Lauren Holmes - Barbara the Slut and Other People

Finally Susanna got there and I walked out to meet her.

“How was everything?” she said.

“Good,” I said. “We had a pretty hard time with the homework.”

“It’ll get better,” she said. “He needs to get used to you.”

“I know,” I said, “but I was thinking that this might not be the best fit. By the time he gets used to me I’ll have to leave.”

“He’ll be fine,” she said. She started getting red.

“He was really upset with me,” I said. “Maybe it would be better if you looked for someone else.”

“Excuse me,” a woman called from the playground, “is this your daughter?” She was holding the hand of a little girl who was sobbing.

“No!” Susanna snapped. “I don’t even have a daughter!”

She turned back to me. “Well, we’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said. My heart was thumping. I went to my car and pulled out of the parking lot. I realized she hadn’t paid me, and if I wanted any money at all, I would have to go back. On the way home Silas called and I ended up going to his apartment. I didn’t want to because I was tired and in a bad mood, but he said he would take care of me, and he did. He made me a double-decker peanut butter and banana sandwich for dinner, and asked me what happened. I didn’t feel like talking about it, so I just told him that I hated babysitting and I was going to quit. When we were done eating he came around behind me and took out my hearing aids and started rubbing my head and my neck. He couldn’t have known that wearing the hearing aids made me tired, but it did. He rubbed my head and my neck and the day started to go away, and then he took off my shirt and unhooked my bra.

• • •

The next day on the way to Timmy’s school, I made a plan. As soon as I picked him up I was going to tell him the schedule for the day, and I was going to get him to agree to it. He clearly needed structure. I had also brought a camera, my two and a quarter camera, thinking at worst I could distract him with it, and at best I could take some pictures.

Timmy didn’t seem unhappy to see me, and I wondered if he had forgotten I was a jerk and if the day would be fine after all. We drove to speech therapy, and when we got there we had half an hour to kill. We went to a grocery store to get a snack, and Timmy somehow disappeared in the aisles. I tried to call his name in a calm voice, and finally I found him holding two half gallons of chocolate milk. I helped him put them back and I paid for our apples and waters and we left. Timmy wanted to eat in the graveyard across the street. I wanted to say no but I couldn’t think of a reason why not, other than that I didn’t want to. He saw me thinking and said, “My other babysitter takes me.”

“Fine,” I said.

We ate on a bench and then walked around and read the grave markers. It seemed like he really had been there before, because he had favorite graves.

“Look.” He brought me to three graves, one little and two big. “This one was a baby. And this is her mom and dad. The dad lived to be ninety-nine.”

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Wow.”

“You know what you could do?” I said. I took a piece of paper and a pencil out of his backpack and showed him how to rub over the letters to copy them to the paper.

“Isn’t that cool?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want to do that.”

“Okay,” I said.

When we got to speech, the therapist offered for me to come in, and said that Timmy’s other babysitters did, so they could help him at home. I explained that I was only going to be babysitting for a short time. I sat and read magazines in the waiting room. Susanna texted me to see if I could stay later. She said a work thing came up, and she would be so, so grateful if I could stay until nine thirty or ten. Bedtime would be easy, Timmy was good at it. I couldn’t decide what to do. It would ruin my plan to go straight to Silas’s to get fucked, but I was bad at saying no. Finally I texted her that I could stay but I had made plans to meet my boyfriend at eight thirty, and could he come hang out at their apartment with me. It felt wrong to say boyfriend, but I couldn’t really call him my rebound, or my animal sex.

Susanna wrote back that it was fine, and thank you so much. When speech therapy was over I drove Timmy home, and on the way I reminded him that he was going to have to do homework first thing.

“I know,” he said. “And then can I watch one show and then can we go to the playground again?”

“Sure,” I said. I was starting to feel bad about the day before. Now I thought that Timmy wasn’t so much of an asshole as a really stressed-out little kid. I could have done a better job with him if I’d been more prepared. But Susanna should have prepared me. Maybe she didn’t know to. Or maybe she decided not to, because there was no way I would have taken the job if she had.

Timmy did his homework peacefully and I warmed up his dinner and let him eat it in front of the TV. He sat on the floor with his face inches from the screen, and I wondered if that was just a bad habit, or if he could hear better that way. When I was a kid I could barely hear the TV, and then I got hearing aids and could hear more of it, and then I found out about closed captions and wondered why no one had ever mentioned or offered them before. It was amazing to read every word that everyone said.

“Do you ever watch with closed captions?” I said. “The words on the bottom of the screen?”

“I just like to listen,” he said.

I realized he probably couldn’t read fast enough for the captions, anyway.

I got my camera and took a picture of Timmy in front of the TV. The bottom left quarter of the frame was Timmy’s face and the bottom right quarter was the glowing TV, with only a thin line in between.

“Hey!” He whipped around when the shutter went off. I was surprised he heard it. He studied me and the camera and said, “Oh. That’s a big camera.”

“All cameras used to be this big,” I said. “Do you want to look through it? It makes square pictures.”

But he had already turned back to the TV. When the show ended we drove to the playground, and I let him play until the sun started to go down. On the way home we stopped to get ice cream, and in exchange I made Timmy promise that he was going to get right in the bath and then right into bed.

He did get right in the bath. He took his hearing aids off while I ran it for him, and then he got in and played. I waited for him to use soap and shampoo, and when he didn’t I realized I was going to have to write him a note. I went and got some paper and a marker and wrote WASH YOUR HAIR AND WASH EVERYWHERE WITH SOAP.

“Wash, your, hair, and, wash, every, where, with, soap,” he read, but he didn’t start washing anything.

He took the sign from me and submerged it in the water. He held it up. I rolled my eyes at him and held out my finger to say, “Wait.” I went and got my camera and he held the dripping sign in front of his face. I took the picture from the other side of the bathroom, with the whole tub and bar and shower curtain, and Timmy’s small wet chest and the bleeding letters.

I took the sign from him and threw it in the garbage. He grinned. I waited thirty seconds and wrote him a new note: HURRY UP!

I thought he was going to get mad but he read the words out loud again and smiled a goofy smile.

I poured him shampoo but he did nothing with it, so I scooped it out of his hand and washed his hair.

“Mm,” he said, leaning into my fingertips.

I rubbed his head a little longer and then rinsed his hair. I put a bar of soap in his hands and made washing motions under my arms and over my crotch. He thought this was hilarious.