My Hollywood (7 page)

Lola
HOW I CAME TO HOLLYWOOD

“So how did you find your way to Hollywood?”

That is the story people tell at the house of Ruth.

I came to America because of a flyer. I had heard already about the money from relatives of Lita. The daughter went to university with my eldest. Then I saw the flyer.
JOBS IN AMERICA! MOTHERS, NURSES, COOKS! SEND MONEY HOME. RETIRE RICH IN FIVE YEARS!
I folded the flyer and put it in my purse. At that time, Issa was writing her examinations for medicine.

My port of entry was San Francisco, because Bong Bong had a cousin in Petaluma. When Luz arrived at the lobby of my Chinatown hotel that was a little rancid, she smelled like a mint. All in white, in her red car, she looked like the American Red Cross. I sank into the seat and she drove. They live far outside. You cannot see other houses from that place—they are really alone. The movies we saw in Tagaytay—the Westerns! It is really like that.

Luz and the husband, they have monkeys, parrots, all different birds and snakes. Monkeys I really do not like, very dirty animals, and they made noise all night. There was a taste at the top of my mouth like an infection that did not go away. The guy bumped over the ground in a wheelchair; everything was built for him with wooden ramps. He was very good to the animals. One bird just sat on his shoulder.

I asked our relative, “Was he the same since you know him?”

She nodded.

“That is hard for you.”

“No,” she said. “He is so kind. More than a Filipino guy. Lot of Filipino guys, they are a little mean. He really cares what I am thinking. In my mind.”

But Bong Bong, her cousin, he is not mean.

The next morning, she folded into her red Toyota. She drives one hour and a half every day to be dental hygienist.

I cleaned, first the bathroom, then the kitchen, then I washed myself. By the time the guy woke up, I was raking gray dust that was their front lawn. The ones working there were Spanish, but with their hands they showed me how to work the cages. There was old dirt, because the animals.

“Sit down,” the husband said. “Let’s see if you’ll eat a Denver omelet.”

Now, I can make that. With the heat there, a smell rises—baked dirt, bird poo, and eucalyptus. But in the evening, your arms feel good. We sat on chairs made of aluminum tubes and woven plastic. Made in the Philippines.

So many stars, it seems you are inside that sky.

The guy brought out the magazine where he first saw Luz. Each page showed rows of pictures. Our relative wore a school uniform with a small gold cross.

Then the guy carried out a square box of ice cream; he served it ruffled in bowls. Luz opened a tied folder of his letters. In the first one, he had written
I’m not any girl’s idea of a prince
. He provided a typed sheet of his stocks and bonds and a copy of the deed for the property. He wrote in small, neat numbers what whoever became his wife could afford.

Did he include a picture, I wondered. Who ever sent any but the best picture? Still, our relative is thirty-seven now and prettier than she was in the catalog. Her face became thin. And her clothes look nice, because she is a professional woman.

But I had to find a job. I told them, just a few more days and then I will go south.

The guy had to deliver snakes to the San Jose Zoo, so he drove me to the train station. I called the number on the flyer before but when I arrive, there is nobody. I shouted into the pay telephone. “I am here! Yes! In Bakersfield!” They told me to take a taxi. It is an agency, I thought. The crippled guy had given me a bag of oranges, almonds, dates, and bills of American money that now I used.

The address from the flyer belongs to a pink one-story hotel with a chain-link fence all around. The taxi driver set my suitcase on the pavement. Another taxi waited, with a
tatay
and two daughters from Iloilo, trying to pay their driver in pesos. I gave him the rest my bills. They came to find work too, they said, and the people running this place were distant relatives that they had never met.

Inside, the ones who made the flyer looked at us, then at each other and giggled. The old lady said, since we are all here, they will go out to the movies! We can stay and give the patients their food! And we do not know anything! We have only been there fifteen minutes. The
tatay
does not understand English or Tagalog.

None of the retardeds has a mouth that is right. When the ones who made the flyer left, the retardeds cried. They pulled at us, whimpering.

“What? What is it you want?” The young from Iloilo shouted, every time louder.

Eight retardeds and only four of us. The ones who made the flyer left out cans of soup and packages of frozen hot dogs. And the way the retardeds ate! No one is teaching them. They are each different, one a mongoloid. Only all abnormal. Finally, I discovered by accident what will work. I snapped the TV and they all sat, weak as if it had power on them. We could clean up then; there was food over everything. When we finished they were still watching, tigers in a net, with their hands on their privates. The young from Iloilo went and placed the hands in the pockets. The elder shrieked. “I should do that! She is not yet married.”

“They are asleep,” the young said. “Anyway, I finished medicine already.”

“So you are doctor?”

“Yes, Lola.” Like my Issa will be, I thought. That is how I met Lucy.

The retardeds have dreams. They cry out, wanting their parents. And no family visited, all the time we lived there. The youngest of the ones who made the flyer, he told me the government pays them. But they are not really teaching! And the retardeds can learn. They are docile; before maybe, the ones who made the flyer, they were hitting. I taught the retardeds to dress themselves. Little by little. We spent many days on tying the shoe; the bow Tommy made, it was wobbly, but still a bow. We stayed forty days. The hotel is a pen. The ones who made the flyer, they just keep the money.

“I observe that I am losing weights,” Lucy said.

They were not paying us, just our food. I had headaches trying to think. All around was chain-link fence. The two from Iloilo said they had to go to the Veterans Administration. “None near here,” the old lady snapped. But the
tatay
, he receives a benefit check!

“We will go with you,” the old lady said the next time. Her conclusion.

At night, the distant relatives watched TV, the
tatay
went to sleep, and I talked to Lucy. They took a boat from their place, then a bus, then a jeepney to the airport in Manila.

“Where is your mother?” I asked, because usually it is the mother who will come.

She is still there, running the store. I hug her goodbye, my arms do not go all the way around, she is so fat! She smells like water and sugar
.

Their point of entry was LAX. The bus driver looked in the mirror and said to them, “Chinatown?” In the Philippines, it is better to be Spanish. Here, better Chinese. They found the Veterans Administration Building and brought in their papers, with the decoration of honor from the Second World War. Their family had that frilled ribbon on the wall before these two were born and now, here, they were spending it.

The ones who made the flyer learned right away that Cheska can cook and now every meal, she was the one preparing. I washed the dishes, and I saw the purse of the old lady open. I observed that the payments came in a certain kind of envelope.

“How about if you share that with us too?” I said, over my shoulder, like throwing a thin ball into the air, the one we use with the retardeds in the swimming pool.

The room behind me changed shape; it now had points. I scrubbed. Every chink and ring widened. Then I wiped my hands, turned around, and they were staring. “Because we are working hard. We are new here, we need money.” We did all their work and they partied around, the
tatay
they asked him to bring them pineapple and coconut milk drinks by the pool. That is what they are doing!

The room made a funnel; the old lady the opening. “Not even legal here. We take you in. We could call police, they’d send you out on a jail boat.”

A ring of my head lifted off the top.

“Not legal?” Lucy whispered. “But we registered already.” She kept papers in the purse for novenas hung around her neck.

“You are lucky you have relatives,” the old lady said, the jaw closing. I had made things worse.

Good we know it is a happy ending
, Ruth said, when I first told the story.

The hotel is the shape of a saw; the big end a lobby they changed into a kitchen, the smallest room number 9. The pool makes a saw the opposite way. On the other side of the fence there is another building the same except pale blue, where old people live in bathrobes. I observed, the people who took care—Sri Lankans—they are good. But the olds came right up to the fence and stared. They liked to watch the abnormals.

Then it was a heat wave and the retardeds were all the time in the pool. Every day the ones who made the flyer sat by the side and let the retardeds bob, in life jackets. Like human corks. They get no exercise! That is why they stay fat! I showed Tommy and the twins to hold the side and kick. The ones who made the flyer became wet, where they sat with their drinks. They watched me. They could not hate Cheska; she was making their foods. There was a cake they craved, with almonds and oranges. They let her out to buy ingredients. I told her to get sunblock, too, and we put white zinc on the noses of the retardeds.

“Lola! They are liking my cooking,” Cheska said. She was proud!

The olds next door hung with their fingers in the fence and they got wet from the kicking. The ones who made the flyer did not want that I would teach the retardeds to swim. But if they cannot swim, they should anyway know to float.

“If anything happened,” the younger one told me, the best relative, “the parents could sue. With life jackets, they’re safe.”

“But what if they fall in with no jacket?” Tommy sleepwalked. Three or four times we found him at night rattling the fence.

The best relative shrugged. The old lady controlled all.

The first time I saw Ruth outside the fence, I knew she could save us. A heavy middle-age woman wearing a T-shirt, the hair chop short. She looks like a hundred mothers, back home in the Philippines. She came Sunday morning when we were alone there. The ones who made the flyer locked us in when they left for church; Ruth rattled the gate and said she had heard about us here. Now I know Ruth goes to that place every month. She knows about their flyer. That day, she told us she had jobs, good jobs, one weekends, in a mansion taking care two children and the other an old lady.

“We can do that.” I told Cheska to bring the pineapple-and-coconut-milk tea drink. “We are looking for a place to live.” I went fast because church would be over soon.

The tall glass would not fit underneath the fence so Lucy held it, and Ruth leaned close to drink through a straw. She closed her eyes. “I have room,” she said.

I wanted to leave. I could climb the fence and the sisters too, but not Tatay. A sprinkle of water hit my back. I remembered then, the retardeds. We cannot leave! But if we put them in their rooms, I thought, with the windows open on the top, they will not suffocate. Less than one hour. We will give water.

“One load in the wash, one in the dryer,” Lucy said.

We will leave the wet, I said. I was hauling their huge suitcase when I saw the brown car slide in. It felt I am shot. I dragged my body, a bag of sand.

The ones who made the flyer unlocked the gate.

“So I have given a job to your friends,” Ruth said. “Weekends.”

“And Ruth has been so nice.” I looked down. “She has a place in LA we can rent.”

“But here you don’t have to pay,” the old lady said.

“It is okay,” Lucy said. “We do not like to be charity case, like that.”

The old lady made a sound that is her laugh. “Can pay us, then.”

“Well, we better get going,” Ruth said. “The bus comes at noon.”

I picked up their suitcase and nodded to Cheska. Poor Cheska, she was very confused. The
tatay
was saying, in Cebuano, his wet clothes over there, and Lucy said, “It is okay.” We were almost out the gate; Cheska turned and said, “Thank you, goodbye.”

Then there was a noise. Like an animal, big, but human. It was Tommy running at me, I heard all at once he is shouting “No!” and the word stretched oval. That was his face, what he means. I cannot go and leave him. He spread over his side of the fence, still bellowing as we walk away. We follow Ruth and I heard a splash. Tommy ran and jumped in the pool, wetting the ones who made the flyer and the olds. On the other side of the fence, Sri Lankans stood clapping.

Right away, the first night, Ruth asked, Baby or elderly?

“Wherever I am needed,” I said.

“You wait,” she told me. “We will find for you a full-time.”

Lucy hugged Ruth. She told me she expected her to smell like sugar, like her mother. But Ruth, she really has no smell.

Claire
THE COUPLES’ DATE

Paul and I hadn’t eaten together on a weeknight for more than a year.

“Wanna go out?” he asked on the phone. Usually he left in the morning and came back after it was all done. But apparently Jeff Grant had asked if we were free.

“I told Mooney my grandparents were in town,” Paul said. “But it’s probably okay, don’t you think? I only asked to get out early once before.”

The once before his grandparents really
were
in town. Paul never did this for us—Little Him and me—which was how I thought of myself now. As an “us.” But I liked the idea of the other couple.

I picked clothes in a flurry while Lola fought Will into the bath. “
You
to do it!” he screamed, reaching for me as I tried to blast the blow-dryer onto my bad hair, all three of us in the room, William naked, me shirtless, and Lola dressed. I’d hardly spent any time with him today. I’d driven for an hour to the Colburn School to talk about teaching, and then it was him or a shower. I gave up on blow-drying and stepped into his bath. Lola understood my problems. She did our laundry, but I buried the ruined underwear, in garbage cans in the alley. When I stepped out, she handed me a new package of briefs. “From Chinatown. All cotton. Ten pieces for twenty dollar.”

On our front step, William reached from her arms, screaming as I tripped in my heels, which sank, muddying in the sprinkled lawn, fog winding around my bare legs. You need tights here at night, I guess. And you have to stay on pavement. I walked into the loud, warm restaurant in a jacket with wet hair. My hand went to my head. Did I look okay? That was a question I’d been asking myself for at least a decade. The one thing more intimidating than growing up average with a beautiful mother is growing up average with a beautiful mother in LA.

Piped-in music made a score for my movements. Elton John. I liked it but it was loud. I wouldn’t feel lonely tonight, I thought, sliding into the booth, but I was disappointing Will.

Jeff signaled the waiter to get me a drink. He was good at drinks.

“How’s the mothers’ group?” As a child, I’d been taught to remember something a person said and bring it up the next time.

“Oh, I’ve got to do that. But we’re looking for a nanny. How’d you find Lola?”

“She did it,” Paul said. “She saw her and hired her.”

“At a bus stop,” I said, crossing my arms.

“Wow,” Helen said. “Lucky.”

Then Paul asked Jeff a question about the new head of comedy at Disney and they were off. I was left with her. We sat quiet a minute—two women with hands folded on the table.

“It’s weird isn’t it, having this substitute for you every day?” I said. “I’m not even gay and William has two mommies.”

“Wait a minute,” Paul said, turning, “you’re
not
gay?”

“Well, I would be if it weren’t for …”

“Oh, come on, Claire, we could do it,” Helen said.

Both men looked at us. I felt flattered.

“We should hire
male
nannies,” I said. “See how they’d like being duplicated.”

“Oh, these little boys would love—”

Suddenly, Jeff turned. “Before we do that, you’ll stay home and take care of him.”

“Yes, yes,” she shushed. Their deal was tight. “We’re just joking.”

I looked at Paul. We’d talk about this later. But what was our deal? I wouldn’t have signed the one we lived by, which was that I worried about everything. But I supposed you couldn’t make someone worry fifty-fifty.

“What’re you working at?” Paul asked Helen. She worked! To say I was surprised was an understatement: looking the way she looked was a full-time job.

“She wants to write,” her husband said. “And she’s talented.”

“What’re you writing?”

“Poems, mostly. There’s a contest. A poet I really love is judging this year. Sharon Olds.”

So many women here said they were artists. A surgeon didn’t have to contend with other mothers at dinner saying that they were actually surgeons too.

I was out of practice. Paul asked Jeff how he’d come out here. The waiter came to take our orders.

“Guess I called back some Hollywood guy who’d left a message,” Jeff said. “I think her getting pregnant did it. My dad was a pharmacist who’d always wanted to be a chemist. ‘A real scientist,’ he used to say. But he never went back to school because he had the two kids and the house and the wife and …” His hand finished the sentence.

“The life,” I said.

“Yeah. Exactly. The life.” He nodded. “A quiet guy. Bald by the time he was thirty. My mom gave the color.”

“A beauty,” Helen said.

“She says that ’cause they look alike,” Jeff told us.

“You know, in
The Dayton Widow
, I thought Aleph Sargent reminded me of you,” Paul said. “Is that why you had her dye her hair?”

“Does your father still have his pharmacy?” I asked.

“He killed himself when I was sixteen. A bad investment.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Paul’s head turned down. What could you say?

“Jeff was the last person to talk to him,” Helen said. “That’s what his next movie’s about. A comedy.”

“Well, that’s backstory. My father killed himself in April, and we were supposed to go on a safari that August. A nonrefundable safari. So my mother decides, here’s where the comedy comes in, we’re going anyway. And because we had an extra ticket now, she invites my aunt Bette, who’s an agent at the county airport but who’s never left the state of Ohio. She weighs a hundred and ninety pounds.”

“You’re kidding,” Paul said. “This is really your movie? Does your mother know?”

“She’ll be okay with it.”

“His success matters more to her than privacy,” Helen said.

“That wouldn’t be true of your mother,” I said to Paul.

“My mother’s
completely
open to hagiography,” he said.

“I wonder what they’ll think of us, when they’re grown up,” I said. “Sometimes I wish I could be a different mother.”

Helen shook her head. “But no one would trade their mother. Think. Would you?”

I didn’t answer. I would have, of course I would have, but not for me, for her. We’d once driven to a place far from everything I knew. The vast grounds bordered in lilac; inside, the polished halls seemed peaceful and forbidding. Nuns put my mother in a wheelchair, fitted a blanket on her lap. She seemed different, grateful for her release. From responsibility for me? From walking? From all of it, I thought. “You’ll miss me at first. But then,” she’d said, looking up at the high windows, “you’ll get used to it.”

“I will not,” I blubbered.

“You’ll go to school still, you’ll live with Gramma.”

I could see relief seep into her. When the nun pushed the two horns at the back of her chair, she clasped the metal armrests and closed her eyes.

My mother’s best friend, Julie, whom all of a sudden I didn’t know that well, tried to hold my hand. That failing, she got me by the wrist.

“Aleph says she’ll do Aunt Bette, but she has to gain fifty pounds and she’s balking on that. We’re negotiating. She’ll put on twenty. I’m toying with the idea that she ends up staying in Africa, and when the guy goes back, grown up, with his kid, she’s still there. Incorporated in a tribe. I want the kid to be blind or deaf or something.”

“This is a comedy?” Paul said.

“Autistic. We were thinking autistic,” Helen said.

“Seriously, I think it could be funny. Do you see it?” Was Jeff Grant asking Paul to work with him? I wanted to make Paul sit up straight. I kicked him under the table.

He looked at me with alarm. “I can see it.”

“Oh, and if you get off the Jeep? On the Serengeti Plain, the animals’ll eat you. So there’s a suspense element.”

The waiter refilled our glasses. When Helen excused herself to the ladies’ room, I followed. “We have real love,” she said, at the sinks, “a passion.”

Maybe you do, I thought, but I couldn’t imagine
him
saying that. “That’s good,” I mumbled, rinsing my hands.

“Great dress,” Paul said to her when we returned.

If I’d brought it home, he’d have checked the price. And should he be commenting on the other wife’s
dress?
But we hadn’t been out for a long time. I was out of practice.

“Target,” Helen said, with a smile of accomplishment.

The shoes, the bag—
they
weren’t from Target. She didn’t
shop
at Target. She shopped at Barneys and dipped into Target for an offbeat trophy.

Helen appreciated Paul’s attention, but she wouldn’t have traded.

I might, I thought. Then I reminded myself to be grateful.

She started talking about pregnancy. She said she’d religiously practiced Kegels. “Lot of good they did me.” Most of what she talked about meant sex. She had an easy laugh.

I said that I’d thrown up. She said she tried to eat only sheer proteins and fruit. She didn’t really worry about the baby. They were on the same side, the baby and her. The Keeping Him side, I thought. The conversation was breaking down, as couples’ conversations did. I wanted to be in the other one.

Pregnant, I’d felt like a child bundled in a stiff coat, sitting in the backseat of a car being driven somewhere, wheels underneath spinning, the world outside reeling by, the sky so big, and me just along.

“Even though we did this thing together, all of a sudden I was the one changed.”

“I hated that! What about fifty-fifty!” This was a conversation I could manage. I went days without talking to an English-speaking adult. Now I wished I’d ordered the salad the waiter was placing before Helen.

“My feet got fat. I had to buy all new shoes,” she said.

“My grandmother owned a bakery,” I said, “and she was heavy, so she concentrated her beauty efforts on her feet. She had crocodile pumps, velvets, satins. But she had tiny feet. Size five. We had to throw those out when she died, each shoe in its own felt bag. Lola found out after and said,
But I have small feet also!
She lifted her foot up. She still thinks about those shoes.” I told that story to wrench us all back into one conversation. I thought I could do the Filipina accent. I heard Lola’s voice all day long.

“I wanted a 1964 birth,” Helen said, “including the trip to the beauty shop. But this one insisted on watching.”

It had never occurred to me that Paul shouldn’t see.

“And hers was a doozy,” Jeff said.

“I expected to be a natural at it,” she said. “Well, I wasn’t.” She’d probably been a girl whose ideas about growing up concerned dresses, a girl who loved pink. But birth was ugly: blood, shit, and noises. “I wasn’t good at it.”

“Good at it?” I interjected. “Just doing it was enough for me.” Pain smeared everywhere, brown handprints on the walls. Not for one minute did I doubt that they could get the baby out, if they really tried. This was a hospital in America. In 1991.

“And then when he was born, I looked down at him and thought, Who are you?” She said, “I was waiting for that rush of love. For me that didn’t come till later.”

“She woke up and asked,
Did I have an episiotomy?
” Jeff said.

We laughed. Just then the waiter brought our dinners, setting down warm plates. Couples discussed birth, I thought, watching Jeff tear into his trout, as if it weren’t our bodies. Paul waited, politely, as his mother had taught him to, until the hostess took her first bite. But who was the hostess in a restaurant?

The time just after William’s birth, I was a scarecrow, stitched together. I knew my body was broken. I turned to the window and understood landscapes. They were seen from the dead. I recognized the world without me, still beautiful, more. I understood resignation that day and wanted to make some structure of pain, natural but fantastic, like the palaces of bees. “He’s a redhead,” someone remarked in the distance, in what sounded like an office party ending. Little Squib. I thought, He’s funny looking, red and chinless, not cute, his hair pilly. But I loved him, oh, I loved him.

“How was it for you?” Jeff reached an arm across the table and touched my elbow, that small tunnel between bones. “How is it being a mother and one of the real composers of our generation?”

“Most of the time I don’t feel like either.” I shrugged. “My office here is hot. I fall asleep.”

“Do you have any concerts coming up? We want to go.”

I mumbled that I had something in Detroit next year.

“She has a symphony in New York the year after,” Paul said.

“You ever think of film scoring?” Jeff asked.

“She’s got her hands full.”

“I’d do it. Sure. It was good enough for Aaron Copland. And I’m one of the people who likes
Koyaanisqatsi.”
I shrugged. “No one’s asked.”

We’d come in four cars, and I stood, waiting for the valet. I used to eat like this all the time, I thought, holding my stomach the way I had pregnant. It felt like my intenstines might fall out. I’d thought, ordering, Why not! This was a rare night. I wanted to feel young. I guess I couldn’t do that, anymore. I felt a trickle down my leg, tickling my knee. I tried to tell Paul later. He listened, nodding solemnly.

“Now that we have Lola, you should see that doctor again.”

I had. Nerve damage, he’d said. That was it. Done. Gone. Thirty-eight years old. The odd thing about bad news is the humiliation. You feel ashamed to be less. They sent me off with a box of Citrucel, a package of adult diapers, and the rest of my life.

My headlights swung into our drive and I rushed from my car into Will’s room. He lay sleeping, hands on his stomach. I watched him, listening to his breath.

He was little. He didn’t know yet that I leaked.