Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  The coincidences continued. When Mary and Pooja set eyes on each other, they shouted and embraced. They had gone to high school together, it turned out, in a convent school in Darjeeling.

  “Maybe the universe is trying to tell us something,” I said to Tom. He smiled indulgently.

  I offered Pooja the job. She’d earn the same salary as Mary, minus the bus money. She moved into the servants’ quarter, and everything became easy. Pooja’s rooms were small and grim, but she paid no rent and escaped the expense and risk of commuting while female. She came early in the morning, took a long midday lunch break, and stayed through Max’s bedtime—keeping Patrick company in the living room while I lavished stories and good-night cuddles on Max before turning to the baby’s last feeding.

  Once Pooja took over the cooking, I regressed to adolescent disinterest. I’d shamble into the kitchen and carelessly ask, “What’s for dinner?” It was a question that never got old. Pooja gloried in the responsibility—she took careful note of our tastes; surprised us with new dishes; pored over cookbooks.

  Pooja puffed wearily when she mopped the floors. She was three-quarters blind, and her grin revealed a tumbledown fence of lopsided teeth. But her handwriting looked like flowers; she knew everything there was to know about Indian cinema and music; she baked the best lasagna I’d ever tasted.

  When she held Patrick in her arms he lay rapt, eyes drinking in her smooth cheeks and awkward eyeglasses. She whispered to him in Nepali. She sang to him in Hindi. She turned on the kitchen radio and shimmied to Yo Yo Honey Singh, and Patrick laughed hysterically.

  “Babies always love me,” she said and shrugged.

  As for Patrick, he was so easygoing I found it disconcerting. His day was a shifting round of caretakers, sights, and sensations: oil massages with Mary, feedings with me, and babbling senselessly to Pooja while she cooked. On Christmas Eve, at the tender age of just over two months, he slept twelve hours in a row overnight. He did the same thing the next night, and the night after that, and every night to come. I could have wept with gratitude. In fact, I think I did.

  There was a sense of plenty; of life’s messy eruption. Pooja’s husband found a job nearby. The children thrived, everybody slept, and Tom and I both got our work done. We’d had another baby, but thanks to the extra women we’d hired into the house, there was still enough time for everything. Mary took Max to the park and the zoo and escorted him to playdates. Patrick never tired of hanging around with Pooja.

  “If you leave India, please give me warning,” Pooja said one day. “Otherwise it’s too hard. We get to love the kids, too. You know?”

  She was not the first woman I’d hired to care for my children, but she was the first to confess to sentimental entanglement. She was the only one who’d ever talked to me with the linguistic fluency and emotional frankness that made her seem more like a friend than an employee.

  Pooja and I were coming up the driveway one winter afternoon. Crows wheeled wildly in the blanched sky, spinning and catching, voices scratching like match tips on phosphorous. Our steps slowed, our eyes fixed on this weird winged dance.

  “What are they doing?” I asked.

  “There must be a dead crow,” she said. “One of their own.”

  “They’re mourning?”

  “I have seen them do like that.”

  We watched for a time.

  “Crows do that?” I couldn’t quite believe her.

  “I’ve seen it many times,” she said.

  She taught me that; she taught me more.

  Chapter 16

  Slowly Pooja dropped crumbs of her story. She was a young widow and single mother from the mountains of Darjeeling. She’d left her son in the village with her elderly father because there was nobody else to raise him. Pooja offered these pieces but never told a coherent story of herself.

  Neither did Mary. Their sketchy chronologies did not account for all the time they’d been alive. I assumed jobs had been expunged because they hadn’t ended well. Relationships, maybe. Places lived, degradations endured, gambles lost. Other moments were told and retold, repeated until they loomed as crucial turning points that had made this particular version of life inevitable.

  Pooja had run away with a man when she was still a teenager. That was the thing she made me understand: that all the events of her life, everything she’d done and seen and been, had flowed from the original, adolescent impulse to take her clothes off with a man. Then she’d had to marry him, and then she’d become a mother. In my earliest understanding of Pooja, the choice to have sexual intercourse had been the only free decision she’d ever made.

  “Why did I run off like that?” Pooja diced tomatoes; their sharp sweet smell rose from the board. There was a shrug in her voice. “I’m like that, even now. A little bit crazy. Sometimes I just decide to do something and I do it.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I’m like that, too.”

  “Yes,” she said, laughing. “I have seen.”

  And so she warned me. And so I warned her back.

  * * *

  ————

  “I like you,” I told Pooja one day. “But if Tom decides he doesn’t like you, I can’t help.”

  I waited for this warning to sink in. This was the lesson of Xiao Li: Nobody who causes this much trouble between you and Tom should stay in the house.

  Pooja nodded like she already knew. She didn’t need my help. She was an instinctive genius; she knew how to win people over. After Tom contracted severe food poisoning, Pooja announced he must stop eating “from outside” and began to fix a boxed lunch every morning. Tom, of course, was delighted. There were impassioned summits to negotiate olives in the salad; cheese in the pasta; mustard, mayo, and tomatoes but never, ever onion on the sandwiches.

  “I like ol’ Pooja,” Tom would say.

  “Because she spoils you.”

  “At least somebody does!”

  I’d long been unnerved by Tom’s cold indifference to the private lives of our domestic staff, but now it occurred to me that I’d misunderstood. I began to think that Tom was eager to show kindness to the people who worked in our house—but first he wanted them to be good at their jobs. This is a fundamental and familiar difference in our characters: I don’t expect things to be perfect, and I have a high tolerance for flaws. Tom, on the other hand, glances at things—the restaurant table, the hotel room, the apartment—and immediately decides that something better exists and that he can get it for us. And he does. He inevitably delivers us from “good enough” to “really great” or even “amazing.” I’m not always convinced the leap in quality is worth the hassle, but the improvement is real. Only now did I realize that this long-recognized habit was also present in his view of the housekeepers. He had a keen sense of India and China as places brimming with bright and poor people eager for an opportunity. It drove him crazy to see me settle for a subpar worker when he was certain—he just knew—there was somebody better out there, just waiting to be found, if only I’d keep looking.

  Pooja was the first person he considered worthy of her job, and his goodwill toward her was huge. In his eagerness to help Pooja in any way he could, he became—for the first time since Max’s birth—a creator of quotidian domestic events rather than a passerby.

  Tom traveled a lot in those days—to meet uranium miners in Jharkand and intelligence officers in Karachi; to meetings in Mumbai and New York. I secretly relished absences that spilled into the weekend, because they gave me an excuse to ask Pooja to work overtime on Sunday.

  This was welcome because Sundays were a recurrent disaster. Every seventh day, the cheerful fictions of our domestic life were painfully exposed as a batch of lies. On Sunday Tom discovered that hanging out with tiny children was not a sun-washed field and overflowing picnic basket, but a jumble of physical needs and messy rooms and senseless tears. On Sunday I discover
ed that my partner didn’t know where the diapers were kept and thought it prudent to let crusty dishes fester in the sink because a “maid” would arrive twenty-four hours later.

  By the time the sun set on the Sabbath, we were often simmering and hardly speaking. We’d tuck the children into bed with forced smiles, then Tom would tumble across our bed and snore ostentatiously while I drank a beer much too fast and washed the dishes.

  No doubt there were deeper emotional yearnings at work. Suppressed worries about family life; religious guilt; nostalgia for youth. The existential dread of the seventh day is a recurring theme in art. But none of that was the real problem. We struggled on Sundays because we weren’t used to functioning without a cook, cleaner, or nanny.

  The simple replacement of Tom with Pooja turned Sundays into a delight. The house was impeccable. The children were nattily dressed and wholesomely fed and carefully chaperoned. I went with Pooja to restaurants and backyard brunches and birthday parties, where I’d dandle the baby on my knee and sip a glass of wine while Pooja heaped Max’s buffet plate and plied apart brawling toddlers on the bouncy castle.

  The only one who disapproved was Tom. “Nobody should work seven days a week,” he said.

  Suddenly we’d switched roles. I was complacent; he was consumed by guilt and doubt.

  “She appreciates the overtime money,” I argued.

  “Just make sure she knows she can say no,” Tom said.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” I pressed Pooja.

  “It’s easy for me,” she laughed. “We always work like this.”

  Tom was mollified, but soon he had a new concern: Pooja’s water supply.

  Pooja saved plastic bottles, refilled them from our kitchen filter, and packed them into a sturdy tote bag. Every night she’d hoist this sloshing load with one arm and lug home another day’s water for cooking and drinking.

  Pooja’s water situation didn’t bother me. I never gave it a thought. Considering the countless Delhi neighborhoods where people survived without any water at all, carrying the bottles across the yard didn’t stand out as a severe hardship.

  But Tom fretted.

  “I feel bad when I see her carrying that water,” he complained.

  “I guess.”

  “Couldn’t we get the people who deliver our water to take some to Pooja’s room?”

  “Sure,” I said. “We could do that.”

  Then I forgot. Tom complained again. I forgot again. He reminded me. Now the conversation itself had become an annoyance, so I bought a water dispenser and ordered jugs delivered to Pooja’s door. I doubled my tips to the emaciated teenager who now had to lug the barrels of water up the narrow, twisting steps to her rooms, trying not to think about how making things nicer for one person always seemed to make things worse for somebody else.

  * * *

  ————

  We were visiting the ruins of a Mughal fort near our house when I had a crotch rubbed against my ass. I was standing in line to buy tickets. It was a Sunday afternoon. Max was at my hip, and Tom paced in the grass with Patrick.

  The dick was hard, and looking for purchase. I put my hand on the shoulder of my toddler and turned to face the man behind me. I looked into his eyes. He looked back. He was skinny and poor; his wrists poked from his sleeves.

  “Back up,” I said, and he did. He dropped his eyes to the ground, and his friends laughed and jostled at his elbows, and then it was over. I forgot within five minutes.

  That night in bed, the memory slipped across my mind, and I mentioned it to Tom.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” he cried. “I can’t believe—it’s so outrageous. You should have told me!”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I handled it,” I said.

  “I should tell you so you can get beaten up in front of our kids?” I said.

  He stewed and muttered and smacked at his own face until finally I erupted.

  “What does it matter? Don’t you know how many times, in how many countries? Why is it important to you? You don’t remember I’m a woman? You haven’t noticed there are almost no women on the streets of Delhi? Look at the bus stops. Look at the sidewalks. There are no women!”

  “Of course, I know,” he said. “It’s terrible.”

  But then he looked at me as if that had nothing to do with me. And in a sense he was right, because I was a white foreign woman, but also he was wrong, because there always arrives a moment when you are still a woman, no matter what kind of woman you are. I couldn’t believe I was still invisible to my husband in this big, basic way. The failure to see what was in front of him; the failure to imagine the rest.

  I’d been shocked at the divergence of our fates after we became parents, but in truth, the gender discrepancy between us had started long before that. I’d experienced sexual harassment in countless cultural forms while Tom wandered unscathed. He inevitably felt compelled to intervene manfully when he happened to be present, but otherwise he was largely oblivious. I seldom called his attention to these experiences because I didn’t want them to stick around as memories between us. And we were always so busy, and it was always easier not to think about it, because thinking about it drove me into what felt like an unproductive rage.

  But now it all slid through my mind: The years of come-ons from sources and colleagues. The news organizations I’d roped off in my mind as no-gos because I’d sexually rejected some man who’d since become powerful, and didn’t want to risk getting undercut and blackballed. The times I thought I was about to get raped. All the things that had been said to me, or said about other women in front of me, to be sure I didn’t misunderstand my position as an amusing but ultimately inferior presence. We were welcome as long as we were young and beddable, and then we were supposed to do what self-respecting women did: disappear into a household somewhere. Tom had faced none of that. Tom had been free to move through his career; there had been so little for him to navigate. And I’d never explained it to him. I’d assumed he just knew, because I thought it was obvious. I’d been treated like an accessory. I’d been groped and pawed and cornered. I’d let sly remarks slide off my back. It was all in the game, and I was so eager to play.

  But now he looked at me blankly, as if I were not part of it, and it occurred to me that he had no idea. Did he really think his wife had been clever enough to be a woman in the world without being a woman in the world?

  There was so much to say I couldn’t stand to start.

  * * *

  ————

  When the boys napped and the air in the house stood thick with afternoon stupor, Pooja and Mary sprawled on the floor under the whip of ceiling fans. Together they fiddled with hair and examined fingernails and whispered in Nepali. Together they fell into gape-mouthed sleep. They rose together, and together they worked: Mary mopped floors and washed clothes while Pooja cooked. When Pooja shopped for fresh vegetables and meat, Mary carried Patrick along for the ride. “Just for an outing, Madame, some air.”

  “Bahini,” they said. Sister. Shouts of “Bahini!” between rooms and down halls. Mary and Pooja whispering their secrets, laughing at jokes they refused to translate, crying together. I turned my rooms over to them, and they created a kingdom of women and children. I passed through on my way to my desk, my computer, my language, and my imaginary worlds. The house was full of mothers. The more they took over, the more I could withdraw into work.

  They made it all so easy. In the haze of memory, it looks perfect. I know I was working hard then and beating myself up for not working hard enough, and that every day I tried to split myself between two babies. I was struggling. I cried sometimes. There were mornings when I doubled over in the shower with anxiety. But when I remember those days now, I think they were perfect.

  * * *

  ————

  A
friend wrote me in a panic. She was pregnant. She’d gone to a cremation. It was a colleague’s brother; she’d felt obligated. But people had chastised her for exposing her unborn child to the funeral pyre. In India, pregnant women are not supposed to attend cremations. The soul of the dead is burned free and, it is said, may find its way to the fetus and leave its mark.

  “Am I ridiculous for feeling weird?” she asked.

  I happen to believe that feeling weird is a sign of vitality. The world is a weird place full of weird portents; who can pretend otherwise? I myself have felt weird about linoleum patterns and paper factories and thousands upon thousands of minor objects and cameo personalities.

  So, of course, I replied: “NO!”

  “I’ll ask Pooja,” I added. “She’s so smart about things like this.”

  Pooja had become my trusted reference for all questions of history, culture, and health.

  “It’s okay,” she said immediately. “The same thing happened to me.”

  “Really?”

  “My husband died when I was pregnant,” she reminded me. “I was scared to go to the funeral, but I had no choice.

  “But”—she shrugged—“nothing happened.”

  My friend should sprinkle holy water around the rooms of her house and on any clothes worn to the crematorium, she added.

  “What kind of holy water?”

  “Any holy water,” Pooja said.

  I knew of precisely one kind of holy water, and surely Pooja didn’t mean fonts by the church door. Or maybe she did.

  “From a church? A temple?”

  “Like that,” Pooja agreed.

  “Which one?”