The revolving door of my childhood sitters began to spin in the late seventies, when my mother, who cooked, cleaned, and took care of us by herself, decided to get som e extra help and put an ad on the bulletin board at Juilliard and the School of American Ballet. It was before they built the sleek new dorm the two schools now share at Lincoln Center and many gifted kids from around the country couldn’t matriculate if they couldn’t find housing in New York. So I spent my whole childhood with an au pair living with us, along with her flute or toe shoes.
The first was Ann. With thighs you could floss your teeth with, the Jamaican-by-way-of-Liverpool Brit was a gorgeous dancer who lived in the small room upstairs and babysat my brother, Willie, and me when she wasn’t studying. My mom recalls her as elegant and sweet, a nice person to have around and a hard worker. There was just one small problem. She put the “Ann” in “anorexia.” When we brought her on a ski trip to Idaho, and Willie and I were in ski school, she decided to sweat off the carrot she’d eaten in the scalding Jacuzzi. For four hours.
My parents were skiing down to the base when they spied the blackboard by the chairlift at the bottom. In large chalk letters it read: COCO AND ARIE KOPELMAN: CALL LODGE ASAP! Panic. They had no clue what had gone down—was Willie neck-braced in one of those ski patrol sleds? Had I choked on a tater tot in the kiddie mountain cafeteria? They raced to the courtesy phone. Ann had passed out. Unconscious post-soakage in 104-degree bubbles. She’d been spatula’d off the tiles and luckily made a full recovery. But this was only the beginning of the chaos.
When we got back to New York, my parents decided to repaint the apartment, and they were under contract to use the company the building recommended. My mom took me to an interview for kindergarten (yes, this is normal in New York) as tarps were laid out and paint poured in pans.
Cut to my dad at the office with one of his biggest clients, a Midwestern fat cat hailing from a rectangular-shaped red state. Mid-schmooze and presentation, his secretary came in with a worried look.
“Mr. Kopelman?”
“We’re in the middle of an important meeting,” he explained.
She stood nervously in the doorway. “Um, it’s your sitter.”
He looked concerned.
“Excuse me for one moment,” he said apologetically, rising to take the call outside.
“Mr. Kopelman!” Ann screamed into the phone in her English accent.
“Ann, what’s wrong? Are the kids okay?”
“The children are fine—” she sputtered between gasps.
“Okay, what’s wrong?!” he asked.
“THE PAINTER IS TRYING TO RAPE ME!”
“What?!”
“The painter! He’s trying to rape me.”
Gulp. Holy shit.
“Where are you now?” my dad asked, trying to remain calm.
“I’ve locked myself in your bathroom with a carving knife!” she wailed, her voice quivering.
My dad swallowed hard. Fuck.
“I’m on my way.”
As he grabbed his coat, he went sheepishly to face his client.
“I-I’m terribly sorry,” he stammered. “But I have an emergency.”
“Everything okay?” the midwesterner from Purina Cat Chow inquired.
“No, unfortunately. I’m afraid I have to go,” my dad replied. “My painter is raping my babysitter.”
The client shook his head. “Only in New York.”
After sprinting home fifteen blocks, my dad busted open the door to find the painter had bailed and Ann was crouched and sobbing with a hunter-green handprint on her boob and the thigh of her jeans. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibits A and B. She was a mess. Bawling. My mom and I came home to complete chaos and my parents called the painting company, freaking out.
“She’s lyin’,” the owner said to my mother. “You should see what goes down with my guys. You should see! I got ladies up and down Park Avenue callin’ for painters. They open the door in the nude. Buck nekkid.”
Ew. My mom tried to shake the image of some rich matron trying to toss a Benjamin Moore–covered roller aside and throwing the Polish painter on her Léron linens, untying her Pratesi robe, and unhooking his overalls.
“Perhaps, but that’s not what happened here,” my mother asserted. “She had green paw prints all over her clothes.”
“She prolly came on to him. They always do.”
No apologies, nothing.
The next day came the wrath of Ann’s six-foot-five Rasta boyfriend pacing our living room like a caged panther, gripping his dreadlock-covered head as if he had a migraine that would make his whole noggin explode onto our carpet, covering our shellacked walls with his brain’s bloody mist.
“I’M GONNA FOOKIN’ KEEL HEEM! HE IS A DEAD MON! I’M GONNA FOOKIN KEEL HEEM!” he screamed. “GEEVE ME HEEZ NAME! HE IS A DEAD MON. HE. IS. A. DEAD. MON.”
“Okay, calm down . . . ,” my dad begged, attempting to soothe the sheer unbridled ire that was the nuclear mushroom cloud erupting in the living room. “Killing him does what? Then you go to jail and you can’t see Ann anymore. Then your life is ruined. What good does that do?”
Her boyfriend channeled his extreme rage into deep breaths that morphed into hyperventilation.
“Geeve me his name!” he yelled. For the record, it was Rudy.
“It’s not worth it,” my dad continued. This went on for another hour until my parents had a promise from Ann’s boyfriend he’d drop it and not track this guy’s ass down and machete him to Polish pieces.
“What a day,” my mom said with a sigh after the mollified couple had left. “How is this our life? We spent the whole afternoon talking this Rastafarian out of committing murder.”
Shortly after her near-ravaging, Ann’s studies ended. It was time for a clean start.
Enter Sue. Her hair was blond, her sweet home Alabama. With huge blue eyes and a virginal demeanor, my parents were thrilled when she smiled in the doorway for the interview. They spoke with her twang-talkin’ warm, kind parents, who sent them homemade jams, and she happily installed herself in Ann’s old room.
It started out okay. She was very sweet, and seemed to be happy in potentially overwhelming New York and not longing too much for the calmer pace of the Deep South. But there was one small detail that hadn’t come up in the Q & A session she’d had with my parents. She was a sex fiend.
The first evidence of this was when a neighbor called my parents.
“I’m . . . afraid my maid has witnessed some inappropriate behavior by your babysitter,” she confessed.
Huh? Sue? Southern belle Sue?
The neighbor arranged a sit-down between my parents and her nervous maid, who recounted how one evening as she was drawing the curtains by her window, which looked out on our building’s roof, she saw little Sue running about stark naked, giggling and being chased by a large black man.
“I’m the Big Bad Wolf!” he bellowed as she ran from his grasp, laughing.
“What are you gonna do to me, Big Bad Wolf?”
“The Big Bad Wolf is gonna fuck your brains out!” They ran in circles as the maid crossed herself in the window and called her boss right away.
My parents gulped. Time to talk with Sue.
“Um, Sue, you can’t bring men into this building. This is a co-op and we have very strict rules about guests.”
“I’m sorry!” she cried, weeping. “Pleeeeeeease don’t tell my parents! Pleeeeease!”
My parents looked at each other.
“I won’t do it again, I promise,” she swore.
A few weeks later, my mom brought me home from school, and from the second we got off the elevator, she smelled the stench. “PU!” I recalled her saying. (Remember that? What happened to PU? And what did it stand for? Random.) Within seconds, Willie emerged. He was matted with sweat and waddling in a T-shirt and a bulging diaper that contained heaps of what we call in Latin rhea explosiva.
“Oh my god,” my mom exclaimed, scooping up her little son. “Sue? SUUUUUUUE!”
My mom’s voice rang through the apartment. Clearly Willie had been majorly neglected, considering he was coated in perspiration and poo. “SUE! SUE?” We followed my mom as she looked for her. Willie’s nursery. Nope. The bathroom. No. My room? Nada. Nowhere to be found. She walked down the hallway and saw the door to the den was closed. Just as my mom reached for the doorknob, Sue opened the door with a startled look on her face and her bra showing through her half-buttoned shirt. My mom pushed the door open and there was our doorman, Joe, sans uniform top, zipping the fly of his gray pants with the gold stripe down the side. It was unclear where the doorman hat was. Maybe Sue wore it with nothing else as they porked.
Willie and I stood with wide eyes as my mom asked Joe to please leave and told Sue there was going to be a Talk that evening.
“Pleeeeease don’t tell my parents!” Sue said beseechingly.
“I thought I told you this is not acceptable!” my dad said.
“You said I couldn’t bring in people from outside the building,” she said between tears in her defense. “So I found someone in the building.”
After a last warning my pushover parents acquiesced to her pleas and let her stay. But the worst was yet to come.
.
Sue’s pal Nightingale was trouble. She was a tall, striking brunette with that disco-era big hair worn with two combs. I liked her because she always came over after my parents left and would bring us frozen Kit Kat bars. As Sue and Nightingale watched our cracked-out shit-eating grins as we tore off the dark orange paper and foil wrappers, they realized something. Chocolate = kiddie currency. With those four cocoa-dipped bars, they could buy our silence.
Nightingale had wads of money. Why? Because rather than work for peanuts as an au pair wiping asses, she worked two blocks from our apartment, at the Playboy Club on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street, a huge mansion that is now the Polish embassy. But in the 1970s, it housed a different genre of poles.
Bunny suits with cotton tails paraded by the cabaret tables serving cocktails on logo-covered napkins. Somehow I knew what Playboy was even at age five because of its extensive advertising campaigns for subscriptions. Because I was glued to my television, particularly the commercials, the bow-tied rabbit was already burned in my brain. Nightingale told Sue she could easily get her cute self a gig there as well, and so soon Willie and I began our career as child extortionists, bribed with Kit Kats for our silence. Nightingale would come over, help Sue put coats over our footie pajamas, and take us to the Playboy Club. Sue installed us in a back room, a lounge for the girls, with a VHS tape of Flash Gordon and our chocolate. She would make the rounds with Nightingale and come in every few minutes to check on us.
It worked out great! She got her extra dough and we got candy and movies on a school night; bingo!
When my parents needed her on a night she had to work, we’d simply come along for the ride. This happened once a week for about two months, but it felt like we rode the Hefner Express for ages.
And then one night the blackmail train came to a screeching halt.
My parents left for a dinner party and arrived at the hostess’s home to discover that her husband had abruptly fallen ill and the party was canceled. As it was the dead of winter and they didn’t much feel like going out anyway, they decided to come home.
When we walked in laughing, me on Nightingale’s shoulders and Willie piggyback on Sue, our giggles quickly turned to busted sheepish grimaces. I think I recall Nightingale cursing as we all four beheld the ENRAGED red-faced gazes of my parents on the foyer bench.
And that was the end of Sue. They had her packing her bags before you could sing the chorus of “Centerfold.”
Many others followed: Sabina, the morbidly obese German cellist, who was such a compulsive eater she once ate a dinner my mom had prepared for eight guests. Sabina thought it was food up for grabs and Dysoned it all down, leaving my mom sobbing in her bathrobe as she found the empty platters with her dinner party starting in a half hour. Buh-bye, Sabina.
Saadia from Morocco: she lasted for a while and I remember her screaming and beating her chest when Sadat was assassinated. Eventually she was gonzo, too. There was the gal who had a life-consuming obsession with the Doobie Brothers, covering the walls with posters. And there was scary Lucille. I asked Lucille if I should go ring for the elevator since we were headed to the park. Her response to my first-grade self? “No. Don’t get the elevator! Why don’t we all just spread our wings and jump out the window and fly down!” Sarcasm + six-year-old = massive confusion and in this case, fear.
In the end, while this chorus of artistically talented but high-maintenance women was more trouble than it was worth, I’m glad I was exposed to the colorful chaos, but as we got older, the (sometimes graphic) book was finally closed on the student au pairs, a permanent wedge stuck in the revolving door. To this day, whenever someone complains about some psycho nanny, I always know I can trump them with our tales of woe. It was pure headache for my parents, but now we all relish the retelling. Because you can’t make up that shit. And hey, at least they didn’t give us shaken baby syndrome. Though they most definitely shook the hell out of my parents.