Eight weeks in, Joan stepped into her study for the first time since giving birth. Illuminated by the cold winter light, the room was a frozen preserve. The typewriter on her desk, lifeless and cold, the dictionaries she hadn’t reshelved still sat there, hulking books she barely remembered paging through with delight, finding words she once lovingly, ecstatically, used in her writing. When Martin returned home that night, she agreed.
A week later, Joan opened the front door to a tall young woman wearing a high-collared, long-sleeved dress in bright tropical colors, magenta and teal and cobalt blue and orange. Flower earrings budded from her earlobes, and her hair, the color of wet sand, was pulled back tight in a ponytail. It was barely thirty degrees outside, high drifts of snow in front of all the houses, small paths from front doors to road, but the young woman wore no coat, no hat, no gloves, and did not seem at all cold.
“I’m Fancy,” and she shook Joan’s hand with a hidden might. “Sorry,” she said when she saw Joan’s face. “I think I’ve gotten rather too vigorous. I joined the gym at the community center, been working out with weights every day since landing here in Rhome.”
At the kitchen table, she tightened her tight ponytail, and said, “So I’m Canadian, grew up on Lake Ontario, the eldest of seven brothers and sisters. There comes a time when all chicks must leave the nest, and when my time came, I grabbed my best girlfriend, Trudy, her family lives down the block from mine back home, and we jumped on a bus and kept traveling until we stopped in Rhome. Strada di Felicità is just so pretty, and it seemed to me like this would be an interesting place to live, the way the town is a bunch of circles, getting larger and larger and larger, all the lovely stores, the lovely houses, so I turned to Trudy and said, ‘This is the place, you game?’ and she said she was, so we got off the bus and got down to business. We’ve got an apartment over Rudolph’s Delicatessen on Tennessee Place. Such good food there, I must say. And I loved learning that the Italian man who founded Rhome thought every town should have a Street of Happiness running through it. I figured I could be happy in a place with a Strada di Felicità. And it’s true, we are, the two of us, and we just love the busyness of the town, how there’s always people out and about.”
Joan thought Fancy’s Canadian hometown must be minute indeed, because Rhome was charming, but sleepy, even with the hopefully named street.
“When I saw your advertisement for a nanny at the community center, I thought, ‘Fancy, that’s the job for you.’ And now looking at you, such a pretty mother, I know I made the right decision to call. I’m nearly twenty, the oldest in my family by five years, so I’ve got tons of experience taking care of little ones. I practically raised my siblings myself. And this might be important to you, to gauge my seriousness, so I’ll tell you now that I have no interest myself in men or romance. I leave all that to Trudy. Do you mind if I make us some tea? That’s a nice kettle you’ve got on the stove. Just point me to the cabinet with the cups.”
Joan did not laugh although she wanted to, listening to this Fancy, this odd young woman with her whirlwind of words, and instead said, “The cups are in that cabinet,” pointing to the cabinet next to the sink, “and there are all kinds of teas in the drawer next to the fridge. Choose whatever you’d like.”
Fancy was up and out of the kitchen chair, smoothing down her tropical dress, opening the cabinet, taking down two cups and saucers. “Nice, bone china,” she said. “My family’s never had much, but we always drink our tea from bone china, keeps it hot and makes one feel regal.” Then she was opening the drawer and inspecting the boxes of teas. “Orange Pekoe okay with you?” and when the kettle whistled, Fancy brewed them tea strong as coffee, telling Joan, “This is what our queen, the queen of England, drinks, tea just this black.”
Steam swirled up from their cups and Joan said, “Isn’t Canada an independent country now? I didn’t think the Queen still ruled there.”
“Well, it’s a little hard to pin our independence down to just one date. Some say it happened in 1867, but the truth is, it wasn’t official until 1931, and it’s only eight years ago that it was finalized, with the Canada Act of 1982. But the queen is still the official head of state, and she is our monarch. All Canadian children learn to speak the queen’s English, and we are taught our table manners by imagining we are dining with her, that she is sitting just across the table from us. For instance, did you know that the proper way, the queen’s way, of consuming soup is by sending the spoon through the liquid, away from yourself?”
“I don’t think I did,” said Joan, unable to picture the way her spoon moved through soup when she ate it.
Joan sipped her tea and Fancy drank hers down in two large gulps. “Nice, isn’t it, when tea is sharp and powerful?” and Joan said that it was and then led Fancy out of the kitchen, down the short hallway, and into the baby’s room, where Daniel was asleep in his crib.
Fancy took long strides across the room, leaned over the crib, her head falling forward, as if loose from her neck, and said, “He’s a beautiful cherub and sleeping so well. What time did he go down for his nap?”
“Thirty minutes ago,” Joan said. “He should wake in an hour.”
Fancy straightened, and Joan thought she must be close to six feet, a good six inches taller than Joan, just a couple of inches shorter than Martin. A basketball player in flowers.
“I’m so glad you’ve got him on a schedule,” Fancy said. “Too many mothers today think naptime is catch as catch can, which is nonsense in my book. A child on a sleep schedule is a happy child indeed.”
Fancy stepped back nearly to the doorway and Joan watched her take in all of the room, her eyes moving from painted blank walls to bookcase to closet to changing table and back to the walls. Joan was waiting for the day when Daniel crayoned pictures and she framed them and hung them up.
“This is a lovely nursery,” Fancy said. “I’m so pleased you chose yellow for the walls. Did you know that the yellow wavelength is relatively long and its stimulus is emotional, so it’s the strongest color, psychologically? A yellow like this lifts spirits and self-esteem. It is the color of confidence and optimism. Living within it will help the cherub’s emotional strength, his friendliness, his creativity. If you had chosen a brighter yellow, it could have caused his self-esteem to plummet, given rise in him to fear and anxiety, irrationality, emotional fragility, depression, anxiety, and a propensity for suicide. Or maybe in you, considering how much time you probably spend in here with him.”
“Yellow can do all of that?” Joan asked. She had not considered the psychological ramifications when she and Martin chose the paint at Olinsky’s Paint & Hardware in town, she had simply liked the shade.