My Hollywood

by Mona Simpson

  On our front step, William reached from her arms, screaming as I tripped in my heels, which sank, muddying in the sprinkled lawn, fog winding around my bare legs. You need tights here at night, I guess. And you have to stay on pavement. I walked into the loud, warm restaurant in a jacket with wet hair. My hand went to my head. Did I look okay? That was a question I’d been asking myself for at least a decade. The one thing more intimidating than growing up average with a beautiful mother is growing up average with a beautiful mother in LA.

  Piped-in music made a score for my movements. Elton John. I liked it but it was loud. I wouldn’t feel lonely tonight, I thought, sliding into the booth, but I was disappointing Will.

  Jeff signaled the waiter to get me a drink. He was good at drinks.

  “How’s the mothers’ group?” As a child, I’d been taught to remember something a person said and bring it up the next time.

  “Oh, I’ve got to do that. But we’re looking for a nanny. How’d you find Lola?”

  “She did it,” Paul said. “She saw her and hired her.”

  “At a bus stop,” I said, crossing my arms.

  “Wow,” Helen said. “Lucky.”

  Then Paul asked Jeff a question about the new head of comedy at Disney and they were off. I was left with her. We sat quiet a minute—two women with hands folded on the table.

  “It’s weird isn’t it, having this substitute for you every day?” I said. “I’m not even gay and William has two mommies.”

  “Wait a minute,” Paul said, turning, “you’re not gay?”

  “Well, I would be if it weren’t for …”

  “Oh, come on, Claire, we could do it,” Helen said.

  Both men looked at us. I felt flattered.

  “We should hire male nannies,” I said. “See how they’d like being duplicated.”

  “Oh, these little boys would love—”

  Suddenly, Jeff turned. “Before we do that, you’ll stay home and take care of him.”

  “Yes, yes,” she shushed. Their deal was tight. “We’re just joking.”

  I looked at Paul. We’d talk about this later. But what was our deal? I wouldn’t have signed the one we lived by, which was that I worried about everything. But I supposed you couldn’t make someone worry fifty-fifty.

  “What’re you working at?” Paul asked Helen. She worked! To say I was surprised was an understatement: looking the way she looked was a full-time job.

  “She wants to write,” her husband said. “And she’s talented.”

  “What’re you writing?”

  “Poems, mostly. There’s a contest. A poet I really love is judging this year. Sharon Olds.”

  So many women here said they were artists. A surgeon didn’t have to contend with other mothers at dinner saying that they were actually surgeons too.

  I was out of practice. Paul asked Jeff how he’d come out here. The waiter came to take our orders.

  “Guess I called back some Hollywood guy who’d left a message,” Jeff said. “I think her getting pregnant did it. My dad was a pharmacist who’d always wanted to be a chemist. ‘A real scientist,’ he used to say. But he never went back to school because he had the two kids and the house and the wife and …” His hand finished the sentence.

  “The life,” I said.

  “Yeah. Exactly. The life.” He nodded. “A quiet guy. Bald by the time he was thirty. My mom gave the color.”

  “A beauty,” Helen said.

  “She says that ’cause they look alike,” Jeff told us.

  “You know, in The Dayton Widow, I thought Aleph Sargent reminded me of you,” Paul said. “Is that why you had her dye her hair?”

  “Does your father still have his pharmacy?” I asked.

  “He killed himself when I was sixteen. A bad investment.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” Paul’s head turned down. What could you say?

  “Jeff was the last person to talk to him,” Helen said. “That’s what his next movie’s about. A comedy.”

  “Well, that’s backstory. My father killed himself in April, and we were supposed to go on a safari that August. A nonrefundable safari. So my mother decides, here’s where the comedy comes in, we’re going anyway. And because we had an extra ticket now, she invites my aunt Bette, who’s an agent at the county airport but who’s never left the state of Ohio. She weighs a hundred and ninety pounds.”

  “You’re kidding,” Paul said. “This is really your movie? Does your mother know?”

  “She’ll be okay with it.”

  “His success matters more to her than privacy,” Helen said.

  “That wouldn’t be true of your mother,” I said to Paul.

  “My mother’s completely open to hagiography,” he said.

  “I wonder what they’ll think of us, when they’re grown up,” I said. “Sometimes I wish I could be a different mother.”

  Helen shook her head. “But no one would trade their mother. Think. Would you?”

  I didn’t answer. I would have, of course I would have, but not for me, for her. We’d once driven to a place far from everything I knew. The vast grounds bordered in lilac; inside, the polished halls seemed peaceful and forbidding. Nuns put my mother in a wheelchair, fitted a blanket on her lap. She seemed different, grateful for her release. From responsibility for me? From walking? From all of it, I thought. “You’ll miss me at first. But then,” she’d said, looking up at the high windows, “you’ll get used to it.”

  “I will not,” I blubbered.

  “You’ll go to school still, you’ll live with Gramma.”

  I could see relief seep into her. When the nun pushed the two horns at the back of her chair, she clasped the metal armrests and closed her eyes.

  My mother’s best friend, Julie, whom all of a sudden I didn’t know that well, tried to hold my hand. That failing, she got me by the wrist.

  “Aleph says she’ll do Aunt Bette, but she has to gain fifty pounds and she’s balking on that. We’re negotiating. She’ll put on twenty. I’m toying with the idea that she ends up staying in Africa, and when the guy goes back, grown up, with his kid, she’s still there. Incorporated in a tribe. I want the kid to be blind or deaf or something.”

  “This is a comedy?” Paul said.

  “Autistic. We were thinking autistic,” Helen said.

  “Seriously, I think it could be funny. Do you see it?” Was Jeff Grant asking Paul to work with him? I wanted to make Paul sit up straight. I kicked him under the table.

  He looked at me with alarm. “I can see it.”

  “Oh, and if you get off the Jeep? On the Serengeti Plain, the animals’ll eat you. So there’s a suspense element.”

  The waiter refilled our glasses. When Helen excused herself to the ladies’ room, I followed. “We have real love,” she said, at the sinks, “a passion.”

  Maybe you do, I thought, but I couldn’t imagine him saying that. “That’s good,” I mumbled, rinsing my hands.

  “Great dress,” Paul said to her when we returned.

  If I’d brought it home, he’d have checked the price. And should he be commenting on the other wife’s dress? But we hadn’t been out for a long time. I was out of practice.

  “Target,” Helen said, with a smile of accomplishment.

  The shoes, the bag—they weren’t from Target. She didn’t shop at Target. She shopped at Barneys and dipped into Target for an offbeat trophy.

  Helen appreciated Paul’s attention, but she wouldn’t have traded.

  I might, I thought. Then I reminded myself to be grateful.

  She started talking about pregnancy. She said she’d religiously practiced Kegels. “Lot of good they did me.” Most of what she talked about meant sex. She had an easy laugh.

  I said that I’d thrown up. She said she tried to eat only sheer proteins and fruit. She didn’t really worry about the baby. They were on the same side, the baby and her. The Keeping Him side, I thought. The conversation was breaking down, as couples’ conversations did. I
wanted to be in the other one.

  Pregnant, I’d felt like a child bundled in a stiff coat, sitting in the backseat of a car being driven somewhere, wheels underneath spinning, the world outside reeling by, the sky so big, and me just along.

  “Even though we did this thing together, all of a sudden I was the one changed.”

  “I hated that! What about fifty-fifty!” This was a conversation I could manage. I went days without talking to an English-speaking adult. Now I wished I’d ordered the salad the waiter was placing before Helen.

  “My feet got fat. I had to buy all new shoes,” she said.

  “My grandmother owned a bakery,” I said, “and she was heavy, so she concentrated her beauty efforts on her feet. She had crocodile pumps, velvets, satins. But she had tiny feet. Size five. We had to throw those out when she died, each shoe in its own felt bag. Lola found out after and said, But I have small feet also! She lifted her foot up. She still thinks about those shoes.” I told that story to wrench us all back into one conversation. I thought I could do the Filipina accent. I heard Lola’s voice all day long.

  “I wanted a 1964 birth,” Helen said, “including the trip to the beauty shop. But this one insisted on watching.”

  It had never occurred to me that Paul shouldn’t see.

  “And hers was a doozy,” Jeff said.

  “I expected to be a natural at it,” she said. “Well, I wasn’t.” She’d probably been a girl whose ideas about growing up concerned dresses, a girl who loved pink. But birth was ugly: blood, shit, and noises. “I wasn’t good at it.”

  “Good at it?” I interjected. “Just doing it was enough for me.” Pain smeared everywhere, brown handprints on the walls. Not for one minute did I doubt that they could get the baby out, if they really tried. This was a hospital in America. In 1991.

  “And then when he was born, I looked down at him and thought, Who are you?” She said, “I was waiting for that rush of love. For me that didn’t come till later.”

  “She woke up and asked, Did I have an episiotomy?” Jeff said.

  We laughed. Just then the waiter brought our dinners, setting down warm plates. Couples discussed birth, I thought, watching Jeff tear into his trout, as if it weren’t our bodies. Paul waited, politely, as his mother had taught him to, until the hostess took her first bite. But who was the hostess in a restaurant?

  The time just after William’s birth, I was a scarecrow, stitched together. I knew my body was broken. I turned to the window and understood landscapes. They were seen from the dead. I recognized the world without me, still beautiful, more. I understood resignation that day and wanted to make some structure of pain, natural but fantastic, like the palaces of bees. “He’s a redhead,” someone remarked in the distance, in what sounded like an office party ending. Little Squib. I thought, He’s funny looking, red and chinless, not cute, his hair pilly. But I loved him, oh, I loved him.

  “How was it for you?” Jeff reached an arm across the table and touched my elbow, that small tunnel between bones. “How is it being a mother and one of the real composers of our generation?”

  “Most of the time I don’t feel like either.” I shrugged. “My office here is hot. I fall asleep.”

  “Do you have any concerts coming up? We want to go.”

  I mumbled that I had something in Detroit next year.

  “She has a symphony in New York the year after,” Paul said.

  “You ever think of film scoring?” Jeff asked.

  “She’s got her hands full.”

  “I’d do it. Sure. It was good enough for Aaron Copland. And I’m one of the people who likes Koyaanisqatsi.” I shrugged. “No one’s asked.”

  We’d come in four cars, and I stood, waiting for the valet. I used to eat like this all the time, I thought, holding my stomach the way I had pregnant. It felt like my intenstines might fall out. I’d thought, ordering, Why not! This was a rare night. I wanted to feel young. I guess I couldn’t do that, anymore. I felt a trickle down my leg, tickling my knee. I tried to tell Paul later. He listened, nodding solemnly.

  “Now that we have Lola, you should see that doctor again.”

  I had. Nerve damage, he’d said. That was it. Done. Gone. Thirty-eight years old. The odd thing about bad news is the humiliation. You feel ashamed to be less. They sent me off with a box of Citrucel, a package of adult diapers, and the rest of my life.

  My headlights swung into our drive and I rushed from my car into Will’s room. He lay sleeping, hands on his stomach. I watched him, listening to his breath.

  He was little. He didn’t know yet that I leaked.

  Lola

  THE AMERICAN SEX KIND OF LOVE

  I take Williamo to the post office, seal the envelope, and send my money home. Four hundred fifty this week. A ticker tape of dollars runs now all the time in my head. Last year, I totaled more than twenty thousand—in pesos, three times what Bong Bong earns, and he is executive Hallmark. This year it will be more because my weekend job. Besides what I send, I give myself allowance of five dollars for daily spending. Twenty five go to my private savings, so when I return home there will be some they did not know. Also, I need my account here for shoes or treats for Williamo or if one of the babysitters gets married. When you are working seven days, you need some your own money. And I tell Williamo, Every day, Lola requires her coffee. Is twenty-five thousand ninety dollars enough to support a coffee habit on Montana Avenue? Lola is not a yuppie. I am here to pay tuitions and medicine, in our country that goes ten years.

  When we enter the house, the mother of Claire and her friend Tom are there. Tom says, “Two years ago, no one paid more than fifty cents for a cup of coffee! Now they’re all spending five dollars a day! That’s a five hundred percent increase.” The mother of Claire goes every day to the coffee shop. But Tom, he will not attend.

  “But-ah, I get the plain. Only one fifty. Plus they give the sugar we use to make the cinnamon toast.” I lift a handful of natural-sugar packs from my pocket.

  “Coffee costs them cents, Lola! Cents!”

  Does he think I am spending the money of Claire and Paul? Compared with other parents here my employers they are not rich, but they are still rich to me. You have to pay what it costs where you live to join the club of life. Anyway, my weekend employer makes my coffee for me.

  I leave on the counter the receipt for tapioca and the change.

  Walking to my weekend house, I hear my heart. Tops of planted grains tick my hands. Sprinklers spray a chain on my wrist. From a long time ago, I remember the strangeness that comes with hope. Love, the way I have known it—it is also dread. I move slower when I see the house. My happiest moments are before. When I first married Bong Bong, I felt afraid he would die. Then, after my children, I worried they would die. I still had long hair, like my daughters now. And every night, Bong Bong worked on my neck. “Time to work on your neck,” he said. He made it a project, not a favor from him to me. He likes to turn his gifts invisible. Credit, the way children want, it would embarrass him. I lay down on the hard bed. He held my head on his knees. All those years, he never missed one night. He would start by extracting the sticks that kept up my hair. I felt the tug and loosening.

  What my weekend employers want that they do not have is me. I try to keep this light in the air. When I sit on the floor playing with Bing, Helen brings me a pale green mug, steaming, the taste of something sweet and burnt.

  “Drink it now, Lola. Tonight, when Jeff gets home, we’re taking you out.”

  The doorbell rings. Estelle, the mother of Helen, arrives to babysit. Why?

  “But I am the babysitter,” I say. “I will be the one to stay home.”

  “We want to take you.”

  “Three is a crowd,” I say.

  Helen tries to push me into the front, but I climb next to the car seat.

  The restaurant it is all couples. Small candles on the tables and no children; I am not comfortable wearing my secondhand T-shirt that says HARD ROCK CAFE. Here,
I never attend restaurants in the night. It is all going very slow.

  I am looking around that no one will see us.

  “Her sea bass is very good,” Helen says. “And people say she does a great steak.”

  Employers and employees do not sit together at restaurants. I never once took my helper out to eat. She would have been embarrassed in a Manila restaurant. With the other babysitters I am the one to talk. But here, it moves too slow.

  “How are your children?” Helen asks, while Jeff finally orders his food.

  I say all I want is soup. I am sounding like Vicky, but he tells me he is going to order me a steak, because I never get meat at their house.

  “Fine,” I say. “My kids they are good.”

  They tell me stories about Vicky. It is true, Vicky is not a good babysitter. I would never hire her for my kids. Maybe at this one thing, I am best.

  “She still doesn’t talk to us,” Helen says. “I don’t think she ever really liked us.”

  “At the playclub Vicky is dal-dal.” Actually, she is tomboy, what here they call lesbian. She likes the mother of Bing. It is the dad she complains. “No, Vicky likes you,” I say.

  At last, our food arrives and I keep my hands on my lap. The steak it is many pounds. Enough for the whole family of Lola.

  Then we eat, quiet. The guy, he is serious, deboning his fish. He finally puts down his knife. “Lola,” he says. “We’re going to fire Vicky.”

  This is so fast, skidding, too soon something will be over. “But-ah, Vicky is nice” is all I can think to say. I have heard about proposals like this: professional parents go to the park to find a nanny and offer her double her salary. Maybe it is true for love also, what you see in the movies. I never believed those things before because they did not happen to me. My grandmother once saw the Virgin. The Virgin sat down, moving her robe to smooth it out, when my grandmother took her lunch at the school. The robe was blue cotton, not velvet, a brighter blue than she had always pictured it, my grandmother said.