How to Start a Fire (38 page)

Edgar waited three days until he sent flowers. The first day after George returned home, she felt ambivalent toward Edgar. The second day, when the phone didn’t ring and there was no message in her inbox, she began to feel a stew of emotions that she interpreted as longing. By the third day, she was so desperate to hear from Edgar that when the bouquet of red roses arrived, she convinced herself she was in love.

Edgar would eventually notice the consistent and reliable push and pull in their relationship. If he withheld emotion or attention, George came alive. When he showered her with affection, she would first accept it hungrily, and then withdraw. Edgar often felt like he was tending an extremely temperamental garden.

Boston, Massachusetts

“She’s barking like a dog,” Colin said. He was referring to his three-year-old daughter, Zooey.

“I don’t see the problem,” Kate said.

Kate had been working at the West End Branch of the Boston Public Library going on three years. She took the job when she finally returned from Operation Bankruptcy, as Colin called it. As Kate saw it, she’d merely come home from her travels with much less money and a little less guilt. It was that simple. Kate never regretted that first swing of the bottle on the intruder, but she’d always wondered if the death blow had been necessary.

It had taken Colin all morning to track Kate down. He knew she worked part-time at a library, but she had never mentioned which library. So he had his secretary call every single one in Boston proper.

At that very moment, while Colin was speaking in hushed tones to Kate behind the stacks of biographies (Dewey 900–999: history, geography, biography), Zooey was barking and crawling on all fours in his office while his secretary chased her around, shushing her.

“The
problem
is that my nanny quit because my daughter has been barking like a dog for a week straight. Mrs. Kline says that she doesn’t have a dog of her own for good reason.”

“Allergies?” Kate asked.

“I’ve been through three nannies in the past year. If my ex-wife hears that I took my daughter to work again and left her in the hands of my secretary, she will use this against me in court and file for full custody. Don’t you have any vacation days coming?”

Kate agreed to nothing at that first meeting. She dropped by Colin’s office after work and picked up Zooey.

“Zooey, do you remember Kate, Aunt Anna’s good friend?”

“Arf!”

“Good doggy,” Kate said, patting Zooey on the head.

“Don’t encourage her,” Colin said.

“Why not?” Kate asked. “She’s three years old. When else will she have a chance to be a dog?”

Colin didn’t have time to argue, at least not with Kate. He had a brief to write. Kate drove Zooey straight from Colin’s office to the dog park, where Zooey raced around with the medium-breed canines, having quickly abandoned the dedicated but cumbersome four-legged approach. Most people assumed that Kate had an animal in the mix of ecstatic hounds. But a few dog owners were suspicious. A woman approached Kate, who was standing leashless by the sidelines, and said, “Which one is yours?” Kate pointed to Zooey and said, “That one.”

The woman clarified: “Which dog?”

Kate pointed to Zooey again. “
That
one.”

The woman did not make any further attempts at conversation.

After the dog park, Kate took Zooey to the pet-supply store and let her pick out a dog bowl and a few balls, which Kate made sure could bounce and therefore would be useful when the Fido phase ended.

“This was a mistake,” Colin said when he returned home and caught sight of his daughter eating oatmeal out of a dog bowl on the floor. He sat down at the table and rubbed his temples. “My mother would have a heart attack if she saw this.”

“And your mother is the gold standard for good parenting?”

“Point taken.”

When Zooey lifted her head from the dog bowl, Colin took a napkin and wiped the oatmeal from her face.

“Arf.”

“Good dog,” Kate said.

Colin winced. “I’m not sure this is the approach I would take,” he said in hushed tones.

“I want ice cream,” Zooey said, her first human words in forty-eight hours.

Colin was about to remind Zooey that they had sweets only on the weekend, a rule instituted by Madeline, whose fear of her daughter becoming fat had started when Zooey was an underweight baby.

“Dogs don’t eat ice cream,” Kate said plainly.

Zooey regarded Kate for a long stretch, the child’s giant brown eyes boring into the eyes of this tiny woman in her home.

“I don’t want to be a dog anymore,” Zooey eventually said.

“What do you want to be?”

“A girl.”

“Girls eat ice cream,” Kate said.

There was no ice cream in the house, but the trio walked hand in hand to a shop around the corner. Zooey got a scoop of rocky road on a sugar cone and devoured it under the fluorescent lights of the pastel-colored parlor. When she was finished, she said “Arf” for the last time.

The next phase she stuck to a bit longer. Zooey ransacked her costume trunk one afternoon (dress-up was an activity Kate wildly encouraged) and donned a white tennis skirt, a black cape, and sweatbands and called herself Swinger Girl, an unfortunate moniker that referenced her high-flying acts on a swing set. Swinger Girl’s primary objective was to have the cape afloat in her wake. When she wasn’t on a swing, she was racing through the house shouting, “Swinger Girl is on the loose!”

“Zooey, please sit down for dinner,” Colin said three nights into the Swinger Girl era.

“How long is this phase going to last?” he asked.

“A long time, I hope,” Kate said. “Swinger Girl eats her vegetables.”

Colin was working seventy-hour weeks and had little time to vet potential nannies. He delegated the responsibility to Kate, who interviewed five women and one man but found no acceptable candidates. Candidate number one kept referring to Zooey as a
young lady
, emphasizing
lady
and loading the word with old-fashioned notions of gender roles—or at least, that was how Kate interpreted it. Candidate number two spent five minutes talking about how children needed routines and consistency; Kate didn’t have a problem with the concept, only with the degree to which it was underscored. Candidate number three was clearly anorexic. Candidate number four appeared unduly concerned when Zooey scratched her head, and she inquired repeatedly about lice. Candidate number five mentioned her fondness for porcelain figurines. Candidate number six, the one male, arrived forty-five minutes late for the interview.

For almost a month Kate managed to work her library schedule around the half of the week that Zooey spent with Colin. Three days a week she’d tuck Zooey into bed, go home, read, sleep, return to Colin’s house at 7:00 a.m., and get his daughter ready for school. Every other weekend, when Colin had Zooey but could care for his daughter on his own, Zooey would ask after Kate. Sometimes she would call her and tell her about her day. When Zooey was with her mother, she asked for Kate. Madeline phoned Colin in a rage.

That was when Colin offered Kate the job. Kate turned it down at first, but Colin appealed to her sense of thrift. He offered her more money than she made at the library, free rent, and three and a half days a week in which she could kill as much time as she wanted among shelves of books without having to actually shelve them. Kate immediately gave notice and moved out of her three-hundred-square-foot apartment into Colin’s three-thousand-square-foot home.

A few weeks later, after Kate served breakfast to Zooey while Colin read the newspaper, she choked on her coffee as she recognized the comically domestic tableau. She was even wearing a chef’s apron (to hide the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra). Zooey ate Cheerios laced with white chocolate, which would have been forbidden on most school mornings, but Zooey and Kate had brokered a deal the day before when Zooey had strict instructions to clean her room and found herself lost under toddler flotsam, unable to even begin to comprehend the task. Kate sat on the bed and bribed and coached until the room was suitable for the housekeeper to clean—a concept Anna once told her she thought was hilarious.
Clean your room before the housekeeper gets here
, Lena used to say every Thursday morning for almost ten years.

Zooey hunched over her cereal like a convict protecting her food. She was mostly trying to hide the dead chocolate weight at the bottom so her father wouldn’t catch on. When Colin did check his daughter, he grimaced at her rounded back and elbows on the table.

“Sit up straight, like a nice young lady.”

Kate’s expression tightened into a cold stare.

“Zooey, sing the bath song for your dad,” Kate said.

Zooey put down her spoon and launched into a loud rendition of a tune she’d heard in Kate’s car that later became the theme song for bath time.

Ain’t nobody dope as me, I’m just so fresh and clean

Don’t you think I’m so sexy, I’m just so fresh and clean.

Kate approached Colin and whispered, snakelike, in his ear, “I’ll teach her every swearword in the book if you
ever
say anything like that to her again.”

Neither Kate nor Colin informed Anna of their new living arrangements. Kate and Colin discovered this fact when Anna arrived at Colin’s house during an unscheduled trip to the East Coast. Don had recently been diagnosed with stage 1 esophageal cancer and insisted that Anna come home to consult. Two years before, he had received a diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s. Most of the time he remembered that his daughter was no longer a resident at Boston Medical Center and that she lived three thousand miles away and worked as a paralegal. But when the diagnosis came in, the trauma of the word
cancer
seemed to choke out the hard facts he had come to accept.

Anna arrived in the middle of the afternoon and took a cab from the airport to Colin’s house. Kate answered the door.

“What are you doing here?” Anna asked as she dropped her bags in the foyer.

“Didn’t Colin tell you?”

“Tell me what?” said Anna, leaping to a conclusion that felt disquietingly unnatural.

“I live here,” said Kate. “I thought he told you.”

“Why didn’t
you
tell me?”

The women had spoken at least a few times since Kate’s move, and many things had come up in conversation: the origin of Brillo pads, the decline of the seersucker suit, the gradual disappearance of phone booths, dangerous ingredients in sunblock, those crazy motherfuckers who didn’t believe in global warming, Kate and Anna’s mutual fondness for turtles, and how to sanitize kitchen sponges in the microwave.

“I guess it never came up,” Kate said.

While that statement was true, Kate had known that whenever she spoke to Anna, she was omitting an important piece of information.

Anna remained in the foyer, slack-jawed, glaring at Kate with an alarming expression of disappointment.

“It’s not like I robbed a bank, Anna.”

“If you robbed a bank, I’d know what to do.”

This was no time for a conversational detour, but Kate was curious what Anna’s response to that particular event would be.

“So what would you do?”

“I’d help you lie low for a little while, then I’d secure you a new identity and get you out of the country.”

“Really?” Kate said. “You’d do all that for me, even if I committed a felony?”

“Sure. Although I would make you give the money back.”

“That’s pretty swell of you.”

“Can we get back to the subject at hand? What the hell were you thinking, moving in here?”

“I was thinking free rent.”

“Huh.”

“You remember I’m cheap, right?”

“Does my brother know this?”

“That’s how he lured me here. By telling me to think of all the money I’d be saving.”

“How romantic,” Anna said, parking her bags at the bottom of the stairs and making her way into the kitchen. She promptly turned on the kettle, a marginally satisfying substitute for pouring a drink. Her friends marveled at the ridiculous number of herbal beverages Anna could consume in a day. The hot liquid was soothing going down, but there was no lasting effect.

“I think you have the wrong idea,” Kate said.

“What idea should I have?”

“I’m Zooey’s nanny. The last one quit and all the others were going to cause permanent psychological damage. He offered me a handsome wage and free rent. I have the maid’s quarters all to myself. More square footage than my last apartment. And it comes with a bathtub.”

Anna drew Kate into a bear hug and said, “Thank God.”

“Did you really think—”

“Yes.”

“That would be very . . . odd,” Kate said.

When she said it, it sounded like a bluff, like she was hiding something. On occasion, Kate had caught herself looking at Colin in ways that would complicate her role as domestic help. But she knew his history, his reputation, and she had more than a few times witnessed his schooled flirtations. That gave her an excuse to subjugate her desires, and Kate hardly needed an excuse to do that. Most days she could shove the nuisance thoughts aside; some nights she couldn’t.

Anna visited her father after his first chemo session. Lena had hired and fired two nurses before she found Alvita Bailey, a Jamaican woman with green-card issues, an impenetrable accent, and the remarkable ability to make virtually anyone do her bidding. She rarely used the imperative to elicit a desired response. She was a master of the judgmental interrogative.

To get Donald to put his clothes on: “Are ya going to sit around all day in your pajamas like a schoolboy home with da cold?”

To encourage Donald to eat his untouched plate of food: “Are you on a hunger strike?”

To make him exercise: “Will I have to carry you or will you walk on your own?”

She would even use the same tack with Lena: “Will you be eating lunch with your husband or going out with your girlfriends again?”