My Hollywood

by Mona Simpson

  “Want coffee?” From her throney chair, Helen gestured to a pot on a table with Styrofoam cups and an open milk carton, next to a bowl of powdery Goldfish. That was the refreshment. No wonder she looked relaxed. A banner of wind riled the room, making everyone sink farther back in their chairs. “Mine taught Bing Rolls-Royce,” Helen said. “How do you explain not to do that? You can’t. So we’re letting her go.”

  “Esperanza put nail polish on Brookie and Kate,” said the mother who’d been impressed with Will reciting. “Bright red. And she’s got a boyfriend. With a messy divorce.”

  Melissa had a reassuring voice. She wasn’t as pretty as some of the moms, but she wore beautiful, tailored clothes. Melissa was the one I’d want to be if I’d had a more normal family, which is like saying if I’d had a totally different life. My mother used to say if she’d raised me married, I would have ended up a doctor. Melissa had been an ophthalmologist before she had the kids. Two years ago, she’d fought breast cancer. Her hair had grown back a darker color.

  She toyed with this new-grown hair as she spoke. “I like Lettie, but Lettie’s depressed. She told Simon he was sad because American parents aren’t with their kids enough.”

  Helen laughed. “Bing came home and said Vicky’d taken him to see cheeses. I said, Did you buy any? And he said, Chesus. You know, Chesus.” She put her arms out and dropped her head. “I had to sit her down and say, Vicky, please, I’m Jewish.”

  A tall Indian woman sat with her back extremely straight. “They need to be instructed, where to go and where not to go.”

  Outside, a tire swing hung from a fort. Will stood at the top, shouting, in with the rest. An accomplishment for us. While I watched, the conversation turned from nannies to Costco. How was I going to ask about the school?

  “Shrimp for five ninety-nine a pound, but you have to get the jumbo.”

  “To buy food for kids’ parties anywhere else is madness,” Sue said.

  These women owned houses. They drove dentless cars and wore diamonds. I had an old Jeep, but I didn’t drive it to Costco. I’m not made for this, I thought.

  “I swear, Pilates changed my body,” Beth said.

  My body could have used some change. “Weak cervix,” Sue was saying, as I got up to find a bathroom. Paul was right. I didn’t have to be here. They weren’t talking about the kids anyway. Going through the bedroom, I noticed something I’d never seen outside a movie: a vanity. Kidney shaped, gray-blue with a transparent chair, it supported a three-sided mirror and an open laptop.

  From: hbgrant@earthlink.net

  To: jgrant@ix.netcom.com

  Subject: fat

  Is it pathetic or ridiculous to be thirty-two years old

  and still hate your ankles?

  From: jgrant@ix.netcom.com

  To: hbgrant@earthlink.net

  Subject: ankles

  I adore your ankles.

  I felt socked. Whatever Paul and I had—and we had a lot! we had Will!—it wasn’t this. It was never this. Could Paul have found it with someone else? From the shower curtain rod hung five panties, like different-colored strings. Had Lola neatly spaced them?

  I really had to go.

  I began to say my goodbyes. The women looked at me with faint and justified suspicion, as if I wanted something from them. I did: I wanted the secret of their ease, the way their houses felt. But I couldn’t bear the life they had, to pay for it. In back, Willie hung upside down from monkey bars.

  “Maybe I’ll slip out the front,” I said.

  “Always say goodbye,” the Indian mother ordered, as if I looked sneaky.

  “No, Mommy, stay, Mommy, please, Mommy, stay!”

  I couldn’t. I didn’t want to. Story of my life. Helen stepped out to see what was going on. Lola tried to help.

  “Williamo. Come to Lola.”

  I pried him off me from the outside in, the way you’d lift a sticking crust from a board. “We’ll have fun tonight. We’ll do the glow-in-the-dark thing.” I was always promising more later. At bedtime, with a flashlight and our fingers, we made a show on his room wall.

  Helen looked away, cheeks hard, superior. “That parenting class starts right after Christmas. If you want, I’ll try to get you a place.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  I drove home, ran up to my room two steps at a time, unlatched my scuffed case, and the smell of rosin billowed on my face. There it lay, my old instrument. As fancy as the most elaborate dress. I held it with my knees while I rosined the bow. Look, Ma, no hands. I tuned my strings, the old known hope and bellow.

  Did William need new shoes? I jerked back to the familiar room. I couldn’t stay inside the music. I kept bursting up, as if from underwater.

  I adore your ankles.

  I set my cello down and bent over double, imagining Jeff Grant pushing me against a wall. Holding me between his knees. When had this started? I pressed the button that turned on his fan.

  I tried to warm into a melody I’d written, when? Missing only a morning, I had to fight my way back in. Score paper on the desk, I told myself, no more outside things. Only that one workshop at the school for the blind. Composing had to be done alone, but did it have to be this alone?

  My best friend from conservatory had come over every morning, even in rain or snow, because I fed him. He’d sit at the piano and work out a line while I heated muffins and made coffee. Harv was obsessed with Beethoven; he’d read every biography. He thought he was going deaf and heard humming and buzzing the way Beethoven did when he was finally rich and famous.

  “’Cept I’m not rich or famous,” Harv said.

  In Beethoven’s time in Vienna, he told me, the king was an amateur cellist.

  “Yeah, and musicians doubled as servants.”

  When he came to Vienna Beethoven tried horseback riding and took dancing lessons, but he never learned to dance in time to music. He quit performing, because of deafness, by the time he was forty.

  After we ate, we took turns at the piano, trying out sequences. Sometimes, walking on the street with Harv, I’d whistle a phrase. I wondered if I could call him now, but it would be near dinnertime in the East, so I just used Finale to try flutes. Then I switched to oboe.

  You should just quit. You’d love it, Sue had said, that mother of China, with the muscular legs. But what had she quit? I think she’d once been a tennis player. They owned sporting-goods stores.

  My work was not exactly work. It formed something I’d had since I was a girl, a banister I touched to be calm.

  The phone rang. Lola. “We are going to the pier. It is only five dollars, five-fifty. It is okay?”

  “Sure.” Five dollars was a cheap price for fun.

  Lola had five children, and in her country she’d been Helen. A leader. Joker. Head mom. Once president of the Parents Association in Tagaytay, she now called herself the CEO of Filipinas in Santa Monica. I felt glad to give William what I couldn’t be. I sharpened a pencil and set back to work. Tired. But from what?

  Lola

  THE BOOK OF RUTH

  I will pick for my weekend employers their new Mary Poppins. They pay me to travel to our Mecca, in Eagle Rock. On the Westside of Los Angeles, where all the employers live, a good babysitter is hard to find, as hard even as a good husband. “I worry about Lola’s birthday more than Paul’s,” I heard Claire say. But at the place of Ruth, in Eagle Rock, many Filipinas live and decent jobs seem scarce. Ruth knows a priest in Altadena who finds placements, but those are not high paying.

  I take three buses and still, it is a walk. All for Williamo.

  The building stands across from a water-bottling plant with big lights that stay on all night. Ruth bought this place twenty years ago and it has been her luck.

  Once, Ruth was a wet nurse. They were both doctors, modern people, Hong Kong Chinese, but they believed human milk had power. And the mother she had no milk. They made me promise to keep secret. Then, when that boy turned seven, the mother felt he was too dependent on R
uth. Too attach. They gave her forty thousand to go away. Ruth bought this place with that money and now it is worth half a million. They save me, she says, of that first family. They found her, with her kids, at a YW shelter. Ruth is large and strong, but she was once like a slave in the house of her husband.

  Inside the place of Ruth, it is a teeming pool. Like the string in chemistry, I will dip in to come out carrying the crystal. I think I will take the younger from Iloilo.

  My first good bed in America was a low bunk in one of these rooms. A person needs a bed that is hers, even one night a week. Most here work live-in, so they use the beds in shifts. But Ruth gives each girl her own sheets and a dresser, hand-me-downs from an employer.

  Ruth was my teacher of here. Before, I had never been the favorite of any teacher; I used to be the favorite of the class. I was the one who made the face that started laughter. But Ruth believed I had a talent for babysitting because of the schools my children attend. Even here, Filipinas know UP and UST. I was the only one Ruth ever asked her employer to find a job. “The others, they are not Beverly Hills,” she said, quiet, because that is her way. Dr. Saperstein found for me the lady with the house three layers.

  I dive in.

  The tatay sits near a television, fiddling the remote.

  Through the doorway of a far bedroom, I see a brown arm dangling from a top bunk.

  Ruth stands, a dress bunched around her neck. “Lola, my success story!” she calls. “Her employer every night cooks for her!”

  “Two hours a month free phone to the Philippines,” I boast, for the newer ones. Faces poke out. “Remember, Ruth, I am still your valedictorian.” I whisper into the confusion of lace. “I need one for to be my pupil.”

  “First, help get me out of this.”

  “Do you need a gown? For city hall?” Ruth will marry her roommate Danny, a gay. This fabric is tight, and I do not want to tear it, the tags still on. Maybe in her size they do not make wedding dresses. In our dialect we have a word that means bride-thin. Ruth is a person you do not think about her looks. I have seen nuns who have this quality. The teeth they are false, but she has a smile that means.

  “Have to have a dress,” Ruth says. “Have to have a cake. The INS, they ask to see the album. But Lola, I cannot shop.” She usually wears shorts and a T-shirt. Every few months, one of the girls brings her a blouse or a pants, for thank-you.

  Finally I get the zipper to move. On the skin, it made a dotted red line. She pulls on a big T-shirt and looks around. In the kitchen three with bowl-cut hair stand mincing vegetables. “They work already,” she says. In the bedrooms: “Lettie lost her job—they told her she is depress and Melissa gave her three hundred to go for Prozac. But Lettie wants to put it toward her ticket home.” Ruth shakes her head. “Cheska has interview there. At the place of Simon. I have Lucy again. We had for her a good job, a two-year-old in San Marino, but since she broke her ankle with the tennis she is just part-time. The babysitters babysitter.”

  The babysitters babysitter is a job for someone with no English or who limps. They only pay her a couple dollars. Ruth bends up an old blind. Outside now, the tatay holds a hose. He grows tomatoes, long beans, and squash on a patch of dirt. Talking, Lucy jumps up and down in flip-flops. She is clean. No makeup. I am already saving my employers the agency fee. “Maybe she can get good money.” I feel bothered again, to have given away one hundred ten a day.

  “You take her,” Ruth says.

  The tatay holds his T-shirt like a bowl, full of long beans. Lucy jumps to get the door. “Cheska will add to our dinner.”

  He sits with us for the meal. Ruth invites him every night, but most he likes to eat alone in his room. The ones cooking have made pancit, long transparent noodles, with flecks of meat, small squares of carrot, and shining dark eggplant. There is also a steamed fish with ginger and scallions. Rice. Chicken adobo.

  The babysitters ask Ruth questions about the wedding. Natalie, the daughter I call Her American Trouble, talks about stores. The long noodles taste delicious but Ruth cannot enjoy while they are discussing the problem of her dress.

  “At the park yesterday,” Shirley says, in Tagalog, “I met a woman who is here a slave. Working Saudis.”

  “Filipina?” I ask, switching to English because two here know only Visayan.

  “She is from Thailand, I think.”

  There are always some living TNT. We call that tagong-tago, always hiding. Employers hold their visas and dock their wages.

  “More than a year they have not paid. She is still working off her plane ticket.”

  I look over at the child of Natalie. She should not hear this. But Aileen sits quiet, watching. Ruth must be glad we are talking about someone else. People who are heavy, they do not like to be seen eating. “I am from Asia,” she says in English, because her daughter cannot understand Tagalog. “But I’ll say it, rich Asians are the worst employers. Saudis also. Americans are much better, Jewish especially.”

  “Seven days! Cleaning the house and four kids,” Shirley says. “The mommy when she changes the diaper just leaves the dirty on the floor.”

  “But we are full already,” Ruth mumbles.

  “Every afternoon, she has to rub the lady’s feet. The lady says she has pains.”

  “Gross,” Natalie says.

  “Massage is also your profession.” Ruth paid for Natalie to attend college, but she dropped out before the degree. Now she makes big money massaging.

  “I’m a chiropractor, Mom. I treat people suffering from chronic pain.” So the masseuse does not want to be masseuse. Nobody wants to be what she is to other people.

  “Massaging the wife,” I say. “Is that not the job of the husband?”

  The noodles go around again. Ruth still has on her plate but she gets more. She understands living with other people: if you want something you take when the bowl comes around. It is a good feeling to be in with many when still there is enough.

  “They give her only table scraps,” Shirley says. “What they feed to the dogs.”

  I serve myself more pancit too, and pass it. The young babysitters talk, with rescue plans. Ruth and I have been here longer. We can eat. This slave, she is not Filipina.

  “Can you help us, Ate?” Shirley looks up. She is young but she does not look young or old. She has the small always-gnawing face of a squirrel. If she had stayed home, she is a girl who would have entered the convent.

  “What papers does she have?”

  “That lady took her passport. Her bed is in the garage, on the floor. She sleeps with the dogs. One dog, the poodle, they let sleep in the house.”

  “How about getting a lawyer?” Natalie says. “This’s gotta be illegal.”

  “A new passport.” Ruth shakes her head. “Very expensive.”

  Natalie says, “That’s why there’s police.”

  “Does she have kids over there?” I ask.

  “She has one daughter. She will tell you,” Shirley says. “It is a sad story.”

  “But-ah, the world is full of sad stories. They are not all ours.”

  Outside, a truck backs into the water plant. Sapersteins have this water delivered. The city water we get from our faucet has to pass tests to graduate to our pipes, Tom says. My weekend employers buy bottled water too, but I drink just the tap. I do not want to get used to things I cannot myself afford. The refrigerator at the place of Ruth belonged to Sapersteins before. One of her pleasures is clean ice. Before bed, she makes herself a mug of ice water. Out back sits the old refrigerator. Still good.

  I am the one to wash and Lucy dries. This is Filipino privacy: a two-person conversation in a house full of people. “I have for you an offer,” I say. “But there is a catch. When I finish Williamo, I will take that job.”

  “It is okay for me,” Lucy says. “Only one year, two years, like that. We will try to get our medical certifications here.”

  I do not know what to say. She will not go anywhere so fast. Los Angeles looks tropical, b
ut underneath it is a desert. “I will show you everything. You will be my pupil.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. Get ready your things.”

  The evening is done. I have for Bing his Monday-to-Friday. While I wait for my pupil, I open The Book of Ruth. It is like lighting a candle in the church. Some of the older women wrote their advice so long ago, we cannot anymore use. Some did every week manicure and pedicure for their mistress, daily fix-ups with the buffer. My old lady, she wanted me to give her manicure. Because her hands, they had arthritis. I never told anyone, not even my husband. Bong Bong does not want me a servant. The teacher of Ruth once admitted that “Emily”—the lady she worked for—“she has soft cuticles. Nobody but me touches. Because they easily tear.” I once passed a sign in Quiapo that said:

  NOSE TRIM

  TATOO REMOVAL

  VAGINAL REPAIR

  Another woman wrote that when she went home to Argentina, the lady grew a huge clump, matted in the hair. Nobody else knew how to do the curlers and the combing out, not even the owner of the head. I have noticed, the ones from Latin America, they will not say “the mother of” or “my employer.” They all say “my lady.”

  Some of these babysitters wait on their husbands, too, when they go home at night. I am the same with my husband and my employer. Not devoted.

  Except to Williamo.

  The groom arrives from his job parking cars as my pupil returns with an overshoulder. It has started to rain, silver in the big lights of the plant. “Thank you, Ate, I will be back the weekend,” my pupil says, accenting the “end.”

  “How about you, Lola?” Ruth says. “Come to dinner Sunday?”

  “Me? No. I have weekend job. I am only here tonight to get my pupil. In fact, right now I am actually working.”

  “You know,” Ruth says, “not so long ago, our biggest fight was to get the girls weekends. For years, domestic was Thursday off and half day every other Sunday. The people went to church and they came home for their big meal. You served the luncheon and then you cleaned up after. You could leave when you put away the dessert plates. The girl didn’t get out till three or four in the afternoon.