by Mona Simpson
Paul lay on the bed, flipping channels. “Well, he’s more intelligent than Bing, that’s for sure.”
I went to the crib. Our treasure.
Paul pulled down our shade.
“He sure sounded mad about those earrings,” I said.
Paul laughed, opening the bedspread. “He just doesn’t want to pay. And he told me his deal. I always heard TV paid more, but sheesh. He can afford to get her a pair of earrings.” The way Paul started was happening. A hand on my shoulder, he aimed his mouth. It was after midnight. A new year. Tonight I’d touched a chain of stars. Light from a passing car danced over the walls and then was gone. What was good slept in the next room. I waited on my back. It was so hard to find the thread of starting. Paul tensed, alert to my movements.
I felt like an old lady, a triangled scarf tied under her chin. My stomach puffed. Running, I’d had a working body. But now, when I turned on my side it made a noise, like a rag being wrung out. It wasn’t normal not to be able to digest one restaurant meal. “It’s normal for you,” a gastroenterologist had told me.
I felt invaded by his happy movements. I wanted to break in and talk. I was aware of his hand touching where it shouldn’t, my body wrong. We needed a blanket of dark; some spell of enclosure. Our passionate life was not smooth, like what we sometimes watched, with a feeling of awe, at the movies, when people fell onto each other. (I adore your ankles, Jeff had typed, then plinked SEND.) Our physical life was slower, choppy, liable to stall. When it stopped it seemed my fault. His hip bone pressed into me.
“Do you think curtains in the living room?”
He looked at me with fury and turned over, yanking the covers.
It helped that night to think about Jeff in the last swoop before sleep.
But I woke to peace, the sound of Paul’s shower. I loved so many parts of our days. “I really may not be able to do this anymore.”
“Shush,” he said, a towel wrapped around his waist. “We shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. We’re still standing. We have a son.” He opened drawers, happy, getting ready to leave.
“Where’re you going?” I said. “It’s New Year’s Day.”
“The rewrite’s due end of the week. I thought I’d better work a few hours. Hey, you wouldn’t want that kind of diamond studs, would you?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“Oh. I’m surprised.”
“Should I have an affair?” I asked Lil, an hour later.
“I will if you will,” she’d once said, in that let’s go mood, the ring on her finger, a dry pink champagne already selected. “No,” she said now. “That would tear the masks off these marriages.”
“You really think they’re masks?”
She paused. “Yes,” she said, and we both laughed with mirth and rue.
Paul called; two guys from the show had wandered in and offered to break his story. “They’re doing me a favor, they don’t get paid for this, so I’ve got to stay as long as they do.” I had the phone cupped between my shoulder and chin like a viol; Will stood on the chair; we were whipping eggs, my hands over his on the electric beater.
“But you’ll be home tonight?” We planned to put a bean in the yellow cake and fold a foil crown for whoever found it.
“That’s the thing, I don’t know.”
“Paul, it’s New Year’s Day.”
Don’t all men work too much? Lil had asked that morning. All the ones I see do.
“I’d rather be there,” he said. “Why don’t you call Lola?”
“She charges double for holidays.”
“Just get her,” he said. “Because it could be late.” Paul’s nanny had lived with them, in a little room off his bedroom. I’d understood when I married Paul what we had. Enough, I’d thought. I’d chosen a family man. Paul was that, except he worked all the time. Maybe that was what family men did now.
My hands over Willie’s small ones vibrated with the machine. Start of the year, before three o’clock, a fresh still day. We were baking a cake. Lola was on her way.
Later, I thought, I’d climb the steps to my office.
Willie pushed the beater to WHIP. Comets of batter flew into our hair. He took one dab in his mouth and grinned. The first day of a new year.
In the tiny upstairs room that was my work, I was composing an elegy.
But I had a comedy life.
Lola
A LITTLE BIT HERE
I am the first one up. Lola starts her day washing plates frosted with food. Low slurps and a sing of water in pipes; that is how Williamo will recall his thousand wakings, twenty years from now. I open blinds. At the end, I will be the one to close the lights.
But I am becoming old. I count white hairs in the mirror.
My pupil arrives with Bing. I look at her and think: You are lucky.
“Lola, I just want to ask you. He will not sleep! I am too tired!”
Sleep never was my problem. One night, they let Williamo cry. It was an accident. Claire was out running and he cried. I was on my way to the crib to pick him and the phone rang. Paul, the guy. Williamo is crying, I said, and he said, Just let me give you a list for tomorrow, and while I am writing the things down, dental floss, Tums, his shirts he needs from the place they iron, I listen. I noticed the cry went up and down. Then, the guy called back. He said, Maybe let him cry. When Claire came home, I told her, Get in the shower, so she will not hear. She washed the hair, she came out in the bathrobe, then she went in again. I was the one to sit with Claire through the shrieking hours, our backs stiff in chairs like pilgrims praying hard sad prayers. But it was only one night and then done. I did not like it either. Now, though, you cannot tell, I say to my pupil. “Children are like that. When they cry, you think they are breaking, but later on they are the same—no cracks.”
“Inside, maybe.”
“Cracks inside? Only God knows. Anyway, if your employers were the ones getting up, they would change their thinking. Maybe at night water down the milk.”
• • •
On the weekend, Helen says, “With you, Lola, we knew right away.”
“She’s very bubbly,” the guy says, knee bent, foot on the ref. “A giggler.”
“Oh, that is my fault. I am the one telling her to smile.”
On Monday at the P.A.R.K. Park I ask my pupil: “What else do you know how?”
“Tatay and the old guy he met,” she says. “They are teaching me plants.”
“Good. Do not forget, you are my insurance policy.”
“Lola! The old guy he is telling me not to wear long pants. He says, ‘You are not yet married. Your legs, they must stay fresh!’”
My pupil, she is giggling about her legs while the employers have doubt of her.
Bing runs over from the swings, his hair dark from sweat.
“You want a water?”
He lets Lucy hold the bottle while he sucks. Under his ribs, I feel the heart. A boy sandwich. Lucy squats in front, dabs sunblock on the nose.
“See, now with Bing. He listens you.”
“Lola, I told him, ‘Before, in our place I had a sweetheart, he was merchant sailor, with tattoos all over. He looked like, what you say? A pirate.’ He says to me, ‘But what about your boyfriend Tony?’”
“Tony? Who is Tony? Why are you telling your two-year-old employer before the teacher?” I have to instruct Lucy to keep her private life private. “Filipino?”
“Yes, Lola. But he is U.S. citizen. His mom was a nanny in Bel Air.”
“Oh, Bel Air nanny.” I pick up sand and let it run through my fingers. My weekend employer told me when they developed the beaches at Waikiki, they imported sand from our Santa Monica shore. But sand in sandboxes never feels as clean as sand on the beach. And our sand, it is much cleaner than here. “Where you meet?”
“The old guy, he said, ‘I have someone for to partner you.’”
“What is the profession of Tony?”
“He is in the navy. He wants that he will become me
dical technician.”
“Doctor and med tech. That is a marriage across classes.”
“My up,” China yells. Across the park, Mai-ling scuttles along the concrete wall, where China walks on top. Mai-ling reaches for the ankle.
“He did not finish his college?”
“Lola, he told me, he said, ‘Mine is a very sad story. I did not live like you.’ His mother was here while he grew up with yayas outside Maynila City.”
“Sounds like the mother had a hard life. Not him.”
“Lola, look at me,” Williamo calls from the top of the slide, arms spread.
I cover my eyes, then open. Babysitters, we are used to conversation in pieces.
Lucy takes out an envelope from a small case, where she keeps her father’s VA registration and her novenas. She unfolds a letter, postmarked Municipality of Roxas, Zambo, Del Norte, Philippines. “He gave to me.”
Dear Ate Nellie,
We are hard here. It is so poor. We need everything. Please help our mother. She will try to be any you want. We saw the picture of you in the restaurant wearing a flower necklace. They say you are very successful in Glendale.
Please help us from there in the Rich Country.
Respectfully yours,
Your nephew,
Tony (first boy of Lita)
First boy of Lita. The bad son! I have heard about him. Gambling. Cockfights.
This kind of feeling I really do not understand; most of us just watch it at the movies. I would not have thought this one. “You are a good date.” I give her back the brittle paper. “Less expensive than candy and flowers.” That she does not like to hear. “Did you make their bed tight?” I am the one to worry her job while she is thinking of Popeye the Sailor Man.
“Yes, Lola. I wash the sheets. Tuesday and again Friday. Lola, I just want to ask, that first night I overhear, he is thinking of other women, like that?”
“Married couples, like children, you worry only when they are too quiet.” I look across the field to the wall, where China is stamping down on the hand of Mai-ling. “The marriage really stopped, it is the employers of Mai-ling. The mother wants for China to be baptized. But the father, he is a Jewish. The parents of Bing, they are just young.”
I see China, then, dangling on the monkey bars. She moves one arm, then the other, the whole body wriggling to balance. It is beautiful, this muscular will, her body swaying below the iron bars, white puff clouds above. Six months ago she could not do this. It will not last. But right now she has grace. Mai-ling scuttles below, the monster ready to catch.
Friday night, the time of our relay, Bing twirls on the lawn. Cheska sits on the porch with Lucy. She had her interview today with the parents of Simon, where Lettie Elizande used to live-in. She likes Melissa, she says, but she has never before taken care kids. And Melissa does all the cooking herself. She does so much, Cheska says. And she is still sick! She need to rest. Then Cheska bends over a movie magazine, tallying points with a pencil, for a quiz about the wardrobe of Aleph Sargent.
“Cheska,” Bing shouts, “look at me!” That is the problem with only children.
The son of Aleph Sargent will join our playclub. I met the babysitter in the park.
Aleph Sargent was born on an orange farm. She worked babysitter through high school, then checkout clerk. But she is now forty-three and has the boy on her own.
“Lucy! You are a low score!” Cheska says. “You should spend sixty percent of your budget on the coat. You said false, but it is true. Because you will wear the coat all the time. Oh, yes, Lola, people always see. At the garage sales, we will look for coats.” Weekends, Danny, the future groom, drives the babysitters to find yard sales. Cheska sticks up her leg at me with a thick shoe. “Michael Jordan! It is so cheap, Lola! Only two fifty! Just one size big.”
Helen steps outside barefoot, plucks a pink flower from a bush. “I hate these.”
I start picking off buds because she hates them. Cheska stands to help. My pupil, the one with a job to keep, stays on the porch step, holding her face in her hand. Where did she get this pout? She is from dirt, Panay.
Helen pulls a wad of money from the waist of her leggings to pay her.
“Helen,” Lucy says. “It seems you are losing weights.” She says that to her employer? Weight here is private, like money.
But Helen says, “Six pounds,” and goes back in the house.
“I do not want that you will become serious with that guy!” Cheska says, still picking. “We are here to work.”
“But you are married!”
“And I have kids already, Inday. You, you do not have.”
One portion of the bush is already green. Lucy scratches her ankle while Cheska takes out two pictures from her wallet, with wavy edges. Typical Filipino children. Facing forward with their school uniform collars and clipped hair. Obedient. Sometimes, taking care kids here, I worry for our own.
“With Tony, I just go to Chinatown, like that. So I can relax my mind.”
But that is not what she told me, walking to the post office. My pupil, she every week writes to her mother. She showed me. Ma, do not worry anymore that I am suffering Armando. I met a man, he is in the US Navy and I think he will be the one.
So you are a little more here, I said.
When the car of Danny pulls to a stop at the curb, Lucy springs up with her tennis racket. Where did that jump come from? They ride off while I pick blossoms from a tree-sized bush.
Armando must have been the pirate.
From pirate to sailor. I suppose that is improvement.
• • •
The next time I see my pupil at the playground, I can tell from the face something is wrong.
“I hear the guy saying, Who knows what ‘doctor’ even means in the Philippines? Maybe they think I am lying, to make myself big, like Ruth, telling about her jewelries.”
My pupil believes the life of Tony is hard, but not the life of Ruth. But it is from Ruth she has her job.
“I observe, Helen says a lot of times that Lola is pretty.” She looks at me, strange in the mouth. The young, their standards are too high. Even this young, who is only average. “You are the one they want, Lola.”
I shrug. “But you are the one they have.”
She takes a Kleenex from the waistband of her leggings. “Anyway, it is okay for me. Still dignified work.”
Seventy-five dollars a day. It should be okay.
Bing runs over and smears her front. When Vicky was still babysitter, he ran to me. But I did not take the offer.
“Now what?” Williamo says, tugging.
A young Spanish, college graduate, went to an agency and got six offers. People bid against each other for her. Then, after the flurry she was stuck in a room with a baby that looked like a potato. “It drools,” she said. You can never be too proud this kind of work. There is a rush to get you—but only to do what they would never do themselves.
Just when my pupil began to annoy me, God helped.
It takes a long time for mail to go from Santa Monica to their place. Ten days to fly over the Pacific to Manila Central. Then that folded paper, it will sail on a boat through the South China Sea. The mother of Lucy never received the letter that loosened her gait after she dropped it in the mailbox. Five days after we took it to the Santa Monica post office, my pupil learned her mother died.
All her clothes, they are from Gap, new: black leggings and a black shirt. “I told Cheska, we will just spend for that.” The dad, he is on the plane already. Cheska and Lucy, they have only tourist visas. If they go, they can never return. So she will not say goodbye to her mother. For a Filipina, that is very hard.
“My sisters are there,” she says. “Francesca and Lucila. Nelly.”
“You have Lucy and Lucila? And Francesca. That is almost the same Cheska.”
“Lola, my parents, they are Florencio and Florencia.”
“Loo-see!” Bing got himself hanging upside down, and now he cannot get off.
> “I tell him already,” she says. “He knows.”
“Tony?”
She nods to Bing. “He says to me, ‘Lucy, did you miss her when she die?’”
So she is starting to love Bing. That is natural. Before I ask for our deal, I will have to find for her a grown man.
We are the last in the playground and it is getting dark. We pull our boys, warm from climbing, off the bars, their shirts bright in the fog. She told me once, her mother smelled of sugar. Lola! She is so fat!
Today, my pupil is not asking; still I have advice. “But-ah do not let the parents know. They think Bing is too young for death. Every time the goldfish floats, they flush and purchase a look-alike. He believes it is all the same fish.”
I am thinking, They cannot fire her in black, with a mother dead.
“What is a slave, anyway?” Natalie says, on the May Company escalator. The legs of Natalie stand bare, with a bracelet made of threads. The daughter, Aileen, five years old, she wears a bracelet on the ankle too. But Aileen, she is chubby, a serious girl. She makes an odd fit with the mother.
Ruth turns to me. “See, my own daughter and she does not know.”
I shrug. “She is American.” I brought my pupil, to show her off. My protégée obtained the name of the American medical testing board. The next week, she had already purchased the review book. I felt the way I did when the brilliance of our youngest began to unfurl, big-headed, a coiled fern.
“The slave, there is no off for her,” Ruth says. “No limit.”
“Other people work live-in. Lola, are you really free at six?”
“But she cannot quit,” I say. “They do not pay her.”
“Still, it’s not that different,” Natalie says.
I am shocked. She is talking as if I am a blacked-out box.
“Of course it is,” Ruth says. “Her shame. Her shame and fear.”
“How about your friend Mai-ling? She’s kind of like that.”
“Even late, they pay her,” I mumble, not to Natalie. “She can quit.”
Ruth says, “We have to think, what to do about Mai-ling. They still did not pay.”
Natalie shakes her hair and stamps the brown leg with the bracelet. “You know, there is such a thing as a lawyer.”