Nanny in the Darkroom

The package came when Clara, the au pair, was outdoors with the children, but Mark was home, so he signed for it.

“Taking some P.T.O. so I don’t hit the cap,” he explained to the deliveryman.

“Work hard, play hard, you know?” said Mark. “Have a good one.”

The package was heavy and shoebox-sized, wrapped in brown paper and clear tape. A customs form stuck to the front. Mark carried it out to the pool, where Clara was teaching Katie and Little Mark the breaststroke.

“Package for you,” he said. “Want me to drop it in your room?” Clara blinked at him, blonde hair chlorine-sticky on her forehead. She wore a green lanyard on her wrist, even in the pool, the kind kids made at summer camp. (Had one of the kids made it at summer camp?) Clara quickly opened and closed her jaw as if to clear pressure in her ears. Mark wondered if he should repeat himself.

“Please leave it in the front hall,” she said. “I’ll pick it up myself.” Little Mark splashed her for attention, and when she splashed back, Mark saw a key on the lanyard, brass against bronze skin. Of course: Clara’s room was locked. Not ready to turn tail yet, Mark called out to Katie, “Hey, what’s ‘swimming’ in German?” There had been an unspoken idea that Clara would teach them German, though this had not happened.

“Schwimmbecken!” she shrieked, treading water.

“What about French?” said Mark. Also French.

“Piscine!” said Katie.

“You’re pissing?” said Mark.

“No, piscine,” said Katie, drawing it out.

“Watch out for your sister,” Mark said with a wink at Little Mark. “Let me know if the water feels extra warm.”

“Da-ad!” howled Katie.

The package disappeared from the foyer at 4:06 p.m., while Mark was watching SportsCenter on ESPN. He heard the door to Clara’s room open and close. He did not hear the deadbolt, although he muted the television and listened closely. The insides of his ears pulsed, trying to suck a sound out of the air. Ears like bear traps straining open and closed. He couldn’t tell whether he didn’t hear the deadbolt because the sound wasn’t there, or because he didn’t hear it. At dinner, Mark’s wife Jennifer asked Clara what she’d gotten up to. Clara didn’t mention the package. Mark chewed his fajita while they talked about Little Mark and Katie. “There was that box,” he said.

“Oh yeah,” said Clara, “Katie mentioned she might try out for the school musical this fall.”

“Oh brother: more extracurriculars,” said Jennifer. They laughed.

---

Mark had installed the deadbolt himself, before there had been a Clara in the house. It had been his suggestion, as had Clara. She was a present to Jennifer—a fiscally-prudent present that paid for itself. Clara had been with them since September. Mark could have kept Jennifer at home, of course; could have paid bills and college funds solo. But Jen had gotten bored of yummy mummy yoga wear and started to talk too loud at parties, or not at all.

They’d spent a few weeks browsing online listings, sending e-mails that didn’t go anywhere—then wham, bam, thank you, ma’am. Mark moved his weights and elliptical out of the workout room, Jennifer renewed her realtor’s license, and Mark installed a deadbolt. It paid off in the bedroom, especially on days Jennifer made a sale. She’d started getting lowlights in her hair, and although she was around the house almost as much as before, she wiggled her hips like an invading bobcat.

They had not met Clara at the airport. Since customs could take hours or hours, it made sense to stick her in a cab. They greeted her with big hugs. “Texas style,” Mark said. “You got to get used to Texas style now. We’re friendly.” He took her bags up to her room and handed her both deadbolt keys.

“So you can feel real safe,” he’d said. “Nobody’s getting in while you’re asleep unless they kick the door down.”

That had been the last time he’d seen the inside of Clara’s room. She emptied her wastebasket into the kitchen trash can. Mark sometimes heard techno music through the door, and once, before a waterpark trip, he’d knocked to ask when she’d be ready. She’d shouted her answer through the door. Mark assumed she’d been naked.

---

“Have you been going in Clara’s room?” he asked Little Mark.

“No. Gross,” said Little Mark.

“You’re not in trouble,” said Mark.

“Dad, gross,” said Little Mark. He thumbed a button and his video game made a sword-slash sound and some groans.

“I’m in your room right now,” said Mark.

“Clara’s an adult,” said Little Mark, as if that answered everything.

“You come in my room,” said Mark.

“Is that what this is about?” Little Mark’s voice up-pitched dangerously.

“You’re not in trouble,” said Mark.

---

Until the incident with the package, Mark hadn’t wondered much about Clara. Candidly, he was king of the castle, but just as candidly, a home is the wife’s domain. He repeated this dualism often, with chesty laugh or gimlet solemnity. Clara was very German, German enough Mark could say “Well, she’s German all right” to people who’d met her and people who hadn’t. She didn’t sound like Colonel Klink, but the way she held her shoulders square was not American. Mark could imagine those shoulders in a Berlin nightclub, jolting through pulses of klaxon light. Her speech was direct but withholding, words an efficient assembly of engine parts. They’d watched the World Cup together, and she’d pounded the table at the ref’s bad call, thrown her body against the chair back in disgust. Little Mark had emulated the move for several months.

Katie asked a boy at church to go to the movies, any movie, and he said no. Katie was inconsolable. “What do you need boys for anyway?” said Mark, and “he doesn’t know what he’s missing.” Katie was inconsolable. Clara said the same thing in the same words, and Katie smiled like a wolf. Mark thought the relentless economy of Clara’s emotions might have something to do with Heidegger or Nietzsche. While Little Mark and the girls were out for ice cream, he stretched out on the nubbled buff carpet outside Clara’s room and pressed his nose against the door seam. It smelled like the hallway. If Clara smoked, although they’d specified non-smoker, she must do it out the window. She probably didn’t use filters.

---

During the summer, the kids generally didn’t wake until 10 or 11, so neither did Clara. Mark and Jennifer enjoyed breakfasts undisturbed by school-morning rush hour. Jennifer sliced fresh cantaloupe and bunches of mint leaves, and laughingly called it date night. They watched recorded television comedies and caught up on jokes made months ago, the origins of catch phrases. Mark’s departure for the office felt like time travel. When he returned in the evening, it was a different house, not a cocoon but an anthill, Katie and friends by the pool or sprawled in front of a Japanese cartoon, Little Mark and his buddy Elvis pretending to shout through walkie-talkies. At some point, without Mark’s noticing, his man cave beer fridge became a kid cave soda stash. He looked with confusion at the pale blue can.

“It uses coconut water and natural sugars,” said Jen. Katie and Little Mark’s half-finished game of Monopoly was ringed with discarded shoes, sneakers bright as road flares.

“Maybe we should take up a neighborhood collection,” said Mark.

“I like it,” said Jen. “It means they feel safe here.”

Clara stayed up late, past midnight. When Mark turned off his bedside light, she was microwaving popcorn in the kitchen. Sometimes he didn’t know where she was at all. Weekdays, the door to her room was never open when he might casually pass through the hall. Anything could be in there—drugs, guns, weird porno. Not that it was, but it could be. You tried not to make conjectures about someone you knew, but how could you not at least entertain the notion, with what you saw on the news these days? Dentists who molested anesthetized kids, that normal-seeming teenager who blew up the marathon. The Devil was a real force in the world. Mark truly believed it. He had no reason to doubt Clara, but there were those unknown unknowns. If he could just get into the room once, he felt, it would put his mind at ease.

He refrained from discussing this preoccupation with Jennifer, who might mistakenly see it as sexual, breaking past the young woman’s hymenal door. There was no use worrying her. Part of a husband’s duty, like a father’s, was to act as a bulwark against small anxieties like roof maintenance and the affordability of vacations. He was the household C.E.O., literal employer of Clara. She was his responsibility. Anything she did in his house, he was liable for.

---

“I think she might, um, be renting from you. I mean, you’re basically paying yourself the rental cost of the space as her income. I think she might have renter’s rights.”

“She doesn’t have renter’s rights,” said Sadler, and he sounded sure, but Mark was less sure.

“But she’s not exactly a guest,” continued Perry. He took a long swig of amber ale to emphasize his point by de-emphasizing it. His salmon-pink polo shaded to orange in the burnished light of a late sunset.

“No,” agreed Mark. “She’s not exactly a guest.” He had raised the question post-golf at the clubhouse patio bar, packed tight around a tiny table flanked by open rolling greens. None of his friends had live-in help, and they were all too happy to catastrophize. Clara was a longstanding status symbol.

 “You’re in dangerous territory here,” said Perry. “I mean, workplace harassment is real, a real thing. Remember I told you that chick in my office—” Perry was not a lawyer, nor did he work in H.R. Several failed marriages, two failed restaurants, and an adult daughter who wouldn’t speak to him should have sapped his moral authority, or suggested a contagious form of bad luck. Instead, it gave him seen-it-all gravitas which made his pronouncements harder to dismiss, especially when he didn’t know what he was talking about.

“My housekeeper, Lina, been here fifteen years. Right here in Texas. Never even goes home for Christmas.” Brett raised caterpillar eyebrows, what he called his forehead mustache, as if to say this was a woman who cried on the phone long distance in a foreign language, a woman of deep family feeling. “Loves America. Watches all the court shows. Yells at ’em. Yells! I made her go home this year. Bought her a plane ticket. Said, go see that grandbaby. She comes back, what does she bring me? Coca tea.” He slapped his leg. “Walked right through customs with it. What’d you bring? Tea.” He slapped his leg again.

“Was it good?” asked Sadler.

“Hell yes,” said Brett. “But come on now.”

---

Mark thought she might be a lesbian. Or not lesbian—bisexual, like Angelina Jolie and Anna Paquin. Lesbians were female men, easy to understand. There was a lesbian in the audit department at work, and nothing about her was uncomfortable. She could ask what happened to a receipt, and there was none of the macho bullshit, no schoolmarm nag, no flirty subtext. You could trust her, like Ellen or Rachel Maddow.

With bisexuals, it was different. A bisexual woman might come on to a man, have sex with a man, might even marry one, but she would never need him, would never have that Mars-Venus “you complete me.” Would never be complete by herself, but half-submerged; would have a secret identity that wasn’t even secret, but meant, like Batman, that part of her was thinking about a cave.

He’d read on Facebook or maybe in a magazine that bisexuals had worse health outcomes than gay or straight people, a higher mortality rate. They were more likely to smoke (Clara did, he was sure) or drive too fast (unknown). To take risks. Was Clara safe for the children? Not deliberately incautious, but unable to perceive dangers that would be obvious to someone else?

She had some friends, some Germans, in a college town nearby. Some Friday nights, she left the house with no more bags than usual, but didn’t return until Saturday evening. The first few times, she left a message on the house phone, the when and where. Mark had teased her later: We’re not your prison guards; A day off’s a day off; Live while you’re young; What’s youth for, if not getting into trouble; If one of the kids dies in your capable absence, we’ll be sure to send an S.M.S. She’d stopped checking in, and Mark was proud of her for that. He felt he’d helped her adjust to the culture, given her a dose of rugged American individualism. But of course you could still talk about your friends. You could invite one or two to drop in at Jennifer’s famous New Year’s Eve party.

Mark couldn’t remember whether Clara had stayed home more than usual in December. Maybe her college friends migrated during winter break. Summer hadn’t brought a social diminishment. Clara had clearly moved on to townies.

“Has Clara mentioned a boyfriend to you?” Mark asked Jennifer.

“Really?” said Jennifer, looking up from the bottle of self-tanner whose ingredients she was scrutinizing. Something about D.H.A. “That’s great! Maybe we could have him over for dinner sometime, grill out?”

“No,” said Mark, “has she mentioned one?”

Jen pursed her lips and puffed her cheeks like a chipmunk. Almost all her facial expressions these days reminded Mark of small animals. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her forehead move, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it. Disappointment, he thought. She was gently shaking her head.

“I think she’s holding a torch for somebody back in Germany, and it isn’t exactly on or off,” she said. “Young-person jumbles. I try not to poke at it. It makes me sad, though. I think there are a lot of boys here who would love to take her out. I mean, I think she’s very pretty! But I always think that about women I like. Don’t you?”

“I never gave it much thought,” said Mark.

---

Something Mark began to notice was that Clara kept her blinds closed. He didn’t typically enter the house from the front. He used the attached garage. Still, he had a long, uninterrupted view as his luxury S.U.V. purred up the driveway. Two windows on the upper floor were always opaque white, as though the room inside was wrapped in butcher paper.

It irked him. For Clara’s sake. The view from those windows, in Mark’s opinion, was among the best in the house. Not purple mountain majesty, but a well-groomed lawn on a well-groomed street. Mark himself did not spend much time looking out his bedroom window, which faced the same street. However, Mark had not traversed an ocean to immerse himself in the daily rhythms of an exotic metropolis. Their mutual experiences of the landscape were impossible to compare.

Certainly, some Mexicans, some Tejanos, burritoed themselves in summer. They tin foiled up. They were a resourceful people in a lot of ways. Mark joked with his gardener, Alejandro, that of the two of them, Alejandro was the smarter businessman. Why pay to water your own lawn when you could spend all day walking on somebody else’s? I must be crazy, Mark said, to spend my money on a Bowflex machine when I could use a weed whacker and get someone to pay me.

There was no reason to close the blinds besides desire for closure. The window was peeping-Tom private, screened from the street by pecan trees. Air conditioning in the house kept the indoor temperature brisk in even west-facing rooms, and Clara showed no special inclination toward environmentalism. If she was protecting something, it wasn’t the world. It was something that had to be shielded from light.

After midnight, Mark stood on the grass and looked at his house. He counted left from his bedroom. Behind the shades, Clara’s room glowed faintly blue, like an aquarium.

“Thought I heard a small animal trapped in the gutter, but I didn’t see anything,” Mark said when he came inside. The living room was empty.

“Thought I heard a small animal trapped in the gutter,” he repeated, but Jen was asleep.

---

One of Mark’s nieces got married in August, on a ranch. Everybody rented cabins and stayed for the weekend, gritting their way through family activities like sack toss and rock painting. In the evening, there was a keg, and dance music from someone’s iPhone. Kids crowded the campfire with marshmallows, though the night was sweltering. The women sustained intense, wine-soaked discourse about the best citronella candles. Mark and Jennifer had bought the couple a stand mixer off the registry, because it was large and useless and gaudy. Or else they’d bought a cordless drill, because the groom likely added it. Mark couldn’t remember. He and Jennifer had talked about it, since it was his niece. Not a baker, he thought: stand mixer.

The next day, on the drive home through hill country, the kids napped through the scenic route. To them, a luxury S.U.V. was just a car. Little Mark called the scrub oak boring. Didn’t want to hear about the cypress. Katie’s videogame pad was out of battery and they hadn’t brought the car charger. It was in the other S.U.V., Clara’s.

“I think around two more weeks,” said Jennifer. It was hard to hear her over road noise, even though their S.U.V. was expensively insulated from road noise. She spoke quietly, maybe for the sleeping kids, maybe a hangover.

“And she’s telling us just now,” said Mark. “Right when the school year’s about to start.”

“Well, I guess she got the acceptance back in March, but it didn’t seem like her financial aid was going to come through, and then it did. Imagine how hectic.”

“Did she even think about the family,” said Mark. The tidiness of two weeks needled him. Walking out the door, no notice—that would be something. Two-week notice was what a drive-thru cashier gave a manager at Taco Bell. He accelerated past a patch of Lady Bird bluebonnets, hoping to startle a jackrabbit. “Maybe we should check the silver cabinet when we get back, see where this financial aid is coming from.” There was no jackrabbit. He’d be within his rights to make a fuss about her contract, which said one year. It would be another thing if she was moving on to another nanny job. That kept it professional. Yes, he’d paid Clara—as a way of taking care of her. Yes, she’d had responsibilities—like chores—that he’d expected done. He’d been generous.

“We should get her something,” said Jennifer. “A goodbye gift. A charm bracelet?”

A Bowie knife, thought Mark.

---

Television shows, Mark remembered. Prestige television loved the antihero. Real people watched stuff with heart: crime scene investigations and singing contests. But the arty shows, they liked to let the bad guy win. They were either sex and blood and castles, or regular citizens who became ruthless drug dealers. What impression did that give of America?

Unfamiliar twentysomethings drifted into Mark’s house and left with taped-up boxes for the post office and folded-over giveaway bags. Leaving aside the oddness of summoning (presumed) acquaintances for a task the house’s residents had volunteered to do—happy to lend a hand, treat us like your pack mules—the implied accumulation was mysterious. Not that Mark knew squat about women’s clothing, not that Mark scrutinized Clara’s body, but Clara did not seem to care about what she wore. All other comforts of home had been available in other parts of their comforting home. Bounteous, Mark would call his dominion—as full of pleasures as a home could be and still respect the Lord.

True, girls liked their craft supplies. At Katie’s school, the classrooms were built out of wall-to-wall cubbies for glitter pipe cleaner. But Mark didn’t think a six-three man with a name like Jamian would wink as he left with a free tub of beads. Mark was a man, and knew men in a way that was not girlish. That wasn’t to say the bag was contraband. It didn’t have to be. All kinds of things could be in that bag. But if it was lace and sparkles, it was in the context of lingerie, speaking honestly. He shook Jamian’s hand at the door, coming and going. He shook hands with a Brandon.

Jen bought twelve pounds of pork ribs to barbecue, but there was a hailstorm forecast the night of the “last meal” blowout. They ordered in. “Still real Texas barbecue,” said Mark. “Still really from Texas.” He gave Little Mark an elbow nudge. “German potato salad! Hold on to your mustard, mister.”

“Ha, ha,” said Little Mark.

“Can I get a Coke?” Katie was sullen and distractible.

“Do you think your flight might get cancelled?” asked Jen.

“No,” said Clara. She sounded certain.

---

The car was gone, a blue car driven by one of the box carriers. Clara had only two suitcases. She’d brought them down while Mark was eating breakfast. Katie chased the car down the road, waving and jumping on already-hot asphalt. No part of Mark wanted to follow her. He wanted to pace the lawn, lock down the perimeter. Instead he held himself still while Jen hooked her arm through his elbow and leaned her head against his shirt.

“Can I go to Elvis’s,” said Little Mark, addressing the mailbox instead of his parents.

“She said she’d send me postcards,” said Katie, out of breath from the jog back. Her upper lip was a sweat mustache. “I’m going to Elvis’s too,” she added with the confidence of transparent fishy masculinity. Jennifer disentangled herself, wiggling her eyes back and forth as if to say, “these kids.”

“I’ll walk you over and we’ll see,” she said. Hand in hand, the three perambulated with flip-flop lassitude, a sidewalk filmstrip family.

“Oh the mother and child reunion, is only a motion away,” Mark sang after them, repeating the refrain several times because the song repeated it. Jen turned her head to blow an air kiss. It was the kind of upbeat musical fragment that didn’t ask too much of the singer, a tune that let you deliver the punchline without needing to learn the full joke.

On the table in the foyer was a paper bag with “keys and I.D.s” scrawled in Sharpie. Mark’s fingers found the brass key lanyard, and without a memory of traversing the hallway, he was in Clara’s room, emptied of Clara. He couldn’t remember what the room had looked like before, whether the carpet divots and wall scratches were identical to the time before her coming. The slight slump at the foot of the mattress was expected and familiar. It was possible she’d left no mark on the space, left it bare as a dormitory. No half-used shampoo. No desktop “wuz here.” The wastepaper basket held a cellophane wrapper the size of a starlight mint.

If Mark inhaled quickly, a hint of something chemical seemed to whiff by his nose hairs. It could be cleaning solution, ammonia, some cheap solvent. It could be his own aftershave. He was no bloodhound. He blew his dry nose a few times and tried again; but whatever he was looking for wasn’t there.