He had always said she just needed something to shake things up for her, this job, so that other parts of the situation rose to the surface. And now he seemed to think that something had arrived. He was in Pennsylvania right now visiting his family, so it wasn’t a question of luring her into the city to see him. She knew why he was calling. He wanted information. He assumed she had it.
She began loading the cereal bowls into the dishwasher. Bob spent plenty of nights in the city. He slept there all the time. This particular time had lasted longer, but that meant nothing. Isabel had chosen not to elaborate, and seeking the root causes of Isabel’s moods was not in Lily’s job description. Her job was to decipher those moods, to see how she could help the children to navigate around them, and then to withdraw.
Having done every dish she could possibly do, she looked around the kitchen for a moment. She could go upstairs to gather the detritus the boys always left in their morning wake, their sweat-choked pajamas on the floor and the fine spray of toothpaste across the lower half of the bathroom mirror. She could also sit down with the various sports and academic calendars and type up the kids’ schedules from now until Christmas; Isabel would be thrilled if she had that all squared away this early. She was reluctant, though, to go upstairs. She opened the refrigerator and took stock of what she had. She decided to prep a marinade for flank steak; they could eat it tomorrow, for a late Saturday lunch. She took out the glass baking dish and began to chop the onion.
It was true Madison had that tough coarseness, her father’s trademark, though she seemed powerless to apply it against her mother. But then Isabel was equally steel. When Isabel dictated the arrangements of the place settings for a dinner party, wasn’t she just providing Bob with the polish he’d always wanted, the things he’d married her for? His nickname hadn’t come from nowhere. He needed someone beside him who could transmogrify that noisiness, convince you it was dominance and not just a panicked tantrum.
And that, that definitely was something Isabel could do.
Lily hadn’t seen marriage in this way before this job, as a mutually beneficial merging of goods and services. But then, that wasn’t entirely fair. She saw the way Bob looked at his wife when she wore something backless, the near-ferocious blend on his face of aggression and pride and longing.
Again Lily felt the brief recoil of guilt. The part of her mind hired to play cop admonished the other part, the part that allowed for fear. Already, any minor doubt felt like a punishable offense. As if it would be caught on tape, recorded somewhere within the walls of this house, and played back to her later as proof of her momentary disloyalty.
Not that she’d actually understood much of what she’d read, the news all summer. Whenever Jackson mentioned it, either alone with her or on one of her nights in the city when she’d meet him and his J school friends at their favorite scummy bar beneath the BQE, she’d take that moment to visit the urine-coated, graffiti-mirrored bathroom. She was careful to keep her iPhone always locked around Madison, to conceal her periodic news checks throughout the afternoon.
So what did she really know? The other women, the nannies and the wives and—she could only assume—the mistresses, talked about these guys like they were firefighters and nuclear scientists and the president rolled into one. Meanwhile, she was not a moron and was in fact a champion eavesdropper, and yet she had not a clue what it was Bob D’Amico actually did for a living. Whatever activities filled the corridors of his soaring glass building on Times Square were utterly foreign to her. So what did she know?
She knew daily routines. She knew the unpredictable weather of summers in southern Connecticut, and she knew which layers of clothing that weather might call for at any given time. She knew favorite snacks and local shortcuts. She knew, in brief, his children.
And Bob, in turn, got to feel cozy and validated for hiring such a well-educated nanny, and a young one to boot. She knew the other yummy mummies—Jackson’s nickname for the Greenwich contingent, a phrase that had unfortunately lodged itself in her brain—would never have stood for a recent graduate shuttling their children to and from soccer practice, a young trophy-wife-in-training who might remind them of what they’d seen in the mirror only a few years earlier. No, most nannies around here were middle-aged and terrified of losing access to this world. Lily wasn’t exactly competition for Isabel, she was no nubile blonde. Still: Isabel had the confidence to hire someone young, a girl with an education who spoke three languages (this was another blurred detail on her résumé, but whatever), whose ass hadn’t spread yet.
So, no, she hadn’t studied the canon at Columbia so she could clean up after the CEO of Weiss & Partners and his beautiful children. But no one had ever explained to her how this was any less valid than the amorphous digital-media analytics jobs her friends had signed up for in open-plan offices near the Flatiron. She was taking care of small people and helping them learn to negotiate the world around them. What was more useful than that? If she wasn’t here, their only available guides would have been their parents, who were so deeply ensconced that they couldn’t possibly give their children any real, accurate information about the world. And so the next step, her next step—she’d get to it when this job was done.
They treated her well. Lily couldn’t speak for the others, the army of gardeners and landscapers or Lena the silent Ukrainian woman who arrived each day with her helpers at nine o’clock to scour the house, one room at a time. The truth was that the D’Amicos could have a lot more people working in that house every day, and probably would if Lily herself hadn’t negated the need for a personal assistant for Isabel. There was a girl in the city who exclusively handled the MoMA correspondence, sure, and that was the primary source of Isabel’s business from day to day. But out here, with the kids? Lily had made herself irreplaceable, without even realizing how important it was for her to do so. Eight years was an epoch unto itself when it came to nannies in Greenwich; it was leverage.
She took the flank steak from the refrigerator, slit open its plastic cover. She took the strip of meat in her hands and laid it flat in its dish. She washed her hands with scalding water, covered the dish with foil, and slid it onto a shelf in the refrigerator.
Whatever was going on now, Lily had no real complaints, no smoldering resentments about her life with them. Anyone who didn’t believe her, who didn’t understand that this felt good, had clearly never felt it. She was embedded, now. And Isabel had to know this. There was no way, after this long. There was no way Isabel didn’t understand.
THREE
I guess I’m just struggling. To understand. This sudden . . . enthusiasm.”
Madison could see that Amanda was making a true effort not to roll her eyes. The end effect was twice as insulting as the most condescending smirk would have been.
“You hate football,” Amanda continued.
Madison slammed her locker door with a degree of force she knew was unnecessary.
“That isn’t fair,” she said.