My Hollywood Read online

  But Paul had to go. His first ten weeks were up, and they decided to give him another ten-week trial.

  I began trolling parks. I set up interviews in coffee shops. My generation’s adultery, I thought, scanning the tables for the one dark head among blondes.

  I found Lola sitting on a bench and hired her, without references. I liked the way she looked. She was small, dark, well joined.

  The next morning in bed, I told Paul.

  “Whoa, slow down.”

  “I already did it.”

  He stilled his head, blinking. “A person likes a little stability in his life.”

  “Then you work at home and worry all day.”

  “So what do you want to tell this one?”

  I fired the twelfth woman. It turned out to be remarkably easy. I gave her money; she nodded and left.

  I’d always wanted to do no harm. That was my banister. In my twenties, leaving my temp job, which I faithfully attended, I walked in the pedestrian stream. Like all those others (black tights, slitted coattails), I made a living. If I tried to do more and failed, at least I would leave the world as I’d found it. But now I had a fresh boy, who took every imprint, however faint. I feared that my invisible soul could harm him.

  I knew my deficiencies and so I selected a supplement. I hired a happy nanny.

  “I prefer a mother who works,” Lola told me. “Because then I can have the friends of Williamo to the house.”

  “You’re hired,” I said.

  “When will you be needing me?”

  “Today.”

  When Paul first told me he wanted to write television comedy, I’d been surprised. That’s your dream? I thought. It didn’t seem big enough for a dream.

  “Yup. I really think I coulda done it.”

  “I bet you still can.” He knew guys from college who made four hundred thousand dollars a year. Those little cartoon people? I used my thumb and forefinger. I hadn’t known such a thing even required writers. But I could see in his face, this was an ardent wish. Before, even with his sharp features, there’d been something undefined. Work still meant the true great thing to me; I wasn’t old enough yet to know people whose dreams had wrecked them. I only gleaned the wistfulness of those who’d quit.

  My tenderness for his hope must have been what Paul saw in me. His dream might have set other young women’s jaws, at a time they wished to furnish a nursery. When Paul got the offer in California, I’d said, Let’s go.

  “That show about the hunchback who lives with his father?” my producer asked.

  “Yes.” I nodded solemnly, trying to be a wife.

  The group I’d written most of my music for recorded in New York City. Only my mother was in LA. Doctors had called me in the past. Hospitals. Is this the daughter of …

  My life or hers, I’d thought. Each time.

  I’d chosen mine.

  But now we took slow strolls with her friend Tom, an ex-Jesuit who led garden tours for white-haired ladies and the occasional still-extant husband. My doorbell rang midafternoon, and there the two of them stood, seeming surprised I didn’t expect them. At seventy, my mother maintained a policy of wearing only one color at a time. She had a strict philosophy about jewelry too. I saw Tom several times a week those first years back in California, and from what I could tell, he always wore the same clean khakis, the same shoes, and the same striped shirt. I asked my mother about this once and she made a face. “Oh, he buys five of everything,” she said.

  “I hate to shop,” he mumbled.

  As we walked, Tom pointed out plants, saying their Latin names. Platanus rasemosa. Miscanthus Gracillimus. Lavandula Goodwin Creek.

  My mother tripped. She wore three-inch heels, matching her pantsuit.

  Willie, in the stroller, fell asleep.

  “I just don’t think they’re going to renew me.”

  “Why not?” I didn’t stop to think—maybe that would be better, for us.

  “I pitched ten, twelve jokes and they used one yesterday. One. Claire, I know I’m funny, but I’m just not funny in there.”

  “But you are funny. You really are.” Every time we went out to dinner with our friends in New York, he’d set the table laughing. But we didn’t go out to dinner here.

  When Will woke screaming, I brought him back to the bed to breast-feed. He fell asleep between us. It was too late for sex even to be an issue. But it was, anyway, sort of, a wave above us in the air.

  “You know,” Paul said, one morning, “I really can’t take having him in the bed. I don’t sleep.”

  “I’m tired too.” It had been more than a hundred nights since I’d slept.

  I wanted Will with us. He could turn over and nurse without fully waking. But Paul worried about rolling over Will in his sleep.

  “We should use some of that pumped milk and let her take him in her room. You need some rest too,” he said.

  “He eats three times. We can’t ask her to do that.”

  Paul promised to feed Will at 5:00 a.m.

  That night we gave him to Lola and we slept.

  Lola

  I WAS DISCOVERED

  Lana Turner they discovered at the Schraft counter, me on a bench for the Wilshire bus. Claire hired me for nanny, live-in, without even asking a reference. When I first came the house, I was surprised, because it is small small. Normal touches a mother would do, I did not see here. Pictures, they left just leaning against the walls. The livingroom looked like a school, books everywhere and a telescope by the front window. Good, I thought, Lola will learn.

  But the first day, I found my employer crying by the heating grate. She was trying to breast-feed and she had very little. Maybe she is too old, I thought. My uncle in Visayas keeps cows and after four, five years, they will not anymore milk. My employer married late. Accomplished does not matter so much for a woman. Unless you are a movie star. I told her, It is okay, you cry. But when your tears dry, you will see, your baby he is very healthy.

  In the Philippines, what we do is make a soup of bones and then you will have plenty milk. That first day I took the baby in the Snugli and walked to the market to get a chicken, but really it should be the bones of a goat. The nipples of Claire had cracks that oozed, already infected. I applied hot compress. Still, she wanted to keep going. That night, she sprang up every time Williamo cried and let him suck. Then, even after she fed him, he drank a full bottle. One of five in the freezer.

  “I’m trying to save up,” she told me, in the morning.

  After she fed him, she stood at a pump. This was the first time I ever saw that and in twenty, twenty-five minutes, all that came out was two ounces. I called Ruth, my teacher of America. At the time the daughter of Ruth, Natalie, had her baby, she stapled up signs to sell vegetarian breast milk. I asked if I could buy anywhere, but Ruth said Natalie did not know. With my youngest, I did not have enough either. I was working too hard. Issa complains that is why she is short. Only the height of me.

  I asked Claire. “Do you want that I buy formula?”

  She looked at me a way I could tell I had done the first thing wrong.

  “No formula, Lola. He can’t have anything but breast milk. Not even water.”

  Formula, it is like poison to them here. For us, it was only too expensive. “Me, I did not use either.”

  “That’s probably why your kids are healthy.”

  But this baby, he cry a lot. Maybe he is hungry; but I am not allowed to give anything. I stayed up thinking this riddle.

  Paul, when he came home at midnight, dropped keys. Through the wedge open to his bedroom, his wife slept, her face a small cameo above the cover. He looked at the closed door to Williamo. “Do you need anything?” he asked. At this time, I liked the father of Williamo: it was easy to see the coiled terror inside.

  “I will be the one. Save your energy. Later on, a boy will need his tatay.”

  They paid me two hundred and fifty a week.

  I was sending home money. She was saving milk. We
measured ourselves by ounces in the freezer. She wanted enough to feed him while she went away. She pumped at seven in the morning, again after lunch, then before bed, but at that time she did not milk even one full ounce. And what we gained in the day, we spent at night. In the early hours, his cries shrieked wild; she and I walked him in the hallway, the bedroom closed so Paul could sleep. At that time they would have paid anything for this baby to be quiet.

  A week before her trip I calculated: we would never have enough.

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” she said. “Can you come? Of course, I’d pay you extra.”

  I was working then weekends for my old lady, but Ruth gave me one from Iloilo to fill in.

  I packed the pump in my suitcase. We brought two frozen bottles. All. But even nursing, Williamo cried on the plane.

  “My nipples hurt,” she whispered. I had something for pain, made from monkey gland, but it was back in my place.

  Halfway across the country, I had to ask the stewardess for hot water, to warm one bottle.

  New York, it is more cold than the Philippines ever. My jacket it is too thin. My employer unzips her suitcase to give me one of hers. I put Williamo in the Snugli underneath. A line of wind comes from the crack where the door fits into the taxi; we bump; the car is old, like cars in the Philippines. The New York sky is a way I never saw before. Still, forever-looking, as if the clouds had frozen.

  And the hotel, it is not so good. I do not want Williamo on the carpet. All of a sudden, I am missing the guy. Paul would not let this be half clean. The baby cries.

  “I’ve been feeding you the last five hours!”

  “But there is no.” I touch her breast, an empty flap. I run water in the sink to warm the last bottle.

  Then, the husband calls. I am the one to answer. Williamo cries and cries.

  “Lola, what’s wrong?”

  “I do not know. Maybe he is hungry. And outside it is very cold.”

  “Put Claire on,” he says.

  Her leg bounces as she talks. Williamo screams, so she lifts her shirt and reaches for him, but he yanks the head away. I hear the voice yelling out the small holes. “You have to feed him! Send her out to buy a box of formula. You can’t let our baby starve, Claire.”

  I check the bottle bobbing in the sink. Just right. I give to him and he quiets, dream eyed, sucking steady as a bobbin. Then he falls asleep and I set him on the bed. “Do you want that I will go the store?”

  She tells me her friend Lil, who lives here, sent us five bottles.

  “Through the U.S. mail?”

  “Messengered,” she says.

  “When it will arrive?”

  “Before I go.” She nods at him. “I feel like a nap too.” My employer undresses in front of me. I pretend to be busy with our suitcase. Then I set up the travel crib.

  She sleeps through the phone ringing. “A messenger here,” the voice says. “Would you like the bottles in your room, for the minibar?” Or, he says they can send up one and keep the rest. They will bring when we need. Day or night.

  A knock at the door; a man carries a tray over his shoulder with a doily, a vase with one small pink rose, and the bottle of milk.

  I set the room straight. A pout of steam comes from the radiator and my two sleepers breathe. I make a changing place on the dresser, stack the diapers. I hang the dress of my employer, line her creams on the counter. I unpack our suitcase, put together the parts of the pump. Then I sit by the window, the right temperature at last. Outside, I see rooftops. At the corner, yellow flowers in buckets look like a picture of somewhere old. Then Paul calls again.

  I tell him they are both asleep and ask if I should wake Claire.

  “Nah, let her rest. But Lola, listen, if you’re at all worried, you go buy a can of formula.”

  “But-ah, the mother told me not to give.”

  “She’s a new mother. The doctor said to breast-feed and she wants to do everything right. Just don’t tell her.”

  “But Lil, the friend of Claire, she sent. We have now five bottle.”

  “Okay, good then. No problem.”

  At four o’clock, I wake my employer. She takes her shower, dries the hair.

  “Should I pump or should we wake him?” she calls from the bathroom, where I have the pump plugged in, clean tubes fitted on.

  “It is okay. We have a bottle here, more downstairs.”

  I zip her back, then Williamo wakes, so she steps out the dress again to nurse, a blanket over her. Now when we have in the minibar, Claire milks too.

  When she is walking out the door, he reaches for her, the face crumples. “Lola, why don’t you just come,” she says. “But bring the bottle. Bring two.”

  So we stand in the freezing air that cuts. Before, she said I could order food that would come to the room on a tray, with a doily and a rose. I could have watched the TV. Now, what will I eat?

  Cookies. That is all they have in the Before Room. The other ladies, like Claire, they wear long dresses. I am just in my jeans. Williamo, too, I did not have time to change. Claire stands by the stage curtain and he starts fussing. I tell her, “Do not worry.” I have warming in the sink one full bottle, with a layer of cream. More than eight ounces. I doubt the breasts of Claire ever made that much.

  Then I sit to feed. I hold the bottle the way we do, at a slant, test a drop on my wrist. A little hot. I wait a minute, shake. He opens the mouth, closes his eyes, sucks, then he stops, yanks the head. I test the temperature again, push the nipple toward him. He twists the head, the back arches and he starts to cry. He knows: this is not the milk of his mother. I try one more time but he will not take.

  “I am impressed,” I say. He screams. I push him around the back the auditorium. From here, he can still see his mother on the stage.

  The audience almost all has gray hair. Silver. Women majority. Many in blue jeans. Like me.

  I hear the musicians tuning. I attended a concert once before. My father took us to hear the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra. The audience there wore hats and gloves. On top the stage, three words: KATOTOHANAN, KAGANDAHAN, KABUTIHAN. I see Claire, in the distance, standing with her back to us. Williamo still screams and I walk back and forth, back and forth, between the open doors, patting him. Usually, when they arch like this, it is gas, but I cannot get the burp. The screams go up and down. “So you are singing along.”

  I am thinking what Paul said, if I should buy formula. But I do not know where. If I go out the auditorium, maybe there will be gangs. Still, at the intermission, people push through the doors. We step too into frozen air. At the corner store, with fruits outside, I ask if they have formula and buy with my own money, but as I am getting the change, I think, He has never had formula. If he can tell the milk of another mother, maybe he will not take. But I already paid.

  When the music starts again, we go to the Ladies. I empty a bottle, rinse, put in the formula, and stand running it under the hot water. He is watching me.

  I sit on the floor just outside the auditorium. At first he sniffs, turns the head. Instruments, they are tuning again. Maybe he is tired. Claire told me after the intermission, they will play the music she made up. Far away, on the stage, she leans over the stand, her arms begging.

  “This is your mother’s song,” I whisper.

  I push the nipple between closed lips, squeeze a drop onto the gums. He lets it in, then sips. A little more he drinks, fusses, squirmy. Turns away, then comes back. A little more again he drinks. I stand now walking with him.

  There is a melody I think I have heard before, a scrap, very pretty and sad. I lose the thread when he fusses, I pat-pat, and there, now I get the burp, a big one, loud; and after, the bottle settles, loose in his mouth. He looks like a little drunk.

  After a while, it comes again, that small melody. This time it makes me think of my grandmother sitting, her hands on a velvet lap. Before I came here, my family visited Antipolo, the church of the Black Madonna. In the Philippines, we go there, be
fore we travel overseas. For good voyage. Emigrants, foreign workers, you see many families, because usually it is the mother who will go. That is where I heard sounds like this before. Music that floats from somewhere you cannot see.

  Then there is a thunder. Applause. At first it sounds like rain on the roof. But people rustle, gathering bags, and they are coming outside.

  Williamo, now he is finally asleep. In the cab, Claire touches his cheek. All of a sudden, I remember: the formula.

  Do I have to tell? I cannot. She might fire me.

  The next morning, Claire has to teach at a symposium, but we stay in the room. I hold him at the window to watch her go. A car comes and a woman helps her put in the cello; but the car it is very old. There is a piece of the fender tied on with a rope.

  Alone, I can give him formula. He drinks one and a half, almost two bottles. Good: he will be full for the plane.

  I pack everything to bring downstairs. As I fit the clean clothes in the bag of Claire, I see a check, typed, from the concert hall. The envelope, it is ripped open already, but the amount is wrong: one thousand U.S. dollars. Another check from Yale University. This one for two hundred.

  That does not make sense. I know what she is paying me. She told me one hundred extra each day for three days. I get out my airline ticket. On the bottom, the price says six hundred eighty-five and forty cents. What I earn from this trip will be more than she gets.

  I put Williamo in the stroller still adding. I unpack her bag again to see if there is another check. Only clothes. A mystery. She is doing this for something else. It does not pay.

  Me, I work for money. I haul the suitcase, thinking, I will call home tomorrow. My husband tells me Issa, she is complaining. But what does she have to complain? We pay her tuition; all she has to do is study. She is saying too she does not want to work for money only.

  If I were very good I would say to Claire, It is okay. You do not have to pay the extra if you make so little profit.

  I have one bottle formula hidden in the bottom of the carry-on. But it is a different color than breast milk. She will see.