“You see the situation,” she said. She looked Elise in the eyes, as if acknowledging something she’d prefer not to mention directly. “We’re from Sacramento,” she said. “And I’m going to tell you the truth. We’re here illegally. I just drove us across the border. I said we were shopping and kept going. I had to leave because my husband was abusing me and he was starting to hurt the boys. I couldn’t stand it anymore.” She sat very straight, with her legs tautly crossed. “I was afraid all the time,” she said. “I didn’t want the boys to . . . to . . .” She made a strange crumpled gesture.
There was a silence. The children were in the corner playing with their toys, but Elise felt their attention on their mother.
“I’m an American too,” she said. “I ran away from home too.”
To her surprise, Robin smiled. “So we have something in common,” she said. “Were your parents abusive?”
Elise hesitated. She pictured her father sitting in his armchair, looking miserable.
Robin held up her hand. “It’s okay,” she said. “You must’ve had your reasons. You can tell me later if you want, and if not, that’s okay.”
Elise said she had done a lot of baby-sitting but hadn’t taken care of an infant before. Robin said that it was okay, that she would make up some bottles of formula before she left in the morning. She would show Elise how to change diapers.
“There’s one thing, though,” she went on. “I know it’s bad, but I can’t pay you for at least a week. I don’t even have a job. That’s why I need a baby-sitter. I need to find a job. Until then I need every penny for food. I know it’s asking a lot. But if you can just stick with me for a few weeks, I promise I’ll take care of you.”
“Okay,” said Elise. She felt irritated with herself for saying it; she wasn’t sure why she had.
“Thank you,” said Robin. “I know it sounds flaky, but I’m a good judge of people. I feel I can trust you. Only two other people have come by, and they were just. . .” She gestured with distaste. “Druggy, crazy. I was getting frantic, you understand.”
Elise nodded. She felt as if Robin had reached out and grabbed her.
Robin asked if she could start the next day at nine o’clock. She said she had a job interview at ten. “I think I’ll be back around three,” she said. “But if he offers me a job right away, I’ll take it. Then I probably won’t be back until six or so.”
It did not occur to Elise to ask what kind of job it was, or why the interview was being conducted on Sunday morning. Robin introduced the children. The oldest boy’s name was Andy and the little one was Eric. The baby was Penny. The boys looked at Elise gingerly, as if she might do anything.
Elise left feeling strange about the arrangement. She was glad she had a job, but she didn’t like having to wait for money. The family on the porch registered her departure. The little girl crouched and stared up at her as if from the bottom of a pit.
She went back to the flat she was sharing with a guy named Mark. She had not known him until four weeks ago. He was the friend of a girl in Seattle named Wren, and when she told him that Wren had given her his address, he let her in. He was a pale, exhausted twenty-five-year-old with an air of affable ruin. He offered her a cup of tea. They sat together in the living room and talked while he sewed leather patches onto his jeans with dental floss. He told her he had come to Vancouver to stop using heroin and to recover from romantic disappointment. He sewed very deliberately, as if each fine, repetitive movement replenished his faith in the bodily truth of his existence. He told Elise that his roommate had gone to London for the summer; she could stay in his room. She had been sleeping there since then. The sour, musty little mattress was covered by a faded flannel sheet with blue sheep on it. Instead of a blanket, there was a heavy pink curtain that she slept under. Once she got used to it, she’d come to like its exaggerated scratchiness.
She found Mark in the kitchen, drinking tea out of a flowered china cup and reading an article about an actress who had been a porn star at the age of twelve. She told him about the baby-sitting job, the abusive husband and the no money at first.
“It sounds fucked up,” said Mark cautiously. His face had the abstract look of someone who has just categorized something and then quickly stepped away from it.
“I think she’s just freaked out,” said Elise.
“I guess she would be.” Mark scratched his stomach and blinked at the sunlight trembling on the table.
For some reason, this conversation made her more determined to make the job work. She lay in bed that night, imagining herself going to the apartment every day, playing with the children and caring for them. She imagined greeting Robin as she came home from work with that tremulous smile on her face, her shoulders drooping as she stooped to take off her shoes. They would form a team. Elise would save money. Years later, Robin would still write to her to tell her how the kids were doing. Elise lay awake under the curtain all night, thinking these thoughts and listening to people walk up and down outside the window. Every now and then, one of them would yell terrible abuse, and she would strain to hear it.
In the morning she had some of Mark’s bread and cheese for breakfast, along with olives snuck from an old jar, and left to baby-sit. There were only a few people on the street; they seemed random yet deeply set in their private purposes. Two men with big blunt faces walked along drinking beers and talking about how some ridiculous awful thing that was always happening had happened again. “Pop goes the weasel!” said one. “Yeah, pop goes the weasel,” said the other. A pretty, peevish young man in a dress and a wig swiftly padded along in his stockinged feet, his tiger-striped pumps and matching purse in one hand. A middle-aged woman carrying three heavy bags pressed forward as if she had decided that no other direction was allowed.
The front porch of Robin’s apartment building was bare except for a child’s red plastic bucket with some dirty water and a dead gold-fish in it. Robin let her in, greeting her as if they were both already far away in some happy future. The two boys, however, were sitting at a rickety table eating bowls of cereal, and the baby was sitting up on the bed, flailing its tiny fists at the present. The older boy, Andy, stopped his spoon in midair and watched her. His eyes made her feel guilty, even though it wasn’t her fault.
“Penny’s just dropped a load,” said Robin, “so I can show you how to change her.”
They sat on the bed, and Robin laid the infant on her back, supporting her head with one slim, splayed hand. She unfolded the diaper as if it were a little paper puzzle. The smell of perfect shit rose into the air. The baby’s private body was blank as the flesh of a plant. She kicked her legs, working the fierce new engine of her body. Robin’s hands were deft and quick, and Elise thought their movements pleased the baby. Elise expected that Robin would want her to redo the diaper, to show that she had learned, but instead Robin just smiled and said, “See?” The baby gurgled at her mother’s big smile. Robin showed her the bottles of formula she had prepared and told her how to heat them. Then she opened a badly dented tin cupboard and showed her a jar of peanut butter, some bread, and a yellowing orange that they could eat for lunch.
“I know you’ll do great,” said Robin. She turned to the boys; her smiling profile tingled wildly. “Be good for Lisa,” she said.
When she left, the air felt roiled, like water in the wake of a furious propeller. Elise sat on the bed. The boys sat at the table with their eyes down. Eric, the little one, fiddled with his spoon as if he were rubbing a secret comfort spot. Elise looked at the baby; it dispassionately stared back. She looked at the boys. She had lied about her baby-sitting credentials; she had had very little experience with children. She went and sat at the table with them.