Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,6
you were to take this job, when would you sleep?”
“I don’t need much sleep. I’ll nap when the baby does.”
Was that normal? For a sitter to nap on the job?
Silvia looked Elisabeth up and down. “You sure that baby came out of you? You’re tiny.”
Other people had asked the same question, which Elisabeth presumed they meant as a compliment, but it felt accusatory. Though she was naturally thin and petite, her body was foreign to her now. The pouch of skin where her flat stomach had been. Her breasts, still small, yet newly droopy. Her hips were wider, her feet too big for certain shoes. All this, she knew, was supposed to be distasteful to her. It was, sometimes. But it was also the proof of what had happened in that body, the thing she had done that was somehow both ordinary and extraordinary.
The second candidate, a sophomore with a blue streak in her hair, answered her phone in the middle of the interview. She didn’t say, I’m sorry, I have to take this, it’s an emergency, she just held up a finger while Elisabeth was midsentence and said, “Hey.”
The third had only ever worked with older kids, as a camp counselor. She didn’t support the baby’s head when she held him. Elisabeth snatched Gil back, a tad overdramatic, and said she’d be in touch.
* * *
—
The fourth candidate was due at nine. She had sent an email in response to the ad, saying she had spent the previous summer working as a nanny in London. Elisabeth knew better than to get her hopes up, but she could not stop entertaining visions of Gil being adored by a loving, yet firm, British woman.
Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins.
Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp.
At five to the hour, Gil asleep on her shoulder, she watched a plump young brunette in a baggy T-shirt dress and flip-flops come up the block.
The girl walked past the house without slowing down.
Elisabeth decided it must not be her.
She had made coffee and put out muffins and croissants, as if she were hosting brunch. She did the same for the others. The girl with the blue streak in her hair had asked if she could take the leftover pastries to go.
Elisabeth had never interviewed anyone for a job before. When she was younger, she would have imagined that by the time she was doing so, she’d know how. That just being on this side of things conferred authority, control.
She pulled up her to-do list on her phone. Dinner at Faye and George’s. Shower. Babysitter. WRITE? She sometimes added things to the list that she had already done, so that she could check them off later. A question mark after an item meant there was no way she was going to do it.
The doorbell rang right at nine, and there stood the girl in the T-shirt dress, a huge smile on her face. Had she kept walking so she wouldn’t arrive early? Or had she gotten lost?
“You must be Sam,” Elisabeth whispered, pushing the screen door open with one arm as she cradled the sleeping baby in the other. “I’m Elisabeth. And this is Gil.”
“Hi,” the girl said softly. Chipper, that was the word for her tone.
She stepped inside, looked around.
A soft blue rug ran the length of the front hall, exposing on either side the hardwood floors beneath. To the left was the large, sunny living room. To the right, a wooden staircase with a white banister. Midway up the stairs, there was a stained-glass window, which Elisabeth had loved as soon as she walked in for the first time, knowing then, before she had seen a single room, that they would buy the place.
“I love your house,” Sam said. “It has such a peaceful vibe.”
Elisabeth almost snorted, but then took stock of herself: her plain white button-down and black leggings. Her bare feet, her hair up in a loose bun. The silver tray of pastries; Simon and Garfunkel playing on the Bose. The baby in his soft white pajamas. She could see how it seemed peaceful from the outside.
The girl couldn’t tell what was in her head. Elisabeth liked that.
“Oh my goodness, look at his curls,” Sam said.
It was what most people said when they saw Gil for the first time. The words filled Elisabeth with a foolish degree of pride, as if she had designed him that way.
He was born with a full head of golden hair, which made him special from the