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Summary
Summary
From the much-loved author of Anywhere but Here and The Lost Father, a long-awaited novel--her first in ten years--about two women behind the glitter of Hollywood.
Claire, a composer and a new mother, comes to L.A. so her husband can follow his dream of writing TV comedy. Suddenly, the marriage changes, with Paul working all hours and Claire left with a baby, William, whom she adores but has no idea how to care for.
Enter Lola--a fifty-two-year-old mother of five who comes to work in America to pay for her own children's higher education back in the Philippines. Lola stabilizes the rocky household, and soon other parents try to lure her away. What she sacrifices to stay with Claire and William remains her own closely guarded secret.
In a novel, at turns satirical and heartbreaking, where mothers' modern ideas are given practical overhauls by nannies, we meet Lola's vast network of fellow caregivers, each with her own story to tell. We see the upstairs competition for the best nanny and the downstairs competition for the best deal, and are forced to ask whether it's possible to buy love for our children and what that transaction costs. We see the endangerment of a modern marriage despite the best of intentions. This tender, witty, and resonant novel provides the profound pleasures readers have come to expect from Mona Simpson, here writing at the height of her powers.
Author Notes
Mona Simpson lives in Santa Monica and New York City.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first novel since Off Keck Road (2000), Simpson tells a blistering story of fractured love and flailing parents. Claire, a composer and new mother, has moved to Santa Monica, Calif., so that her husband, Paul, can follow his dreams of becoming a TV comedy writer. When Paul's job requires late nights, Claire, already overwhelmed with balancing motherhood and career, hires Lola, a middle-aged Filipina, to help with her son, William, and soon Lola's trying to plug holes in Claire and Paul's slowly sinking family ship. Claire and Lola narrate in alternating chapters; fragile and sometimes fierce Claire deploys a biting wit that shreds the pretensions that permeate her social life and her marriage, while Lola is more open-hearted and eager to help people, though she also draws laughs with her observations about wealthy families. The story both satirizes and earnestly assesses the failings of upper-middle-class L.A., and Simpson's taut prose allows her to drill into the heart of relationships, often times with a single biting sentence. Funny, smart, and filled with razor sharp observations about life and parenthood, Simpson's latest is well worth the wait. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Novel by novel, Simpson takes fresh and disquieting approaches to fractured families. Her fifth book is a duet between Claire, a high-strung composer who has left New York for Hollywood to support her husband's television ambitions, and Lola, a Filipina in her fifties who becomes their nanny, caring with sensitivity and love for their precocious, moody son. Claire is ambivalent about motherhood. Lola is putting her children through college while continuing to support their household in the Philippines, where she is of the same class as the Hollywood women who hire her to care for their children. Claire's deepening loneliness as her workaholic husband becomes a stranger and her artistic struggle in a place she finds arid and alien are compelling, but compassionate, wise, and self-sacrificing Lola, with her mellifluous voice and wonderfully inventive English, rules. In her arresting portrayals of Lola and her nanny and housekeeper friends, Simpson explores a facet of American society rarely depicted with such insight and appreciation. As Lola and Claire tell their intertwined stories, Simpson subtly but powerfully traces the persistence of sexism and prejudice, the fear and injustice inherent in the predicaments of immigrants, and the complexity and essentiality of all domestic relationships.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
NOT everyone who has a child is cut out to be a parent, and not every kid is cut out for a carefree childhood. There's no clean connection between these two accidents of character and fate. Hot-housed children can end up with blighted lives, while neglected kids can succeed and thrive as adults. Nonetheless, when Claire, one of the two women at the center of Mona Simpson's new novel, "My Hollywood," has a baby in her late 30s, she convinces herself not only that she's an unfit mother but that her 17-week-old son, Will (who "seemed more furious than other babies, more bereft") is aware of her shortcomings: "Will and I both felt astonished that he was stuck with me." Is an infant capable of such nuanced misgiving? Or could Claire be projecting? Taking no chances, she hires a nanny, Lola - a mother of five from the Philippines and the novel's other central character - to take care of Will and to lighten her psychic load. But eventually she starts to worry: What if the nanny isn't up to the job either? How can she know? Raised by a delusional and willful divorced mom, Claire has no road map for child-rearing. Her mother, though crazy, was spirited and assertive. Claire, though sane, is passive and self-doubting. "One tends not to emulate the mentally ill," she reflects. Yet, despite her perilous upbringing, Claire has turned out more than fine. She's a Guggenheim-winning composer, married to a man who writes for a hit television comedy, living in a nice (though rented) house in Santa Monica. Just weeks into her life as a new mother, left alone with the baby while her husband vanishes into his unending workday, Claire sees why "so many people feel mad at their mothers; because whatever childhood was or wasn't, they're the ones who made it. Fathers loomed above it all, high trees." Claire loves her son, but music has always been "the true great thing" in her life, and the new love doesn't cancel out the old. Gazing at her baby, she thinks fearfully, "Someday you will come to me and ask, Did I do my best?" But she also fears that she will never again give her best to her work. Enter the nanny. The relationship between modern mothers and the people who look after their children is a subject ripe for exposé. Indeed, a bumper crop has already fallen from that tree. In 2002, the satiric novel "The Nanny Diaries," set in Manhattan, caricatured Park Avenue mothers as grotesque narcissists. The next year, in the play "Living Out," Lisa Loomer dramatized the unequal power dynamic between Latina child-minders in Los Angeles and their Anglo bosses, focusing on a Salvadoran nanny and the entertainment lawyer who employs her. Loomer showed more compassion for the nanny than for the mother. (Who could pity a corporate lawyer?) Since then, a laundry basket's worth of nonfiction titles have piled up, replacing the Technicolor Mary-Poppins-and-Mrs.-Banks myth with the unbleached reality of contemporary child care, from "Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy," edited by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, to "And Nanny Makes Three," by Jessika Auerbach. In "And Nanny Makes Three," Auerbach, a career woman who raised four children on three continents with the aid of 19 nannies, au pairs and baby sitters, addressed the emotional and practical fallout that results from outsourcing nurturers. But she also reminded her readers that nannies, known in East Asia as amahs, are working women too. "To their relatives back home," Auerbach writes, "whom they frequently support, feed, clothe and send to school with a large chunk of their monthly salary, the amahs are the ones who have made it." "Who's to say," she adds, "that a mother should never abandon her children when her only alternative is to raise them in poverty in a country that is deeply and systemically corrupt, with no prospects whatsoever?" But who looks after the amah's children while she tends to her foreign charges? In "My Hollywood," a compassionate fictional exploration of this complicated global relationship, Simpson assesses the human cost that the child-care bargain exacts on the amah, on her employer and on the children of both. Claire and Lola take turns narrating the novel, each in her own voice - Claire's intellectualized and anxious, Lola's down-to-earth and pragmatic. Simpson allots each woman her portion of sympathy, giving context and legitimacy to their contrasting social worlds. Both women regard themselves as onlookers in the Hollywood scene, even though they're inside the gate. Claire, attending a party with her husband's high-powered friends, feels let down. "Before I lived here," she thinks, "if I'd heard the words Hollywood party, I'd have pictured ball gowns and men in tuxedos. If I'd imagined servants at all, they'd have been in black and white too. But the men here turned their baseball caps backward. The nannies wore everyday clothes." Lola, who knows she should work for a wealthier woman than Claire, so as to send more money back home to her family in Tagaytay, stays with her out of love for the baby she calls Williamo. Liking to feel needed, she boasts, "My employer, she says when a baby comes home from the hospital, a Filipina should arrive with him." But is Lola truly indispensable to Claire, and vice versa? Lola tells her Filipino friends: "We are status symbols. Like a BMW." Paul and Claire's friends try to poach Lola full time after hiring her to work for them on the weekends. But the nannies know that one wrong move could land them on a plane back to Manila. Ignoring that specter, they jockey for position like trophy wives, aware at all times of the risk of divorce, rupture, reversal. "We compare jobs," Lola observes, "the way women compare husbands." Lola defends Claire for caring about her career: "My employer has the American problem of guilt. But you should not be guilty to your children. It is for them that you are working!" But it confuses her when she learns that Claire earns less for her compositions than Lola earns for looking after Williamo. "A mystery. She is doing this for something else. It does not pay," Lola thinks. "Me, I work for money." But does she? Over the years, Lola sends home enough money to establish all five of her children in the "professional class," justifying her long absence by reasoning, "Even children understand money." When at last she returns to Tagaytay, her relatives seem like strangers, and she misses the American children she left behind. "How can I live here?" she wonders. Does her family in the Philippines still need her? And what about the families in California? Will they find another Lola? Could they? Subtly, almost dispassionately, Simpson works her habitual magic, showing how love travels, ownerless and unbidden, among children who need adults, and adults who need children. "Children, they are dependent for their life," Lola observed back in Santa Monica. But so are adults. Sitting with her friends, drinking "nonfat lattes, ice blendeds, a dozen small consolations," Claire asks, "For what, exactly, were mothers always being consoled?" Simpson gently suggests an answer: for their fear of failing in their responsibilities to their children and themselves, the extent of which they'll know only when their children grow up, and tell them what they were. 'My employer has the American problem of guilt. But you should not be guilty to your children.' Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
This dour take on class and immigration from Simpson (Off Keck Road, 2001, etc.) focuses on a circle of wealthy Hollywood families and the nannies who care for their spoiled children.Classical composer Claire moves with husband Paul and new baby William to Los Angeles where Paul pursues his dream to become a sitcom writer. Unable to concentrate on her music, Claire resents carrying most of the responsibility for William. Although she declares her maternal love frequently, readers don't see much evidence. After Paul's mother suggests she hire live-in help so she can work, Claire, whose carelessness as a parent grows only more mind-boggling as the novel progresses, finds Lola sitting on a park bench and hires her. Claire, or rather William, has lucked out. Lola had a comfortably middle-class life in the Philippinesa husband working as an illustrator for Hallmark, a house in the suburbs, her kids in a good school where she was President of the Parents Associationbut she has come to the States to earn her children's way through university and graduate school. While Claire is never comfortable with the parents of William's friends, Lola quickly becomes the unspoken leader of the mostly Filipino nannies who care for them. William is a difficult child with limited social skills, but Lola loves him. She turns down a job offer from another family, sacrificing a significant raise in pay, only to be fired by Claire at the recommendation of William's kindergarten teacher. Claire soon realizes she made a mistake, but Lola has already moved on to care for Laura, the possibly brain-damaged daughter of a single working mother, whose love and need for Lola is deeper than William's.Simpson trades chapters between Claire and Lola's viewpoints, but Claire never becomes Lola's equal, as a character or as a human being.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
PEN/Faulkner Award nominee Simpson's fifth novel, her first in ten years, is a contemporary look at the dual levels of Hollywood households reminiscent of the Masterpiece Theatre series Upstairs, Downstairs. The story centers on Claire, a composer and overwhelmed new mother, and her son's nanny, Lola, a middle-aged Filipina working to open up avenues of opportunity for her own five children. As with the TV series, it is the hired help whose stories are the most engaging and revealing. The novel can drag through all of Claire's angst and marital jealousies and woes, but Lola's inside views of her multiple employers and insights from The Book of Ruth, a nanny's survival guide, together with Bhama Roget's skilled narration, make this worth experiencing. [The Knopf hc was recommended for those "intrigued by the rich but unseen lives of the domestic class Ø la Gosford Park," LJ 8/10.-Ed.]-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria College, Buffalo (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
"Come on comeon comeon comeon comeon. Come to Lola. I have something for you." Because he is very angry. Today it is the mother he was hitting. She has her hand over her eye and I dab ice, the way I do his boo-boos. She lets her face in my hands. Then I take him away. But Williamo, he is strong. I cannot so easily hold. And Lola told a lie. I do not have anything. So I make promises. "Some-a-day," I whisper, "I will bring you home with me. And there we will make the ice candy." He lies still, not any longer fighting. His bones fall in a pattern, like the veins of a leaf. "I will put you in my pocket and feed you one candy every day. You will be happy. Because the ocean at our place it is very blue. The sky higher than here. And the fruits that grow on trees, very sweet." Jackfruit, durian, lanzones. Attis. Santol. "In my pocket I will give you one lychee. You can bounce for a ball." "If you were a kangaroo you would have a pouch," he grumbles, better now, slower the heart. Through the window I see my employer. She looks like she has too much assigned to her; she cannot complete it all before she dies. She holds the ice and paces, talking long-distance to a woman who reads books about the raising of children. When my employer becomes upset she calls this friend. My employer has the American problem of guilt. But you should not be guilty to your children. It is for them that you are working! Then I remember that check for a thousand, long ago. I do not like to think that; it still opens a taste of confusion. But Williamo, he is better now. Only the mouth smears. I promise him candy, not the ice candy, just candy we can buy here. "But-ah do not tell your mother." I call to her, "Excuse, we are going now." "Okay. Thanks, Lole." My employer believes she cannot live without me. She is telling her friend who reads the books that he is better with me than with her. Lil will tell her that this is perfectly normal. My employer, she needs to be left alone. But that is not a quality for a mother. Children, they are dependent for their life. "Playdate," my employer says. "I can't even stand the word." "Do you have poo-poo?" I pull out the diaper. I am paid to smell that. But what she said to her friend is true. With me, Williamo is no problem. My employer, she says when a baby comes home from the hospital, a Filipina should arrive with him. That, for her, would make a perfect world. "It's the Asian thing," I heard her say once. "They're more gentle with kids than Hispanics." She thinks it is all Filipinos. Maybe every single human being from Asia. I could introduce her to a few. Claire walks out carrying keys. With a child small small, it is like a ball and chain. You are never free. Not even sleeping. "Bye." She slams her car door. An escape. She will stroll in the conservatory, thinking about old songs. Americans, for them the highest time is college: books in a bent arm, on the way to learning. Us, we go to school to get the degree. I push Williamo in the stroller and he sits. That is the good of fighting; it makes them very tired. The sun is solid, like many small weights on our arms. This neighborhood is ours during the daytime. You do not observe mothers, only in and out of cars, carrying shopping bags. In my place, I was, at one time, one of these married ladies. Now when I watch from afar, it looks like a lot of work. I put coconut oil and zinc powder on the nose because Williamo he is very white. My albino grandson. All the while, I talk to him. Ruth told me, You have always to talk, even a baby, it is important . And I talk to him, more than my own, because my kids I had one after the other, five in nine years. In the class of two thousand and ten, at Harvard University there will be two Santa Monica boys saying to cooks in the cafeteria, Excuse, where is my adobo? Lola by then will be swaying in a hammock, back in the Philippines. "What for?" He is young. He does not yet understand the importance of rest. When we pass the play store, I turn in and ask, "Where is Lola from?" He points on the globe. "Very good." Outside again, in the distance we see children, past tall trees, old in the glittering air. But Williamo says he does not want to play, not now, so we roll under the eucalyptus once upon a time from Australia until the eyes close. I knew from Ruth to work for a working mother. The women who stay home want their babies tucked in cribs for naps, so they can tiptoe in and peek. But Williamo, he can sleep on grass. Today he will nap in his stroller. I told my employer already: When they go to Europe to celebrate their tenth anniversary, I will take Williamo to the Philippines. We are saving for the tickets. I cannot save much because every month I send home eighteen hundred. My kids, they are a little jealous, especially Dante and Lisa, because they have their own. And it is true. I am closer to Williamo than I am to my grandchildren. Because I see Williamo every day. Tomorrow for the playclub, I will make tapioca. Williamo likes the big kind we have to soak overnight, so I walk to the grocery. For a long time, I worried this job. Then one day I was not trying anymore. Someone touches my arm in the aisle. "Hola!" she says. " Cómo estás? " Here, they think I speak Spanish. "Hi," I say. "I know you. You're the babysitter of the boy who says To be or not to be ." I point to the stroller. Thumb in his mouth, eyes closed. "Not to be," I say. My employer made an orchestra from a play by William Shakespeare. That is why Williamo. At the end of his speech, after 'tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish'd , I told him, Then you bow. And he will bow. "I'm Beth, Brookie and Kate's mom," she says. "You're Lola, right?" "I know Esperanza," I say. Esperanza, she is the only one in the playclub not Filipina. The woman stands writing on a small card. She puts the name and address and she scribbles Call me! We need help Saturday nights! But I am not tempted. Esperanza says her employer leaves her exercise clothes, underwear and all, in damp lumps on the floor. The next time Beth Martin wants to see those things they will be clean and folded in her drawer. I am a little popular. With my new weekend salary, I send home an extra hundred every week. In America, I am on the way up. I push the stroller to the place of Mai-ling, where babysitters sit at a picnic table eating her fresh lumpia, light and porous, and savory adobo, with bay leaves planted by the landscaper. Mai-ling stands ironing, using an extension. Here, the man and the boy go out every day; it is only babysitters and children small small and sometimes a half-dressed woman upstairs, cataloging the possessions. Afternoons, they are not like this in Manila, even in the gated residential districts of Makati where outside you see only workers in uniform. In tea shops mothers gather with their children in an after-school world. Williamo still sleeps, so I park him facing the wall. "My employers, they change when they move to the big house," Lita says. "They really change." "For your salary, let them change!" Her employer is Alice, the doctor. The husband, he wakes up in the middle of the night when the stock market opens in New York. And Lita gets one hundred dollars a day. They live in a Beverly Hills mansion. We compare jobs, the way women compare husbands. The house of my employer it is the smallest. But one day I will bring the disc with her music and play that little melody I heard. This is the mother of Williamo, I will tell them. Usually, you would trade a part of what you have, but not all. When I think of my husband Bong Bong, I see him bent over his table, drawing the lines of a white chrysanthemum, a tropical Christmas flower. I close a fist in my pocket. "But-ah, your employers, they are good." I am always the one telling babysitters to stay. Because too much change, it is bad for children. And the two of Lita are well behaved, because they are Asian. Chinese, adopted. "They don't think I will leave but lot of people, they are looking Filipinas." "Rich people," Vicky says. "We are status symbols. Like a BMW." I can usually make babysitters laugh. "No, you know know what Alice told me?" Lita whispers. "In the hospital they have a joke, what does 'yes' mean in Tagalog? 'Yes' it means, 'fuck you.' " "Yes," Vicky repeats, loud. "Fuck you." "Shhh," I say. Williamo is a myna bird. Sure enough, the head pops up. "What?" He is very advanced. "What?" He tugs my sleeve. Vicky, she does not think! The employer here is usually in the house, even when we cannot see her. Some unmarried women, you wonder why. But not Vicky. It is a face I have seen before on retardeds, the profile a crescent, the jaw and forehead more out. Vicky thinks only about her meals and money. In our place, we would not know each other. Mai-ling I would never meet either, unless she worked in my house. A peasant, ethnic Chinese, she has no education. Only Lita lived in my social class, in the suburb next to mine. "Alice will be very surprise." One or two times a year Lita says she is leaving. Lita wears the clothes of a wife, the fingernails filed oval, polished pink like the inside of a shell. Twelve years ago, she came here to work and married an American. Not in the church but in a courthouse, her real husband still alive in the Philippines. We call that Ca-Ching. But later on she got her kids here. All three. She lifts a teddy bear from her bag and clicks a button in the fur, and a panel opens. "Look, it is a video. They are spying me. I should have known, the toys all wood. They would not keep a bear so ugly." One Chinese Adopted stands pouring a stream of glittering sand from a teapot. Her dress strains at the belly. I am always telling Lita, Do not feed so much. The mother a doctor. Why would you let your child be like that? "A long time, that bear is in their room. They probably watch what I am teaching. They see their daughters learn to wipe." "Let I!" China says. We have Chinese Adopteds named Emma and Larkin and a blond, blue-eyed girl named China. "Let I do it!" She grabs the teapot from Emma. "We will buy a film," I say. "The parents will be the movie stars." "Alice, I really do not like." Most babysitters, they do not like their employers. "Ling-ing!" we hear from above. See. All along Sue, the employer, was here. In my house, I did not hide from my helpers. Mai-ling runs up and then comes back with another basket of laundry. I tap her belly, Slow down . Living here, with husbands across the ocean, we touch each other more. Esperanza says last night in her place, the guy took everything out of the refrigerator, looking for a piece of meat leftover. Her hand slaps the mouth. "But I ate." A lot of what they talk about is food, what they can eat in the houses where they live-in. Many keep food under the bed. When the Sapersteins have chicken, Ruth will not accept a leg or a breast, even though she is the one preparing. "I take the neck," she says. "I eat bones." And she is working there, taking care Ginger nine years. I am lucky; my employer every night she puts too much on my plate. Lettie, the new babysitter, says her people are nice, but the food, it has a different smell. "I miss my baby," she whispers. Mai-ling hangs the blouses she finished ironing on a branch. Esperanza lifts one melon color to her cheek; it would look more on her than on Sue. Mai-ling has told us the closet of Sue fills tight with clothes. She is always buying. Two blouses here for Mai-ling to iron still have tags. Between the hangers in the closet of my employer, you could fit an orange. Her formal hangs on the end, inside dry-cleaner plastic. "Ooh la la," Esperanza says, holding up a black sleeveless. The young babysitters, they are not married. They would like pretty blouses. I would rather wear my T-shirt I can wash. When I came here I had already turned fifty. Romance is a belonging of my children, an obstacle I worry for, like drugs. But the young babysitters, they do not stand in the evening, looking back across the Pacific. They face the big dry continent here. Thinking of cowboys. The laundry machines of my employer stand in the garage, on the other side of my wall. At night, I wash my clothes, put them in the dryer, and my wall purrs. I go to sleep like that. Wrinkles web my shirts, but I cannot sleep anymore without that purr. "Black is good on you!" Lita says. "Like a Spanish Lea Salonga." Esperanza, she is Latin, too dark, but the skin looks good. A good dark. She is what they call here sexy. The young babysitters, they are not like my daughters or the friends they bring home from University Santo Tomas. For my kids, I do not allow sport dating. "Remember me for that one," Esperanza says to Mai-ling. Because our employers, they give us their old clothes. But a price tag flaps on that blouse with no sleeves. One hundred seventy. Two of those blouses, that is one week Mai-ling, and they are two months behind on her pay. The life of Mai-ling is for her son; the husband is dead already. Her health is not strong. All she can do is work and send money to her son who was taking drugs before. Maybe the granddaughter can get in a good school, a Catholic. That is her wish. Some nights before sleep, I think Mai-ling will work here until she dies. We will be the ones to give the funeral and send the body home. She is another reason I need savings. All of a sudden, I turn to check--the kids, they have been too quiet--and I see them fall in fighting. I have to separate the two. Some nannies favor their own and some the other, just like mothers. As a mother, I was stricter with mine. But with Williamo, I am more fair. "Two-minute rule," I say. "I am timing. You take turns on the truck." Before the end of two minutes, Williamo throws the bear. The thing drops near my feet with a jangle. "Craft time." I clap. Last week, we made newspaper boats. Then Sue had the idea to go to the lumber store. Mothers here find a way to make more work. We painted the wooden boats and put in small hooks she bought, and today I will tear a sheet for sails. I think of our kids holding strings to the colors of her blouses, cut and rigged for use. Then I take the sheet in my teeth and start the rip and show Lettie how to hem a sail. Lita is feeding Emma again. Emma eats too much! Mai-ling still stands ironing. The piles of bras, underwear, and T-shirts make different-shaped blocks in the laundry basket. "Bing," Esperanza calls. "Look your boat." The boat floats, but the water stays still in this pool. Maybe if we turn on the jets for the Jacuzzi. Esperanza steps out her shorts, shaking her body into the bikini. All her parts fit the way they are supposed to. "Brooke, when you are big and rich, what will you do with all your money? Maybe you will live on a yacht!" Babysitters, even if they are in America one week from a swamp in the jungle, they know what is a yacht. The employers do not like us to tell these words to their children. But why not? That is the fun of here. "I will buy you a house," Brooke says. "Oh," Esperanza murmurs, happy in her cheeks. But this is a girl promising a babysitter; she will grow up and forget. The Latins, they are always watching telenovelas. It makes them too romantic. Bingo! The jets start waves. "What about me?" I call. "I will buy you a house too." No one asks Esperanza why she thinks Brooke will become rich. She is rich now, already. But in the Philippines, we seemed a fortunate family when I was the age of Brooke. Williamo, he stands with his arms stretching, then he loses his balance and falls into the water. I hook him out, under the arm. My happiest times are when we are laughing at our life. For that you have to be the same. To be above other people, you will say goodbye to laughter. "How about me?" I hear Vicky ask Bing. "When you are rich, what will you buy me?" He puffs his cheeks, blowing, trying to whistle, but nothin comes out. Esperanza holds a sail to her cheek. "No?" But all colors look good on her. "You know the house on the corner of Twelfth?" Lita says. "A lady, she told me the wife was first the baby nurse. The mother, she die in childbirth." "Yesterday," Esperanza says, "we are walking and I see him--the guy. Oh, he is tall. Guapo ." "Hand-sum," Lita says. The young babysitters they want handsome husbands. My employer, she would like a new stove. I wish only for money. To buy schooling. So my kids, they will have their chance. Degrees cannot make them happy. Not guaranteed. But what else can you give? Today is Friday, the last of the month. Lita is selling the lottery tickets she gets from her bad son. She has two kids hardworking but the middle one, he just plays. Lettie Elizande buys a ticket. She wants to go home. She does not like anything here. I buy also. This week I can send home fifty more. I have thirteen hundred savings, my little mound. If I win, poof, no more Lola. That was all I wanted, when I flew over, my hands useless on my lap. But that was when all I loved was there. Now I have Williamo. Excerpted from My Hollywood by Mona Simpson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.