I did end up finding a job shortly after the binder incident. And even as a nanny, of sorts. I had been out for a walk and had stopped in to a diner to buy some gum from their gumball machine. There in the vestibule, thumbtacked to a small bulletin board, was an index card covered with bluebird stickers. Written in shaky, delicate old lady handwriting, it said Grandma Betty Needs a Friend, followed by a telephone number. I tore down the card and ran home to call.
“You’re hired, Sweetie,” she told me.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Thanks what?”
“Thanks a lot?”
“Thanks, Grandma Betty,” she corrected me, giggling a crackly little giggle.
The job was to help her with her chores and keep her company. Thankfully, she had a nurse who helped her bathe in the evenings after I went home, so I just had to do things like dust her knickknacks and buy groceries for her. She let me drive her car, insisted actually (how else could I bring groceries back from the store?). I was terrified.
“I don’t know how to drive. It’s illegal. I am only fourteen!” I told her, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She just put the keys to her Buick in my palm and said, “I’ll watch Days of Our Lives until you get back.”
The Buick’s wide, cushy front bench seat seemed more like a sofa than part of an automobile. I could barely see over the huge steering wheel or reach the pedal. As people often do, I became attached to the car and wanted to add my mark to it, so I stuck a ladybug sticker on the rearview mirror and stored my Carmex in the ashtray. I think the only reason I never got pulled over was because no one actually saw me driving it.
Grandma Betty loved Kraft singles, white bread, and liverwurst. We fell into a pleasant routine: Each day at lunch I would grill myself a cheese sandwich and then grill a liverwurst and cheese sandwich for her. We would take them down the wheelchair ramp, to the picnic table in the breezeway, which was a little screened-in porch attaching her house to her garage. She told me stories about her life as a girl and about the job she’d had as a telephone operator, but mainly she wanted to talk about her husband Lloyd, who had passed away five years earlier.
“Would you believe,” she’d tell me, “that Lloyd thought he wanted to marry my sister Martha? Oh no! I wasn’t having it. I told him that I was the girl for him.” She laughed. “Martha didn’t mind. She always liked Herbie Stanford, the principal’s son. We had a double wedding! That was kind of the fashion back then. Nowadays I don’t think they do that. Oh, that Lloyd... He was trouble… I miss him every day.”
As she spoke, I munched on potato chips or crackers, anything I had been inclined to add to the grocery cart, thankful for unstale food to eat. Then she and I would share a Mounds bar for dessert.
Taking care of her was easy. She paid me $10 an hour, which was more than my mother made. Ten dollars to watch soap operas and drink Kool-aid, water plants, help her with her Search-A-Word Puzzles. In comparison, baby-sitting the previous summer had paid $2.00 an hour and I had thought I was raking it in.
“Who do you think is cuter?” she would ask me, while we watched Days together, “Shane Donovan or Mike Horton?”
“They’re about a tie,” I would say, munching on Pringles.
“Should Jennifer be with Emilio or Jack?” she would ask me.
Well, they were both cute. But I still wanted her to end up with Frankie. I said as much.
“So do I. Me too,” she’d say nodding.
“Is he ever coming back to Salem?”
She flipped through her Soap Opera Digest. “Not a word about him in here.”
At night after I left, she watched Wheel of Fortune and knitted sweaters, scarves, mittens, and blankets for me. She’d present them to me along with my daily eighty dollars. I often told my mother that these gifts were in lieu of a paycheck, to hide how much money I was making. I feared if she knew, she would hunt down Grandma Betty and convince her that fifty cents an hour and the occasional potholder were plenty of compensation for me.
For the first few weeks, my mother was oblivious to where I was going and the growing pile of winter accessories on my dresser. Then one day as I sneaked past her to my bedroom she noticed.
“What are you doing with that Afghan? Is that from Valencia’s hope chest?” I never knew Valencia had had a hope chest. My mother got up from the kitchen table where she had been reading a fitness magazine, and she came over to me.
I told her the story I’d practiced on my walks home: “It’s from Betty. You know, that old lady I work for. ‘Cause she is poor and couldn’t pay me today.”
“Oh. She’s paying you in blankets?”
“Yes.”
“Well that’s new. How do you think I’d like it if the dentist paid me in fillings?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well think about it. You need to stand up for yourself.”
“She pays me in money, too,” I said, fearing I had taken it too far.