I rubbed my feet restlessly on the Adriens’ carpet, pressing my toes into the plush beige fibers so deep that they disappeared. As the afternoon dwindled, the light from their ten-foot windows fell inside honeyed and golden and made me want to fall asleep. I yawned and placed my fingers in a peach ribbon of sun. It was September: autumn only in advertisements, cartoon-orange leaves and red backpacks lining the signs for back-to-school sales, the warmth whittling down but still keeping us in short sleeves. After a month and a half, I’d won out as the full-time nanny, somehow.
Bijou and I were sitting in the entryway. As the most wide-open space, it served as her pseudo-backyard, a place she could twirl in pirouettes, or lie on her stomach drawing, or, today, practice downward-facing dog. At her school, yoga began in the first grade, so it was her fourth year of practice. She was concerned that I did not know as much about vinyasa as she did. She asked if I could do a split, and I couldn’t, not anymore—not since I was young, like her, when I wore black leotards in my middle school’s basement a dozen years ago.
“Can you?” she asked again. I shook my head, and Bijou slid her legs on either side of her body to show me that she could. She was still in her school skirt, a pleated navy blue with the Stanton Academy crest sewn in yellow thread above the right knee, and I noticed she was starting to sprout leg hair. It was so blonde it wasn’t visible as much as reflective, shimmering with the last wisps of sun. She popped up and went back to downward dog.
“What did you play in school when you were a kid?” She kicked her right leg into the air, away from her tented body, and then brought it in front of her torso, bending it into a neat ninety-degree angle while her left leg lay straight. “This is called pigeon.”
“Softball.” I lay on my side, stretching my arms toward the exit. “Kickball.”
“What’s kickball?” She held her arms out stick-straight, like a zombie, and then collapsed forward over her leg. Her school called gym class “cooperative teamwork time.”
I was debating whether to explain kickball when we heard the rumble of the elevator doors. I still felt special about being in an apartment that had an elevator open right into the living room. When I’d told Lucy about it, she’d marveled, “Wow. Imagine being so rich, you’re actually unable to lose your keys?” Lucy had locked herself out of our apartment twice that month alone.
I scrambled to sit up and look alert before Nathalie came in. When the doors opened, it was her husband, Gabriel, and I slouched back down. He wasn’t home as much, and even though I’d been in his home for almost two months, I didn’t know what to call him. Mr. Adrien sounded too formal, Gabe seemed too casual, and I’d never heard anyone actually say Gabriel. He was a doctor, and tonight he’d left his white lab coat on, sticking out from under the hem of his jacket. He looked at us sitting on the floor as the doors slid shut behind him, and his voice was tentative as it came out.
“Hello, you two,” he said. He didn’t know how to talk to me either.
“I’ve been showing Willa how to do yoga,” Bijou said, standing up in front of me. “She didn’t even know what pigeon was!” The end of her french braid was right in front of my face. I thought about tugging it and then I did. She whipped her head around, confused.
“Sorry,” I said, guilt pinpricking my chest. “A strand was loose.” I rearranged the bracelets on my wrist. “Um, have you heard from Nathalie? She hasn’t told me what to do about dinner.”
Gabe’s eyes widened a bit, and he shook his head, turning toward the coat closet. “No, I haven’t.” He removed his jacket and then his lab coat, hanging each of them up before shutting the door. When he turned back around, he looked surprised to see me still looking at him. “I’m sure there’s something in the fridge?”
“I’ll go look,” I said. I hadn’t thought the light meal prep would be so complicated, that there were no frozen fish sticks in this house. There were only meals made from scratch and my constant fear of infecting Bijou with something like salmonella.
“I’ll come,” Bijou chirped, skipping until she was in line with me. Taking care of a child meant being under constant scrutiny, no escape for even two minutes into the kitchen by myself. I opened the fridge hopefully; I still hadn’t cooked without meticulous instructions from Nathalie. Bijou had the palate of a classically trained chef. She often asked me to buy langoustines or duck liver when I went to the grocery store, and spent her allotted television time on competitive cooking shows. Each time I put a plate in front of her, I thought she might take one bite and give me a rundown of its flaws. Sometimes, she did.
Bijou was nine and a half, but not the way I was once nine and a half. How many languages do you speak? What instruments do you play? How many countries have you been to? Can you do a split? I rubbed my temples whenever she started on the litany of questions that seemed so popular among the widely trained. None, nothing, no.
“Here’s some chicken,” I said, fishing out some fleshy pink pieces wrapped in plastic.
“Oh, these shallots are old,” Bijou said, standing on her tiptoes to look through a bowl of produce.
I still wasn’t exactly sure what shallots were. Something like garlic? “Okay. There’s some tomato sauce. I can make you pasta with tomato sauce and chicken? Like chicken parm.” I tried to sound confident. Kids were supposed to take what you said at face value — I’d heard that somewhere.
“But do we have mozzarella for that?”
Is that what’s in chicken parm? “Why don’t you go talk to your dad?” I said. “Ask him how his day was. See if he wants chicken parm.” I took a large skillet under her gaze and switched the flame on underneath.
Their stove’s brushed steel was so smooth and easy, a bright blue flame with the slightest flick of my wrist. I drizzled olive oil in the pan and looked at her, thinking, See? I know what I’m doing.
She shrugged and scampered out. I searched easy chicken parm on my phone, then filled up a large pot with water. I could see my reflection in their stainless-steel pots, my face bent like an hourglass, a funhouse image of my tan skin, my black hair, my nervous brown eyes staring back at me. I unwrapped the chicken breasts and flinched at how slimy and wet they felt between my fingers. I dropped two in the pan and immediately felt the hot spatter of oil on my wrists. I jerked away quickly, rubbing at my arm.
“Are you okay?” Bijou said as she walked back in. I nodded and dropped my hands to my sides.
“If you place it in gently, it seems like it will splatter but it won’t,” Bijou said crisply.
“What?” I said, dropping another piece the same way. She yelped as if burned. “Oops, sorry.” I turned the faucet on and pulled her toward it. “Did that really get you?”
“Did you salt the water?” Bijou asked, pointing her chin at the stove.
“I was about to,” I said, and left her with her wrist outstretched under the cold water. As I grabbed the salt, I saw Gabe in the doorway. He cleared his throat. Bijou turned off the faucet and came to stand by my side. She was so tall for her age, almost at my shoulders, and I could feel her elbow against mine as we looked up at him.
“Nathalie’s over at Amico—she said she’ll bring us something to eat from there. Sorry you already started, Willa. She said that she meant to tell you.”
“Ooh.” Bijou reached behind me to turn off the stove. “I love the duck there.”
I looked at the burners. “Should I finish that and put it away, or…?” The chicken breasts were still half flesh and half meat, like pulsing organs on a pan.
“I hate to say it, but you better throw it out. We have dinner plans tomorrow and then we’re away this weekend. Thanks, Willa. They were about to go bad anyway.”
I tipped the pan into the garbage and covered the mess up with paper towels. One, two, three chicken breasts, cage-free and organic. They could have fed me for a week. I shouldn’t have asked Gabe — Nathalie would have told me something different. Most times while we fixed dinner, Bijou talked about how good Nathalie was at making this, how Nathalie’s mother had taught her that.
“Did your parents cook much?” Nathalie had asked me once when I’d left the lid on a pot of boiling water, and it overflowed onto the stove. She’d been in a good mood that day and had said it playfully, not like the time I didn’t put enough bread crumbs in the meatballs and she’d raised her eyebrows at their soggy shapes.
“My mom worked,” I’d said with my back turned, crumpling a paper towel into the trash. Nathalie murmured something tactfully, and we avoided what was in front of us on the counter: evidence of Nathalie’s own career, stacks of folders and files and notes that she’d been working on before she’d seen the lid trembling.
I never imagined that someone who worked for a bank could work from home as often as Nathalie did. She walked around the apartment in monochromatic exercise clothes or silky-looking loungewear, video-chatting into business meetings. I didn’t always know when she was home, either. Her office was off to the side of the living room, the door shut, and I was never sure if we were alone.
One day, she’d called to me from her office. Bijou and I were in the kitchen, doing her homework. She was tracing Chinese characters, and I was watching her make the strokes. I’d known Nathalie was home because she’d greeted us in black leggings and a soft-looking striped sweater. She looked young when she wasn’t dressed up, and I realized that she couldn’t be past her mid-thirties, maybe twelve years older than I was. But around her, I felt like a sixth grader in the home of the senior prom queen, finally invited into her lair.
“I’m trying to declutter,” Nathalie said when I walked in. Everything in her office was pastel and precise, a sharp-lined desk, a pale pink rug, silver-framed photos on the wall of her, Bijou, and Gabe. I looked up at the pictures, one of Bijou and Nathalie, leaning their heads toward each other. Nathalie sat on a velvet sofa, holding a box on her lap.
“You know when you order a hundred dollars of something and they send you these samples? I keep them, but I realized I need to purge.” There was a glass-on-glass clatter as she held the box upside down, and a stream of jars spilled out onto the table. “There,” she said. “So many! I wanted to see if you wanted any before I threw them out?”
“Samples?” I said, holding up a full-sized bottle of moisturizer in a frosted-glass jar.
“Oh, I guess some of them are old products I never used. But I’m so set in my ways now, I can’t stray.” She got up from the couch and sat in her computer chair. “If you’re the same way, you don’t have to take any. Do you have a skin-care routine?”
“Not really.” I bent to sort through the jars. They were like little pieces of jewelry, a clear pink case of eye cream, a jagged-shaped clear bottle of moisturizer, little liquid bottles with delicate script.
“You have such nice skin, though. You’re not Korean, are you?”
“I’m half Chinese.” Didn’t she remember my last name was Chen?
“I love Korean skin care,” she said. “It’s totally changed my skin. I wish I’d started even earlier. They say that in Korea, the girls start doing this routine at fifteen.”
“Oh, really?” I felt that this blank phrase was what I said the most around Nathalie, never sure of how to respond.
“Was your mom into skin care?”
“Oh, no, my mom’s never really been into the beauty thing.” I hesitated, wondering if I should tell Nathalie that my mom was white. I glanced at her, and she was looking at me attentively. I looked back to the bottles, nervous.
“My mom was so controlling with that stuff when I was younger,” Nathalie said. “I had to wear my hair or dress the way she wanted. And she wouldn’t let me wear makeup until I was fifteen or so. I felt like that was the hardest thing in the world.”
“I guess when you’re young, you want to be older,” I said, commending myself for the full sentence.
“Yes, believe me, enjoy being young,” she said. “Enjoy not having to have a skin-care routine, because if I don’t put night creams on, you can tell.”
Maybe Nathalie did think I was a few years younger than I was, just out of college, even though she’d asked me about having kids. Maybe she thought I was young enough that I didn’t have to think about starting my life or fending off wrinkles. But anyone could tell that her skin looked more like glass than mine did. I smiled politely at her comment. “Are there any that you recommend?” I was still kneeling on the floor in front of the table, not sure how many I could take. There must have been thirty. “How many do I need?”
“Oh, honestly you could take them all. But here, let’s see.” She bent next to me. I noticed for the first time that she had a bland little star tattoo on the inside of her wrist. She gathered up eight or nine, pushed them toward me. “How about these?”
I thanked her and she handed me a little shopping bag folded up near her desk. I placed the bottles in, hearing them clink, clink, clink against each other. “Thanks so much,” I said again. “I’m excited to try them.” I felt like I had to keep telling her.
“Not that you need anything. Such pretty skin,” she said. “It’s so great that your mom didn’t push you into a beauty routine.”
I nodded but felt like I was lying. I wondered again if I should tell her my mom was not Asian like I was, to see if that changed things, but it felt too uncomfortable, presumptuous somehow, like it would change the pleasant, generous energy filling the room. So I smiled, and agreed.
Excerpted from Win Me Something by Kyle Lucia Wu. Copyright © 2021 by Kyle Lucia Wu. Reprinted by permission, courtesy of Tin House Books.
