Oh, Nabokov, how I love thee

Looking through the lens of the View Master, my favorite childhood pastime, an image appears showing our first babysitter, a petite woman named Wendy. My father would pick Wendy up in his shiny, maroon Buick (with my brother’s and my legs hanging off the back seat, dangling) and bring her back to our house to look after us while he and our mother went out. When she’d open the passenger door her auburn tendrils would spring wispily above her shoulders as she ducked down into the car. My father would greet her with a consistent, sprightly monotonous smile on his jolly, round face and he would spill out a few questions about her parents, always mentioning her parents’ sailing boats; then he would always insert the same cassette tape into the Buick’s stereo and turn the volume knob clockwise. The song “Windy” by The Association would come loudly through the speakers, most times at a much higher volume than my father anticipated, causing his arm to quickly jerk out to turn the knob counterclockwise, lessening the music. Then he would sing to Wendy. He would sing the lyrics over the bands’ voices, unaware (I suppose) that the song is about a girl named Windy, not Wendy. In response to my father’s unabashed enthusiasm for her name, Wendy would sit there disquieted, forcing a small grin to please my father’s childish impulses. It never occurred to me that Wendy didn’t appreciate my father’s personal performance in her honor, until once, while pressing my hands into the bottom of the back seat and lightly levitating my body; I saw her face in the side mirror. She would look out the window, up toward the sky, and roll her eyes, sometimes shielding her expression with her hand from a possible glance of my father.
As I push the orange lever down with my thumb, the picture reel inside the View Finder rotates to show our next babysitter, Brenda: a tall, dark person, with short brown hair and stern, lifeless lips. She babysat us often because she lived down the street, about two blocks away (on 93rd St.) She would always announce as soon as our parents left that she was wearing perfume and demand that my brother and I come close to smell her; the scent was always overwhelming, burning our nostrils, and once my brother’s nose began to drip blood, the drops softly plopping on the white-tiled floor, just moments after her arrival.
Brenda took it upon herself to do my brother and me “good” while we were under her care, and would subject us to a series of individual lessons. She would sit me at our thick, oak kitchen table with a thin sheet of lined paper and a sharp-ended pencil; holding my wrist she would guide the pencil in my hand over the paper in a swooping motion to create the shapes of swaying and slanted cursive letters. I despised her for making me unwillingly learn this, and she stopped after I threatened to report her to my parents. (I would later excel that year in school, far beyond my classmates, by perfectly penning, on the first day of our grammar lesson, half of the cursive alphabet.)
Brenda also, without getting our parents’ permission, made us watch films of her personal choosing. She once forced me to watch Ernest Scared Stupid after I’d asked her if I could sit in the other room and read my book: The Boxcar Children: The Mystery of the Wild Ponies. I would always warn her that I would give a bad report of her to my parents when she did something that seemed unfair to me (like reading me my bedtime sound-book only if she could be the one to push the multicolored, cartoon character buttons that made the sounds. This made me so angry that often, out of pride and sheer stubbornness, I would go to bed without the story.) She didn’t last long, as my brother and I continued complaining about her to our parents.
The next image on the circular paper reel inside the View Finder is of Emilie. One brisk fall morning, while at my brother’s soccer game (Emilie had babysat us the night before) I overheard my mother gush to her friend about Emilie’s consideration in putting the leftover pizza slices from dinner into a small zip-lock bag and then lovingly setting the bag in the fridge. I loved Emilie too; she had a sweet demeanor and was slender and tall, with a beautiful smile despite her pink, rubber-band braces. Emilie would sometimes take my brother and me to an old-fashioned pharmacy on Ingersoll Street, which, from my four-foot view, was lined with towering parking meters. We would sit at the pharmacy’s soda-fountain bar on red vinyl swivel stools, which, when peered into, would divulge hundreds of tiny, silver sparkles floating inside. Once, while we were eating our ice cream, which was quickly melting off the cone and rolling down my hand onto my wrist where I would lick it off, Emilie told us not to tell our parents about our pharmacy trips. And the Christmas lights that always bordered the window of the pharmacy twinkled rhythmically to the music inside, buses and cars zoomed by, and it began to rain.