Oh, I don’t mean to imply that it started right that minute. The onset took much longer than that. But, really, it kind of did.
The first several months there, I had hardly any contact with Buster at all, nor with Alissa for that matter. Since Buster spent a large part of every year either in Washington or at the foreign embassy to which he had been posted, he was mostly at home only on weekends and sometimes not even then. As for Alissa, she was too busy being everything but a mother to be a mother; that’s what she had me for. And so, most of my dealings with them were through the daily notes Alissa left for me on the butcher block in the kitchen, a knife always stuck in the top of the note so that no stray wind could ever blow her precious words away, notes filled with instructions on nutrition and scheduling recommendations for Stevie and Kim.
“Five fruits and vegetables each and every day, Charlotte. Even with your math-challenged mind, you can count that high…right?”
“Fifteen minutes of TV in the morning and fifteen at night. That’s it. They don’t call it the idiot box for nothing…right?”
“That last piece of chocolate cheesecake is mine…right?”
There were times I thought there must be better uses for that sharp note-stabbing knife than the purpose it was being used for.
And so, before another day had passed following my interview with Alissa, my life began to be filled with the education of small children, with shopping for birthday parties and making sure granola bars and juice boxes were in backpacks, with tutus and Samurai violin lessons.
It didn’t take many more days to pass before I started to fall in love with those kids. It wasn’t so much that they were particularly charming, certainly Kim wasn’t, but there was something so vulnerable about their orphans-within-a-two-parent-household circumstances. If their parents would not pay enough attention to them, then I would let Stevie play with what little makeup I owned, I would learn how to play games involving balls and things so I could teach Kim how to play, too.
It may not have been anybody’s idea of the Ideal Life, but it had become my life and it was sufficient.
The bedroom they gave me was in the far corner of the penthouse, a tiny box of a room—see? I had guessed that would happen!—that I suspected had been meant as an extra storage closet. It wasn’t so bad, though, not like what I imagined would be the airless, lightless, spiderweb-infested lodgings of any nanny living in the suburbs. I had a bed, a lamp to read by, there was even a TV, if I were so inclined, which I rarely was. So what if the room was a shade of yellow I detested; I was too timid to complain.
All households with small children have their routines. But the Keating household really didn’t have a routine that involved both parents and children for six out of the seven days of the week.
The only thing Alissa could be depended upon to do with her children was to take them out on Saturday afternoons. They invariably left at 1:00 p.m. and would remain gone for three to four hours, no more, never less. Their routine was also invariable: lunch at a kid-friendly restaurant like Rumpelmeyer’s, a visit to the toy store FAO Schwarz when it was still there, the big Toys “R” Us when it replaced the other and a final stop at some educational place, the planetarium or the Museum of Natural History.
The first few Saturdays that Alissa took the kids out for their afternoon outing passed unexceptionally. Even though I had told myself I would spend my three hours off a week working on writing something, anything, I instead met my own friends for lunch and shopping, Helen and Grace, my closest girlfriends.
Take care of kids for 165 hours; eat, shop for three. Take care of kids for 165 hours; eat, shop for three. If nothing else, the routine that I was forced to follow was improving my math skills.
But then a Saturday came when I woke with a stomach bug, leaving me no choice but to complete the remaining three of the 168-hour weekly cycle in my room, with no more than golf on the tiny TV to keep me company.
Then a knock came at the door and I suddenly had company.
“May I come in?” Buster poked his head around the door. “I didn’t hear you leave today so I thought you might be in here. Are you unwell?”
It seemed such a formal way to phrase the question—“Are you unwell?”—formal and utterly charming.
And when he came all the way around the doorway, the tray in his hands containing a Lenox bowl of chicken soup and a SpongeBob SquarePants plastic glass with a straw in it, he needed to do no more to sweep me away.
Even if I was lying down, he still swept me away.
“I just figured that—” he smiled sheepishly like a wolf “—even the girl who takes care of everyone else needs someone to take care of her sometimes.”
See what I mean?
When I had trouble sitting up, he set the tray gently on the floor and even more gently helped me, arranging the pillows behind me.
He even fed me with the spoon.
“Shh,” he said when I started to protest.
It just seemed so unseemly, my ambassador boss treating me with more tenderness than I’d ever seen him show to, well, his own children. It was inconceivable that he’d ever behaved so with Alissa.
“One day, when you’re feeling better, maybe I’ll let you take a turn and you can feed me.”
Combined with my feverish state, the image he’d put in my mind of me feeding him caused me to snort, which in turn caused the chicken soup that had been in my mouth to spray out my nose.
I must have seemed a charming companion.
Red-faced, I finished being fed in silence.
Afterward, he dabbed at my mouth, then eased me back down upon the pillows, smoothing the sheet over me.
“Would you rather be alone,” he asked, then paused before adding hopefully, “or would you like some company?”
All of a sudden, I hated the thought of being alone in that yellow room with nothing but golf, which I could neither stand nor understand, for company.
“Some company would be okay,” I said tentatively, “I guess.”
Aside from the narrow twin bed, the only other seating in the yellow room was an uncomfortable armchair with unpredictable springs that I only used late at night to sit at my desk, trying to convince myself I could someday be a writer.
Buster looked the question “May I?” And before I knew it, he had pulled the uncomfortable seat up alongside the bed, settling himself into it, despite that he dwarfed the thing.
“Do you know much about golf?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“It’s a silly game,” he said. “Useful, though. Would you rather watch or talk?”
“Talk would be good,” I said, “I guess.”
The chicken soup and juice had revived me enough so that I was wanting to cringe for having nothing better to say than “I guess” at the end of every response. In fact, I found myself hoping that I’d be interesting enough to command the attention of a handsome ambassador, even a married one.
He got up, switched off the set—there was nothing so exotic as a remote control for the nanny, certainly not one that worked—and sat back down again.
And then we talked.
Mostly, he talked, I should say, about his exciting career, about the books he liked to read. And yet, even though he did most of the talking, it felt as though we talked a lot about me. He would ask a question, like, “So what was it like, being on television in all those commercials at such a young age?” And then, when I mealymouthed with, “It was okay…I guess,” he amplified my answer with, “I know it must have been surprising.