“Is that a problem?” I asked, wanting to kick myself even as the words were leaving my stupid, stupid mouth. Did I want the job or didn’t I? Why raise the issue, why say the word problem for her? Let her do it if she was going to do it.
“Oh, no, no,” she pooh-poohed. “I mean, after all, with that hair alone, not to mention the lack of height—” she eyed me up and down in no time at all “—you’re bound to stand out.”
This from a woman who was shorter than me and had blue hair?
But I kept my thoughts to myself.
“Challenges can be good,” I said, “for me and for Iceland.”
She smiled for the first time.
“You’re a little plucky,” she said, “aren’t you? I kind of like that.”
“Are Icelanders prejudiced?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
“Not at all,” she said. “They’re just all tall. And blond. And not Jewish.”
Until she’d brought up the subject of my religion, it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder that it might be strange to be a short, dark-haired Jew in Iceland. Maybe I hadn’t thought about the last so much because Judaism had never been a salient feature of my existence and was more like one of the less prominent lines on my résumé, like my high-school job at Dunkin’ Donuts.
In fact, it wasn’t until I was eight that I even learned I was Jewish and even then it was by accident.
Aunt Bea had just given birth to Joe, her first, and they were getting ready to baptize him. I was curious about the process, having never seen one before.
“Why would you know anything about it?” Aunt Bea had asked me in a rare unguarded moment. “Your mother was Jewish.”
I had known so little about my mother, other than that she’d died while having me. Women aren’t supposed to die in childbirth anymore, all the books tell you that it just doesn’t happen, but sometimes it does.
A decade before, I’d been a fan of the TV program E.R., until one night when I saw an episode called “Love’s Labors Lost.” It was about a woman who goes into the hospital to have a baby and everything goes wrong, one thing after another, until the woman dies. It was like they were playing the story of my birth, and after that I could never watch the show again, had no interest in any medical show or movie of any sort.
After my mother’s death at the moment of my birth, my father raised me until I was three. It was at that point that the constant reminder I represented to him of my mother, whom he had loved dearly, became too much for him. I was sent to live with Aunt Bea and Uncle Thornton, while my dad departed for Africa where he pursued work as an archaeologist. He wrote often, and came to visit a couple of times a year, his visits always initially having the forced formal feel of royalty calling. I cherished those visits, kept what warm moments transpired during them locked in a special treasure chest in my heart. But it always seemed that no sooner had we got used to one another once more, he was off again.
Uncle Thornton was kind to me in the ways that Aunt Bea was not, but when he died not long after their third child was born, I was left without an ally in the household. Aunt Bea was of a mind that I needed to earn my way there and the form that earning took was in helping to care for her three spoiled children. The upside was that in caring for them, I learned a trade that would help me care for the children of others, like now.
Still, finding out I was Jewish had come as a surprise, not necessarily an unpleasant one, but a surprise nonetheless. Once I knew, I clung to it as the only remaining legacy, other than the pearls, of my mother. Aunt Bea tried to shrug it off as some kind of obstinate whim I had taken into my head, and there was no one to teach me about my religion, but I clung to it all the same. I might not practice it very much, might not know enough about it, but it was a part of who I was, where I came from, who I’d always be.
Mrs. Fairly wanted to know some more about my experience with children, so I told her about my years helping Aunt Bea raise her three, neglecting to mention the parts about those three abusing me in every way their evil little minds could come up with.
At least, I thought, there had never been any red bedroom for them to lock me in.
“Children can be a wonderful challenge,” I told Mrs. Fairly. “I like challenges. I like wonder, too.”
If she thought that last was odder than something most people would say, she didn’t let on.
“Would you like to meet Annette now?” she inquired.
I looked at her questioningly.
“You did realize,” she said, “when you applied for a nanny position, that you’d be caring for a child…didn’t you?”
Apparently, she had her own plucky side.
“Annette,” she told me, “is the little girl you’d be caring for.”
When I nodded my consent, Mrs. Fairly summoned the liveried servant who in turn summoned an older woman in a tweed skirt and sweater set who entered the room holding the hand of a small girl, about age six, who was dressed in an old-fashioned pink dress that had puff sleeves with a white apron on it. The girl had dark curls, not so different from my own, and a spark of mischief in her dark eyes that would not be quenched, I suspected, no matter how serious those around her might get.
Annette quickly curtsied when she was immediately before me and tilted her head to one side as we were introduced by Mrs. Fairly.
“What kinds of things will you teach me?” she asked. “Are you good at geography? Math?”
I wondered how the little imp had read my mind so quickly and seen into my shortcomings.
I shook my head slowly, twice.
“I’m afraid that neither of those things is my strong point,” I confessed.
“Good,” she laughed, “since I am not good at them either and I would hate to have a nanny who was going on all the time about places and numbers. But…what are you good at?”
“Words,” I said. “I’m very good with words, language. Anything to do with reading, writing, I’m your girl.”
She laughed again, apparently delighted at the idea of me being her girl rather than the other way around.
I was puzzled though. Even though Mrs. Fairly had neglected to introduce me to the woman accompanying Annette, I knew instinctively this woman was not the child’s mother and must in fact be her nanny. She was too stereotypically caretaking to be anything else.
Apparently, though, I was in a houseful of mind readers, for Mrs. Fairly said next, “Sylvia has no wish to go to Iceland. That is why the master has had me look for a replacement.”
I did so wish she would stop referring to him as “the master.” Give her a humpback, crooked teeth, make her a man and put her in a castle, change her accent, too, and I’d swear I was sitting there with Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant.
“That will be all, Sylvia,” Mrs. Fairly said, indicating they could go.
I
