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didn’t want to lose that crib.
    â€œWhat? Oh my God, what happened? Where’s Duncan?”
    â€œDeirdre-Agnes is having a baby.”
    â€œNow?” he said.
    â€œIn August.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œShe wants her crib back.”
    â€œJesus, you really scared the hell out of me,” he said. “I’m in a restaurant with someone, can we discuss this later?”
    I didn’t even have a chance to tell him about Careena and my new plans to try to find another job, although I knew it wouldn’t be easy.
    By the end of the day I’d scheduled fifteen interviews for Saturday and fifteen interviews for Sunday. The best ads were the ones written not by the nanny herself but by her employer. These sounded like modern-day slave-trading posts: Our legal, loyal & reliable nanny of 12 years sks new family. Our loss, your gain . Not a single nanny, I quickly discovered, was Irish. Or even English. Or even Welsh.
    On Saturday, I set a plate of mint Milanos on the coffee table. I unwrapped a new package of legal pads I’d taken from the office, ready to take careful notes about each candidate.
    I sat on the couch before the first one arrived, looking at my list of questions, but each question seemed to conjure up a past nanny. Suddenly it was almost as if they were with me, my three former nannies. The three C’s—Careena, Carella, and Carellis—or the ghosts of them, like the three witches in Macbeth , squeezed onto the couch, talking on their cell phones, each with its own annoying ring tone, waiting for the parade of new nannies.
    The first nanny showed up right on time and took her seat across from me in my best Ligne Roset Moël chair. I asked her my first question: “Do you cook?”
    â€œYou want me to cook!” she said, making her eyes so wide it was as if I had asked her to take off her blouse. I crossed her off the list.
    I crossed the next two off my list right away because one brought her baby with her to the interview and the other had long, decorated nails with pastel stripes.
    â€œYou speak excellent English!” I told one enthusiastically.
    â€œI’m from Trinidad,” she said.
    â€œYes, but your English is excellent,” I said, nodding my head like a crazy person.
    â€œWe only speak English there.” She looked at me with unmasked disgust.
    I crossed her off my list.
    One had an almost contagious case of mush mouth. “Yesh, yesh, thatch nicesh,” was her answer to all my questions. I croshed her off my lisht. One, I could have sworn, answered, “Double, double toil and trouble. Fire burn, and caldron bubble,” when I asked her how she liked to handle playdates. I crossed her off.
    I’d forgotten how much advice these nannies liked to give. “I can tell you had a C-section,” one named Marlene said after she’d sized me up. “When they sew you up the air gets trapped in there and your stomach can never be flat again.” I crossed her off my list. I crossed off anyone who had a long story about why her bus was late. Or anyone who wasn’t the person I’d spoken to on the phone but her friend instead. One of them complained about her last employer, who had worked her too hard. “I was with this child night and day,” she said. “I don’t know why some people go and have children.” I crossed her off. Her children were in Haiti being raised by her parents. Almost all of them had children being taken care of by relatives. “What’s that?” one of them asked, pointing to Russell’s desk and the towers of boxes all around it. “My husband works at home,” I said cheerfully, but she just shook her head no and made a tsking sound I had become familiar with. If I ever went on vacation to Jamaica, I imagined I would hear that tsking sound like a sea of locusts when I got off the plane. I blamed Russell-working-at-home for the fact that we’d gone