My pupil avoids Natalie. Lucy is either a little afraid or a little bit a snob, I cannot tell which. Even now, the middle of February, she still wears her black. Natalie leads us to the top floor. She once worked Bullocks Wilshire, and so she understands stores. “My mother,” she says to a saleswoman, “for her second marriage.”
I never thought of this as a second marriage. But there will be a cake.
The saleslady returns holding a large cream-colored suit. Ruth slips the jacket on. She looks more herself in this than she does in her own clothes. We stare at the tall, three-sided mirror, where three arms of Ruth pick up three price tags from three sleeves, and then let them all drop. “Too much.”
“Can we put it on hold?” Natalie asks. “See if we can cough up the moolah?”
“Do not say that,” Ruth whispers.
“She understands. They make five twenty-five an hour.” Natalie worked behind a lingerie counter; she punched a time clock too. My pupil chases the boys ahead.
“Are you going to show me your shoes?” Ruth says, on the way down. Then, on the second floor, Ruth marches her daughter to the shoes! They are little stilts, the ones Natalie likes. And she is already tall for an Asian. It is the milk they drink here. The dairy. When kids grow up in America, the mothers want them to look like the ones on television. But to what will that lead? The wallflower has a better life, I tell my daughters. Unless you are so beautiful you can be movie star. And you cannot, because you inherit my nose.
At the out door, Ruth looks back over the field of things in the store. I have never before seen Ruth wanting for herself. She wants for other people: finding the newest a job, now rescuing a slave. I like to keep her up at the front of the class.
She asks about my daughters, if they are dating.
“No,” I say, “they cannot. Not until I get my diplomas.” But my second youngest, she is almost the age of my pupil. She will be attorney already next year.
“I should not have stayed live-in while Natalie was in high school. That was my mistake.” Ruth says that because the divorce, and now the boyfriend is a Korean.
“But she was beauty queen,” I say. “That is very difficult.”
“Just alternate princess,” Natalie says.
“Still, look at me,” Ruth says. “I was virgin. I married a good family. With a big dress. People who know me now would never believe my wedding. Like a royal almost.”
I have seen the picture of Ruth as bride, very small, wrapped in fabric. Her mother-in-law gave the seamstress a bolt of silk gazar. But she was too young inside that cocoon. Everyone nodded at her, whispering, Say thank you.
I tell my daughters, Not everything wrapped is a gift.
Ruth and I joke about the INS interview. What is the color of the shower curtain? they will ask. His favorite vegetable. But Ruth knows these things. She and Danny, they live together. Bong Bong and I, we are really married, but we have lived apart now five years. He does not know anymore what I eat. Anyway, the government cannot question the bedroom.
“I had a high position,” Ruth says. “Jewelries.”
My pupil, she tries to catch my eye. But I will not. She knows Ruth goes to Las Vegas. Lucy told me when Ruth leaves at dawn she brushes her teeth with the hose outside that Tatay uses for his plants. I think of her on the bus riding into the desert. In America, there is a different loneliness. The loneliness in Asia, it is never sweet. She gets a room complimentary, free champagne and flowers. I suppose that makes her feel big. But Ruth has real achievements. She has helped many people. I wish I could buy that cream suit. It has put me in a bad mood. Sometimes, a stage curtain parts and you see: life could be better if you had more. Usually, I think, we can get just as good a different way. But tricks, they do not always work.
I stop to tie the shoe of Williamo while Ruth and Natalie bicker about the Garcia girl. Everyone knows the story of the Garcia girl. Home from Harvard College for summer, wearing cut-off jeans, she went with her mother to clean a house and married the son, graduate UCLA film. House in Brentwood! North of Sunset! The husband works Fox Studio! It seems Ruth saw the Garcia girl in the Brentwood Country Mart.
“She was reading a book thick like that,” Ruth says. “War and Peace.”
I nudge Williamo. “Some-a-day you will read that.”
Natalie snorts. “I saw the movie. Thinks she’s some Russian princess in the snow.”
“She says she was skipping the war part,” Ruth says. “Says she likes peace.”
“But-ah she is too fat to be a princess.” I would not want my daughter like Natalie, divorce, but Aileen skips ahead, spic-and-span. All day long while Natalie paints her pictures of beds, Aileen stays with her. My kids have good jobs and my grandsons wear the uniforms of the best school in Manila. Still, they are most of the day with the yayas. On the phone this morning, I fought with Issa. Because Lita came back and said my daughter was complaining of me.
My mother will not allow even a crush, she told Lita. Issa should not talk of me like that.
Claire
NO MORE TWELVE-TONE, PLEASE
My teaching started with no fanfare. Thursdays, I drove downtown, parked underneath a freeway overpass, and taught my workshop, then met with students in my bare office, going over their scores with a pencil. No parallel fifths, I wrote, if you want harmonic language. One used Mancini’s theme for The Pink Panther as an instrumental obligate. No more twelve-tone, please, I scribbed on another’s score. I’ve suffered enough. After, I hurried to my car. It wasn’t at all like Julliard, where the practice rooms closed with ancient velvet curtains and I knew most of the teachers on the floor.
One afternoon, an older accompanist held the door open for me. He walked on the balls of his feet. Unusual, I thought, for a tall person.
He said he’d heard my oratorio, a piece I’d written a decade ago. “Oh, thank you,” I said, as if he’d complimented me. Which he hadn’t and hadn’t meant to, apparently. Because he started shaking his head.
“I didn’t think much of it. I actually reviewed it. I knew at the beginning just how far it was going to go.” He grimaced. “I hear things in a Cagean way.”
“Oh,” I said, looking toward my car into which I desperately wanted to get.
A Cagean way? All I could think of was Cage’s 4′3″. A player sitting in a chair, doing nothing, for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
Then, incredibly, against the background of a dull Los Angeles sky, the freeway roaring over us, the accompanist bent over and tried to kiss me. I ducked away, patting his back. He was old and in need of dentistry; he’d insulted me at the same time he tried to seduce me. That was new.
I drove recklessly. Was this the romance available to me now?
As the 10 freeway flared west, I began to laugh.
Lola
HALF-HALF
I tell the story of a car. Claire and I enjoy the extravagances of my weekend couple as we pare vegetables with small knives.
“Bet they liked Helen at the dealership,” Claire says. “Pretty young mom.”
“It is a nice story. The wife buying for the husband.” The salesman and also the manager stood watching her pull out to test drive.
“‘Must be some hub,’ the salesman said, even with Bing and me there.
“‘Wonder what he does?’
“‘Entertainment business,’ I said, to remind them we had ears. Helen did not check the Blue Book but they like her, so maybe they will not cheat. She drove to the restaurant, with the convertible down. Lucy will pick her there. So tonight, they celebrate.” Fog blows past the window, cold here, near the beach. “When they come out the valet will bring him the new car instead of the old. She will have to drive the old.”
“Or go back for it tomorrow,” Claire says.
Bong Bong and I, we would never leave our property outside overnight. When my weekend employer steps out from the restaurant, he will notice the car. “There’s my car,” he will say. She will stutter, “It is, it really
is,” without the confidence for a punch line. It will probably take a few minutes for him to understand. It was his money anyway, she will think. All I did was spend it. But the valet driver, the mâitre d’, the waiters, they like her and they will feel disappointed in him. Because he will not be happy. Even with this car. He is a man taken with moths.
A week later, I receive a call from him. “Lola! I’m in New York!”
“So you are not driving your new car.”
“I’m here for a focus group. But Bing’s sick and Helen’s alone. Could you go stay the night?”
“What about Lucy?”
“She’s there. But Bing’s really sick.”
My weekend employers have never fired my pupil, but they have not yet given her the job either. “You have Lucy, you do not need Lola. One baby. One babysitter.” I do not like going there with Lucy too. I stand outside that house at night. It is the place I end my walk now, after the Pacific.
“Lola, I’ll pay you. I don’t have time to talk to Helen. They have me booked every fifteen minutes. I can’t even pee.”
“I will have to ask my employer.”
“Put Paul on. Tell him Bing has a fever.”
I go in the back door. I have never before knocked the bedroom. Claire, she is already asleep under the covers, only the nose shows. He sits on top with the remote in his hand, wearing only the undershorts I know from washing.
“Excuse, but-ah, Bing has fever. It is okay for you, I will go there?”
He stands up, scratching the back of his head. “Sure, Lola. That Jeff?” He takes the phone. “You can have her as long as you want. Course.”
You can have her. Walking through the dark, this permission pushes me down from the head. You live-in too, Natalie said. What’s the difference?
Opening the door with my key, I call out, “Three women one baby. Usually, it is the other way around.”
Lucy kneels by the bath, holding Bing from under the arms. When I get closer, I see Bing is limp and the pupils fall back to the outside corners. The eye is all white.
“He is hot, Lola! Convulsions. Febroid seizure. Oh my God.” My pupil moves a way I have not seen her. She fills a plastic boat under the tap and pours cold water over his head. He blinks awake, shaking. Half the pupils return. This must be how she learned in the hospital. “His temperature, Lola. I am worried the brain!”
“Shhh.” Helen stands one phone at each ear. “You give medicine?”
“They only have chewable. He spit it. So we cannot be sure.”
“I brought Motrin. New.” The new works better.
“A high fever,” Helen says, the voice sharp with terror. This is her job, standing tight with two telephones. “Just the service again.” She would rather let us touch him. On the cold bathroom floor, my pupil administers the medicine, forcing it in, while I hold him down. Red in the face, he kicks.
“All this work, he will be tired,” I say.
“Really a seizure, Lola.”
Finally, he quiets—the Motrin. Then, after he falls asleep, the doctor calls. Helen lunges. Of course. She is the mother.
“In the hospital, they will check for meningitis. Spinal tap,” my pupil says.
“It is only fever,” I say. “Children here do not so easily die.”
“Yes. Yes! We did that! That’s what Lucy said! Lucy, what’s his temperature?”
“Down to one-oh-three, Helen.”
“Are you sure I shouldn’t bring him in?” Helen looks at my pupil now, after she put the phones down. “He said to do what we did already.”
“Your nanny is graduate medicine,” I say.
“Only names of drugs are different,” she says. “And here you have psychiatry.”
Bing sleeps on the bed of the mother, and she sits, watching a movie. “Hey, come here, you guys!” she calls. “Doesn’t she look like Lola?” She points with the remote to a lady with short hair, in a black-and-white picture. Only the nose looks like me. She is blonde with more cheekbones. Of course, she is movie star. Helen goes to the kitchen to make her popcorn and returns with the tin-foil chef hat, opens it with a fork.
“You will become big again,” Lucy says.
Helen points, with the remote, at the albino Lola. “She’s the best comic actress who ever lived! She was married to a great director. Italian.”
I dip the sponge in a bowl of ice water and touch the forehead of Bing, quick dabs, until the growl from his chest evens. Then we transfer him to the crib.
“That is why she thinks Lola is pretty,” I say, getting in bed. “Because a movie star. For them to think a Filipina is pretty they have to see a white look-alike.”
Fridays, before her off, Lucy changes the sheets for me and I change back for her Sunday. But tonight, we lie together listening to Bing breathe.
I tell her the story of our new neighbor, Jean, how she went shopping in Wild Oats and all of a sudden remembered she left the baby sleeping at home.
“In our place, we leave them, just in a hammock, Lola,” my pupil says. We are quiet then. “Me, I will be going along fine, but then, I remember, my mother, she died. And the day is the same but mean. The birds, the kids—it seems they are laughing at me.”
I do not know what to say. The birds, they are not laughing at her.
“I have two lives. When I forget it is good to go to playclub, like that. But when I remember, I want to be alone.”
Bing is still the age when being with him is almost like being alone. The better parts of alone.
“On Good Friday, our mother does not want us to eat shredded coconut, because then our hair will turn white. She will not let us eat a cake or we will get freckles. On the New Year, she pulled my nose so it will become nice. I was a caesarian because I was face presentation, and so my nose was flat. See, now it is okay. We eat something long for long life. And something round for good luck. Before, Lola, I always daydream. The merchant marine, I thought of him long time after he marry that other girl. I only stopped when I could close my eyes and see Tony. But now, nothing. She was only fifty, Lola.”
“That is bad luck,” I say.
A roar surges; we freeze; maybe he will sleep back. Sure enough, the head drops.
“I try to get a little time every day alone. Even doing nothing, I feel I am doing something.”
“That is the way I felt pregnant.”
“Helen, she says she feels that way from dieting.”
My pupil and I share a bed, two grown women. I love Helen, but I would rather sleep with my pupil. Both Filipinas, it is the right smell.
• • •
The day is warm and sticky. We move in stars of light. Bing has a morning-after dampness; I like the dirty smell. It is more than a decade since I slept so long. I feel good, loose in my limbs.
“I will talk to Helen about your permanence. But then I have to go my Monday-to-Friday.”
Helen wanders into the kitchen, wearing pajamas. In fact, I am the only one dressed. “My protégée would like to know if her trial period is over.”
“Oh, sure,” Helen says. “Everything’s fine.”
So that is the end for my matchmaking. No “Thank you.” Nothing but “See you Friday” and the walk back to work. Long ago, with my weekend employers, something warm started in my chest. What was that? The nose of Lola has always been her guide. I cannot start to use, at my age, a new guide. But things I did not believe before I cannot any longer deny. My grandmother felt this way about the Virgin.
I could not leave Williamo.
It would be different if I took care first Bing. The wish for another beginning, it is a problem for the middle-aged. Children are stones, keeping us down, in the world we already know. We cannot start again.
The next time I see my pupil she is pumping on the swings. “Lola,” she says, a giggle in the voice, “in Washington, one of their friends show them a painting looks like me.”
I thought before, There is no look-alike for my pupil. But it is the other way around: when th
ey begin to notice us, they find a white. So Lola will not be favorite anymore.
Our kids run up the slide, but the sky begins to mix, until the tops of palms shake. Then a hard rain starts, slanted broken lines of water.
“Iglesias!” Esperanza says. “Vamos!”
Just across the street from the P.A.R.K. Park stands the church.
“Maybe there is a phone,” my pupil says. “We can call the mom of Bing.”
In the church, Mai-ling starts to fight a dress onto China. Mai-ling talks to the ground, “I will ask the priest to give her baptism.”
“Baptize?” Esperanza says. “She is not baptize?” The Latins, they are more Catholic even than we are.
“Maybe she is a Jewish,” Cheska says.
“Half-half. Only the dad.” The church is empty, and beams in the ceiling and pews look like the ribs of a whale. Out windows, water runs, smearing colors. “You cannot baptize,” I whisper hard. “The priest will tell that guy and he will fire you!”
Mai-ling is wide and the face flat. Something about her jaw, the way the top and bottom lip fit, with balls in the cheeks, it resembles the face of a lion.
“The parents baptize,” I scold. “Not the babysitter.”
Williamo pounds on my arm. “You stop this. Right now.”
“What do you say?” I turn, opening a Ziploc bag of cheese cubes. The kids still have food left in their lunchboxes, the healthier parts.
“Please.”
“The mother wants her baptize,” Mai-ling says. But how much does Sue really want? Like another blouse she saw?
I have always been careful to want one thing only.
Far in front, a priest moves at the altar, just in slacks. In Manila, where it is hot, you see priests in robes that swish their shoes. Mai-ling keeps a hand on China, a leash. If anything happen to her, they will court-martial me, I have heard her say.
Here there are rights, Ate, I told her. You have rights.
Me? I no have the green card. But today she says, “I am afraid the soul.”
“But China is healthy. Nothing will happen to her.” Often, the parents go camping, in high mountains, with the older boy. Mai-ling stays with China. Before they leave, the mother pumps milk and when they return, they tell her how many feet in elevation they climbed. I have seen Mai-ling on all fours, China riding, holding her ears. It is hard luck; Mai-ling would like to sit and fix the hair. But the only time I have seen China still is nursing. Two years old, she still nurses. She is the last one to nurse. Right now, she lands on the back of Mai-ling, her arm around the neck, hanging. Mai-ling walks, carrying China, down the long empty windpipe of the whale. Bowlegged, one hundred percent Chinese, Mai-ling really is a peasant. Here they have homeless, but that is different.