novembre ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- i've had enough of primary caretaking for the next decade. my one week of all nanny all the time ended in the middle of saturday afternoon. technically it ended later, when the parents showed up around seven, but emotionally it ended at three pm after the morose young teenaged boys grew bored of playing their gameboys in my car and the ten year old girls ran twice through their roster of road trip songs, when the more morose of the two boys called the parents of the second boy and asked if they could come over for a little while. the minute we herded ourselves into that house my shoulders relaxed and i found my neck again. real parents, used to serving the needs of small, constantly forming beings. they offered me orange wedges and i exclaimed over their coffee table that the father made twenty years ago for camping to fit on top of their car. (they still have the same car. and they still use that table for camping, even though it is the most beautiful coffee table i've ever seen; it has diagonal legs and beveled edges.) walking around, i complimented their house and its space. the mother instantly brightened and gave me an hour-long tour complete with history and a handmade bench in the winding oakland garden. the original structure, what the whole house was when we moved in? it was made entirely of box cars. the walls didn't look that thin but when we installed that window over their we saw layer after layer of siding over the box car. box cars? yeah. my husband found out when he was pruning the hedge by the driveway one day a few years ago. this old woman walked up to him and asked about our neighbor's house, and then explained that her father had built it. he asked her if she knew anything about our house, and she told him. i think the house was built as a temporary shelter for the workers that farmed this hillside back when it was still orchard. box cars? (i was standing there, blankly staring at their front wall, waiting for it to rumble off on an invisible track) and upstairs is our new master bedroom. we're really excited about this view. careful, we haven't reinforced the stairs yet. see this? this was where the house ended. this was deck. downstairs, watch your step, this is a good six inches higher than the foundation we repaired. this was my son's old room. we're going to tear it down soon. (his pictures are still on the walls, and riding along a windowsill is his name spelled out in wooden blocks.) she leads me outside and points out where giant planters will go, a possible front porch. the green house filled to the brim with tiny cacti. my husband built this on the deck of our old apartment, and we just took it with us. our poor plants. i really need to water. the garden and backyard are gigantic stairs, casing down the hillside. our lawn was just sod placed over an old dump. we kept finding glass and nails so we started digging and found huge slabs of concrete, car parts, bicycles, you name it. my husband actually had to hand-sift the top layer of soil, about six to eight inches deep. her husband, who has joined us outside, hands his wife some flowers and beams at me in a sedate old-hippy kind of way. you were part of the california gold rush, i say. only you didn't find any gold. i found that i don't like the husband nearly as much as i like the wife. the wife is welcoming and open, whereas the husband is aloof and standoffish and a little cutting. for an old hippy. she offered me tea and we sat around the camping coffee table with the morose teenaged boys and their gameboys. she told me about berkeley and camping and more berkeley and asked me twice if i was from berkeley and i started to zone out a little once she got overzealous with berkeley. i bet they hate to say that they live in oakland, at least a little bit now after fourteen years here. i bet the pain lessens year after year because they live right next to a forest and they have finally yanked up all the concrete from their perfectly manicured lawn. she helps me extricate the kids i'm nannying from hers and we leave, and i feel so much calmer. a nice lady with a life i'd hate to have, at least right now. and i'm never gonna marry an aloof liberal, i'll tell you that much. even if he is a good carpenter. 10:35 pm - 05.11.03 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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