“Algebra. Mr. Provolone. I mean, Mr. Provatella’s.”
“Well, you can’t get much more behind than you are, I guess. You’re not going to be a mathematical genius, Miss Taube. You better cultivate your other talents.” He poured some coffee out of his thermos. “I have to go teach. I can give you a ride home if you want.” He walked off quickly, a kind of fast, barrelly cowboy’s walk.
I sighed and rummaged in his desk for the chocolates in the back of the bottom drawer. He loved me.
Mr. Stone drove me home that afternoon, and in the cocoon of his little Volkswagen I inhaled the smoky air and held my breath, smiling and trying to memorize each passing house, to make the trip from the junior high parking lot to my driveway seem longer.
“You’re growing up.”
“Yeah. It happens,” I said.
“Do you babysit, grown-up?”
I had, but I was still scared to stay by myself at night. “Yes. I mean, not much,” I said. “But I can.”
Mr. Stone frowned. “Okay, maybe you’ll babysit for us sometime.”
He pushed my hair behind my ear, squinting at me through the smoke, and I thought that he wouldn’t ask me to babysit, that we would never sit in the Volkswagen, driving past darkened houses in the moonlight, but he did, right before school ended.
I expected to be a good babysitter, even a great babysitter. I liked cats, I admired the toddlers at my father’s office Christmas party, I cleaned up after Mrs. Hill all the time. I could babysit for the Stones. Really stupid girls babysat for three kids, even three boys, all the time.
I waited in the foyer, watching for him through the colored glass panels. His car drove through the purple, the blue, and the yellow, and at the green I went out to keep him from honking the horn. The thought of my parents and Mr. Stone in the same room, standing in the foyer, sitting side by side in the leather chairs, chatting about me, was so horrible that at night I would imagine it to scare myself, the way I used to shut my eyes and see, on the deep red screen of my inner lids, blood-tipped green monster claws hanging over the edge of the clothes hamper.
Mr. Stone didn’t say much on the ride over. I wore my low-riding bell-bottoms and a Mexican blouse with lemons and oranges and red hearts swirling down the front of my breasts. I sat completely upright so my stomach wouldn’t come close to my belt. He said, “Pretty blouse.” He talked like a father, about his sons and what they were good at; he didn’t even look my way. He said that they were good kids and exceptionally bright, which even my parents said about me. He said Danny was shy, Marc was outgoing, and Benjie was nine going on thirty. I thought I would probably get along with Marc and maybe we could watch TV while the other two played chess or read The History of Western Civilization or did whatever brilliant children do. I told Mr. Stone I loved children, and he laughed.
I had never seen a house like the Stones’. Later on, lots of the houses I went into reminded me of theirs, but then it was as new as a foreign language. I loved the zebra-striped door and the leather-and-bronze knocker and the brambly brown lawn. Every cliché of bohemian life was new and charming to me: the black and red canvas pillows on the scuffed wood floor, the low black foam couch on fat mahogany feet, the grey, balding rugs, and the trailing, two-generation spider plants in bulbous hand-thrown pots, their hairy green strands winding down through the macrame onto the backs of people’s necks and into their lumpy, half-glazed mugs. A headless mannequin with an army cap on its neck and a peace symbol on its chest stood in the front hall. My parents had taken me to Versailles when I was eleven and I was not half so impressed. The only things I didn’t like were Mrs. Stone’s paintings. I didn’t not like them; they terrified me.
Mr. Stone practically pushed me through the front door, and when I had to go back to the car for my knapsack, he disappeared. Mrs. Stone invited me to look at her pictures and made me cross the room with her until we stood facing them. They hung on the wall like nightmares, even the frames oddly pale and uneven, covered with worm lines and tiny brown bug holes. I could hear Mr. Stone in the other room, rumbling over the sound of the little boys and the Muppets.
“Well, now you see what I do,” she said, like I’d been wondering.
“Uh-huh, yes, I do.” I looked around, hoping Mr. Stone or the boys would come out of the TV room.
The biggest picture was a corpse, a woman with her belly slit open to her breasts and little creatures — I didn’t look too closely — miniature soldiers and animals climbing out across her body.
“What do you think?” She reached up and put her hand on my shoulder and just left it there.
“It’s trying to say something” is what my mother always said when she looked at things this ugly, but I couldn’t say that. I did not want to know what these pictures were trying to say, or why Mrs. Stone was trying to say it to me.
“Elizabeth may not be ready to comment on her employer’s artwork, sweetheart.”
I kept quiet, listening to that complicated “sweetheart.”
“All right, Max,” she said, and she took her hand off my shoulder.
The boys were behind Mr. Stone, hanging on like little freight cars and wearing the weirdest pajamas I had ever seen. They were like flannel nightgowns, but instead of being navy or plaid, which would have made them a little less weird, they were hot pink with tiny black houses, grey with rust-colored stars, and yellow with blue frying pans printed all over. Danny and Marc were real twins, not fraternal, and one of them was wiping his nose on the hem of his nightie. He wasn’t wearing underpants.
“You’re quite tall,” Mrs. Stone said.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say, And you’re quite old. Or, Your teeth are quite yellow and your paintings are quite nuts.
“I designed the boys’ nightwear,” Mrs. Stone said.
I figured. “What time do you want them to go to bed?” That’s what babysitters always asked my parents.
“Oh, let’s see. Eight-thirty for the twins, I don’t know, they’re only eight. Nine for Benj, I guess … if that seems reasonable.” She didn’t seem to have much experience with babysitters.
I asked them for the phone number where they’d be and if the boys were allowed to have snacks and everything else that my babysitters used to ask. My parents’ favorite sitter wrote it all down in a little notebook, which I thought was pretty obsessive, even though I hadn’t known the word at nine. Benjie probably knew the word.
Mrs. Stone clasped each boy’s face in her palms and turned around to look at us all as Mr. Stone led her out, as if she were going away for years. When the door closed, all three boys sucked thoughtfully on their lower lips, just like Mr. Stone.
“So, who eats ice cream?”
I was the babysitter I’d never had. I was better than Mary Poppins because I didn’t care what kind of people they became, I just wanted to be their favorite; I wanted them to despise other babysitters. I showed them how to soften the ice cream, mix it with broken-up cookie pieces, and refreeze it. We ate a quart of that. Their eyes got big and starry when I found the hot fudge and let them eat it out of the jar while we watched Million Dollar Movie. We played cowboys-and-Indians-in-outer-space until the twins collapsed in the hall, and then I wiped the biggest chocolate streaks off their faces and dragged them heels first up the stairs to their beds. They had bedspreads as weirdly patterned as their nightgowns.
Benjie said, “They have to go, you know. Or else.” And I got them back up for that and threw them in bed again.
“Let’s play something,” he said.