Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  Back at home, Max played with toys on the kitchen floor while I cooked dinner. By the time I’d bathed him and put him to bed and cleaned up the dinner mess, I wanted only to collapse in front of the television.

  This existence wasn’t bad. I knew that. I was still drifting away from my work, and so I had no peace. But when your mind is haunted by images of a child in a hospital cot with a mysteriously fading heart, a day alone with a healthy child is no hardship. My baby pointed out the early crescent moon in the sky; he tugged my earlobes; he said, “Mama.”

  Please God, do not ever let him hurt. Please give his hurt to me instead.

  Visceral prayers. Inevitable. No good in the end. My parents didn’t own my life; I don’t own his. They couldn’t spare me and I can’t spare him. One day I, too, will loom in my child’s imagination as a foreigner who thinks she has a right. One day he will shout, I hate you. He will shout, I didn’t ask to be born. And he’ll be right, all right, he’ll be right like I was right…

  I know all of that.

  But still, but really, please God please, spare him…

  Heavy thoughts while frying sliced pork, steaming broccoli, boiling noodles.

  Xiao Li came and went throughout the fall, back and forth on the bus. She played quietly with Max. Her giggles no longer rang from the walls. She locked herself in the bathroom, but there was no rush of water in the pipes.

  She had vanished into a quiet so perfect it made me shudder.

  * * *

  ————

  “How’s your writing going?” Tom asked one of those evenings.

  “Poorly,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “Sorry, honey.”

  “Why are you even asking?” I could see the end of this argument before it began, and I knew it wasn’t good, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “You must know that if I’m cooking and cleaning and taking care of Max, I’m not also writing,” I said coldly. “Are you trying to make me feel bad about it?”

  “Not at all,” Tom said, raising his eyebrows over his glasses. “I’m sorry. I really don’t know what goes on all day.”

  “Then stay home for a day and try it, and I’ll vanish off somewhere and get some work done.”

  “But don’t other parents, like back in the U.S., manage to have kids and also work from home?”

  “Yes. Yes, they do.” My anger collapsed into perfect calm. “They have messy houses and they don’t complain about dinner. They buy baby food at the store and it’s not poisonous. Their kids watch TV and play with iPads. If I plunk Max in front of the TV all day, I’ll get plenty of writing done.

  “Or!” I couldn’t let him get a word in. “Or—you could stay late in the mornings and do some housework, or come home early and make dinner, or grocery shop on your lunch break. I can come up with plenty of solutions.”

  “This is crazy,” Tom replied with an infuriating lack of emotion. “We have a maid.”

  “The maid”—I lingered hatefully on this word—“is a person who has a family crisis.”

  “So fire her,” he said. “I’m tired of this.”

  “You think she should be fired because her daughter is sick?”

  “I think she should be fired because she’s stopped coming to work.”

  “Are you a psychopath?”

  “Come on, Meg. Be serious. She’s not doing her job anymore. We can give her a nice severance—”

  “No! I can’t—I mean—what if Max were sick and my boss fired me for going to the hospital?”

  “Obviously,” he said unrepentantly, “I would be furious.”

  “But you’d do it to somebody else.”

  “Because I have to worry about our family. And we are not a welfare state.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Xiao Li has become a problem for us.”

  “Because she’s missing work?”

  “Not just that. Honestly, the bigger problem is that she has this weird hold on you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t even ask about what she does all day because you get so defensive. I feel like you have gotten so emotionally entangled with this—maid—that you’re not seeing things clearly.”

  “I do feel solidarity. And I think firing her is wrong and I’m dead against it and I won’t do it. I won’t.”

  “Listen to yourself,” he said. “I’m just trying to help you get back to work.”

  “It was really hard this past year, and she was here when you weren’t,” I blurted. “I know it’s her job and she didn’t do it out of love, but I feel grateful to her and I feel loyal to her.”

  “You feel loyal to the maid.”

  “Yes. I do. Stop calling her that!”

  “That’s what she is!”

  “But the way you say it is so—nasty!”

  “I can’t talk with you about this anymore,” he said. “It’s too crazy.”

  “You’re the one who sounds crazy to me!”

  We thrashed our way through the same argument many times that fall. Neither of us backed down. The disagreement festered like some rotting thing caught in the trap of our personalities.

  I admit: Tom was right. Xiao Li did, indeed, have a hold over me that transcended the technical boundaries of our employment relationship.

  Plainly put, I loved her. My emotions toward Xiao Li were not sexual or romantic; neither platonic nor familial. But love it was, all the same. It was a love of gratitude and recognition and dependence; a love that tempered the madness and desperation of my love for Max into a survivable emotion. It clung to the plastic spoons, teddy bears, teething rings—but especially to the dimpled elbows and fuzzy skull and warm milky skin of the baby we passed back and forth.

  In those fragile, wild months after Max was born, I’d lived in a dreamscape of darkened rooms and feedings and, most of all, terror. And just as surely as Tom could not understand this existence no matter how I tried to find the language to evoke it, Xiao Li intuited my state without a single word. I never had to explain to Xiao Li. She knew, the knowledge was in her face and hands, tactful and gentle, and I loved her.

  I believe this love is inevitable and biological, weaving itself among women over the heads of newborns. I believe that the discovery of a woman’s place in a constellation of other women is the new mother’s consolation and best hope for happiness. I believe it evolved as a method of species survival. I haven’t seen a study, but I will forever accept this as truth.

  I didn’t even know her full name, and I don’t think she knew mine, either. She called me Excuse Me. Our relationship was inherently transactional. But I associated Xiao Li with sanity and health, with my escape from sleeplessness and depression. She was a trail of bread crumbs I’d followed out of the loneliest wilderness, and now I understood why bread crumbs figure in this ancient tale of children lost in untamable forest: because bread crumbs are domestic and comforting, they are the very stuff of survival, broken into bits.

  Tom’s intuition was correct. My attachment to Xiao Li had turned into an irrational dependence. And he didn’t even know the extent of my treachery.

  In those days I sometimes imagined Xiao Li, Tom, Max, and me adrift in an overcrowded lifeboat. Somebody had to be thrown overboard. I knew Tom would have to go; I would pitch my one true love into the waves. That is how deeply I had come to depend upon Xiao Li.

  I repeat: I envisioned sacrificing my husband in favor of the nanny. And then I was surprised, even indignant, when he expressed unease over our family dynamics.

  But I was also right. Xiao Li was in trouble. The doctors and tests were expensive; the agony of a sick child was acute; the implications for her family’s future were bleak. I was correct that only a truly evil boss, some ghoulish overseer from the heartless factories of a Dickensian melodrama, wou
ld fire Xiao Li at that moment.

  Could I, a mother, tell another mother she was not entitled to care for her sick daughter? Should I tell her to abandon her own child and hurry back to mine?

  I could not.

  Did I secretly, fervently hope she would do that anyway?

  Some days, I did. I wished she would do whatever it took to arrive at my doorstep in the morning. I wanted her to go to the very edge of the not-horrible. I wanted her to allow me the illusion that her family’s hardships were not so severe.

  Tom was saying, forget her, save yourself, pay attention to our family’s needs!

  And I was saying, I can’t forget her because her problem is also my problem and it has to stop somewhere.

  We both had some truth on our side.

  One afternoon I poured out the situation to a friend and former colleague. I was sure she’d take my side—she was a free-thinking single mother who had raised her son in tandem with a nanny. But her answer overturned my expectations.

  “You should get rid of her on principle,” she said. “Anybody who is causing this much trouble between you and Tom should not be allowed to stay in your house.”

  * * *

  ————

  The child’s health improved and then worsened. She left the hospital, then went back. Doctors prescribed a month of medication followed by another round of tests. She came to Beijing to be examined at the Children’s Hospital.

  “Who’s taking care of her all day?” I asked.

  “My husband.”

  That made sense. Xiao Li earned more money than her husband.

  “She’s not in school?” I asked.

  A beat.

  “No.”

  Thousands of years of mute maternal emotion embedded in pauses, sent across in looks, threatening the foundations of our homes and jobs.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Now that her daughter was just across town, maddeningly close, I wondered how Xiao Li could stand leaving home. I studied her for signs of impatience or fatigue, but she kept her lips set and her eyes clear.

  I’ve spent my adult life immersed in the vocabulary and the study of language, but it was Xiao Li who made me see starkly that communication is not strictly an affair of words. There is something beyond speech and writing, some ephemeral compatibility. Xiao Li and I shared fewer than a hundred words in a common language, but suggestions and plans ran between us unspoken.

  I understood her far better than I did many a native English speaker.

  * * *

  ————

  “Excuse Me.”

  I had been waiting for the coffee to boil up through the espresso maker when Xiao Li called. She leaned in the door, looking unusually calm.

  “I want to go to the doctor.”

  “What happened?” I was geared for disaster.

  “I think I’m pregnant.”

  Silence was wrong. I had to say something.

  “Really?” That was no better than nothing.

  “I think so.”

  “Are you—? How late?”

  “I don’t know.” Her hands flapped, fingers stretched, and I realized that her calm had been a thin facade. “My daughter was sick and—I wasn’t paying attention. Two weeks, three weeks.”

  “Late?”

  “Yes.”

  I was trying to track this.

  “Are you happy?” I blurted. That sounded bad, so I tried again. “Do you want another baby?” That also sounded bad.

  “I don’t know.” She blinked, and tears pushed through her lashes.

  “Don’t worry.” I rubbed her arm awkwardly. “You should take a test.”

  “I want to go this afternoon to the doctor.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine,” I added, trying to sound enthusiastic as I said good-bye to yet another afternoon of work.

  A doctor at the neighborhood clinic said she was indeed pregnant, but that the pregnancy wasn’t viable.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  It was the next day, and we were back in the kitchen. Xiao Li had drawn a diagram of reproductive organs to explain the diagnosis. It was the first time anything had felt so crucial and impossible to explain that we had resorted to drawings.

  “I will—” She slashed a hand across her stomach.

  She had scheduled an abortion.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said plainly. “It’s better.”

  I looked at her face, trying to understand if she really thought so. Then I worried that I was taking liberties with her privacy, so I looked away. Her phone rang, and she excused herself for another huddle by the washing machine.

  I wandered into the living room, mulling. What I had said was true. I was sorry. At the same time, I was relieved. Our status quo—my status quo—was safe. Xiao Li would not have to leave her job. I would not have to go forth without Xiao Li. At the same time, I was horrified at the easement of my panic. How malign I had become, I thought, to take relief from another woman’s abortion.

  Before I could finish excoriating myself, Xiao Li was back.

  “Excuse Me,” she said. “I talked to my husband. He made an appointment at Chaoyang Hospital. Just to check, before—” Again, she made that slashing motion across her lower gut.

  “Okay,” I said. “Of course.”

  We could see the red lettering of Chaoyang Hospital from the elevator landing. A dignified block of glass and steel, it promised a quality of medical expertise unavailable in a neighborhood clinic in the hinterlands of Beijing.

  “Do you have pain?” I asked.

  “No,” she grinned dismissively, and went back to work.

  A few days later, she returned with her diagnosis.

  “At Chaoyang Hospital they said the pregnancy is okay,” she announced, slapping a manila folder of reports down on the counter.

  “What?”

  “Yes!” She grinned. “It’s okay!”

  “Wonderful,” I remembered to say. “But how?”

  “I don’t know. That other doctor—” She gave a dismissive jerk of the chin.

  “So you will have a baby!”

  “Yes,” she said. “I will try. We’ll see.”

  “Wonderful,” I said again.

  I stopped myself from asking about the job.

  I already knew the answer, anyway.

  Chapter 9

  Xiao Li would quit her job and go. There remained only the question of time. Ever since I’d gotten pregnant, it seemed as if absolutely everything were nothing but a question of time.

  “My husband wants me to stop working,” Xiao Li told me.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to finish this year.”

  “So you’ll work until January?”

  “Yes.”

  It was already October. I wasn’t sure why she wanted to work those two extra months, but I was glad for the time. Xiao Li was the only tried and trusted babysitter I had.

  “You need to develop a network,” scolded a single mother friend who’d somehow flourished as a globe-trotting diplomat while raising her son. “You need at least three babysitters on rotation.”

  This advice sounded reasonable and yet utterly detached from my reality. I couldn’t imagine where I’d find three distinct babysitters. Come to think of it, I’d never heard anybody in Beijing use the word babysitter. There were family members, if you were Chinese, or there were ayis. The idea of hiring a near stranger to keep an eye on the kids for a few hours—nobody I knew did that.

  I had grown fond of some of the ayis who worked for friends, but it was a breach of unspoken protocol to ask another family’s ayi to babysit. I’d be expected to first consult the mother of the family, and even if she agreed,
she would secretly resent the favor. She would think I was trying to poach her nanny; she would be irritated to think of the ayi wasting her energy on another family. The situation would force her to confront her own submerged sense that she held a claim over the life of this woman—and she would resent all of that.

  “It’s too late now,” I told my friend crossly.

  “No, it’s not,” she insisted. “This will happen to you over and over until you set up a good network.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Seriously, I’ve been through this.” She pushed ahead with surety and briskness. “You need to think in terms of networks instead of focusing on individuals.”

  “Duly noted,” I grumbled.

  Let alone three, I could hardly face the prospect of looking for one ayi. I dreaded having to replace Xiao Li.

  “You should have changed earlier,” a Japanese mother from our building said bluntly. “I read if you want to change nanny you should do it before the baby turns one. After that, they are traumatized.”

  My life seemed to have devolved into a maze of faces pointing out my mistakes and failures and shortcomings—usually when it was too late to change course.

  “Noted,” I told her sourly.

  “What?”

  “I get it,” I said, “but it’s too late.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  As for Tom, he couldn’t get Xiao Li out of the house fast enough. As far as he was concerned, she was nothing more than her technical identity: a worker sent forth by the agency, quickly found and easily replaced.

  “We should all move on,” he said. “Start looking for somebody else.”

  “I don’t want to find somebody else.”

  “Are you serious?” he said. “Why? We’ll find somebody better.”

  “You don’t realize how good she is.”

  “I have confidence that we can find any number of great nannies in this city of millions of people.”

  “Max loves her,” I said.

  “All the more reason,” he argued. “The longer she stays the harder it will be to separate them.”