My Hollywood (40 page)

Lola
MY HOLLYWOOD

I visit each my children. I meet the radiologist asking Issa to the movies. But she says no, she is studying; she wants to pass the test for residency at UCLA. My second youngest, the lawyer, she earns more than her papa, already associate in the firm. She tries to give me her card. I say,
I do not need that. I know your name. I gave it to you
.

“Magmahalan kayong magkapatid, dahil kung wala na kami, walang ibang magtutulungan kundi kayo din.”
I delegate in advance.

My kids, they are asking me to stay. I say, “Only if you will pay me a salary.”

“Okay,” my son says. “We will pay you, but your salary it will be in pesos, not dollars. We are five here. Why you are going back for one?” But Laura is young. Maybe she will still need her Lola.

Because I have been gone a long time.

Really, I don’t know why.

I will give Bong Bong to the lady who loves him. He is different than he was to me, unlocked. I could not do that for him. I did not know how. It is okay; because I had my love, too, mine not the shape of romance. But I am old enough to understand it is the same as big, the same as true. And now I love people in two places.

Then, the week before I am scheduled to leave, we watch the plane going into the tower on the television, again and again. “Now you really cannot go,” Bong Bong says.

“It is not there I am flying. I live in California,” I say. “No one will bomb Hollywood. Even Muslims, they like to watch movies.”

“Wanda, look at Mindanao. They do not even want electricity,” Dante says.

“But I have nonrefundable ticket.” They all stare at me.

America, it is like a drug addiction.

My last day Bong Bong and I amble through our house. Issa lives here also, but she is at the hospital. My son, his wife, and their boys have the second floor, but they are out too. The downstairs, it is worn from years of children. Cracks, fingermarks, leaks—the kitchen, it really needs fixing. But even broken, it is a good house, in a neighborhood with old trees, better than the houses of Claire and Laurita where I am returning. My daughters wear soft sweaters, slender gold chains with each one a tiny diamond. They are what I wanted them to be: polite, modest, educated women. My son, like me he is the clown. It is easier to do the job I am going back to if you see everything for class. But I cannot anymore—it will not fit. I remember Claire, the way she sat on the floor by her heating vent and ate alone.

“Why you want?” my husband asks. “You have achieved your goal.”

I look around, cracks web the ceiling. “I will just go until we have money to fix the kitchen.”

“I think you are done, Lola. You have worked hard enough.”

“Only a little more.”

He does not answer. All my children and grandchildren stand in the airport as I climb back up the ladder onto the plane.

“Lola is still big in the Philippines,” Dante says. The clown.

It is strange arriving back, past my mark. LAX, it is not Ninoy Aquino—you stand under concrete, cars zoom on top your head. Fine soot floats in the air; the sky has a dirty sparkle. My hands rub together, beginning again—here, where the world is.

Danny drives me through the marina. On Washington, we pass banners for the Venice Art Walk and the picture they use is a rusted bed frame with grass growing up from a wooden sandbox.
UNMADE BEDS: NEW WORK BY NATALIE BERSOLA
. So she is the artist she always talked about being. Danny frowns. “But she look old.” LA seems bright, scrubbed. Everywhere flags. We pass a flower shop with a huge banner:
WE WON’T LET TERRORISM HAPPEN HERE!

Ruth does not work for the Sapersteins anymore, Danny says. She finally opened an agency. Danny goes there sometimes; when they want the bikes and toys clean, he washes them, and they give him one hundred dollars, just to wash with water.

China now is on all-star soccer. He knows from Mai-ling. All those years Sue and Howard fell behind with her pay, but Mai-ling returned to them. She lives there still. I am thinking, The same false blue water. But while we were getting one hundred a day, one hundred ten, we left our own with someone we gave only a grocery store cake.

Ruth gets Candace day jobs now—she is at the place of Judith until I arrive. She likes my old car. “I thought the world would be worse,” she told Danny.

I will have to buy another. You cannot live LA without a car.

I have Danny let me out in front. I want my reunion with Laura to be private. But when I come in, no answer. The refrigerator hums. Candace sits at the table, her face like a hook. She is still a slave, I think.

I open my purse to give her money. She just looks at it.

“It is okay for me,” she says. “I need experience. And you gave me the car.”

“Here. You take. You need experience and a little money. Go now,” I say.

I am happy to be back, but the air in the house feels wrong.

Candace pushes up when I tell her to leave. She moves slowly behind me. She is a person used to being yelled at.

The sound Laura makes when she sees me! We clamp around her wrist the charm bracelet. It is tight; she is too big now.

“Next time you go to the Philippines,” Laura whispers, as if she has finally won a long game, after too many times losing, “I come.”

When the slave is out, Danny honks, and we are alone. Okay okay okay okay okay. So we will build back. It is not only Laura who needs our easy hours. That first night, after I give Laura her bath, she will not sleep. So we watch a movie.
The Parent Trap
. I make popcorn with butter. “Open your legs,” she says and I hold her.

When she is finally sleeping I sit at the kitchen table. The bird looks at me. The fish, he pushes his mouth against the glass. I sprinkle a little food on top the water. I am the one to keep alive the pets. The day of my interview for the job here, I wanted that my car would be clean, so I took it to a car wash and they gave me the fish in the bag free. He was the gift I carried in to her. The bird, they did not take out enough and now he has become a little mean. The attention he wants, he is also afraid of. When I get him he squawks, he tries to fly. I need to give him more. More on love, my pupil would say.

Because this bird, he is my old employer, his movements, his jittery humor. He crawls up my arm, walks on my back, bites under my hair. The earrings I wear with small diamonds, he pecks.

Once I unpack again, I see my room became shabby. The whole house, it needs repainting, dirty from lack of care. I go to the small closet where is the washer-dryer and begin to separate laundry. I start a load of coloreds. Judith walks in while I am spraying stains. She looks at my coffee I am drinking now with a straw. Tony, the dental hygienist, he told me to do that. My pupil makes him clean my teeth once a year free.

“See,” Judith says, “no one else will accept you, all the coffee you drink.” It is not a joke, really. She is trying to be light for her pride. “I want you to watch the sweets,” she says. “For her own good. The kids tease her. Two girls in her class are really evil.” Because the bad babysitter, Laurita has become chubby.

“You do not have to worry that,” I say. “We will exercise.”

Before, we attended specialists; Laura has been many times tested. Sugar, that is not so large a problem. Tomorrow while she is at school I will buy for us two bicycles. All my life I have saved. Now I will spend.

I am returned to die on American soil or maybe, who knows, some-a-day I will die in the sky, between. Where will the bones of Lola go? To the Philippines. Majority rules. There is only Laura to vote the American continent.

My Lola died here in America
, she will say,
in the year two thousand what?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I worked on this book over too many years and days to thank properly all the people who helped me. But I’d especially like to thank Jennifer Gully and Cecily Hillsdale, who assisted with my research on immigration and domestic work in its many forms over the past century, and Magdalena Edwards and Caroline Zancan, who shepherded the book to publication. Elma Dayrit and Denise Cruz vetted and tweaked the Tagalog idioms and Filipina-American phrasings until they rang true in both vernaculars. I’m grateful to my editor, Ann Close, whose subtle advice coaxed me to think through the deepest questions of the book. Binky Urban has been my counselor for many years and every book. My friends read the novel many times, especially Beth Henley, Craig Bolotin, William Whitworth, Allan Gurganus, Richard Appel, John D. Gray, Laurel Leff, and Jill Kearney. Leon Botstein and Michael Druzinsky made sure my musical lexicon didn’t sound like music for the movies. Finally, I’d like to thank Richard, my lifelong friend; my brother, Steve, who has taught me a great deal of what I know about love and family; and most of all Gabriel and Grace, my kind, patient, quixotic, and ever-beguiling children.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mona Simpson is the author of
Anywhere But Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy
, and
Off Keck Road
, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize of the
Chicago Tribune
. She has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim grant, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, recently, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Santa Monica, California.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2010 by Mona Simpson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint “Ode to Ironing” from
Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon: Selected Poetry of Pablo
Neruda
, translated by Stephen Mitchell, translation copyright © 1997 by Stephen Mitchell. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Portions of this work originally appeared in slightly different form in
The Atlantic
,
Harper’s Magazine
, and
The Best American Short Stories 2003
, edited by Walter Mosley and Katrina Kenison (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simpson, Mona.
My Hollywood : a novel / by Mona Simpson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59377-1
1. Motherhood—California—Los Angeles—Fiction.
2. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3569.I5117M92 2010
813′.54—dc22     2010000726

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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