Adventures in Babysitting

I was an early entrepreneur. I sold greeting cards door-to-door in the military housing neighborhood on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base when I was in elementary school and marketed awful perfumes that a friend and I had distilled with unlikely ingredients and by no recognizable method to my classmates. I did extra chores for a nickel or a dime, and began sewing for hire in junior high. I was known as the family banker, someone who could be persuaded to pull a dollar or two from the stash in my Bible. I couldn’t wait to start what I saw as the lucrative career of babysitting, the venerable economic mainstay of tweens and teens.

My avarice was tempered by some degree of kindness so I had a fair amount of business. My first bookings were overflow requests for my older sister. I scheduled as many evenings as I could at a rate of 60 cents an hour, a ten cent premium charged not on the basis of my junior high school Red Cross certification but because I could make minutes into pennies.

One of my mainstay clients was a sweet southern woman whose husband was the base psychiatrist. She was a compulsive talker who would review the same information each and every time I came over. One night, after her typically interminable directions and rambling, she drifted toward their front door. Her husband, who almost never spoke to me, took me by the elbow into the kitchen. There he said quietly, “I was counseling a young airman today who had a violent outburst. He has threatened to kill me and my family. The APs have him now, but if anyone comes to the door tonight, don’t open it.” Then they left. That was the longest evening of my life. Every scritch of a tree branch on a window, every pop or crack of the house settling had me clinging to the ceiling like Sylvester, the cartoon cat.

When my family moved off base, I lost my clientele of officer’s and higher-ranking NCO’s wives and had to rustle up new business. My clients now were single mothers who lived nearby our house in our working-class neighborhood of new tract-development houses. I walked to their houses; there was no father or husband they could send to pick me up and take me back home.

There was one confusing evening when a young widow for whom I was sitting was preceded home by her date, who leaned on the door jamb and told me to go home because the mother would be home shortly. I couldn’t keep him from entering the house—I didn’t try—but there were two toddlers and a baby asleep down the hall so I stumbled around, not actively refusing to leave but nonetheless remaining until I saw my client standing in her own house. She did indeed arrive about half an hour later, as drunk as he and with a couple of friends in tow. I left, unsettled about leaving the kids and about the ways grownups entertained themselves.

I was still saving some of my earnings with a hazy idea of college tuition in mind, but would occasionally splurge on record albums. High school studies should have taken more of my attention, but I maintained my babysitting contacts, and worked every day of the summers that I could. Later that year, I was baby-sitting for a working mother of two little boys.  I remember the tedium of daily lunches, Mr. Rogers and naptime. The boys had a few toys, but were often bored, so I made up a few games, and once went through the hall closet looking for creative play materials. I didn’t know quite what to make of the 8 mm projector and some film canisters, one of which was labeled, “The Twins and the Banana”.  One of the days was enlivened by a tornado touching down on the far east side of Tucson. I heard later that it took the roof off the science building of my high school. Meanwhile, three miles away, I took the little boys into the bathroom and had them play in the tub. When the water got cold, I wrapped them in towels while I drained the tub and ran fresh hot water into it. Adding bubble salts the second time kept the boys entertained long enough for the storm to pass.

I was losing the will to be self-employment by the summer of 1972. I was working then as a wildly underpaid housekeeper for a woman who asked if I would sit for a friend of hers who had three small children later that week, adding that her own ten year old daughter, Sara, could co-sit with me. This would be handy, partly so the daughter could see how it was done and partly so my employer could join her friend for a night out as I’d be taking care of her child as well. This was illustrative of the generally Dickensian nature of this woman. Not only was she paying me an exploitive 25 dollars a week for full housekeeping: laundry (including ironing school clothes for the little miscreants who took their cotton shirts from the closet for summer play), vacuuming, dusting, and toilet scrubbing, but she required me to prepare lunches and start their dinners before I left for the day. Nonetheless, an extra few hours on the end of this week would be a few more dollars, so now I had plans for my Friday night.

That evening I had four children to look after, but they were good natured and easy to amuse. I had put the littler two into their bunk beds, and was diapering the baby when the power failed, as it often did in Tucson during the summer monsoons. I managed to get the diaper pins fastened by feel, which is pretty much how one does it in any case. I held the baby up on my chest and carried him up the hallway. I called for Sara to come to the kitchen and stay there. We found two squat candles in a drawer. I handed the baby to Sara, lit the candles from the gas stove burners and set them on the table. The baby slept in my arms as we sat in the flickering light, me telling Sara any story I could remember from the Andrew Lang fairy books. After a bit, I went to check on the toddler boys. I wasn’t gone more than two minutes when Sara began screeching. I ran back to the kitchen to see the curtains above the sink on fire. Sara had carried the candle to the window to look at the trees flailing in the wind and rain. I hauled Sara out of the room, and almost threw the baby into her arms. I told her to go stand on the porch and I ran down the hall to roust out the boys. It took forever to awaken them; I largely  dragged them down the hall and out the front door. I growled at Sara to keep them on the porch and ran to call 911. The phone was in the kitchen, but so was the fire. I looked from one to the other and decided to address the blaze rather than pick up the phone. A wet dishtowel served to douse flames of a fire larger that it would have been had I simply thrown water from the sink on it in the first place rather than staging a wholesale evacuation, but still small enough to make the telling of this modest adventure longer than the experiencing of it. I retrieved the children from the porch just minutes before the return of the adults. I was grateful that they were matter-of-fact about the blackened curtains, agreeing that getting the kids out of the house had been the proper course of action and that I should still be paid.

Those summers impressed on me at long last that working for ready money with near-slave labor was not going to pay for college or much of anything. In fact, independent sales as a tween and kitchen duty as a teen-ager snuffed out any desire for the rewards of capitalism. I set my sights on academic rewards and steady government work.