Джули Салливан - Friends and Strangers

It was better when Andrew was beside her. He bragged in a way she could not about herself. Her first was a bestseller, he might say. Or Simon and Schuster gave her a three-book deal.

That third book, due in a year and not yet begun, was the reason she needed to hire someone to watch Gil. Elisabeth didn’t even have an idea yet. It was unlike her. Usually, as she wrapped up one project, she was already well into thinking about the next and eager to start. She had expected that by now she would want to get back to work. Instead, her ambition was something she remembered vaguely, yet couldn’t seem to conjure.

She knew from friends’ experiences that the search for a sitter could be worse than dating but similar—some were duds, and you knew right away there was no chemistry, yet you still had to go through the motions of an interview. Sometimes you liked someone who chose somebody else. Nomi had hired a woman on the spot who turned out to be faking her references. That had petrified them both.

When Elisabeth told her neighbor Stephanie that she was looking for someone, Stephanie said this was the best part of living in a town that was home to a small women’s college.

“I’ve used a couple of the students, and they were good,” she said. “Good enough. No one burned the house down.”

Elisabeth thanked her for the suggestion and suspected that Stephanie didn’t love her children half as much as she loved Gil.

But in the end, she decided to try a college student. She could get someone three days a week to start, ease into things. If the arrangement didn’t work out, the end of the semester would make for a natural parting of ways.

A week ago, Elisabeth had pushed the stroller over to campus, a flyer in hand.

“Can you point me toward College Hall?” she asked a girl with close-cropped hair.

The girl stared back, then pulled out an earbud.

“Sorry,” Elisabeth said. “College Hall?”

The girl pointed to a red-brick building with turrets at the top.

Inside, the space was hushed, dim. Stephanie had told her there was a bulletin board where people from off campus could post requests for help. But the walls in front of her were lined with portraits of the school’s presidents—twelve somber-looking white men with varying degrees of hair loss and, at the end of the line, a black woman with a triumphant smile. Elisabeth stared at her until the baby squawked, a reminder of her purpose.

She turned a corner. There, between the open doors of the registrar’s office and Alumnae Relations, was a large corkboard, with papers pinned all over. One advertised a potluck supper at the local Presbyterian Church. Another, the need for volunteers at the animal shelter. Most were from mothers like her, looking for sitters, though unlike her, the others only wanted someone a few hours a week, or to call on date night.

As Elisabeth took it all in, a man’s voice broke the silence. The sound startled her.

He came into view a moment later. Silver haired, handsome, in a gray blazer and dark jeans, walking beside a student who wanted to know if it was possible to get an extension on a paper because, she said, her grandmother had died.

The man showed no sign of sympathy.

“I’ll need a copy of the obituary,” he said.

Harsh, Elisabeth thought. Peculiar.

You couldn’t marry a guy who taught at a women’s college. It would be like marrying a gynecologist. There was something pervy about it.

Or maybe there wasn’t.

For some time now, she’d been attempting to be less judgmental. While trying for a baby, she read a blog post about how a woman’s negative thoughts could harm her fertility. From then on, every time she wanted to say something judgy, Elisabeth said the word banana instead. There were entire days when her speech came out like a letter censored during World War II: “And I love my sister, but she can be so banana . I know this guy she’s dating is banana, but does she deserve anything but banana after that whole banana thing with the banana guy?”

One night she dreamed she gave birth to a banana.

—

Four potential sitters called in response to the ad. She had already ruled out three of them.

The first, Silvia, was, to Elisabeth’s surprise, not a student but a woman from El Salvador with grown kids of her own.

Silvia critiqued Elisabeth’s way of burping Gil; she suggested he was cold and should be wearing one more layer. This didn’t bother Elisabeth. Because she often believed she was the only person who knew what the baby needed, it was an interesting change of pace to have someone come along who thought she had no idea what she was doing.

She planned to offer Silvia the job, but at the last minute, Elisabeth thought to ask how she’d come across the flyer.

“I work nights, cleaning, at the college,” Silvia said. “I’ve been looking for a good second job.”

“But if you already work nights and you were to take this job, when would you sleep?”

“I don’t need much sleep. I’ll nap when the baby does.”

Was that normal? For a sitter to nap on the job?

Silvia looked Elisabeth up and down. “You sure that baby came out of you? You’re tiny.”

Other people had asked the same question, which Elisabeth presumed they meant as a compliment, but it felt accusatory. Though she was naturally thin and petite, her body was foreign to her now. The pouch of skin where her flat stomach had been. Her breasts, still small, yet newly droopy. Her hips were wider, her feet too big for certain shoes. All this, she knew, was supposed to be distasteful to her. It was, sometimes. But it was also the proof of what had happened in that body, the thing she had done that was somehow both ordinary and extraordinary.

The second candidate, a sophomore with a blue streak in her hair, answered her phone in the middle of the interview. She didn’t say, I’m sorry, I have to take this, it’s an emergency, she just held up a finger while Elisabeth was midsentence and said, “Hey.”

The third had only ever worked with older kids, as a camp counselor. She didn’t support the baby’s head when she held him. Elisabeth snatched Gil back, a tad overdramatic, and said she’d be in touch.

—

The fourth candidate was due at nine. She had sent an email in response to the ad, saying she had spent the previous summer working as a nanny in London. Elisabeth knew better than to get her hopes up, but she could not stop entertaining visions of Gil being adored by a loving, yet firm, British woman.

Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins.

Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp.

At five to the hour, Gil asleep on her shoulder, she watched a plump young brunette in a baggy T-shirt dress and flip-flops come up the block.

The girl walked past the house without slowing down.

Elisabeth decided it must not be her.

She had made coffee and put out muffins and croissants, as if she were hosting brunch. She did the same for the others. The girl with the blue streak in her hair had asked if she could take the leftover pastries to go.

Elisabeth had never interviewed anyone for a job before. When she was younger, she would have imagined that by the time she was doing so, she’d know how. That just being on this side of things conferred authority, control.

She pulled up her to-do list on her phone. Dinner at Faye and George’s. Shower. Babysitter. WRITE? She sometimes added things to the list that she had already done, so that she could check them off later. A question mark after an item meant there was no way she was going to do it.

The doorbell rang right at nine, and there stood the girl in the T-shirt dress, a huge smile on her face. Had she kept walking so she wouldn’t arrive early? Or had she gotten lost?