My Hollywood (6 page)

Smells from gardens wind in the air, lights come on inside houses. Automatic sprinklers siss on.

Every home has a place that makes the center. In my house, it is the cabinet, where I keep our remembrance and the diplomas of our children. In the downstairs of my employer, it is the stove where Claire cooks every night. For Claire, it is her cello, upstairs in the room she works. In the place of Ruth, the center is a book, left open on a stand like the Oxford dictionary in the studio trailer of my handsome weekend employer.
The Book of Ruth
tells the story of our careers in America.

The teacher of Ruth was a picture bride, and then she worked domestic. On the first page, she typed
HOW TO WORK FOR THE WHITE
.

They do not like their own smell. Their waste. Their own used things
.

Americans, they are very dirty. They used to be clean. The grandparents are clean. And the habits they lost are what they crave from us
.

I have with me tonight this old book. Ruth gave it so I will make repairs. I walk to Palisades Park, sit on a bench, and lift out the frail book from T-shirts I have wrapped around. The spine is tearing from so many times being opened, and some of the pages glued in, the paste has dried and they are coming loose.

There is a carbon copy of a letter the teacher wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt and the reply, which came, eleven months later, from someone called Mary Anderson. The carbon paper is smudged from so many handling.

The teacher of Ruth trained Filipinas.
Because we know English
, Ruth said.
And Japanese did not work anymore domestic
.

A fellow student of Ruth learned English with the children of the family she lived-in. She left to Ruth that Visayan dictionary, with English words penciled in the margins. Into
The Book of Ruth
, women pasted copies of letters to Marcos and the unfamous presidents of Latin America. One housekeeper wrote a poem in Spanish for her granddaughter.

Underneath the torn leather of the spine, it looks like machine stitching.

The teacher of Ruth had a friend from the bus stop who wrote to the president.

Dear President,

I am a married woman and my Husband has been out of work for nearly eighteen month. I have been doing house work to keep my home together. I have one boy four and one half years old and it is very hard for me to leave my home and work at house work by the week. I get $12.00 per week. I work from seven in the morning till eight at night and if they have dinner parties I work much later and all I have off is from three o’clock one afternoon during the week and on Sunday afternoon. I wish you could do something to shorten the hours. I do not mind working to support my family but I sure do hate to be made a slave of. I hope Dear President you will not over look us poor things that has to work for the Wealthy. I sure hope my Husband will get work and I sure think if things keep up the way you have been doing every thing will come back wonderful. Dear President, we poor things want to thank you so much for all you have done.

Sincerely yours,
Grace Wicker
17 Mercer Avenue
Altadena, Calif.

PS I sure hope you can do something so I can be home with my little boy for I feel he needs me.

That smudged carbon copy the teacher put on the second page. Grace Wicker worked next door to where she worked.
And she is a white
, the teacher told Ruth.
That is how they even treat their own
.

I take out a needle and three spools of thread. I try to match the faded spine and thread the needle. I sew cross-stitches very tight. After I sew, I will seal the holes with Crazy Glue.

Everyone who stayed at the place of Ruth signed her name. It is also a how-to book. How to set a table, with four forks and four spoons, tricks about pie crust, how to fan a napkin so it stands.

Always Do Extra
, someone named Dora wrote in 1966.
Anything a little nice without spending their money. Here where I am they have orange trees. So I make an orange and lime salad
. She drew a picture of the way Valencia trees hold new oranges, along with some from the year before and white blossoms, at the same time.
Always pick the old
, she advised.
Sweeter
.

If someone made a dessert—floating island or a layer cake—she recorded the compliments.

I need one praise every day
, Analise Deoferio wrote.
I work Professor Williamson, of UCLA, for twenty-nine years. When my husband die, she pay the funeral
.

The book includes tips.
Two baths a day, teeth cleaning at four-hour intervals, no curry, onion, or garlic, even on days off
. That is a page someone cut out and taped in:
IF THE DOG LIKES YOU, YOU’RE HIRED
.

—Don’t let yourself become the queen. You’re not the queen. The mother is the queen. Especially, it will happen sometimes before the kids are in school. Because the mothers become so dependent. The
mother, any fun she can have with her friends, any minute to go shopping, any for herself—she needs you, so at that time they will do everything to keep you happy. But the babysitter made her price so high that later on they decided they do not want. And instead of just changing the pay, they fire her
.

I know because this was me
.

—The babysitter who was La Reina

The edges of the page lift up; the tape, it is too dry. I will glue this in. I wonder if I can use the old typewriter of my employer to retype the carbon letters. They make a mess on the hands every time you open.

The penmanship of Ruth is small.
If your employer offers you something, old clothes she will not wear anymore, even a food you like to take home, always say no. If she really wants you to have, let her insist
.

Avoid families that do not use paper towels. Cloth diapers even worse. Always put a plastic inside every garbage
.

In the place of Ruth, there is a shelf with a row of black volumes. How many years to fill a book?

“Average four,” Ruth said.

“What will be your series title?”

“A
Wealthy Woman’s Guide to Being a Maid
. No, seriously, Lola, the real problem in our profession is age. Like Mai-ling. She is too old to chase kids. And the mother knows it. But the father likes the way she irons his shirts.”

In
The Book of Ruth
this year, Lita wrote the address of Patricks Road House, where she and Esperanza sat an hour and still the waiter did not take their order.

Are you not a business?
Babysitters work hard for their money; sometimes we want to spend too.

I still have not yet added anything in the
Book
. I only fix the old, where it is tearing.

I think what I can write. I have some advice about silence. If you are smart, when something happens, if the baby takes his first step or says the first word, the first of Williamo was “light,” second “French,” third “fries,” you keep in your private journal so you will have the true date but do not tell. You wait and that evening or the next they will call you shrieking,
Lola, Lola come here!
But the hitting; that I really do not know. Claire, she is nervous. And the guy, he is not strong. When he is there, he is only playing. I am the one to explain:
Williamo, that you cannot do
.

When I am finished my stitching, I wrap the book again in two T-shirts.

I stand at the fence and watch the Pacific. Fog blows in. Magic carpets.

Ruth likes to have a picture of every babysitter.

The book is also for memorial. Since we are working, we cannot always attend ceremonies. The weddings and baptisms, even the funeral. But we will send a letter of remembrance. And that will go alone on a page in
The Book of Ruth
. I have not known anyone yet who died here.

I stand at the fence looking down at the ocean, then I turn back. Coming the other way, a woman runs lopsided. My weekend employer. Jogging. “Lola! What are you doing here?”

“I am waving goodnight to the Philippines.”

She asks me how long I will stay, meaning Los Angeles, but she is also meaning something else.

“As long as I am needed,” I say. “It is not up to us.” Williamo, he is an only child. Often, when they start school, the parents they do not want to pay. Or they ask the babysitter to clean the whole house, for no extra. Here kids start school already at three years. You boil all the bottles and nipples with tongs, and then one day, you stop. Raising children, it is all the same story—they grow above you. And you are no longer needed. They have a name for that here—obsolete. Things outlive their use, even people. And that is actually success. “My employer, she always says they will need me until the day Williamo goes to college. I will be the one to plan the graduation party.”

Maybe this is what I will write in
The Book of Ruth
. If you can stay until they are five years old, then they will never forget you.

I wash my dish in the bathroom sink. On the bed, I glue in the pages that have loosened, put stones on top for the paste to dry overnight.

There at home, across the ocean, I have a house.

Here, one room, attached to the garage: a bed, bathroom in the corner. Television.

There I lived with other people. Bong Bong, our kids, friends and relatives arriving, sitting for a bite of gelatin squares on a plate.

This room is my place here. It is still light in the sky but already dark on the ground. Before, I did not like to be alone. My sister became the doctor, so I became the clown. Bong Bong, he is the serious one. The cheese stands alone. Not the clown. Because when I am alone I cry. It is a strange thing: here, it feels good, untangling strings. After a few minutes, when I finish, the lines of the day laid out straight, I begin to hope Williamo will come crashing to the screen, yelling
Lo-la
.

And when I begin to hope, he comes galumphing.

Claire
MY OLD CHAOS

The phone rang after midnight—my mother. “Come over right away, I was broken into.”

I made out our dresser, Paul not there, everything the same. The clock blinked 12:18. “Did you call the police?”

“Just come over. This once you really have to. It’s all I have!” Her voice peeled a shred off me.

I pulled on sweats, tucked in my nightgown, and walked out back, the wet grass sharp on my ankles, to Lola’s room off the garage, where I heard the faint noise of TV—good, she was still up. But when I knocked, she didn’t answer. I pushed the door open. She’d fallen asleep, the remote in her hand.

I ran back to the house and called Paul. “Can you come home?”

“Not yet. Oh, thanks. Diet Coke. Sorry, they’re just passing out the pizza. You’ll have to wake her and give her the monitor. Call me from your mother’s.”

I felt terrible touching Lola’s shoulder in the dark. She bolted up, as if she’d done something wrong. “I have to go to my mom’s, I think her apartment was broken into.” I handed her the small plastic baby monitor.

But she said, “I will just stay in the house.”

I felt grateful I could drive back to my old chaos and leave Will sleeping. Paul’s mother’s edict against live-out nannies finally made sense, for a reason she wouldn’t have imagined. I coasted empty streets. Without traffic, my mother lived nine minutes away, which would swell into an hour when the sun rose. Had she really been broken into? Growing up, I’d become the man of the house because there wasn’t one. I’d learned the power companies’ addresses and how to pay their bills. But I’d failed to protect her.

All her lights were on. She met me at the door, her hair sticking out at wild angles and her eyes sketching back and forth. “It’s gone,” she said. “I had a money order for one hundred thousand.”

I didn’t believe her. She didn’t have a hundred thousand dollars. But I asked questions with the distant patience of a police officer, one not particularly kind.

“No windows broken?”

“Huh-uh.”

“And nobody else has your keys?”

“The landlord does. And I’ve been wondering about him. Last week, he came to repair that leak, you know, I told you in the back of the—”

“It’s not the landlord, Mom.” The landlords, two men who’d upgraded their forties building, got a kick out of my mother and hadn’t raised her rent in seven years. A complaint could trigger a correction, I thought, or worse.

“Maybe one of his men. You know, fixing something.” As she talked, describing small repairs, she picked up things off her kitchen counters and opened drawers. I’d completely lost track of her story, when all at once, she gasped “Oh.” She’d lifted up a small cutting board behind a statue of Joseph and the Doves and under it she had her money order, Bank of America, for one hundred thousand dollars.

“Mom, what is this? Where did you get it?”

“That’s my retirement. Everything.”

“Why do you have this here? It should be in a bank! Where it can’t be stolen.”

“I know.” She held it to her chest.

“Why don’t you call Tom tomorrow and he’ll take you to the bank?”

“Well, not Tom maybe.”

I gave her a warning look. “Why not Tom?”

“I don’t know if I trust him always.”

“You can trust him,” I said, remembering Paul calling Tom the most boring man in the world.

“Don’t bother with it.”

“Why are you crying now? You still have everything.”

“I know,” she whispered, as I went to leave. “I know.”

When I got home, Paul stood eating a cold chicken leg. When I came to the part about her pulling out the money order, he started laughing. “Your mother. You should go with her tomorrow, make sure she gets that into a bank.” My mother was an old story.

I woke up to the sound of Paul and Will growling engine noise. I heard the windup mouse scuttle across the floor, then the clomp of

Will’s feet.

Do it again
, he said.

Paul left scribbed notes on the backs of envelopes by the door of our bedroom. I stepped over:

TO BRADY
CALL JENNY MEACHER’S SON
CLAIRE’S MOM—BANK

Later that morning, I asked my mother if she’d called Tom. She said she had.

“He’s coming to get me.”

“To go to the bank?”

“Mm-hmm,” she said. I didn’t believe her, and we never talked about it again.

For a long time, I thought I’d gotten away with something. I wasn’t behind the upper-middle-class kids who, from college on, moved everywhere around me, wearing their advantages lightly, like expensive clothes, only a tiny bit different from what the rest of us had. The trouble their parents had taken: lessons, tutors, AYSO. It seemed incredible that it hardly made a difference at all. Still, I’d understood that when I had children, they would resemble those kids more than me. I’d wondered if I could love them.

Now I had my answer.