Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “D word happiness is deleted from my dictionary,” Pooja wrote one day. “It’s really not meant for me. To all concerned ppl I hv set ur loved one free.”

  “I’m sick n tired…just waiting for d day wen I close my eyes for eternal sleep,” she wrote around the same time. “Waiting for dat day to come.”

  A few days later Pooja was in a bar with her sister and a near-empty bottle of whiskey. She grinned blurrily. “Birthday bash @ MANHATTAN,” she wrote. “hv learnt to stay happy.”

  I sent her a text message. She ignored me. I waited a few weeks and then sent another message. This time she agreed to meet.

  * * *

  ————

  I wanted to meet Pooja in one of the mall restaurants from her Facebook pictures. I pictured us sipping cocktails in a bright and airless room with perky pop music playing. Drawn close by the alcohol, jarred into frankness by the novelty of sitting together in such a place, we’d talk. I wanted that more than anything: just to finally talk without rules and roles. It had been half a year since she left our house, and anything seemed possible.

  But Pooja didn’t let me off so easily. She asked to meet at Dilli Haat, a sprawling open-air handicrafts market perched on the edge of a screaming thoroughfare in South Delhi. I’d been there a few times, escorting houseguests who wanted to shop for bargain tablecloths or tapestries. I thought it was an odd place to meet Pooja, whose tastes ran to the brand new and machine manufactured. I wondered whether we’d shop for wind chimes and stoles, or hit the regional food stalls for dumplings and spiced tea. But I had no room to complain about the venue. I’d once held all the power, but now Pooja was in charge.

  We met on a Sunday afternoon between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The sky over the city was tinged yellow, and grains of dust stuck to my teeth. I climbed the chalky steps to the craft market entrance and there, right away, was Pooja, stepping forward in a twisted lurch—as if she were reaching for me and trying to escape at the same time.

  She looked more street hardened than I remembered, dressed in a camisole and black cardigan, hunched against the cold. Blue eye shadow smudged her lids, and her mouth was painted shocking pink. When I hugged her, I smelled cigarettes and musky perfume. Maybe an undercurrent of stale beer, but I wasn’t sure. Her sister loomed over her shoulder.

  “Hi, Ricky.” I tried to sound bright.

  “Hi, ma’am,” she replied curtly. “I want to go inside,” she told Pooja scornfully. “You two can talk.” She vanished into the crowds.

  I turned to Pooja. “Should we go? We can get tickets.”

  To pass the gate you had to buy a ticket. The tickets cost about twenty-five cents.

  “No, ma’am,” said Pooja. “No reason to go inside.”

  She wasn’t going to spend any money on this meeting, I realized, nor would she allow me to spend any money on her. Not even a quarter. We’d have to hang around in a free public place until Pooja’s pride was satisfied.

  “I’m really happy to see you.” I shifted my weight from foot to foot. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said. “Even me.”

  “Please don’t call me ma’am. You don’t work for me anymore.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She caught herself, laughed, shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  “So—” I glanced around, wondering why she’d picked such an unmanageable meeting spot. “Where can we talk?”

  All this time I was evaluating her clothes and posture, desperate to discern what her life had become. Expecting, every moment, that she’d tell me to go to hell. There was something exquisitely delicate between us, and I worried that, if I pushed too hard, it might break. But questions rattled urgently in my skull, and I wanted to spit them out before I lost her again.

  “Just here.” She nodded toward a low ledge that edged the courtyard. Women perched along its length, wrapping the hair and painting the hands of tourists. We found an empty stretch of red rock and sat there, side by side, staring at the gates of Dilli Haat. Beggar children approached and tapped on our knees, muttering and mewling. Pooja shooed them away, but not unkindly. She talked to them in a soft voice, and called them baba—baby.

  “Why did you want to meet here?” I asked her.

  She pointed a thumb to the food market across the highway.

  “We go there every Sunday, me and Ricky,” she said. “We buy pork. Just to have some meat.”

  “Oh, I see.” She hadn’t gone out of her way.

  “How are Max and Patrick?” For the first time, she smiled.

  “They’re fine. They still miss you. Max is at the same school. Patrick goes to playgroups now.”

  “I miss them, too,” she said.

  “You and Patrick always had such a strong bond.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Pooja, really. You don’t have to—”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I’m sorry about the way things ended.” This was graceless, a blunt blurt, but once I’d started I had to keep going. “I never wanted you to leave, but.” There was no way to end that sentence without making things worse.

  “I’m also sorry.”

  “I care about you. As a person. You weren’t just a housekeeper who worked for us. I still would like to be in touch with you.”

  “Me, too.”

  “So what’s going on with you?” I fled the topic of her firing as quickly as I’d pounced on it. “You’re working?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  It started like that, tentative and strained. She told me about her new job: she was a nanny to infant twins in Gurgaon, just on the outskirts of New Delhi. I was relieved. Her life hadn’t changed so much, after all.

  “I give them all the love and all the care, but there is something I hold back,” Pooja said. “After I left your house, speaking frankly, I was crying for many days. Now I won’t bond with them in that way. I am protecting myself from this hurt.”

  I thought of Pooja’s gleeful posts after her firing. There was no time to dwell on this disconnect, though, because now Pooja was telling me that her employers would leave India that spring. She asked me to help her find a new job. I agreed, thinking this was the reason she’d come to meet me.

  Then she told me she’d stopped drinking.

  “Really?” I studied her shoes. Shiny black flats that came to a sharp point, dulled with streaks of winter dust. Shoes my grandmother would have worn, something you’d find in a church thrift shop. Looking at them made me sad.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m not drinking so much anymore.” I noted the equivocation. “I’m not drinking anymore to go to sleep.”

  “You were drinking to go to sleep?”

  “When I was at your house.”

  “What was going on with you? After Varun left, I mean, I knew you were in bad shape. I could see it—”

  “It was bad.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I couldn’t sleep at all back then. If I slept for half an hour I’d have the feeling that I’d slept for hours and hours. It was strange. I went through a very bad time. I never told you everything that was happening.”

  Sunday traffic stuttered over a bedraggled overpass. Foreign tourists in their flowing and jangling and khaki India costumes straggled through the gate. I looked at her shoes, my scuffed leather boots, her shoes again.

  “When that happened with Varun, I was three months pregnant,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You mean that night he beat you up?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You were pregnant?” I couldn’t assimilate this piece of information into the story I’d already built in my mind.

  “Yes, ma’am.” She laughed, and somehow that laugh—a self-conscious, mirthless, self-deprecating laugh in the mid
dle of a dusty winter afternoon—was easier to understand than any of the words.

  “Oh God. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s all right, ma’am. I know.”

  “So. What happened?”

  “I aborted that baby,” she said. I suddenly remembered crossing her path when she came out of the bathroom. The sorrowful self-loathing on her face. Disgusting, she’d muttered. It was around that time, I realized now.

  “You never missed any work. Pooja. You should have told me.”

  “I didn’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I just thought, ‘Those things are not for me. I shouldn’t think about them.’ ”

  Those things. The baby and the man. Those things are not for me.

  The truth had come now, but it was still too small. It was an empty frame; I didn’t understand it yet. I could have ended the meeting immediately and gone home to mull the fact of Pooja’s abortion. But she was still talking. We’d have to flounder forward.

  She told me about drinking every night with a friend who also worked in our neighborhood. Both women lived alone in staff quarters. They bought bottles from a maid’s husband who peddled black-market liquor.

  “Is she still there, your friend?” I asked.

  “She left and I left,” Pooja said flatly. “Life moved on.”

  The conversation felt strange the way so many things about our existence in India felt strange—balanced on the edge of a tourist site, in between home and away. We sat quietly for a while. Everything I started to say was wrong, but I didn’t want her to go yet. I’d missed her terribly; now I just wanted to sit beside her as long as she’d let me.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I finally said.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “My life is always like this. Now I’m happy.”

  “I’m glad.” I didn’t believe her. “You have a boyfriend?”

  I had the familiar feeling of pretending I didn’t know something I’d learned on social media. Now she laughed hard, curling herself bashfully inward. The man came from a good family, she said. He wanted to give Pooja a business to run—a rooming house for students back in Darjeeling. But they’d met only once in person.

  “How did you meet him?”

  “He’s from my same place,” she said, which didn’t strike me as a real answer.

  “So…”

  “So, you know, we know each other.”

  “Mutual friends?”

  “Like that.”

  He still lived in Darjeeling. He wanted her to move back, and she was tempted to go. She wanted to leave Delhi and live closer to her son. But on the other hand, she had only recently escaped one man. And in Delhi she could earn what she called “a handsome salary.”

  By now the air between us had softened. Gradually we’d turned to face each other. Pale winter hands, fingers twitching in our separate palms as we talked. Pooja asked after friends she remembered from parties and playdates. She asked about my mother and Tom’s mother. I asked after her son and father. We both announced that everybody was fine. Then she asked about my book.

  “I finished it.” This wasn’t true but still felt accurate. “Now I’m thinking about something new.”

  I didn’t tell her that she was the new project’s muse and main subject. I simply said that I was interested in writing about the lives of domestic workers in Delhi. I had the impression there were many experiences and troubles that employers never intuited, I said, and I wondered about the real lives and stories of these women.

  Pooja’s face brightened.

  “It’s true,” she said. “We’re all just playing parts. There is so much—”

  “But how do I get to it? How do I get people to talk to me honestly?”

  “I can help,” she said. “I have some days off. I know people who will talk to you.”

  I could imagine it, too. She’d be good at that work. She was skeptical and smart, and she could bring down people’s guards. I told her I was still gathering my thoughts. She listed her precise working hours so I’d understand when she’d be available to help.

  “Can we meet again?” I asked.

  “I’d like to see Max and Patrick,” she said.

  “They’d like that, too.”

  “Maybe if you go somewhere, like to the mall or a play center on the weekend, you could call me. Even if I could just see them…”

  A stab of guilt.

  “Of course you can see them. They would like to spend time with you. Let’s find a way.”

  We hugged good-bye. Her sister sauntered over, avoiding my eyes and glaring at Pooja through yellow sunglasses.

  “Bye, Ricky,” I said.

  “Bye,” she grumped.

  They headed for the pedestrian underpass; they would cross the highway and buy their pork and continue along their way. Lightened by happiness, I drifted back to my car. Pooja was back. Pooja didn’t hate me. I’d told Pooja that I cared about her. The burden of guilt I’d been carrying since the previous spring broke into atoms and drifted into the smog of the city. I was forgiven for the firing. That was the first thing: forgiveness.

  I squinted into the storefronts and lanes of the food market as I passed, looking for a woman in black, trying to catch one more glimpse of Pooja. But I couldn’t see her. She was lost in the crowd.

  Chapter 27

  I bought a ticket to Beijing and made my plans to see Xiao Li with an absolute lack of excitement. I dragged myself through the packing and logistics. Whenever I pictured the trip, my stomach twisted with anxiety.

  It had been four years since, pregnant and professionally adrift, I’d left Beijing. Going back now should have been easy. I was returning, unencumbered by children, to a city I loved. I’d stay with friends and carry out a few simple interviews. I’d already contacted Xiao Li, and she was eager to meet. This was practically a vacation.

  And yet I couldn’t shake the formless worry. I began to wonder, superstitiously, if I was having a premonition of coming disaster. Maybe I shouldn’t go.

  No—that was stupid. I had to go. Xiao Li was the beginning of the story, and the story must be gotten.

  But disentangling myself from home wasn’t easy. It was now obvious that, gradually, I’d become the brain stem of our domestic corpus. Mary knew the kids’ routines. Tom was a doting father. But a thousand details and nuances were cataloged solely within my skull. Tom couldn’t find the thermometer, and Mary didn’t know how to operate it. Nobody had a clue about my elaborate forages through Delhi’s markets to keep the household supplied. They didn’t know how to get in touch with the pediatrician or classmates’ parents. They didn’t know how much cash was needed for tae kwon do class or which school uniform to wear on which day. I was the only one who’d ever trimmed the kids’ fingernails.

  I wrote lists of minutiae, forgetting practically everything and berating myself for allowing this to happen. Resentfully I thought of Tom’s reporting trips. He didn’t write checklists or brief the nanny or schedule an extra-tantalizing slate of playdates and outings to keep the mournful children distracted. He simply packed a bag and left. When it came to the hourly scramble of school and friends and vitamins and pajamas and meals, Tom was superfluous. A sad position, in a way, but what freedom!

  I knew this status quo was my own doing. It began with biology—I’d been pregnant, then breast-feeding. I’d been a physical necessity, which had been a role of exquisite privilege and total destruction. And somehow my rarefied status stayed unchanged even as the babies grew. The habits we’d all adopted—my centrality, the children’s dependence, Tom’s slight remove—had stuck.

  Now I thought: I should have traveled, even unnecessarily, so the boys would understand that women, too, were beings who went. I should have forced Tom’s attention onto picayune details. I should have trained Mary more assiduously. I should have trad
ed some measure of control, faced a few more arguments, for a bit of liberation. Instead, what had I done? Maybe I had taught my sons that women stayed back in households while men charged off into the world. Maybe they would grow to disdain women as the dullard companions of a discarded childhood. All of that, all my fault. Enough! It wasn’t too late. I was going now. They would stay with Tom, and they would see it could be that way, too.

  But if leaving was bad, arriving was worse: when I tried to envision the meeting with Xiao Li, my imagination choked.

  Here’s the thing, I’d say. I’ve been writing about you.

  I pictured myself looking into her face and saying those words, and my stomach flopped.

  I need to know more. I have questions.

  I’d watched, recorded, and judged. I’d turned Xiao Li from an employee into a character. This meeting didn’t feel like journalism; it felt like a confession.

  I wrote my children a love letter in oil pastels and left in the middle of the night. I flew east through the darkness and onward to China, where it was already another day.

  * * *

  ————

  I stayed with friends in our old apartment complex. Same lobby with the uniformed doormen, silk flowers, and imposing faux marble desk. Same elevator with the mirrored doors.

  I asked a Chinese friend, a mother from our former baby group, to translate my first call to Xiao Li. I knew there would be an immediate conflict: I wanted to go to Xiao Li’s place, and she’d expect to come to me.

  I heard her voice: “Wei?”

  “Xiao Li,” I said.

  She paused, then exclaimed, “Ni hao! Hello!”

  “I’m here.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to see you!”

  “Max is with you?”

  “No,” I admitted guiltily.

  Another pause.

  “When can you meet?” she finally asked.

  “Anytime. Today?”

  “I will come there.”