My Hollywood

  So tough luck. “Now again, I am scrubbing toilets for your allowance,” I tell Issa. Laura cries and I cannot always satisfy her, because I am the one to buy the food and take out the garbage. My new employer, she works a long time every day, so I work long time too.

  All through November we receive postcards: a restaurant built in the shape of a hamburger, an enormous turnip. The second day in December, Ruth telephones from the YW in New York. “I will not tell anything. Only that Mai-ling is old, so better just to clean, not for kids.”

  Just then I realize she is asking me advice! “Yes,” is all I think to say.

  A week later, Ruth calls again. She found for Mai-ling a job full-time laundress. Five hundred a week.

  “They ask I iron the lady shirt. And they like it,” Mai-ling says.

  She will stay in the apartment of Cora and Benny from the Hippo Park. The landlord pays the heat. Mai-ling will have a bed against the wall and a dresser where she can keep her altar of China. Outside the window a faded horse is painted on a brick building with the Marlboro Man. They can see him now, Ruth says, through a blizzard of snow.

  Claire

  JOHNNY CARSON WAS AN ARISTOPHANIC SCHOLAR

  I sat writing at the kitchen table. I’d managed to make Will’s lunch and wipe down the counter before I took him to school. Since we’d let go of the last nanny, I wiped down the kitchen twenty times a day. I liked the empty house, the clean hours. I should have called the agency, but I just marked the scraps I could conjure on staff paper.

  Hitchcock’s career, I’d read in a book Jeff had given me, was an unending search for the right song. So was mine.

  At eleven, I banged a pot of water on the stove for soba noodles, measured out sesame oil and red pepper flakes, ate, and had the bowl rinsed in under ten minutes. Then I fell asleep on the sofa. Twenty minutes later I returned. At two, mad at myself for not calling the agency, I ran to the school. My run for the day.

  I heard the sound of jump ropes hitting pavement. Double Dutch. That rhythm. Yes. Ropes, I could put that sound at the beginning.

  We came home for our snack, and then I offered the park.

  “It’s okay, Mommy. You can work,” he said.

  I found two jump ropes, different sizes, and taught Will to spin them with me. Then I brought my papers down on the floor while he stacked LEGOs.

  I hummed as I scribbled, and Will said, “That’s beautiful, Mommy.” What would happen when he became aware of other hummers, hierarchies in the world, not subject to his love? Would he, in the course of my diminishment, feel smaller?

  These hazy hours (sponsored, it seemed, by Starbucks) while Paul was gone, I entered childhood from a different door.

  Maybe we were building something, too, that would last.

  Paul called at five to say that a friend of Jeff’s owned a no-longer-hot restaurant, and Aleph Sargent had made a reservation. The owner wanted to fill the room.

  “Tonight?” I reminded him we had no babysitter.

  He sighed. “Maybe it’d be good for us to get out.” He’d started back on his old show, working for Allen, the showrunner, again. He’d write another pilot for a midseason replacement.

  “I could ask Molly.”

  “I don’t know if he’ll go to sleep with her.”

  Then Tom and my mother stopped by and we ended up with all three, my mother unstable on heels, holding another Mason jar of persimmon sauce. “It’s so good if you heat it up and put it on ice cream.”

  She and Will stood on my bed, in a pillow fight, while I debriefed Molly. Tom moved in the yard, inspecting shrubs. I showed him where we planted the orange tree they’d given Will for his birthday.

  “We need to aerate it, okay?” he said. “Do you have a hoe?”

  I brought him a trowel.

  “What have you been doing?” I asked.

  “I’ve been getting my garden tours together for the class. That was a real nosebleed.”

  It was actually easy to leave. “Good one!” I heard my mom call, through the open window.

  Happiness. What almost could have been.

  “Where’s Paul?” Jeff asked, when I slid into the booth.

  “On his way from work.”

  “So same old same old.”

  But now that Paul had had a disappointment with his show, I didn’t want to complain. The large restaurant room waited mostly empty.

  “We invited Lucy and she said, But, Helen, we are only wearing our regular, so I told them—her sister’s there, too—they could raid my closet. Now I’m thinking Cheska’s pretty big.”

  Then Lucy and her sister walked in wearing Helen’s clothes. They had the best skin. I’d never seen any of the Filipinas in makeup.

  The last time I saw her, at Lucy’s wedding, Lola had had fewer wrinkles than I did.

  “Clothes okay?” I whispered. “Not stretched?”

  “Looks like she found stuff from the back of the closet I never wear.”

  “You should, though.” The black skirt looked great on Lucy.

  I should have dressed up more. I was just wearing a black blouse and jeans.

  Even offered the whole closet, Lucy understood what Helen wouldn’t want her to take. We scooched over in the booth. “Hey, married lady.” Jeff handed them menus. “Everybody order lots.”

  They each ordered steaks, giggling, looking down at their plates. I asked how Lucy’s studies were going.

  “It is slow, Claire. I am too tired.”

  Like well-behaved children in my generation, they didn’t speak unless spoken to.

  Jeff asked for flounder, no oil no butter, some chopped cilantro on top if they had it. Helen ordered lamb.

  The redheaded woman who’d once thought Will sounded autistic stopped at our booth. “Just got back from Europe,” she said. “Elissa and I. Great trip.” Pleasure, she meant. So much of what we did for our boys was for their future. Did I even know how to just play? This year, he’d started T-ball. I loved watching him run with the other boys, the clumsy mitts on their hands almost tipping them.

  Helen shook her head. “She’s at that school every day. Just fighting to keep Elissa in. They might have to sue the LAUSD. We’re lucky, you know?”

  Jeff nodded obediently.

  “You hear they’re divorcing?” She shrugged. “That’s what happens to people who hang up their love letters in the guest bathroom.”

  I didn’t know if I should order for Paul. Why couldn’t he ever just be here?

  “In the Greeks”—Jeff flipped open a small green book—“‘tragedy was always set in the past.’ Comedy”—he socked his other hand—“is right now.”

  “Only you could read out loud at table and seem just a little obnoxious,” I said.

  “You been served,” Helen said. “Hey, knock on wood. We’re pregnant again.”

  This time it didn’t floor me. Would the freckled doctor deliver this baby?

  “Three thousand dollars of couple’s therapy later,” Helen grumbled.

  He put his arm around her and whispered in her ear in an obligatory way. She looked up at him. A show.

  Lucy stared at the plate the waiter set in front of her. “So big, Helen!”

  Jeff got up. He pushed open the swinging doors to the kitchen. I assumed there was a problem with his fish. “Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?”

  Cheska whispered. “Helen? Aleph Sargent, she will be here?”

  “There’s her table.” An empty booth with one rose, a branch of pine, and a RESERVED card. Helen frankly worked at her chop with a fork and knife.

  I glanced at the door. “I guess movie stars eat late.” As did comedy writers, apparently.

  When we stood to go, the table with the reserved sign remained empty, and Paul was still at large. Nourished by flounder, Jeff regained charm, snapping the small book closed. “Johnny Carson considered himself to be an Aristophanic scholar.” While I waited for my car, Annabel Grass walked in. An oboist, she’d never married, never had children. She must have
been forty-five, but she still wore her hair long and straight, Alice in Wonderland style. She strolled into the restaurant at ten-fifteen, carrying a backpack, full of wildflowers. “I just drove in from the desert,” she explained.

  When I unlocked the front door, Molly sat up. “Paul’s not home yet?” I should pay her, I thought, but I wasn’t sure what. When I tried, though, she refused.

  “Really, it’s no problem. Your mom put him to bed. I had to read this script anyway. Oh, that persimmon thing your mom made? It was awesome.”

  I liked Molly for what might have been the first time, feeling inordinately grateful. She appreciated my mother’s confection. I wished Paul had heard her say so. Too few kind things had ever been said about my mother.

  Just as Molly’s car pulled out of the driveway, Paul burst in. “Oh, man, you can’t believe the inanity. The human comedy. What’d I miss?”

  “They’re pregnant again,” I said. “The movie star didn’t show. Lucy and Cheska came. Seeing them made me think I should call Lola to see Will.”

  “Yeah. We probably should.”

  This was what I liked: talking about Will. Agreeing. Paul sat on the other side of the couch and our jeaned legs entwined. I wanted to talk—I always wanted to talk—but I didn’t know where to start. He asked how the songs were going. I said I wasn’t finished yet. He bit his bottom lip. “Takes a long time.” I’d gone on the field trip to the zoo and another day to a playdate with a new boy who could maybe become a friend for Will. I’d worked almost every night for a few hours after I put him down and I was near the end of the seventh song. I talked with Harv and Lil about these daily shifts and calibrations. Paul knew my general trajectories, but he didn’t have the details.

  I made a mewing sound he understood meant backrub.

  “Okay,” he said, from behind a magazine. “C’mere.” He rubbed with one hand. I closed my eyes to feel the sparks shower down my neck. I wanted two hands, but he’d have to put the magazine down, and that carried the risk of hands roaming. I looked around the room. “Rake,” I said. That was the term we used for scratching, with spread fingers, through each other’s hair. I thought of the afternoon I’d seen Jeff at the bar in Pasadena. Paul would never be at a bar with another woman. He was so much better than Jeff. But better as he was, when his fingers strayed toward my breasts, I felt I had to stop him, the way I had in high school, when a guy tried to get something off of me. An aversion. When had this started? In the other house right now, clothes were probably flinging, and Helen, in those tiny strings I’d seen hanging on the rod, knelt on the bed, tense and eager. But what about the doctor? Was their sex the same?

  “You know my mom’s persimmon sauce?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Paul was deep in an article. “New magazinage.” He tapped the cover.

  “Molly loved it. Want some?”

  I stirred the thick sauce in its jar rattling in a pan of boiling water. The sweet carmelly confection hardened on the ice cream.

  “Molly’s right,” he said. “It’s great.”

  Then we began. I turned my head to the side when he kissed, so his mouth reached my ear, making it tingle.

  I stood up naked, after. “We should do this more often. I feel better now. It’s just before.”

  “You always say that.”

  That night, I fell asleep on his chest.

  December 1995.

  After winter break, the news at school was Melissa. Her cancer was back, stage four, in her liver. The moms galvanized; Helen was already planning a blood drive. “It’s bad. Really bad. Harry wants to take a leave of absence, even though the case he’s been working on for three years is finally going to trial. But she wants him to try the case. She says, If I live, I don’t want to have to move out of the house. She’s stopped doing the photo albums, that was her big project she wanted to finish, and now she’s writing letters for each kid to open on their eighteenth birthday.” A tear formed at the corner of her eye. Odd to see someone so determined cry. I couldn’t donate to the blood drive, though, because I’d contracted hep A once on a USIA concert tour in Turkey.

  If I got sick, Paul would hire someone. He’d find the best person he could, from a day of interviews. And here was the thing: I’d want that person. Paul could never sit still at home with me. One day in the kitchen, Lola and I had talked about getting old; I’d asked her what she would do when she retired.

  “Me, I will go back to my place. Here, it is hard. If you do not have money, no one will take care you. If I am strong, I will take care you, but I don’t think so, I will be too old. We are too close the same.” That may have been the first time I ever heard her use a contraction.

  “Maybe I’ll come with you to Tagaytay.”

  “Yes, Claire. You can still write your music. You come there.”

  I’m sure she hadn’t meant that, exactly. But I still held it, like a promise.

  Lola

  IT IS GOOD TO OWN A HOUSE

  For a long time, Judith tried to hide her purchases. She would leave the bags in her car and sneak them in while I slept. So the first I would see was when she wore the blouse or put it on my chair to take to the dry cleaner. But I am the one who empties the trash, where she snipped the tags. Anyway, the price of clothes, I approve. If it will work to find a man who can be father for Laura. My daughters, I would never allow. Soft hair, it is okay. A fine gold chain. But Judith is not the natural age for pairing. And she does not have many advantages. If there is a help she can buy, then we have to pay that. My employer, she watches the weight. The face she cannot change. The thing that bothers me is not her wardrobe. But more than she is paying me, she gives the landlord. At the end, it is not even her house. One day in winter, when Judith comes home, dropping her scripts on the table, a flyer from a real estate agency flutters down, with small dim pictures.

  “Good to buy, Judith. The rent here, it is too expensive.”

  “To buy, we’d have to move. To Mar Vista maybe. Or Beverly-wood.” She sighs.

  I have heard these places. “But it is good to own a house.” I am thinking for Laura. That someday she will be owner of a house.

  Saturday morning we drive, the three of us. In Manila, too, we have graded neighborhoods. Cheska has a house not far from mine in a new development. You see factory chimneys and in the empty lots, just dirt and goats. Still, the way Cheska spreads her shoulders, I detect a flutter—that somewhere, across the world, she owns land.

  But walking through the insides of American houses, there is an air of loss.

  “It is okay,” I say to the best one.

  “Let’s go for breakfast.” When Judith becomes depressed, she will take us to a restaurant. It is how we pretend to have more. Really, that is what restaurants are for. The people who can afford them do not need their spell.

  Laurita sees a pancake with little cubes of canned peach and a swirl of sprayed whipped cream and she reaches for it. Today, we want to match her desire.

  “You know, we don’t have to move. We can just keep doing what we’re doing.”

  “We can move,” I say. This job, it is really different.

  “But what about your friends?”

  “Make new friends.” I shrug.

  Every month we will pay into something, money dropped in a jar. Better to someday own a house in a lower neighborhood than someday own nothing here.

  There is a FOR SALE sign in front of the Castle.

  “Divorce,” Lita says.

  “Your house we will never sell,” I whisper Laura. But every month now I put the postage stamp on the payment to the mortgage company. What if something happened Judith? Tonight, I will have dinner ready when she comes home. We will treat her like a Filipino husband.

  The pager of Lita beeps. My former pupil. From the Christmas leave of Tony, Lucy became pregnant, and now she is pregnant like a queen. Bing is the one to answer the door. Lucy stays on the couch, holding her stomach. “I am worried the baby.”

  In emergency, Lucy goes to the f
ront of the line, because Lita called Alice. She hears the heart, and Alice tells her the pregnancy, it is normal, but still my former pupil rides home in the front facing forward, a hand on her belly. She goes right away to the couch. Bing sits alone on the floor, TV on. And he is old enough now to tell.

  We move into the new house the first week of June. One by one, Laura and I fix the rooms, her in the Snugli with a dry brush, pretending to paint. “We are the ladies of the house,” I tell her. “Later on, we will give party.” Judith buys an electric sander, and I strip every window frame. All July I rush through errands to come home to sand. In August, I put primer and stay up late painting. All the time, I think of a party. We will invite everybody, I tell myself while I work. My weekend employer, it is hard to remember I cried once for that house. At night, I stood outside in the dark. They were more than employers then. Without that, work looks a little dirty. Rain feels cold, not silver. Out of the ground, the sun lifts a smell of rot. Some people experience a great love. When Esperanza was rocking like a cup in a saucer on a table that had been banged, we said, It will not always stay so bad. This is the worst. And the worst cannot last. But Esperanza, until now, she never got over that guy. Not really. She attends night school, to be a teacher, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Those evenings, Beth Martin keeps her daughter.

  But mine turned out to be only ordinary love. I still think about the years I lost forty-seven fifty a day; that is all. In the end, I quit them.

  Williamo, I saw every day, but they always love the parents more. I never wanted to admit that when I was taking care him, and the first year, you really cannot tell. Then at ten, eleven months he cried and cried, and it was only the mother he wanted. You do everything and then, they love someone more. No fair. Just true life.

  But I am the one Laurita wants. With the mom she cries. It is something, to be loved like this.

  I was the one to pick the name, to baptize, to take Laura to the doctor appointments. I told Judith to buy this place.