Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “I’m working now,” I finally told him plainly. “And once she leaves, I don’t know how long it will be before I can work again. I want to hang on to this status quo for as long as it lasts.”

  He said nothing.

  “Can you understand that?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  It had all, somehow, gone wrong. Xiao Li was hired so that I could peel some attention from my child and reapply it to my work. That had happened, but only in precarious flashes. A nanny, I was learning, was not a day-care center. She was not a village. She was not a gadget who showed up and simplified life without complication. Xiao Li was a human being, and her problems had become my own. Maybe, as Tom kept saying, this entanglement signaled a lack of professional boundaries on my part. But it couldn’t have been otherwise, I thought, unless I lacked all human emotion.

  Every woman who hires another woman for childcare must struggle along this continuum. Emotion is injected and then removed from these relationships in a constant and nonsensical flux. At the whim of the employer, family sentiments are first amplified, then denied. Housekeepers and nannies who too aggressively assert the rights of the formal employment relationship tend to be harshly criticized. My thoughts rang with remembered voices of friends. These conversations boiled around me all the time. With the mothers in my building. With the women in our baby group. With my working mother friends.

  It’s just a job to them.

  You treat them like members of the family, but you should see what happens when they leave. Suddenly all they care about is the reference letter and money.

  I thought she cared about us. I mean, the kids. They cried. And suddenly she was like a stranger. Her whole face was different. She walked out the door like it was nothing.

  It reminded me of a joke one of my Russian colleagues used to tell: I thought it was love, but she asked me for twenty dollars.

  The punch line is the same: Even if love appears incidentally, that was never the point. It’s survival. But when children are involved, it’s hard to see things dispassionately. Who wouldn’t like to enjoy the benefit of familial love without the inconvenience and inevitability? A family you can hire and fire?

  We delude ourselves.

  In those final weeks with Xiao Li, these uncomfortable ideas pinched at my thoughts.

  “I would love to have you come back,” I’d assure her, “when you are ready.”

  “Yes,” she’d agree. “I also want.”

  This exchange had the sheen of sugar icing. There was no deal, no negotiation, no promise on either side.

  Meanwhile, we lived with the inconvenience of new life. Clatters of falling brooms, furniture shoved aside, feet slapping down the hall. And then the explosion of a door; the splutter and retch of vomit. She still slept with her head twisted down onto the kitchen counter, neck bent like the stem of a stomped flower, but now the naps stretched longer.

  Watching her, I remembered my own early pregnancy. Sickness had roared through my veins, congealing into a nausea every day more stubborn and strong than the day before. Thin swallows of water tasting of rust, lumbering like a wounded bear in the subway, miserably smelling every foul whiff of sewage and trash and cooking oil. Throwing up into traffic medians, behind buildings, in public toilets.

  I still had my job then, but I had found small ways to get relief. I confided my condition to colleagues, slept on the office sofa, gave myself permission to produce a little less work.

  In pregnancy I’d discovered one of those biological truths of womanhood that hide in plain sight: morning sickness is not a punch line or a plot device, but a severe illness that aches from the roots of the hair to the marrow of the bones.

  For the first time, I wondered about all the women in the world who have no choice but to endure this sickness and keep working. Farmers and factory workers; women whose jobs were manual and grueling. Even white-collar women—who could at least sit down much of the day—suffered this crippling sickness in secret. Almost every woman I knew commiserated with my nausea because they, too, had been dreadfully ill, and yet there exists no employment protection for this stretch of early pregnancy.

  We must do the essential work of the species in sickness and in secret. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised: We are still children when we learn to conceal the pain and blood of menstruation. We understand that the denial of our physical shell is the price of admission. We can join the men at work so long as we leave our bodies behind, or pretend that our bodies are just like their bodies. There is quiet sympathy from other women, but you must hide these things from the men because, as soon as they finish nodding gravely and sympathetically, they will remind you that this biological discrepancy was their point all along, and they will show you the door. Biology will be twisted into a rope and used to bind you.

  Now here I was. Xiao Li was pregnant and puking, and I was her boss.

  “You want to lie down?”

  “No.”

  “You want to stop working? Stay home?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m okay.”

  I turned back to my computer. I left it alone. I picked up her slack with the housework so that Tom wouldn’t realize she wasn’t physically able to do the job anymore. I encouraged her to rest whenever she wanted. I promised myself I would not pressure her or add to her load, and I didn’t. At least, I don’t think I did. The best I can say for myself is, I could have been worse, and she wasn’t expecting anything better.

  Meanwhile, I prepared for her departure.

  “Xiao Li isn’t going to come every day anymore,” I told Max. “But she will still come sometimes.”

  “Why?” Max asked.

  “She’s going to have her own baby.”

  “What baby?”

  “Her baby. Her own baby.”

  “I also want my own baby,” Max replied.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Months are really just a few weeks. Nothing, really. The time dwindled away and then, on the appointed day, Xiao Li gave Max an extra-long hug and a kiss on his forehead. She looked into his eyes and said good-bye.

  “Zaijian,” he replied cheerfully.

  “I love you,” she said. “I will see you again,” she said. “Okay,” she said.

  We had agreed to keep the parting quick and unemotional. We would not conceal from Max what was happening, but we would avoid a dramatic scene. Xiao Li picked up her purse and walked out the door and stepped onto the elevator.

  And then she was gone.

  She’d taken her work flip-flops, I realized with a start. Staring at the square of blank floor, I had the crazy sensation that I’d been tricked.

  Well, of course she had taken her shoes, I told myself. They were her shoes, perfectly good shoes.

  But she’d taken them surreptitiously. She’d waited for a moment when I was distracted to tuck them into her bag.

  Looking at the empty floorboards, I knew that Xiao Li was gone. And I knew that gone was final.

  Chapter 10

  Next came a parade of ayis who didn’t last.

  The dour woman who scared Max. The young, pimply woman who kept the dirty dishes company while gossiping on the phone. The one who lied. The one who stank. The one who was so perfect she was whisked away to London.

  “Do you think,” said Tom, “that you’re subconsciously looking for Xiao Li?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I can’t help it.”

  “You should stop,” he said.

  “Good help is hard to find,” I swanned.

  I wanted him to laugh. He didn’t laugh.

  By the time Cheng Ayi arrived, I’d given up hope. I figured I’d spend the rest of our years in Beijing pining for an ayi who never came.

  But Cheng Ayi was ideal. Her face had been beaten by years of sun
and wind, but a quick smile punched deep dimples into her cheeks. She’d worked with the same family for seven years before coming to us, and immediately I could see why: she was energetic, intelligent, and good at everything from baking pies to inventing silly games with Max.

  In truth, she was a better employee than Xiao Li had ever been. The house was shinier, the air fresher, the food tastier. Xiao Li had babied Max, but Cheng Ayi engaged him: the howls of Max laughing over Chinese riddles filled the halls.

  Max still asked, from time to time, where Xiao Li was.

  “Home,” I’d say. “With her own babies.”

  “Okay,” he’d agree.

  My son’s understated reaction surprised me. Max was an effusive toddler who hurtled across rooms to throw himself into his father’s arms after a few hours apart. But Xiao Li was gone, and Max hardly reacted.

  But then I noticed something: He didn’t cuddle with Cheng Ayi. He didn’t clamber into her lap or stroke her cheeks or giggle while she cooed into his face. All of the physical intimacy he’d shared with Xiao Li, the pantomime of a familial bond—he neither initiated nor accepted such tenderness. He rambled with Cheng Ayi through parks and chased through rooms and sang nursery rhymes with gusto. They were rambunctious together, even uproarious. Max was always delighted to see her—but never particularly sorry to say good-bye.

  I wondered whether Max had learned to keep his caretakers at arm’s length. Maybe he’d felt something when Xiao Li left our house that he didn’t want to feel again.

  I could sympathize. I was deliberately keeping Cheng Ayi at a friendly but firm distance. I hired another woman to clean and cook on the weekends. This cleared more time for family, and also gave us a potential replacement if Cheng Ayi abruptly left. I discreetly assessed the ayis working for my neighbors, especially foreign families due to leave China soon. I was constantly formulating backup plans and preparing for the disappearance of Cheng Ayi.

  Max and I had learned, in tandem, that nannies are transitory figures. We wouldn’t get too close a second time around.

  * * *

  ————

  “How’s your book?” Tom asked.

  We sat at a shaded sidewalk café table near our apartment, eating an early lunch before Tom headed to the bureau. Twenty floors overhead, Cheng Ayi cleaned our house while Max napped.

  A few days earlier, we’d been jangled awake at dawn by a phone call from Ethel Kennedy. She had informed a startled Tom that he’d won the Robert F. Kennedy award for human rights reporting for a series of stories called “China: Living Under the Yoke.” He would travel to New York to be feted.

  And now here he was, asking about my book. The book I had hoped to finish before Max was born. The book that was constantly getting shoved aside while I attended to domestic crises. The topic of work—of my work and his work—remained raw. We could easily slip from this question into a bitter argument.

  I took a breath and carefully stifled all of the defensive barbs clamoring for release. I took a time-buying slurp of espresso.

  I’d learned a trick: Pretend that somebody else is asking. Not Tom. A friend in a café.

  “It’s hard to say,” I began. “I’ll try to explain—”

  His eyes flickered; his mouth twitched. But he was just a friend in a café, so I tactfully ignored these signs of regret.

  “Before I had Max, I thought the book was almost finished. You may have noticed, I always underestimate how long things are going to take.” I tried to toss off an airy laugh. The man at the next table craned his neck around to see if somebody was strangling.

  “But now I’m back in the swing of writing,” I continued. “Finally, I can sit down almost every day and work uninterrupted for an hour or two. Do you know how huge that is?”

  “I do.” Was that a smirk or a smile? “That’s great.”

  His tone was final. He was ready to change the subject. But I wasn’t done.

  “Now I’ve reached the most terrifying place yet. How can I explain?”

  His fingers twitched in the direction of his phone. Don’t do it—

  “You know what it’s like? It’s like—”

  His fingers slid and enveloped the phone; he peered into the screen.

  “—eh—” I gargled air, gave him a minute to realize his rudeness. But his eyes stayed on the phone; his thumb prodded and tapped.

  Pretend he’s a friend in a café.

  “It’s like I’ve been trying to swim across the ocean. And now I’ve swum so far I can’t go back. But I can’t really see where I’m going. It’s like that line from the Bible. We walk by faith, not by sight.”

  He said nothing. He was writing an email.

  “So that’s what…” I trailed off. “Are you even listening?”

  “I’m listening! I get it! You feel like you’re in an ocean and you don’t know how the book is going to end.”

  “No, I do—it’s not—never mind.”

  “Do you mind if we get the check?” He’d already tucked his blazer over his arm. “I’ve got to get to work.”

  “Yeah,” I said bitterly. “Me, too.”

  * * *

  ————

  It was still like that, but basically we were happy. It was hard not to be.

  The seasons swept along, Max chattered and chirped and we caught ourselves laughing. We had a beautiful small boy who spoke Mandarin and English and made our hearts sing with every smile. We had excellent childcare in the form of Cheng Ayi. I reveled in an era of unprecedented productivity and contentment. I was fit and alert from running interval sprints at the gym. I was writing. I was working. The book was taking shape.

  We left Max with Cheng Ayi and went out to eat and drink with friends. On the weekends our family of three picnicked in ancient parks and hiked the Great Wall and visited the zoo.

  At Chinese New Year we feasted on soup dumplings and sesame-studded greens and vinegar cucumbers. We followed the lion dancers as they snaked and meandered through the neighborhood. We let Max stay up late to watch fireworks splash and fade over the rooftops.

  We were finally enjoying China as a family. Life had become fun again.

  Too much fun.

  By the time the Year of the Snake broke over Beijing, I was pregnant again—I just hadn’t realized it yet.

  * * *

  ————

  “I wonder what this one will be like.”

  “It’s really hard to imagine.”

  “What if it’s another baby just like Max?”

  “What if it’s totally different?”

  “What if it’s a girl?”

  “What if it’s another boy?”

  A new baby! A new love! We were thrilled. We were terrified.

  “At least this time,” I said tentatively, “we know the hard part passes. It isn’t endless.”

  Tom pushed his glasses up and rubbed his eyes.

  “Please,” he finally said. “I can’t think about it.”

  “Everybody says the second baby is easier.”

  “I don’t want to get our hopes up.”

  “Well, it can’t be harder,” I said. “That would be impossible.”

  “Let’s stop talking about it.”

  The nausea had faded, and the rest of the pregnancy looked smooth. Max was thriving, Cheng Ayi was brilliant, and I would finish my novel. I was close now. I couldn’t see how I could fall short. What could happen?

  Something happened. Tom was offered a job. He’d work on investigations and projects, report to an editor he adored, and make more money. I knew he had to accept. This was the proverbial offer too good to refuse. I knew if I convinced him to say no, the untaken job would shadow us for years to come.

  But there was a catch: The job was in New Delhi.

  Slowly
, sickeningly, the truth soaked into my mind: I wasn’t going to spend the pregnancy finishing my book.

  I would spend it moving our family to India.

  * * *

  ————

  Xiao Li came over one last time to say good-bye. She was waiting for me in the lobby when I biked home from the farmers’ market. Her face had pillowed into softness; her stomach was firm and round. As the elevator climbed through the floors, she turned to me abruptly.

  “You have my reference letter?”

  “Oh. Of course. Yes.” Had the letter been her only reason for coming?

  Inside the apartment, she and Cheng Ayi exchanged polite greetings and appraised each other with cold curiosity. Max marched Xiao Li to his room to show off his books and toys. I could hear them chattering in Mandarin down the hallway as I printed and signed the letter.

  She had brought him a present: a yellow T-shirt with some garbled English about mustard, and a pair of gray shorts with a monkey’s face printed on one leg.

  “Here you go.” I handed her the letter.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll go now.”

  “You don’t want to stay for lunch?”

  “No, thank you,” she sang sweetly.

  Max came behind me and wrapped his arms around my legs, staring gravely at Xiao Li.

  “Say bye-bye to Xiao Li, sweetheart.”

  “Bye-bye,” he murmured.

  I looked at him and felt a stab of pained confusion. She’d only stirred up Max’s feelings. If all she wanted was the letter, I could have met her somewhere or even left it at the front desk…

  I opened the door and watched her step out over the threshold. She smiled and blushed and—I realized in a rush—tears shone in her eyes.

  “Good-bye,” I said.

  “You’re beautiful,” she blurted.

  “No,” I said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re beautiful,” I said.

  And then she was gone.

  PART TWO