My Hollywood

  “She already started First Pres.”

  One year behind Williamo. “How is Williamo?”

  Sue shrugs. “I heard something about him and another boy sticking their heads in the toilet.”

  I walk home fast to get the bottles in the ref. Two men stand at our curb, waiting to deliver a large crib, compliments the doctor, they say. Lita told me Alice was glad I took the job. She told Lita, That baby needs something. The crib was for her own baby who died. They had a whole room. Very expensive, Lita said. All match. She gave away everything. I set the milk in the freezer—wealth. I heat one bottle, mix with formula, introduce a tiny bit at a time, only one drop. I remember Williamo. But this one she accepts the better milk. She is like me, in with the many who need. I think about the soul of this one. I do not even know the religion of Judith. When she comes home, I ask. “Will your daughter be baptized?”

  “I don’t really go to church, but I suppose it couldn’t hurt. What do you think, Lola?”

  “Join the club,” I say.

  She sits in the dark again, frowning. She narrows down to the top three.

  Ida Louise

  Natasha Sophia

  Laura Anne

  “Which do you like, Lola?”

  I pick Laura.

  Laurita and I go to see off Ruth and Danny when they drive Mai-ling to New York. Mai-ling asks me if I gave the certificate.

  “China is fine,” I tell her. “At First Pres.”

  Lucy flutters around the car, because her father will ride in back. To an American, he and Mai-ling can look married, even though they speak no common language. They will ride through cornfields under lifting arrows of birds. But if I knew Lucy would be here, I would have stayed home.

  There is Cora and Benny, Lucy remembers. But she cannot find telephone numbers. “I only see them in the park! The Hippo Park!” So in all of New York City, Ruth will have to try to find three Filipinas in a park.

  I have five children my own and Williamo to age four, but I never had a baby like this one. She cries so I see lines on the walls, air comes to a crack in my head where air should not be. She arches her back and screams, to ask God for what she does not have. And God does not answer this girl. I wait with her, through the night. I need this job. I really cannot quit. The door of the mother stays shut, on the other side the kitchen. It might as well be the other side the world. But Judith has to get up early for her work.

  At first, when Laura woke in the night, my new employer shuffled in, but the shrieking became more.

  I said, “I will be the one.” And the baby sucked my third finger. Her weight dropped in my lap.

  So now it is Lola she wants. My employer, she sleeps, but Lola cannot rest anymore. I count money in a circle. This time I will try to get ahead.

  With my kids, I had my husband and our neighborhood association. The job of even a baby, it is really too big for one person only.

  I pull the legs every day so they will grow straight. I did not do for my kids. I come from an educated family that does not believe those old things. But my pupil pulled the legs of Bing, and now, they are growing good. My boss, she goes before nine in the morning and comes back at seven. At first I scheduled the bath when she got home. But she felt frightened holding the baby; she thought Laura would slip out of her hands.

  “Your mama thinks you are a piece of soap,” I tell her.

  Now, when my employer walks in the door I have Laurita in foot pajamas, a tiny duck on the collar. I used to keep the evening bottle in warm water for the mother to give. But now I start the dede and Judith will finish. Judith when she gets home wants to look at her mail, eat some dinner.

  Laura is dark—dark skin, dark hair. She could be Asian. She looks up at me, eyes to eyes. “When I first got the job, your mother said, We won the lottery. Because-ah the moment I held you, you smiled. I said, Och, look, there is chemistry.”

  Finally, for me, Laurita sleeps. I tell her, Otherwise, Lola will be too tired to take care you. Help me. I said that also to my own babies. Help.

  I clear the kitchen table, make a coffee, take out my notebook, and mark how many weeks are left of the year. Since I have been in America, I have sent home more than $180,000. That is 495,485. In pesos, we are millionaires.

  From six years working here, I have paid more than half the medical training for Issa. That money, it is my shipyard pile. As a married woman, I worked, too, but Bong Bong was the breadwinner. Since I came here, they are dependent on me.

  I do not feel married anymore, even though I talk to Bong Bong every other Sunday and still receive a card once a week. In our house, we have drawers of cards. Christmas in the Philippines, Buko Pie for Assumption. I remember when greeting cards came to the Philippines. Bong Bong was working his first job, in the National Book Store, for Mrs. Socorro Ramos. People from Kansas came on Good Friday. That first year, Bong Bong drew on the kitchen table in the house of Mrs. Ramos. A year later, they had a warehouse with desks, at each one an illustrator. First you could only buy cards in Metro Manila. Now they employ four hundred people. We had times of softness too. But Lola did not get her grand passion. Alone here, at the kitchen table, I open my letter from home.

  My daughters sent me a clipping from the Manila Standard, with a note. Is this the lady you paid to send home?

  Oton, Iloilo—Faced with the challenge of raising four children, Lettie “Nang Palang” Elizande decided to bake and sell pies to augment the earnings of her husband Eduardo, then a public jeepney driver. In 1991 she went to America to work as a nanny. Two years later she returned home to Iloilo. “There I was having a nervous breakdown. My friends took up a collection to send me home.” Once back, she started baking. She formulated her own recipes based on books that she read. She baked cassava puddings, banana cakes and buko pies using a gas oven that could only cook three plates at a time. After baking from her home in Barangay Trapiche, Oton town, she would sell the pies in offices and schools in Iloilo City, about eight kilometers away. On a good day, she sold ten plates at fourteen pesos each. She also received orders for weddings as well as baptismal parties. After just three years, Nang Palang’s name has become synonymous with the tasty buko pie in the Oton town. Her earnings from the business were small but these helped send her children to school. In 1994, Nang Palang’s husband quit driving public jeepneys and has since been helping in the business. The store now sells an average of three hundred plates daily aside from orders for special occasions. To cope with the rising demand, Lettie acquired two ovens that could bake seventy-six plates at a time.

  Lettie! Good for her.

  Maybe you are next, Bong Bong wrote in pencil at the bottom, from the other side the world. But I do not want to go back and bake pie.

  Claire

  THE WORST SUMMER OF THE MARRIAGE

  Paul had grown up inside a family. He knew how to do this, even if he never came home. He didn’t think it was so hard. I let Paul decide. I had no confidence for life. But as soon as we fired Lola, I knew it was wrong.

  She deflated. Did a small bump stick out in her back? I realized she was a few inches shorter than me. I’d always thought we were the same height.

  I knocked over a coffee the morning of the first day. She started wiping it.

  “No, I’ll do it,” I said.

  A light left her face I didn’t see again, the rest of the time she lived in back of us.

  Lola still lived in our garage and for first time in four years, she was there more than in the house. She took Will by the hand, pulled, and said, “We are going now.” He looked back at me, a wish on his face. I didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t stand to be near me. She stayed ten more days and each one felt like an emergency.

  Will gazed up at me when we told him. I said it would be all right. That was the worst thing. He trusted me and I lied.

  That first week felt like a divorce, glittering with event. We’d fired Lola, but then we took her out to dinner, as the school director told us to. We had gifts t
o give. A card with money and a locket. But I didn’t feel alive in my life.

  We didn’t know when she was leaving, so we couldn’t interview other people. We’d told her we couldn’t afford her.

  Paul sighed. “We may have to say she has to move.”

  But I’d grown up with a terror of landlords. I couldn’t kick her out.

  His phone beeped. “I’ve got to get that,” he said.

  Then, the first Sunday in August, Ruth and her slight husband appeared. Ruth had gained weight. They carried boxes from Lola’s room to the ancient green Mercedes, and they wouldn’t let me help. Paul stayed in bed, watching television. He thought he was coming down with something. In a little more than an hour, they drove away, and Lola was gone, the door left hanging open.

  An empty room and a globe.

  Monday morning Paul came to the kitchen, carrying his briefcase as usual, showered, dressed, baseball cap on backward, ready to go.

  I’d have William all day. How had we decided this?

  I’d looked at my score before anyone else woke up, then I kept it on the table while I made breakfast. A teasing scale passage. I had ideas! But when would I work?

  Paul had made the decision to fire her, but he still went to the Lot.

  All of a sudden I understood with an awful clarity. He made more money than I did now, and for him that explained everything. Still, his show was in production. Right now, there really wasn’t anything he could do.

  He must have seen my face, because he scrawled out a number. “Here, call the agency and get somebody temporary. Just for a few hours. Go to work.”

  “You think he’s going to accept somebody the agency sends!”

  “He’ll be fine,” Paul said, and then the door slammed.

  With school out, Will had nothing to do. I called each of the moms from the playgroup and left messages. No one called back. When the replies straggled in over the week, the moms apologized, with what seemed like excuses. Sorry they couldn’t do Monday, they said, but didn’t suggest other days. When I mentioned tomorrow, they said the next few days were crazy. In a week, it was evident; nannies had been calling for playdates with Lola, not Will.

  And it became apparent how much Lola did. By Wednesday, the hampers in both bedrooms overflowed. By Friday, laundry spilled onto the floor. Then Ofelia called in sick.

  “So we’ll sign him up for another camp session.” Paul looked over at the mound in the corner. “We still have towels?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  But we did, thanks to his mother, the outlet shopper. Her boxes waited unopened by the door. I slit one, and bingo. Dark purple towels.

  I did what Paul said. I signed Will up for another session of camp, but when I drove him into the state park, he didn’t want to get out of the car. One of the teenage counselors helped with the extraction. Will looked at me through the window.

  “All right, so he looked at you. It isn’t the biggest deal in the world,” Paul said. “Did I always want to go, when I could have stayed home with my mommy? Just say goodbye and leave.”

  I did. But camp only went until two.

  During those hours, I called Lil to ask for advice.

  Drop the ball, she said. See what happens.

  That night we had takeout for dinner.

  The ball dropped.

  And dropped.

  Paul won. I couldn’t live like this. The next Tuesday morning while Will was at camp, I did four loads of laundry and went to the store to buy food. I did everything and felt exhausted by the time I put Will down. Everything but work.

  I didn’t see Paul at all that day. Or the next. I was asleep before he came home. Saturday morning, I said I wanted to talk.

  “Can it wait until breakfast?”

  In the kitchen, I told him I wanted a separation.

  “Can we talk about this in three months?”

  “I’m not joking.”

  He shook his head, clearing his plate over the garbage and leaving the unwashed dish in the sink. (For whom? He had odd cutoffs for decency.) “I can’t even think about this until we finish these thirteen episodes.”

  “When will that be?”

  “January.”

  January. I took that and held it like a promise. In the meantime, we’d go about our business. I’d try to figure out each day. Will’s friendships. His meals and bath. The house. Huge boulders. Responsibility. Food. Shopping. Where was the music in this?

  How had Lola done it? I tried to remember. For at least two hours, midday, she watched a soap opera in her room. She also took a walk every evening. But in the evening she’d had me.

  The third Saturday, the parade began again. Molly had set up interviews through an agency. Paul had less time than he did the first round but more confidence. None of these women seemed possible to me. How could I live with another person? Paul favored a woman named Elizabeth who spoke accented English and drove her own car.

  “But I thought their point was it should be an American.”

  “How long have you lived in the States, Elizabeth?”

  “Twenty-two years,” she said, her chin lifted. “I am American citizen.”

  Her first day at our house, she roasted a chicken with fresh garlic, olives, and lemongrass. “The people I work before, they love this.”

  But I’d promised Will fish tacos, so I left it for Paul.

  I found him in the kitchen at midnight, chewing a bone. “There,” he said. “You still want a separation?” He looked up from under his thick eyebrows. In profile, Paul was so handsome—wealth in a foreign currency. “A divorce?” he said, confidence building the joke. “Didn’t you want to divorce me?”

  I liked this new form of play. The stakes were interesting, at last.

  “I think so. Why?”

  “Because we’re invited out to dinner Friday night with the Grants. I thought it might be fun to try a new restaurant.”

  He’d come home once in August with flowers at eight o’clock, twirling on the porch, ending on one knee. Another night, he brought a wrapped box: earrings.

  Why didn’t I show up at the Lot and scream? Or take Willie on a plane?

  I didn’t want to blow Paul’s chance. His show was a treasure. I couldn’t live with the guilt of harming what he loved.

  But I could live with my anger. I’d been living with that so long already.

  • • •

  Elizabeth picked up Will from camp, and all afternoon I heard her plead. When I came downstairs, they were locked in a fight, arms braced.

  “He bite me,” she said, looking up as if I were a monster.

  He was a small child. A boy. Didn’t they do that? Puppies did. “William,” I said, “you can’t bite. I’m going to take away a privilege. No cartoons tomorrow.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “See,” Elizabeth said.

  I stayed up late to tell Paul.

  “In a few weeks, school starts. Why don’t we wait and watch how she does then.”

  That weekend, Paul felt sick and stayed in bed. Monday morning he roused himself, and Elizabeth arrived with a project.

  “Pot holders,” she announced, with satisfaction. The kids she’d taken care of before, she said, loved making pot holders.

  “He’s a pretty active boy,” I said. “You might do better in the park, with a ball or some chase game.”

  “You will see.” She issued a knowing smile.

  She had a sour expression that night, but Tuesday brought another attempt: lanyards. A week later, when I told her it wasn’t working out, she looked relieved.

  I asked Paul once.

  I asked him twice.

  I asked him three times to leave.

  This made the bookend to our courtship, when he’d pursued me until I said, Well, maybe. Let’s get married.

  Paul hired another woman. “Send her to the playclub. He can see his old pals.”

  I sent Vanji with Will and a tray of homemade oatmeal cookies. When they returned, I asked
how it went. Vanji scrunched her nose. “They don’ talk to us.”

  “Next time don’t ask,” Paul said.

  When the big envelope from the school came, I studied the list. We invited the boys from Will’s new class for a party. I wanted a good start for his year. The night before, I stayed up late making cupcakes. I was frosting them when Paul came home.

  “When do they get here tomorrow?”

  “Eleven to three.”

  “That’s a long time. Well, she’ll be here, too, won’t she?”

  “Who, Vanji? I didn’t ask her. I don’t think she’d be much help.”

  “Well, I’ll try to get over at lunch.”

  Paul arrived like a movie star, late and dressed like the kids, in sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt. Boys crowded around him. The way he wriggled his back when Will tagged him and then spurted forward, you could tell he really didn’t want to get caught. Paul had a talent for fun. Forty minutes running with boys chasing him, and he was calling out to each one by name, smoothing over Will’s bossiness, making it invisible. Then, out of breath, he leaned against the kitchen counter and ate a cupcake. He looked around the room in a way I knew meant he was about to go.

  “You’re good at this. I’m not. Can’t you stay?”

  But he had to leave.

  I tried to take his place, carrying out the tray of cupcakes. I bit into one. Soft, with tangy frosting. I ate the purple pansy. It tasted like lettuce.

  But by one-thirty, Will sat in his room, knees up, arms crossed over. “You can play with them. I don’t want to.”

  I sat on the bed and stroked his damp hair, boys’ voices coming through the gauzy screen. Did I have to make him go back out? What would the mothers say? But I let him look at his train book and quietly closed his door when I went to offer the guests sandwiches. I didn’t want them here now either.

  Was he like this because other mothers stayed through more? Crumbs on the counter, gibberish. Will and I had bright flashes of glory, but too many times I’d left him reaching for me, from a babysitter’s arms. Am I still a mother if? I asked myself. If I went to the camp orientation, but had Vanji take my place at the picnic? What parts of the day could I cut out and still give him enough?