During work yesterday, a friend of mine currently living in Philadelphia left me a voice mail message. "Nora!" it said. "I am working at a coffeeshop in Philly, and a girl I work with says she used to babysit you!"
...Now, this kind of thing is not unusual for me. There are always strange B-list connections like this showing up in my life. In high school, my close friend Kate's ex- girlfriend went to school half a state away with an acquaintance of mine, a connection that the two of them somehow worked out and then relayed the information back to me. When I came to college, my theatre camp best friend's middle school best friend came to Emerson too. Sophomore year, it turned out that I moved into this girl's former dorm room... and a few days after we bonded over shared living space, said middle school best friend of my theatre camp best friend ended up running into an early high school friend of mine from back home, who was visiting Boston for the weekend— and they somehow figured out the connection... and then relayed the information back to me. Absurd, yes? Get the idea?
So it wasn't the fact that one of my ex-babysitters had found her way to the same coffee shop in Philly where my ex/friend happened to be working that surprised me— it was the fact that this woman suddenly existed again outside of her role as The Bad Babysitter in my childhood newsreel. Lynn was one of a very few babysitters who made a lasting impression on me, and might be responsible for many of my misguided notions about what it means to be a grown-up. All or most of the speeding down dirt roads with windows open that I did with boyfriends in later years was done because of her, and the way she made climbing down her mother's trellis after 9PM look glamorous. Looking back, she was young— 14, 16 at most—but from my upstairs window (she lived next door) the laughter that rolled away with the crunch of tires on gravel was exactly what I wanted out of adulthood.
When she came over, she terrified me. She spent the whole time lying upside-down on the sofa, watching MTV and talking on the phone about things she would hiss at me not to hear. I think there was a boy once or twice. One time she told me that my food was made of dog poop, and then yelled at me when I wouldn't eat it. I ratted on her to my parents every time, who I think gave her a talking-to so the next time she came over we painted T-shirts and she talked with me straight about not being like her when I grew up. I listened, but those illicit still-frames of Madonna's bustier, the boy on the couch, and the long legs of the babysitter swinging for footholds as she climbed out her window were filed away somewhere to make me always slightly dissatisfied with my safe choices. I wanted crop tops and cigarettes and laughter like car exhaust trailing behind me when I went out after twilight in the summer. I was four years old and I fell asleep with the window open.
In the morning, I owned the world again. The dewy hours before 8AM were my familiar territory, and I could go next door to where Lynn's mother had her garden and pull up the Kohlrabi she grew for me on the back stretch by the nature preserve. Who knows why I ate that stuff— I was a picky kid who wouldn't eat sandwiches, yet couldn't get enough of the green alien pod things that Carla coaxed out of her raised beds. My favorite foods then were kohlrabi and fried calamari— alien vegetable and fried squid, who knows. I would pull one of the bulbs up and rinse it off at the garden hose before setting down to snap off the stalks and eat it over by where the tree surgeon had illegally buried the petrified trunks in our yard. I crunched the mild sweetness of the vegetable meat and poked at the petrified trees with bamboo twigs until they frayed or bent limp in my hand. I waved to Carla on her knees in the dirt with the big holey straw hat that scattered speckles of light across her shaded face. In the morning it was easy to be a good girl.
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