Big Sister Is Watching

My first overseas trip was a novelty for everyone. I financed the entire trip off letters written to anyone I’d ever shook hands with and some people I hadn’t. When they heard that I was going to volunteer with poor Aboriginal tribes pens were immediately grabbed, checks written, and congratulations notes mailed with them. Everyone wants to be a part of a good thing. That good thing being help for poor Australians and cultural education for mildly annoying tomboys named Gigi.

Unfortunately for me, as the years went by and the trips continued people became more and more attached to their pocketbooks. The novelty of me telling Peruvian orphans that somebody somewhere loved them and learning to say “where is the bathroom?” in Thai wore off more and more as my thank-you and please-give-me-money letters continued six years in a row. I was the most well-traveled high-school kid without rich parents anyone knew, but after that first year I had to work for it.

My second and third trips were financed largely by the lucrative world of child-care. Fortunately for the teenage female population, not many adults want to take care of someone else’s screaming toddler for minimum wage. Particularly fortunate for me was the well-practiced, smiling, “I’m raising money to teach AIDS awareness in Africa.” Not only was I willing to work for less, but I was a do-gooder too. What a bargain.

One of the longest-running jobs of my babysitting career was for a sweet couple down the street. They had adopted two girls several years apart, naming the first Anna, after a relative of some sort, and the second Ruth, to be sufficiently Biblical.

The oldest, Anna, believed herself to be an undiscovered talent. She was going to be a famous singer. In particular, she believed herself to be the next LeAnn Rimes. She sounded more like LeAnn Rimes sucking on helium. But no one would tell her. Her parents encouraged it. Other adults encouraged it. I stayed silent as the grave when asked for my opinion. Now all I can think is "that's how those people end up on American Idol...everyone told them they could sing and they thought 'man, I must sound better than I thought'".

Anna's younger sister, Ruth, was training for a future career as the first human bulldozer. She had a real talent for destruction. She was so unpredictable and dangerous that her parents confined to her room behind a baby-gate at night. Otherwise she'd leave her room, roaming the halls and ruining perfectly good carpets, furniture, and, of course, walls. And, while I highly prefer Ruth’s hiding my shoe in the cat-box to Anna’s version of the ever-popular "Blue" sung at the top of her surprisingly large lungs, her parents didn’t appreciate the glitter ground into the carpet or the lipstick all over the marble countertop.

Anna and Ruth had a typical sister relationship: Anna was cruel and protective and Ruth believed everything Anna ever said. If Anna decided the sky was pink, then certainly it was. If Anna thought her version of “The Light In Your Eyes” was award-winning, who’s to argue? And Anna’s most effective lie was told one night before Ruth went to bed, during my tenure as their sitter.

"Hey, Ruthie, if there's a fire in the house you're going to die because you're trapped in your room behind that gate!"

Ruth, understandably and as any small child should, started bawling and had to be comforted. Anna was scolded. Tears were sniffed away. I promised to save Ruth first if there was a fire. And everything was fine. Until bedtime.

I tucked Ruthie into bed, per the usual, and began down the stairs. Suddenly, as if all the air had been sucked from the room and exhaled in one exhaustingly frightening scream, Ruth was standing at the gate, gripping it with little white fingers and wailing: "I don't wanna die. I don't wanna die! I DON'T wanna DIE!"

“You aren't going to die, sweetheart.”

"ANNA SAYS. ANNA SAYS!"

That night I sat outside her bedroom door until she fell asleep. Two hours. Two hours of a backache and her face peeking out every few moments and me scolding her back to bed and then ignoring her in my exhaustion. Two hours until she fell asleep in the middle of her floor, and I didn’t move her, terrified that she would wake again.

I decided that night that if Anna were my child, she'd be grounded until she had kids of her own. And then I would tell them that they were going to die unless she sat outside their door for two hours every night. And I would feel no pity.

That was one of the last times I remember babysitting for them. And I'm pretty sure Ruth kept up the screaming and shaking act for at least another couple weeks before Anna realized that she had sabotaged her own peace and quiet and proposed some worse fate that awaited her screaming four year old sister.

My fourth, fifth, and sixth trips were no longer financed by babysitting. At the age of seventeen, I finally realized that there were better ways to make travel money. Ways that didn’t involve searching frantically for a runaway eight-year-old or spending an hour looking for my left shoe, which had decided to hide in the cat-box all by itself. Or watching Thomas the Train Engine, who is the real reason for a high suicide rate in America. There were better ways, certainly, to earn my money: drug testing, becoming an exterminator, lion taming—you know, safer things.