Selena Kitt - Crazy About the Baumgartners

I didn’t become a nanny because I loved kids. I wasn’t one of those girls who started babysitting when I was ten and fell in love with children and decided to spend the rest of my life playing Mary Poppins. I became a nanny because I hated school, anything involving retail, and working in fast food. Being a nanny required that I know how to cook and how to do CPR. Basically, I needed to know how to keep kids alive.

Sometimes I thought a monkey could do my job.

Not that I advertised that fact during interviews.

I’d been a nanny for five years and had gone through three families, when I finally found the perfect job. Thank God I found the Baumgartners. Or they found me. I was crazy about the Baumgartners. They were my favorite people in the world. And their kids were great, which is something I couldn’t say about the three families I’d played nanny to before them.

Although they had their moments.

“Henry did it!” Janie, who was eleven, blond and blue-eyed like her mother, stomped into the kitchen where I was making their after school snack-“ants on a log.” They were just celery sticks spread with peanut butter, raisins dotted on top, and looked more like turds on sticks to me, but whatever.

“Henry did what?” I licked peanut butter off the knife and slid it into the sink. Henry, almost ten, was always doing something to annoy his older sister.

“Look!” Janie held her ponytail up to me, showing me a wad of gum so big I couldn’t imagine how anyone even got it in their mouth in the first place.

“Great.” I sighed, putting the ants and logs on a plate in the middle of the kitchen table. There was no point yelling for Henry. He was likely out back, hiding in the tree house his father had built, which is always where he “hid” whenever he’d done something he knew he might get in trouble for.

So I was standing in the middle of the kitchen with a sobbing Janie, Googling “how to get gum out of hair” on my iPhone, when the house phone rang. Of course, the cordless wasn’t on its base where it should have been. I ran through the house, stopping every few moments when it rang again, trying to pinpoint the sound. I finally found it buried between the couch cushions, where I also found a wad of yellow Silly Putty with a penny stuck into it.

“Hello?” I asked, out of breath, trying to get Silly Putty off my fingers in long strings.

“Gretchen, can you stay late tonight?” Mrs. B. sounded just as out of breath as I was. “I have another couple showings and Doc’s at that conference in New York.”

“Sure.” I was always amenable to more time-and of course, more money. Besides, Mrs. B wasn’t as picky as a lot of families I’d worked for. She didn’t mind if I made a frozen pizza for dinner or let the kids watch TV. As long as homework was done and no one was on fire, life was good.

“Is Janie okay?”

I’m sure she heard her howling in the background.

“She got gum in her hair.”

“Ugh. Ice,” Mrs. B said. “Put ice on it. It will get cold and you can chip most of it out.”

“Thanks.” I headed for the freezer, grabbing a glass and dispensing ice into it.

“And you can order a pizza if you want. There’s twenty bucks in the tin. You’ve got to be sick of cooking frozen ones.”

“Okay.” It cracked me up how Mrs. B vacillated between wanting to feed them healthy things like celery and peanut butter and then gave up and ordered pizza.

“I should be back by nine or ten,” she said. “Is that okay?”

“Sure.” I sat a tearful Janie down at the kitchen table, pressing the ice against the glob of gum. She frowned at me, but at least she’d stopped howling. “We’ll see you then.”

“All right, thanks, Gretchen. You’re a life saver.” She hung up.

“Your mom says ice works.” I held my other hand under the ice to catch the drips. “But… if it doesn’t work… are you okay with me cutting it out?”

“What?” Janie’s eyes went wide. “Cut my hair?”

“I think you’d be cute with short hair.” I was trying to set it up, ease her into the idea, because I had a feeling this much gum plus that much hair was going to spell a trip to the hair salon tomorrow with her mother. I was just the nanny, not the Miracle Worker.

“You think?” Janie sniffed, fingering the end of her ponytail, now wet from the melting ice.

“Janie, where’s my goddamned iPod?” Henry stormed into the house, slamming the French patio doors behind him. “What did you do with it?”

“Bite me!” Janie snapped. “Look what you did to my hair!”

“Both of you, watch your mouths.” I sighed, pulling the ice away to find the gum was, indeed, hardening. “Janie, did you take his iPod?”

“Maybe.” She crossed her arms over her chest, glaring at him. “But he took my eyeliner and won’t give it back!”

It was strange to me how, one minute, they could be playing and the best of friends, and the next minute, they were at each other’s throats.

“Well, if the iPod doesn’t appear in the next five minutes, I’m going to let you figure out your gum problem.” I carried the ice over to the sink, tossing it in. “And if Janie’s eyeliner doesn’t appear in the next five minutes, Henry, there won’t be any pizza for dinner or watching a movie afterward. You can do your homework, eat peanut butter and jelly for dinner and go to bed by eight.”

I turned around and leaned against the sink, arms crossed over my chest, and looked between the two of them. I wasn’t above bribery, it was true. It probably wasn’t the best parenting technique in the world, but I wasn’t their parent. I was the nanny.

“Your iPod is under the treehouse,” Janie grumbled. “I buried it at the base of the tree.”

“Here.” Henry reached into his pocket, handing over the eyeliner. I didn’t even ask why he took it. Janie wasn’t even supposed to have it, but I didn’t mention that either. Then he was out the door to find his iPod.

“Okay,” I said to Janie. “Let’s see what we can do with your hair.”

It took me almost an hour to get all of it out, and it was still sticky to the touch, even after we’d washed and conditioned it six times. Janie thanked me and went to her room to try to brush out the stickiness while I sat at the kitchen table, eating the untouched ants on a log while I ordered a pizza.

Then I called Ronnie to tell her I was going to be late.

“Don’t watch Mad Men without me,” I warned, crunching celery.

“I won’t,” she promised. “I don’t feel well anyway. I think I’ll just go to bed early.”

I frowned. “You don’t sound sick.”

“Stomach thing,” she said. “Maybe my period coming. I dunno.”

“Awww. Fill a hot water bottle.” I licked peanut butter off my fingers. “I’ll come home and rub your belly. I’ll kiss it and make it all better, I promise.”

“I gotta go,” Ronnie said. “My other line’s ringing.”

I sighed. “See you tonight.”

Mrs. B had been asking me to stay late a lot and while I liked the extra cash, I didn’t like spending so much time away from Ronnie. We were best friends and even better lovers. And that, well-it had just kind of happened. I’d been with girls before, but I wasn’t a lesbian. I liked men too much for that. The way Ronnie and I had come together was kind of just meant to be. At first, it was just incredible sex and a lot of fun. Now, it was easy, comfortable, and I loved her dearly.

The pizza came and I paid for it, setting us up in the family room in front of the giant 80-inch screen TV with Surround Sound. Janie was freshly scrubbed in PJs when she came down the stairs. Henry, however, was dirtier than ever from playing out in the treehouse. I made him wash his hands before sitting down at the coffee table to eat. We didn’t even bother with plates. We just sat on the floor and ate out of the box.