the end of the story, he sees it end at the zoo. The characters: a single father, his daughter, and the nanny the father hired. The little girl sees the elephants and runs toward them. The father wants to smoke, but there’s the issue of the heart murmur and he’s uptight about dying. The nanny beside him is shorter, bolder, and more sure of herself. She wants to wrestle the story away from the worried father and even from the seven-year-old who hasn’t had a single break all story until the elephants. In someone else’s hands it might have become the little girl’s story but she has a lot to learn. He thinks her smiling satisfactorily while feeding the elephants won’t go over. The child is not changing, the adults are—and adults are the ones who read his work. Quickly, he directs the little girl to run toward the lion house and that’s the last the reader hears of her.
He stops the pen and considers the nanny. She’s sort of young, sort of sympathetic—she enjoys life. She’s been a good nanny and she doesn’t have a lot of money. She is right to wrestle the story away from that worrywart who secretively drinks. Also, women read more fiction than men, so it’s appealing for the woman to have the last laugh. Maybe she’ll reject the father sexually and still be a mother to his daughter. Then she will be free to roam and fantasize and eventually attract a certain type of refined man to complete her life—very akin to the author himself, he thinks. A man who sees the beauty in mothers, the supreme life-giving force that he has so embraced by dating mother after mother, until his last relationship with a woman who wasn’t a mother yet fancied herself one.
Was that the problem? No, it was more along the lines of her criticizing him and him writing science fiction to make money and stop the criticizing. But after one story sold and the criticism didn’t stop, he looked at his life and saw waste in himself and rot in her. He left her, leaving everything, even his writing desk, and moved into a friend’s house, thinking of the woman he held onto for so long and loved—that woman who was not a mother, but who could have been and even could have been the mother of his children. Who was she really? These are questions he thought he’d left behind, but he always carries them into the next piece, sci-fi or not. The way he tried to solve the problem of her was by creating another woman, a young nanny free and attractive, and now a mother, though her body never experienced the rigors—motherless children need mothers. The nanny feels kinship with the little girl—the nanny truly wants to give her the puppy she desires. He decides everything is perfect because the nanny character loves him, the writer, in an affirming way his former love could not. The hair color is black, not brown. She does not criticize, though she wants to be center stage, which he allows because she is so selfless—so bold, yet composed. She does not cry all the time, but is strong and not resentful. Soon, the little girl will be very taken by her new mother and will shrug off the early, mismanaged rearing of her inattentive father.
He ends it there. No-one can touch her—the nanny, in her new freedom. Is that the last line? It feels right and sitting on his friend’s couch for the last four hours, trying to figure out the end, he decides he can’t wait any longer for a better one, his coccyx really hurts. But a while later, he feels he should give the reader a small promise of just how happy this odd triad could be and changes the last line to, No-one could touch them. And in the middle of the night, coughing and feeling unwise and powerless in a strange room on a couch not meant for sleeping, he changes it to, No-one can touch him.