermarket on Wheeler Road––I had another gig: babysitting. It was suburban Long Island, mid-1960s, and all around us scrubby woods were being cleared to make way for rows of new houses as people fled the city, bringing children and giving birth to new ones. And so, while the times they were a'changing, I was wiping noses and peering into neighbors' lives behind the scenes.

But I actually thought babysitting was cool, especially on New Years’ Eve, when folks would come home liquored and magnanimous and you could make as much as six or seven bucks. My friend Rosemary had the dream gig with a stylish woman named Thomasina, who acted like every night was New Year’s Eve, and never failed to provide ice cream, not to mention bags of expensive hand-me-down clothing.

I once accepted a sitting job for Thomasina’s sister Rae––Rosemary had already committed to Thomasina that night––and I approached it with greedy hopes, but it turns out Rae was surly and cheap, not at all like her sister. It worked out all right; I don't recall a thing about the children involved, but Rosemary and I talked on the phone most of the night, comparing notes and gossiping and freaking ourselves out with scary stories and imagined noises. (That’s what babysitters often did for amusement in those days; when they weren’t sneaking their boyfriends in, they liked to freak each other out.)

But I didn’t need Rae. I had my own turf, and I was in demand, even on school nights. It seemed that all the mothers, whether married or divorced, were ready to step out, leaving the kiddies behind, and I was a rare gem––a responsible teen-age girl, experienced as a big sister, and genuinely desperate for coins, so desperate, in fact, that the pay, which was fifty cents an hour, was a reasonable incentive to say yes. That yes meant that I would not only watch the kids…in an active, let-me-entertain-you way…but also clean up any dishes or mess left behind in the grown-up’s haste to escape, get the children ready for bed and into it, and then spend hours in bleak living rooms waiting.Unfortunately, I was never able to sleep on someone’s couch, and in those days of three working television channels that eventually sputtered into late-night nothingness, TV was no distraction. I usually did my homework, little drudge that I was, then watched the clock, my only consolation being that every full 60-minute sweep would mean an additional fifty cents in my wallet.

It was not beyond me, either, to contemplate my surroundings with a sense of dismay and superiority, all the still-new ticky-tacky houses with their Sears Roebuck furniture and matched lamps on side tables and utterly oppressive ordinariness. I would peek nosily into drawers and flip through address books by the telephone and search the fridge and cupboards for anything worth eating. I began to sense a hunger behind all the soda pop and breakfast cereals, and a great emptiness amidst the middle-class possessions, perhaps not even paid for. With the arrogance of a teen-age girl, I judged, and I concluded that I would do it all differently someday.

I had two clients who most frequently called. My favorite was a red-headed divorcee who drove a red sports car. She was usually still getting dressed when I came over, and when she stepped out, her red lipstick newly applied, her outfit carefully chosen, she invariably looked glamorous. She had one child, a little boy named Tommy, whom she hugged tightly and sadly every time she left. She seemed almost guilty about leaving, like it was something she had to do but didn't really want to, and it was clear to me she was trying to find a new father for Tommy, but Tommy might have preferred just to spend more time with her. The scent of her perfume would linger in the air for hours afterward, and Tommy and I would sit on the couch side-by-side, and I would read him stories in the cloud of his mother’s fragrance, and gradually he’d grow sleepy. This was an easy gig.

The other job, on the same street, was the Fusco family, a more complicated picture. It involved a married couple with two kids, a docile little girl and a brother who disliked me. The Fuscos liked the full-service aspects of my sitting business and took lavish advantage of my apparent willingness to wash their dirty dinner dishes. Once they even left while the little girl had what appeared to be conjunctivitis, completely unattended, ignored, and unmentioned. She woke up in the night crying, her eyes swollen and crusted shut, and I somehow found what I needed to make a boric acid solution and wash her eyes and comfort her.

I was fifteen years old. It seems amazing that I even knew to do that, but I was probably mimicking the way my father cared for us. Meanwhile, it was a school night, and they stayed out hours later than they had promised, and I was worried about how I would feel in the morning, and angry when they finally walked in.

“Honey, you know you can just sleep on the couch,” said Mrs. Fusco. “What’s the difference?”

I guess that fifty cents an hour must have meant a lot, because I continued to accommodate their requests. One evening when I walked over to babysit, Mr. Fusco was not there, and Mrs. Fusco came to the door in a hideous pink dress, a lacy thing with a wide hoop skirt like a little girl’s, and very short, revealing a pair of chunky legs that were frankly not her best asset. She wore high-heeled shoes as though to elevate the whole concoction, and had her black hair teased and lacquered into a tall beehive upsweep style. (Teenage girl, judging: Yikes.)

“I’ll be meeting Frank there,” said Mrs. Fusco, and off she went to wherever it was, her pink dress swishing.

Another long night awaited me. This may have been the time when the boy and I had it out, just as siblings might. “You’re not my mother,” he said, defying me when I asked him to go to bed. “I don’t have to listen to you.”

“Oh yes, you do,” I said. Things escalated. Lest you think I was an angel, I may have called him a little shit or some other term of endearment. He may have said fuck you. There was some mutual shoving, shouting, a door slammed, tears. I don’t remember how it ended, and I don’t remember how the little girl reacted, but it was a singularly unpleasant night on the babysitting circuit.

At last the children were in bed and I waited. I waited until the midnight hour slipped into morning, and morning began to lighten the sky, and there was still no sign of the Fuscos. Finally, Mr. Fusco appeared, and he was alone. He did not appear to have dressed for the same occasion his wife had attended. He wore a tired white shirt, unbuttoned at the top, just regular office clothes, and he looked beat and disheveled. I never could distinguish among alcohol smells, but he was vaguely scotch-y or maybe it was gin.

We went outside to his car so he could drive me home, essentially a couple of blocks and around a corner, five minutes perhaps––the kids would be fine. A neighborhood cat blinked at us and slid away. All the houses dozed, their shades drawn, their front lawns dewy. I sat next to Mr. Fusco on the front seat and he paused and turned and looked at me in a significant way, a way I didn’t want to be looked at. There was something creepy about it.

“It’s late,” I said.

“You have no idea,” he murmured.

He dropped me off and I never got paid.