My Hollywood

by Mona Simpson

  I’d watched it happen to a hundred girls, thinking, Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  She’d made her whole life out of love, not daily love, but feelings that seemed to me as imaginary as angels.

  Just then, three women tromped down the incline, exhaling like horses, carrying water bottles. There were posses of moms everywhere here. A lizard zigzagged across our path.

  “One night, I was in the office staring at my computer, and a catalog opened on my lap,” Helen said. “I thought, The world rests on the shoulders of a hundred righteous men. My father always said that, quoting someone. He expected me to be one of that hundred. My sister really is. But I wanted a cinnamon-colored mixer.”

  “Is that your zoo sister?”

  “Yeah,” she sighed. “All of a sudden I realized, I want out.” I pictured her staring at that mixer in the catalog, then canting her ankle, thinking, Kitten heels.

  But I wanted to be one of that hundred. A veterinarian at the San Diego Zoo, Helen’s sister led a movement to breed extinct species in captivity and repatriate them. Eighteen bongo antelopes, hunted to extinction in Africa, were bred in San Diego and flown to Mount Kenya. If I’d had a father who expected me to do something, what could I be now? I’d have at least remembered whom he quoted.

  “I wanted out and I got out.” She laughed. “I got way out.”

  I wanted in. I still did. So what was I doing on a dry mountain in the middle of the day?

  “I tried to stop myself from calling him.” The urge to quit and order a cinnamon-colored mixer wouldn’t have been, in the 1990s, a desirable feature. She’d known enough to hide it. Falling in love sounded like something she’d done alone. “You’re not careful like that with Paul,” she said.

  “I guess not.” I wasn’t afraid to call him. That was for sure. He complained. I got to my office and there were nine messages from you. Nine! That’s just too many, Claire!

  “I wanted to marry him,” she said.

  That hit me like a fine arrow. Guilt. My crush dropped, crumpled gold paper, nothing on the ground. Okay. We could be friends, raise our kids together. I would try to be good. “But you’re beautiful,” I said.

  “He was the catch. We both knew that. All of 1990, I waited for a proposal.”

  “I didn’t wait,” I said. “I did it myself.”

  She turned around, gave me high five. “But now that I’m home all day, I think he’s bored with me,” she mentioned, moving again, tall stalks blooming on both sides of us. In the clear air nothing mattered as much.

  Paul watched TV when he came home. “I need to unwind,” he said. “Been with people all day.” He required an hour in the morning, too, with his paper and coffee. Thinking of Paul as someone I could have a crush on was as preposterous a notion as festooning a bear with ruffles. Still, it never occurred to me that I might bore him.

  “Sex is becoming a problem,” she said.

  “Well, married sex isn’t sex. It’s something. But it’s not sex.” I remember sex, Lil had said and laughed. The lack of interest among my friends seemed less a matter of disillusionment with our husbands than with hopes, even knowing better, for married life.

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve experienced climax, but never with him.” She shook her head. “It’s like tennis. I’m better at it when he’s not watching.”

  But that open-mouth laugh! “Have you read that, what’s the name of it? Our Bodies, Ourselves? It was big when I was at college.” My dormitory had been a riot of jokes and devices. I could only assume times had changed in the five years between us, so that Helen had missed this crucial bit of collegial education. “Lil calls it the cliff of dread. The men want to have it. Women don’t.”

  “I want to have it.”

  “I do too. Just not with him.”

  “I want to have it with him.”

  Who wouldn’t want to have it with him? I thought, with a shiver, and I shouldn’t know this. “Nobody’s having great sex with the person they’re married to. I don’t know if we ever really kissed right.”

  “We don’t kiss either.” She looked as if she might cry.

  I’d done something wrong, opening this.

  Paul was Paul. But I didn’t suffer over him, not that way. No more Jeff, I promised silently. From now on I’d be good.

  But she picked up a stick from the ground. “This movie is going to be great, though. Paramount’s giving it the A-list budget.” This is how she rose again. Then she paused. “Do you even think of what Paul does as art?”

  I wanted to hit her. More than anything you do, I thought. Paul was still dear to me. What if she was repeating Jeff’s opinion? We’d been hoping Jeff would direct Paul’s pilot. “Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

  “How did you guys get together?”

  What could I answer? Should I have waited longer? But wouldn’t that have been the foolhardy romanticism of a spinster, like Julie, who’d stubbornly loved a movie star (in her case, a dead gay one) and refused to accept any local man? At the time, the last of my friends were enlisting. Giddiness in the air, the thrill of registering for china, mixed with an intoxicating relief that I wasn’t being left behind after all. Paul and I met at restaurants; we strolled in shops. Wasn’t this what people did?

  The woman falls in love with her children, my landlord said, handing me the rent receipt. But what if I didn’t? Children sniveled. Children dripped. I was thirty-three. There were omens: older women musicians, for whom no one expected that anymore. To me they looked uncannily alert, like owls.

  “How did we get together? Oh, I don’t know. I guess the usual way.”

  She bent over and poured a whole new bottle of water over her head. A rich girl, I thought. Another posse brushed past us, heading up.

  She sighed, staring at one woman’s ankles. “Jeans are going in again,” she said.

  • • •

  When I got home, the house was still, clean vegetables on the cutting board, Willie and Lola out. Four o’clock. I almost started on supper, but instead climbed to my study and began to read my score. I went back fifteen measures, then ten more to get caught in it again. When the sound of their footsteps roused me, I thalomped downstairs and found Will under the table with two Power Rangers and Lola by the sink chopping fennel. Everything touched with light.

  The phone rang: Paul calling to say it was going to be another late one, they were passing out the dinner menus now.

  “Where’re they ordering from?”

  “That Thai place you like.” I didn’t mind. I’d talked enough today. One summer night in my twenties, I’d devoured a peach for supper, standing up, the juice running down my arm. Did dinner still feel like that for him? Tonight I hoped so.

  I called Will outside to help me tie up peas. Nine bean rows will I have there and a hive for the honeybee. We stooped and picked mint for the soup, and I wondered what I’d remember of these years. Will sprawled under the table while I chopped, the scent rising. I hummed “I Fall to Pieces,” “Is That All There Is?” What Paul called my good-to-cry music. We’d devolved to eating the way women eat: either the pasta or the soup. Lola kept a portion for Paul in Tupperware. He ate at midnight and left the container in his den, where she collected it in the morning.

  “I didn’t get married to have dinner every night with my kid and a maid,” I’d railed on the phone yesterday to Lil, to whom the maid part didn’t sound so bad.

  “You leave him,” she pointed out, “you’re still going to be having dinner every night with your kid. And maybe not the maid.”

  Anyway, Lola wasn’t a maid. And she didn’t actually eat with us. She took her walk every night when we sat down. “I will go now,” she said, lifting her soup, covered with a napkin. Tonight, Will and I ate from bowls on our laps in front of the heater grate, next to his LEGOs. A dinnertime house with a child.

  I gave him his bath, warm water on the top of my hand. With the bubbles, we made his hair stand up like Marge Simpson’s. Until shampooing, everything was laughs
, surprising pokes, and gushes. Finger-bees, earbees, but then full-out sobs with the rinse. After the dry-dry, he got four books, then a one-minute, which is what we called the time I lay with him until his breath settled. When I slid out, dishes were put away, the jar of flowers restored to the table. Lola had our tea steeping in the red pot. We sat and talked about Will’s day.

  I made a second pot to take with me to bed with staff paper and a pencil, Little Him asleep, jasmine a warm sweet outside. Was this happiness in marriage? Within it, anyway. In bed, I read what I’d written. All of it so far. But Lola rapped on my door. “Excuse. Lucy is here, okay I make her a coffee?”

  “Sure, of course,” I said. “Lola, offer her some orange cake.”

  “You put one scoop per cup?”

  “Two.” At first I’d barely noticed Lucy. But she arranged branches in vases. I copied her, adding rosemary and Japanese maple to the roses I stuck in the jar.

  I found the two nannies at the table, the cake between them.

  “Thank you for the orange!” Lucy tapped her belly. “I am eating too much!”

  I knew from Helen that Lucy brooded about her bad boyfriend. I asked, “How are things with Tony?”

  “I say to him, Other guys, they want to kiss their girlfriends. Hug, like that.”

  I’d assumed they were sleeping together. Maybe he just didn’t touch her in public. But anonymous corners of life pressed in through the dark windows. Lola was already married; she had her children. I wasn’t keeping her from life.

  “My tummy, Claire, he thinks it is too big!”

  “You are eating so much!” Lola said. “I am telling you. You are big now.”

  The last time we’d gone out with Helen and Jeff, they’d told a story about Tony’s cockfights. Helen saved up scraps from her day to amuse her husband. That one worked; Jeff spluttered, requiring a second napkin. She said Lucy ended her bad reports, But he is trying, Helen. He really want to change.

  “Not the worst thing that Tony’s got his problems,” Jeff had said. “Otherwise, they’d run off to Vegas.”

  I wrapped a square of orange cake in wax paper for Lucy to take home.

  “But she does not need cake,” Lola said.

  For the first time, I thought about Lucy’s life. “Maybe this really won’t work out for her,” I said. “And if it doesn’t, it’s no joke. Thirty-one already when they hired her.” Helen talked about Lucy’s tests, the way stay-at-home mothers imagined their daughters becoming doctors. “She has the doctor stuff,” I said, “but Lucy might not want that enough.”

  “Well, she should want it,” Lola said, putting things away. “Medicine, it is ten years in our country. She has three tests for doctor, two to be nurse.”

  “Maybe Tony seems a better bet than passing.”

  She took the sponge from my hand. “He is not a better bet than anything.”

  For us, sex was a problem too. But Lucy and Tony needed sex. Everything teetered on it. “It’s him, clearly. She’s in love, all right.”

  “The story will not end like the movies she is watching.” Lola bent down with the dustpan.

  Later, underneath Paul, on that rare night, I imagined being Lucy with Tony.

  That was another way, those years, they served us.

  “We should do that more often,” I said to Paul. “I like it, I really do, and I feel good after. It’s just starting that’s hard.”

  January 31, 1994. A day that worked: out for hours, I didn’t feel mad at Paul. We even had sex. But no music.

  “That was the month my mother died,” Lucy said, years later. We’d known that. The night she’d come to my kitchen and eaten orange cake, she’d worn black clothes already gray from so many washings. I’d never put together her quiet and her bereavement. I’d thought that was just her personality.

  Lola

  THE RAISE

  I stand in a corner where once I made the center. Babysitters crowd around my pupil now; all of a sudden she is high status.

  Wednesday starts out dark, with clouds. Under our tree, Mai-ling whispers that my pupil has a raise already. Not even her six-month anniversary. They let her drive their old car home weekends, Mai-ling says. It is almost hers now. My pupil, she did not even tell me.

  So she will earn more than her teacher. I will have to quit that job if they do not give to me the same. All the babysitters know I work in that house first. Sunday, our mutual employer lifted his eyebrows and looked at a vase of flowers. Lucy, Helen mouthed. Maybe that bouquet decided them. Lucy makes the beds, like I told her. She puts on the pillow a waxy orange flower, washed under the tap and dried. That was her own idea. And today I planned to introduce her to Lita, the mother of Tony!

  “My parents, neither had any education, but they wanted their kids to get, like that,” my pupil says. “My oldest sister was supposed to be the doctor.”

  These same babysitters, three months ago, I had to convince, she really is a doctor; I saw the stethoscope. Only the babysitter of Aleph Sargent looks bored. Probably to her, one hundred a day is nothing special.

  I lift foil off dishes; it is my playclub, but I wish it would end. That is the problem with people; it happened to God too: what you create, you cannot anymore stop. I feel like announcing on the toy megaphone, They offered me that job first. But no one remembers the trip you did not take, the life you did not have. In our suburb of Manila, inside houses, our mothers talked about the things they would have done if our fathers had not come along and touched them with feathers, turning them into our mothers instead. According to them, the Philippines would have been chock-full of dancers and singers, glamorous professional women, if our fathers had not cajoled them with their temporary charms. We did not believe them. A cake has only so many ballerinas on the top.

  “Lola, I think they are liking me a little because they raise me now.” My pupil, she does not feel lucky enough. She thinks one hundred dollars a day is what she deserves.

  “Then I will introduce the two one-hundred-dollar-a-day nannies,” I say to my pupil and Lita.

  They shake the hand of the other, polite and shy.

  “Alice had me wrapping presents for Secretary Appreciation Day,” Lita tells the babysitters. “Lola, you ask your husband to make a day for us. Her husband works high up in Hallmark. Manila branch. Nanny Day. For caregivers.” Just for playclub, Lita is wearing a belted dress and leather flats. The rest of us all have on rubber shoes. She helps me carry foods, whispering, “If I can only get him to propose her.” Then she looks up through the branches of our tree. “You know, it could rain today.”

  “Rain would not be the worst thing.” Sometimes I am not in the mood to play. But the club, it is at our house.

  “Because I am last,” Lucy says, “my parents, they always expect me to be something big.”

  No one expected me to be anything big. And I am not. The parents here in the U.S., they are all expecting big.

  The babysitter of Aleph Sargent takes a plate. Clarisse appreciates food. She is like the trunk of a tree. She grabs the arm of Brando and whispers hard. Brando is what, in the Philippines, we would call salbahe. But the small boys, they follow him.

  “I never wanted to be doctor,” Lucy says. “I like something with art, decorations, like that. But I am the last so I study and study, all the time I study.”

  If she did not want, then why use the spot? One of the high days of my life was when Issa received her letter of acceptance from Far Eastern. “So why you come here?” I say. “Doctors, they can find work in the Philippines.”

  “There is no money in the provinces, Lola, since Marcos already. If you are rich, sure, you come to America, and even if you are only attending seminars, when you return you get a good position. The only job I could get was in the army. I was given my ranking already. If you are a doctor, you become colonel. But then my father brought us here,” she says, quiet, to me only. “So I could forget that guy.”

  The pirate. Anyway, she attended school in the provinces.
Not FEU. Issa will find work. That is enough for me. Maybe Issa can come here to attend seminars. Later on, I will ask Alice, the employer of Lita, to help.

  While the boys run in the driveway, the sky cracks. Los Angeles, it is not built for rain. The palms shake; the road turns black. Whole rooms of water tip over.

  The rain has saved us from the life story of Lucy, unabridged. Kids crawl the walls in the room of Williamo; babysitters unclip fists from shelves. But Brando refuses to return to Will his Batmobile. The mouth is a slanted gash. Next will come fighting. It is not easy to share. That is the refrain of Claire. What if our friends came over, put on jewelry, tried on our clothes, and wouldn’t give them back?

  Good you do not have daughters, I say to her.

  I clap. “Movie time!” The VCR sits on the dresser in the room of my employers. I whisk off the bedcover.

  Brando still has the Batmobile, so I let Will pick the movie. He wants the video the plumber took inside our sewer. I say, Not while we are eating. Then he selects one that is gears, big machines moving slowly. Jeff made this at the site that will be the Getty Museum. But the girls fidget. I eject and slide in Mary Poppins.

  The babysitters serve themselves. Our kids, they are small small; we still feed them from our plates. The telephone rings and it is Claire, at Colburn. “Power still on?”

  I drag the cord so I can see Mary Poppins land. “Your bedroom it is a movie theater. But I took away the cover.”

  Babysitters sit on the floor, eating foods. Like the mothers we know, Mrs. Banks wears expensive clothes. But she does not look as much as her helper. My employer asks if it is okay she is late, and I say, Do not worry. In the Philippines, growing up, we wore dresses and gloves to the cinema, sat on plush seats, and entered a better world. The American streets looked pink, the lawns blue, and all the people’s problems, they were about love. Husbands and wives threw pillows at each other; feathers filled the screens. And it is really true here; rarely is the trouble money.