All the way home, she lets him nurse. Then he falls asleep on her breast. I think, Later, I will say about the money, that she does not have to pay all. Even when we arrive home and Paul hands me an envelope with cash, I think, maybe tomorrow. But all I say is thank you. I am still remembering that small melody.
That night, I unpack all the things. The formula, I empty in my bathroom. That is the last; I will not tell. I run the water, set the clean bottle to dry. She could have fired me for that. I walk through the house, close the lights.
In the hall I hear: “Pretty big crowd, I don’t know.”
Big crowd but not much money. What do they charge admission? They should up the ticket price. That little melody still runs in my head.
“He has a voice, all right. Clear strong instrument. I don’t know why she had to walk him there.”
When I hear that, something opened: I can keep my money.
I wanted him to see his mother.
• • •
For months, I worried what I could feed Williamo and not get fired. I thought it would end when we began solid food. But then, they wanted only vegetables I mashed and Williamo did not like. One day, a long time later, I thought of that formula I never told. By then, I had our playclub.
Vicky, a new Filipina, said, “Lola, my employer wants a weekend babysitter.”
“What about you?”
“Me, no! I want my weekends off!” Vicky had plenty because she never spent.
“How much?” I worked for my old lady weekends who paid me sixty, and she really could not pay more. But I worked for her a long time already. I did not like to quit.
“Maybe you can ask them a lot.”
I brought Williamo along to the job interview, and he hung, a vine on my leg. Later, they told me he was why I got the job. “And what will be the salary?”
“We were thinking eighty,” the father said.
I was going to ask seventy-five, but I said, “How about ninety?”
“Eighty-five.”
The parents, they were the age of my eldest and like the ones I warned her from: too good-looking. They had the baby in a basket on a chair. The husband swung up his arms. “Isn’t it just the greatest thing!”
I had to ask Ruth to give me someone for my old lady. I took the elder from Iloilo again, because she can cook. I gave her my notebook with recipes the old lady liked.
That first Saturday, my new employer made coffee and milk heated so it tasted together like caramel. We sat at her round table. Before she had Bing, she told me, she worked lawyer. Like my second youngest. Then my weekend employer finished her coffee and rinsed her own mug. You hear about jobs like this. Like the house on the corner of Twelfth that we call the Castle, where they say the wife is Filipina. That first night, I bathe the baby, wrap him in white flannel, and hand to them to kiss-kiss.
“Like a cigar,” I said.
They told me he woke up three times in the night, and then she opened the freezer. Rows of pumped milk, yellow with a skin, each with the date marked in black. At the house of my employer, we had had so little; Claire pumped and we kept track of ounces of the bluish liquid.
The next morning, I heard sounds, birds one at a time. I bolted. But the little guy, he still snored next to me. I carried him to the kitchen.
“The milk is still in the refrigerator,” she said. The guy stood up. They looked that they might call police.
“Last night, we slept, the two of us.”
They looked at me, almost afraid. There is such a thing as luck, at the beginning. Even for magicians.
“He never slept through the night before,” the wife whispered.
Vicky and me—both Filipinas, they were thinking. They like me better.
All those bottles in the freezer, and this baby, he did not even need.
Claire
THE WEEKEND PEOPLE
But I was not right.
Paul took Will on his shoulders, to give Mommy some time by herself. I’d had one of what Paul called my Clairenados. Now, Sunday morning, I wandered to the Farmers Market and touched hard fruit, grateful to be in the world again, able to appreciate. The footsteps around me and pigeons made a melody. I took out my notepad. Woodwinds, I scrawled. After more than a year, California fruit still amazed me. White nectarines, tiny seedless watermelons, enormous figs. I picked up a small yellow globe with barky skin and smelled it. It cast a whiff of something faintly like sex.
“Take it,” the young man said.
“How much?” I fingered a soft worn bill.
“Just take it. Tell me how you like it. White inside.”
The man was giving me a melon. I started to cry. He put the fruit, the size of Will’s head, in a flimsy bag. Why me? Did I look good (my hand shot up to my hair) or did I appear to be someone who needed a melon? I glanced over my shoulder, but he stood weighing two cantaloupes, one in each hand.
Walking, I swung the bag so the melon tapped my thigh. But when I got home, it was after ten: I’d blown half my time. I made coffee, spilling grounds—no matter; I’d clean it later—and climbed the rickety steps to the small hot room upstairs.
Marriage hadn’t changed me. Having a child did. I was a dandelion blown. But I had no right to be tired. Paul got up when Will did, at five. He let me sleep until seven. I woke up and listened to them making sounds to approximate the whoosh of wheels.
I was thinking of rain, that rhythm, chaotic yet patterned. Then the door rang, like a high school bell, excusing. I ran down, two steps at a time.
A couple stood there, too hip to be door-to-door religious. She filled her T-shirt, her hair touching her elbows, and at various points she sparkled.
“Helen and Jeff.” He stuck out a freckled arm. “Lola’s weekend people.”
Last spring Lola had said something about her new weekend employers, I didn’t remember what, but there was lace at the edges. He was somebody, my mother would’ve said.
An hour ago, I’d deemed the foray to the market idiotic, even destructive, but now, I invited them in. I needed friends. In the kitchen I sniffed the melon, then decided to save it and brought out a plate of figs, almonds, and Israeli feta.
The possible Somebody began a rambling talk about Lola, which his wife interrupted. “We hired her because we saw how close she was to William.”
My Will! This stranger knew my child, in his hours away from me.
“It’d be nice for the boys to play together.”
“Who’s your son?”
“Bing.” She waited. But I’d never heard of him. What kind of name was Bing? They must have named him for Bing Crosby. It couldn’t have been the cherry.
“And I’m starting a mothers’ group with the moms of kids in Lola’s playclub.”
Typical of me, I said, “Oh, sure, great,” when I knew I couldn’t do it.
Then the door yawned open. Will ran to me. I said, “These are the people Lola lives with on the weekend.”
“Jeff Grant.”
“Helen.”
Paul’s face tightened when the Somebody said his name. Paul knew who he was. I asked him to help me with coffee in the kitchen.
“He’s an indie director, he made that movie The Dayton Widow.”
I thought, He could help you maybe. Paul was in his second year working for a showrunner who didn’t think he was funny. Just this week, though, he’d had a triumph. At the table read of his script, people laughed. The head of comedy clapped. But Paul still felt precarious. “The room punched it up,” he said. “The biggest laughs were Jack’s lines.” Since we’d moved here we’d been on a treadmill. I’d been holding down the fort waiting for things to settle. It would still be years before I’d realize—we had settled. I was the only one waiting.
“So Jeff Grant uses our nanny? Man. What are the chances of that?”
At first it felt weird having Lola in our small house, but now I was used to her. It was too easy to have someone pick up after you to mind much. Will hung on to my knee.
“She wants to start a mothers’ group and I said yes.”
“You can get out of it.”
We went back in, carrying a tray with coffee. Paul said he’d loved The Dayton Widow.
“And we love her work,” the Somebody said, pointing at me, but I didn’t believe him. My music tended to pull in nuns, librarians, and middle school teachers (not surprising, I suppose, since these were the people I’d grown up with). I’d had my picture in the paper a few times; that was probably how these two knew me. The Eroica Trio named themselves after Beethoven’s Third and the first month they performed, people said, Oh yeah, I’ve heard of you.
We ended up taking a walk with them, sliding Will into his stroller. Outside, the pavement sparkled and the palms looked still and old. Even though we’d been here two years, we didn’t have friends. Paul was always working, and I stayed with Will. Weekends, Paul crashed on the bed, flipping channels, exhausted from the pressure to be funny. For two years, he’d felt about to be fired. They could let me go tomorrow, he’d told me. Contractually, I have nothing.
We needed fun.
The men walked ahead. I always liked the way Paul walked. There was ease to him, a gracefulness. Years later, Will would own that same gait. Paul’s arm conducted Jeff Grant’s laughter, which exploded in bursts. They lived close, two streets over. We found Lola sitting inside a city of blocks. She looked odd in this other house. Their boy ignored Will.
But meeting this couple, with a boy Will’s age, by the chance of our goofy nanny, felt promising. Though I didn’t know what to say to Helen. She was not really my type—beautiful.
We ducked into a coffee shop. The boys sat in their strollers snubbing each other. When we stopped at the park they ran, pushing to be first to the top of the slide.
Looking at Will, Jeff said, “Where’d you get the … the outfit?”
Will swooshed headfirst down the slide in the blue jumpsuit that looked like a gas station attendant’s uniform. I loved that one. When I’d bought it, Paul had gone ballistic.
He groaned. “Those tiny things cost seventy dollars. And she brought home two.”
“Size eighteen months and size three.” I’d skipped size 2. That was prudent. The Guggenheim I’d stashed away had paid for our move here, but Paul made it his job to preserve that fortification against my raids. It gave me pleasure, though, to write the check at the sweet children’s store. I disliked having to find the right moment to confess to Paul, whose mother was an outlet shopper. So I didn’t always. Confess.
“Got that?” Jeff asked Helen, when I said the name of the store: Imagine.
“I’ll remember,” she said, rummaging in her purse.
“Or I’ll tell you again.” I liked it that I’d picked something Jeff Grant wanted. His approval seemed hard to get.
Jeff handed her a pencil. “Let’s write that down.”
“I buy Bing’s stuff at Ross Dress for Less,” Helen said. “You two could never be married. You’re too much alike.”
Are we? I thought, the sun burning my arms. Jeff probably was impossible.
Helen laughed. “But his craziness comes with his genius.”
The putative genius nodded along.
I was already talking myself out of him. I’d once thought I’d end up with a guy like Jeff. But I was thirty-three by the time I got married, old enough to know I wanted to make music. The difference was huge, a deformity that had its cost. Once, music had been enough for my whole happiness. (I named my tap concerto Rapture.) But then I’d begun to want a life. Mistake. Now I had one and was no good at it. So I won’t get that, I thought, watching Jeff, thinking of bells, their linger.
The four of us stood at the swings, our boys pumping, a take-out latte in each mother’s hand. A middle-aged form of dating. It felt as if this new friendship could change us the way that, in my twenties, I used to think a guy would. Maybe, I thought, as wind dragged flecks of eucalyptus against my face, this would give us a thread of excitement. I didn’t imagine whispering under the sheets at night the way we once had or turning each other’s bodies in the gray dawn. But even dressing up to go out, talking with the bathroom door open, was something we hadn’t had for a long time.
Helen and I sat on a seesaw, behind our boys. I didn’t know how hard to bump. Bing looked delicate, his teeth small and even, like corn. Helen’s hands absently reached up to her hair and made a deft braid. A girl stopped in front of her, belly out, the hem of her dress torn. “Could you do that to me?”
“What do you say?”
“Please.” She turned around and stood still. “Can you make a French one?”
“Come on,” Will demanded, stranded on the up slant.
Willie jumped down then, jolting Bing, and ran off to the monkey bars. Helen gave him a look, her hand still working on the careful immobile head. “I should have a girl,” she mumbled. I understood that they planned to have more. That was true of them in general.
That day Will looked his best, wind riling his curls, a gift from Paul’s mother, who blow-dried her own straight. He climbed a play structure, manning a wheel. I jumped up to tell him five more minutes, a way I’d copied from an offhand mother. Another kid crawled near my shoes and I tripped. Will pushed onto the kid, almost horizontal, swimming in air. It happened so fast. I sat on the metal floor—the kid had tied his shoelaces with mine. By the time I staggered up, Jeff had pulled the boys apart. He handed the shrieking kid to a big-faced woman, who moved forward, the girl with Helen’s braid holding her leg. The woman clamped Will’s shoulder. “Say you’re sorry.”
“Say you’re sorry, Will,” I warned. Lola would’ve known what to do. She prided herself on her instincts. I didn’t seem to have any.
The woman looked at me with a beam of accusation. “Lookedit. Knocked his tooth loose.” Her fingers pried open his mouth, wiggled the tooth. “That’s bone!”
“Was defending his mom,” Jeff said.
Paul dusted Will off, then lifted him onto his shoulders. Good.
“You okay, bud?” Jeff said to the other kid. Jeff stared at the mom, whose face fell trapezoidal. “Our guy shouldn’t have hit, but your guy shouldn’t have tied her shoelaces.”
Helen murmured agreement. Still, it would’ve been different if Bing had been beneath our boy’s windmilling arms. The fight had been almost beautiful to watch. Paul had his arm out; like me, inclined to apologize.
“Hey, I worry Bing’s too timid,” Jeff said. “I fought when I was a kid.”
Back at their house, Lola jumped up from where she’d been watching TV, looking caught. Their fireplace poofed on with the turn of a knob, giving real, lifting flames. In no time Jeff put a glass of wine into my hand.
“I will go now,” Lola called, from the door.
Helen stepped over things, handing us plates of warm take-out food, with big napkins. “Look,” she whispered. Our boys were finally playing together. It was as if that was something we’d made. I didn’t know it then, but this was our happiness, kids on the floor, intent on a tower of blocks. After a while Helen lifted Bing to his crib and I put Will in his stroller, wrapped in a borrowed blanket. He closed his eyes and started sucking. Behind us on chairs, the guys were laughing.
“Walking down the aisle, she’s thinking, The last blow job I ever have to give.”
Paul would never say that. But he shook his head. “Think about it every day.”
“Try every hour,” Jeff said.
Helen sighed. We all laughed. That somehow made it better.
William slept in his stroller, his hand on his delicate ear, as we walked home. Behind branches, our windows glowed. Lola had turned on lights. I had that full-day feeling as I undressed Will and slipped him into bed. But the weekend ended with a sighing quality.
Tomorrow, it would all start again—Paul gone until next Saturday.
Lola
COINS
“Come on comeon comeon comeon comeon. Come to Lola. I have something for you.” Because he is very angry.
Today it is the mother he was hitting. She has her hand over her eye and I dab ice, the way I do his boo-boos. She lets her face in my hands. Then I take him away. But Williamo, he is strong. I cannot so easily hold. And Lola told a lie. I do not have anything. So I make promises. “Some-a-day,” I whisper, “I will bring you home with me. And there we will make the ice candy.”
He lies still, not any longer fighting. His bones fall in a pattern, like the veins of a leaf.
“I will put you in my pocket and feed you one candy every day. You will be happy. Because the ocean at our place it is very blue. The sky higher than here. And the fruits that grow on trees, very sweet.” Jackfruit, durian, lanzones. Attis. Santol.
“In my pocket I will give you one lychee. You can bounce for a ball.”
“If you were a kangaroo you would have a pouch,” he grumbles, better now, slower the heart.
Through the window I see my employer. She looks like she has too much assigned to her; she cannot complete it all before she dies. She holds the ice and paces, talking long-distance to a woman who reads books about the raising of children. When my employer becomes upset she calls this friend. My employer has the American problem of guilt. But you should not be guilty to your children. It is for them that you are working! Then I remember that check for a thousand, long ago. I do not like to think that; it still opens a taste of confusion.
But Williamo, he is better now. Only the mouth smears. I promise him candy, not the ice candy, just candy we can buy here. “But-ah do not tell your mother.”
I call to her, “Excuse, we are going now.”
“Okay. Thanks, Lole.” My employer believes she cannot live without me. She is telling her friend who reads the books that he is better with me than with her. Lil will tell her that this is perfectly normal. My employer, she needs to be left alone. But that is not a quality for a mother. Children, they are dependent for their life. “Playdate,” my employer says. “I can’t even stand the word.”
“Do you have poo-poo?” I pull out the diaper. I am paid to smell that. But what she said to her friend is true. With me, Williamo is no problem.