I’ve been going through old notebooks so I can harvest phone numbers. These are the notebooks I keep in my bag and toss in a drawer when they’re scribbled full. In one, I wrote down a conversation between two men in a restaurant. True story.

“How’s Gillian?”

“She’s fine. She’s busy. Daycare. Lessons…”

“Do you spoil her?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t buy her a lot.”

“Got a nannie?”

“Oh yeah. You got to get one, man. Get your shirts ironed, you never go back.”

“She does that?”

“Yeah. They go down the laundry chute and come back from like, One-Hour Martinizing. You build another place, you’ve got to get a laundry chute.”

“You treat her well? The nannie?”

“Oh yeah. You’ve got to, you know, or you’re in trouble. They come after you.”

“Pay her well?”

“Not really, no.”

“I mean, relative to other nannies.”

“Nah. No. Ya know.”

“What made you think of a laundry chute?”

“What are you going to do? Leave the clothes lying around in piles otherwise.”

That’s all I wrote. I should probably have published it on International Women’s Day, but I’ve been nursing a cold. Chocolate seems to help.