Cleaning for Darlene

When I was 16, my family moved to Sylmar. Darlene, a neighbor, noticed my sister Elaine and me in our front yard. She walked down the street and asked, “Do you babysit?” I said yes. She had three girls.

I told another neighbor, Susie, about the babysitting job. Her sister Marian came out and said, “Don’t babysit her kids; she’s got a retarded child.” I said, “I don’t care. I’m up for challenges.” Darlene was desperate for help; she was a waitress. Overworked and underpaid. Neither Darlene nor her husband Hal accepted their youngest girl, Anna, nine months old and so she was neglected for some reason. They left her in bed with bottle propped up and let her poop her pants and spread it around. Anna had a habit of staring straight into your eyes, unnervingly.

Darlene made oatmeal for the girls every morning, and after I arrived I would heat it up and serve it. One day after I’d cleaned Anna, I brought her the oatmeal. She stirred and stirred the bowl, with her distinctively expressionless gaze. I asked her, “Anna, you’re not going to eat that. What are we going to do with it? I know what we’ll do: we’ll put it on your head.” I turned the bowl over on top of her head and expected her to start crying. But she turned around to look at me and had the most beautiful smile on her face, which I’d never seen before. “Oh, Anna, now you need to have another bath.”

While I cleaned Anna up each day and got to know her, the other two girls went out to play before I fed them lunch and had them take a nap. I babysat them five days a week for about two years during the summer months. Darlene adjusted her work hours so I could babysit the girls in the evenings. Even though husband Hal was present after work, he didn’t involve himself in Anna’s care.

I kept the babysitting job until I realized my mom was stressed out because she couldn’t meet our bills, so I quit school at 17-and-a-half to work to contribute to the rent. I paid $75 out of my $80 check for our $150/mo. rent.

Eventually Darlene met a nice guy, a truck driver, at the coffee shop where she worked, and began an affair. When Darlene and Hal separated, she moved into the front unit of a duplex on our street. Marian, who had told me Anna was retarded, moved into the back unit. Marian had two out-of-wedlock kids, fathered by different men. Marian got a job where I worked, assembling TV antennas. She was fired because she decided to sweep the floor rather than working on the assembly line.

One Saturday, Marian called the cops on Darlene, claiming she was beating her children. My sister Elaine had been babysitting Darlene’s kids that day and Marian had hoped the police would catch her with the truck driver when he returned from work. But Elaine had already gone home and was in bed. I returned from errands with my mother and my other sister, and saw three cop cars outside Darlene’s. I ran into our house and asked Elaine what had happened and she told me Marian had called the cops. They had arrived while Elaine was still there and examined the children, but there were no bruises and the kids didn’t admit to being scared. When the truck driver came home, Elaine left.

I ran to the duplex after Darlene had arrived and was crying. The police had inspected the home and told Darlene that if the house wasn’t cleaned up by Monday they would call Social Services. Darlene was very upset because she’d planned to take the kids to the circus on Sunday. I told her I’d clean the house so she could keep her plans with the kids.

Because I hadn’t been babysitting for Darlene, I hadn’t done any housework there. The place a disaster. Sheets and clothes hadn’t been washed in weeks, the floors were dirty, and the dishes were piled high. I figured I’d have the work done in a half a day, but by the time Darlene and her kids returned from the circus, I was still cleaning.

In the end, the police failed to return on Monday.

Header image:
Me at about the time of
this story, June 1958,
in front of my
grandfather’s travel trailer