In a much-publicized case at the Hackensack Superior Court this past October, a woman named Manjula Patel was charged with aggravated assault and child endangerment. Hired by a North Jersey couple to care for their infant, she had been caught abusing the baby when her employers installed a "Nanny cam" in their home to monitor her behavior. News reports, after detailing the abuse (and invoking Patel’s immigration status), typically ended by mentioning the debate surrounding Nanny cams and citing their popularity. The Bergen Record reported that 40 percent of American households with children either own Nanny cams or have expressed interest in them. Over one million were installed in 2006 alone.
       
        I kicked the Bergen Record toward the house from my driveway every day as a kid—not that my parents (or I) had heard of Nanny cams when I was growing up in the age of Alf. But there is no doubt where they would have stood on the question: My mother was a feminist, my father was a Marxist—the only one, as far as I ever knew, within the one square mile of our town. When I was 10, my mother told me that if I ever "got into  trouble," I shouldn’t be afraid to come talk to her; we would "take care of it." (I don’t remember when it crystallized for me that she was talking about abortion, but it was well after that conversation.) Mom was not particularly fond of the television, but monopolized it to watch CNN’s coverage of the William Kennedy Smith rape trial: she wanted that son-of-a-bitch to go down. My dad, for his part, would drive me to swim lessons at the Hackensack YMCA—just down the road from the Superior Court— each Saturday, smoking his pipe and entreating me to think of just one scenario in the world in which wealth was not created by Labor. I would not oblige. I chose instead to reflect on whether I wanted McDonald’s or Burger King after being released from the pool. Still, their politics rubbed off on me. In the fall of 1988, when my second grade teacher asked us to write down the name of the candidate we wanted to win the upcoming presidential election, I and I alone spelled  out "Jesse Jackson." This despite the fact that at seven, the only thing I knew about Jesse Jackson was that he was a relative of Michael.
        
        If, when I was a kid, someone had suggested to my parents that they surveil their babysitter, my dad would have replied with a sober rebuttal about "civil liberties," "workers’ rights" and "mechanisms of control," or else a belly laugh and a dismissive wave of the hand. Mom would have simply thought the idea creepy. But had my parents been different people, with different ethics, they might have been surprised by how the caretakers they chose for me would have fared under a Nanny cam’s scrutiny.

       Liz, who looked after me for about a year when I was in elementary school, was a cop’s wife and the mother of three kids, and she’d honed the suburban mom look to perfection: Aqua Net-ted red pageboy, lavender eye shadow, and puff-painted outfits, always seasonably appropriate. But all the reindeer sweatshirts in the world could not have concealed one fact about Liz: She was mean to children—and not just to those of us who were her charges, but to her own kids too. I’m talking, "I-heard-you-say-you’re-hungry-but-I’m-just-going-to-scowl-at-you-from-the-couch," mean. Or, "Quit-bugging-me-about-homework-can’t-you-see-I’m-feeding-the-ferrets," mean. And most often, "You-are-one-lazy-little-[boy/girl]," mean.

       Liz’s was a subliminal cruelty, all cold stares and clenched teeth—it might not have registered on a video camera, causing a parent to rewind in horror. What would have was her daughter, Sarah, a white-blond gymnast-princess who wore a flaming red unitard every minute not spent in school and liked to tie me to a chair in the dark, hit Play on A Nightmare on Elm Street soundtrack and pour soy sauce down my throat. Had it not been for Sarah’s hijinks—the reason my parents yanked me from that house for good, once I managed to tell on her—Liz would have passed the Nanny cam test just fine.
       
        And then—mercifully—came Cindy, Liz's replacement. Though just one block away from Liz, her ferret pen, and her personality disorder, Cindy was galactically far in spirit. On another planet, in fact. A braless, tattooed, potty-mouthed, exuberant ex-hippie divorcée and mother of two, Cindy ran a nail salon out of her basement. She sported multiple piercings and two-inch fingernails, which themselves were multiply pierced. She also had two long tails, braided and beaded, growing down from her spiky blond buzz-cut. Cindy had no inhibitions. I didn’t live in a particularly repressed household, but neither was I used to being flashed, which Cindy did regularly. She was also fond of the word "pecker."

         A mother hen by nature, Cindy considered any child within her sight de facto under her care. Policing the neighborhood for any potentially dangerous activity, she yelled at cars passing by her house to "Slow the fuck down!" Her caution didn’t prevent her from driving us to the top of her favorite hill and flooring it to the bottom, exhorting us to throw our hands in the air on the way down like we were at Great Adventure. Twice I fell out of her car, while it was moving. Not because Cindy  was reckless, exactly. She just packed us in so tightly, never refusing any neighborhood kid a ride.

       Nanny-cammed, Cindy would have been toast after two days.  (My parents were progressives, sure, but they would have had to draw the line at their little girl tumbling out of a station wagon.)  Unwatched, she remained my “babysitter” until I went off to college. I haven’t seen Cindy much since my family left Jersey, though I often get messages from her asking after me and my brother: “How are you? How’s Giuseppe? My little Italian boy!” (My brother’s name is Joe and we’re Jewish/Irish, but it never made sense to split hairs with Cindy.)  Perhaps because she’s been on my mind lately, I crossed the bridge and went to see her last weekend. It was a good time: We laughed, we reminisced, we marveled at her recently-purchased Hummer. At the end of the visit, she walked us to the front door, chattering, oozing affection, and then stopped abruptly—“Wait!” she said, jutting a fingernail upward and sniffing at the Yankee Candle-scented air. “Can you smell the Christmas?”