Marilu -A Personal Essay

Memory 1
Marilu was our live-in nanny. She lived in the maid’s room downstairs for a while, until my sister was born, then she lived upstairs in the baby’s room. She was a frog of a woman. I’ve read that description many times, but it wasn’t until I remembered Marilu that I could put an image to the phrase. She wore tacky floral-print dresses that slid right over her head and clung lightly over her marshmellow-like body. Out of the short sleeves hung the fatty, flabby skin of her under arms, I made my personal silly putty on long car rides –she didn’t seem to mind. Her hair was cut short, masculine and black –she was by no means an attractive woman. She always favored my older brother and was later referred to as 'grandma' by my younger sister. We used to tease my sister and the nanny because somehow, my sister looked more like Marilu than she did us.
They all loved her; my brother because she played Super Nintendo with us (and always beat me); my sister who fell asleep each night and awoke every morning in her crib that would eventually become a full mattress matching her nanny’s; and my parents because now they could go out to dinner occasionally without a worry. But I never did like her. She used to chew on a single uncooked grain of rice, making the most disgusting smacking sound. Smack -as her tongue tried to force out the grain from between her teeth to suck on its disgusting shell again, and again –for hours.
She never took me seriously, constantly mocking my eight-year-old intelligence. Sometimes before she left to run errands I’d innocently ask her,
“Where are you going?”
And sure enough, every time she’d reply,
“I’m going to get old”.
Every time, no matter how many times I asked, no matter how frustrated I became –I might even have cried once.
One night I woke up to the sound of her screaming “Mickey! Mickey!” and thought that because her voice was naturally loud and obnoxious, she was just having a laugh with my brother Mike. She yelled my name twice and I too got up to see what was so funny. I find Marilu hysterical in the hall way and she orders Mike and I to get in her room immediately. Frantically she phones the police, then my parents. No sooner, the cops arrive, and my parents just behind them. A few weeks later, I was still hearing the story.
Apparently, Marilu was going downstairs with the baby for a warm bottle of milk, to find a man using the round end of a broom to try and unhook the keys from the wall, through the opened sliding glass window above the kitchen counter –to climb in would have made too much noise on account of all the appliances. He dropped the broom and raised his gun, demanding Marilu give him the keys. She begged him to let her put the baby in the other room first –because that's where the corresponding keys are anyway, she told him. Somehow she managed to sneak away with the keys on the wall in the kitchen and upstairs to call for help –they never caught the guy.
Marilu was our live-in for almost seven years. When we moved to the States she continued to share a room with my sister, and I shared the bathroom in their room with them –I didn’t like this. The older I got, the less I liked her, and the more I avoided her. One day while we were at school, she packed up all her tablecloth dresses, cheap toothpaste and worn out brush, and left. A few days later she returned to embrace my sister, begging my father for her job back. I did not care for her presence any longer, but they all loved her and she stayed, until the second time –that time, she never came back.