You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny (6 page)

A fat letter arrived in our family mailbox in April. The envelope bore a rich gold logo embossed in the upper left corner.
NNI
. I stared at it for a moment. I sounded out the initials in my best upper-class British accent—“ehn, ehn, eye.”

“Congratulations,” the enclosed letter began. “Your application has been accepted. You have been selected to attend the Northwest Nannies Institute as a fall enrollee.”

I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I’d been a bit worried about the criminal background check. No, no felonies, just a dismal driving record, which they were fortunately willing to overlook. My rap sheet included four speeding tickets in the two short years I’d been licensed to drive. Okay, it was actually five citations, but they removed one from my record because I attended an all-day driver’s safety course. That had been quite an eye-opener. As the members of my class of multiple offenders introduced themselves, I realized that I was the only student in the room who didn’t have a prison record. After class, the teacher reviewed my poor driving history. She said she had never before counseled a teenage girl who had good grades and was on the rally squad. Unlike the other lead-foots there, she told me gravely, my chances for eventual life success were as high as fifty-fifty.

Surely she was kidding, but if she had known about the institute, I knew she’d have rated my chances a lot higher.

Just the thought of attending a school that looked like Harvard or Yale intrigued me. The elite training would certainly launch me into a different life, working for a well-to-do family with adorable children. My ever-positive mom caught my feeling of excitement and put her Cottage Grove spin on it. “Just think, Suzy, you’ll probably live in a mansion, just like Pamela Ewing on
Dallas!”
She was sure that my down-to-earth influence would even spare my future employers some of the grief that had so fascinated her during the show’s run.

On the last day of school, Kristi and I passed by a large piece of butcher paper posted in the hallway:

NNI. That sounded dignified and respectable. I prayed no one would ask me what the letters stood for. I hoped they would think it was a small college in Northern Nebraska. Or maybe the National Neuropathy Institute? I’m not sure why I cared about what other people thought, since my hometown had a low percentage of college-bound seniors, anyway. I just didn’t want my career plans to seem like a joke to my fellow classmates, sophisticated bunch that we were.

At the end of the summer, I packed my bags and bid my parents a tearful good-bye as I waved from my little Toyota. Roots ran deep here, and many of the kids in my graduating class had attended nursery
school with me. I had never been away from home for any extended period of time. A hundred and fifty miles was beginning to feel like fifteen hundred.

I followed my directions to the home of the family that NNI had arranged for me to stay with. They were welcoming, but that first night I barely slept; skittish butterflies danced in my stomach. It felt just like my first day of school in fourth grade when I had carefully laid out my new school supplies alongside my Wonder Woman lunch pail.

The drive to the institute early the next morning took less than twenty minutes. First I passed through the heart of the financial district with all of its imposing, shiny new buildings, then through a part of town with shorter and older buildings, and finally to an area that looked decidedly underwhelming. Maybe I was lost. Perhaps I had to go through this area to get to where the stately institute lorded over the lush countryside. I unfolded the map again, checked the address on the letterhead, and continued to scour the numbers on the sides of the buildings. There must be some mistake. Where in the middle of all this concrete was my beloved institute?

I reached the cross street that appeared in my directions, slowing down to peer at a strip mall that resembled prison barracks. In the middle of the block stood a two-story stucco building, which I can best describe in architectural terms as one long beige box stacked on top of another. It was surrounded by a 7-Eleven (which looked like it might have been the very first one in the franchise), a “beauty” parlor, a shabby dry cleaner, and a low-rent Chinese takeout place.

Clearly I must have mixed up the directions. Maybe I’d read the address wrong? A hundred thoughts raced through my mind as I pulled NNI’s letter out of my purse one more time. Aha! Maybe I was on the northeast side of Portland by mistake, not the northwest. But no. To my dismay, I read the address, 2332 Northwest Broadway, on the letterhead, then turned to the identical tarnished brass numbers on the side of the building.

I desperately wanted to turn my car around and drive straight back to Cottage Grove. (Well within the speed limit, of course.)

But I had come this far; the least I could do was investigate a little further. After all, I told myself, I could always go home and enroll in
dental hygiene school. I had considered this once, until my mother commented that she thought it would be gross to look in peoples’ mouths all day. If she couldn’t see the good in it, I reasoned it must be terrible. Yet, suddenly, a career in dental decay was looking more appealing—and there would always be plenty of business in my hometown, because most of the men never left the house without a big wad of chewing tobacco and a chew cup.

I began to climb the concrete steps to the second story, and all my earlier excitement drained away. At that moment I could not possibly have imagined that in four short months I would be flying to Los Angeles, going on interviews with some of the wealthiest people in the country, and becoming the highest-paid nanny to graduate from NNI.

But right then my place was at an old-fashioned desk. The seat was attached to a wooden tabletop, the kind I remembered from third grade with hearts and initials carved all over. Fourteen other girls and women sat all around me in the neat rows. At the front of the room stood the teacher, a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Carolyn. I stared at an enormous blackboard next to her desk, where the following was written:

A Professionally Trained Nanny Is:

• Not a maid
  
• Prepared for the unexpected
  
• Always conducting herself in a professional manner
  
• Truly committed to the profession
  

Underneath there was an outline of some of the course material:

Today’s Subjects:

• Etiquette—Table Manners
  
• Grooming—Hygiene
  
• Family Dynamics—Husband and Wife as Parents
  
• First Aid/CPR
  

I was pleasantly surprised at the scope of material we would be covering. I would later learn that there are very few programs offering official training or certification as a professional nanny. NNI was one of the first of its kind. Carolyn and her partner, Linda, had started the nanny school just a year earlier, and, as with many start-up businesses, they did it all. Sometimes during our lessons they would have to interrupt class to take phone calls.

“NNI. May I help you?” they would say brightly.

“Yes. Uh, yes.”

“No, we don’t do pet-sitting.”

“Well, uh, yes, sometimes our nannies do work for families that have pets.”

“Uh, no, we don’t offer a dog-walking service.”

“Yes, I realize there are similarities between babies and puppies.”

“Perhaps your vet would have a referral?”

“No, once again, sir, just human beings, not schnauzers …”

Nannies were still a new concept in Oregon.

I studied the other nannies-in-training. Most of the others were fresh out of high school, just like me. I found out that one girl had just graduated at the top of a class of fifteen, and several others were from tiny towns in rural areas. There were also a few older women in the class, divorced with grown children, who had never worked outside the home but were quite practiced in raising kids.

For the rest of the morning we went over our syllabus. In the months ahead, we would also be covering household management, health and safety, the physical and cognitive development of children, résumés and interviewing techniques, career planning, and employment contracts. But it wasn’t all textbook work. We were also given a practicum family—literally a practice family—that we would work for during our training. And Carolyn explained that a mother would be bringing in a newborn to show us how to give an infant a bath.

I had a lot of questions. And I asked them all. First, why would we be discussing personal hygiene? Second, exactly what kind of grooming did she mean? And finally, isn’t it probably best not to go into the childcare profession if you’ve never even given a baby a bath?

Carolyn asked me to stay after class to speak with her privately. Oops.

During our after-school meeting, she explained, “Not all of our students share your privileged background,” as if my last name was Kennedy. But after peering at those around me more closely the next day, I realized that what Carolyn had said was true. I
was
judgmental—just like my mother had always been telling me.

Carolyn’s words reminded me of my first babysitting job when I was in the fourth grade. I’ll never know what possessed my mother to think that I was responsible enough to oversee a child only two years younger than me, but Mom had blithely promised my services to our Avon lady. She needed someone to watch her four children, ages one to seven, for an evening because she had an important date. I wondered who she was dating. And who was the father to the four she already had? But my mother had said I wasn’t supposed to criticize people unless I’d walked a mile in their shoes, a concept she had explained to me more than once.

When I arrived, the Avon lady informed me that there had been recent reports of a prowler in the area and that I should call the police if anything suspicious happened. I turned on every light in the house and spent the entire night peeping out from behind the curtains. How could anyone let me, a nine-year-old who still played with Barbies and was scared of the witch in
The Wizard of
Oz, take care of her children in the face of such imminent danger? I wanted to call my mom. But the prospect of a paying job convinced me to tough it out.

At NNI I could now see that my very first adventure in babysitting had truly been an early indication of things to come. My talent as a busybody, my propensity to psychoanalyze people and their relationships, my alternating confidence and self-doubt, and my willingness to face the unknown, be it possible prowlers or shady strip malls. I was ready. Bring on the kids!

But there was more school. We were taught the definition of a nanny, to wit: “A nanny’s role is to provide support to the family by serving as a loving, nurturing, and trustworthy companion to the children. A nanny has special childcare skills and a deep love for and understanding of children. A nanny offers the family convenient, high-quality care to meet each child’s physical, emotional, social, and intellectual needs.”

Our teachers urged us to remember that a nanny isn’t a maid or a cook. Carolyn and Linda were experienced enough to know that there
would indeed be families that were looking for a nanny to perform housework, such as doing laundry, washing dishes, or making dinner. They told of one family that even required their nanny to shovel snow from their Chicago sidewalk each morning; apparently the dad had a bad back. I learned that a lot of nannies were taken advantage of. But I thought I had the perfect plan. I would work for a family that had a maid and a cook, and then I wouldn’t have to worry about scrubbing the floor and whipping up dinner. Why were all these other girls such pushovers? That wasn’t going to be me.

Carolyn laid out a few more basic rules:

• Don’t wear suggestive clothing.
  
• When you’re out to dinner with the family, don’t order the most expensive item on the menu.
  
• Maintain a professional decorum. Don’t make your employers your friends.
  
• Do not be the wife’s confidante about her troubles with her husband.
  

Or, in some instances,

• Don’t be the mistress’s confidante.
  

(And of course)

• Don’t become the mistress.
  

(Was this rule really necessary? Wasn’t it just assumed that you shouldn’t sleep with your boss? Had this actually been a problem in the past?)