Make Lemonade

On her school’s job board, LaVaughn sees a flyer reading “BABYSITTER NEEDED BAD” (4). LaVaughn’s mother will allow her to work as long as LaVaughn finishes her homework, which is “a completely required thing/like a vaccination” (4). When LaVaughn calls the number from the ad, the voice on the other end, who introduces herself as Jolly, sounds to LaVaughn like someone who could be a friend: “like we could be friends/right away” (4). LaVaughn arranges to meet Jolly and her children after school.

LaVaughn goes to meet Jolly and discovers she is only 17 and has two children: 2-year-old Jeremy and baby Jilly. Jolly lives in “even a worse place” (6) than LaVaughn’s apartment building, and Jolly’s apartment is “smelly” (7) and filthy. LaVaughn reminds herself that she could still refuse the position, but while Jolly is explaining that she can’t lose her factory job, and repeating that she “can’t do it alone” (7), Jeremy reaches for LaVaughn’s hand. LaVaughn says she’ll take the job, but she has to ask her mom—a statement that causes Jolly’s eyes to “experiment with the word mom” (7), as though it’s a concept she’s not familiar with.

LaVaughn begins this chapter by stating that “this word COLLEGE is in my house,/and you have to walk around it in the rooms/like furniture” (9). She explains that when she was in fifth grade, she watched a movie about college in school and asked her mom if she could attend college herself one day. Her mother responded that no one in her family, and no one in their entire apartment building, had gone to college—but “‘somebody got to be the first, right?’” (10). She warned LaVaughn that college requires “money and hard work” (10), and as the years passed, she put some money aside for a college fund, but LaVaughn will have to earn most of her money for tuition. Thus, LaVaughn has decided to take the babysitting job—to get to college and “get me out of here” (11).

On the bus home from Jolly’s, LaVaughn wonders how she’ll convince her mother to agree to the babysitting job. LaVaughn says her mother spends her evenings working for the Tenant Council—as the council captain, she fights to “keep the bad elements out” (14) of their inner city home. LaVaughn resolves to tell her mother she needs the money and can do homework while the kids sleep; she won’t tell her mom about “that sideways look of Jolly’s eyes/like a car will come out of nowhere & run her down” (15). Returning to her apartment, LaVaughn sees “the Watchdog lady patrolling the street” (15), and mentions that she’s taken a woman’s self-defense class. Still, she is careful not to enter the elevator of her building if there are “strangers inside” (15).

LaVaughn tells her mother about the babysitting position, but leaves out the fact that Jolly is only 17. Although she’s concerned LaVaughn won’t have time to do her homework, her mother lets her take the job, but warns “you let those grades slip down, you’ll be sorry./Not from me. From your life you’ll be sorry” (19). LaVaughn, imagining herself “marching up the steps of a college” and no longer living “where they have Watchdogs and self-defense” (19), calls Jolly to tell her she’ll accept the job.

Looking back on her time spent babysitting, LaVaughn says that Jolly’s kids “were sloppy and drippy” (2), that Jolly was always on the verge of losing her electricity, and the rent usually “ain’t paid” (2). She wonders why she “kept going back” (20) and remembers a time Jeremy cried from a nightmare, and when LaVaughn held him, he “shut up for a minute” before “start[ing] again” (2). 

LaVaughn’s friends, Myrtle and Annie, warn her the babysitting job will cause problems—the apartment is dirty, she might not get paid, and her grades will slip. But LaVaughn’s mind is “made up”—“clenched/like you’d clench a fist” (21)—and she’s determined to keep the job.

During her first week of babysitting, LaVaughn notices a spiderweb attached to an “almost-dead hanging plant” (22) over baby Jilly’s high chair. LaVaughn sees the web, a “thready place of air” (22), move when Jilly cries, and thinks that Jilly “could shake a spider’s whole style of life/just by her sad hollering” (22).

LaVaughn describes the filth in Jolly’s apartment: the “rooms smell like last week’s garbage” and “You can’t imagine the things that live/down the plugged drain” (23). Since babysitting takes time away from her studies, LaVaughn got a C-minus on a recent test, but still imagines herself going to college and working in an office, and “never see[ing] a place like [Jolly’s] again” (23). Despite her vision, she still feels “afraid” (24) as she looks at herself in Jolly’s dirty mirror.

LaVaughn brings a pot of dirt and lemon seeds to Jolly’s and helps Jeremy plant the seeds, explaining that “If you want something to grow/and be so beautiful you could have a nice day just from/looking at it,/you have to wait” (25). Jeremy sits and watches the pot, calling it “lemon blom [sic]” (25), and LaVaughn thinks that the boy is “concentrating”—“or praying” (25).