Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “I’m comfortable,” she insisted.

  One day Tom happened to be home; he was even more unnerved than me. “Why is she sleeping in that chair?” he hissed.

  “She won’t move,” I said. “I tried.”

  “Xiao Li, please,” I heard him say. “This looks very uncomfortable.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m okay!”

  One day a friend brought a sack of Japanese takeout for lunch. She was also a new mother, but she’d gone straight back to her reporting job after her baby’s birth. Now we dunked sushi rolls into soy sauce while she regaled me with her reporting adventures.

  She’d recently visited a Beijing garbage dump, she told me, and profiled an old woman who rescued infant girls from the trash.

  “People just throw baby girls into the garbage,” she muttered, lowering her voice so that Xiao Li wouldn’t overhear. “Can you imagine?”

  “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “She’s sleeping.”

  “By the way,” I added, “will you please look at how she’s sleeping?”

  She tiptoed to the kitchen door, peeked inside, and, with a grin, returned to the table.

  “It’s driving me crazy,” I said.

  “She probably likes it there,” she insisted. “It’s her own little place.”

  “It looks,” I said, “insanely uncomfortable.”

  “Chinese people,” replied my brilliant and compassionate friend, “have a totally different sense of physical comfort.”

  Those words stuck in my head. I remembered them in a sick rush, months later, when I picked up Julia Boyd’s book about denizens of Beijing’s foreign legation in the years leading up to the Boxer Rebellion. The foreigners regarded the Chinese people of Beijing as “entertaining, challenging, occasionally frightening but ultimately unreal,” Boyd writes.

  “By convincing themselves that the Chinese operated under different criteria, the foreigners were able more easily to accept their suffering,” she continues. “It was clear that the Chinese did not feel physical pain as acutely as Westerners.”

  * * *

  ————

  Xiao Li ran clothes through the washing machine and hung them to dry in the sun. She tucked fresh sheets over the beds. She bought vegetables and rice and noodles and meat and eggs and cooking oil and spices. She fried our dinner every night, poured the steaming food into our dishes, and arranged the plates on the dining room table.

  It wasn’t enough. Xiao Li hungered for the baby. She hovered over him and whispered into his face. He smiled at her. She caught her breath with delight. The more I tried to discourage her interest, the more sweetly insistent she became. One day she blocked my path as I carried him toward the changing table.

  “I do it,” she announced, stretching out her hands for the baby.

  “No, I will do it,” I snapped, surprised by the hardness of my own voice. “You can watch,” I added more gently. “So you learn.”

  “Okay.”

  Her eyes twinkled with smothered laughter. It was a kind laugh. She was not unsympathetic to my madness.

  “Okay.”

  One afternoon I rushed home from an unexpectedly prolonged bank errand. My heart was flopping like a fish thrown to land. Max, I was sure, was howling for his mother, believing in his tiny brain that I had abandoned him. I imagined he was hungry and afraid and lonely. I couldn’t endure the anxiety of imagining his anxiety.

  I burst into the apartment—into a scene of serenity. Xiao Li cuddled the baby by the window. She sang to him softly in Mandarin, turning him gently back and forth in a shaft of sunlight. He stared at her face in rapture. She turned to me and grinned, as if to say, “See?”

  Looking at them I understood that, if I was serious about getting back to work, I had to encourage this bond, not squelch it.

  I began to hand Max over to Xiao Li at least once a day. Chattering and crooning, she carted him through the rooms. She laid him on the couch and sat on the floor, her face level with his, and amused him with a singsong monologue. She pointed out the sun and clouds and a faint stain of daytime moon. She read aloud from bright board books, tittering when she caught me eavesdropping on her clumsy English. “Feet in the day, feet in the night,” she’d squeal, and tickle his toes.

  I will never forget the way she said his name. The delicious anticipation of the M; the long-savoring relish of a drawn-out a; the strong x like the surprise of a smacking kiss. Exclamation point every time. Max!

  As if the name itself tasted delicious.

  * * *

  ————

  “You want lunch?”

  I had plumped down in my usual spot, on the beige armchair next to the bookcase—back to the kitchen, face to a window full of sky. I was staring at the autumn afternoon, sipping coffee with milk and trying to cheer myself up. And there was Xiao Li, ready to feed me.

  “I don’t want to eat,” I told her gloomily. “I’m still too fat.”

  “No,” she said politely.

  I sighed. “I can’t wear my clothes. They are too small.”

  “Okay,” she said warmly, waving a dismissive hand. She didn’t have the American inclination to convince me the fat was a figment of my imagination, but she was generous enough to insist it didn’t matter.

  “Your baby is still very small,” she said. “After my daughter, I also was very fat. Like this—” She blew out her cheeks.

  I laughed. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Really. Even after one year, I was fat. After that, okay.”

  “How old is she now? Your daughter?”

  “Three.”

  “Oh! Big girl.” Compared with my infant, even one-year-olds loomed like freakish gargantua.

  Xiao Li nodded agreeably.

  “She’s in your village?”

  “Yes, she used to be here with me, but it was too difficult,” she said. “Now she is with my parents.”

  “Your husband is here?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “He’s working?”

  “Yes.”

  “What does he do?”

  I wasn’t politely feigning ignorance. All of this was news to me. I’d heard these details when Xiao Li interviewed for the job but had forgotten them immediately.

  “He is building.”

  “Construction.”

  “Construction,” she agreed.

  “Interesting.” I smiled and let the questions drop. I didn’t inquire after the child’s schooling or caregivers. I didn’t check whether it was Xiao Li’s choice to get a job, nor dwell on the unsettling knowledge that her daughter had been deposited in a village with grandparents because (this went without saying) Xiao Li could not, herself, afford childcare. I made no effort to discover whether her lifestyle was a grand adventure or heartbreaking drudgery, or some combination of the two.

  Those questions lined themselves up in my thoughts, but I left them silent. They lit too starkly the discrepancy in our positions. That I had money and would not have to leave my baby behind. That she was poor, she had not been educated, she didn’t have choices.

  I had the vague idea that my silence was magnanimous. I told myself I was sparing her from embarrassment. It hadn’t occurred to me yet that I was the one being spared.

  Anyway, we couldn’t communicate very well. My rudimentary Chinese and her broken English gave us only a small vocabulary of baby- and household-related nouns and verbs.

  But I also failed, deliberately, to use my imagination. I did not envision the faraway room Xiao Li shared with her husband, or her life beyond our apartment: the lengthy bus commute, the cooking and shopping and cleaning she did for her own family.

  This line of thought was dangerous. If I found out too much, if the facts were too grim, then I might conclude that my domestic arrangement was fu
ndamentally unfair. That was my formless and underlying fear: that if I understood too much, I might have to rip apart the status quo. I could either drown or I could wear Xiao Li as a life vest. There was no third choice.

  * * *

  ————

  “I’ll take Max outside?” Xiao Li suggested one afternoon, tilting her head and brightening her eyes.

  “Um,” I said, obscurely annoyed.

  My gut reaction: Absolutely not.

  I glanced around the clean, empty apartment. It was a Tuesday afternoon. There was nobody here but me, Max, and Xiao Li; Tom wouldn’t be back until the end of the week. I thought of my long-neglected book manuscript. In order for Xiao Li to make sense, she needed to do things like take the baby for a walk.

  I knew that. I absolutely knew that.

  This is what people do, I reminded myself. This is what everybody does, everybody you know. They put their faith in babysitters, nannies, day cares. They research the characters of the caregivers and the policies of the facilities, but there’s no avoiding the inevitable moment of turning over a helpless child to near-strangers.

  It felt crazy. It felt awful.

  This must be crazy and awful.

  No, I’m the one being crazy.

  “It’s okay?” Xiao Li prodded at my silence.

  “Okay.”

  I seated Max in the stroller and reached for the straps, but, with a sidelong glance, she gently took the plastic buckles from my hands and fastened them. She wanted to show that she could do things right.

  “You have your phone?”

  “Yes.”

  I heard the ding, swish, and clank of the elevator.

  They were gone.

  What have I done?

  Left alone, my mind flashed with disaster scenarios. Years of journalism have permanently seeded my imagination with all manner of sinister human possibility. What’s the worst that could happen? is my least favorite rhetorical question, because I always have an answer.

  Take now, for example: Human trafficking. Xiao Li had struck a deal with a kidnapping gang. Max was a perfect baby, lacking defects, brand new. He was worth a fortune. They could be waiting in a car downstairs. He couldn’t talk, he would never remember me. Why had Tom insisted on using that agency? They were probably involved. I never liked that agent with her wolfish teeth…

  No, stop it, stop! A thing so simple, I chided myself, this should be okay—a babysitter takes the baby for a walk in the stroller. Try—just try!—to be normal.

  No, it’s not right!

  What was I thinking, letting this unknown woman in a foreign country take my baby? My mother would never have done such a thing.

  No, she left us alone with random teenagers; that’s worse!

  I am a worthless mother.

  I am out of my mind.

  I tried to reason with myself—a white baby would be tricky to pass through the Chinese market. Surely my son would be more trouble than he was worth.

  But—the Russians!

  Oh God. The Russians.

  We lived a short walk from the surreal hustle of the Russian district, a few square blocks of seedy karaoke bars and wild nightclubs and shady cargo depots. Groaning, rusting trucks panted into town off the long dusty highways to Central Asia to unload their crates into heavily guarded warehouses.

  She could sell my baby to the Russians!

  I hovered at the living room window, squinting into the midday glare, trying to distinguish the baby’s red stroller and Xiao Li’s yellow shirt among the crowds below. There were trendy boutiques, cafés, dry cleaners, beauty parlors. Paved paths snaked up grassy slopes dotted with pomegranate and ginkgo trees. It was a cheerful, busy place, utterly devoid of street crime, bustling with a steady smattering of business commuters and couples and schoolchildren, watched over by a small army of security guards. It was hardly a place that suggested danger.

  There! Xiao Li pushed the stroller in lazy circles, pausing to chat with other ayis who chaperoned charges of their own. She bent into the baby’s face, adjusted his sunshade, then wandered along the sidewalk, staring in the shop windows. She parked him for a time in the shade and sat companionably on the curb at his side, then rose and walked some more.

  It was fine. I was ridiculous.

  When she brought him back I snatched up the warm small body and breathed the sweet cream smell of my own, unmistakable baby. He gave me a grin as if I were the best thing that had ever happened to anybody, and nuzzled against my cheek.

  I flushed with euphoria. My baby was back, and I had glimpsed a way forward. Xiao Li had taken the baby away and then returned him safely. Here she was, humming and cheerful and ordinary. Perhaps, then, this was indeed a woman I could trust.

  And so it was, at first: the relationship with Xiao Li was transactional and strategic and terrifying.

  Everything that was most precious to me—my work and my child—was bound up in the behavior of a woman I hardly knew.

  The reality was simple and relentless: If Xiao Li showed up for work, I could shut the study door, sit at a desk, and write for an hour or two. Her absence—an attack of flu, a family crisis—collapsed all hope for writing on that particular day.

  And so I enmeshed myself in a web of women’s work—as worker, employer, and beneficiary, all at the same time. My own work rested on the cornerstone of another woman’s labor. My writing was a commodity. My time was a finite raw material. The choice to hire domestic help was an investment, and therefore a gamble.

  Like Apple computers or Goodyear tires, I reaped the benefit of cheap Chinese labor. But unlike those companies, I lived in my own factory, and spent more time with the cheap laborers than I spent with my spouse.

  And, too, I fretted over the condition of my soul.

  A friend called from Hong Kong one day: a mother and human rights activist.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m having a postmodern feminist breakdown every single day,” I told her. “But otherwise okay.”

  She laughed. “Join the club.”

  It’s true: I was in good company. The most brilliant and socially conscious female professionals I met around the world—the human rights workers, entrepreneurs, artists, journalists, diplomats, and wonks—enabled their careers by hiring impoverished women to care for their children.

  That was the underbelly. That was the trade-off.

  There was no other solution in sight.

  * * *

  ————

  Tom got tired of Xiao Li’s cooking.

  Even I, her fondest ally, had to admit a sameness in the stir-fried meats, greens, and eggs; mounds of white rice; cucumbers in vinegar. Any mouthful we didn’t eat reappeared at the next meal as a side dish. Tom shoved these dingy leftovers aside, but I was too ashamed to instruct Xiao Li to waste the food. Instead I’d crumple the remains into paper towels and sneak them out to the garbage chute after she left.

  I could feel Tom’s silent irritation swelling. I knew an outburst was coming, and my outrage grew in anticipation. How dare he fuss over food when I was clinging to sanity by my fingernails? It wasn’t the most innovative cuisine, but it was serviceable and nutritious and infinitely better than anything he or I was in a position to prepare. Couldn’t he just eat dinner and shut up? Silently, I dared him to bring it up.

  And, of course, he did.

  “This is terrible.” Tom pushed his chair back one night with a clatter.

  “No, it’s not.” I knew an opening shot when I saw it.

  “I can’t eat any more stir-fry.”

  “I like it! These garlic shoots—”

  “Can’t you teach her how to make something else?”

  “In all my spare time?” There was a warning in my voice.

  “I’m going downsta
irs to the Italian place.”

  “What about me?” I said.

  “You said you liked it,” he spoke with fake patience. “So eat it. Or, if you want, you can go out when I come back.”

  I brushed past wordlessly when he returned. I’d lost my appetite, but there was principle at stake. In the Japanese restaurant downstairs, I ordered a bottle of beer and drank it very slowly, staring out the window. Childless couples rushed through the darkness, stylish and conspiratorial, passing in and out of the streetlights.

  By the time I got home, Tom had gone to bed.

  * * *

  ————

  I was stuck in my shrunken world. I tried to call forth another.

  I found memories, sounds, smells, and followed them back to Moscow. Then, from a remembered Moscow, I softened the cityscape, let the buildings quiver and reform themselves as a fictional Moscow. A city that had been real to me, home to me, must now be rearranged in imagination. Truth had to exist inside the fakeries of manufactured details. To make fiction that was true, that was the trick. If the sentences didn’t all but conceal the truth in a way that was palpable but not overt, then it was plain garbage. But somehow if you tried, you failed. There was a blindness to it, and a freedom. I had to let myself go, follow the words, reel myself out knowing it might be a sea of mud and the line might fray and snap. Go now. This is my chance. Go.

  The computer was white. The page was white. The great empty sky in the window was white. The white of a Moscow winter. The white of a summer sky. White nights. St. Petersburg. Tired images. Postcards. Something somebody else would write. Not mine.

  Turn the white space to snow. Fill the void with language. Find something true and put some words on top of it.

  I was too tired. The fatigue was not wild and suggestive, but empty. Moscow had fallen out of reach. Instead I wrote:

  You think about the 1950s. You think there is perhaps some value in repression and bottling things up. You think it might be more palatable, at least more honest, to live with some Don Draper, an unabashed sexist who does not labor under the illusion that he leads a progressive and egalitarian lifestyle. You wonder what happened to the man who said we’d never outsource our childcare. You think about the competition between short-term needs. You think about compromises. If you speak up angrily, he says you are acting crazy. If you speak up sadly, he says you are making yourself into a victim. You try not to speak, but that makes you sadder and more crazy. If you don’t speak up, nothing will change. If you speak up, nothing changes. You become unable to take seriously any feminist who hasn’t had children in a heterosexual relationship. You have learned that’s where the bloodiest, hardest most intractable battle lies, and that it lies there mostly hidden because millions of families balance on the silence.