CHAPTER TEN

The Servant

The child’s voice has come loose.

It is somewhere at the center of the night, a lost thing, this imploring cry: Mama, Mama, Mama.

Daddy gets up and goes to her, wandering through the nightlands. But tonight she sobs and says, Mama, Mama. And then there is nothing to do: Hand finds its way to the covers, peels them back, the warmth coming away in a soft, thick layer. Feet find their way out of dreams, midair to the floor. Pushing up, assembling bones upright, pushing against the downward currents of sleep. Push, push. Bones straightening. The rooms shifting to starboard as if in a gust of seawind. Wavering in her doorway, whisper, “Yes, Baby?”

“Mama, I’m hungry.” Plaintive.

The kitchen at the other end of the nightlands, barely lit: a digital clock, a computer switch, scattered and rare dots of light, the windows of a small town in the evening. Pat the counters, half-blind, eyes nearly shut, until hand closes on something.

Back in her room, soft with the smell of sleep. “Here, Baby.” Give her the opened banana.

She pulls back the covers. “Mama, come in,” she murmurs.

Obey. This is who I am now: My service has sunk into me, deep down, knit to the bones, to my very name. I am hers, possession and servant. Lie down. Her head rests on my shoulder and there are the tiny sounds of eating. Neither of us speaks. We belong to each other. Within six bites, she melts back into sleep. Her hand and half a banana float on my ribs.

Both of us asleep.

But what is her title—babysitter or nanny or caretaker? She is not family or even, yet, friend.

Her name is Soledad, but she says we should call her Janet. She’s twenty. She’s attending Miami–Dade and wants to be a doctor someday, or a flight attendant, maybe—she is having some trouble in organic chemistry. Her hobbies include swimming and shopping online. She cooks, she tells us, ticking off her kid specialties, “macaroni and cheese—frozen and box types; chicken fingers—just frozen; and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” Her smile draws her face into deep dimples. She comes bequeathed to us from a friend of a friend, who calls her the “Cuban Mary Poppins.”

“Can you speak Spanish?” I lean forward on the couch.

She crosses her arms and legs, foot bobbing. “Like, if I totally have to?” Her mother is from Cuba, her father is Nicaraguan, and she is “one hundred percent Miami-girl.”

I nod with enthusiasm, tell her about my dread of Bud’s daily Arabic lessons—the rote memorization and repetition of formal phrases; his attempts to enforce our identity. I sling my legs over the couch arm, act like we’re already pals, have known each other forever. Grace lounges on the couch cushions, twinkling at the new sitter. Janet pounces on her. “Look at the princess!” She lifts Gracie, nuzzling her neck. “I can’t wait to have kids. I’m gonna have a million!”

She shows up for work swathed in perfume, outfitted in Miami-wear I describe to a friend as stripper casual. Clinging T-shirts with plunging necklines and Versace-esque cutouts. Miniskirts of layered fishnet with opaque leggings. Painted-on jeans, nude heels, glittery bangles, as well as baby-exciting necklaces known around here as mommy-nooses. She pushes Gracie—wailing—up the street in her stroller. Riveted to the window, we watch them amble away.

Scott puts an arm around my shoulder. “There goes our daughter with a total stranger.”

I stare until they turn the corner at the end of our block and briefly consider tailing them in the car. I go to my office, sit bolt upright at my desk; next thing I know, I’m in the kitchen making pretzels.

Over the years, I’ve lost the habit of eating ice cream for breakfast, but my baking has only increased. And this process feels as good as a stretch—all that kneading, squashing, smashing, rolling dough on the cutting board, tying pieces into knots, throwing them in boiling water. It’s one of Grace’s old anxiety cures. Out of the oven, the tray of pretzels gets brushed with butter, sprinkled with coarse salt. When they return, Janet leaves Gracie in her stroller and heads straight to the kitchen. She eats three pretzels in a row, murmuring, “You made these?” During the first week with Janet, I bake pretzels every day. Very slowly, my fretting dissipates; my head wanders back to the new novel, working out questions of motivation and structure. I push the dough, fold it, push, and the mindless movements draw the thoughts forward through my arms. On the third week with our babysitter, I skip a day of baking. Janet stands in the kitchen, staring as I pour a cup of tea, and finally says, “Where are the pretzels?”

I am learning something about serving, which is that when you become a good servant, it is tempting to bow to everyone. Especially when you’re new on the job. I try not to be obvious when I tidy up after her—wait till they’re on their walk before collecting the dishes she leaves here and there, little piles of crumbs like the Hansel and Gretel trail. She straightens not a thing, leaves mostly ruin in her wake, and during the hours that Gracie sleeps, she stretches out on the couch, languidly clicking through shopping websites. I half-admire her; she might be a babysitter, but she is not a servant.

I stock Janet’s favorite coffee, call her mother if she’s caught in traffic on the way home, worry if she’s forgotten her umbrella, buy her a pair of more comfortable shoes. There is also a lot of listening. Janet has personal problems. Her boyfriend has moved in with her and her family and he’s “causing issues” with her mother. Her mother’s own boyfriend is, she says, “a boss” who tells her to study more. Her father wants her to move back to Nicaragua and wait on him. One day she arrives red-eyed and sniffling: Her family is maybe about to be evicted. Her mother’s second ex-husband is demanding an equal division of all their assets. Her mother isn’t able to afford to buy his half of the house; unless she allows the ex-husband and his mother to move back in, the eight of them must go.

“Go?” I perch on the footstool across from her. “To where?”

She rubs the back of one plump hand under her nose. She has a lavish figure, her skin smooth as an olive. When she’s agitated, she draws her black hair forward on to one shoulder and pulls it through her fingers as if stroking a cat. She tips back on the couch, stroking her hair, skirt inched up her plump thighs. “My mom’s got a friend in Kendall with three-bedroom apartment over her garage. She says we could move in there.”

But there are so many of them! Later, I wonder quietly if we should offer to let Janet sleep on our couch, and Scott smiles and says, “Absolutely not.” He doesn’t like the “endless problems,” her “telenovela life.” For all our talking and proximity, we are still scarcely more than acquaintances. Recently, when Janet was out walking Gracie, our excitable neighbor Ines—whom Scott and I call “the neighborhood watch,” came rushing over.

“Some girl has gone off with your daughter!”

“No, that’s Janet. The babysitter.”

Ines scowled. “She’s from where, that girl?”

“Here. Hialeah.”

Ines stared at me.

“Her father is from Nicaragua, her mother is Cuban.”

Her scowl deepened. Ines is Cuban. “That is what she told you? With hair like that? She’s some kind of Indios.” She pulled down one lower lid with an index finger. “Keep an eye out.”

The telenovela continues. We don’t know from one day to the next if Janet will show up for work with a mascara-tracked face or even show up at all. Scott begins to say things about “moving her along.” But after several months together, I’m used to her. Spending entire days with someone in your house is a lot like living with them, even if you don’t know each other very well. Almost without noticing, and against my better judgment, I’ve developed a fondness for Janet. I’d seen it in all sorts of families—it’s the child with the grubby, teary face, the unemployable cousin, the trying auntie who gets the most money or help or love. The virtuous ones are too self-sustaining, too functional—what do they need? The ones with the problems always have their arms out for hugs.

Because I can’t think what else to do to help, I begin making big pots of food in the afternoon and sending Janet home with bowls of pasta carbonara, meatballs, spicy chili, lentil soup. Her mother has allowed her ex-husband and Mami to move back in, and now he works with the boyfriend in his landscaping business. According to Janet, somehow they’re all getting along “very lovely.” But not even Mami wants to do the cooking. Through the kitchen wall, I hear the sounds of Janet singing, reading, chanting rhymes to Gracie. The minute actions of slipping skin from the garlic, washing lettuce, and stirring a roux or risotto steady the mind, release imagination. I jot book notes on the backs of recipe cards—details, plot points, fragments of metaphors, images.

Gradually, a writing life reassembles itself within the form of this new life. When Janet arrives, I turn on the slow cooker, gather up a book bag, and walk to a café. There are new hours to spend, let loose in the imagination, hunched above a coffee mug, walking home in the late afternoon with new pages. The Miami sun is brassy, a razor burn on the back of the neck. A hundred familiar scents float in the shade, and I’m transported right back: childhood, little hamlet outside of Syracuse, climbing off the school bus into the smell of baking milkweed, pussy willow, Queen Anne’s lace, the house filled with younger sisters and cousins waiting to be entertained.

Even when I was nine, conjuring up and describing to Aunt Aya my single life in airplanes above the cities and houses and sidewalks, I never pictured doing it alone: Someone in this dream-life always flew with me—a partner or friends. There would be an imaginary backdrop of parties, crowds next door. I wanted children—just beyond arm’s reach—a sociable introvert’s dilemma. Laziest of servants, I had only one entertainment to offer when I was a babysitter. After school and on the weekends, my younger sisters, cousins, and I were regulars at Flamingo Bowl. We wore the rented bowling shoes, creased by generations of children. Sprawled at our lane while Suzy kept score, Monica, Ibtissam, Dalia, and Farhad all rolled two-handed, slow-rolling strikes and spares. I brought composition notebooks along, slouched in the molded seats, drank root beer, dragged fries through lakes of ketchup, and wrote stories about escaping. The crashing waves of balls and pins and spilled sodas and pretzels all hovered at the edges, just beyond thought. I felt them around me, the small faces, the dark slices of their eyes, a nearby humming energy.

Who is the served and who is the servant? What I learn and relearn is they’re inseparable, and frequently, quietly, they change places. The roles are unfixed, despite class, education, gender, despite anything. The one requires the other.

Janet takes home plastic containers almost every night, returns them empty. She requests dishes that I don’t know how to make: ropa vieja, empanadas, and roasted pork chunks. I work on vanilla-scented flan, guava pastellitos, tres leches. One night, I hand her a cooling loaf of sweet Cuban bread. The next day, she tells me that they’d eaten it but I hadn’t used the right flour. She gives me a cookbook, Eat Caribbean, saying, “I thought, since you like cooking, you might like to learn more.” The book’s edges are ruffled with Post-it notes: “These here are our favorites.”

I spend the weekend cooking and paging through the book, trying to figure out the proportions for twelve servings. “Maybe I should just triple everything?”

“When did we open a restaurant?” Scott responds, peering into a bubbling pot.

One Monday, an hour after Janet’s usual starting time, she sends a text: “Found new house. Moving to Pensacola. Sorry.” Her cookbook lies on the kitchen counter.

That cobbled-together work life goes up in a whoosh. Scott is amazed. “How could she leave us? We paid her to nap on the couch and shop.” I compose many different letters to her in my head in varying shades of pleading. Upset as I am about losing writing time, I’m more shaken by the sense of abandonment—it’d felt like Janet had grown into the shape of our lives. I find I miss waiting on her, miss picking up her plates and worrying about her family. We barely knew each other, yet we leaned on each other—weren’t a lot of families like that? After Janet’s departure, I begin to appreciate her labor a little more. Toys and picture books drift unmoored around the house. Scott and I start leaving crumb-filled plates in every room, creating our own fairy-tale path. Eventually, a couple of our worried neighbors send their daughter over, a teenager with a clear, intelligent gaze, a kind voice; she wears T-shirts and running shoes. She brings her own meals and rinses off her plates.

Writing comes back in the smallest dribs and drabs—sentence, paragraph. I’m careful, afraid these restored working hours will be yanked away like a magician’s tablecloth. One word at a time, I reenter the manuscript. My process is attenuated but still in motion—increasing as Grace begins to sleep better. Scott takes over nights entirely and the work picks up.

One day, a new novel arrives at the house in big cartons, the cover a woman’s face consumed by shadow. I take one off the top and stare at it, surprised it exists, this confirmation that it’s possible to do more than one thing at a time. I open it and sign one for Janet, Thank you for this.

Janet got me started. That extra nudge that rolls the wheel.

Now, I sit outside at the café table with my notebook. I’ll stay here and work until I can’t see the ink. In the distance, bundled dark clouds move continents across the sky; far-off thunder murmurs in the ground, but up close a moth opens black wings, tumbling through the wind, playing, it seems, around the edges of the storm.