My Hollywood (8 page)

Lola
THE AMERICAN SEX KIND OF LOVE

I take Williamo to the post office, seal the envelope, and send my money home. Four hundred fifty this week. A ticker tape of dollars runs now all the time in my head. Last year, I totaled more than twenty thousand—in pesos, three times what Bong Bong earns, and he is executive Hallmark. This year it will be more because my weekend job. Besides what I send, I give myself allowance of five dollars for daily spending. Twenty five go to my private savings, so when I return home there will be some they did not know. Also, I need my account here for shoes or treats for Williamo or if one of the babysitters gets married. When you are working seven days, you need some your own money. And I tell Williamo, Every day, Lola requires her coffee. Is twenty-five thousand ninety dollars enough to support a coffee habit on Montana Avenue? Lola is not a yuppie. I am here to pay tuitions and medicine, in our country that goes ten years.

When we enter the house, the mother of Claire and her friend Tom are there. Tom says, “Two years ago, no one paid more than fifty cents for a cup of coffee! Now they’re all spending five dollars a day! That’s a five hundred percent increase.” The mother of Claire goes every day to the coffee shop. But Tom, he will not attend.

“But-ah, I get the plain. Only one fifty. Plus they give the sugar we use to make the cinnamon toast.” I lift a handful of natural-sugar packs from my pocket.

“Coffee costs them cents, Lola!
Cents!
”

Does he think I am spending the money of Claire and Paul? Compared with other parents here my employers they are not rich, but they are still rich to me. You have to pay what it costs where you live to join the club of life. Anyway, my weekend employer makes my coffee for me.

I leave on the counter the receipt for tapioca and the change.

Walking to my weekend house, I hear my heart. Tops of planted grains tick my hands. Sprinklers spray a chain on my wrist. From a long time ago, I remember the strangeness that comes with hope. Love, the way I have known it—it is also dread. I move slower when I see the house. My happiest moments are before. When I first married Bong Bong, I felt afraid he would die. Then, after my children, I worried they would die. I still had long hair, like my daughters now. And every night, Bong Bong worked on my neck. “Time to work on your neck,” he said. He made it a project, not a favor from him to me. He likes to turn his gifts invisible. Credit, the way children want, it would embarrass him. I lay down on the hard bed. He held my head on his knees. All those years, he never missed one night. He would start by extracting the sticks that kept up my hair. I felt the tug and loosening.

What my weekend employers want that they do not have is me. I try to keep this light in the air. When I sit on the floor playing with Bing, Helen brings me a pale green mug, steaming, the taste of something sweet and burnt.

“Drink it now, Lola. Tonight, when Jeff gets home, we’re taking you out.”

The doorbell rings. Estelle, the mother of Helen, arrives to babysit. Why?

“But I am the babysitter,” I say. “I will be the one to stay home.”

“We want to take you.”

“Three is a crowd,” I say.

Helen tries to push me into the front, but I climb next to the car seat.

The restaurant it is all couples. Small candles on the tables and no children; I am not comfortable wearing my secondhand T-shirt that says
HARD ROCK CAFE
. Here, I never attend restaurants in the night. It is all going very slow.

I am looking around that no one will see us.

“Her sea bass is very good,” Helen says. “And people say she does a great steak.”

Employers and employees do not sit together at restaurants. I never once took my helper out to eat. She would have been embarrassed in a Manila restaurant. With the other babysitters I am the one to talk. But here, it moves too slow.

“How are your children?” Helen asks, while Jeff finally orders his food.

I say all I want is soup. I am sounding like Vicky, but he tells me he is going to order me a steak, because I never get meat at their house.

“Fine,” I say. “My kids they are good.”

They tell me stories about Vicky. It is true, Vicky is not a good babysitter. I would never hire her for my kids. Maybe at this one thing, I am best.

“She still doesn’t talk to us,” Helen says. “I don’t think she ever really liked us.”

“At the playclub Vicky is
dal-dal.”
Actually, she is tomboy, what here they call lesbian. She likes the mother of Bing. It is the dad she complains. “No, Vicky likes you,” I say.

At last, our food arrives and I keep my hands on my lap. The steak it is many pounds. Enough for the whole family of Lola.

Then we eat, quiet. The guy, he is serious, deboning his fish. He finally puts down his knife. “Lola,” he says. “We’re going to fire Vicky.”

This is so fast, skidding, too soon something will be over. “But-ah, Vicky is nice” is all I can think to say. I have heard about proposals like this: professional parents go to the park to find a nanny and offer her double her salary. Maybe it is true for love also, what you see in the movies. I never believed those things before because they did not happen to me. My grandmother once saw the Virgin. The Virgin sat down, moving her robe to smooth it out, when my grandmother took her lunch at the school. The robe was blue cotton, not velvet, a brighter blue than she had always pictured it, my grandmother said.

I tell my daughters,
Do not trust roses; they will stink one week in the jar
. Maybe I have been wrong!

But Vicky was good for me, I never minded Vicky. They like me better and that will never change. With someone new, who knows?

“Helen tells me they’re paying you fifty-five dollars.” He pauses, napkining his mouth.

They do not know my raise. I am now sixty-two fifty.

“I just signed contracts for two projects. We could start you at one hundred.”

One hundred dollars a day! Like Lita. Maybe the things I heard before—even the man in the Castle marrying the baby nurse—maybe they all come true. It feels like The End. Darkness eats in from the edges. I think of the carmelly coffee, fine silt at the bottom.

“But I will have to think,” I say.

They look at each other. It seems they were expecting me to jump.

“Tell us, Lola, if there’s anything we can do. Because we really want to have you.”

He leans over. “Would a hundred and ten make a difference?”

I say no to dessert. Outside the restaurant the sky is dark blue. They tell me I can take the night off.

“You could catch a movie.” He looks at his watch. “It’s only eight-thirty.”

Helen touches my wrist. “Either way, still friends?”

I am carrying a small heavy bag—my steak. “More than friends. You are my weekend employers.”

They laugh. For them that is a joke. For me it is not funny. If I say no, what if the person they get wants seven days? One hundred ten dollars a day! The last few minutes in the restaurant, they upped me fifty a week! More than my year raise from Claire and him. After six months, Claire raised me five dollars a day and again when he turned two, seven-fifty. I walk around the dark neighborhood, past houses where I know children, entering a room of jasmine and a smell of pepper. After one more year, Williamo he will start in the school.

I always work for free the day of his birthday and the one before. For their wedding anniversary, I give a weekend. I throw in the Friday night. And they celebrate the anniversary of my coming by raising me. So when Williamo turned two, that is when I became sixty-two fifty. Some of my friends get more, but their employers, they are rich. Also, if Claire asks me to work late, she will pay extra. Many here pay one price for live-in. No matter what you have to do. I always say to them, “As long as I am needed.”

But $110 every day! Five days or seven. Up to me. That is $770 a week instead of $482.50. Per year, an extra $14,950. My God. I think I have to take that. Plus in that house, I will have my coffee made every day. That is $416 saved. Helen is young. They will want more kids. Maybe two more. This is a good job for a long time.

I walk all the way to the ocean to say good morning to the Philippines.

I live Sunday in this life. There is a light wind, teasing. The sky you can see through to ships far away at sea. We sit in Starbucks, Bing asleep in his stroller, and I write my letter home.
This one a toddler, very easy. I do not have to clean. My career in America it is up
. For the first time, I keep my numbers private. They will guess a raise, but not this big.

I need another international stamp. Tomorrow morning I will walk Williamo to the post office. Those machines take pennies. I will have to find things to stack so he can reach the slot. On the stamps are pictures. I know from Bong Bong, that is the job of someone to draw. But a needle starts in my heel; sand scratches my mouth, opening a bad taste. I pray for a hint. I never asked for too much, from Bong Bong, from the teachers of my children, even from God. If you ask for only a little, maybe then the answer it will be yes.

As I come into the weekday house, Claire shouts, “Lola, we’re in here.” Her arms cross. Williamo looks the way he looks when he gets bad, his face the shape of a box. This is my sign. My heart slopes.

“Do not worry,” I whisper. “Your Lola will not leave you.”

Monday morning at six, I hand my weekend employer his newspaper. “I cannot leave Williamo yet. Maybe I will be the one to raise your next baby.”

“Oh, okay,” he says, scratching the back of his head.

“Williamo is almost the age he will no longer need. One or two years more only. I will bring to you Inday to fill in until I come.”

“Okay, great, anybody you know, I’m sure Helen’d be glad to meet.”

Helen stands here now, too, holding a sweater over her nightie. “But you’ll still come weekends?”

“As long as I am needed.”

Forty-seven dollars and fifty cents poorer, I want coffee. I fix Williamo his breakfast and take him to church. He is now old enough, I will teach him to pray. Pain shoots up my knees the shape of star fruit; this is a feeling I have known all my life, lowering myself in a high place. I understood after I married Bong Bong I would never have a love affair. This is the closest I came and see, I did not. I never wish for a different husband. In America, people make second marriages. Many women on our street, they are second wives. For me, a second marriage would be, I had a broken life. It is not that I think Bong Bong is the only guy in the world I could get along with. But he is the one, we had our children. Does that mean a Catholic can make herself happy with anyone? A good Catholic would say yes. An American would ask, But what about chemistry?

“Williamo, you light a candle.” I count out fifty pennies for him to put in the offertory.

He knows to whisper in the church. “Can I make a wish?”

“It is not that kind of candle. Watch.” I hold my letter to the flame and burn my written present home. A wafer of ash floats up and then lands, the last of it.

“I want to blow it out.”

“Here you ask your prayer and let the candle burn.” You already have your wish. I almost left. No more Lola. Now I can never tell Bong Bong. They will not understand. They would say,
Take the hundred ten dollars
. I have cried already from this house too many times Wolf.

“What is
Pax Deus
?”

“You read that?” Not yet three years old. Another sign.

There is no longer a letter, but I bring Williamo to the post office. We stay for a long time choosing stamps. In the bottom of the stroller I keep our rolled pennies. I am in the mood to spend. We go to the Discovery Store and pay the whole rest to get the globe. The counting takes us almost twenty minutes.

Every Monday, some babysitters meet at the Brentwood Country Mart. Today I play a trick. “I am getting coffee. Does anyone want?”

“Mmm, yes, please, a latte. Large.” Lita looks down. Esperanza says,
“Sí
, cappuccino,
gracias.”
Mai-ling asks for a tea. But Vicky says she has already eaten, like I knew she would. Every week Vicky drinks only water from the fountain and says she has already eaten. Well, if you know you will meet friends, why you eat before? Vicky sends only to her mother. I have five kids. But Bong Bong understands, I have to live too where I am.

But the joke is on Vicky. When Lita hands to me her dollars, Mai-ling her coins, and Esperanza stands to pull a bill out of her tight jeans pocket, I say, “No, our treat. Come, Williamo. We will count the pennies.” The price of coffee, it is a tax. The restaurants here, they cost too much, and the dress shops, but we can still afford coffee or a fries. Some-a-day at the end, when my kids work in offices with their diplomas and I sit in my house, with my cabinet full of glass, I will talk about my life in Hollywood, and the locations for my stories they will be Starbucks, McDonalds, and the Brentwood Country Mart, where we talked, holding children on our laps. I can say I drank the hot hot coffee I liked every day and never once spilled on my boy. You need to have every day in your life a small treat.

“They want us,” Lita whispers, “because they are having problems their kids.”

American children are different because their parents work far away at things they cannot understand. We were always working too. But even children understand money.

“You can never hit them,” Mai-ling says. “If you hit them, they will call police!”

“Our kids, they are good.” But I am not sure we can make these kids the same. Williamo sits, stacking pennies, attracted to everything he should not hear. “The boy of my brother was giving them trouble. So they hang him in a jute bag from a banyan tree and when it become night, they cut him down. They are not having problem with him anymore.”

“What is jute?” Williamo asks.

“It is what they wrap on roots of plants. What you here call burlap.” I write down for Esperanza six words and Williamo draws the pictures. Every week we trade: six napkins English for six napkins Spanish.
La Mariposa
. She marks a butterfly.
La Estrella. La Flor
. Words of the day. We chant for the kids too, but after a few words they run. I learned English in grade 1, but my real voice it is Tagalog. Here, people shout at me in Spanish, louder each time I do not answer. I have memorized sentences, present tense and also simple past. I have learned by heart two poems. But while I work to learn Spanish, my English grows tall without anything. I tell Esperanza, I will make her honorary Filipina. Now we hear the faint music of the ice-cream truck and follow the kids, searching our pockets for dimes. They bend into the cool cavern coming up with cones and Popsicles, bunnies and ducks in colors that stain the face.