Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  Then we were married and living in Beijing. It was just the two of us over a hot summer. Trained pigeons circled out from neighboring rooftops. Their passing, the tight music of their feathers and fleet shadows sliding over the grass, stirred our hair and prickled our skin. We ate red beans on crushed ice and listened to music from the bars on Houhai. Thunderstorms, shaved noodles, weeping willows. I was sure I had never been so happy.

  I went to Australia for a book tour, and when I came back it was fall and I was studying Chinese and working and then I was pregnant. I crashed out of Mandarin class to puke in the language school bathroom. I fell asleep on my office sofa on winter-dark afternoons. I understood that I was going to quit my job, but I couldn’t complete the act. I spent weeks crafting my resignation letter.

  The day I finally pushed Send, Beijing stretched frozen and glistening under winter sun and I rode a taxi across town, past the skaters on the lake and the shabby, low-slung shops selling mittens and toys and the steaming stalls where workers and students queued for roasted chestnuts. And I told myself that everything might be better or worse from that day, but at least things were changing. I was having a baby, starting a new book. My teeth sliced the winter air; I would eat the future whole. I was ready even to savor a mistake, to lose everything for the pleasure of building again from scratch.

  One thing led to the next, and the next had led me here, to this bus. This was my last journalistic journey for a long time. Forever, for all I knew. My last big story would not be a conflict or a corruption or a hurricane or an election—it was an extended domestic vignette, the illustration of one family. Li was one man, and his family was the story.

  Households had never held my interest. Houses were everywhere—inside war zones, across from parliament buildings, along military parade routes. They were the background scenery of great events; their residents were bit players who crept onto balconies to peer down at the action on the streets below. A collection of walls and beds and things to eat. No big deal. They caught my attention only when their members met with violence or achieved greatness in the wider world.

  I hadn’t realized yet that households are life itself; households contain and enable the entire human landscape. The only household I had ever inhabited had been a place I’d yearned to escape. I’d worked adult jobs for years before I could bring myself to buy a couch, with its implications of a sedentary and stable lifestyle.

  It was night by the time we reached our stop. Fireworks burst pinwheels in the sky. We newspeople clambered into the backseat of Li’s cousin’s van and muttered together. The photographer warned us to hang back when we reached Li’s house.

  “I need a good shot of the reunion with the wife,” he said.

  Li sat quietly in the passenger seat as we plunged into the country night, on rough roads that bumped through winter-dry fields of wheat and corn. At last we stopped before a darkened house. Last year’s faded wishes for prosperity and happiness clung to the metal gate.

  Shoulders hunched, fists clenched, Li stomped through the courtyard in a few strides, pushed open the door, and stepped onto the concrete floor. The sitting room was bone-cold and bathed in thin sulfur light. The photographer crept behind him, hands on the camera. The translator and I lurked outside, watching. Beyond the cotton curtain that led to the next room, a television flashed and flickered.

  Li glanced at us over one shoulder. We stared back wordlessly. A cornered grimace passed over his face.

  “Hey,” he shouted gruffly in the direction of the television. “Come out here.”

  Ducking her head and staring at the ground, his wife swept reluctantly through the curtains. Her face was chapped ruddy from wind and sun. For her husband’s homecoming she’d tugged her hair back into a bun and put on a padded cotton jacket printed in red swirls.

  Li frowned and huffed, shooting his bride an impatient, unreadable look. I couldn’t understand his annoyance. Maybe the appearance of his moon-faced wife had rudely smashed his city reveries. Maybe he was just nervous. She stepped closer, then stood uncertainly at his side. Shoulder to shoulder, they regarded us. No hand stretched, no smiles cracked, no arms opened. Nobody said a word.

  The uneasy moment was diluted in cries of welcome as the neighbors poured in the door to greet Li.

  The next morning Li’s wife minced goat fat for stew, banging it over and over with a shining cleaver. Her breath hung like fog in the frigid kitchen. The frozen fat resisted the blade, and she rubbed her thick fingers on her belly for warmth. Her name was Sun Fengzhi.

  “You know,” she told me almost immediately, “I went away once, too. Look—”

  Wiping the lard from her hands, she led me into the bedroom. On the wardrobe, in pride of place, hung a fading snapshot of Sun and three other women. They posed in factory smocks on the dock of a faraway harbor, smiling shyly for the camera. The woman in the photograph was so young and pretty I could hardly recognize her. The picture was only two years old.

  That was the year Sun left the children with her parents and found a job at a DVD component factory in Qingdao. She was thrilled by the travel, stimulated by the new city, and happy with her friends at the factory. But her son grew unruly; his grandparents could not handle him. She returned to the village.

  She was not satisfied, she told me, but she was resigned. She had hardly seen Li since their wedding. She knew how the story ended: Her children would grow up and find jobs elsewhere, and she would raise the grandchildren. The cycle would repeat itself.

  “I’ll end up here alone with the grandchildren,” she said flatly as we wandered back into the kitchen.

  I sensed the emotional slackening, the relief of a sympathetic stranger. Another woman.

  “He went away, and I had to take care of everything,” she said quietly. “It was really difficult for me. I had to take care of the kids myself. I used to hold them so long my arms were in pain. I had to be their father and their mother.”

  The women of her husband’s clan lurked in the doorway, listening. One of them peeled away and raced through the neighboring houses to find Li. Your wife is criticizing you to the foreigners!

  Sun Fengzhi’s face clouded with coming tears. Her voice fell to a whisper.

  “In the beginning, when he went away, he hired—” The word was in the air. Prostitutes.

  Li burst into the room.

  “Stop complaining so much,” he hollered.

  He lurched toward her and snarled in rage. She flinched away from him. Watching their eyes and bodies, I thought that he had hit her before, and would probably hit her again, for answering our questions.

  “She has so many complaints,” Li said to us, glaring at his wife.

  Their son joined in: “Stop complaining,” he shrieked at his mother.

  She dropped her reddened eyes to the stew.

  Li’s quiet panic was obvious. It made me think he’d agreed to our project only in a muddled rush of incredulity and embarrassment. Perhaps he’d thought it would boost his status in the village. He hadn’t expected us to write about his wife. He probably hadn’t expected us to speak with her at all.

  Now we hovered in his kitchen and followed him around like some ungainly Greek chorus, whispering among ourselves and documenting his every sneeze. Staring at him. Taking his picture. Asking everybody questions.

  Well, not everybody. The next time we saw Li’s wife she hardly looked at us. I tried to catch her eye, but she always managed to look elsewhere. She was a woman and so it was easy enough for her to disappear. When the men burned money for the ancestors in the graveyard, she stayed home and cooked. She gave the men the juiciest morsels. The women of the family fed themselves on scraps and leavings.

  She was a woman, and so she could vanish into our midst. The world will always suggest that this is an appropriate thing for a woman to do.

  When our time was done we lef
t. Casually we took a very long and very expensive taxi ride to a distant airport so that we could avoid another bus trip. We ate noodles in the departure hall restaurant and drank coffee and then we flew back to Beijing. I was returning to a week of parties and folk festivals. I was flying back to my husband. I was flying back to myself, to the rest of my life.

  I thought it was my last trip. But that’s a trick that trips have: You don’t even know where you’ve been until you’re not there anymore. I didn’t know where I’d been, and I didn’t know where I was going.

  I didn’t know that, in the years to come, I would spend more time with women like Li’s wife than I’d spend with my husband. I didn’t know that my own family life was about to get enmeshed with the lives of migrant workers—women who left their villages and children to earn money in my home. I didn’t know that the sensation of being flummoxed, of plunging into another family’s private dynamics, would soon dominate my days.

  I didn’t know that I, too, was about to disappear.

  PART ONE

  HOW TO

  DISAPPEAR

  Chapter 1

  It was a Tuesday morning, and Tom was packing to leave me. He was headed out into the hinterlands, to a small town in south China where the Communist Party was cracking down on rioting factory workers. This was Tom’s kind of adventure—a trip out into the provinces, into The Real China, to witness a fracture in the power of the Party. A substantial assignment with a light dusting of adrenaline.

  As for me, I was just trying to get comfortable. I experimented with pressing my spine straight against the floorboards, then raising my pelvis into the air. I sighed and groaned.

  Rolling clothes into logs and stacking them upright in his backpack, Tom pointedly ignored me.

  “Are you really okay with going on this trip?” I asked churlishly.

  “Come on.” He smiled at me. “You’re not due for two more weeks.”

  “That means anytime from right now.” With a heave I rolled over to my side, letting the heavy sac of water and child splash dully onto the floor.

  “The doctor said you’ll probably be late,” he pointed out cheerfully. “I bet it’ll be three more weeks.”

  “You don’t know.” No, that wasn’t comfortable either. I pulled air into my lungs and held it, trying to push my ribs off my womb.

  “There are flights every hour.”

  I sighed. The baby punched. He had to come out, somehow. My flesh stood in the way of his life. Tissue would tear, blood must flow, pain was a promise.

  “I’m going to the airport straight from the office.” Tom dropped a kiss on my hair. “Text me and tell me what the doctor says.”

  “Don’t go.” I was too hot to think straight. I begrudged him, in some confused way, the airports and adventures that I had relinquished. Maybe I sensed that our fates were about to diverge radically; maybe I was trying, clumsily, to make him share my inconvenience and immobilization. Maybe I just wanted a companion, my love, the baby’s father. Maybe I was scared.

  “Honey,” he said. “I can’t sit here for four weeks.”

  And he went.

  * * *

  ————

  “Your fluid is too low,” the doctor announced the next day. “He has to come out right away.”

  “What?” She might as well have said I was pregnant with a kangaroo kid. The indignation I had unloaded on Tom was, at bottom, an empty flourish of spousal guilt. Never for a moment had I believed the birth was imminent. “Why is the fluid low? What do you mean, right away?”

  “The fluid is low because he’s not peeing. That means he’s not getting nourished. This can happen with gestational diabetes. The placenta sometimes stops working.”

  I was numb, trying to follow. Then a spike of horror.

  “He’s starving?”

  “He’s not starving,” she said gently. “But he does need to come out now.”

  “My husband isn’t here. I mean he’s traveling.”

  She squinted at the ultrasound report, pen on her lips. “Can he be here tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” Goddamn right he can. “Are you sure it’s okay to wait?”

  “One day is okay. Go home. Take a long walk. Hopefully you’ll go into labor and we won’t need to induce.”

  “So I’ll have the baby tomorrow.”

  “If not tomorrow then Friday.”

  “But the baby is coming now. Like, this week.”

  “Yes.” She was laughing at me.

  I called Tom, too shocked to be smug. Then, alone in the apartment, I started calling friends. I’m having the baby tomorrow. Repeating the words, I tried to make myself believe it was true.

  I hadn’t packed a suitcase. Most pregnant women pack for the delivery months in advance. Checklists clutter the Internet: soft pillow, relaxing music, favorite chocolate. But I, who had thrown together hundreds of suitcases for all manner of climates and crises, who had once kept a “go bag” stuffed into my office closet for the next suicide bombing—I had never faced the ritual of packing this one, particular bag.

  The baby was coming. I wasn’t ready. Tom wasn’t here. The whole thing was slipping off track.

  I can no longer remember why this seemed important at the time, but during my pregnancy I’d become obsessed with the idea of a natural birth. I wanted to push my baby into the world through the vagina and without drugs. I told myself that I was a writer and an artist, a woman unbound by fear and pain and convention. I wanted the undiluted experience.

  I knew everything about birth, or so I thought. Of course, I knew nothing about birth then, and I know nothing now. I know only that nobody knows anything about birth except women who are in the act. Like all great pain, like every altered state, it can be apprehended only from within. It can’t be anticipated or remembered.

  I thought birth would be the texture of the soil; the color of the moon. I thought labor would be simple work. I thought pain would not be pain. In my imagination, it was like that.

  I didn’t stop to consider that a truly “natural” birth would consist of a teenaged mother facing a decent chance of death, nor that there had been nothing natural about my pregnancy so far. I’d staved off motherhood with birth control while I built my career, only to discover that I needn’t have bothered. Pregnancy eluded me until I flew halfway around the world to undergo surgery for endometriosis.

  A thirty-five-year-old frame stiffened and battered by decades of hard living and neglect, my body was not the youthful web of flexible ligament and muscle that biology would favor as its maternal vessel. “Advanced maternal age,” the doctor had written across the top of my file.

  Nor was my temperament suited to natural birth. I’m a runner and an insomniac, not a yogi or meditator. I’d distinguished myself as the least relaxed mother in the HypnoBirthing class I’d attended with Tom in tow. The midwife had rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue over my tensed shoulders, so I ground my teeth and tried even harder to relax. I tried, really I did, and somehow that was part of the problem. I didn’t know how to stop trying.

  During all this moony preparation, I hardly thought about the baby at all. This new human life was a misty idea, a blurred bundle of my own emotion wrapped in an impossibly fluffy blanket, which, come to think of it, I didn’t own.

  It was a lot to think about; it’s always a lot to think about. Maybe this is how our contemporary psychology confronts drastic change. Couples drown out a fear of lifelong commitment by obsessing over iris-and-ivy centerpieces and the vocabulary of the vows. Who wants to think about diapering and colic when you can sip chamomile tea with beatific pregnant ladies and swap tactical advice designed to outmaneuver the dreaded obstetrician? (“They’re surgeons, you know. They think it’s their job to cut you open.”)

  I approached birth with the competitive, adrenalized mentality of hard-charging ne
wspaper work. Labor was an arena in which I would struggle and—inevitably, eventually—triumph. I would do it. Me. Motherhood itself lurked out in the margins of an old map, scribbled with sea creatures. Here be dragons.

  Tom struggled to get home. Thunderstorms raged in southern China that night. His flight lingered for hours on the runway. Hunched over his computer, dripping sweat, he hammered the interviews into a news story. Finally the plane took off into the night sky, carrying my husband north.

  Harried and soggy and exultant, he reached our apartment at three a.m. I was lying in bed, wide awake.

  Four hours later, we drank a pot of coffee and took a taxi to the hospital.

  * * *

  ————

  A cot with bars and perfectly white sheets. Instruments with dials and screens, steel tables, metallic skeletons and hooks, things that rolled away. A pullout sofa for Tom.

  I kicked off my shoes and climbed onto the bed, but lying there felt like an affectation. Hospitals are for broken bones, surgery, stitches. Now I felt, obscurely, that I was making much of myself, swanning around on a perfectly normal Thursday morning.

  “What are we going to do all day?” I asked Tom.

  I kept looking at him and thinking, You should be at work! I think I even said it once: “This could take a while. I could call you.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

  I hated the bars that made the hospital bed resemble a cage. They delineated the man from the woman, the mother from the father. I malingered in plastic and metal and hospital pajamas. Tom sat with his exhausted complexion and street clothes. I wanted him to find it strange, too, but he didn’t share my agitation. When I fretted over the bars, he frowned. “They’re just for—you know, physical safety,” he said absentmindedly.