Because I Said So (42 page)

doing much the same unmonitored, in-home tending that had flourished in my childhood during the 1950s, when the term

“babysitter” first made it into the dictionary—only for me and my friends, the proto-parenting was happening against a backdrop of feminist and family turmoil that was headed who knew where.

For Clare, I’m struck by how the landscape has changed.

Occasionally, she does have old-style neighborhood jobs, and she’s a hit in part because having “big girl Clare” come is such an exciting departure from the usual round of grownup guardians (often the nanny network) that most parents I know use—so exciting, in fact, that two kids around the corner, when they learn that Clare’s on for the evening, clamor to come over hours early to get her. But for the most part, like so much else in her life, from sports to playdates, babysitting for her has all but ceased to be an improvisational, unsupervised pursuit—a chance to write the rules for an afternoon or evening, to tyrannize and empathize on her own terms, to infiltrate another family, however briefly. There are no tipsy dads chauffeuring her, just her own familiar mother shuttling her to and fro.

So what is it, exactly, that draws a girl with a packed extracurricular schedule to the institutionalized, organized, adult-directed work she does across town, I’ve wondered? Not surprisingly, the Martha’s Table staff welcomed Clare back for another week under the impression that she was polishing off some community service requirement or other: that is de rigueur on the résumés kids these days are busy burnishing well before the college crunch arrives (and it’s what keeps Martha’s Table going—

waves of volunteers meeting assorted standards of do-goodism).

“Don’t forget to give us whatever paperwork you’d like us to fill out,” the day-care director told us as we stopped by her office on the way out one afternoon. I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t considered the possible future cachet of this highly presentable pastime of Clare’s; I had even briefly wondered whether it might have occurred to my super-conscientious child, too. I wondered again that day as I paused to watch her through the glass-windowed door
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of Classroom A before collecting her in the nap-time lull. There she sat, studiously filing each kid’s daily form (about meals, activities, behavior) in the right take-home bin—a day-care bureau-crat, worlds away from the undercover agent I’d imagined I was.

But I could tell from the utterly blank look Clare gave the director that the last thing on her mind was some take-home form attesting to
her
performance or, for that matter, any need to explain her presence there on her vacation. “See you tomorrow,”

she said in the cheerfully polite tone she’s cultivated for convers-ing with adults, and left with me at her heels. I picked up some news on the way to the car. Zachary had acted up on the class walk that day, because Clare had been asked to hold two other kids’ hands. Javier, she was pleased to report, had finally spoken up in circle time. My girl then sighed a little like a beleaguered mother, saying she was tired, and flicked on the radio as usual.

I guess I shouldn’t have
been surprised that when we got home she didn’t want to curl up for a mother-daughter reading of
Jane Eyre—
the novel about a “raw school-girl governess” that had mesmerized me back when I was beginning my babysitting career. Even for my bookish daughter, that was carrying spring break enrichment too far. (“Family reading,” which we used to squeeze in, lately makes her roll her eyes.) Together we’d gotten through poor orphan Jane’s red room ordeals at the hands of the heartless Reed clan, and met Bessie, a raw unschooled nursemaid herself. Barely more than a child, Bessie was a capricious yet kindhearted source of comfort before Jane was cast out, first to the cruelest of “charitable” schools and then to “earn the dependent’s crust among strangers.”

From there I carried on alone, and rereading, I couldn’t help wondering how much of Brontë’s subversive portrait of unprotected childhood I had truly absorbed at twelve. Half waif, half wise witness left adrift in a bleak world, Jane had hovered over my rather gothic investigation of dark passions behind the doors of adulthood—

but of course there had been no haunted attics or craggy, love-struck
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employers in my babysitting adventures. When Mr. Rochester sighed to Jane, “You Neophyte, that have not passed the porch of life, and are absolutely unacquainted with its mysteries,” I think I remember feeling that she, and I, knew it was not so simple as her enamored “master” thought. In truth, though, I had barely peered into the vestibule of life. What Clare would have made of Brontë’s insight into the brutal drama of dependency and thwarted intimacy, I realized I really had no idea.

And as I thought about it, I wasn’t entirely disappointed that she put the book off. It had never struck me before how spooked some of my favorite writers have been by the spectacle of vigorous, virginal caretakers dispatched into the corrupt adult world—

and if Clare wasn’t yet drawn in by Brontë’s ur-tale on the sexually charged theme, maybe so much the better. From anti–child labor crusades to latchkey-kid panic, irregular custodial arrangements for children have aroused alarm for more than a century—

and inspired some haunting fiction. Literally haunting, if you think of Henry James’s
The Turn of the Screw
, a very different story about a “young and pretty” governess and ill-fated orphans, in which who can say where innocence ends and depravity begins?

Compared with her friend James, and with Brontë, Edith Wharton was astutely satiric rather than gothic in her exploration of precocious—and precarious—nurture in
The Children
(1928), a book of hers I had belatedly stumbled on. Her title, it’s immediately clear, applies not just to the wandering tribe of siblings at the center of the novel, but also to their elders—divorce-prone American parents too distracted to be bothered with the offspring produced by their convoluted (often trans-Atlantic) affairs.

Wharton’s fifteen-year-old “little mother,” Judith, the eldest of eight, steps up as “playmate, mother and governess all in one; and the best of each in its way,” joining Jane Eyre as a valiant survivor of adult negligence. “If children don’t look after each other, who’s going to do it for them?” she says as she shepherds her flock from crisis to crisis. “You can’t expect parents to, when they don’t know how to look after themselves.” In the Brontë tradition,
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Wharton plants a middle-aged male admirer at the heart of the story, drawn by Judith’s uncanny blend of competence and innocence. Yet is he protector or predator? He’s certainly no Mr.

Rochester, and in the end Wharton doesn’t hold out very promising prospects for a weary Judith and her juniors, forced to grow up too soon.

Even (or especially) in the family-focused 1950s, when the spectacle of young parents-in-training fit the postwar ideal of domesticity, Brontë’s insight into the power of young interlopers to upset domestic harmony and hierarchy lived on as a literary theme. The scene of Francis Weed, swiftly kissed by the babysitter he’s been lusting after as he drives her home, is so vividly lodged in my head that I’d almost swear I was an impressionable babysitter myself when I first read John Cheever’s story “The Country Husband,” which won the O. Henry Award in 1956 (the year I was born). But of course I must have been older, not least because I remember being struck by Cheever’s prescience about suburban suffocation: he had diagnosed the male version of Friedan’s problem that has no name.

Well before
The Feminine Mystique
(and before, as the story notes, divorce had come to his fictional Shady Hill), Cheever evoked a quietly disenchanted couple whose scripted routines get derailed by a night visitor—a sitter who is not “the old lady who usually stayed with the children” but a young girl, “frowning and beautiful.” In the fable-like story, she offers the illusion of liberation: Francis is swept up in a passionate infatuation. But Cheever has frustration in store. Husband and wife briefly rebel against their daily rounds and roles, only to end up clinging to each other in childlike dependence. And the babysitter, catalyst though she is of glowing fantasies, is hemmed in herself. Saddled with a father who’s “a terrible rummy,” she has a jobless—and hapless—fiancé‚

who can’t wait to marry and “have a large family.”

Thank God I didn’t hear of Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter,” which came out in 1969, when I was still a novice at the job. What a jolt the intervening decade had delivered: Cheever’s wistful parable is reborn as a disorienting horror story.

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In cross-cutting scenes of mounting mayhem, Coover lets every character’s consciousness loose to spin out libidinal fantasies. As the TV flickers and jangles in the background and the phone keeps ringing, the suburban house fills up with the conflicting, converging urges that grip the babysitter’s edgy boyfriend and his sinister buddy, the blubbery drunken father, the keyed-up kids and screaming baby, and the hormonally supercharged babysitter herself. Violence erupts, and Coover’s surreal montage poses a disconcerting question: Is what’s happening fantasy or not?

I didn’t see the movie version of Coover’s story when it appeared in 1995 either. (It’s an adaptation, I gather, in the terrifying tradition of
When a Stranger Calls
of 1979, which popularized the chilling refrain, “Have you checked the children?”) Back in the babysitting market by then, this time on the employer end, I knew enough to steer clear—and to expect getting more than my quota of sitter horror stories from the newspaper. In 1997, even dogged efforts to avoid bad childcare news (and isn’t the most unnerved mother, and father, among us in fact perversely drawn to it?), were futile in the face of nightmares no novelist would dare invent. It was a Kennedy—one of RFK’s sons, Michael—to emerge that spring as the ultimate dad-you-don’t-trust-to-drive-the-babysitter-home.

He’d begun a four-year affair with a family babysitter when she was fourteen, just the age of the Catholic girl two doors down from us who giggled irrepressibly (and ate voraciously) whenever she came over to watch our kids. A few months later came the murder trial of an eighteen-year-old British au pair, Louise Woodward, charged with shaking her infant charge to death—an anti–Mary Poppins drama that kept Americans riveted.

By these standards, Alice McDermott’s novel of a couple of years ago about a fifteen-year-old star babysitter,
Child of My
Heart
, hardly rates as shocking, I suppose. “If my husband tries to fuck you while I’m gone, don’t be frightened. He’s an old man, and he drinks. Chances are it will be brief”: though those parting words, delivered by the mother who leaves her baby in young Theresa’s care, ring harshly in the early 1960s setting of the story, of course I’d heard a lot worse. Still, with my then sixth grader
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beginning to get a few calls for nearby jobs, McDermott’s novel struck me as particularly unsettling. Theresa’s first-person reminiscence of one freighted summer of child care— a sort of portrait of the artist as a young babysitter—hit a nerve as my newly independent daughter headed out among strangers.

Here was a curiously lyrical summation of the long-standing fear, and allure, at the heart of the babysitting saga: the secret of family bonds isn’t simply, or mostly, bliss and safety, but loss—of freedom, of control, even of innocent trust. It’s a secret that adults generally try to keep from children, yet can’t help betraying—

certainly to adolescents intent on discovering it for themselves.

McDermott’s mellifluous delivery makes the message, if anything, seem more ominous—and timeless. Parents can behave like capricious children (that mother in the novel absconds to New York City for weeks, her artist husband is indeed horny and rummy, and every other adult is somehow adrift). Even model adolescents like Theresa are elusive, and transgressive, creatures. And vulnerable children are at the mercy of both. In McDermott’s Long Island enclave, domestic responsibility has a way of deadening creativity and breeding cruelty. Yet it also inspires curiosity and empathy, and her babysitter narrator (a
Jane Eyre
fan) is a reminder that young interlopers in the lives of others can be busy honing their imaginative gifts.

So perhaps it was perverse of me to balk when Clare, then eleven, picked up McDermott’s novel—the two lollipops on its cover made it look almost like preteen fare—when I’d just put it down. I knew the flap copy would draw my eager reader in.

“Theresa is . . . a wonder with children and animals—but also a solitary soul already attuned to the paradoxes and compromises of adult life”: it sounded almost like a profile of my girl, an uncanny analyst of character and, as it happened, a petless child devoted to dogs. What lay behind my protective urge, when I thought about it, wasn’t a desire to cosset Clare or play censor, but the opposite. Let her launch her babysitting career on her own, without a writer’s vision in her head—without yet more adult apprehension hedging her in.

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After all, it isn’t that I thought the mother’s warning to Theresa would be all that jarring, even to a young reader like Clare. Inevitably, she’s been steeped in PG-13 entertainment and has read her share of young adult “problem” literature drenched in family dysfunction. She’s well armed with the latest enlighten-ment on such topics as sexual harassment, child abuse, date rape.

(As for the actual deflowering scene, which is brief indeed, Judy Blume gets more graphic than that.) But that’s precisely why I bothered to put away McDermott’s book, a Brontë-inspired story shadowed not just by sex but by a child’s death. Kids today have been reared on public warnings about endangered childhood, embattled parenthood, marital woes, harried households—a legacy not just of the fraught era of my adolescence but of decades of mounting alarm about the eroding home. What heartens me about my daughter’s caretaking spirit is how undaunted, and unhaunted, she is.