Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  My head rang. I was tired. I’d fought again with Tom. We fought over all the new things there were to fight about—chores and time and sleep and responsibilities. We fought because we were both exhausted and secretly convinced the other one had the better end of the deal. We fought because we were neurotically careful not to fight in front of the baby, and that meant we almost never got a chance to fight at all, and by the time we fought the annoyances had fermented to a potency that obscured altogether their original cause. We fought because we used to baby each other and now nobody got babied but the baby.

  As for me, I fought because I was reeling in shock, and because Tom was hardly there at all. He had slipped easily back into his old life while I had been bombed back to some prehistoric version of myself. And I was angry that he had accepted this superior position, this lesser disruption, as a sort of birthright. And so I fought with his absence.

  It felt, in sudden flashes, like we were on the brink of collapse. But, then again, every new parent I knew was having some version of the same argument. And that made it seem safer—like a head cold or a developmental phase, something that would pass with time.

  When we weren’t fighting, Tom listened with interest. I told him how I’d been changed and humbled; described the things that had happened to my body and mind.

  “You should write about all of this,” he told me.

  “All of what?”

  “Becoming a mother.”

  “No!”

  This suggestion made me furious. It seemed to me that every college-educated woman with a laptop, a baby, and a sketchy grasp of grammar had reinvented herself as a “mommy blogger.”

  Not that, no way—not for me. I had fought too hard and too long to go down like that. Never would I absent myself from the broader world and its serious abstractions like politics and economics. I had beaten the boys before and I wouldn’t stop now. My writings would not be set among refrigerators and cribs; would not smell of rubber ducks and diaper creams.

  True, I was adrift in that world. I was suffused with maternity, plumped and drifting on streams of milk and hormones—but I would not allow myself that fecundity, that dissipation of clean living, which made me think of a spot in overripened tomatoes where the skin disintegrates and the fingernail sinks into caving flesh.

  That could not be me.

  That’s why I needed Xiao Li.

  Chapter 4

  Six perfect pastries glistened under glass. The kiwi seeds twinkled like tiny chips of onyx. They would never be eaten; the slender customers who frequented this bakery did not traffic in lardy sweets. The bakers, with their exquisite aprons and heavily Chinese-accented French, were guards and props in this museum to rarified dough.

  I was drinking tea with a pair of friends. One was the mother of two small children. The other friend, after months of baggy blouses and soda water with lime, had finally copped to her long-suspected pregnancy.

  “My husband is all ready to change diapers,” the pregnant woman said smugly.

  We laughed at her.

  “You won’t even care about the diapers,” I said.

  “Then what?”

  We locked eyes. How frank should we be?

  “Well, there’s the sleep—” I began carefully.

  “And the breast-feeding—” the other mother said.

  “Right,” I agreed. “God!”

  A heavy pause settled over the table.

  “For a while, like maybe a year, your husband will be an alien in your household,” the other mother finally said. “It will feel like he doesn’t even live there anymore.”

  I stared at her.

  “That,” I said with wonderment, “is exactly how I feel.”

  This mother-friend of mine had managed, in a few simple lines, to diagnose the malady of my own domestic life.

  Tom had become an alien in the household.

  * * *

  ————

  “Are you getting any writing done?” Tom asked a few days later, dragging his eyes from his computer with the air of a disgruntled student forcing himself to contribute to the class discussion for the sake of his final grade.

  “Some.” I tried to sound light. “I’m still struggling to find the time.”

  “Maybe we need to find somebody better than Xiao Li,” he suggested idly.

  I stared at him in horror.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense that we pay a full-time maid but you still have to deal with all this work.”

  From all corners of my brain, different strands of objection reared up and raced at once toward my mouth, where they collided and collapsed in a hopeless snarl of converging verbal attacks.

  “The thing is—”

  What to say, where to begin? Tom had no concept of the working hours required to maintain our tidy, properly supplied, and salubrious status quo.

  He interrupted: “Well, honey—”

  “Wait,” I snapped. “Just wait a minute.”

  I covered my eyes and pressed as hard as I could.

  Xiao Li was supposed to make me free, but she’s turned into a trap.

  In truth, Xiao Li and I both worked full-tilt. We shopped, cooked for the adults, cooked for the baby, cleaned, washed clothes, and, of course, there was the ceaseless time commitment of the baby himself.

  If Tom and I were willing to live in a messy apartment, or to eat more takeout, then the addition of Xiao Li might have signified an easy path back to my writing desk. But we’re both neat freaks and Tom is a picky eater, and since Xiao Li had started working for us, he didn’t see any need to accept an unkempt domestic existence.

  I had failed, yes, but not in the way Tom assumed. I had failed to properly communicate my daily reality to my husband. Now I had to try, but it was late and I was indignant.

  “It’s not that Xiao Li isn’t doing her job,” I finally said, tugging on the reins of my voice, which bucked and threatened to charge into a scream. “It’s just that there’s a lot to do. Like if she’s cleaning the house, then of course I am with Max.”

  “What about his naps?”

  “I have to, like, shower sometimes.” Spikes of hatred, shards of sentences: Picking the hours apart—I have to explain—and who is he to ask?—where is he all day?—if he takes a walk in the park, if he goes out for coffee—how dare he interrogate me like this—I would never—

  I wanted to throw a plate at his head.

  “You don’t understand,” I finally said. “You’re not here all day and you just don’t have a realistic sense of how much work goes on.”

  “No, I guess I don’t,” he said meanly.

  Now I was murderous.

  “You should take my word for it. You should trust me,” I exploded. “Because I have done your job. I know exactly what your day is. But you have never done this and I bet you never would.”

  Tom stormed off to the bedroom, and I sat reviewing my position with horror. Xiao Li had given me crucial scraps of time and valuable hope for my career, but I had paid for her presence in currency I was only beginning to understand. Now I saw that, if I pressed Tom to do more housework, he would call for Xiao Li to be fired. His estrangement from the housework would be recast as failures on the part of me, the manager, or Xiao Li, the “full-time maid.”

  He always used that word, maid. It made my skin crawl. There were accusations embedded in this word with its suggestions of opulence. I was an exploiter feeding on the flesh of the poor. I had turned into the kind of person we never wanted to be.

  Tom, of course, was still at large in the world. He stuck up for the underdogs. He interviewed dissidents and human rights lawyers and Tibetan monks. He had become a parent and kept his career without making any degrading compromises. He didn’t count his minutes and hours the way I did, w
ith desperation, like a beggar reviewing a dwindling pocket of coins.

  * * *

  ————

  On the occasion of our baby’s first Christmas, we gave him toys from IKEA: plush animals and wooden trains and puzzles. Things-that-were-not-plastic, imported from Scandinavia.

  We were afraid of China. Not afraid of its streets or its people, but terrified of Chinese chemicals and plastics.

  Not for nothing: Poisoned fog hung in the air, the water was filthy, and people died by the hundreds from tainted drugs and food. Black markets and counterfeit scams thrived, so you could never be sure you were buying what you thought you were buying. The scandals of a polluted land were incessant, each revelation more nauseating than the last: The “lamb” that was really dog meat soaked in goat urine. Human hair culled from hospitals and barbershops then melted down into “soy sauce.” Cooking oils dredged from sewers.

  The toys for sale in the shops of Beijing smelled like turpentine and kerosene and rubbing alcohol. One sniff sent the nervous system flashing and recoiling. The toys contained heavy metals and illegal dyes and phthalates, plasticizers widely banned in the West.

  On Christmas Eve, Xiao Li burst into our apartment with apples in her cheeks and a wrapped present for Max.

  “Merry Christmas,” she told our baby sweetly. “I love you.”

  She helped him rip the paper, revealing a hard plastic duck with a round bottom. It chimed tinny songs and bobbed upright when knocked sideways.

  Max loved the duck. He knocked and spun and guffawed. Next to our drab offerings of wooden contraptions and stuffed animals, Xiao Li’s duck was shiny and loud, and he liked it better than anything he’d ever received from anybody. He batted and gurgled at the clattering creature, and Xiao Li glowed with pride.

  “We have to get rid of that duck,” Tom whispered as soon as we were alone.

  “What are you talking about?” I knew exactly what he was talking about. “We can’t.”

  “Honey,” he said. “If he puts it in his mouth…”

  I knew Tom was right. The duck was unhealthy and our baby was tiny.

  But I also knew Tom was wrong. Chinese children played with such toys. Must we always dangle our child aloft, letting him see the world but not partake? We wanted China to enrich but not poison him, and sometimes, I thought, the line between the two evaporated.

  And then, of course, there was Xiao Li. It was the only sort of toy her daughter would ever have. How could I dismiss it as a kidney failure waiting to happen? I might as well announce that her life and its contents were too cheap, her country too disgusting, our baby too precious for her offerings.

  I tried to think of a way to subtly disappear the duck. But Max didn’t have many toys, so the duck’s absence was sure to be noticed and interrogated. It’s not easy to hide anything from the person who cleans your house.

  I tried to make everything all right with everybody, and it was a project.

  I buried the duck in a pile of sweaters on an upper shelf. I never explicitly told Tom I’d thrown the duck away, but I allowed him to assume as much. When Xiao Li hunted for the duck, I’d shrug distractedly and make a mental note to put it back the next day—once Tom had left for the office. I always remembered to hide it again before Tom came home from work.

  I shuffled the duck around, stretched the time between its appearances, and waited for everybody’s memory to fade.

  I needed camouflage, so I expanded Max’s holdings. Now he had a shape shifter from America, a puzzle from Australia, a keyboard from Germany.

  One day, of course, I slipped. Tom discovered Max with the duck.

  “Why is this duck still here?” he cried in dismay.

  “Oh,” I feigned surprise. “I dunno.”

  “I thought we got rid of it.”

  I started to say Me, too, but stopped myself because this was technically a lie. “Yeah,” I said. “We should throw it out.”

  I watched my husband yank the duck off the floor and stomp out of sight. Patriarch and protector, vanquisher of toxic fowl! I heard the steel door of the garbage chute creak open and then crash shut, swallowing the bird whole.

  Max whimpered. I scooped him into my arms and carried him into another room.

  A moment later, he had forgotten.

  As for Xiao Li, if she ever noticed the duck’s disappearance, she kept it to herself.

  * * *

  ————

  I counted once, and counted again. I rifled the other hip pocket, and the back pockets. Yes, for sure, cash was missing. The wad of bills I’d stuffed in my pocket was short a few hundred yuan. I was positive.

  Well. Almost positive. Maybe I’d spent it and forgotten. Maybe I’d taken less money than I thought. I stood dazedly in the laundry room, jeans dangling from one hand, trying to relive the morning.

  I’d set out to buy slippers for Max, shoving the bills deep down into my pocket. I’d made my way on foot along bright, hard winter streets and pushed through the weighted plastic curtains into the dim warrens of the Silk Market: stretches of stalls and booths piled high with all kinds of clothes for all kinds of people, every imaginable knockoff and piracy and grotesque synthetic creation haggled over by a rowdy pack of merchants and buyers and tourists and vagrants.

  My quest was specific: the January drafts were keen and the floors were cold and Max needed thick wool socks, the kind with plastic beads on the soles so he wouldn’t slip. I hunted and prowled and pawed and soon found the sort of slippers I had in mind. A quick negotiation, and I was headed home.

  All that time, the clump of bills sat snug and deep in my pocket, pressed against my thigh. A knee-length coat, in turn, covered the pocket.

  I had been bumped and jolted a bit, true, and ridden on packed escalators. Still, I was certain nobody had sneaked a hand up under my coat and down into my pocket. I’d stopped in the deli for coffee, spilled the coffee on my jeans, rushed upstairs, and changed clothes hurriedly at the bedside. The bedroom, then, was the likeliest place—the cash could have fallen to the floor. But the money was nowhere to be found.

  “Xiao Li.” She paused in the kitchen, eyes turned over the rim of her hot water thermos. “Did you find money?”

  Blood flew into her cheeks.

  “No,” she said. “How much?”

  “A few hundred.”

  “Ohhhh…” She frowned. “You went to the market—”

  “It wasn’t the market,” I interrupted.

  “But many pickpockets are there,” she protested. “And they are very good at taking money. You won’t feel it—”

  “Will you help me look?”

  Our hunt turned up no cash. Meanwhile, I had picked apart my memories until they were meaningless. I’d constructed a dozen plausible explanations and false recollections—handing money to a beggar, absentmindedly dropping change onto a pile of merchandise—and one of them might be real. It was nothing. Maybe it was nothing. Probably.

  Or maybe I’d been losing money steadily for weeks, months, who knew? Maybe Xiao Li was a nefarious, snickering stranger who’d been ripping me off all the while, preying on my sleep-deprived psyche.

  As if she’d read my thoughts, Xiao Li’s search became desperate. She turned out the pockets of coats I hadn’t worn in years and scrabbled in disused shopping bags. And she kept telling me that I must have been robbed, these thieves are very clever, I wouldn’t know…

  I was uneasy, she was uneasy, and soon Max would be awake from his nap. I hadn’t accused Xiao Li or even hinted of suspicion, but the suggestion of petty theft loomed between us. And maybe, I thought in annoyance, the suspicion was legitimate. Maybe in exhaustion and desperation I’d invited a clever con artist to plunder my home.

  So what if she steals some cash? I suddenly thought. Maybe I should look the other way.

  But nastine
ss clumped at the root of that thought, too. As if Xiao Li’s poverty excluded her from the norms of human interchange; as if she were not a woman in full standing, but some wretch whose misdeeds should be expected and overlooked.

  Besides, I had to consider my own conscience. If we weren’t paying her enough to feel firmly that we didn’t deserve to be robbed, then obviously her salary ought to be raised.

  We paid her plenty, I reminded myself. More than most, I reminded myself.

  We were paying the agency, though, that was the catch. The agency offered protection for all involved: It covered Xiao Li’s health insurance and would place her in a new home if we fired her. But this arrangement cost us all more than the going rate because someone from the agency showed up every month to demand their share of Xiao Li’s salary.

  All of these thoughts churned past, one suggesting the next, as I searched for money I hadn’t earned in rooms I hadn’t polished.

  Tom, of course, had no doubt.

  “She took it,” he pronounced, interrupting before I’d even finished the story.

  The easy certainty of this accusation filled me with fury. It was one thing for me to entertain fleeting suspicions. It was quite another for Tom, who’d so casually detached himself from the household, to accuse Xiao Li.

  “You don’t know that!”