Ali in Wonderland Read online

  Greta was German. Never hire a German woman to care for your kids. You wouldn’t want an Italian working on your car or an Irish lass cooking your meal. I’ve never admired the German language, least of all when it’s screamed at me from a foot away. When she ordered us to do our homework, it felt like we were going to invade Latvia. Greta was eventually fired for her undemonstrative outlook and tyrannical views toward punishment (to her, Triumph of the Will was a Disney movie), but the real reason she was discharged had to do with a Thanksgiving incident in which she tore a leg off the turkey before it was set on the table, and continued eating it as, like an SS captain, she yelled at us to wash our hands. It wasn’t so much that she had destroyed the symbol of the holiday by ripping off its limb as it was a chilling metaphor for what she was capable of when it came to child care.

  My stepfather was a notorious bachelor before he married my mother in his early fifties. He’d had his share of the ladies; on the wall of his study he hung a photo of Marilyn Monroe in a leotard eyeing him lasciviously as if he were a six-carat diamond or a bottle of pills. During his bachelorhood, he was looked after by Elizabeth Morrison, who cleaned for him, collected mail for him, and gave disapproving looks to women searching for their heels in the dawn light. Elizabeth was a hefty African American woman who wore a white nurse’s uniform. In her younger days she had been a nurse, and she found it easier to simply stick with the same outfit week in, week out than go through the imbecilic routine of trying to decide what to wear every day. Even in the summer when she would take us to the beach, she wore the nurse uniform, black support hose, and white shoes. She hated the beach and used to mutter, “Look at everybody just sitting in the sun. Black people want to be white, white people want to be black.” I loved her gravelly voice, the result of fifty years of bourbon and cigarettes. And Elizabeth loved poker. She refused to get down on the carpet with a box of Barbies or create collages with rubber stamps; in fact, she didn’t like to do much, least of all crafts, but if you flashed a deck of cards, within seconds you’d be at the kitchen table with a bowl of Chex mix, watching her inhale Pall Malls like a desperado for hours on end.

  Elizabeth gave off an aura of fortitude, perhaps the byproduct of a tough childhood or some hard knocks along the way. One afternoon when I came home from school, expecting the usual tongue bath from my beloved Max, I was instead greeted by a deathly quiet house and Elizabeth solemnly standing in the doorway. She fixed me with a stern look. “Max is dead. It doesn’t matter how [he’d been hit by a car], he dead. You can cry and cry, which ain’t going to bring him back, or just move on now.” I spent the afternoon playing seven-card stud and biting my lower lip. If I missed my mom, Elizabeth would say, “She’s coming back! But if you keep moping around like that, why would she want to?” And when she tucked me into bed, she would turn out the light with a simple, “All right. Good night.” When my brother was giving her lip, she would twist a wet towel and try to thwack his thighs; she wouldn’t take shit from anybody, especially not an awkwardly tall, long-haired teenage boy with acne and doped-up eyes. I loved Elizabeth. She lived with our family on and off until I was ten and then went off to live with a relative; she had gotten too old for the antics of a family of obstreperous kids, incontinent dogs, and itinerant parents. I hope for her sake that relative resided in Vegas.

  I think my mother hired each babysitter as a reaction to the predecessor. If one was too loose, the next one was too strict, and so on. One of the most baffling decisions my mother ever made (besides working in a Republican White House) was hiring Brandelyn, a three-hundred-pound Mormon from Utah. My mother must have found her in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints Craigslist. I’m not a fatist, but somebody who is caring for young children should be able to at least walk. And not wear powder blue polyester pantsuits while battling a body odor problem. Brandelyn would bathe my little sister and me every night, scrubbing our bodies with loofahs. “You have to get the dirt out of your bodies and your minds,” she would say as she scoured our necks raw. And there was never enough talk about the Lord. “The Lord wouldn’t like it if you ate that cookie before dinner, the Lord doesn’t like children that scream, the Lord damns people to hell if they don’t floss. . . .” She did a horrific job of selling us on Jesus; he was more didactic and ominous than any parent I knew, including Mrs. Williams, the Chinese mother who hit my classmate Adele with a stick while she practiced violin. Brandelyn’s fate was sealed when she flushed my gerbil, Bubbles, down the toilet because she decided it was rabid. Bubbles was from a reputable pet store, but apparently the Lord deemed it so. We draw the line when you start killing family.

  And then there was Summer. She looked like the Joan Armatrading album cover she was always playing. She was skinny, had a huge Afro, and wore bell-bottom jeans and crocheted sweaters. And she was beyond cool. There was no bedtime, dinner was craving-based, and undergarments were strictly optional. Summer was popular and beloved; the doorbell rang at all hours of the day and night. I thought we had finally found a staple in our life, a surrogate mom, friend, and confidant, all embodied in a woman who looked like she jumped off a Mod Squad lunch box. But six months into the job, Summer was abruptly fired; she had been (allegedly) dealing heroin out of the house. Yup, just another nanny hustling junk, selling pie, flipp’n sack from behind an Easy-Bake Oven.

  And then there were none. I think my mother decided, before our home became a crack den, that we would no longer have babysitters live in. She threw in the towel and decided to just raise us herself.

  I had my eldest daughter in a heat wave in Washington, D.C., the summer of 2002. She was a few weeks old when I started the search for the babysitter. I tried word of mouth, referrals, and the local paper. I decided to cover all my bases and pulled a phone number tab off a self-made nanny advertisement at the corner pharmacy. I hired Lala the day I called, mostly because I felt like a hen flapping around in the “I don’t know how to do this” motherhood pen. She was from the Philippines, legal, and had raised six children herself; I thought I had struck goo-goo-ga-ga gold.

  That afternoon Lala pulled the baby off my nipple and said, “Oh Mommmmyyyyy . . . I take baby to the park.”

  Naturally, I thought she knew much more than me when it came to child rearing, the Pacific ring of fire, and how to cook milkfish. “Um, okay,” I timidly answered, buttoning my blouse, “but be back in thirty minutes, because I think she’s still hungry and it’s ninety degrees out.” She nodded and laughed, exposing a mouth full of dental mishaps. The amazing thing about women from the Philippines is they’re ageless. Lala could have been eighteen or eighty, there was no way of telling: their skin stays the same, their silky hair—the only clue is the teeth. When a Filipino woman takes her teeth out and puts them in a cup of water, she’s over forty.

  An hour went by . . . then two . . . then three. I called my husband in a panic. “She’s been kidnapped!” I ran sweating up and down the stairs, balancing a breast pump and the phone. Like a Vietnam vet who hears a car backfire, I flashed back to the many babysitters from my youth and feared I was starting my own line of adventures in babysitting hell.

  Three and a half hours later, Lala came home with the sweaty and parched baby. Needless to say, she was fired immediately; a neighbor later told me they had seen her at the park canoodling with a man while the stroller sat there under a tree. SHE LEFT MY STARVING BABY FOR THREE HOURS DURING A HEAT WAVE! I spit on her name.

  After Lala’s one day of employment, we hired a baby nurse named Juju. My eldest is almost nine years old, and Juju still lives with us. I have no idea of her age, but she’s never abandoned my children out in a heatwave and she loves crabbing with raw chicken necks as much as me. As General Electric would say, “She brings good things to life.”

  And Juju will live with us forever—even if she sells dope out of the house!

  Chapter Four

  Don’t Look Back

  When my older sister was seventeen, she underwent spinal fusion surgery. She had scoliosis from birth, and my parents had hoped a back brace would mend it. But she never wore her back brace. She would leave for school, sneak around the back of the house, stash the brace in the garage, and race onto the school bus. The surgical procedure fused her vertebrae together so her spine would be straight, and the brace could permanently live behind the pile of firewood and mice droppings.

  I was twelve years old the summer Sissy had surgery at Mass. General Hospital. It was a sweltering and sticky July in Boston, and I remember living on chips from a vending machine and lying on the plastic-tiled hospital floor talking to my sister while she was suspended upside down in a medieval bed contraption. At the time I didn’t realize the extent of such major surgery. (The only other time I had been in a hospital was when I was born, on a gurney in the hallway during a blizzard, so my initial reaction to being there was to feel cold and lonely.) Both my divorced parents were there, trading seats, conferring with doctors, and fetching coffee. Sometimes my sister would scream so loudly I could hear it down the hallway in the waiting room, where I’d be working on my Mad Libs. It was usually a sign the morphine drip had run dry.

  The hospital had a distinct smell, a combination of pudding, Lysol, and piss. (Do hospitals have a rule against potpourri?) My sister couldn’t move for weeks and had to poop in a bag, which was both fascinating and repulsive to me. For that reason alone I never wanted to have surgery. Although as a middle-aged woman, I might put up with pooping in a bag for a good face lift.

  When I wasn’t trying to amuse myself with popping rubber gloves and stacking pill cups at the nurses’ station, Fiona and I stayed in our house in Plymouth. The modest house, with a stunning view of the public beach, was just over an hour’s car ride from the hospital. Back then, Plymouth was a tiny village that survived off saltwater taffy sales and tours run by adults dressed up as pilgrims and Indians, who crushed corn and sharpened arrows with rocks. They weren’t allowed to break character, so if you asked a pilgrim where the gift shop was, she would answer, “Thou dost not know from what thou speakest.” (“Yes, but doesn’t thee drive a Pinto and babysitteth us sometimes?”) I still remember seeing an Indian Squanto complete with loincloth sharing a cigarette and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with Captain John Smith behind the Wampanoag barn.

  Fiona and I would spend the days in Plymouth with a mélange of long-haired, long-legged teenage babysitters in bikinis and straw hats named Jody, Darcy, and Liz. Down the hill from our house was the Eel River Beach Club. It was named for the begrimed canal of backwash between the club and the ocean, which housed slimy eels that boys threw rocks at or tried to catch in the janitor’s bucket. The only prerequisite for being a member of the club was you had to live in the town. If you lived kinda near, that was okay too. The club consisted of a cracked saltwater pool, one tennis court with grass growing through the tar, and a snack shack with a cook who was always out of supplies. We would spend the whole day there, dozing on our Marimekko beach towels on the hot cement, perfecting our knee flips in the saltwater pool, and slurping melting Creamsicles. The highlight, when it was really hot, was when we would pop tar bubbles on the paved parking lot.

  The nights were peaceful; with the window open you could hear the crashing of the ocean waves, which lulled me to sleep—until that summer when the movie Jaws came out. After that, my windows were permanently sealed shut; I was too young, and the film traumatized me for life. My brother and his long-haired stoner friends took me opening night. These are the sorts of mishaps that occur when your mother is away changing bedpans. After the movie we all went to the beach, where I was catatonic, held hostage to their fake shark attacks in the moonlit ocean. I didn’t take a bath for two years and still won’t swim in water above the waist, and that includes swimming pools and koi ponds. Sissy missed the Jaws phenomenon that summer, but considering she was ripped apart by the teeth of great white surgical instruments, it was a blessing.

  I used to lie on my single bed during those summer days for hours. When you’re young, your mind isn’t bogged down by questions about discovering your true self, preventing cancer, and liquidating assets; you can obsess about when you’ll sprout breasts for weeks on end. My only fleeting concerns (aside from my sharkophobia) were for Sissy and for my mother, who slept in a hospital chair for weeks. There’s a scene in the movie Terms of Endearment that was pulled from that summer. In the scene Debra Winger is dying and in great pain, and her mother, played by Shirley MacLaine, runs to the nurses’ station, screaming, “Give my daughter the shot!” For me it’s like watching a home movie.

  My mother decided that when my sister was released from the hospital, we would all stay in a rented house up in Marion, near Buzzard’s Bay. Sissy was going to be encased in a full body cast for six months, and Marion was breezy and temperate. My mother rented an ambulance to transport Sissy up there. At the time I assumed this was so that in the event of a postsurgical complication, the medical technician would be on hand. But in hindsight, I think my mother just didn’t want to have to stop at red lights.

  The Marion rental was a small white clapboard house with windowpanes of original glass that distorted the landscape and faces that passed by. Sissy spent most of the day horizontal. The body cast extended from her chin to below her pelvis. Fiona and I would break up the monotony of her day by taking extra-long Q-tips, dipping them in rubbing alcohol, and digging under the plaster to relieve itches. Fiona was young enough that a piece of string could occupy her for hours. Sissy was despondent with boredom.

  One afternoon Sissy was particularly agitated. She was crying and banging her cast against the wall molding and narrow doorways, much like a toddler trying to walk with a bucket on his head. Fiona was busy still playing with string, and I was on my twenty-sixth pastel drawing of a clamshell. Sissy stomped into the kitchen. “I can’t live like this anymore! I’m running away!”

  My mother stopped snapping peas. “Okay, okay, simmer down . . . you want some ginger ale?” The comfort elixir in our house.

  Sissy’s fist hit the side of the refrigerator. “NO! I’m leaving! I’m running away!” And like that, she threw open the screen door and started waddling down the front path. My mother walked into the living room, where I was spread out on the floor surrounded by paper, pastels, paint, and a bunch of clamshells. “Go with your sister.”

  I looked up at her. “I don’t want to run away!”

  My mother tapped her foot on the knotty pine floor. “Please run away with your sister! I don’t want her out there alone!”

  “But I don’t want to run away!”

  “I’m asking you nicely, now go!”

  I was getting irritated. “I don’t want to run away, Mom! I want to stay home! I’m happy!”

  At this point she snapped, “GET OUT!”

  I stood up in a huff, grabbed a Channel Thirteen tote bag, and filled it with a can of tuna, a bottle of juice, two apricot fruit rolls, and a spoon. I slammed the screen door as I ventured out to find my sister lurching like Frankenstein through a cluster of pine trees. It’s hard enough to swallow your mother forcing you to run away, but when I finally caught up with Sissy, she screamed at me to go home. I considered running away on my own at this point, but knew my mother would invest all her efforts in finding Sissy first, and I’d be in Tijuana doing tricks with a donkey before anyone realized I wasn’t at breakfast. So I followed Sissy from twenty feet away like some nymph stalker. We were in a part of Massachusetts that was foreign to us, so I just followed her path and prayed it would lead to a Howard Johnson. Finally, as dusk began to fall, we collided with an actual paved road, an occasional car whizzing by. Sissy stormed along the side of the road and I scampered behind, giving passing cars the “don’t ask” look. I was seething. We were in danger of missing The Partridge Family, and I had forgotten a can opener for the tuna.

  We walked for yards. Sissy finally stopped and rested her cast against a stone wall surrounding a cemetery. A small cemetery, probably one family’s worth of deceased. I was starving and ready to face the consequences of going home for food and shelter. “I’m never going home,” Sissy huffed, trying to catch her breath.

  “You know it’s Friday night! We’re going to miss The Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, and Love, American Style!” I was on the verge of bursting into tears. I felt guilty; here was my sister, who had just had her back split open like a chicken breast, with a metal rod skewering her like a shish kebab, and my shallow universe was shattered by the idea of not hearing a family of bad shag haircuts belt out, “I think I love you.” Even though Sissy was tall, blond, and very beautiful, she didn’t deserve that horrific operation. Well, maybe her svelte legs merited a root canal, but not this.

  “What do I have to do for us to go home?” I asked as Sissy looked away. Silence. And then: “If you can make me laugh, I’ll go home.”

  I repeated the terms, so we were crystal clear: “If I make you laugh, you will go home?”

  “Yes,” she snorted. For the record, Sissy hadn’t cracked a smile in eight months.

  It’s difficult to be funny on demand. In the woods. Without pay. I’m sure if Richard Pryor had been in my position, he wouldn’t have jumped up on a mound of dirt and delivered a thirty-minute set, in Massachusetts, with no crack.

  I zipped across the road to the cemetery, because where better to find yucks than a plot of dead people? I looked around for props and anything that would trigger some creative initiative. Sissy stared at me like she was watching the Nuremberg trials. I found an unused black garbage bag caught in a branch. I hid behind the largest tombstone (clearly the moneymaker of the family), out of view from Sissy and the road. I stripped down to my white undies with pink faded bows. I used my teeth to make holes in the top and sides of the bag and pulled it over my head. I gathered a bunch of twigs and meticulously wrapped them around small bunches of hair—instant forest hot rollers. The ground was moist enough to mix a muddy concoction, and I rubbed it on my face like Trish McEvoy cover-up. I put leaves between my toes, weeds around my neck, and a dandelion behind one ear. I was Bigfoot and Nell’s child.