You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny (27 page)

I realized that maybe it would be best to hang up and call her back after I’d finished venting in my journal.

“Do the Goldbergs have a tree yet?” I asked Mandie in December.

“Oh my gosh, yes. It must be twenty feet tall. And get this: they aren’t going to decorate it themselves.”

“They’re not? So you just have a big naked evergreen in the living room?” Another strange Hollywood custom?

“Only for another day. They hired someone to come in and do all the decorating—not just the tree, but also the entire house. Can you believe it, a professional tree decorator?”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Judy’s got the holidays all figured out, too,” I said. “There’s a woman who goes out and buys some of her Christmas gifts and comes back with them all neatly wrapped. Plus, she has a florist come by the house to pick up twenty crystal vases. He returns them the next day filled with gorgeous fresh-cut flowers. When those die in a week, she repeats the whole thing. On top of that, she hires someone to write all her thank-you notes. She told me that after Brandon’s baby shower, the girl who came from the office to write the notes left with carpal tunnel.”

“And you know those dog walkers and tree decorators make way more than we do!” Mandie exclaimed. “Can you imagine anyone in Montana or Oregon hiring a tree decorator?”

I snickered. I pictured the hardworking men of my little logging community coming home to an interior designer named Pierre who was gleefully decorating their home in a trendy holiday motif, say lime green snowflakes. I could hear the lumberjack saying, “Honey, whadja do with Clyde?” pointing to the spot where his prized elk head had been mounted. “And who is that guy in the living room? I never seen a guy in a pink shirt before.”

I tried hard to imagine Judy standing in a sea of lights on one side of the tree and Michael on the other, yelling, “Here, I’m going to jiggle this strip and you tell me if any bulbs are burned out.” The scene just wouldn’t form in my brain.

Actually, there was no tree at our house. The family celebrated Hanukkah instead of Christmas. I hadn’t known much about the Jewish religion, but NNI gave me sort of a Judaism for Dummies—tutoring on traditions, customs, and beliefs. (This had already come in handy at Rosh Hashanah and Passover.) One Friday night in December, Judy decided to light the menorah. Hanukkah struck me as a chance to reflect and think, and I was up for a little divine peace myself. We could have used some that day—rowdy and revved up probably best described the kids. But just as she lit the first candle, Joshua yanked Amanda’s ponytail, triggering much squawking.

“Goddamn it!” Judy yelled. “You kids have no respect for anything.”

Needless to say, eight nights of light stopped short right there. I got the distinct feeling that Judy viewed the whole holiday ordeal as one big inconvenience. I started wondering what her holidays had been like as a child. Probably not the kind of loving, haphazard gaggle of fun I remembered.

The whole Hollywood holiday felt quite surreal to me. Christmas Day was probably going to be a perfect Southern California eighty-degree day, and I was used to snow. I was eager to get back to it. I couldn’t wait to leave for my four-day Christmas vacation in Oregon. Delma had agreed to work the Christmas shift in Aspen with the family. But Judy was having second thoughts about my time off.

“Suzy, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said worriedly. “Carmen will still be on vacation when we get back from Aspen, and I’ll have to let Delma have two days off, and I won’t have any help here on
the day we get back. I know you want to go home and be with your family, but can you make it back before the twenty-seventh?”

I said of course, whatever she needed, and booked my flight accordingly.

It was the season for giving—and for Michael’s annual bonus checks. I learned from my sister and Sarah that bonuses were the mainstay of CAA agents. Apparently most of them actually made 75 percent of their entire year’s earnings in bonuses. Of course, these were people with six-figure incomes. My sister heard that the accounting department had all received CAA-inscribed watches for a holiday gift last year. But Delma and Carmen promised that I would get a bonus, too. I could hardly contain my excitement. Carmen told me Michael had given her $10,000 the year before. Of course, Carmen had been there for seven years, and a big bonus kept her in the kitchen. Delma’s check had been $1,000. What kind of money would I get? The high-flying LA lifestyle prompted outrageous sums to dance in my head. Like an eight-year-old staring at all the gifts under the Christmas tree, I just had to know.

I was obsessed. I could not get it out of my mind—and I sunk to a new low. The next morning I began my search. I looked in drawers, peeked in stacks of mail, and opened cabinets. No luck. I was just about to give up when I noticed a note from the CFO saying, “Please verify these are the amounts we decided on.” Attached was a list with the names of each of the household staff and an amount beside each name.
Suzy: $2,500
. More than two months’ pay! I danced around the room, waving my arms in the air in an awkward attempt to give myself a silent high-five.

My conscience churned in overdrive. I felt absolutely awful and couldn’t get my misdemeanor out of my mind. Why did I search for the check even though I knew it was wrong? Maybe I had a problem. I never
had
been very good at minding my own business.

I decided I would try to make up for it by not snooping around my parents’ house to find the Christmas presents. I needed a little childlike magic for myself, and I thought a Hansen-style holiday would be the perfect tonic.

And it was. My family seemed like an old-fashioned Norman Rockwell painting compared to the abstract and modern people in LA. We played board games, opened presents, and laughed uproariously. We frosted sugar cookies and hand-delivered them to friends, and plenty of company stopped by to drop off mouthwatering holiday desserts.

I trekked to a kegger at the lake with my high school friends. Some of them were home on semester break from their second year in college. I was beginning to wonder why I hadn’t gone to a real school. I fielded everyone’s questions about my glamorous job in Southern California. It didn’t seem nearly as glamorous as it had only six months before.

Of course Amy and I saw Ryan at the party. He was still handsome and muscular, and I felt a rush of emotion when I saw his familiar face. I immediately forgot everything I’d highlighted in my
Women Who Love Too Much
bible, and in a rush of holiday sentiment, we decided to get back together. How we thought this would ever work since we didn’t even live in the same state I’ll never know.

Looking back, it’s clear to me how needy I was at the time and how desperately I wanted to have
somebody
in my life who cared about me and valued me.

Before everyone had left for Aspen, I had been given one last official duty, a minor one. Judy asked me to pack the children’s clothing for the trip, including snowsuits. I packed the snowsuits for Joshua and Amanda, but I somehow forgot to include Brandon’s. When I returned to Brentwood, Delma filled me in on Judy’s rage. Joshua made sure I
understood: he pointedly told me how mad his mom was at me and informed me, triumphantly, that they had to go buy a new suit for Brandon because I foooooooooorgot to pack it. He then stuck out his tongue at me, just so I wouldn’t miss the point that I was a real loser.

I clamped my lips shut to avoid screaming my thoughts at him:
You know what? I don’t even care that I messed up! If your family with their screwed-up values ever ran into a real problem, none of you would have the slightest idea what to do. You want to hear a real problem, kid? It’s when the mill lays everybody off and your parents go on unemployment and you have to join the school lunch program because your parents literally don’t have enough money to buy food! Now that’s a problem!

I succeeded in squelching my anger and calmly told Josh that I was sorry to hear they’d had to buy an additional snowsuit. Then I calmly went up to my room, where I proceeded to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling.

Was there ever a time that I was sick and couldn’t work? No. I had been sick several times, but I still worked. Was there a time when I was late to work? I was tardy after my hair fiasco, but that was it. Had I ever missed a day of work? No. Did I ever complain (well, not out loud) or not do exactly what was asked of me? No. I offered to help even when I wasn’t asked. Did I say yes to every request they ever made of me? Absolutely.

Even though I had taken some prearranged breaks to go home briefly, I had more than made up for them on vacations when I worked nonstop. Barring those quick breaks, for an entire year I had been “on duty” twenty-four hours a day with less than forty-eight hours off on the weekends. I was absolutely forbidden to leave on weeknights, and I had not challenged that. And yet, Judy still showed disdain for me, and over a $40 snowsuit.

I realized I couldn’t stay in a place that drove me to the brink of yelling at a child who was simply imitating the behavior of his parents.

I knew many nannies stayed in jobs with conditions far, far worse than mine, because they felt the children would be so devastated if they left. A British nanny I’d met at Gymboree, who had cared for her charge since birth, brought him home with her so much that he actually called her husband “Papa.” She had a boss just like mine; she knew that if she left, she would never be allowed to see the boy again, and she loved him, just as I loved the kids. “They never spend any time with him,” she had told me in a rare moment of frustration, losing her British cool. “These kinds of people would be better off getting a couple of well-bred dogs instead of giving birth!”

I called Mandie. Maybe her vacation had gone better.

“Remember Mrs. Goldberg told me I could go home for a few days in December since they were taking the housekeeper with them on their vacation to Aspen?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They told me I had to be back on the twenty-third, the day they were coming back. They wanted me to help them get ready for their annual ‘day after Christmas’ trip. When I was making my plans to go home, I told Mrs. Goldberg I could get a less expensive ticket if I stayed over on a Saturday night. She said that this wouldn’t work because I had to be back when they returned from their trip. She offered to pay the difference, since I was getting very few days off. I was thrilled, but when I told her it was two hundred dollars more, she said that Mr. Goldberg would never pay that much. So I ended up buying the more expensive ticket and planning a shorter time with my family. Of course, I was bummed, but I was still excited to go home. Then they called me in Montana and said they were going to stay in Aspen until after Christmas, so I didn’t have to come back on the twenty-third after all. I guess it was pretty thoughtful of her to at least give me the option of staying home longer.”

“So did you?” I said sarcastically.

“I wanted to. But I checked on changing the ticket and found out it would cost three hundred and fifty dollars. My family suggested I ask the Goldbergs to help me pay for it, but I didn’t have the nerve after she said they wouldn’t pay the two hundred dollars to change it in the first place. I was in tears on my way back. Christmas Eve and Christmas Day I spent with some surfer guy who was house-sitting, a guy who watches their beach house, too. We had to order pizza from the only place that was open for miles and miles. It was pretty uncomfortable trying to make small talk. Not exactly a great Christmas dinner.”