That was just my job when I was ten. I babysat kids in our goverment housing neighborhood on the rez in Nevada. The year before, up in Nome, I was the one who had a babysitter. I studied how to conduct myself in this job and while I learned as I went, I got used to the idea that all my jobs would somehow be just like this in the future. Mainly, we played together and since I would be more grown-up at eleven and probably finished with babysitting forever, I played with Jenny and Jeffrey like crazy while I could.
The adults had a dance party going on at our house and Pam's was four houses (mobile homes) away. I could see our house and hear the music blasting across the dried up grass full of bullhead stickers that was our house and the neatly green patches in front of the mobile homes where the doctors and their wives, and another social worker lived. Nothing happened while I worked and when I was woken up on the couch when Pam and Tom came back home, I was only pretending to sleep, I eagerly awaited how they would manage to wake me up. What would they say? What would they do?
The couch was below a self-portrait of Pam done in thick oils. It was rather large and I studied it as I fell asleep and waited for the party to end, for them to return home, for me to not be a babysitter any longer.
Jenny and Jeffrey didn't say much, didn't speak all that much at ages one and three. Jeffrey had cat-like eyes and wanted to wrestle around on the lawn, which we did. Jenny was small and delicate. She cried easily, so I took it easy with the wrestling with her and didn't really but my heart into it in order to protect her.
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