Job #1: Babysitting

            Is babysitting a job? Not if it’s only now and then. Not if I hated it. I was only comfortable if the baby/child/children were asleep when I arrived, which they usually were. There was the occasional child I had to put to bed, but  nothing memorable to make permanent imprint on my memory. The number of times I baby-sat may not have reached double digits.

            All of my babysitting happened in Levittown, Pa., where my family lived for three years, when I was in high school. Levittown was divided into sections with cutesy names: the section I lived in was Snowball Gate, and all the streets in Snowball Gate began with the letter “S.” My street was Sweetgum. Maybe there was a sweet gum tree planted somewhere in Snowball Gate.

            How did I get these jobs I didn’t want? Maybe my mother saw a sign in a neighborhood store. I would call, find out the date and the time range — it couldn’t be too late even if it was on a weekend. I would either walk to the home where the children lived or be picked up by the father and driven to the home if it was beyond walking distance or it was dark out. I often didn’t know either of the parents, and it felt weird to be in a strange house, even if the layout was similar to my own home. Snowball Gate had four different home layouts, and they alternated down the street: layout A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D, you get the idea.

            If the baby or children were asleep when I arrived, I was vastly relieved. This meant I could sit in the living room and watch television or read the book I had brought or do my homework. I could have explored these strange houses, looked through their books, eaten food in the kitchen, but I did none of these things. I was afraid, but not quite sure of what. Maybe I would disturb something, and the parents would be angry. Maybe I would eat food they were planning to eat the next day. Maybe I would find something I didn’t want to know. I had already poked around my own parents’ bedroom and found a book about sex from the Soviet Union; it described a young man who had rigged up some sort of alarm system that would wake him during the night so he would never miss an opportunity to masturbate. I wasn’t quite sure what this meant, but it gave me an unpleasant feeling.

            Mostly I just wanted to walk in the door, sit in a chair, hope the children would remain asleep until their parents came home and the father would drive me home after putting some wrinkled bills in my hand. I didn’t talk in the car, and the father usually didn’t ask any questions. Oh, when the parents walked in the door, the mother would ask how everything went, did the children stay asleep.

            I hated it if the phone rang. I would have to answer, because the ringing phone might wake the children. But I didn’t know phone etiquette. “Hello,” I would say. When they asked for Marge or Harry, I’d mumble, “They’re not here. I’m the babysitter.” If I was lucky, they’d say, “Oh, I’ll call back tomorrow.” If I wasn’t, the person would want to leave a message; I would have to find a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, and then worry that I wasn’t understanding what the person was saying. I didn’t know that I could just ask them to repeat. And then I’d have to remember to tell the parents, when they got home, that there had been a phone call.

            I didn’t worry too much about someone breaking into the house. Crime wasn’t an issue that I was aware of in Levittown. A few years earlier, when we had lived in the Connecticut countryside, there was a spate of UFO sightings. One evening I was babysitting my own brother and sister, and on the phone with a girlfriend. She told me there had been some strange lights in the sky over the area where I lived.  I was in the living room in front of a big picture window and slowly turned around to look out into the dark night. No lights in sight. But I remained staring out the window, unable to turn away from where the aliens might be coming from. In Levittown, I could tune out any unknown house creaks and cracks by turning on the TV. But the presence of a house on either side of the one I was in was reassuring.

            That is all the paid work I did in high school, other than the chores I had to create to justify asking for an allowance from my parents. My father didn’t understand why my brother and sister and I might want an allowance. If we wanted anything, all we had to do was ask — and maybe we’d get it, if the parents thought it was a good idea. That we might independently want to decide to get something — a book, a soda, a candy bar, a sweater — didn’t fit into their idea of child-rearing. So when I was 17, I created a list of chores (such as setting the table, clearing the table, doing the dishes), a schedule of who would do what when, and presented the list to my father with the suggestion of $5 a week. To my surprise, he accepted it. The list was posted on the side of the refrigerator.