Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales Read Online Free PDF Page A

teenage boy with acne and doped-up eyes. I loved Elizabeth. She lived with our family on and off until I was ten and then went off to live with a relative; she had gotten too old for the antics of a family of obstreperous kids, incontinent dogs, and itinerant parents. I hope for her sake that relative resided in Vegas.
    I think my mother hired each babysitter as a reaction to the predecessor. If one was too loose, the next one was too strict, and so on. One of the most baffling decisions my mother ever made (besides working in a Republican White House) was hiring Brandelyn, a three-hundred-pound Mormon from Utah. My mother must have found her in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints Craigslist. I’m not a fatist, but somebody who is caring for young children should be able to at least walk. And not wear powder blue polyester pantsuits while battling a body odor problem. Brandelyn would bathe my little sister and me every night, scrubbing our bodies with loofahs. “You have to get the dirt out of your bodies and your minds,” she would say as she scoured our necks raw. And there was never enough talk about the Lord. “The Lord wouldn’t like it if you ate that cookie before dinner, the Lord doesn’t like children that scream, the Lord damns people to hell if they don’t floss. . . .” She did a horrific job of selling us on Jesus; he was more didactic and ominous than any parent I knew, including Mrs. Williams, the Chinese mother who hit my classmate Adele with a stick while she practiced violin. Brandelyn’s fate was sealed when she flushed my gerbil, Bubbles, down the toilet because she decided it was rabid. Bubbles was from a reputable pet store, but apparently the Lord deemed it so. We draw the line when you start killing family.
    And then there was Summer. She looked like the Joan Armatrading album cover she was always playing. She was skinny, had a huge Afro, and wore bell-bottom jeans and crocheted sweaters. And she was beyond cool. There was no bedtime, dinner was craving-based, and undergarments were strictly optional. Summer was popular and beloved; the doorbell rang at all hours of the day and night. I thought we had finally found a staple in our life, a surrogate mom, friend, and confidant, all embodied in a woman who looked like she jumped off a Mod Squad lunch box. But six months into the job, Summer was abruptly fired; she had been (allegedly) dealing heroin out of the house. Yup, just another nanny hustling junk, selling pie, flipp’n sack from behind an Easy-Bake Oven.
    And then there were none. I think my mother decided, before our home became a crack den, that we would no longer have babysitters live in. She threw in the towel and decided to just raise us herself.
    I had my eldest daughter in a heat wave in Washington, D.C., the summer of 2002. She was a few weeks old when I started the search for the babysitter. I tried word of mouth, referrals, and the local paper. I decided to cover all my bases and pulled a phone number tab off a self-made nanny advertisement at the corner pharmacy. I hired Lala the day I called, mostly because I felt like a hen flapping around in the “I don’t know how to do this” motherhood pen. She was from the Philippines, legal, and had raised six children herself; I thought I had struck goo-goo-ga-ga gold.
    That afternoon Lala pulled the baby off my nipple and said, “Oh Mommmmyyyyy . . . I take baby to the park.”
    Naturally, I thought she knew much more than me when it came to child rearing, the Pacific ring of fire, and how to cook milkfish. “Um, okay,” I timidly answered, buttoning my blouse, “but be back in thirty minutes, because I think she’s still hungry and it’s ninety degrees out.” She nodded and laughed, exposing a mouth full of dental mishaps. The amazing thing about women from the Philippines is they’re ageless. Lala could have been eighteen or eighty, there was no way of telling: their skin stays the same, their silky