You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny (10 page)

It’s strange what goes through your mind when you think you’re dying. Most people would think about their loved ones, maybe an unfulfilled dream. I thought this:
I’m going to die in their swimming pool. My God, what an idiot they’ll think I am. They’ll be convinced that the last act of a dying woman was to throw butter at a six-year-old
.

What an embarrassing demise.

Of course, I wasn’t dying. But this was pretty bad, anyway. I should never have come down to swim alone. Now I had compounded the trouble with Joshua a thousandfold. I shook my head a little to get my bearings, and then pulled myself out of the pool. A knot the size of a Ping-Pong ball was forming on my forehead. It started to throb. I held my hand to it and then looked at my fingers. The blood ran down my wrist and onto my arm.

So. I wouldn’t drown. I would just bleed to death. I could just picture the headline tomorrow in the
Los Angeles Times:

NANNY ACCUSED OF THROWING BUTTER AT SIX-YEAR-OLD–APPARENTLY COMMITS SUICIDE TO AVOID THE WRATH OF SUPERAGENT OVITZ

The last thing I needed was for Grandma and Grandpa Ovitz to see me in this condition, so I slithered quietly up to my room and peered at the gash on my head. It wasn’t long, only about half an inch, but it was very deep. And the blood would not stop running down between my eyes.

“Suzy, are you all right?” I heard Grandpa calling out. He must have seen the trail of blood I’d left on the marble entry.

“Uh, Mr. Ovitz, I’m up here, in my room. I bumped my head in the pool,” I called back, not wanting him to climb the stairs. Too late. David Ovitz was in his midsixties, but in a flash he dashed up the stairs and was in my room.

“Let me see that,” he said as he pulled my hand and the towel away from my face. “Oh my God, that is a nasty one; pretty deep. You’ll have to get stitches.”

Good grief. The situation grew more convoluted by the minute. Grandpa insisted on driving me to the emergency room to have the cut stitched. I should have just let Joshua eat the butter. Maybe he wouldn’t have gotten sick. Then I wouldn’t have gone swimming, and I wouldn’t have had to explain this whole ridiculous mess. Adding to my embarrassment, poor Grandpa Ovitz was deeply concerned. He held my hand the entire time the doctor was suturing my gash.

I was hoping that I could remove the huge gauze bandage protecting the eight stitches in my forehead before Michael and Judy got home. I dreaded having them find out about this little incident. I just knew Judy would shake her head in disbelief, like she did when she overheard me reminding the kids to use their manners when speaking to the rest of the staff. Or she would clearly share her disappointment in me, like she did one day when I returned from shopping. She had asked me to pick up some clothes for Brandon at Fred Segal. When I brought back three baby outfits, she looked through the bag in disgust and said,
“Obviously
, Suzy, you and I have
very
different taste.” I already felt awful enough about this incident and hoped she wouldn’t rub it in.

Oddly enough, they both reacted quite differently than I expected. When Grandpa Ovitz related the tale over the phone that night, they seemed to find the whole thing funny. No trace of anger. “Sounds like Suzy and Josh got in a food fight,” Judy said, laughing.

It wasn’t
funny!
I was mortified. When I got on the phone and tried to explain what really happened, she didn’t seem much interested.

“Suzy, you must have hit those bricks pretty hard. I think that you should go see my acupuncturist, just in case,” Michael suggested two days later upon his return home.

Huh?

“You probably jammed your neck pretty good,” he explained. “Better safe than sorry. Have it looked at now so you won’t have any back or neck problems later.”

Oh. How kind. I told him I appreciated his concern. He had Sarah make an appointment for me the next Saturday.

I’d heard of acupuncture before, but I didn’t know the details—Cottage Grove wasn’t exactly the mecca of alternative health, after all. Upon arriving at the office, I was ushered into a small room with a table that looked like a cross between the medieval rack and a barber’s chair. The doctor entered, asked me a few questions about how I’d sustained my injuries, and then told me to lie facedown on this odd padded apparatus. After he cranked a handle on one side and rotated a wheel on the other, I was elevated to the proper position.

“This won’t hurt a bit,” he said as he pulled on a surgical glove and reached into a drawer full of short, thin needles. I braced myself. Surprisingly, he was right; it didn’t hurt. I was also surprised that he had inserted five of the needles into my lower back and the rest in various parts of my body, including my ears. None of them were anywhere near my neck.

Then came the disturbing news.

“Aha!” he said.

I don’t like it when doctors say “aha.”

“What?” I demanded.

“Oh, you have weak kidneys,” he said matter-of-factly.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

He nodded sagely, ignoring the question. “It’s probably the result of your parents being in conflict at the time of your conception.”

What?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m very open-minded. In fact, my grandmother worked for a chiropractor before most people even knew what one was. But the idea of conception conflict causing my compromised kidneys was a little hard to swallow. Did that mean problems with, um, incontinence? That would greatly decrease my chances of ever finding a husband, wouldn’t it? I’d be a spinster forever.

The receptionist handed me the bill when I left, along with a self-addressed envelope for my convenience. The total was $75. It seemed a fair amount. But then it occurred to me that this was Michael’s doctor and that he had suggested I come here. He’d even made the appointment.
Maybe he was intending to cover the expense since health insurance was never discussed in the contract non-negotiation.

When I got back to the house that afternoon, I put the bill on the desk downstairs where the mail usually stacked up. I didn’t give it another thought, except to thank Michael later and to tell him I felt fine and didn’t think I’d have any problems. I didn’t share with him the impending doom that I was sure lay ahead about me spending my life wearing Depends. That would be my own private torment.

The next night, as I was getting ready to lock myself in for the evening, I noticed a piece of paper on my dresser. It was the acupuncturist’s bill. I thought it odd but figured that Rosa, seeing my name on it, had brought it up. The next morning I returned it to the desk. That evening, as I was getting ready for bed, I noticed it was back on my dresser. Again, I went downstairs and put the bill back and made a mental note to talk with Rosa. The next day the bill reappeared in my room. The bill went back and forth like that four times before I had a chance to tell Rosa to leave it on the desk.

“But, Miss Suzy, I didn’t put anything on your dresser,” she said in her Spanish accent.

Ohhhh.
Judy
was putting it in my room.

I paid the bill myself and, as with too many other subjects, never brought it up again.

I was trapped at the house every weekend.

Okay, maybe
trapped
was a strong word. But when you can’t leave on a weeknight, sticking around for Saturday and Sunday essentially means that you’re stuck at home
all the time
, and
trapped
pretty much summed it up. The awkward situation became apparent quite quickly. Monday through Friday I was on duty twenty-four hours a day. I couldn’t go out on Friday nights because I had the night shift with the baby, and I had to be back on Monday morning when everyone woke up. That left me forty-eight hours of blissful freedom starting Saturday morning. Of course, if I left the premises, I’d have to be back by Sunday night—any arrival after everyone went to bed would set off alarms. But leaving the premises required a car. And I didn’t have one.

Judy told me during my interview that I would be allowed to use the family’s Jeep Cherokee on my days off. This arrangement sounded generous to me, because I didn’t want to bring my less-than-reliable transportation to LA. Besides, the family also owned a Mercedes, a Jaguar, and a Porsche. Problem was, ever since I arrived, nearly every weekend they drove the Jeep to their beach house in Malibu. (Owning a second home just twenty miles away from the first seemed strange to me, but
this wasn’t the only other residence. The family also owned a New York apartment, which Judy spent a great deal of time decorating long-distance. They kept quiet about their place in New York, because, as I was told, if people knew they had it, they would ask to borrow it all the time, which would be a big pain in the neck. I thought the whole thing was weird. What kind of riffraff, exactly, would ask to borrow their apartment?) To top it off, I didn’t even have a bicycle to get around in the city where the car was king. When I tried to explain the situation to Judy, she shrugged and said she was sorry she had forgotten about taking the Jeep to the beach house, but she didn’t like other people driving her Mercedes.

In the beginning, it didn’t really matter because I didn’t know a soul in Los Angeles. My social life revolved around the household staff, and I didn’t need to go anywhere to see them, anyway. And besides, I was
tired
. I retired to my room on my days off, where I’d read, catch up on my sleep, or write in my journal.

If the whole family was home and I wasn’t on duty, I only ventured out of my room to grab a sandwich or some cookies. After all, it was my precious time off, and who wants to run into their boss on days off? Lord knows I stuck out in their family like a pig in a flower patch. My concept of family time was playing Monopoly and water-skiing at the lake, not riding in a limousine to Disneyland and being escorted by a guard through the gates to avoid the lines. So I hid. Michael made it a priority to spend weekends with family, and they fluttered in and out on the Saturdays and Sundays they were not at the beach house. I’d listen at my door until I heard the Jeep pull away, then I’d search out the other staff. But sometimes the family stayed put, roaming around the house, and I’d twiddle my thumbs in my room for hours, unable to work up the nerve to ask to borrow the Jeep.

I knew that I had to force myself to get some semblance of a life, no matter how I did it.

One day while reading the
LA Times
, I saw a notice for a game-show audition in Hollywood on the next Saturday. Maybe I could win some money … or even a new car. At the very least I’d get out and do something. I called the number and signed up. I’d find a way to get there somehow.

After throwing on my classy little black dress, I trundled over to the studio in the truck that I had convinced Rosa to lend me. I didn’t have a clue how ludicrous I looked until I caught sight of myself in the security mirrors at the studio. The faded Chevy pickup lacked a front bumper but boasted a Baja Mexico license plate tied to the grill with bailing wire. And you couldn’t miss the enormous camper shell slapped on top. I reached out the window and handed the guard my confirmation number, faux diamond bracelet dangling. My face was framed nicely by the ring of red dingle balls tacked all along the headliner and by the fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror.

“Have a nice day, ma’am,” he said, handing me back my piece of paper with a strange smile. “Just pull under this overhang and follow the arrows to the parking structure.”

I struggled to put the truck into gear. This was no easy feat, since someone had creatively substituted an eight ball for the gearshift knob.

Looking down, I could see the pavement through the floorboard from which the shifter protruded. The transmission made a grinding noise as I tried to keep one of my dainty heels on the clutch, the other on the accelerator. As I let up slowly, the creaky old truck lunged and jerked and finally lurched forward, passing under the overpass that read
MAXIMUM CLEARANCE 8 FEET 6 INCHES
.

To be honest, I don’t know that I even gave that measurement much thought until I was halfway through the garage and heard the awful sound of tin scraping against concrete. At first I thought it was just some machinery, and I continued on my merry way. I began to suspect there might be a problem when I glanced in my side mirror and saw sparks flying and then got a whiff of the burning steel. I pulled the hand brake and jumped out, only to see that the camper had been shaved down an entire inch. I looked around the parking structure suspiciously for the
Candid Camera
crew. No luck.