Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “But then you had Gladys…” I prompted her.

  “Yes. There was this Canadian priest, he was in charge of us.” I let this strange description pass. “He said, ‘Name her Gladys.’ So we did.”

  “What was it like for you to become a mother?”

  “It was strange.”

  “Strange?”

  “I don’t know. It’s easy to take care of other children, but when it’s your own, it’s hard.”

  “Really?” I studied her face. Mary rarely admitted to failing or floundering. Now she looked abstracted, as if she were still trying to work out the meaning of those years that had been so unlike the rest of her life.

  “So what did you do?”

  “You know, I just decided, I’ll do what those missionaries taught us. When my husband came home from work, I’d give him the baby and just go out to the streets.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to help people.” She shrugged. “There are always so many people who are in trouble.”

  She brought lost souls home to drink tea, she said, and dedicated a room in her house to hard-luck cases so they could have a place to sleep. She’d take girls out of prostitution and deliver them to hostels run by nuns.

  “On Sundays they’d come to visit me as if I’m their mother,” she said. “The sisters always said, ‘If you see someone is in trouble, even if you don’t like the person, just sit and listen to their problem. Your kind words may help them. Even if your enemy comes to your door, invite him in to drink water.’ They trained us well.”

  Listening to her, I remembered a conversation from years earlier. Mary had mentioned some drifter from church who was crashing on her floor between jobs.

  “I always let people sleep in my place,” she’d said.

  This had struck me as a terrible idea. “But aren’t you afraid you’ll get robbed, or worse?”

  She’d looked at me blankly for a few beats.

  “I don’t have anything,” she’d finally said.

  Soon after her first baby was born, Mary was pregnant again. She was still in the hospital recovering from the birth of her son when her husband died in a motorbike crash.

  Once again, Mary was an orphan adrift, but this time she was a mother, too.

  * * *

  ————

  One day Mary brought pictures. They were glossy snapshots of family members posing somewhere public and ornamental—an airport or a courthouse, something like that. I took them in my hands, but I didn’t know what I was seeing.

  “When were these taken?” I asked.

  “A long time ago. Before I was born.”

  “Really?”

  My subconscious detected something discordant, but I couldn’t identify the source of my doubt. Why did I have the feeling the pictures were taken around the 1990s? Was I picking up on some vehicle in the background, something about the clothes or hair? Maybe it was the quality of the photographs, which were glossy and relatively high resolution. I couldn’t figure it out.

  “Who is that?” I pointed to a jowly man whose olive-drab military uniform was studded with medals and insignia.

  “My father,” Mary answered.

  “Oh!” I exclaimed. “He looks like you.”

  He did indeed, but this enthusiasm was rote. I was silently puzzling over the picture.

  “He was in the military?” I added.

  “Yes.”

  She’d never said that before. Or had she? I wished there was a tactful way to duck into the study and consult my notes. The uniform bore an embroidered name tag on the breast. I pulled the photo closer and squinted: TORRES.

  “Why does it say Torres?”

  “It’s my mother’s name.”

  “But why was he using your mother’s name?”

  “You know, people get false papers. I think they were trying to get false papers so they could go and live there.”

  “You mean go and live in Mexico?”

  “Yes, they were trying to do that. But they died in that plane crash.”

  “But where was the plane crash?” I’d been sitting up past midnight to comb through aviation records online, but still hadn’t found any crash that involved India and China during a three-year stretch around the time when Mary was eight. There were a few domestic crashes in both countries, and theoretically several of those flights could have been connections her parents had taken, although none of them seemed geographically probable. But I couldn’t be sure, since her details were so perpetually vague. I didn’t know the routing or the time of the year; where they’d started or where they were headed.

  “I think in China.”

  I held the snapshots and tried to understand the link between fake papers and a uniform; the purpose of taking a wife’s name; when Mary’s father could have been in the army; whether he’d fought for India or Bhutan; whether the uniform was fake and, if so, to what end? I stretched my imagination for a plausible story—just a hypothesis!—that could contain all the pieces of information.

  “My parents were in trade,” Mary said suddenly, interrupting this befuddled reverie.

  The day before she had told me she didn’t know what her parents did.

  “Trade of what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I have a close friend from Bhutan. I ran Mary’s story past her.

  “That doesn’t sound right at all.” My friend’s voice was full of marvel. “The country was so closed back then. We didn’t have backpackers and things like that. It wasn’t like Afghanistan.”

  “So you don’t think a woman could have come from Mexico and ended up staying?”

  “It’s such a small country,” she replied. “And it was so quiet and closed back then. I just feel like people would have known. Like it would have been in the news, you know? If a Mexican woman stayed and got married like that?”

  “So you think it’s impossible?”

  “Look, anything is possible,” she said. “But it’s so unlikely. I’d say it’s, like, ninety-nine percent that story can’t be right.”

  “Huh.”

  “Unless,” she said, “there are some details we’re missing.”

  “Right.” That was always the problem.

  I toyed with the pieces. Latin America. Himalayas. Trade. Were Mary’s parents drug traffickers? Human traffickers? Was her mother a Mexican gangster queen, an international fugitive who’d gone into hiding in this most unlikely of places, a refugee camp in Bhutan?

  I was starting to feel like I was going crazy.

  * * *

  ————

  I told my mother about my struggles to uncover Mary’s past. My mother didn’t say much, but I could tell she disapproved.

  “Do you really want to take her stories away from her?” she finally asked.

  “No,” I admitted. “I don’t.”

  * * *

  ————

  I asked Mary, again, how she wound up in domestic work.

  “Actually my brother is the one who brought me to Delhi,” she said.

  “What? Which brother?”

  “The priest.”

  “You told me before you came with an agent.”

  “Actually we all came together.”

  I’d lived for years with the story she first told me: Mary had been forced to hand her children over to her mother-in-law and trafficked off to Delhi. But now Mary was about to demolish that version of events.

  “When my husband died, I was the one who told my mother-in-law, ‘I’ll work, you take a rest, be with the children,’ ” she said. “People in the village were very scared. They hear about the city, what they do with girls. But my mother-in-law said, ‘You are very strong, more than my son.’ ”

  I didn’t remind Mary of everythi
ng she’d said before—her dutiful deference to a steely mother-in-law, and the wretched turns of fate that had forced her so low. Now Mary was the dashing hero who patted the old lady on the hand and charged fearlessly into the world. This, I had to agree, was a more bracing way to think of oneself.

  Mary explained that, by the time her husband died, her brother (the defrocked gay priest) had gone to work in Delhi for a fabulously wealthy businessman whose name, to her plain disappointment, I didn’t recognize. In this new story, when Mary boarded the train with the agent, her brother followed like a guardian angel.

  “He said, ‘I’ll sit near you in the train. Don’t tell her I’m your brother,’ ” Mary said. “Some of these women, you know, they sell the girls. He said, ‘I’ll just watch. Let me see if you are safe. Don’t say anything.’ ”

  But the broker was not a nefarious pimp. She herself worked as a maid. Mary described her as a decent lady who earned a little money on the side bringing young women to the city. They disembarked in Delhi, and she sneaked Mary and two other women into her own quarter to sleep off the trip. The next morning Mary was taken to work as a maid for a Punjabi-Canadian woman who was visiting relatives in Delhi.

  “The broker lady said, ‘You stay with her for four months and learn Hindi.’ ”

  “You didn’t speak Hindi before?”

  “No. In school it was English, Nepali—”

  “You learned in four months?”

  “Yes, it wasn’t hard. Hindi and Nepali are similar.”

  Mary mentioned that she still sees that broker sometimes.

  “She’s old now. I feel pity,” she said. “I give her some money. Life is not easy.”

  “How long did you have to pay her?” I asked. “Back then, I mean.”

  “One month only.”

  “Really? Before you said you paid her for two years.”

  “My mother-in-law paid her.”

  “Why?”

  “This same broker took all my relatives. My mother-in-law paid her once a month for six months.”

  “So, six months.”

  “Yes.”

  “But last time you told me longer.”

  “No, it was not like that.”

  Whenever I tried to confront Mary with a conflicting story, she adopted a calm, glazed smile and stared at me like there was something I wasn’t grasping. She never got ruffled and she never, not once, allowed herself to be dragged into a discussion of what I considered the fundamental question: why her versions of events changed so radically and whether she even believed in truth and untruth. She’d chuckle and repeat her current version of the facts. The older versions were dead. She wouldn’t be lured into confirming or denying that she’d changed her story.

  “Do you remember telling me two years?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “But you did.”

  “It was not two years.”

  “But why did you say that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We sat quietly. I stared at my notes. Words. Dates. Nonsense. I didn’t know what to say anymore. I’ve interviewed thousands of people: drug addicts, trauma victims, convicted killers, children, psychiatric patients. Sometimes they lied; sometimes they were confused or delusional. None of them had ever changed their stories like Mary.

  “Actually, my brother got me away from that broker,” she said suddenly.

  “What? Which brother?” I imagined all the notes of all our interviews hurled into air, gliding off on breezes.

  “The same one. The priest.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know. He talked to her. Then I didn’t have to pay her anymore.”

  “Okay.”

  Whenever I said “okay” to Mary, I had the feeling I’d stolen her line.

  * * *

  ————

  Maybe I should have dug down to the bottom of Mary’s identity. As a reporter, I saw obvious avenues for exploration. But I left them alone. If I find her story, if I put together the truth about her past, would that be a gift or an assault?

  Mary in my house, with my children, day after day. Mary puffed and blustered; sang and muttered. Mary was a kite vanishing into the sky, reeling out farther and then farther still. She invented a character, created a part, and then she couldn’t resist playing, improvising lines, adding gestures and embellishments. She was a work of her own imagination.

  This was Mary telling me about a little girl who called her “mother.” That girl is grown now, but she had once been a child who lived next door—next to what door?—never mind, just some door in Mary’s past. The girl was beaten and neglected by a heartless stepmother. She crouched outside waiting for Mary to come from work.

  “She slept with me at night. I took care of her,” Mary said. “She’s married now, but she still calls me mother. She was closer to me than my own children.”

  This was Mary complaining that she couldn’t get tickets for the WWE Supershow.

  “You like wrestling?” My imagination couldn’t find this image. Where did Mary watch wrestling, when, with whom?

  “I love that WWE,” she said serenely. “It’s my favorite.”

  This was Mary in the park, swaggering and swinging in wide trousers, men’s cap pulled down low over her forehead, tossing wisecracks back and forth with the gardeners and drivers, beads of candied tobacco in her cheek, the corner of her mouth tugged high in a lopsided smirk. Mary holding court over the men, Mary unafraid, spitting slang like a street-corner crime boss.

  This was Mary telling me stories about going out to poor neighborhoods by the airport, saving young women from forced prostitution. There is always this theme with her—prostitution, the saving of girls, the brutality of men. How far could one woman travel, how many characters could be contained in a single life?

  “I’m a social worker,” she said.

  “Hmm.” I considered this possibility: that Mary earned her salary in my house but, by vocation, in spirit, she still considered herself a missionary.

  “I know you think I’m an agent,” she said suddenly, and she was right. I’d often had the feeling that Mary ran a side business placing women into domestic jobs. It’s become a truism among my friends that Mary can always fill a household job vacancy. But every time I ask, she denies taking a profit.

  “It does seem that way,” I agreed.

  “But it’s not like that,” Mary said. “I’m a social worker.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I believe you.”

  It was true. In that moment, looking into her face by daylight, I believed her.

  I believe her still.

  Chapter 31

  I’m not sure whether Mary is aware of her tortured relationship to truth. When I’ve tried to discuss with her, broadly, her tendency to blur facts, she’s interrupted with testimonies to her Catholicism. “I don’t do like that,” she says. “I’m a Christian woman, I can’t do that.”

  I assume that, as a young orphan in bleak circumstance, she was frequently lied to by adults and older siblings and even herself. Fantasy and comforting obfuscations intermingled in a very young brain; maybe they changed, forever, the way she interacts with reality. Mary’s parents, siblings, and husband are dead or vanished. She was left to the missionaries; left to her own devices. She told herself this was the best thing that could possibly have happened. She has built, with a strength I find literally marvelous, an entire life and system of forbearance from the myth that she was lucky to have been an Indian orphan. Mary is geared for survival, not reckoning.

  That’s not the half of it. Mary brushes the kids’ teeth shoddily and heaps too much cake onto their plates and feuds with other nannies. She gossips and mangles stories. She has broadcast things I’ve said privately—sometimes accurately, and sometimes not, and don’t ask me whi
ch is worse.

  I guess some people would have fired her or at least chewed her out for these indiscretions, but those same people would, no doubt, employ some other nanny who I’d dismiss for another cause. These relationships are subjective and personal; there is no perfect formula. Mary has taken her place as a flawed character among all the other flawed characters in our household. She’s the devil I know, and that’s part of it, but it’s more: I trust her with my children. I trust that she is street-smart, and that she will protect them. Mary is the one who twists the truth. She’s the one who annoys me the most. She’s the one who stayed in our house the longest. She’s the one I trust.

  “These jobs aren’t easy,” she told me once. “You have to be very strong. To stay in a house like that, to work like that.”

  She was talking about somebody else—our driver’s wife—who’d gone to work in a big Indian household and was crying and clashing with the various personalities among the staff of servants. She was explaining to me why she, Mary, could survive the crucible of domestic work.

  “I left my family behind. I left my life,” she said. “That’s why I can stand it.”

  I agreed. I’d long since come to the paradoxical conclusion that Mary was an ideal household employee because she had no real regard for households and therefore no desire for one of her own. She came free and unattached—give her money, she’d stay and work.

  She’d convinced herself that parents were superfluous, and so she didn’t torture herself for leaving her children behind. Her children wouldn’t be too soft. They’d be strong. It was all for the best.

  One year Mary’s teenage daughter came to stay with her during an extended break from university. Mary enrolled the girl in an evening computer course on the other side of Delhi. Homework assignments requiring a computer drove her into cybercafes in dodgy neighborhoods. Tom was so appalled by the dangers of this arrangement that we bought the girl a laptop so she could work at home. Mary was grateful, but bemused.

  “Aren’t you worried about sending her across Delhi alone on the bus?” I asked Mary.