Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  From the storm of wails, a few phrases emerged: You come. Max nose broken. Too much blood.

  I surged to my feet, nearly toppling the table, and gasped some garble about a broken nose.

  “Go, go, go.” The parents took up the ritual chant. Their impassive adolescent children roused themselves from laden plates to regard this crisis with sleepy-lidded interest. “Call me, tell me, I hope…” My friend’s voice fell away as my feet pounded down the stairs toward the street.

  Blindly I fled, shoving the door, bursting into day, wrenching my bike lock so hard I shredded my fingernails. Straddling the bike, balancing on toes, I paused to call Tom.

  “Max has a broken nose!”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know! Xiao Li called! I’m out—”

  “I’m headed home right now!” He hung up.

  Buildings, sidewalks, and trees smeared into shapeless color as I careened through the day. I pedaled so fast I had the sensation of coming unhinged from everything around me. Adrenaline pounded down into my toes, pulsed in my earlobes, threatened to burst my fingernails clean off my hands. Dimly I registered horns, shouts, brakes. But no car hit me; I didn’t fall. By some miracle, some mad grace for desperate mothers, the city opened a path for me where there should have been none.

  I careened to the lobby door, pounded the elevator button, scrabbled for the key, and tumbled into the house.

  Max lolled in dry, sullen silence in Xiao Li’s arms. Gently I carried him into the bathroom. Smears of fresh blood covered the lower half of his face. I sat him down on the sink and sponged his face with a washcloth.

  “His nose looks all right,” I told a sniffling Xiao Li, who had followed. “It’s his lip. Max, sweetheart, look up, look at the ceiling, honey—”

  My voice shook; my heart roared.

  I pried open his mouth and peered inside. The upper lip was split from within, his front teeth had slammed into the soft flesh. Heads bleed—my mother had always said that. You can’t hurt an Irishman by hitting him on the head. That had been my grandfather.

  I picked Max up and cuddled him. I kissed his hot wet cheeks and smelled his hair.

  “He’ll be okay,” I told Xiao Li. “What happened?”

  Xiao Li slapped her hands over her face and began to sob in earnest. Her thin shoulders trembled in her tank top; her keening cries echoed down the hall.

  “What’s wrong?” I cried. “What happened?”

  “He was walking! He fell! He hit his face on the side of the bed.”

  “Well, that happens.”

  She kept sobbing.

  “I mean—he falls down all the time,” I said.

  “I am not good,” Xiao Li wailed. “I can’t take care of him. I will find another job.”

  I felt my back stiffen.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want Max to get hurt,” she sobbed. “I can’t.”

  “But babies get hurt,” I pointed out, rubbing circles on his back with my palm. My child restored to my arms, I had calm to spare. “He gets hurt more with me than he does with you. I know you are very careful!”

  This was true. Xiao Li hovered and caught much more assiduously than Tom or me; the rate of injuries on her watch put us both to shame.

  But Xiao Li couldn’t gather herself. And as her sobs grew louder and Max stirred uneasily in my arms, something in my gut hardened. If I, the child’s mother, could keep my cool, then surely some equanimity might be expected from the nanny. She had lost her head and made that crazy phone call; she had sent me racing across the city with images of a mangled face. I could have died, I thought now. I had a wild urge to shake her or slap her across the face.

  “You need to calm down,” I said coldly. “You’ll scare the baby.”

  But she was lost, beyond the reach of sympathy or anger, adrift on currents of her own sorrows. She was crying so hard I thought she must be grieving, in some oblique way, for herself. I tried to remember how old her daughter had been when Xiao Li had left.

  Max mewled in my arms, burrowing his head into my neck to escape the wails of his nanny.

  “Please go to the bathroom and calm down,” I told her, trying to soften my voice. “This crying is not good for Max.”

  She went, and through the closed door we heard the sounds of running water and stifled cries.

  Tom burst into the living room.

  “Max—”

  “He’s fine!” I’d just locked one hysteric into the bathroom, and here was a fresh eruption of Sturm und Drang. Tom swooped down and lifted Max from my arms.

  “So he didn’t break his nose?”

  “It’s just a split lip.”

  “Where did you get the idea he broke his nose?”

  “That’s what Xiao Li said when she called.”

  “What happened?”

  “He just fell down. He was walking and he lost his balance. You know. He banged his face on the bedpost. At least that’s what I understand—”

  “Where were you?”

  “I had that lunch with Shamini.”

  “Oh right.” He dropped kisses over the baby’s face. “Max! You okay, buddy?”

  He turned to me: “Where’s Xiao Li?”

  “She’s crying in the bathroom.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you yell at her?”

  “No, I was very nice.” I realized that Tom’s line of questioning sought, from all angles, something for which I might be blamed.

  “I was annoyed about all the crying,” I admitted. “Anyway, I want to call the doctor and make sure we don’t have to bring him to the hospital or anything.”

  “I thought he had a broken nose…” I could see in Tom’s slackened posture the same confusing flare and drain of adrenaline that had wrung out my own nerves.

  “Me, too,” I sighed. “But thank God he doesn’t.”

  The doctor told me to ice the cut, and when I explained that the baby fought fiercely against ice, she immediately suggested a cheerful alternative: ice cream.

  So we carried Max downstairs to a sidewalk café, where we presented him with his first-ever taste of ice cream: a soft-serve vanilla cone from the Japanese bakery. While Max earnestly slurped and smeared his face with sweet, cold cream, Tom snapped pictures to send to our mothers.

  While we ate our melting treats, Xiao Li stayed inside, out of the sun, cleaning up after us and getting ready for the night.

  * * *

  ————

  By the time we landed in Phuket, Max was lost to sleep. He lay unconscious in my arms, head jerking and lolling, mouth gaping, feet dangling. I carried him straight through the ill-lit cacophony of swindlers and drivers and porters; the drunk and the drugged; hawkers and touts. Tom struggled along, tugging the suitcase. I carried Max out into the warm, wet night and into a hotel car frigid with air conditioning and finally into a lobby where our necks were draped with jasmine garlands.

  I breathed the frangipani and the fresh salt breath of sea and listened to the distant pounding of the surf and blinked around at terraces of fountains and pools lit by candlelight—and I began to realize the vacation was going to be all right. Maybe even better than all right. Maybe—did I dare to allow this possibility?—even good.

  The trip to Thailand was Tom’s idea. I’d agreed reluctantly. I didn’t believe that the slow restoration of stability and sleep in our home was a function of Max’s growing up. I’d cobbled our family back together with tape and rusting nails and pure willpower, as far as I knew, and I fought even tiny fluctuations in the routine because I feared they would prove its undoing. A birthday party that clashed with a nap, a later-than-usual dinner, or a minor variation in the thermostat temperature were enough to send me into quiet panic. I was always on guard again
st the misstep that would upend our household routine and shatter Max’s ability to sleep and lead to sickness and exhaustion and, eventually, insanity.

  It boiled down to that. I was terrified of being pushed back out to the edge of sanity. I’d been in those woods before, and I didn’t want to go back.

  There was nothing precarious or even particularly adventurous about this trip. We’d booked ourselves into luxury resorts in one of the world’s most tourist-friendly nations. Still, I fretted and fussed over the luggage. I stayed awake until dawn the night before we left, stomach churning. I resented Tom for forcing this point, for obliging me to take this vacation.

  “We haven’t gone anywhere since Max was born,” he’d said.

  “I know.”

  “We spend all our time trapped in the house.”

  “I know.”

  “What is the point of being here if we don’t explore together?”

  “I know.”

  I couldn’t argue. On paper, he was right. Still I believed he was wrong. The trip was reckless; we’d regret it.

  But our days in Thailand were perfect. We picked our way slowly through that fragrant, jungled landscape like survivors of some painful fever. Our arms and legs were hollow as tubes of paper; we touched things carefully; we were easily pleased.

  We strapped Max into a bicycle seat and pedaled dirt paths through rice paddies and fields, to fish restaurants on the beach. We were blessed by Buddhist monks in the mountains over Chiang Mai. We bought painted paper parasols, and when the afternoon rains pounded the hotel lawn we sat in lounge chairs and ate fat black raisins and watched the drops splash into the waters of the pool.

  In a hotel in Bangkok Max let go of everything and walked alone across the floor for the first time, and it felt like a miracle.

  We were happy on that trip, and all the more happy because we had almost come to believe that happiness was not for us. Other families would enjoy their vacations; we were destined to flounder and wallow and turn desperately against one another in the glass and plaster walls of our skyscraper.

  We had traveled to Thailand to swim in the sea, but the sea was not available. Red flags snapped along the beach. The ocean seethed with a riptide that snatched even experienced swimmers straight out to eternity. I wanted to ignore the warnings, in a way, because I always feel tempted to ignore the warnings. Tom convinced me the danger was real.

  So I held Max by the riptide. I sank down to the sand and wrapped my arms around him and held him tight against the tug of singing waves. The sea stretched to the sky. The sky was full of light, and the sea was full of danger. We could only look at the rise and fall; the flash of light and the splinters of dark below, the churn and crash that covered the secret life of the salt ocean.

  I wanted to dip him into the sting of the sea, I wanted him to smell and taste and bathe in all the waters of the world. I wanted to wash him in the ocean with its mineral grains and eerie vegetable growths and unknown animals. But I waited. Maybe there was no real rush. I held on to him just a little bit longer, and together we waited.

  Chapter 8

  There was trouble with Xiao Li, but she wasn’t talking. Not to me, anyway.

  She had always been scrupulous about confining telephone chats to her breaks, but then, all of a sudden, the calls became constant. She stood with hunched shoulders, face turned into the corner of the laundry room, phone behind a curtain of hair. She whispered and sometimes she shouted in a voice that was harsh and scratched, which made her sound like a stranger.

  Sometimes, after hanging up, she bustled back to work with flushed cheeks and averted gaze. Other times she stood by the washing machine and looked at the city sky pale with pollution and cried.

  I paused and fluttered in doorways. I didn’t want to pry into her private life. I didn’t want to ignore her distress.

  “Are you okay?” I’d ask.

  “I’m okay,” she’d reply.

  And I’d turn away.

  At last, she stopped me in the kitchen. Looking full into her face, I realized she looked terrible. Her eyes were shot with blood, and her cheeks looked as lifeless as pinched wax.

  “My daughter is sick,” she said.

  “What happened?” I thought of flu, fever, bronchitis. Some childhood ailment, maybe a difficult one, but nothing too drastic.

  “It’s her heart,” Xiao Li said.

  “Is it serious?” A dread so intense it felt like giddiness.

  “Yes,” she said. “She is in hospital now three days.”

  I reached for Xiao Li, then stopped. I wanted to touch her, but I saw the warning in her eyes. She did not want to be pitied or hugged. My hand hovered, hesitated, then patted her upper arm awkwardly. She looked at me miserably.

  “She’s in—?”

  “Hebei.”

  “Do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know,” Xiao Li said. “No. It’s okay.”

  “Who is with her?”

  “My husband.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s good.”

  “Yes.”

  We both lacked conviction.

  “Do they know what’s wrong?”

  “No,” she said. “They don’t know.”

  “Was she sick?”

  “Yes,” she said. “She got very sick.”

  The girl lay in a provincial hospital near the village. Her heart was making a strange noise; there appeared to be some defect. The doctors ran tests but failed to reach a diagnosis.

  The next day Xiao Li said she wanted to go to her daughter.

  “Good,” I said. “You should go.”

  I wondered, in a wordless flash, whether she’d have planned the trip if I hadn’t suggested it the day before. I knew that some domestic employees didn’t get personal days or family leave, no matter the crisis. Fleetingly I congratulated myself for being superior to those other, nefarious bosses.

  “When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “But you are coming back.”

  “Yes!” she said quickly. “I’ll come Monday.”

  “You’ll come back to Beijing on Monday, or come to work on Monday?”

  “I’ll come to work on Monday.”

  This interrogation had evaporated any illusion of moral superiority, which I quickly scrambled to retrieve.

  “Do you need money?”

  “No,” she said. “I have.”

  “Call if you need more time.”

  “Okay.”

  In truth, I knew she wouldn’t ask for more time. I’d just pressed her to resolve her family crisis quickly. I felt guilty, but I didn’t know how to undo the impression. Or maybe I didn’t want to. Selfish though it was, I wanted Xiao Li to come back quickly. Her sick daughter was a horror I hoped would simply blow over.

  * * *

  ————

  It was September now, and a taste of ice sneaked into the breeze. Schoolchildren marched through the mornings in pressed uniforms. In Ritan Park the ginkgo leaves mellowed to brilliant gold, and gray-headed scavengers squatted in flickering shadows to gather the stinking nuts.

  In the park I held Max aloft. He stretched his arms hungrily to the branches, traced the joints of twigs, and ran his fingers on the edges of leaves. I thought of Michelangelo’s God touching Adam; this child who had so often pined for the light of the sky was seeking now the solid fruits of the earth.

  I told myself to enjoy the long autumn afternoons with my baby. I tried not to worry about Xiao Li or her daughter or my book manuscript, which once again sat neglected. I fed myself with “it will all work out,” “be here now,” “all in good time,” and any other suitable platitude.

  Xiao Li came back the following Monday, but the news was bleak. Her daughter was too weak to get out of be
d. Her heart still wasn’t beating properly. The doctors were uncertain. The tearful phone calls continued, and when Xiao Li asked for another leave, I agreed.

  “Get the agency to send somebody while she’s gone,” Tom suggested.

  “I don’t think she told them she’s been gone,” I said. “I don’t want to get her into trouble.”

  “That’s not your problem,” Tom said.

  “It is, though,” I said.

  “It’s not. Don’t make it your problem.”

  “Still,” I said.

  In the absence of constant cleaning, the rooms lost the fresh whiffs of bleach and wax and took on, instead, the discouraging smells of our carnal selves—dirty laundry, morning breath, diapers. I couldn’t slip away to the gym or meet a friend for coffee, let alone write. Tom played with Max in the mornings until I’d showered, brushed my teeth, and shrugged into clean clothes. After that, I could last until evening without another moment to myself.

  As ever, the biggest problem was work. When could I yank my eyes off the baby and borrow back my brain to get some writing done?

  Naps, that was the obvious answer. But dishes rotted in the sink and pureed plums smeared the high chair and the washing machine chimed its smarmy wet clothes jingle. I’d rush through the rudimentary housework only to find the time had run out, the baby was awake again!

  Desperate for an outing, I’d bundle him into his stroller and push him around to the butcher, the grocery store, the bakery, gathering slabs of meat and loaves of bread and vegetables, pausing eagerly to chat whenever we came across anybody I knew even tangentially.

  I took him to playdates with our neighbors. And since I wasn’t rushing back to my very-important-work at the computer, I finally slowed down and talked with the other mothers. It was out of desperate loneliness at first, but to my surprise I ended up liking them.

  We cracked jokes over sugar-free muffins and bottomless pots of tea, and I shamefacedly realized I’d unfairly written these women off as dullard housewives. They turned out to be bright and witty career women who made me laugh and shared advice and erased my loneliness. I hated to remember how harshly I’d judged them, especially when, in reality, I was one of them.