The Nanny Diaries A personal essay by Lily Dodd.
I.
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t the end of August, I am offered a job as a live-in nanny with a family in L.A. There’s a lot of backstory here, but it might be kind of tedious to explain. Here’s the key point: I don’t know this family, but the dad grew up Jewish in Oklahoma, and so did my mom, and in the same town, and it’s a small world down there. So small of a world that, when my mom was a teenager and my future boss was four years old, my mom babysat him. (He liked dinosaurs.) It turns out this is enough information for both of us, and I leave New Haven to move into his house for the fall. Actually, before I move in, I quarantine for ten days in an Airbnb in Silver Lake. Almost every evening, I mask up and ride a Lime scooter down a massive hill, past Echo Park lake, and up another massive hill to have al fresco, fifteenfeet-away meals with my bosses and their tiny children. Daisy is four-and-a-half and Marie is seven months. (These are not their real names.) Because Marie is a little baby who spends most of her time sleeping, eating, and benignly vibing on the floor, my job will mainly be entertaining Daisy, who has been home from preschool since the pandemic began. When my quarantine is up and I test negative twice, I move into the house in Echo Park. I think I may have the nicest living quarters of any governess in the history of governessing. I’m not sure what, exactly, I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this: a giant room on the second floor, one window looking out onto the branches of a giant sycamore, the other onto downtown Los Angeles. And the sheets are made out of something called “eco-latex,” which I can only describe as feeling
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like sleeping under a layer of Starbucks’ cold foam (This is a positive thing.) In many ways, by accepting this job, I have flashed forward fifteen years into my ideal future. My bosses do absurdly cool work for real money. They wear clothes from independent designers and have sustainable fish (including the bycatch!) delivered to their house. I am intimidated by their friends in our pod, who include an architect, two fashion wizards, the host of a quite popular podcast, and all their elaborately-named children. But really, the person I like hanging out with most is tiny Daisy. In the beginning, I ask her a lot of questions. What’s her favorite animal? A unicorn, because when it jumps over houses, it can make rainbows. What’s her favorite color? Pink and purple and blue and white and rainbow. Talking to Daisy is easy—I can tell we’re going to get along, and taking this job was a good decision instead of an insane one. Daisy has an answer to most questions, and if she doesn’t like the question, or if the question is too stupid to warrant a response, she just ignores it. As we spend more time (many hours of most days) together, I learn that this quality of hers, this constant having-of-answers, extends even to questions that I might have thought too difficult, or too upsetting, for her. But she gets it. She understands it all. It’s simple for her. Why do we wear masks on our walks? To protect our neighbors. Why are all the grown-ups sad? Because a great woman died, and they’re scared about what might happen without her. Why can’t we play outside today? Because someone had a fucking gender reveal party and lit half the state on fire.
