Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  Tom and I took a taxi south to the hospital before dawn, past the school for the blind and the Oberoi hotel; the Hindu crematorium and the Muslim cemetery; Nehru Stadium and the bands of homeless families stirring to life under overpasses. Street sweepers scraped great clouds of dust over the roads. Trees slumped under the weight of sleeping pigeons. We drove past blackened apartment houses and too-yellow gas stations and onward as thin washes of light watered down the ink of night. “I have loved you for a hundred years,” Mohammed Rafi sang on the radio.

  The halls of the hospital were calm and dull. We squinted grainy eyes against fluorescent lights. Credit card, signatures, forms. The cleaning crews hadn’t yet come sloshing their buckets of disinfectants, and so the odors of the body dominated the hallways.

  We were taken to a “birthing suite” to sit in awkward anticipation. I thought of what we had left behind: our apartment, my mother sleeping, and Max, always Max. And now there would be two, and how would that work? Restlessly I roamed the room, squinted out at the lightening sky, inspected the toiletries in the bathroom.

  “Emergency C-section is better,” I burst out testily.

  “Why?”

  “No time to think.” My stomach was twisted with nerves. “If you have to get cut open, it’s easier not to know ahead of time.”

  It was occurring to me, too late, that having a living creature pried from my sliced womb could not possibly be as painless as I recalled. My first C-section came after two long days and nights of labor that had left my nerve pathways blown out like a speaker system, emitting nothing but dull static and fuzz. After all that labor, the slash across my midsection had felt as insignificant as a paper cut. Only now did I panic at the thought of the knife.

  Hunching forward to expose my back for the needle, I tried to calm down by staring into the lush canopy of treetops framed by the window. The anesthesiologist pushed the drugs into my spine. I demanded more drugs. She gave me more drugs, then pinched my toes.

  “I can feel it,” I said.

  She gave me more drugs, and pinched again.

  “I can still feel it.”

  She frowned. “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  It was true. I felt the pinch.

  “It’s not possible.” She nodded at the foot of the bed.

  “Wait!” I gasped. “Don’t cut!”

  “They are already cutting,” she smiled.

  “Oh.”

  A curtain obscured my stomach. I was sitting in the audience, waiting for the show to begin—the suggestion of movement, a ripple of cloth, but the illusion is protected. Something bloody was being done to my lower half. Masked beings muttered and murmured. Impersonal tugging and pressures. I wondered whether they sliced first one layer and then the next; whether the body was even like that, formed in layers, or squashed indistinctly together. I wanted to discern the moment the baby was brought up from its bed of blood into the too-bright light of a surgical morning.

  I was waiting, most of all, to finally know the baby’s gender. Indian law forbids disclosing this detail before birth—too many female fetuses are otherwise aborted. I thought the moment of revelation would be like a movie scene—the howl of a newborn and a yell: “It’s a girl!”

  Instead there was a bustle of movement, a baby’s cry, then silence.

  “Can you see the baby?” I asked Tom.

  He craned his neck. “I see testicles!”

  “Oh!” That’s how I got the news.

  They laid my son on my chest and I put my arms around him, and he lurched toward my face. His sticky eyes were startled wide, bulging with an entire life unlived. Staring at me, evaluating me, certainty and amazement in his mottled face. We had already chosen his name: Patrick. He stared straight into my eyes as if he already knew exactly who I was and who I had been. This moment stayed like a brand in my memory.

  * * *

  ————

  That first night back home, once the baby slept, Max came to me.

  “You said you would take me to the park,” he said softly.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I want to go.”

  “But it’s dark now.”

  “I want to go.”

  “Okay.”

  It wasn’t an ordinary notion, to go to the park in the dark. But our household normal was nullified; we had shredded our family and reshaped ourselves. Max was still my baby, but now I also had this other baby.

  And Max was miserable. I’d left him overnight and returned with a new love who usurped his place in the family structure and demanded all my time. Max watched me with serious sad eyes when I held the baby. He awoke screaming and couldn’t remember what he’d been dreaming.

  “You have to walk on your feet, though,” I told him. “I can’t pick you up.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have to promise.”

  “Okay.”

  I guess I knew that he was lying, just as I’d been lying when I promised the doctor I wouldn’t lift heavy weights for six weeks. I suppose we both knew I’d end up carrying him.

  I eased myself down the stairs, squeezing the banister and gnashing my teeth. The gash across my midsection blazed with pain.

  Outside, the moon hung high in a velvet sky. From the jungled thickets across the way we heard zoo animals low and bellow from unseen cages. Wind tossed the branches and scattered down blossoms.

  We moved over the grassy lawn, and Max ran from me, fleeing deeper into shadows, looking for bugs in darkened earth, snapping leaves, sniffing and snuffing at the night. Beckoning me and then running deeper still through lime trees, puckish and taunting, drawing me to him. I called his name. He replied with flat silence.

  I thought we might talk—out in the shadows, away from the ears and interruptions of the others. But he was two, and anyway, what could we say? The ruthless maternal betrayal was inarguable. He had been mine and I had been his and now there was another, and no denying it.

  So he teased me into the shadows and plunged deeper, testing whether I’d follow. I hadn’t brought my phone; I could no longer see the lighted windows of our house. Under the trees, drivers and guards muttered over card games and joints. A suggestion of unseen animals stirring.

  “Max,” I called. “Sweetie, let’s go back.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Max.”

  Nothing.

  “Max, where are you?”

  Very faint, very sad: “Here.”

  I followed his voice until I caught the gleam of his pale small face. He was sitting, girded for a fight, in a grove of fruit trees.

  I ached to scoop him to my heart, but every nerve throbbed from walking. I cursed the C-section that had rendered me physically unable to comfort my first baby. Film of tears over the night landscape. My little boy vanishing into shadows. It would never again be just us two.

  I sat down and gathered him into my lap. The wail of steam engines cut through the trees.

  “Do you hear the trains?” I whispered into his hair.

  He nodded.

  “There’s a big train station nearby,” I told him.

  “I want to see,” he said.

  “Okay,” I told him. “I’ll take you one day.”

  “Now?”

  “No, love. Another day.”

  I smelled the night coming through the trees, the fresh earth, the rotting leaves, the fallen limes decomposing sweetly into soil. Children called somewhere in the dark. I told myself I would hold him all night long if it made him understand that I loved him now more than ever, that he would never be replaced. But it was late and he was tired and dirty and my breasts ached with milk and we had to go home.

  We had to go home.

  “Max,” I said. “We have to go home.”

 
“No.”

  “You promised.”

  “No.”

  “Please, Max.”

  “No.”

  “Stand up right this minute and come.” I tried to force my voice to sound strict.

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m going home,” I told him. “Stay here if you want.”

  I staggered upright and waddled away. I stopped and glanced back, hoping he was tiptoeing behind. But he sat motionless, his pale face watching me abandon him in the park.

  “Oh, Max.”

  I couldn’t leave him alone or force him to come. I hoisted him against my chest and clasped my hands beneath his bottom and staggered homeward through the darkened park. The seams in my belly strained; I was sure the stitches would pop. He rested his cheek against my shoulder and solemnly accepted his due.

  * * *

  ————

  One afternoon Max walked right up to the baby, who was burbling on a sofa, and slapped him across the face. It was a deliberate and righteous smack—the kind dealt by a person who feels his honor has been trampled. There was no immediate cause, just the inborn sibling grievances as ancient as Cain and Abel.

  The slap rang through the rooms. Patrick erupted in the howls of a barely sentient creature incomprehensibly attacked.

  I dropped a spoon with a clatter and came running from the kitchen. Max skittered into hiding. Mary scooped Patrick up and buried his face in her neck.

  She chuckled and rubbed his thin back, and I overheard the incantation she murmured into his ear:

  “You came for this.” She rubbed his shoulder blades. “Life is this, only, babu. You came for this.”

  I rocked to a stop, confused. I wanted to scold Max harshly and then, with great fuss and indignant pomp, gather the victim into my arms—to wordlessly assure the baby that the unprovoked assault was unfair and unacceptable, an aberration that would not stand.

  Mary’s instincts were exactly the opposite. She was telling the baby that he should expect such unprovoked bursts of pain from a capricious and cruel planet. There was no order, no reason, no protection. The baby should learn to take it lightly, to cheer up, not to cry into the wind. She was comforting him, but there was laughter on the edge of her voice.

  This is parenting without privilege, I thought. This is how you prepare your children when you don’t have the illusion that you can protect them.

  I stepped back. I was looking at Mary, looking at India, looking at the world through Mary and India. And I wasn’t sure she was wrong.

  You came for this. What a thing to say. What a true thing to say. But what an awful thing to say. But what a true thing, still.

  Mary caught sight of my frozen face and smiled.

  “It is not easy to become mother,” she said.

  “No,” I agreed.

  “It will be okay.”

  The baby’s arrival empowered Mary to address me with greater authority. I might be “Madame,” but infants were Mary’s business. She’d been too late to influence the early upbringing of Max, but for Patrick she was right on time. I was open to suggestions, too, having been disabused of my rookie certainty that there was one correct method, a single right answer, for the baby.

  “You want me to massage him?” Mary asked now. “It will make him sleep well.”

  “You can try,” I agreed, remembering how Max had sobbed during newborn massage. “But if he cries, stop.”

  “Only the first time, he will cry.”

  She draped a towel on the sofa, lay Patrick down in a shaft of morning sunlight, and rubbed his tiny limbs with massage oil. He grew quiet, as if considering the merits of this experience. Then he looked as if he were smiling.

  “He likes it,” I said.

  “I will do this every day,” Mary said.

  This incomprehensible life, I thought. What business does my child have with a nanny?

  “You will not buy sweets for the neighbors?”

  “What?” Mary’s voice called me out of musings.

  “The guard downstairs is asking.”

  “The guard wants me to buy him candy?” Somebody taller than three feet expects me to do something for him?

  “Indian families do like that.”

  “Do like what?”

  “If you bring home a baby, especially a boy, you pass out sweets. It’s good luck, only.”

  “Where I come from,” I huffed, “we bring food to people with new babies. We don’t expect them to buy us presents.”

  Mary laughed nervously.

  “Madame,” she said by way of changing the subject. “You want me to buy feet?”

  “Feet?”

  “Yes. Mutton feet.”

  I looked at her, and she looked back.

  “You mean, like, hooves?” I finally said. “Animal feet?”

  “Like that. I can make soup.”

  “A soup of hooves? Of animal feet?”

  “I’ll make it very nice.”

  “Uh—thank you. I mean—why would I want that?”

  “It will make your milk strong.”

  “My milk is fine.”

  “It’s too thin. You drink too much water.”

  “That’s not how it works.” But I paused. Maybe it really did help. Wasn’t there something about gelatin and hooves? But a soup made from sheep hooves—the thought sent acid up the back of my throat.

  “Thank you,” I said. “But I don’t care for feet.”

  “The baby eats too often,” she pressed. “It means your milk is thin. You are always drinking water.”

  “I’m thirsty. And water is good for milk.”

  “You are making your milk too thin, believe me,” she said. “If you won’t eat the broth, then I will make you rice pudding.”

  “Rice pudding!” Now I was enthusiastic. “Great.”

  “That will also make the milk strong.” Satisfied with this compromise, she hoisted Patrick onto her shoulder, this stout wise woman, this professional hoister of babies, and smacked his diapered rump and crowed: “Six lakh rupees!”

  “Why do you keep saying that to him?”

  “Oh!” She laughed self-consciously. “We always say that to boys.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s how much money they will bring for their families.”

  “Why?”

  “From dowry, Madame.”

  “But we’re not Indian. He’s not going to get a dowry.”

  “It’s just something nice to say to boys.”

  “What do you say to girls?” Mary was India. India was in my house. India was already forming my babies’ minds and hearts in ways none of us—not I nor she nor they—would ever fully understand.

  “Girls? I don’t know.” She turned to carry my child away. “Nothing.”

  Chapter 15

  Once we’d settled into the house, I’d hired a housekeeper to cook and clean. That way Mary could concentrate on the children. That ought to be enough, I decided. I mean, you didn’t want a crowd in the house, right?

  Sadly, the housekeeper was a disaster. There is no space to dwell on the depressing particulars here. He was a man, too, and I hate to introduce a narrative thread that would undercut my thesis that men ought to perform more housework. I’ll simply say that under his stewardship our house slowly descended into filth, and he couldn’t cook very well, and when we finally fired him, a chunk of cash disappeared from what we’d thought was an undiscovered hiding spot.

  That was a false start, but I wasn’t deterred. I called some more candidates.

  One of them was Pooja.

  In a show of eagerness, Pooja showed up an hour early and ground her thumb enthusiastically into the doorbell. The napping baby awoke and screamed. I yanked open the door and glowered into her expectant face. Glasses
slipped greasily down her nose, and hair dripped onto her shoulders like a shawl tossed over an embarrassing piece of furniture.

  “Yes?” I said to the short, nervous-looking person who trailed Pooja inside.

  “My husband, ma’am,” Pooja said flatly. “Varun.”

  He grinned at us with sharp teeth.

  “Okay.” I lingered on each syllable so they’d know I didn’t welcome this interloper.

  “You’re early.” I turned to Pooja. “I wasn’t expecting you yet.”

  “Sorry,” she said. None of the flutter of the other candidates, who minced and winced to ingratiate. Not: Sorry, Madame. Not: Oh, so sorry. She shifted her weight and waited, unapologetic and a little bored, for me to say something.

  “Have a seat.” I tried to warm my tone from “mean” to “brisk.”

  Pooja glanced at the upholstery as if appraising the difficulty of cleaning the stain of herself from the fabric. Her husband, conspicuously uninvited to sit, retreated haltingly to a sofa against the far wall, all impatience and wounded pride.

  I asked Pooja perfunctory questions and scrawled her answers into a notebook. This was just for show. I’d already decided against her.

  She handed me her reference letters. I ran an eye over the top sheet and started. I knew the name. “Your old boss was my neighbor in Beijing.”

  “I worked for her until she moved to China.”

  I knew then, she’d tell me later. I knew I would work for you.

  I did not share this belief. The coincidence wasn’t enough to erase my distaste. “We’ll be in touch,” I said. You’re not for us, I thought.

  “Her references are great,” Tom said that night. “You should email your friend.”

  “Think so?”

  “Small world,” began my email to Beijing. The reply was immediate. “She’s a gem…You would be lucky to have her…I have missed her every day.”

  This didn’t sound anything like the sluggish woman who’d visited our home. Doubtfully, I offered Pooja a weeklong trial. Just until we found somebody suitable, I told myself.

  “Once I get a tryout,” Pooja told me later, “I always get an offer.”

  No wonder: Suddenly we were eating creamy potato gratin and hearty butter chicken and melt-in-your-mouth spinach quiche. Pooja scrubbed every room to a shine and amused Max by drawing elaborate elephants and recounting Hindu myths. By the end of the week our house hummed along as never before—a neat, orderly place rich with the smells of cooking.