Jessie & Elizabeth (abandoned)

8. Mom's Mistakes

Holy shit. I was a nanny.

Of course, by the time that fact finally sunk in, I had been one for almost a month already. Yet, I felt like Ari, who had discovered yesterday that when a dolphin is asleep, only half of its brain shuts down while the other half stays awake, and had been trying to make half her brain go asleep ever since. I had highly encouraged her little experiments because she'd be quiet for a while, and when it came to her, silence was even more of a miracle than a dolphin's brain activity.

My probation period was slowly coming to an end, and to my surprise, Elizabeth hadn't mentioned it yet. Highly aware of what was about to come, I'd decided I would have to actively try to teach the kids stuff instead of just entertaining them all day long. Or like Elizabeth had snarled at me when I'd been pretending to be Ari's pony one afternoon: "you're their nanny, not their home entertainment system".

Trying to please her, I had started to give the girls chores. Camille had to help set the table and put her toys away before bed. Ari had to empty the dishwasher a few times a week and sweep the kitchen floor regularly. Manon had to fill up the dishwasher after dinner and assist miss Schneider when she was doing the laundry. Obviously, this schedule had been met with a loud chorus of protests, except from Camille, and Ari had complained about it to her mother. Elizabeth, however, had told her very sternly she thought it was a good idea and that she should've thought of it herself much earlier. From then on, it had been a daily fight trying to get Ari to do her chores. By the time Camille's birthday was around the corner, I must've sent Ari to take a time-out on the stairs for a hundred times already. Being a nanny was not easy.

The hardest part, though, wasn't making Ari do her chores, or even endure her mother's glares and snide remarks. No, the thing I dreaded most every day, was bedtime.

The night before Camille's birthday, I sat on the edge of Manon's four-poster, one of her books in my lap. She lay under the covers, clutching a mint green fox to her chest, watching me with her lips pressed into a tight line, her thin straw blonde hair spread around her like a halo.

Until now, I'd only read to her sisters, which I'd managed well enough when I put some effort into it, seeing as how they were too small for overly complicated stories. Tonight, she had asked me if I'd read to her as well, from Roald Dahl's Matilda, and even though my stomach turned at the prospect, I'd said yes. It had seemed like a nice bonding experience.

Boy, was I wrong.

My finger moved to the next line. I stared at it. It looked so familiar... "Oc— oc— occas — occasion — oh wait! Occasionally. Who puts words like that in a kid's book?"

With a deep sigh, she sat up, yanking the book from my hands. "Let me do it," she said, throwing her hair over her shoulder like her mother sometimes did. "Honestly, didn't you ever go to school?"

"I did! I just wasn't very good at it. And I missed a lot of first grade; I suppose that didn't help." We'd moved to a new school district, and as it was too far for me to walk to the bus stop, an adult had to drive me there, only Ma and Uncle Ray sometimes forgot to take me.

She straightened her back and cleared her throat, as if wanting to show me how it's done, and read out the whole paragraph without stumbling once. The little girl Matilda had asked her father for a book, and he'd responded she should be happy with the television, which, I mused, was probably how my Ma would've reacted too. Apparently, Manon was thinking along the same lines because she looked up and said: "Jessie, do you have a dad?"

"Nope. Ma says I have a number of possible dads, and that's as far as I want to think about that. I don't ever want to picture her flirting with any man, let alone multiple." I shuddered, trying to push the image of her batting her eyes at some mustached dude out of my head. What a nightmare.