![]() ![]() “But I can get phone numbers to you later today.”īuying the car was the reason I’d started checking the career-center bulletin board. “Oh, I don’t have that on me.” I chose not to mention that I didn’t have a résumé anywhere else, either. Then Diane said, “Did you bring a résumé? I’d like to call your references as soon as possible.” Even if Diane hired me, I’d hold on to the administrative job-I needed to buy half a car by June-but the babysitting position seemed tantalizingly, almost suspiciously lucrative. The secretary was nice, and I hated transcribing, hated the office’s smell, and earned $5.80 an hour, after annual raises on the $4.75 I’d been making when I’d started as a freshman. To indicate formatting, the vice provost, whom I never spoke with directly, would say, “Period, paragraph,” and the words period, paragraph often accompanied me through the other parts of my life, as did the smell of the office, which was a combination of copy-machine ink, coffee, and the fake rose perfume of the secretary to whom I reported, who’d worked there for more than 30 years. I listened to the tapes via headphones connected to a machine made for this purpose, whose main body sat on a desk with a foot pump down below that I could tap to rewind the tape several seconds. The job I already had, which was 15 hours a week in the office of a vice provost, mostly involved transcribing letters dictated by the vice provost on mini cassette tapes. My husband usually works on the weekends.” Sophie goes to preschool Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but you’d come the other mornings and, if this works with your schedule, the occasional Saturday night. ![]() I did the coursework when we lived in New York, and now I just need to write the last two chapters. I’m trying to finish up my dissertation for a doctorate in art history. After I described working informally for families in my mom’s neighborhood starting at the age of 13 and officially nannying the previous summer for twin infants and the summer before that for a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old, she said, “You sound more than qualified to watch Sophie. Only then did Diane inquire about my babysitting experience. She asked, then apologized for asking, whether I knew what I was doing after graduation (moving to Tucson with a friend, and, as soon as I was eligible for in-state tuition, applying to law school at the University of Arizona) whether I was from Seattle (no, but Olympia, so not too far) and whether I had brothers or sisters (when I said yes, seven of them, she seemed so startled that I added, as I did whenever people found this fact distractingly surprising, that they all were younger half siblings from my parents’ remarriages to other people). I went to the counter and ordered a cappuccino, and back at the table, I dropped the dollar bill and change in front of Diane more gracelessly than I’d intended. “My treat,” she added, and it was when she reached for her wallet and passed me a $5 bill that I noticed the hard swell of her belly beneath a loose black sweater. “Kit?” I nodded, and she held her hand to her chest and, in a quiet voice, said, “Diane.” Still quietly, she thanked me for coming and asked if I’d like something to drink. When I reached the table where she sat, she smiled. When I entered the café, I looked around, and a woman with light-brown hair and glasses waved. Having never previously described my appearance to a stranger, I hesitated before saying, “I’m 5’9, and I have light-brown hair too, but curly. She’d said, “I’m 5’4, and I have tortoiseshell glasses and light-brown hair cut in a bob.” We met for the interview at a café near campus, after describing ourselves over the phone. This was in late January 1997, my senior year at U-Dub-the University of Washington-and I’d seen the job advertised on an index card pinned to the bulletin board outside the career center, the information in tidy blue cursive. The woman, whose name was Diane, was looking for a babysitter for the girl, whose name was Sophie, two mornings a week from 9 a.m. Over the phone, we’d discussed only her 3-year-old daughter. D uring the interview, I realized almost immediately that the woman was pregnant-I guessed she was about halfway along-but she didn’t remark on it, and of course neither did I. ![]()
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