by Mona Simpson
The reigning comedy wife, Katie Jacobs, whose husband, Jack, created Danny ten years ago, listened with her head cocked in a way that meant We’d contribute. Katie pointed her fork at Jeff. “Your movie’s about Africa too, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s kind of a personal story. About sex, mostly.” He shrugged, shooting a nervous glance at the documentarian, who was talking about clitorectomies. “About a woman learning how to have sex without props.”
“Learning how to love,” Helen corrected.
College kids set down platters of salmon, tureens of mashed yams, and bowls of the greens we’d watched wither. The documentarian was going on about a slave encampment. Annoyance showed around Katie’s mouth; I hoped he’d stop, for the sake of his budget. Two women to my left talked about getting their nannies to do more. Helen glanced over to Jeff as he leaned in to hear the freckled doctor. “When the women had kids, they quit.” But Helen didn’t seem to mind. Maybe she knew he wouldn’t fall for a black woman. Or a doctor.
“I never put in gas anymore. I tell her, Check it every night and take Brookie and Kate to the car wash.”
“How many times a week does she change the sheets?”
Since Will started school, Lola had begun to watch As the World Turns, the whine filtering up through the pipes. Should I be getting her to do more? I felt sorry for the nannies showing up to work tomorrow, or waking up at work, more likely.
The documentarian was still describing his slaves. But by now everyone had had enough of Africa.
“You can’t imagine how many manuscripts I get from the wives,” the agent said to the studio guy.
Jeff’s hands steepled. “How many babies you think you’ve delivered?”
“These yams are no fat,” the hostess called out. “No butter.”
Men on both sides of me marveled, forking the potatoes. Jeff took seconds.
“I wish I’d paid more attention in the kitchen,” I said to Helen.
Then the hostess, beseeched by the persistent, thin agent, listed ingredients: “Thyme, garlic, salt, olive oil.”
“Darling. Oil is not nonfat.” His fork, bearing a lump, returned to the plate.
“I told my nine-year-old if he didn’t make his bed, I’d dock his allowance,” said the woman with the fringed pants. “So now I’m making beds for a nickel a day.”
“I don’t know when I stopped remembering their names,” the doctor said.
Two men joined the conversation about housekeepers. They sounded satisfied, reporting audacities.
“And then she …”
“Well, ours …”
A thousand-dollar dress had been tossed in the dryer. “Brookie’s American Girl doll’s wearing it now.” An Ansel Adams mural was Windexed.
“Oh, we get a detective,” a bearded screenwriter said. “Have him tail her.”
Lights went off and the hostess floated through the dark carrying a flaming baked Alaska. “Homemade ice cream,” she called. “Pumpkin from a real pumpkin.” She raised a champagne flute. “I want to thank Roger, who allows me to do all this.”
Years after that night, Paul would mimic her, arms spread. “All this.”
“None of them were lactating at their eight-week checkup. These women are garment workers; they can’t afford formula. So I found out. They pay brokers to take their babies back to China. One asked me to make a scar on her preemie’s foot so her mother in Xian could recognize him.”
Helen listened to the woman with fringe talk about managing children with no help. I listened too, though I had only one child, a nanny, and not infrequently I cried in my closet.
“If you count the baby nurse,” Katie said, from the other side of the table, “I have more nannies than I do kids, and I still can’t get anything done.” She spoke with the unapologetic air that came with money.
“How do you manage with Jack working so much?” I asked.
The thin agent had his hands on Paul’s shoulders, saying, “Your mediocre rise.”
Paul looked up. “I do hope you mean meteoric.”
• • •
I went over to the table where Esmeralda was setting up a coffee urn.
Andy North asked me how work was going.
I was probably a curiosity to these guys.
I began to blunder. He and Buck listened solemnly, with no twinkle of play. Then Helen walked up, touching Buck’s elbow, and their faces opened.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said to me. Jeff and the freckled doctor were the only ones left at the table. A small black-and-white picture rested on the cloth in front of them. Jeff noticed us coming. The doctor stood, saying, “Congratulations.”
“Congratulations for what?” I asked, bright with the premonition of pain.
“We’d be greatly honored if you’d deliver us,” Jeff said.
I stood numb. Helen looked annoyed. She hadn’t even told us yet. And her husband was offering her womb to a stranger. I watched her privately rearrange. She could count on his forgetting. Doctors’ appointments fell far beneath his radar.
Helen needed more children, I told myself, the way I needed work. I made myself move.
At last we stood in the drafty entrance hall, waiting to say goodnight. Husbands shouldered on wives’ coats. The hostess stood by the open door, barefoot, chatting here and there, as if tasting her guests. “Happy house hunting!” she called to someone on the lawn. “We’re house hunting too.”
Alison North gasped. “But this house is so great!”
“I deserve a bigger kitchen,” she said. “I read the multiple-listings book before bed. Better than any novel!”
“We’re off to Hawaii!” someone called from the curb.
I fell into a late conversation with the redhead, who was telling me that Will tripping and scraping himself and not crying but just getting up and running was typical of autism. The way he spun the wheels of toy cars was another sign. “Sounds like he’s somewhere on the spectrum,” she said.
And I’d been thinking about Jeff Grant! She hadn’t asked about the place on Latimer to humiliate me. She’d been looking for a way to bring up their new house, which she’d selected because she’d decided Canyon Elementary was the best school for their daughter. Most of her life was spent attending conferences, trying to understand Elissa’s disease. She hoped to get Elissa into a school where next year, for first grade, she wouldn’t need a shadow. They hoped Elissa could be main-streamed by second or third grade. Later, they would hope that for middle school.
“I have to get your doctor’s number,” I said.
“Talked to Shields,” Jeff told Helen as we walked outside. “So this weekend, we’ll do more looking. We’ll just up the price to what it takes.” I happened to see the skid of victory, unmanaged on her face. Maybe there was an essential agreement at the bottom of every marriage. I supposed it was time I read the fine print of my own.
In the car, Helen said, “I’m going to get Lucy to do more.”
“Wonder what they’d make of Lole,” Paul said. “She’s not a trophy nanny. But she loves them.”
“I feel like rich people have a whole ’nother kind of nanny,” Jeff said. “Hey, I’m hungry again. Want to go someplace?”
It was cold in the convertible, the stars sharp.
“Pasadena,” I said, the way I’d said Antelope Valley earlier.
“That doctor I was talking to?” Jeff said. “She had her own kid who died the day he was born.”
Wind touched my head in patches; I began to tell Paul.
“He’s not on any spectrum. Too smart for his own good, that’s all.”
Helen turned around to tell us that three couples they knew had had their kids tested after the redhead thought they were autistic.
“Guess autism is just kind of like kids in general,” Jeff said.
“This woman asked, ‘What do you do?’ I hadn’t heard that for a few decades,” Helen said. “I said I’m home with my son. I’m fortunate I don’t have to work.”
“Hardest job I ever had,” Helen said.
• • •
“Let’s go to our place,” Paul said. “So Lole can go to bed.” Lucy had a room in their house; she was probably sleeping already.
“Can we just stop home a minute?” Helen said. “I’ve got to get out of these shoes.”
We shuffled in, a party of revelers, and Lucy appeared at the top of the stairs in a high-necked nightgown, robe, and slippers.
“He asleep?” Helen whispered, taking off her shiny paper hat.
On their dining room table stood a severe rectangular structure that resembled a Quaker church. Helen had gone to a two-day gingerbread workshop. Her house alluded to children, but if a real child had worked on it, it couldn’t have looked like this. It would have been smeared with frosting, lopsided, the roof laden with candy. No, this wasn’t authentic or even useful. Only beautiful. What her life now allowed her to make.
“Bing keeps asking when we’re going to eat it,” she said.
“Helen, I told you I want to put it in the movie.”
“Speaking of eating,” Paul said.
“Promise me you’ll put it away? I don’t want to have to worry about it.” Satisfied, Jeff opened the front door, offering us the night, an inverted bowl of stars. We walked.
At our house, Lola, who’d been on the couch, sprang up like a cat and collected the things around her (keys, her magazine) to carry back to her place.
“Pay you tomorrow,” I called out after her.
I sent Paul to the garage for firewood, handed Helen a corkscrew and a bottle of wine, set water to boil, dressed arugula, and took eggs out of the refrigerator. In a few minutes, I carried nuts warmed with rosemary to where Paul knelt, trying to blow up a fire. “Want help?”
Jeff, as always, handed me a wineglass.
“I think the wood’s wet. Decoupage,” Paul said, standing, abandoning the logs. “I do decoupage.” Paul’s pronunciation made Jeff hoot and slap the front of his jeans, a fire growing behind him at the end of my hands. “Assemblage!” Paul said. “I require a studio to assemble my assemblage! He allows me to do”—he spread his arms, the fire caught and noisy—“all this. All what?”
UCLA kids and a dark-skinned woman had served and cleaned the kitchen. Still, even with help, I didn’t think I could cook for that many people.
Hardest job I ever had, Helen had said, about being a mom.
Paul didn’t think it was a job; he didn’t think it was hard. Paul considered music on an altogether different plane than decoupage, assemblage, raising children, and all this.
I wasn’t so sure.
“Guess the wood dried,” Jeff said, elbowing Paul as flames popped and sassed.
“As I said this morning, when Lola was holding the ladder and Claire put the star on top, Jews don’t fix.”
“Speaking of Lola, what are you doing, a bonus and a present?” Helen asked.
“Definitely a present,” I said. “Lola’s family.”
“Homemade, you think?”
“Maybe.” I hadn’t told anyone about Lola’s earrings yet. Not even Paul.
A few minutes later I served the wet pasta, the arugula just wilting, an egg on top, with tin tongs. I sent Paul in with the plates, his sweatshirt falling over his wrist. In profile, he was so handsome. I’d once rubbed my hands together, relishing. That made me feel wistful, as if something irrecoverable had been lost.
“So two, huh?” Paul said, when Jeff followed us into the kitchen. “You’ll be in Africa, right, when the kid’s born? She okay with that?”
“Who, Helen? Oh, I think Helen’s having a ball.”
I waited until they left, then lay on my side, and the pain, somehow liquid, flooded in. They were having a baby. He touched that other woman too.
Why had Jeff had to flirt with me? He could have left us, in our modest marriage, alone.
“Ofelia!” Paul fell down onto the bed, arms out to the sides. “Who’s Ofelia?”
“Ofelia is the woman who irons your shirts.”
“I overheard you and Helen talking about bonuses. So, what’re you thinking?” In the minutes we had before sleep, he elected to talk about this. “What are they giving Lola?”
“Three hundred, I think.” Helen had said two fifty.
“So let’s do that.”
“But she works for us five days! Lola’s present should be more than the cost of one dinner out.”
“I just gave her that VCR.” In November, someone had had a VCR delivered to Paul as a thank-you present for punching up a pilot. We didn’t need another, so he loaded it, still new in the box, into the trunk of an old green car. Lola had arranged for a friend named Danny to drive it to Ruth’s place. I’d wanted to set it up in her room here.
“But that’s not a present! She has it already. She thought of it as something you didn’t want. The way we hand down our old clothes.”
“This was a brand-new VCR. Sony!”
In front of our fire, Helen had told me she had a persistent daydream: a shiny package, wrapped in pink, with long white ribbons, and inside a check that would astonish Lucy. She wanted to send Lucy back to school, to give her the calm peace of her own college days, albeit late, in another country, and though, according to Lola, Lucy already completed ten years medicine. Helen liked to picture Lucy walking through a campus, taking tests at long tables, filling in the little ovals, getting them all right. We’ll lose a nanny and gain a pediatrician, I’d heard her say.
Paul shook his head. “Lola’ll send it all home anyway, but do what you want. You’re a forty-year-old woman.”
“We have a lot of money, you know.”
“I know how much money we have. And I also know what our expenses are.”
Our arguments felt futile and engraved. Trembling, I wrote the check for one thousand, balancing the checkbook on my knee in bed. I didn’t tell him about the earrings.
But Paul was right. Our gifts didn’t astonish Lola.
“Claire and Paul, thank you,” she said, the next day, with the same inflection she’d had last year, when it was three hundred. She shambled off, hands in her shorts pockets, and from behind doors, edging out of tree trunks, squatting behind bushes, more people rose, all foreign, looking like Lola but each with one thing wrong: a patch of hair missing, teeth broken, thick legged. Multiplying, they advanced toward us. Aunts, cousins, distant relatives, even dead parents stepped from inside trees and ghosted up with open hands. All the money we had was not enough, all the money we’d ever have.
I’d wanted to save her. But Lola refused to be one person.
Lola
THIS IS WHY MY LIFE
In the kitchen of her employer, Lucy listens to hearts. Babysitters who six months ago doubted her degree unbutton their blouses, all because she is now one hundred a day. She handles her stethoscope like a clarinet. “Very expensive, Lola. More than two thousand pesos.” But I know the price of a stethoscope: we purchased one for Issa long ago.
“Heart murmur,” she tells Mai-ling, “You know you have that? You go where they have EKG. Do you get Kaiser?”
“No. I work seven days.”
The doorbell rings. Tarek, the bottom helper of my weekend employer, carries a pink box tied with string. The birthday cake. “I’ll put it in the fridge.” He is used to this house already. He follows me into a fight of hard whispers.
“Almost thirty-three already,” Ruth says.
“It is Luisita,” Mai-ling tells us. “She will not hear anyone but Tony.”
“There was a dentist, Lola,” Esperanza says. The boyfriend of Esperanza, he is not her boyfriend anymore. The divorce, he said, cost him too much. So he can stay rich, he went back to the ex-wife. “The dentist has condominium in Glendale. And hand-sum.”
“Tony is handsome too,” Lucy says.
Tarek looks to me.
“Yes, but Tony …” I cannot explain Tony to the bottom assistant of our employer. Tony honks his car outside and never comes in.
Ruth looks down. “The dentist, he is the brother of my cousin’s wife.”
“And before he saw Lucy and he likes!” Esperanza says.
“He has savings already.”
“Tony has been here long time.” I would finish And he has nothing if Lita was not here.
“Before he is immature, but the army really change him. Tarek,” Lucy says, “they think because Tony is in the U.S. nine years he should have money. Like that.”
Tarek studies her, up and down, the way a Filipino man would. She is dedicated, honest, brooding. Faithful to her private feeling, watching its value drop. He shakes his head. How much could Tony possibly make at whatever he does? How much do I save?
But Tony could. The U.S. government pays his rent and food. Like me, he works live-in! And I have saved a lot.
Tarek looks uneasy. He is only the bottom assistant, twenty-two years old. “China!” we hear from the living room, then a crash.
Tarek puts a hand on the shoulder of Lucy. “I’ll marry you, Luce.”
“You would marry me!” Her voice, it is often exclamation.
“But you are too young,” I say. “You should not marry for immigration.”
“Danny, he is saying too, ‘After I receive my green card, I can divorce Ruth and marry you.’ But I am waiting for a real, like that.”
“And you’ll get it too,” Tarek says. Relieved, probably.
“We need to find for my pupil a guy in his forties. Thirty-five minimum.”
Lucy taps the arm of Tarek. “You want I take your blood pressure?”
Esperanza and I get out our index cards. She paid for a lawyer and she was on the list to get a green card this year, but now the U.S. government added a test for English. She took that twice and did not pass. So today I brought a dictionary.
Lita says, “Remember my teddy bear?” From her purse, she lifts out a cassette. “I finally have our home movie.”
It is strange to watch. You understand how much professional cameras add. We see people in a kitchen talking, but mixed in equal is the sound of running water. The camera does not follow faces, only torsos move in front of us, random dark fish passing. “Listen to here,” Lita says.