Unless you deal with kids on a regular basis, you cannot grasp the degree to which Talia was being a motherfucker. She is seven. She likes to tell me that her mother allows her to do things which we both know her mother does not allow her to do. She is not a good kid or a bad kid. She is a child. You can tell that there is a show going on in her head and she won’t show you all of it. She looks at you from the sides of her eyes. She will turn out fine, because she has great parents. She will turn out fine, because she has texture and she will have guidance.
We have to leave for school, and she won’t go. “I know you won’t leave me,” she says. “Don’t make that bet because that is a bet you will lose,” I say. Thomas and I do our usual morning race to my car. He is four and so I let him win. I will stop letting him win when he turns six, maybe. Talia waits by the window inside the house, looking out evenly at me. I feel like Winston Churchill, giving her one last eyebrow and a sharp finger pull toward me. She blinks slowly and calmly. “And we’re off,” I say to Thomas.
We drive away. Of course we only circle the block once, but I am filled with the silent almost-glee of justice. This is the juice that keeps you young. Maybe the things that we think keep us young are really just thematic notes we first feel vibrate throughout us in childhood. We are gone for maybe three minutes.
When I come back, Talia is crying on the porch. Suddenly, I am deflated. “I’m sorry,” I say. I am the nanny. I’m not supposed to make the children cry. But I also say “Next time don’t make a bet you can’t follow through on.”
Was that right or was that wrong?
