Once we’d settled in, I ramped up my search for a new nanny—Nuala had quit shortly after Jay was diagnosed. I’ll never know exactly why. We’d been so lucky to have a wonderful family of Bahamian women helping us while Jay was sick: Nell, and later her sister Emily, then her caring daughter Charlene, who’d pitched in at the Surrey. I loved them all and found it comforting that they were a family, helping ours.
But I needed someone who could live in and be there for us in every imaginable way—covering for me when I had to travel at a moment’s notice, helping with meals, homework, and everything else.
An agency sent me Lori Beth Meyer. When we met at Sarabeth’s, my favorite neighborhood spot for brunch and lunch, I found her unassuming and charming. In the last half hour of the show we’d done a segment on hairpieces, including extensions and falls, which were very trendy at the time. I had luxurious, flowing locks clipped to my crown, and I was so strangely delighted by the princess-y effect that I’d decided to leave them in for a little while—even during my interview with Lori Beth. We had a great conversation despite the fact that I looked like an aging Barbie. （Lori Beth would tell me later that she assumed I was trying to be incognito—although she was confused about why I was smiling and waving at everyone who recognized me.）
I invited Lori Beth over to meet the girls. Watching her and Ellie play computer games, I knew we were a match.
WITH OUR NEW life taking shape, we decided to get a dog—a cairn terrier like Toto in The Wizard of Oz, which played on a loop for a month in the playroom. （That Halloween, all three of us dressed up as Dorothy.） Our puppy was blonder than Toto, and one of her ears folded over, prompting my mom to say we should name her Flopsy. Instead, we called her Maisy, after the cute mouse from the kids’ books we loved.
I’d never owned a dog before and quickly learned how high-maintenance they can be compared to a sleep-and-sun-loving feline like the incomparable Frank, my roommate in Miami. A dog trainer came in and suggested I put a match in Maisy’s bottom, noting that the sulfur on the tip would activate her sphincter and train Maisy to do her business. I know. I could barely use a rectal thermometer on the girls when they were babies—thank God they invented the ear kind—much less stick a match up Maisy. （I’m sorry to say she had more than a few accidents on Jay’s grandparents’ Oriental rug.）
Our all-chick apartment would become an unlikely bachelor pad for my nephew Jeff, Emily’s younger son. He’d graduated from Dartmouth the previous spring and I had asked him if he wanted to come stay with us while he figured out his next move, hoping to break into the film business. “You can live here rent-free,” I told him. “Plus, I think it will be really nice for the girls to have a guy around the house.” Jeff got a job assisting Pierce Brosnan while he was in New York shooting a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.
At night, the playroom became Jeff’s bedroom; he hung his clothes among the plastic bins full of toys and costumes and slept on the pullout couch. Sensibility-wise, he was the male version of me—I suspected he’d easily channel our humor and inject some much-needed fun into our lives.
We started calling him our “manny.” He walked Ellie to school while Lori Beth tended to Carrie; he’d impersonate a gorilla and chase the girls throughout the apartment or dance while Carrie jumped around with two oranges stuffed in her tank top singing “Oops!…I Did It Again.” He was Gaston to Ellie’s Belle and a frequent guest at tea parties. It may not have been what he envisioned as a 20-something single guy in New York, but I know he had fun. So much so that when Pierce Brosnan asked Jeff to join him on the London set of his next James Bond movie, Die Another Day, Jeff turned him down, clearly thinking life with a 42-year-old widow and her two little girls was more exciting.
One of his main responsibilities was to help me get some sleep. I was burning the candle at both ends and in the middle—just perennially exhausted. After the girls were in bed, he’d sit at the desk in the playroom, with a clearer view of the hallway than Lori Beth had from her room. Jeff would chase down any little night creatures who had escaped their bedrooms and were headed to mine.
Much to Jeff’s chagrin, the girls’ playroom never became his, er, playroom—the living arrangements seriously cramped his dating style. He joked that when he met potential hookups, he’d say, “Hey, do you wanna come to my place and do a puzzle?” I tried to make it up to him by taking him to cool parties and premieres, where I couldn’t resist introducing Jeff as my “boy toy.” When people found out he was actually my nephew, they’d try to set him up with their daughters and nannies.