Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It was inadequate. Everything was inadequate.

  I closed the door and went back to work.

  Chapter 21

  I finally typed the last lines of the first draft of my novel. It was the middle of the night. Everybody was asleep. A lizard scrabbled over the wall, hunting for bugs.

  I looked at the blackened windows and remembered lost seasons in Moscow, and that one perfect summer in Beijing when I’d begun this book, veins bloated with confidence, throwing dice and winning every roll. I thought the novel was something to finish fast, the next idea in a long parade of ideas.

  And then the babies came, and I realized I was also destined to bleed and fall short and watch from shadows while other people won their crowns. My ambition could find no object except for these hundreds of thousands of words that I showed to nobody. I spun daydreams. I cuddled my children. I listened to music. Baby, sweet baby if it’s all the same, take the glory any day over the fame. I instructed myself to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I pined and cried and understood failure and accepted obscurity and lost patience and found it again. All those words. All those days. The sentences abandoned halfway through because a child screamed. The scenes that came as fingerprints of themselves from a dead weary brain. All of that.

  But at least I’d kept writing. I hadn’t written perfectly, but written I had. I took something out of myself. I made a piece of work. Now I wanted to burst from my house and pace the darkened streets; wake up Tom; phone people I hadn’t seen in years.

  I’m done.

  I wasn’t done. Only a draft was done. A draft is nothing. A first draft means you’ve bought the stone. You haven’t carved anything; there is no sculpture. You’ve produced a block, nothing more. For a few days, though, you can thrill to its existence. This first creation is more godlike than anything that will come after. Chipping, adding, polishing, perfecting—this is the same familiar human enterprise, the improvement and reduction of something extant. When you create a draft, you bring material from nothingness.

  I imagined writing the acknowledgments for the novel. I would thank Tom, of course. Tom first, Tom always. I tried to imagine what I would say: “You definitely could have been more supportive, but on the other hand, you didn’t divorce me.”

  * * *

  ————

  Goa in monsoon season. Sun buried behind opaline sky. Cracked sea of metal, veined with silver and bronze. Pale sand gone to crumbled moss under the passage of feet, studded with tiny seashells.

  The boys held white crabs in their hands, they chased fish into open water, but red flags snapped on the beach, and lifeguards called them back to shore, every time back again.

  I stood in shallows and felt the water tug at my feet, watched everything slide weightless in the drag of undertow, crouched down until my face almost broke the singing shushing skin of the water, snatching at shells and pebbles as it rushed to the deep. Breathe the salt, breathe the terror of the tug toward open sea, toward something vast and unknowable, an ocean that cannot be fathomed. We dabbled on its edges, over and over we brought our children to plod and plash.

  “We have beach boys,” Tom said, all quiet happiness. “They love the beach so much.”

  “Yes.” That’s because this is where we bring them. We could have chosen mountains, we could have chosen forests or desert. They love what we present to them.

  They dipped themselves into the edges, tasted the salt, and marveled at the small pieces of life they could steal from the shallows. They wondered over tidal pools. They feared the waves.

  Watching how the water turned and scraped, I felt vertigo. I didn’t want my babies to be dragged out to sea, out to see. I didn’t want the world to carry them out of my reach. But this is my duty, now, to watch them test the depths and quietly accustom myself.

  Tom was telling Max something, explaining, bent low. Max ran to me and said: “Mommy, the moon is pulling on the sand.”

  “The moon is pulling on the sea, sweetheart, on the water.”

  “No, it’s about the sand. Daddy told me. It’s why the beach is different every day. The moon is pulling the sand.”

  And I stayed silent; I turned my face to the horizon. He could find out in his own time. I didn’t care enough to interrupt our reveries with facts. Anyway, I was the only woman in our family; what would they know about waters and tides and bloods? These truths are fluid, and men aren’t involved.

  Men were coming now, incongruous figures in uniform moving over the sand. Workers from one of the hotels, waiters or porters or front desk staff in matching black trousers and white shirts with collars. They came staggering and skipping down the beach, bearing on their shoulders a statue of the elephant god Ganesh. They neared the water’s edge and then stopped and prayed. Then four of them picked up the clay statue and waded with it into the water. The rough sea slapped and curled. Over and over the waves pushed them back to shore, and the men fought their way forward again. Their trouser legs were soaked; the salts of sea and sweat slicked together on their faces. Always, everywhere, water is sanctified. This presentation of Ganesh to the sea represents the divine melting of matter into the absolute. Ganesh will return perpetually to Kailash. Ganesh was created from the dust of his mother’s skin. Her husband chopped off the child’s head, and only when he saw his wife wrecking the world in the rage of mothers did he adjust his thinking. Never mind, I didn’t understand, you are my son, too.

  The hotel workers could not force their offering into the mouth of the sea. The absolute did not accept their clay. Finally they turned and walked back up the sands. Sometimes the act of offering has to be enough. Their part, at least, was pure. The next day Tom and Max would discover the statue washed up on the beach, mud skin melted to reveal the straw skeleton beneath.

  A fisherman hauled his net up onto the sands, combing its strings with calloused fingers. His catch was paltry: a jellyfish and a single white fish that gasped on the sand, gills shuddering in and out. The boys leaned over for a closer look. I let them look. Why shouldn’t they look? They didn’t know what death was, and even if they did—well, even if they did. Still there was some impulse—don’t let them look. And its echo—make them see. In the end I stayed neutral. They didn’t ask, and I didn’t volunteer. The fish had no hope; it was dying on grained earth, drowning in air. My boys are animals, could they sense its plight? Finally Patrick, the baby, set down a starfish by the fish’s head. He had been carrying this starfish for half an hour; he wouldn’t let anybody touch it. Now he offered it to the dying fish as if he’d been saving it always just for this. Then they lost interest and drifted down the shore. When the fisherman finally carried away his catch, I pointed out his retreat to the boys so they wouldn’t cry. “Say, ‘Bye-bye, fish,’ ” I coaxed them.

  “Bye-bye, fish,” they repeated.

  We gave them what of India we could reach. They grew up with things we never had. With passports and airports and embassies and hotels; with being foreigners, the only white face in a room. They heard their parents say “home,” and they were confused to realize we meant a place they hardly knew on the other side of the planet.

  My boys are alien to my past self. I was the child of a few rooms, a patch of woods, a handful of adults. Predictable, dull, and contained. I starved for the world; I nearly died looking for an escape. They are children of the world. The world is all they have. They don’t have a hometown. They don’t expect things to be comfortable. They don’t expect places to smell good. They don’t expect people to look like them or to speak their language. They don’t complain. I don’t know how they are being marked by this life or what it portends for them. I guess and I hope. I hope it helps more than it hurts.

  Chapter 22

  One little-discussed problem with hiring domestic help: it is difficult to maintain the professional equanimity of a boss in your own home, at all hour
s of the day, with privacy stripped away and your every snack and sniffle on display.

  Imagine: You didn’t sleep; you had a quarrel; the baby is crying; you’ve burned the last egg. Goddamn it. But don’t forget, you are the boss. You are in a condition of intimate emotional disarray, but you’re also in the midst of a professional situation, and it’s all happening in your kitchen. Your employees watch you stalk around in your bathrobe. In this sense, they have the private knowledge of family members.

  But you can’t snap at employees the way you might snap at a family member. They are vulnerable to your whims. And, unlike a family, they don’t love you. Why should they? Sometimes I saw myself through the eyes of the women who worked in my house and felt they couldn’t possibly like me, let alone love.

  In some ways, I was a bad boss. I couldn’t have predicted the corrosive potency of the emotions that rushed through my nerves when my kids were involved. The house was there, all around us, no escape. And I’m a flawed human. More than once, I lost my temper. In the hangovers that followed these rare eruptions I experienced a paralyzing self-loathing. I hid in the bathroom and cried. I reminded myself that these arguments were unfair. In fact, they were not arguments, because an argument implies equality of status. When one person has power, it’s not a fight, but something closer to abuse. I was free to say whatever I wanted, while the women in my employ—for a thousand reasons—were muzzled.

  Then I’d apologize, only to worry that I shouldn’t have apologized, that the entire thing had shown my weakness.

  It wasn’t only that I lost my temper a few times. There were other behaviors—subtler and more frequent—that made me a bad boss.

  Here’s one: I stalked Pooja on Facebook.

  * * *

  ————

  It started as procrastination and idle curiosity. I pecked her name into Google and clicked through to her Facebook page. Who knew Pooja had Facebook? She hadn’t configured her account for privacy, so I could see everything she posted. A little more snooping led me to Pooja’s sister, who also posted a trove of Pooja pictures. I didn’t send them friend requests or tell Pooja I was watching her online. I didn’t want her to censor herself.

  That’s because, in truth, I was mesmerized. In our house Pooja was steady, calm—even nerdy. Her quiet intelligence and careful bearing were the ship railings that kept us all on deck.

  The Pooja of Facebook was frivolous and wild, a volatile woman who stayed up late squinting reddened eyes and hoisting drinks for the camera. She haunted bars and malls with her sister and another friend. They called themselves the “Three Angels” and puckered their lips into unflattering duck bills. They posed in lush gardens and immaculate homes and shopping malls. If you didn’t know they were cleaners and nannies, you would never guess from their profile pages.

  I couldn’t understand how Pooja had so much money to burn. I worried that she wasn’t saving. The flashy lifestyle she flaunted on Facebook struck me as something worse than fakery. It was almost an expression of nihilism—as if she didn’t believe there would be a future for herself or her son.

  I was also worried about the mood swings documented in her feed. One day Pooja was drinking in a bar long after midnight: “dis party getting hot! feeling happy.” But soon she moped in sorrow: “Don’t depend on anyone in dis world bcoz even ur shadow leaves wen ur in darkness. ‘feeling so lonely’ ‘GUD NITE’ to all my frenz.”

  Now I saw that the Pooja who came into my house was only a single, fragmentary aspect of a more complicated woman. Her broader existence was beyond my understanding. I felt close to Pooja, and yet I found daily evidence that she was still a stranger, and I found this mystery addictive.

  I was privy to constructed selves: the role she performed in my house, and the avatar she built on Facebook. This stranger-woman, this person of flesh and soul, swung between the two like it was nothing. Our family was never mentioned on Facebook. The hours we spent together felt like my entire life, and yet Pooja had enough time and material left over to build an image of an existence that didn’t contain us.

  Eventually, of course, the spying stung me. I saw a picture of Pooja wearing a quilted navy jacket I’d once bought in Beirut. I loved this coat for its swingy cut, high collar, and oversized buttons, and because it reminded me of traveling alone and ducking into trendy shops on a whim between meetings. Now there it was on the Internet, not fitting Pooja properly.

  I closed the computer in annoyance, half stood to march into the kitchen and confront her, then dropped back into my seat. What could I say, I saw you on Facebook? Besides, maybe I was wrong. I looked again—yes, I was sure that was my coat. I checked the closet, and there it hung, looking spiffy and innocent of all misadventure. Treachery!

  “I was Facebook stalking Pooja (separate and embarrassing conversation),” I messaged a friend, “and saw a picture of her out partying in a bar…wearing one of my coats!”

  “Ha ha ha,” came the reply. “Busted. That is my first real chuckle of the day.”

  “If that’s the worst you saw,” continued my wise friend, “it’s not so bad.”

  That night I spilled the story to Tom, expecting an indignation hotter than my own. But, once again, I’d underestimated his empathy for Pooja. He listened quietly, and answered slowly.

  “She shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “And you can confront her, if you want. You wouldn’t be out of bounds.”

  “But you don’t think I should.” I was incredulous.

  “Pooja is poor.” This plain truth shut me up.

  “What she did was wrong, but very human,” he continued. “Are you really going to fire her for it?”

  “No.”

  “If you’re not going to fire her, then what do you gain by humiliating her?”

  “I know,” I said. “But.”

  “So I guess what I think is, if you want to fire her, I will understand,” he concluded. “Really. I will. But if you’re not going to fire her, I think you should leave it alone.”

  I never spoke of the coat again, but the picture rankled. I’d long been stifling the temptation to tell Pooja and Mary to stop dipping into the miniature hotel shampoos and creams I kept in a basket for guests and weekend trips. I resented the petty pilfering that forced me to choose between two unlikable roles: the dim-witted housewife oblivious to the swiping of her stuff, or the small-minded boss who begrudged the domestic staff a few daubs of shampoo. I didn’t really care about coats or toiletries, but these things were leftovers from a life I’d lost. Now I was weaker and older. I no longer lived in hotels. My womb had been stretched and emptied. And the women who helped care for my children were plundering the remnants of my past.

  My mind churning with all of this, I kept checking Pooja’s Facebook page when I was supposed to be working. In another picture, she posed on a park bench in tight jeans and gold flats, cradling a bright pink handbag. A few palm trees were visible behind her, but otherwise the shot was tight. When my eye hit the comments, I started.

  “Nice pic,” Pooja’s sister wrote. “How was ur Hong Kong trip?”

  A moment later, she’d commented again: “Plizz send me some of ur lovely pics on Whatsapp.”

  A few minutes after that, their friend and drinking companion chimed in: “So didi wen r u coming bac yaar we r missing u sooo much u knw na we r three angels…like charlie’s angels.”

  Pooja liked all of these comments but replied to none. Soon yet another friend voiced the confusion I was also feeling: “Nice yaar,” she wrote, using local slang akin to dude. “R u in Hk?”

  I found Tom reading in bed, and flopped down.

  “Pooja has gone to Hong Kong!” I cried. “Why would Pooja go to Hong Kong?”

  I was dismayed and disoriented. It was a Sunday. Pooja had just been at our house the day before, and, as far as I knew, she’d be back the next morning. How
long was the flight to Hong Kong? Was it possible to go and come so fast? Pooja must be a prostitute or a drug mule…

  “What are you talking about?”

  Sheepishly I described the findings of my online snooping.

  “Pooja’s not in Hong Kong,” Tom said when I’d finished.

  “How do you know?”

  “How would she pay for the trip? How would she have a visa? Does Pooja even have a passport?” He snorted. “It’s bullshit.”

  “Then why would she say that on Facebook?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Not really.”

  “What possible explanation can you imagine?”

  “They want somebody to think she’s gone to Hong Kong. They’re trying to create that impression. It could be any number of things.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Please don’t waste your time with this.” Tom cast a regretful glance at the book he’d set aside.

  “What if she doesn’t come tomorrow?”

  “She’ll be here.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “I am.”

  I said nothing.

  “Is there anything else?” asked Tom, reaching for his book.

  The next day she came. She was right on time.

  * * *

  ————

  Mary’s boyfriend would soon leave India. This wasn’t the ending we’d imagined. Mary had expected him to find a loophole in the law or sweep her off to Nigeria for a wedding, but he couldn’t solve the problem of his expired visa. She’d been living on his promises for years. Dutifully she’d stood in the lines to procure an Indian passport. But when the time came, he simply boarded an airplane and flew away.

  Now it was Mary’s turn to cry.

  “I told you,” she reminded me quietly. “Everybody takes their turn to cry.”