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We fired our first nanny
after two weeks. She wept. Feeling guilty and foolish,
and on a steep learning curve, we were determined to
give our next nanny a month’s trial. We fired
her the day before it was up. I would like to say we
fired both of them because they weren’t up to
the task in some tangible, specific way, but the truth
is more complicated, and I can’t explain it better
than this: They spooked me.
It took only a couple of days for the first, Sofia’s,
eccentricity to become fully apparent. She had an obsession
with birthdays. She could never mention anyone, anyone
at all, without including the exact date of his or her
birth in the sentence. My husband became “Peter
December 4th”; our son, “Thomas January
29th.” Her extensive family, about whom she talked
a lot, were all referred to by name and date. It may
not sound like much, but I was swimming with hormones
and it was driving me crazy. I also feared it was a
sign that she was crazy.
We had hired Sofia through an agency, and I couldn’t
face explaining why it hadn’t worked out, so we
hired Alicia from an ad in the Irish Independent,
even though, during the interview, I’d had reservations
about her long nails. They curved like silver dough
hooks from each finger. “Jesus Christ, she’s
going to circumcise him!” whispered Peter, as
we spied on her changing Thomas for the first time.
But the nails were not the problem.
It turned out that Alicia also had an obsession. She
took notes. Detailed, eerie notes, which she jotted
down in school exercise books. She would present them
to us upon our return and await our comments. A typical
entry might read: “8:29 p.m., the baby is crying;
8:31 p.m., the baby is still crying; 8:32 p.m., I comfort
the baby by stroking him; 8:34 p.m., I walk with the
baby in his bedroom; 8:37 p.m., I put the baby down;
8:38 p.m., the baby is still crying.” The entire
evening would be recorded, including the precise times
she switched on the television, used her cell phone,
ate pizza.
“You know what freaks me out about this?”
remarked Peter, as we mulled it over one evening, having
told her several times that such detailed notes weren’t
necessary. “They’re like coroner’s
notes, the sort you go back over to establish cause
of death.” He paused: “It feels like they’re
written to be read out in court.”
We gave Alicia two weeks’ pay and promptly hired
our housekeeper, largely at her suggestion. “You
know my own kids are in school,” she said. “And
you said how well brought up they are!” The last
bit was true, at least: Theresa’s three girls,
ages 10, 12, and 15, were delightful. She’d brought
them with her occasionally during the year she’d
been working for us. What she failed to tell us, in
case we might have seen it as an obstacle to hiring
her—and which we only discovered by accident six
weeks into our new arrangement—was that she also
had an 18-month-old son whose own child-care arrangements
were somewhat precarious.
There was another surprise: Without her apron on and
her hair tied back, she was a dead ringer for J.Lo.
I wasn’t so concerned about Peter—he was
too sleep-deprived to focus on anything other than a
looming book deadline—but our doormen were quickly
beside themselves. One in particular fell victim to
her charms and took to hanging around the lobby hoping
to hear the distant squeak of our stroller. For her
part, Theresa would alternately flirt wildly with him,
or, equally wildly, accuse him of sexual harassment—which
soon brought another member of her family into our lives:
Mario. They weren’t married, but Mario was the
father of Theresa’s son.
An ominous, brooding presence who claimed to be in
construction, Mario took to hanging out in the lobby,
too, to make sure Theresa went straight home.
Mario eventually began
calling us late at night to tell us, among other things,
that Theresa was a liar, that she was having affairs
with some of our local shopkeepers, that he had beaten
up one of her lovers and was on the run from the police,
and that we should fire her. We didn’t (well,
not at his prompting), and we never told her about his
calls, but over the next few months, her life began
to implode. Her ex-husband filed for custody; one of
the girls was expelled for stealing money; Roberto,
her little boy, escaped from his baby-sitter and went
missing, instigating a police search; and Theresa became
less and less reliable. Some days she would arrive seriously
late, others she would have to leave early, after receiving
an urgent call about the girls or Roberto. We wanted
to help, but what she needed was a new boyfriend and
a social worker. After eighteen months, we called it
quits.
That was more than a year ago, and things have settled
down since we learned to rely on personal recommendations
from other parents. But I’ll still occasionally
bump into a local shopkeeper who recognizes Thomas and
demands to know where Theresa is. “Do you remember
me?” he’ll say, as Thomas smiles back diplomatically.
“I was the one who used to give you all those
presents.”
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