The Richest Babysitter in the World
During the interview, I realized almost immediately that the woman was pregnant—I guessed she was about halfway along—but she didn’t remark on it, and of course neither did I. Over the phone, we’d discussed only her 3-year-old daughter. The woman, whose name was Diane, was looking for a babysitter for the girl, whose name was Sophie, two mornings a week from 9 a.m. to noon, for $10 an hour. This was in late January 1997, my senior year at U-Dub—the University of Washington—and I’d seen the job advertised on an index card pinned to the bulletin board outside the career center, the information in tidy blue cursive.
We met for the interview at a café near campus, after describing ourselves over the phone. She’d said, “I’m 5’4, and I have tortoiseshell glasses and light-brown hair cut in a bob.”
Having never previously described my appearance to a stranger, I hesitated before saying, “I’m 5’9, and I have light-brown hair too, but curly. And no glasses.”
When I entered the café, I looked around, and a woman with light-brown hair and glasses waved. When I reached the table where she sat, she smiled. “Kit?” I nodded, and she held her hand to her chest and, in a quiet voice, said, “Diane.” Still quietly, she thanked me for coming and asked if I’d like something to drink. “My treat,” she added, and it was when she reached for her wallet and passed me a $5 bill that I noticed the hard swell of her belly beneath a loose black sweater.
I went to the counter and ordered a cappuccino, and back at the table, I dropped the dollar bill and change in front of Diane more gracelessly than I’d intended. Then I sat down again.
She asked, then apologized for asking, whether I knew what I was doing after graduation (moving to Tucson with a friend, and, as soon as I was eligible for in-state tuition, applying to law school at the University of Arizona); whether I was from Seattle (no, but Olympia, so not too far); and whether I had brothers or sisters (when I said yes, seven of them, she seemed so startled that I added, as I did whenever people found this fact distractingly surprising, that they all were younger half siblings from my parents’ remarriages to other people). Only then did Diane inquire about my babysitting experience. After I described working informally for families in my mom’s neighborhood starting at the age of 13 and officially nannying the previous summer for twin infants and the summer before that for a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old, she said, “You sound more than qualified to watch Sophie. I’m trying to finish up my dissertation for a doctorate in art history. I did the coursework when we lived in New York, and now I just need to write the last two chapters. Sophie goes to preschool Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but you’d come the other mornings and, if this works with your schedule, the occasional Saturday night. Not every week, though. My husband usually works on the weekends.”
Was the job mine? I hoped so. The job I already had, which was 15 hours a week in the office of a vice provost, mostly involved transcribing letters dictated by the vice provost on mini cassette tapes. I listened to the tapes via headphones connected to a machine made for this purpose, whose main body sat on a desk with a foot pump down below that I could tap to rewind the tape several seconds. To indicate formatting, the vice provost, whom I never spoke with directly, would say, “Period, paragraph,” and the words period, paragraph often accompanied me through the other parts of my life, as did the smell of the office, which was a combination of copy-machine ink, coffee, and the fake rose perfume of the secretary to whom I reported, who’d worked there for more than 30 years. The secretary was nice, and I hated transcribing, hated the office’s smell, and earned $5.80 an hour, after annual raises on the $4.75 I’d been making when I’d started as a freshman. Even if Diane hired me, I’d hold on to the administrative job—I needed to buy half a car by June—but the babysitting position seemed tantalizingly, almost suspiciously lucrative.
Then Diane said, “Did you bring a résumé? I’d like to call your references as soon as possible.”
“Oh, I don’t have that on me.” I chose not to mention that I didn’t have a résumé anywhere else, either. “But I can get phone numbers to you later today.”
“Do you have a car?”
Buying the car was the reason I’d started checking the career-center bulletin board. Together with my housemate Kevin, who was not exactly my friend and also unfortunately not my boyfriend, I was, for $2,000, going to purchase from a third housemate a navy-blue Ford Taurus with 80,000 miles on it. Kevin and I would drive it to Tucson, where he was from, and share it once we got there, which seemed to me to be thrillingly like something a married couple would do, as if we were simply vaulting over the dating phase. To Diane, I said, “I have a bike.”
Diane’s brow furrowed briefly, but then she said, “I think that should be fine. We live close to campus, in Ravenna. Would you be free to come over tomorrow morning to meet Sophie, so we can see if it’s a good fit? It could just be for half an hour, but I’ll pay you for two hours.”
I thought. Several times I’d been left to look after kids whose
