Women's Work
Page 8
“Come on,” he said. “Look how much money we’re burning through. We never spent so much before.”
“We didn’t have a baby.”
“He barely eats any food!”
“He changed the whole economy of our house.”
“Changed the whole economy—?”
“Look,” I said. “I keep telling you, you don’t understand this house anymore. So you should just—shut up! Because I am not a moron, and I am here all day.”
I paused. Tom said nothing.
“We buy diapers. They are imported, and they cost a fortune.”
“This is not diapers—” Tom interrupted.
“And wipes,” I interrupted back. “And diaper creams. And fancy moisturizers and organic shampoos and stuff like that. And on top of that, we used to skip meals and eat out a lot. Which was somehow cheaper than buying groceries.”
“The places we ate were not cheap!”
“Sometimes they were. And besides, now I buy organic milk and organic vegetables and fancy farm meats and all of this, because Max is here and I’m breast-feeding him and now he’s starting to eat food too—”
“Fine. I can accept everything you’re saying,” Tom said. “But I still don’t think that adds up to what we’re spending. You should look at the bank statements.”
“I’d be happy to.” We both knew I was lying. I didn’t want to look at bank statements.
“Anyway—” he began, and I braced myself.
Now it would be time to discuss my irresponsible financial behavior. I ran the household in cash. I didn’t track expenditures or save receipts. I emptied cash from my pockets onto tables and counters.
“You’ve got to stop leaving cash around the house,” he said now.
“I know.” I sighed in defeat. “But it’s never a lot of money. And I trust Xiao Li. Trusted her. Trust.”
“But it’s not fair to her,” he argued, and now his voice was kinder. “That money means more to her than it does to you. You shouldn’t test her in that way.”
I understood that he was right. Not about everything, but about this one point. Yes, fine, he was right.
We never found the missing money or discussed it again. But the memory of its disappearance stuck.
* * *
————
Every morning Xiao Li opened the door with her copy of the key, slid off her clicking flats, and set down her faux leather purse. Then she picked up the jeans and T-shirt and flip-flops from her cubby by the laundry room, and headed to the bathroom to change herself into a domestic worker.
She dressed for the bus in slacks, blouses, neat turtlenecks, and dress shoes. She could be mistaken for somebody’s secretary or an entry-level bureaucrat. I assumed that was the point: to camouflage herself in the crowd, drop her identity, answer to nobody.
Anyway, that’s what I imagined. I never embarrassed her by asking about her clothes. Besides, I was in no position to talk about fashion.
Pregnancy fat still clung to my frame, but I refused to buy bigger clothes. I wore stained maternity dresses, baggy tops, and frayed pants that had once required a belt. My shoes were scuffed and split. The busted seam of my favorite leather shoulder bag hung agape.
“Geez, if only we lived in a city full of skilled craftsmen who work supercheap, maybe you could get that bag fixed,” Tom said bitingly.
“Meg, seriously,” he said another day, touching my bare elbow through a hole in my sleeve. “Will you please—please—buy some clothes?”
No, no, no. I would not.
I was desperate to lose weight, and buying a larger wardrobe would be a capitulation. I was also paralyzed over money. I physically cringed whenever I recalled my status as a nonearning member of the family. From Tom’s salary we lived and saved with disposable income left over, but I hated depending upon my husband’s job. No matter how many silent pep talks I gave myself about the importance of being with Max and the long-term investment in my writing career, I couldn’t convince myself that I had a right to spend money when I wasn’t actively earning.
Meanwhile, I looked terrible. I knew it, Tom knew it, and, perhaps most of all, Xiao Li knew it. The baby was the only member of the family who didn’t consider me an embarrassment.
One afternoon I made for the grocery store wearing a Blues Brothers T-shirt I’d owned since college, now featuring a torn neck and indistinct mustard-colored stains. Before I reached the door, Xiao Li stepped firmly into my path.
“You will wear that?” She pointed at the shirt.
“Why?”
“It’s very bad,” she erupted.
“It’s not that bad.” I was surprised, and a bit wounded.
“Yes,” she insisted. “It looks very bad.”
I understood that, in her eyes, I wasn’t doing my job. We had a nice respectable baby and a nice respectable flat; my husband put on his nice respectable clothes and went off to his nice respectable office. I was the note of discord. I should be shopping in boutiques and visiting the hair salon. That was the kind of woman Xiao Li would like to serve.
Xiao Li no longer reminded me of a kitten. Her shyness had fallen away, and I’d seen the dignity she could summon in moments of reflection or duress. She was short, but she stood straight and slim as a ballerina, head erect and eyes appraising.
I imagined that, if she were in my position, she would run the house with glamour and aplomb. Already she carried a nicer phone than I did—hers a counterfeit iPhone; mine an old black Nokia. She was more stylishly—if cheaply—dressed.
I was pretty sure she thought that, given my considerable privilege, I should be doing more.
* * *
————
Winter darkness came down early. I was alone in the apartment.
Xiao Li had taken Max walking in the stroller, but a bitter cold had hardened over the streets and I wanted them to come home. I called her over and over again; no answer.
Anxiety clawed up the back of my throat. Something had happened. Somebody got hurt. A car in the darkness, a motorbike, a kidnapping. Headlights scrambling the twilight, rushing crowds blinded by hoods and hats. Gone, my baby was gone. I paced the floors and made myself swallow some water.
Finally I heard the elevator ding on the landing and the scrape of a key in the lock. They were home.
Xiao Li was flustered. She flitted up and down the length of the kitchen counter, twitching her hands among the utensils, eyes averted. Max fussed, cheeks blown bright pink by the cold.
“Where were you?”
“I went to the bank.”
“What? Where?”
“Just here,” she said. “It’s close.”
“Please don’t take Max for your personal errands.” I rubbed his frigid cheeks with my own face.
“Sorry,” she said.
“And you have to answer your phone. You have to!”
“It was very loud in the street—”
“I don’t want this to happen again.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
“This cannot happen again,” I said coldly. “Do you understand?”
It was as close to threatening her job as I could bear to come.
“I understand.”
I felt that something had happened, some information had been lost. This incident was such an obvious aberration of our normal household routine that I hardly knew what to make of it.
But there was nobody to explain. Xiao Li and I had reached the outer limits of our communication. As for Max, only the cold in his cheeks told a story. I held him tight and whispered nonsense bits of love and told myself, because I thought it was true, that nothing bad had taken place.
I knew I would fire Xiao Li if she scared me again.
* * *
————
We were waiting for Xiao Li. Once she finished cooking dinner, she’d come and hang out with Max in the fresh air while I worked upstairs in the quiet apartment. In the meantime I’d climbed the hill because I didn’t know where else to go.
Mothers, nannies, and toddlers milled in the open air. A group of mothers of school-aged children drank wine and roared with laughter at a sidewalk café. Their hair was blown smooth; they were slim; they talked too loud. “This is like a scene from Sex and the City,” I heard one of them bellow. Back among the children, a fight had erupted over a plastic shovel. A nanny scolded her sobbing charge.
I felt a wave of fatigue and confusion: Now that I had a baby, did I have to take part in this? It looked awful.
I remembered my own childhood, inching onto the playground, unsure how to make friends. The other children were daunting and exotic and sure of themselves. I wanted desperately to join them, but I didn’t know how.
I’d been good at talking, in the end. I’d grown up and moved to new cities and made a lot of friends. Half of my job had consisted of chatting with strangers. But I didn’t think I had anything to discuss with these women. And I was discovering, painfully, that people are considerably less interested in conversing with a pudgy new mother who claims to be writing a novel than they had been in chatting up the bureau chief for a well-known newspaper.
At a recent dim sum brunch attended by writers and journalists and intellectuals, I had sunk down on the ground of the courtyard to breast-feed the baby, for there was nowhere else to go except the bathroom. There I crouched, cross-legged and disheveled, bound like a peasant woman to breast and baby and earth as the adrenalized banter of my past life sailed off into bare branches overhead.
I didn’t fit into this group anymore. I no longer traveled to the cities they mentioned; I didn’t interview the people they discussed. I told myself I didn’t mind, but it was a lie. I minded terribly.
Now, lingering awkwardly outside the crowd of babies and caretakers, I felt that the destruction of my social ego was complete. I’d gone around the globe only to end up where I’d started—awkward at the edge of a playground. Worst of all, I had my baby in tow. He would have to learn from me, and that was a dead end. I propped him up against my side and braced him with one knee, feeling sorry for both of us.
Then I caught sight of Xiao Li. She scrabbled up the hill, an arm flung to the sky, grinning at the rush of spring air.
“Why here?” she demanded in Chinese. “Here there are no little friends!”
“The sun is good here,” I offered weakly, but Xiao Li hadn’t waited for an answer.
She scooped Max up, toted him back down the hill, and plunked him down among the children, calling out greetings to other ayis. She cooed hello to another baby, reached for a toy, and introduced Max. She wove a web of chatter and giggles and light. She knew how to socialize him, she knew how to surround him with friends.
I wandered off dazedly into my sudden freedom, grateful that Max was in the thick of things, where I had always longed to be.
And not because of me, but because of Xiao Li.
Thank God for Xiao Li.
Chapter 5
Night had never been good, but now the nights were getting worse. The baby and I drifted through a landscape of dark stumbly halls and gloomy rooms and ashen sky in the windows. Day was a bright quick flash between the long drag of sleepless hours.
Instead of sleeping longer stretches, the way other babies seemed to do as they matured, Max began to wake up more often. I couldn’t find any method to get him back to sleep except to feed him milk, and since the milk came exclusively from my body, I was stuck in a crazy and lonesome loop.
We told ourselves he must be teething. We cursed our luck. Tom was struggling to function at work, so I decamped to the guest room, next door to the nursery.
“This is insane,” one of my closest friends, an American doctor, erupted over email when I described my schedule. I felt like she was reaching through the computer to shake me by the shoulders.
“You’re going to have a nervous breakdown,” she scolded. “You need to sleep train. Now. Tonight.”
My mother agreed. So did some corners of the Internet—although others suggested we were dabbling in child abuse.
At last we tried the solution that everybody kept suggesting: We left Max alone to cry himself to sleep. To do this, I had to override every flashing emergency instinct in my mind and body. Neglecting to answer my baby’s cries unleashed a hormonal and emotional hurricane in my depleted self. I must have wept three tears for every one of his.
And then something truly dreadful happened: Max’s sleep patterns deteriorated even more. He began to wake up with frantic regularity, and became so nervous in the vicinity of his crib that he refused daytime naps altogether.
Horrified, hating myself and everybody who had encouraged us to sleep train, I abandoned the effort.
“My nerves are shot and my heart is broken,” I emailed my doctor friend reproachfully.
I hadn’t slept more than four hours in a row in the nine months since Max was born, and now I hardly slept at all. We were up six or seven times a night. Before sunrise I gulped down pots of coffee to stay sentient. Caffeine slamming through my veins and hammering in my heart, I could never manage a nap. Sun up, sun down; lather, rinse, repeat.
There was a madness to this lifestyle, and a madness in me. Whenever Max slept, day or night, I hissed and glowered, trying to impose silence on the apartment—on Xiao Li and Tom and, of course, on myself. I disciplined myself with a thousand neurotic tricks:
I could recognize every creaking spot in the floorboards by the graining on the wood, and sidestep them in the dark from memory.
I knew precisely the degree of pressure required to release every doorknob without clicking the latch.
I stifled coughs and pushed my finger into my upper lip to stop sneezes.
I learned to cushion my steps lest my knee and ankle joints crack.
I observed, through careful study, that clattering dishes and clanking cutlery were the loudest sounds in the house, audible through the thickest walls, but that televisions and ringing phones didn’t carry.
I lived in terror of waking the baby, and I shared this terror with deliverymen, houseguests, and anybody else who made the strategic error of existing in the vicinity of my sleeping child.
Tom, naturally, was the most egregious offender. I harangued him at barely audible decibels when he dropped a bowl too loudly into the kitchen sink or turned on the television or opened the bathroom door before the toilet flush stopped running. When his rubber flip-flops pocked and squelched across the floor, I ground my teeth and pledged to divorce his unruly ass as soon as I regained my faculties.
“You have made the atmosphere in this house crazy,” he protested.
“You are making it crazy.” The best defense is a good offense.
“How am I supposed to live,” he shrieked in the whispery way we’d adopted, “without making—any—noise?”
I admit: I stalked the darkened rooms like some weird and wild-eyed Lady Macbeth. I can see, now, that my paroxysms of muted rage when my cousin blew his nose in a closed bathroom were, okay, yes fine, disproportionate. And that it wasn’t very hospitable to kick a pack of girlfriends out into a chilly January night for the crime of laughing too loudly. And that, most likely, my mother-in-law was trying to be silly, and not maliciously mocking me, when she crept on exaggerated, mincing tiptoes while somehow, still, crashing her feet loudly to the floor.
Guilty. I plead guilty.
It did not occur to me that I was, myself, turning into a consequence.
* * *
————
Nighttime socializing was the agreed-upon prescription for all that ailed me. My friends, Tom, Xiao Li, my mother—everybody pestered me to “get out.”
Whenever I was accosted with some evening plan, I smiled a forced smile and pretended to agree that it sounded like fun. Which is to say, I pretended that I still subscribed to a concept called “fun.” Privately, I thought it sounded terrible: an ordeal of strangers I didn’t want to meet and conversations I’d rather not have and friends who would pity my unkempt psychological state and still-fat-after-all-these-months figure.
Most of all, it sounded like hours of lost sleep. Just thinking about getting any more tired was like sliding slowly and nauseously down the walls of a carnival Gravitron that has just stopped spinning.
But, like most people on the outer edge of sanity, I wanted desperately to pass as normal. So I played along. I made plans with my mouth while, in my secret thoughts, I crafted the excuse I would deploy by text message at the final hour.
When I did go out, I’d spend the night obsessing miserably over how late I’d reach home and how achy and ancient I’d feel in the morning. Max would be awake in two more hours, then again two hours after that, then up for the day three hours after that. I’m fucked, I’m so tired, I want to die. Why can’t people just leave me alone?
Meanwhile, all the mental machinery that had once sorted out “interesting anecdotes to share” from “information to repress because it is too personal, too unflattering, or too biologically specific” had stopped working. Talking with anybody but a trusted confidante became the social equivalent of leaning against an expected railing only to pitch into bottomless air. I’d overhear myself answering with full and unadulterated honesty any question posed by any acquaintance of any gender. Dim awareness that I was saying too much, coming across as strange, making people uncomfortable, or, worse, feeding their raptorial hunger for tawdry details—nothing shut me up. I was so sleep deprived I might as well have swallowed a truth serum.