My parents have very sophisticated tastes. They love jazz and modern art, and they wine and dine at the finest restaurants in New York City on the weekends with their well dressed friends. They love to travel to Berlin and New Orleans and Argentina, returning from these places with exotic gifts for me and my sister: chocolates and wooden shoes and hats made of the fur of alpacas; they have friends in all of these amazing places who host them for free, and take them to the local spots where they take pictures of the food, the teenage boy who gave them directions, the cliff where they stopped for lunch, the most beautiful stone in the city, a mural, and a box of Frosted Flakes with the Spanish label “Zucaritas.” Then they show us these photos in a slideshow on my dad’s laptop when they get home.
My parents’ friends always joke that I live on my own. “Have you seen your parents this year?” they ask me, when I leave their homes to go eat dinner, calling my sister so I can talk to her as I eat pre-made organic salads from Whole Foods that my mom buys before she goes away. Sometimes I set the table really fancy when I’m alone for dinner, with candles and Pellegrino seltzer in a wine glass. I like cloth napkins, too; when I went to Vermont for a visit once, the landscape was split into squares so that it looked exactly like the cloth napkins we have in my house. I didn’t always eat dinner alone when my parents were away. I used to have nannies.
The first nanny I had was Leila. I don’t remember her very well, except for one occasion. My sister and I were sitting on the stairs, and we were fighting, calling each other names. Leila said, “The next person that says a dirty word is going to get her mouth washed out with soap!” Leila walked a few steps. Melissa, my sister, hissed, “Dummy,” just loud enough for her to hear. Leila dragged Melissa up the stairs into our bathroom and stuffed her screaming mouth with a bar of Dove with Exfoliating Beads. Leila left because a few months later, she wasn’t paying attention to us, watching TV as my sister ate an entire tube of toothpaste. Melissa had to go to the hospital. My sister hacked up frothy blue sparkly throw-up for a week, and Leila got fired.
The best and most important nanny is Zeny. Whenever my friends meet her, I introduce her as my “godmother-person.” She’s a small Filipina woman whom I first met when I was three years old. We share the same birthday, and she writes a card for me in her small, pretty handwriting each year that she signs “May God Bless You, Zeny.” Zeny used to live with me, until I started to drive and I could have sleepovers when my parents were away. She used to make me Annie’s macaroni and cheese for dinner, and while it was cooking, she gave me baby carrots with ketchup. “Carrots are good for your eyes,” she’d say. “I wear glasses because I didn’t eat carrots with ketchup like you do.” Her glasses have gold rims, and the lenses are bifocals, so they used to look like laughing faces to me.
Zeny had to enforce my parents’ rule that I wasn’t allowed to watch TV during the week. I could watch one movie per day, but no television, though on the weekends I could watch as much as I wanted. I watched all of the Land Before Time movies about dinosaurs, and I really liked The Princess Bride. Without TV during the week, I had to find other ways to pass the time during the week. In fourth grade, I learned to knit. I was really into knitting. I made skimpy little neckties for every person in my family, including Zeny. I also liked gardening. I suppose I liked the idea of gardening better than actually doing it. Once, I planted beans in my backyard, but only one bean grew. Zeny boiled the bean pod for me in hot water and put salt on it. Then, frustrated with my measly crop, I went outside and dumped all of my seed packets in a potted plant, and a forest of beans grew and strangled the potted plant to death.
Zeny says that I was always sweet to her. My sister apparently gave her a lot of trouble, though. Zeny says that when she first started living with us, Melissa, used to scream and cry and break things when my parents left. She used to tell Zeny she hated her. After a year, my sister went into my mom’s jewelry box and picked out the sparkliest diamond necklace. She gave it to Zeny.
“I almost took it!” she says. “I thought it was costume jewelry! Thank god I asked your mommy!” We reminisce about the good old days a lot when she’s at my house now. She only comes three days a week to clean. We talk about religion a lot, because Zeny’s a pretty religious Christian, though she doesn’t know if she believes in the creation story. She knows all about Darwinian theory. There’s a collection of Compton’s encyclopedias in my basement and Zeny has read them all, cover to cover. She knows everything. We also talk about the Philippines. She tells me stories from her childhood.
Her father had a lumber-processing plant in the Philippines, and she used to sit on plates and slide down the mountains of sawdust with her siblings. She says that banana leaves in the Philippines are sometimes taller than people, and when she was there, she would wrap meat in them and steam the food in hot water. She told me about nuts in the Philippines that were as hard as rocks, and when she went back home to visit, she brought me one. It feels like ivory from the tusk of an elephant, and it has a pretty white sheen, like a freshwater pearl. Her husband is Bonny, and they met when they were in high school. They used to have chaperones take them on dates to the movies. The chaperone would sit between them to make sure they didn’t hold hands.
Zeny gave me The Macarena album for my birthday. She taught me the dance, and then I performed it for her probably a hundred times in my basement. I taught my best friends, and the three of us performed it for Zeny another hundred times. She sat on this giant futon with red and yellow triangles on it and said, “What a nice dance! You should perform with Ricky Martin!”
Zeny used to walk me to and from elementary school. One day, in first grade, I ran to Zeny from my classroom: “Zeny! Zeny! Guess what?” She met me in her socks and sandals. I told her all about the first grade play, and how I had gotten the main role in Sleeping Beauty. I showed her my script, and told her how many lines I had. “Many lines,” she said. I told her I was nervous to memorize them, but my nerves faded like the ink on my copy of the script, because every single day, Zeny would read through my lines with me. My parents never read my lines with me; instead, they gave me a bouquet of roses as I took my bow.
Zeny left me for a while, because she had to take care of her daughter. I remember when she told me she was going home. I was in my bathroom, putting on lavender hand cream. She said she was leaving, but we would keep in touch. I cried. When Zeny left, I had a slew of other nannies. Vanji was one nanny, also from the Philippines. She was nice, but a little boring, and my mailman saw her kick my dog so she got fired. Then I had Lucia. Lucia was crazy.
For one thing, she used to sing really loudly when she was living in my house, at like, eleven at night. She could drive, unlike Zeny and Vanji, so she used to pick me and Melissa up at school. One time, she picked us up and ran out of gas on the main road in front of our school. Everyone was honking behind us, and all of the kids from school were staring. She sat in the front seat praying for a while, and then we all got out and started to push the car. I don’t remember what happened, but Lucia left after a few months. Zeny came back when she was done helping her daughter, so that she could help me.
Zeny isn’t the only person I’ve got helping me when my parents are away. I’ve also got Caggie.
Caggie is a close friend of the family, a taxi driver. He was my aunt’s best friend growing up, and now he drives my parents and other people to the airport. Before I got my license, if I had somewhere to go, I would get Caggie to take me there in his car. He’s an old, short, Italian-American guy, a Vietnam vet whose real name is Robert Caggiano. No one calls him Robert. Everyone calls him Caggie.
I introduce him as my “godfather-person.” He calls me “Booboo” and asks me all about school and boys when we’re in the car together. If he finds out I’m sick, he makes a container of chicken soup, or a loaf of bread for me. He used to have a restaurant, so all of the food he makes is really good. He puts on my favorite radio station the second I get in the car, and he gives me advice while we eat gelato from Rye Brook. I told him that my family doesn’t like my boyfriend, and he said, “They don’t have to kiss him so who gives a crap.” He has two tiny white dogs called Daisey and Cracker. On his car, he’s got a sticker that says “Daisey and Cracker: Shit Happens.”
On Easter Sunday when I was a junior in high school, I decided I wanted to go to church. My parents were at Equinox Gym taking a spinning class, so I called Caggie to take me to church. I wore a pink dress with pearl earrings. He picked me up in his car, and we walked through the church linking arms. I had a good time with him that morning; he knew everything about everyone in the church. “His mother cheated on the father with the police chief,” he whispered to me as a man got up to eat the host. When I told him I wondered what the host tasted like, he whispered, “Go try it.”
“Caggie, I never had a communion. I haven’t confessed. This is like, my second time at church.”
“Who cares? You think God will punish you because you want to try a dopey cracker? I bet you’ve sinned less than that schmuck Toriello,” he hissed as he gestured toward another man tasting the host. He looked at my stunned expression and nudged me and laughed. “Happy Easter, Booboo,” he said. I widened my eyes and patted his hand.
Caggie takes me to church, but he’s also got a sticker on his car that says “NRA.” He carries a rifle in his car and has the dirtiest mouth I’ve ever heard. He’s shockingly politically conservative, and he calls Obama “La Mumba” and “Darkie” and tailgates on the back of cars at the toll booths so he doesn’t have to pay. If someone cuts him off when he’s driving, he calls them a “fucking chink.” He tries to talk to me about illegal immigrants and abortion and gay people. I used to say he was racist, but then something happened.
My sister’s best friend is black, and she rode with Caggie in the car to the airport. We rode in the car with them, nervous that he was going to say something, fidgeting and making awkward small talk as soon as we got in Caggie’s car. But he was so nice to her, from the very beginning, asking her about her trip and her future plans. He gave her his business card at the end of the ride when she paid, and still asks about her. “She was a sweetheart,” he says. His voice sounds like crunchy gravel, and when he says “sweetheart” it sounds like “sweet hat.”
For my fifteenth birthday, I had a backyard barbeque with all of my family and friends, and Caggie was there. He gave me a Taylor Swift CD and kissed me on the cheek. “She’s very pretty, and she’s a nice girl. You two would get along I bet. I never heard her music but I can tell she’s got values.” He had a hamburger and said hi to my parents, then left because he had to walk the dogs. I saw him shuffle over to his car, but he called me over before he got in. “I’m gonna take a picture,” he said. He took a photo of me on his phone and then asked me to set it as his cellphone wallpaper.
When I first got my license, I used to get lost on the way home from school. It was incredibly frustrating because I knew that I should have known the way home, but I would miss the exit or get off too soon and end up at the airport by accident. One day I got lost on the way home, pulling into my driveway at nine-o’clock, crying and wiping my runny nose on a scratchy paper napkin.
I got a call from Caggie when I finally got home on that damp night in November. I picked up the phone, and I heard his crunchy voice: “Booboo,” he said, “I got a favor.” I leaned on the kitchen counter, listening to the hum of the microwave heating my frozen burrito. My parents were away. “What’s up Caggie?” I said.
“Don’t forget to invite me to your graduation.” I told him it was months away, in June, and he said “I know. Just don’t forget.”