SUSAN CHEEVER
Dominique came to New York eight years ago, but she says it would take a lifetime to figure out New Yorkers. We teach our kids that money can’t buy love, and then we go right ahead and buy it for them—hiring strangers to love them, because we have more important things to do. “You are workaholics, that’s for sure,” she tells me, in the lilting island accent she uses for unpleasant truths. “It’s work, work, work with you, and money, money, money. You analyze every little stupid thing, and then you run off to some therapist to get the answers.” She shakes her head and laughs, fiddling with a red plastic Thunderzord my five-year-old son has left on the table. Strangest of all, she says, we supersmart New Yorkers are afraid of our children—afraid to say no, afraid to deny them anything that other kids have. “It’s hard for the nannies to adjust to our New York way,” says Eileen Stein of Town & Country, an agency that has placed Dominique in several jobs. “Here children are the boss. The children run the home. The parents let the children do whatever they want.”
If there’s a good woman behind every great man, behind every great woman there’s a good nanny. The restructuring of the American family has created a huge demand for child care. According to a 1992 Department of
Consumer Affairs report that calls the nanny-placement industry a “free-for-all,” there are almost 400,000 children under thirteen in New York City whose parents both work, and fewer than 100,000 places for them in after-school and day-care programs. The demand for child care at home has been met by an unregulated patchwork of agencies, a few experienced nannies, and thousands of immigrant women looking for jobs that require no training, no degrees, and, often, no papers. “It’s hard to make a living back home,” says Dominique, who came from Trinidad on a tourist visa when she was twenty, leaving behind a job that paid the equivalent of $130 a week. “Working here and sending money home is the only way I can take care of my family.”
This collision of necessity and need is a disaster for working mothers, who have to find reliable child care in an unreliable market, and for the nannies who work for them with no protection or guarantees. Many New York nannies are from the Caribbean—Trinidad, Jamaica, other islands of the West Indies—but there are thousands of Philippine, Irish, and South and Central American nannies, too. (A nanny is a full-time worker who lives in or out and is paid between $250 and $600 a week. A baby nurse lives in for twenty-four hours a day during the first weeks of an infant’s life and gets $100 a day or more.) Usually, nannies arrive with visas that are valid for a few months. But finding a good legal nanny is so difficult that many families are willing to break the law. And agencies sometimes lie about the legal status of the nannies they place.
Dominique is lucky; she got her green card through one of the first families she worked for. But in eight years she has had eight jobs—some good, some bad, some ugly. These days, she lives in Brooklyn—like most nannies, she can’t afford Manhattan rents—and works for a professional couple who live with their two children in a big postwar building on East Eighty-sixth Street. She has worked in Greenwich Village (she loves it), on the Upper West Side (she hates it), and in the suburbs (trapped!). From 1992 to 1994, she worked for me, taking care of my two children. I had always thought of myself as the perfect employer; when I interviewed Dominique for this article—in which I have changed some names and identifying details—she gently set me straight.
Dominique’s morning begins in the dark, in the heart of Brooklyn. She switches on CD 101.9 radio and Channel 5 TV (Good Day New York), and
slides a worn Bible out from under her pillow. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow,” she reads. “They toil not, neither do they spin.” It’s 6:08 A.M., and the temperature is thirty-six degrees. There are tie-ups on the George Washington Bridge and ten-minute delays on the Lexington Avenue line. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow,” she reads. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Her apartment, a studio that costs $504 a month, is sparsely furnished, with a glass-topped dining room table and chairs from Workbench, and a bed; Dominique would rather have no furniture than the tacky stuff some of her friends crowd into their apartments. Next to the stereo system are neat piles of Toni Braxton and Luther Vandross tapes and the eight-pound dumbbells that Dominique uses three or four times a week—she does half an hour of lifting and twenty minutes of aerobics. Out the window, beyond the fire escape, she can see the Sears sign over near Flatbush Avenue and the outline of Canarsie out toward Jamaica Bay.
Out on Eighty-sixth Street, an icy wind is blowing off the East River. Dominique thinks of New York as home, but she’ll never get used to how cold it is here and the way night falls at four o’clock in the winter. She stops to buy an orange and a Snapple. The people she works for eat out, and their children live on sweet cereal, bread, boxed fruit juice, and peanut butter and jelly that are premixed in the jar. Dominique nurses her Snapple (guava or pink-grapefruit flavored) all day, eats the orange when she’s hungry, and tries to make herself a proper dinner when she gets home. On a good night, she makes some curried chicken and steams some broccoli. On a bad night, she stops at Burger King for a shake. Now, shouldering her way through the crowds, she passes the health-food store where kids eat vegetarian pizza. She avoids looking in the windows of a new, expensive shoe store: she loves to buy shoes.
At York Avenue, she turns away from her destination and goes around the corner of Eighty-seventh Street to St. Joseph’s Church. Inside, she crosses herself with holy water, lights a candle, and kneels near the back, where stained-glass windows throw splashes of color on the whitewashed walls. It’s almost eight o’clock. The people she works for are just getting out of bed. But as she kneels Dominique daydreams for a minute, remembering home: the big white-and-blue house in Valencia where she lived after her mother married the small town’s unofficial mayor, Big Daddy Will Diamond. The candle is for her mother. She also prays for her own eight-year-old daughter,
Crystal, who lives in Valencia with Dominique’s sister. Dominique hasn’t seen her daughter in three years. As she prays, she feels a familiar, sharp sadness about Crystal. Then she reminds herself that the money she is making will buy her daughter an education, so that she can get a stable job with good wages—she won’t end up in New York taking care of other people’s children.
When Dominique was growing up, she always knew she wasn’t going to be a typical Trini girl—hanging out in Valencia, with its dead-end jobs and girls who had children when they were still children. She was going a lot farther than Sangre Grande, the nearest big town, which everyone called Sandy Grandy. Dominique had an aunt who lived in London, but she favored New York. She saw Saturday Night Fever four times. Every Sunday she watched Fame, the TV show starring the lucky kids at the New York School of Performing Arts, who stopped traffic with their dancing. Dominique loved to dance. She still does, turning up the volume and pulling down the shades and prancing alone around her little room. But now she knows that nothing stops New York traffic. “Take therefore no thought for the morrow,” she remembers as she crosses Eighty-sixth Street to work. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Dominique smiles at the doorman and lets herself into the apartment. Suzanne is desperately jiggling the crying baby on one hip while she tries to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. The dog is yapping. Emily, the five-year-old, is giggling and eating Froot Loops at the kitchen table. There’s a puddle of milk on the floor. Suzanne’s nightgown is stained with apple-sauce and instant coffee. Dominique says good morning; in response, Suzanne groans and hands her the baby. Dominique can hear the shower: Henry is getting ready for work.
It’s a modern apartment, with lots of light, but it’s crowded with furniture, and unopened mover’s boxes are piled in one corner. The kitchen counters are overflowing with dishes, and the cabinets are filled with paper plates and appliances that are still in bubble wrap. When Dominique took this job, six months ago, Suzanne explained that they had just moved in. Later, Dominique found out that they had “just moved in” in 1992; she has often heard Henry boast that they got the apartment for a great price in a buyer’s market.
The baby screeches with delight and then grunts with satisfaction,
wiggling his whole body in Dominique’s arms. Dominique kisses him on the top of his downy head and silently tells him to chill. She doesn’t want Suzanne to be jealous. She doesn’t like dealing with parents’ jealousy of the bonds that she forms with their children. “They want us to be mother and father to these children,” she says. “They’re the ones who brought the kids into the world, but then they don’t have time to raise them. So the kids get attached to you, because you’re the one who’s always there. Then the parents get angry.”
This is part of what Dominique and her friends call the attachment factor—one of the most intransigent problems of being a New York nanny. “The kids see you all the time, and they assume you are going to be part of their life,” says Sally, an Irish nanny, who is Dominique’s closest friend in the building. Sally has had three jobs in five years. Two years ago, she applied for a position with a rich, prominent New York family. When she was interviewed, she was told she would wear a uniform, would have to be available for traveling, and would never under any circumstances speak directly with the parents of the children she was caring for—the family had hired a liaison person for that. She took the job on East Eighty-sixth Street instead.
“When you leave, the children can be devastated—and it can break your heart too,” Sally says. Nannies rarely get notice. Then there’s the problem of the hours, which seem to get more flexible (i.e., longer) the longer you work for a family. There’s also the problem of being asked to do work—dog walking, ironing, serving at dinner parties—that was not part of the job description and was not included in the original salary. And if the job can sometimes be too flexible, the salary is often inflexible: many employers count minutes and deduct dollars when a nanny is late. Sometimes nannies get farmed out to clean or baby-sit for their employers’ friends, too. “When they act as if my services are their property—property they can lend out whenever they want—that really makes me feel bought,” Sally says.
There is the problem of summers. Many families offer nannies a Hobson’s choice: either go away with them and be trapped in some all-white resort (in nanny circles, the Hamptons are a synonym for Hell) or take token wages while they’re gone. There is the problem of a family’s dependence on their nanny. “Some weekends, they call me five or six times,” Dominique says. “Basically, I’m on call around the clock. I feel like my life isn’t mine even when I’m at home.”
Many nannies wonder why their employers bothered to have children at all. “I see these women struggling between being the careerperson who gets self-esteem from her job and being the parent who really loves her children,” Sally says. “But you shouldn’t have kids if you’re not ready to make adjustments. Sometimes it blows me away when I’ll come in to work and there will be no milk and no cereal and no money for groceries. Two people without kids who eat out don’t have to have groceries, but with kids you need to have something for them to eat.”
Worst of all, being a nanny is a job with negative stability. When children go to school—and in New York they sometimes go to school at age two—the job begins to evaporate. Many New York children are in school from 9:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. by the time they are five. Nannies have to get along with their employers in a relationship that is in certain respects more intimate than a marriage. Sometimes they are treated like servants; sometimes they are treated like best friends. They are required to be completely reliable and completely discreet. They are asked to ignore drug problems. They must see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil—like the nanny in Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy, who walks in on her employer licking the neck of his wife’s best friend. (The intensity of the connection between nannies, mothers, and children has attracted storytellers from Homer, who made Odysseus’s nurse the only woman who could identify him, to Charlotte Brontë, who made her most sympathetic heroine, Jane Eyre, a governess. The nanny canon also includes the evil Miss Jessel from Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the precursor to dozens of malign child-care professionals, all acting out a mother’s worst fears, right up to The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.)
Nannies want to be treated as professionals. Dominique’s friend Maria took a nanny-awareness class in Brooklyn last year. “The main thing they told us was to be businesslike,” she says. “Businesslike, businesslike! But it’s hard to be businesslike when you’re going into someone’s house and taking care of their children.” I heard one or two horror stories from the nannies I spoke to: an employer who would give a reference only in exchange for sex; a man who left pornographic pictures around and watched the nanny’s reaction; a woman who checked the garbage to see what her children had eaten; another woman who came home at 2:00 A.M. and broke all the windows in her apartment with a heavy copper saucepan. But the real horrors are more subtle: employers who tell their nannies what to wear, employers who depend
on them so much that the nannies go to work even when they’re sick. Sally says, “I lie there in bed when I’m sick and I think, Did anyone get Laurie’s lunch? Do they know that it’s library day? Do they know that she has a play date with Joan after school? I might as well go to work.” And when a nanny leaves, it can be as devastating for the parents as it is for the children.
“We would close down the city,” says Myrtle Johnson, a child-care veteran who works as a short-term baby nurse because she believes that nannies always end up getting treated badly. “If we didn’t go to work, the mothers would go crazy, and they’d drive their husbands crazy, and no one could work. If there’s a garbage strike, the trash just lies there. If there’s a postal strike, the mail doesn’t get delivered. But if the nannies were to strike it would be different. You can’t just leave a baby around until there’s someone ready to take care of it.”
In twenty-five years as a baby nurse, Myrtle has traveled with families to Calgary (for the Olympics) and London (where she stayed at Claridge’s) and has saved enough to buy a big brick house on Grant Avenue in the Bronx. In her kitchen there’s a double Garland stove—the best. Upstairs, she has installed a pink-and-gold bathroom with a wicker basket of fluffy towels; it could fit right in on Park Avenue. But success hasn’t changed her attitude. “The nannies are there for the duration,” she says. “The employers get to think they own them, and it’s just like anything else. You have a boyfriend, you do anything to keep him, you give him cocktails and lobsters. Then, when he marries you, it’s no more cocktails and no more lobsters.”
In the thirteen years I have been raising children in New York, I’ve employed three full-time nannies, supplemented by about a dozen baby-sitters. Our generation has made a religion of parenting. Our mothers had Dr. Spock; we have books to fill a ten-foot shelf. They had a family doctor; we have pediatric endocrinologists who specialize in glandular disorders. We love our children passionately, and for me, at least, leaving them—for a week, or even for a day—is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. This makes the person who takes care of them in my absence both indispensable and somehow an agent of separation and doom—much more than a simple employee. In many families, where women take on most of the job of raising the children, along with doing their outside jobs, the nanny becomes the true significant other. It’s the nanny who works with the mother to create a place where the children can thrive; the husband is at best an assistant to the team
and at worst an obstacle to their aims. “It’s a fragile situation,” Sally says. “I have to come in every morning and assess the mood in the house and take up the slack. In these marriages, the mothers depend on us so that they can work, and the fathers sometimes get off scot-free—a lot of the time it’s as if they didn’t even have children.” Dominique and Sally have decided that the perfect employer would be a single mother with one child.
Honesty and professionalism go a long way toward helping nannies and families get along, but the circumstances of their employment will always be colored by our worst fears. The nannies know everything about us, and we know little about them. They come from alien cultures to fill our culture’s most important job: raising our kids. We’ve decided to let other women take care of our children so that we can give those children a better life. It’s an excruciating decision, as the nannies know better than anyone. The truth is, we are more like our nannies than we realize—strung out between the old ways and the new, between the demands of money and the demands of love. They have chosen to give their children less mothering so that they can make more money, and so have we. There are bad nannies and good nannies, just as there are bad mothers and good mothers, but it’s our similarities rather than our differences that make the situation so painful.