Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

“I don’t know.” She looked at the floor.

  “You don’t have to—”

  I ran out of words. I was bewildered.

  “I mean—” I tried again. “I thought you’d like to move in.”

  “I feel shy.”

  “Shy?”

  Shy implied bodily functions or sex or social timidity, and certainly Mary had never suffered from the latter.

  “I’m worried what will the others say.”

  “What others?”

  “The other didis.”

  “What would they say?”

  “Pooja is calling people. She says I got her into trouble so I could have the quarter.”

  “She’s telling people that?” I was aghast. “But that’s crazy!”

  “She thinks I did like that.”

  “But—you almost got fired lying for her.”

  “Yes!” Mary’s face shone for a moment with the self-righteousness of a maligned witness. “But Pooja is saying I planned everything.”

  True, the timing was terrible. Mary had just been abandoned by her boyfriend, and there were clean, safe rooms that Mary couldn’t have because Pooja was already installed. Then Pooja had gotten fired after Mary had a secret discussion with me.

  I knew, too, that Pooja’s theory was rooted in something more complicated and ugly: Pooja had eclipsed Mary, and we all knew it. This knowledge twisted its way among us, never spoken but always present. Mary was the faithful employee who’d worked tirelessly for us since we’d come to India. Pooja was a relative newcomer, a mercurial figure prone to drama.

  And yet we liked Pooja better. It was as simple and ruthless as that. Pooja had formed relationships that were impossible for Mary to ignore, and equally impossible for her to duplicate. Pooja and I had conversations about things unrelated to the kids or the house. Tom doted on her. Even the baby, technically Mary’s charge, was rapt and joyful in Pooja’s presence. Her life was turbulent and her decisions unpredictable, but she had some charisma that could not be stifled.

  Mary could not pull off such alchemy. Mary bumbled and blabbed and toiled with ceaseless energy so that nobody could forget how dependable and hardworking she was. And we all appreciated her, and felt beholden to her, and wanted good things for her. But in the brutal, illogical law of human relations, where effort earns no reward whatsoever, Pooja was the favorite. I knew it, and Mary knew it, and Pooja knew it, and all three of us knew that the other two also knew, but that it must never be acknowledged lest our fragile balance of personalities collapse.

  Pooja might have feared that Mary would strike, but that wasn’t Mary’s style. She preferred to let the injustice of her second-place status sit among us like a penance, offering it up to household gods and punishing us subtly with her suffering. I was the only one who saw it, but to me it was plain. There existed this Catholic understanding between Mary and me.

  I leaned on Mary to take the quarter. I warned her against letting Pooja’s wrath destroy an important opportunity to live in a secure spot and save money. And, at last, she moved in.

  After that, their friendship was lost forever. These classmates, these allies, with their impenetrable fortress built barefoot among sofa cushions on our living room floor, in whispered jokes and secrets, picking at their hangnails, hair in their faces—all of that had been torn apart, and it wasn’t coming back.

  Chapter 25

  That summer my agent finally sent a draft of my novel to a few editors. I had enormous expectations. I thought the manuscript would be snapped up and brought forth to acclaim, hardly a word rearranged. It is strange to remember this now, to confess to my own deluded self-regard. But it’s true—that’s what I expected. I was already picturing the trays of rose macarons and rose-and-pistachio-scented kebabs and rose-infused vodka I’d serve at the all-night party I’d throw to celebrate my forthcoming novel.

  It wasn’t like that. Of course it wasn’t like that. Slowly the replies trickled back. There was praise but also the underlying conviction that the book could not be published as it was. Everyone thought the novel needed to be changed, although there was no consensus on its specific flaws. One editor liked the beginning but not the end; another, the end but not the beginning. One found the structure off-putting; the other thought it was uniquely interesting.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. I knew fiction was a gamble. But certain images from the streets of Moscow had clung to the inside of my brain—phrases so jarring I still puzzled over their meaning, loves that had rushed and faded, feelings I had experienced in Russia, so much in Russia, but only in Russia—and I wanted to trace those threads back and knit them together, to turn wisps into substance. I wanted to write literary fiction.

  I’ve always believed there is dignity in risk. There is fun, too, but only—and I was just getting this now—because failure is waiting all the time. That’s what makes it interesting; that’s where the grace lies. You take your chances knowing you might lose, you might crash, you might go broke.

  None of it would be any fun, I lectured myself that summer, if this weren’t always a possibility. But now I was weakened, and subject to temptation. I could sell a pulpier version. And maybe it would be good, maybe even superior to mine, but it wouldn’t be the book I meant to write. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let it be turned into something else. I had to fix the book myself.

  “I’d rather keep it unpublished forever than turn it into something I didn’t mean for it to be,” I told Tom. I wanted to commit this pledge to the record because I was, indeed, tempted to sell it off and move on.

  “Good,” he agreed. “But I can’t believe it’s not getting published,” he added loyally.

  I shrugged. My hurt feelings were drying up, and I recognized the truth of the critiques. I didn’t like any of the suggested remedies, but I saw the flaws they sought to fix. The book wasn’t ready, I now realized, for an editor. In my desperation to prove that I was still a serious writer in spite of motherhood, I had shoved it forward too soon. I’d ignored my doubts because I was so ravenous to rejoin the wider world. And the book was my only ticket, all I’d tried to do for the past four years. Four years!

  Four years, and it wasn’t enough. With dull dread I realized that after all the time I’d poured into the project, the project must have yet more time. It was like giving blood only to be asked for more blood still, and then more, and then more. And you think, surely, there can be no more blood, except somehow there is always more blood.

  I could face this revision, but not right away. I needed a break from the manuscript, with its tangle of psychological motivations and sprawling plot and surreal Russian backdrops. I couldn’t think about it without being washed in the raw emotions of pregnancy and early motherhood. The uneven bursts of work, my crazed insistence on writing when I was too tired to recall basic vocabulary words—the effort had flirted with madness and nearly ruined my brain and yet, in the end, had also salvaged me. The book was a dangerous bridge I’d picked my way over, and on its faulty structure I’d crossed from a defunct existence as a foreign correspondent into my present self.

  Now I couldn’t stand the sight of it. I had to leave it alone and do something else.

  In truth, the next idea had long since unfolded itself in my brain, intact and inevitable. But the subject was terrifying and also somehow abasing, and it took me a long time to admit, even to myself, that I would go there.

  * * *

  ————

  “I have this idea,” I’d say, tentatively, to a friend here and there. Then I’d mention domestic labor. In the form of a memoir. Myself, and domestic labor.

  My self-described “expat” friends in Delhi thought this was hilarious. They loved it, in a nasty sort of way. They didn’t understand what I was talking about, really, and so they assumed I was planning to document the mistreatment of maids. We had the habit of colle
cting and swapping outrageous rumors: which foreigners paid shamelessly low salaries, who made their staff sleep on the kitchen floor, and who kept a much-feared white glove to test the furniture for dust. We’d laughed—because what else could you do?—at the Europeans who were socialists back home but were rumored to have adopted Brahmin standards for their Indian domestic workers in Delhi, forbidding them to drink from the same cups, sit on the same chairs, or use the same toilets as the family. We’d heard all of that and more.

  “It’ll be a bestseller,” my friends said. They were titillated by the suggestion of gossip and embarrassment. They saved salacious anecdotes from other people’s homes and presented them for consideration.

  I protested, but only mildly. “It’s not really going to be like that…” I, too, enjoyed the fantasy of exposing the petty sadism. By isolating the worst anecdotes, I could draw a clean line between my virtuous self and the exploiters.

  But as my ideas got more articulate, the reaction from acquaintances grew colder. Every time I tried to describe the project, people would interrupt and argue. I never managed to finish talking. When it comes to domestic work and motherhood—believe me, I have learned this—everybody has a point to argue. It was enough to hear that I was writing about my own fate getting intertwined with impoverished working mothers in China and India; that I wanted to write not only about my struggles but about theirs, too—their origins, their paths to domestic work, their childcare arrangements. At that point, the conversation inevitably collapsed. As if the simple exercise of placing myself alongside the nannies was already an affront; as if equating my sons with the children of local domestic help was an unacceptable equivalence.

  “Well, just wait a minute—wait a minute,” interrupted an American father at a New Delhi cocktail party. “I just want to say—I mean in defense—it’s a job. It’s a chance for them—”

  “No, but I think what she’s saying—” interrupted his American wife.

  “I’m not condemning—” I interrupted.

  “But the thing is, these people, these jobs, I have seen—” he interrupted me again.

  “Wait, but she’s trying—”

  “I have a nanny—” I said. As if to protest, I am still one of you! I have not broken rank!

  Then they started rambling about the caste system, and soon we all drifted off.

  Nearly every parent I knew in New Delhi, with the exception of the nannies themselves (and I even knew of one highly paid nanny who did employ a nanny), hired a nanny. People assumed I was attacking the crucial element that made their lifestyle possible. For working women, it was even more personal: I was implying that the only method they’d found for continuing their work was, in fact, a source of guilt and shame. That wasn’t my idea, but people heard it, anyway. Those feelings already ghost around the consciences of women who hire other women to work in their homes. We are all guilty—not quite guilty enough to do something else, but terribly guilty, all the same. And we are determined to avoid the trap of this guilt—we repeat incantations to banish the guilt, and when we sense somebody edging in that direction, we rear up to drive them off.

  I was warned not to generalize, even though I was writing about myself. I was browbeaten to include outlying examples—that one super-involved unemployed father, that one unbelievably fulfilled nanny—as if they were mainstream reality. There was a panicky tone to these conversations. As if a few flimsy floorboards kept us all from crashing into the basement, and I was taking an ax to the ground. To suggest this solution for women’s work might be less than ideal—heresy. Domestic labor was upward mobility. Leave it alone.

  “So we’re all just bitches, then,” snapped a working mother friend. We were speed-walking together in Lodi Gardens, and suddenly she was striding faster, taking great angry lopes away from me, and I trotted to catch up, spilling conciliatory words.

  “No,” I panted.

  “That’s not what this is about,” I choked.

  “I don’t have an answer.”

  I kept saying that. I didn’t have an answer, but I was interested in finding one.

  “I assume you’ve considered this from a Marxist standpoint,” crackled a beautiful young woman in a luxurious yellow sari. “Well, you must have, of course.”

  It was late on a thick monsoon night, at the kind of party I almost never attended anymore. Full of smart young things—journalists, publishers, intellectuals. All read up on absolutely everything and hunting for conversational game. Out for argument, to skin the weak, to make a name for themselves. An ugly room, really, but there I was. And everybody I talked to kept asking whether I knew somebody else, and I never did. And then they would act very surprised and say, “You would love her!” After the tenth time or so I began to smirk, although I knew it added to the ambient ugliness, because, of course, I would not love all these people and it was a silly thing to keep telling strangers—that they would love somebody they have never met.

  “Well,” I stammered, caught off guard by the lady in yellow and her undergraduate question. I knew I had approximately three seconds to avoid becoming an anecdote in her arsenal—the American writer with the rubbish education.

  But all I could see were the faces of Xiao Li, Pooja, and Mary. Village faces, hard-work faces, mother faces. Kitchens, cold mornings, aching backs. Then I remembered Marxist writings on women and work that I had indeed read, earnestly, when I was preparing to cover Moscow. Among other things, they advocated for socialized day care. Well, of course I had considered that—but I didn’t need dead German men to come up with that idea.

  “Yes, of course,” I said quickly. “But my book is not a polemic.”

  * * *

  ————

  One day, around the time when I was reporting on war and political Islam and Middle Eastern politics, I met a prominent editor who said: “I just really love your coverage, the way you write about women and children.”

  I responded politely, but privately I was baffled. I knew that my stories had been no more concerned with women and children than the articles of my male colleagues. On the one hand, yes, I had documented the effects of war on civilians—but, realistically, all the journalists in the field had done that. To be congratulated for writing about women and children, to be singled out for that, suggested that I had not covered the strategic and geopolitical and tactical aspects of war. I’d covered those angles extensively, but I was remembered for softer pieces. As if I had lingered, all that time, in households. Except I hadn’t.

  That disorientation came back to me as I sat down to write about domestic workers and the realms of women and children. I couldn’t help feeling that I was capitulating. But wasn’t this attitude part of the problem? If serious people never wrote deeply about the household, about work and gender and money and race, we couldn’t expect things to improve. If the centrality of these domestic chores was consistently denied, then women would just keep on doing all the work. Seeing these women come and go from my house, I’d become curious, then nosy, and finally invasive. I’d stalked Pooja on Facebook, only to realize I couldn’t know her by spying.

  I didn’t want my family to leave behind a trail of forgotten women who once upon a time took care of our children. I didn’t want my boys to grow up and say, I had nannies once. They were like part of the family, as if the women existed only as a function of ourselves. I wanted to commit a fuller truth to print. Our boys should know there were children we never saw; sacrifices we couldn’t make right.

  But to do that, I’d have to track down the women I’d lost. I’d have to interview them and ask their permission to write about them. I couldn’t predict what I’d find, or how it would change my perception of my own household and my own responsibility. Finding the women, I realized, could be dangerous.

  PART THREE

  THE WOMEN

  Chapter 26

  I kept tracking the c
hurn of Pooja’s life on Facebook. I followed her moods, watched her face, tried to read between the lines. She’d crow with glee, fall silent for a few days, and then resurface in sorrow.

  “Does anyone sell happiness on fb gotta buy some,” she wrote one day.

  A few days later: “ALONE…ALONE…ALONE…”

  One day she wrote to her son: “I m so sorry my baby dat at certain times i m not dere wen U need me d most. MAMMA LOVES U A LOT.”

  She posted melodramatic cartoons of pretty girls crying and, one day, an anti-abortion meme depicting the hand of a tiny fetus.

  I was worried. The pattern of lavish spending, comments from men, and sexy outfits made me wonder whether Pooja had turned to sex work because she couldn’t find another job. Considering this possibility, I began to question our reaction to her abuse. For the first time I considered whether, if we’d understood the paucity of Pooja’s options, we’d have overlooked the domestic violence. Perhaps I had judged Pooja’s plight through eyes that were excessively American—simplistic and idealistic and sheltered from the hard truth of her circumstances.

  The same skinny man with aviator sunglasses still covered her every post with obsequious comments. I assumed he was her boyfriend, so naturally I started tracking him, too.

  His name was Rupesh. Imagine a Nepali version of Pony Boy who’s reached middle age without updating his style. If you can summon this picture, then you are looking at Rupesh. He greased his hair into a pompadour, pegged his jeans, and hacked the sleeves off his sweatshirts. Tight muscles popped from his bones like tennis balls encased in socks. He had a bedraggled moustache and glassy eyes with a high-octane, angry light. He was prone to rambling posts and maudlin poetry.

  He didn’t come across very well, and neither did Pooja. On the walls of Facebook they proclaimed their love, vented their rage, and humiliated each other with hinted accusations of infidelity. There were sticky love poems, pop song dedications, and fiery breakups.