Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  Still I wondered: Why was it that, whatever you desired, you could find a poor woman to sell it? You could buy an ass or a vagina or a mouth or a tongue. You could buy a womb, a human greenhouse for unfurled human seed. You could buy hands to change diapers, voices to sing nursery rhymes, backs and arms to carry babies, breasts to flow with milk. You could buy a video of a woman cruelly insulted and then gagged with a penis until she vomits into a dog bowl. Such videos are popular; men watch them. But, of course, men never admit to watching such things. When it comes to culpability, it is always somebody else.

  Prevailing culture dictates that we must separate these strands into individual phenomena: sex work, pornography, domestic labor, and surrogacy. But, in one sense, all of those transactions exist along the same continuum—you may buy anything from a woman and discard the rest.

  I’m complicit. I do it directly and deliberately. The women I’ve rented are sweeping the floor outside my office even as I type; I hear the swish of their brooms over the boards.

  And so, reader, are you. You may think you aren’t, but you probably are. Those clothes and the food you buy cheap, do you know the supply chain, can you trace them back to their raw materials? You can’t, and you don’t want to. I promise you: Nothing is cheap by accident. You’ve eaten slavery and worn it against your skin; you’ve slept in its embrace. I don’t mean metaphorical slavery. I mean plain slavery, the kind that was supposed to be abolished long ago.

  The other argument is that if a woman is paid, then that’s empowerment and shut up about the rest. Who am I to say an illiterate villager shouldn’t rent her uterus to rich Americans to earn school fees for her son? Who am I to say a young woman doesn’t enjoy getting choked for the cameras? Who am I to judge?

  Who am I to feel guilty for renting a mother away from her children? Who am I to feel guilty? Who am I?

  I’m not sure anymore because the women won’t say my name. Excuse Me. Madame.

  There is no quick fix, so you might as well punt. I should think about it later, when my children are grown and I have more time and I won’t risk collapsing my family by trying to force my husband to stay home so I can hold a job I don’t even want. When at last I have nothing to lose, it will be safe to think honestly.

  I traded emails recently with one of the fathers I’d befriended during those early days in New Delhi. He was kind and generous. He offered to send a care package from the United States.

  He’d recently turned down the chance to return to India for work. India was a memory he wasn’t ready to face.

  “I demurred,” he wrote. “It was too close to the forced internment. Perhaps some time when it’s faded a bit. Perhaps.”

  Maybe he didn’t want to confront the supply chain, either.

  Chapter 12

  Morning in the hotel room. Mary had taken Max to prowl the mall. I took a few deep breaths, glared at our rumpled bed, and sat down to work. In my mind I slipped out of India and into the chamber that was otherwise sealed, into the forever winter of an invented Moscow, into rooms and streets where my characters had adventures and love affairs and no babies. My eyes drifted to the mirror behind my laptop—I had repurposed a vanity table as a writing desk. Drab gray strands stained my hair; pinprick pupils dotted inhumanly pale eyes; slamming sun and pregnancy hormones had reddened and splotched my skin.

  I yanked my eyes back to the screen. I couldn’t afford to get derailed by my appearance. I invented a scene, painted backdrops, created conversation. I pounded out two thousand words. They might not be the right words, but they were close. The book was coming together.

  It was enough; it was a good day’s work. When Max got back I hugged him, touched the bones of his slim shoulders, smelled his hair. We had a routine: after breakfast I sat down for an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, of sacrosanct writing time while Max and Mary trawled the mall.

  I was writing, I was working.

  I was in despair.

  I wasn’t going to finish. More scenes remained undrafted than could possibly be written in the remaining weeks before the baby was due. This impossibility was an especially miserable realization since I’d already failed to finish the same book before my first baby was born—and two years had evaporated in between.

  At least this time I knew what was coming: sleep deprivation; anxiety and mood swings; diminishment of self; marital readjustment. One year, give or take, hacked off the trajectory of my career.

  Again, always and ever, it was a problem of time. Women pay for their families with great hoardings of time. They pay—we pay—with life itself. Show me a working mother who hasn’t learned to traffic time. We spend and save; barter and beg and quibble with hours and months; write off a weekend here, a day there.

  I was ready for all of that. I wanted the baby so hungrily I’d shorten my life or wreck my body. I was prepared to complete one less book than I might otherwise have published over my lifetime. I wanted the baby, and I would make the trade. No woman needs to convince me that she would give her life for her children, because every mother has already given her life for her children. That is the very first thing that happens.

  I had struggled mightily to resurrect the book after Max was born. It had felt, at first, exhausting and foreign—like trying to finish a story somebody else had started. My heart and my brain and my life were shredded, but the words on the screen had not changed. Now I’d go to another hospital and have another baby, and maybe I would change all over again.

  For now, I had to swallow another failure, and I had to do so in private, because listening to other people argue that it wasn’t a failure or that I shouldn’t mind—that was more than I could stand. At the very least, I could keep the truth: I had tried, for the second time, to finish this book. I had tried so damn hard. And I’d failed.

  My family had spent my dwindling supply of energetic hours on moving to India. I’d given my time to Tom, so that he could rush off to the office that very first morning and every morning thereafter. I’d given my time to Max, who was scared and unsettled and needed a parent down through the hours. I’d given my time to hunting for apartments, so that we’d have a good place to live by the time the baby came.

  My time had been used as capital. It had been invested in the family future to improve our collective position.

  Well, fair enough. That’s the sort of thing we do in families. I paid slices of time; I paid life; maybe I paid brain cells, or a book or two. I paid and it’s gone. My babies are beautiful; my heart is whole; I’m not asking for a refund.

  Still it does not escape my attention that I paid in time. There is a lingering expectation that men will pay in money. But when it comes to time, it is almost always the woman who pays. And money is one thing, but time is life, and life is more.

  How many ideas, how many discoveries, how much art lost because the woman spent her time somewhere else? How many ideas stillborn, how many inventions undone, how much original thought passed off quietly to a man so that he can take credit—just not to waste, not to miscarry the idea, to pass it, one way or the other, into the world?

  I did it, too. I paid my time.

  * * *

  ————

  Our new apartment was a generous and rambling collection of hardwood floors and long immaculate rooms marching in clean lines toward big, bright windows. We looked out onto a vista of trees splashed by the shadows of birds of prey that circled in the sky overhead.

  Down the road to the left ran the back wall of the zoo and the dank forests that grew wild on its edges. Peacocks roamed those groves and monkeys slipped, sometimes, over the wall, and we could hear the bellows of caged beasts, the white tiger who killed a man, the lions and the elephants. Life penned and caught; life flashing in sun and shadow. Life all around us, pressing in.

  And our family, we were there, too. We unpacked our boxes. Our hearts and memories were
wooden furniture and framed photographs and woven threads handled roughly on docks and now, at last, exploded all over the rooms.

  We were there amid all that life, there in all our mess.

  * * *

  ————

  One day I sat with Max in the park. The neighborhood children were playing soccer under the stern instruction of their Nigerian coach. The servants’ children had no money for lessons, but they clustered along the sidelines to watch. Nobody invited them to play, nor did their faces hold any hope for such an invitation. They passed the time as spectators; the afternoon offered no better entertainment. All the children in that park displayed a firm and fixed idea of their own privileges and limitations.

  A rich kid who’d been playing badly noticed the servants’ children watching. He tugged the sleeve of a friend, jerked his chin toward the pack of poor kids, and then, together, the two boys rushed toward them, clapping and shouting. The children scattered like ragged crows, skinny and scrambling in their tattered clothes. Having run off the poor children, the two rich kids trotted casually back to practice. The coach said nothing. The mothers watching from the benches didn’t blink.

  I was shocked. I looked quickly down at Max. His eyes were round and flat and impassive. I wasn’t sure whether he’d seen what I’d seen or, if he had, whether he could decode its meaning. And I was scared; I felt a sick wash of doubt about this place we’d come to live.

  Our Indian neighbors treated me like a lady of the house. Madame. Mine the front gate, mine the park, mine the living rooms where Himalayan tea steamed on silver platters and well-heeled families came and went from Paris and the Andaman Islands.

  But that was only half the story of our neighborhood and its residents.

  To see the other half, you had to circle around to the backyards. Behind every house stood a servants’ quarter, where paint peeled and shared toilets stank and leaked water stagnated, where families packed themselves into single rooms to shiver through the winters and slept through baking summer nights on rooftops in desperate hope of a stray breeze. Children in the servants’ quarters amused themselves with broken bricks and died from mumps and got scratched by wild monkeys. Within their drafty rooms the servants and their families dreamed, loathed, accepted—poised, always, to heed a call from the main house.

  The neighborhood was like two medieval villages braided into each other: two different sets of roads; two different sets of schools; two different sets of lives.

  Chapter 13

  She trailed toward us through the traffic. My gut clenched as she came. Stay away, little girl, please spare me your face. She loomed in the window and drum-drum-drummed on the glass with one ashen palm, the other hand bunched toward heaven, then toward her mouth, in the universal scooping motion of begging.

  Max went silent. I met her crusted eyes with an exaggerated frown. I shook my head. No.

  She squashed her nose to the glass and stared at Max’s plump thighs, the clean plastic cup at his side, his lashes on his cheeks, because he knew, he must have understood, that something shameful was happening.

  Every drive through the city traced the same emotional trajectory. Every drive began with promise, with glimpses of gardens and bicycles and children and homemade kites skittering over a smudged sun.

  Every drive ended in existential crisis.

  Everything changed at the interchange. The red lights were the inevitable moments of psychological crash. At red lights, the beggars waited. Not too many beggars, because the men who managed the street corners were careful not to dilute their profits. They fielded a few beggars, no more, chosen for their capacity to shock. There was only a fleeting moment to shatter the composure of the passengers and send fingers digging into pockets. The beggars’ faces were bleached with acid burns; they waved stumps aloft; they lacked an eye or nose. They might be hard-faced mothers who balanced moaning babies on their hips and banged hospital receipts in the window, or children with eyes too old for their bodies.

  Tap tap tap.

  She saw something in my face. She thought she had an opening.

  “No thank you,” Max muttered, repeating what I said to the teenagers who peddled dishrags and paperback novels. I did not correct him. I encouraged the fiction that we were being badgered to buy something we didn’t need.

  I wanted to explain that we couldn’t help this child because that would only strengthen the ruthless men who had pimped her into the streets. But he was too young; he couldn’t understand.

  Jesus Christ, when will this light change?

  I never gave the beggars any money. This was agonizing because I wanted, desperately, to give them money. I nearly drowned in shame and self-loathing at those red lights, but I held the line. No money. I had read the reports of NGOs that worked with street children. I understood there was a mafia: a grotesque man around the corner, looking nonchalant. This man was a predator; he maimed and kidnapped and beat. He was the one. He would get the money.

  But always the doubt came creeping. Perhaps what I’d read wasn’t true. Maybe this particular child could keep the money. And maybe she could see straight through my skin, maybe this small prick of doubt held her fast in the window. She was an expert at reading faces like mine. Maybe she knew something about me I couldn’t guess myself.

  I may be a fallen Catholic, but my mind will never be free of catechism. Easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Whatsoever you do to the least of my people. First shall be last and last shall be first.

  Still I sat with cracking heart and tried to fill my eyes with hard meanness and say no. I forced myself to make ruthless eye contact, and I said no.

  When will this light change?

  From the front seat, an eruption of sound. Mary was laughing. She laughed and stretched an arm back to nudge Max and pointed at the girl and laughed again. As if it were a performance put on for our benefit, the children not desperate waifs but puckish actors. The laugh was a bomb in the car—an interruption, a shock, a splintering. But I did not contradict her laughter because I had nothing more coherent to offer.

  Red to green. Gas. Freedom. Go. Involuntary sigh. Thank God.

  The taxi driver punched the gear shift and glared ahead. I wanted to defend myself; to explain that I wasn’t stingy or cruel. Max sat withdrawn in unfathomable thoughts. I floundered and scrambled in my mind, contemplating the filthy glorious mysteries of luck, of being born with things, the meaning of money, murder by poverty. It was immoral to have and pointless to give. I could give away everything, and it would be nothing. The money would dry like dew, and we would join the impoverished masses, my children sleeping in dirt and begging from cars, waiting miserably for the hour of a death that would deliver us. And yet if I did nothing I was complicit. My soft life was an obscenity.

  As we drove away Mary mused, “I feel pity for these children.”

  Still her laugh hung in the car.

  That was Mary, looking at all the misery in the world and laughing into its face.

  * * *

  ————

  “Madame,” Mary said one day. “You want to buy a lottery ticket?”

  The words strung together too fast.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Our church,” she fumbled. “They are raising money for a new church. In Faridabad. They are having lottery.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “The prize is very nice. You want a ticket?”

  “How much do they cost?”

  “Madame,” she said. “It’s one thousand rupees.”

  “For one ticket?”

  “Yes.” She gave a forced bleat of laughter.

  “That’s a lot.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Too much. We cannot. But I thought you and Sir—”

  “Um.” I pictured Mary’s husband braggi
ng to church friends that she’d landed a new position with an American family. The pastor pushing tickets into her hands. Take more, they can afford it! The image stirred an obscure annoyance.

  “The prize is very nice,” she pressed.

  “What is it? The prize?”

  “I don’t know,” she fake-laughed again. “It’s nice, only.”

  “I have to talk to Tom,” I said. “We don’t usually donate to religious things.”

  This was a stall. I didn’t need Tom’s permission to buy a lottery ticket or anything else. But Mary accepted the explanation as if it were obvious and predictable.

  “I’ll talk to Tom and let you know,” I repeated.

  This, I confess, was a tactic I’d started deploying in India against the claustrophobia of shared language. Now that everybody spoke English, I couldn’t pretend to understand less than I did. Flustered or frazzled, seeking escape from an awkward conversation or attempting to absolve myself of responsibility, I invariably invoked Tom.

  “I’ll talk to Tom,” I’d say, and later: “Tom said he doesn’t want to do it. I’m sorry.”

  When near strangers work in your home, everybody tends to adopt a role. This is an instinctive and inevitable distancing technique, the only way to carve out some corners of privacy in an otherwise distastefully intimate comingling. As we settled into India, I assigned profiles: bad cop for Tom, good cop for me. Tom escaped to his office, after all, but I was stuck in the house, dependent upon goodwill. Better to hum along, bright and helpless. The more I pretended to defer to Tom, the more he loomed in the household imagination as a benign but unapproachable dictator. I was often pressed to “ask Sir” for schedule changes or salary advances. It was understood that I could not dispense such favors without permission.