Childcare
The cold came late that fall, and the songbirds were caught off guard. By the time the snow and wind began in earnest, too many had been suckered into staying, and instead of flying south, instead of already having flown south, they were huddled in people's yards, their feathers puffed for some modicum of warmth. I was looking for a babysitting job. I was a student and needed money, so I would walk from interview to interview in these attractive but wintry neighborhoods, past the eerie multitudes of robins pecking at the frozen ground, dun gray and stricken -- though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken -- until at last, late in my search, at the end of a week, startlingly, the birds had disappeared. I did not want to think about what had happened to them. Or, rather, that is an expression -- of politeness, a false promise of delicacy -- for in fact I wondered about them all the time: imagining them dead, in stunning heaps in some killing cornfield outside of town, or dropped from the sky in twos and threes for miles down along the Illinois state line.
I was looking in December for work that would begin in January, at the start of the spring term. I'd finished my exams and was answering ads from the student job board, ones for "childcare provider." I liked children -- I did! -- or, rather, I liked them O.K. They were sometimes interesting. I admired their stamina and candor. And I was good with them, in that I could make funny faces at the babies and teach the older children card tricks while speaking in the theatrically sarcastic tones that disarmed and enthralled them. But I was not especially skilled at minding children for long spells; I grew bored, perhaps like my own mother. After I'd spent too much time playing their games, my mind grew peckish and longed to lose itself in some book I had in my backpack. I was ever hopeful of early bedtimes and long naps.
I had come from Dellacrosse Central, from a small farm on the old Perryville Road, to this university town of Troy, "the Athens of the Midwest," as if from a cave -- like the priest-child of a Colombian tribe I'd read about in Anthropology 203, a boy made mystical by being kept in the dark for the bulk of his childhood and allowed only stories -- no experience -- of the outside world. Once brought out into light, he was in a perpetual, holy condition of bedazzlement and wonder; no story could ever equal the thing itself. And so it was with me. Nothing had really prepared me. Not the college piggy bank in the dining room, the savings bonds from my grandparents, or the used set of World Book encyclopedias, with their beautiful color charts of international wheat production and photographs of Presidential birthplaces. The flat, green world of my parents' hogless, horseless farm -- its dullness, its flies, its quiet ripped open daily by the fumes and whining of machinery -- twisted away and left me with a brilliant city life of books and films and witty friends. Someone had turned on the lights. Someone had led me out of the cave of Perryville Road. My brain was on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir. Twice a week, a young professor named Thad, dressed in jeans and a tie, stood before a lecture hall of stunned farm kids like me and spoke thrillingly of Henry James's masturbation of the comma. I was riveted. I had never before seen a man wear jeans with a tie. The Colombian cave, of course, had produced a mystic; my childhood, however, had produced only me. In the corridors, students argued over Bach, Beck, Balkanization, bacterial warfare. Out-of-state kids said things to me like "You're from the country. Is it true that if you eat a bear's liver you'll die?" They asked, "Ever know someone who did you-know-what with a cow?" Or "Is it an actual fact that pigs won't eat bananas?" What I did know was that a goat would not really eat a tin can: it just liked to lick the paste on the label. But no one ever asked me about that.
I fumbled in my bag again for my resume, and found it folded and bent but handed it to Sarah anyway. I spoke. "My father supplied a few of the restaurants around here. A few years back it was, I think."
Sarah Brink looked at my resume. "Are you related to Bo Keltjin -- Keltjin potatoes?"
It startled me to hear my father's potatoes -- Kennebecs, Norlands, Pontiacs, Yukon golds, some the size of marbles, some grapefruits, depending on drought and digging times and what the beetles were up to -- summed up and referred to that way right here in her living room. "That's my dad," I said.
"Why, I remember your father very well. His Klamath pearls were famous. Also the yellow fingerlings. And his purple Peruvians and Rose Finns were the first to be sold in those little netted berry pints, like jewels. I'd rush out to the farmers' market at 6 A.M. to get them. Come April, I should put those back on the menu." She was getting dreamy. Still, it was nice to hear my father spoken well of. He was not really respected as a farmer back home: he was a hobbyist, a truck farmer, with no real acreage, just some ducks (that every fall raped one another in a brutal fashion we never got used to), a dog, a tractor, a Web site (a Web site, for Christ's sake!), and two decorative, brockle-headed cows of dubious dairiness. We had also once had an ebullient pig named Helen, who would come when you called her name and smiled like a dolphin when you spoke to her. And then we didn't see her for a few days, and one morning over bacon and eggs my brother said, "Is this Helen?" and I dropped my fork and said, "This is Helen? Is this Helen?!" The next pig we got we never met, and its name was No. WK3746.
"Yeah, his potatoes have a rep -- at least in certain places," I hastened to add. "Even my mother admires them, and she's hard to please. She used to call them pommes de terre de l'air."
"That's funny," Sarah said.
I feared that Sarah was one of those women who, instead of laughing, said, "That's funny," or, instead of smiling, said, "That's interesting," or instead of saying, "You are a stupid blithering idiot," said, "Well, I think it's a little more complicated than that." I never knew what to do around such people, especially the ones who, after you spoke, liked to say, enigmatically, "I see." Usually I just went mute.
"Potatoes are grown from the eyes of other potatoes," I said, apropos of God knows what.
"Yes." Sarah looked at me searchingly. "Your father seemed like a nice man. How old is he now?"
"Forty-five."
"Forty-five! Why, I'm forty-five. That means I'm old enough to be your ..." She took a breath, still processing her own amazement.
"To be my dad?" I said.
Sarah Brink laughed, a quasi-laugh, a socially constructed laugh -- a collection of predetermined notes, like the chimes of a doorbell.
"So here's the job description," she said when the laugh was through.
Walking home, I tried to remember everything that Sarah Brink had said to me. It was a mile back to my apartment, so I replayed long snippets of her voice, though the cold air was the sort that bullied a walker into mental muteness. This is an incredibly important position for us, even if we are hiring at the last minute. If we hire you, we would like you to be there with us for everything, from the very first day. We would like you to feel like part of our family, since, of course, you will be part of it.
"You're welcome," Amber said.
When we all walked out to the parking lot, the probation officer followed. An American flag was flapping noisily next to the Perkins sign; the air was picking up wind and snow. The probation officer walked to his car and got in but did not start it. Amber's face was completely lit up. I saw that she was fantastically in love with him. She was not concentrating on any of us, and something about this provoked Sarah.
"Well," she said, studying Amber with an artificial smile.
"Yes, well," Amber said.
"All right, then," Letitia said.
"Can I give you some advice, Amber?" Sarah asked, standing there, as Letitia clutched Amber even tighter. The windbreakered parole officer gave a wave and drove off.
"What?" Amber said to Sarah, but to me she smiled and said, "He was definitely following me."
"When I was your age, I had some rebellious ideas," Sarah continued her unsolicited advice to Amber. "I got in trouble now and again, here and there, but I realized it was because I was doing things I wasn't any good at. Look at this." She tapped Amber's electronic bracelet with a gloved index finger. "You're eighteen. Don't sell drugs. You're no good at it. Do something you're good at."
Sarah meant this tough-love speech compassionately, I could see, but Amber's face flushed with insult, then hardened. "That's what I'm trying to do," she said indignantly, and tore herself from Letitia's grip, walked over to what was apparently Letitia's car, and got in on the passenger side.
"Yeah," I said dopily.
"You may be too young to know this yet, but eventually you will look around and notice: Nazis always have the last laugh."
Then we were wordless through the towns of Terre Noire and Fond du Marais, places named both whimsically and fearfully by French fur traders, before the subsequent flattened pronunciations by Scandinavian farmers made the names even more absurd: "Turn Ore" and "Fondu Morass."
"You'll find I say about eighty-nine per cent of what's on my mind," Sarah said. "For the other eleven per cent? I use a sauna."
She put a CD in the car player. "Bach's first French suite. Do you know it?" After some clicking and static, it began, stately and sad. "I think so," I said, not sure at all. My friends had already begun to lie, to bluff a sophistication that they felt they would authentically possess by the end of the ten-second bluff. I was not only less inclined this way but less skilled. "Maybe not, though," I added. Then, "Wait, it's ringing a bell."
"Oh, it's the most beautiful thing," she said. "Especially with this pianist." It was someone humming along with the light dirge of the Bach. Later, I would own every loopy Glenn Gould recording available, but there in the car with Sarah was the first time I'd ever heard him play. The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x equals y, if major equals minor, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, re-asked, its moody asking a refinement of reluctance or dislike. I had never heard a melody quite like it.
Outside my house, Sarah put the car in park. She patted me on the shoulder, then let her hand run down my coat sleeve. "Thanks," she said. "Phone me when you get back into town after Christmas." Her face looked fantastically sad.
"O.K.," I said. "Sounds good." Sounds good. It was the Midwestern girl's reply to everything. It appeared to clinch a deal, was somewhat the same as the more soldierly Good to go, except that it was promiseless -- mere affirmative description. It got you away, out the door.