This took some arranging. Jessica had had a history of bad experience with help. First she’d hired a nanny who was a wonderful baby-sitter but refused to do anything else, like pick up toys or occasionally wash breakfast dishes. (Often nannies who were citizens and English-speaking had more exacting standards than illegal aliens.) So Jessica hired a housekeeper to do the housecleaning. Then the two began to quarrel, each calling Jessica at work to complain about the other. At first, Jessica tried to unravel the problem, but she ended up firing the housekeeper. Then she hired a wonderful but overqualified woman for the job, who left after three months. Now she had Carmelita, an El Salvadoran mother of two, who worked at two jobs in order to support her family and send money back home to her aging parents. Carmelita did this by arranging for her sixteen-year-old daughter Filipa to cover for her mornings in the Stein household while Carmelita worked her other job.
Because neither Carmelita nor Filipa could drive a car, Jessica hired Martha, an old high school friend, as an “extra driver- housekeeper.” Martha shopped, took Victor to classes, and did Jessicas typing and bookkeeping. Jessica also hired a gardener. Beyond that, she hired another "“helper,” Bill, a nineteen-year-old student at a local junior college, as a “father substitute.” He played ball with Victor, age five, and in general did “daddy-type things.” Jessica felt this was necessary for Victor because “Victor suffers the most from Seths absence.” Bill, a cheerful and reasonable young man, had a cheerful and reasonable girl friend who sometimes stayed overnight. It was Bills barbells that Seth tripped over in the hallway and Bills girl friends sweater that sometimes lay on the kitchen table. Sensing that Bill was a “bought father,” Victor chose to treat him “just like my brother. He can go with us everywhere.” On Saturday afternoons, Jessica wrote checks to pay Carmelita and Filipa; Martha; Bill; the gardener; and other occasional helpers such as plumbers, tree trimmers, and tax accountants.
When I remarked to Jessica that she seemed to have quite a bit of help, she replied, “Well if you want to have children and have a career, I cant think of any other way to do it except to live in a foreign country and have tons of people taking care of you.”
In many ways, she had as many servants as a British colonial officer’s wife in prewar India but still she was missing something. As she explained in a flat monotone:
I think I didn’t look hard enough for a housekeeper that would really talk to the kids when they got home, would be sure they remembered their sweaters or their permission slips from school, would remember birthday parties or to sign the children up for field trips so that they’re not late—like Victor was this morning. I came home and found he hadn’t been signed up for a field trip. I thought my housekeeper would handle that stuff, but she just doesn’t.
Jessica had hired many parts of the attentive suburban mother; but she could not hire the soul of that person—the planner, the empathizer, the mother herself.
Money could not buy a complete solution. These days, Englishspeaking documented workers were asking for more specialized jobs—one would care only for the house, another only for the children. And she’d never had a housekeeper and a nanny who got along. She had her eye out for a new more all-purpose housekeeper.
Jessica had now completely given up on Seth. Indeed, three years after our first interview, when I asked her again how she felt about Seth’s being home so little, she answered with assurance: “Partly it works out so well for me this way because Seth doesn’t demand much from me. I don’t have to do anything for him. He takes care of himself. Other husbands might do more for the kids, but they would also ask more of me.” When I asked what she wanted from her husband, she expressed surprise: “What do I want from him? I think he should let me do what I want to do. Go to New York, Washington, conferences.”
A politics of emotional absenteeism had set in. Jessica had stripped down her needs, retracted her demands on Seth. He should let her “do what she wants.” And she offered little in return: “just enough” mothering of the children and very little mothering of him. In a dejected tone, she explained: “Last year, I started being home less and less myself. I still shop and tell Carmelita what to make for dinner, but then if I go away for a conference or somewhere else, I don t pay any attention to it. Seth has to do it.” Jessica also created for herself a separate world of interest and leisure, where she found nurture for herself:
I try to do what makes me least dissatisfied, which is going to Seattle on Fridays. I fly there after I put the kids to bed on Thursday evening. I have Friday free for shopping, going to the library, and seeing a psychiatrist I really like who’s there, and whom I went to when we lived there. Then I come back that evening. I worry about the kids and my job if I’m here, but going there I have real time to myself. Also, the psychiatrist I am seeing there is really exciting to talk to. I can be fanciful and regressed with him and I’m enjoying that. Plus I have lunch with old friends. That’s my perfect day.
With this “perfect day” to make up for the rest of the week, Jessica no longer found Seth’s absence so oppressive. After all, Bill was taking Victor to his piano lessons, and Filipa was playing hide and seek with Walter. In the past, when problems with Seth came up, she pried them open, worked on them. Now she’d resigned from that “job” and withdrawn to some other world of “perfect days.”