Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “Any one,” Pooja said impatiently. “Just so long as it’s holy.”

  “Where do I get it?”

  “Anywhere.”

  Mary was nodding along, as if to say, “Obviously.” I still didn’t understand, but I stopped talking.

  * * *

  ————

  “Madame.” Everything that Mary ever brought, every cataclysm or joyous eruption, began with these two syllables. “You have anything tonight?” She watched me, face pursed for discussion.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re going somewhere?”

  “No.”

  “I want to go little early.”

  “Okay.” That sounded too indifferent. “How come?”

  “I’ll go look for rooms,” she said. “Our landlord said we have to move out.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I was panicked, pulse picking up in my throat, imagining Mary spat forth into the city’s bellow and smog and crowds of cruel strangers.

  “It’s okay.”

  “But what will you do?”

  “It will be all right,” she said easily.

  Mary never got fazed. She had a level of equanimity so total it was like a superpower. It’s not easy to describe without sounding trivial: Mary had mastered an all-embracing calm that carried her—and sometimes carried me—through one predicament after the next.

  She canvassed friends for rumors of affordable places, and a few days later, she and her husband moved into a flat. Mary was pleased by the new digs: a proper apartment with a separate bedroom and roof terrace. I overheard her calling church friends to tip them off to the identical flat that stood vacant next door.

  There was one drawback: The apartment was out by the airport, clear on the other end of the vehicle-choked Indian capital. To reach our house, Mary would ride multiple buses and waste hours every day in standstill traffic.

  “Is she going to keep working for you?” friends asked incredulously.

  “I think so,” I said uneasily. “She hasn’t said anything.” These questions made me wonder whether I should have involved myself by helping her find a closer room or offering her a rent subsidy.

  “That’s a terrible commute,” everybody said.

  “You should be ready for her to quit,” they warned.

  “I don’t think she’ll quit,” I said tentatively.

  I was right. She didn’t quit. And then they said, “She must really love your family.”

  But I didn’t think that was true, either. With Mary, it never felt like love. We were her duty, nothing more but also nothing less.

  * * *

  ————

  “Madame.”

  Now what?

  “You will travel somewhere?” Mary had cornered me again.

  “Um.” My thoughts flopped helplessly. “Why?”

  “I want to fix my passport.”

  Then we loudly talked our way through a forest of interruption and confusion as I struggled to identify what she wanted. Gradually I understood that Mary urgently wanted a passport. Her husband’s visa couldn’t be renewed again, and therefore he’d have to leave India. Mary wanted a passport to go to Nigeria with her husband so that they could get married.

  “Wait.” I cut her off. “I thought you were already married. To your husband.”

  “I just say like that,” Mary explained. She used the same phrase when Max balked at going to a friend’s house. He’s just saying like that. Once he goes he will enjoy.

  “Say like what?”

  “I say he is my husband.”

  “But you’re not married.”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  Mary’s boyfriend wanted to get married in Nigeria, she explained, under the gaze of his family. He wanted everybody there—

  “The problem is,” I interrupted, “we usually travel over weekends or holidays, and then the government offices are closed.”

  I was still thinking of the problem as she’d presented it: a question of family vacation. I now realize—starkly, cringingly—that Mary suggested getting her passport while we traveled only because she was too shy to suggest inconveniencing our family by taking time away from her usual working hours.

  Recalling this incident now, I’m frankly ashamed that I didn’t immediately offer her a day off. I can’t understand why I didn’t. No, that’s not true. I remember why.

  By this time, I’d gotten used to treating my own time as the cheapest in the family. If a child tossed with fever, I was at the bedside. Tom had to show up at his office, but there was no reason I had to draft the next scene on Tuesday instead of Wednesday. In theory, I could even take a nap. In theory, I could even do nothing. In practice, between the children and my own ceaseless scramble to scrape another hour of writing from every single day, I never, ever took a nap. But this daily hustle did nothing to change the household calculus: My work could get shoved, and so it did—always, and for everything. Every outgrown pair of shoes, trip to the dentist, or preschool obligation—any crisis or errand affecting anybody in the family—inevitably devoured another chunk of writing time. I accepted my status as lowest household priority, below the helpless children and the rigors of Tom’s formal employment, but there were side effects: all this enforced selflessness made me much more selfish. If Mary had plainly asked for time off, I wouldn’t have said no. But because she’d shyly soft-pedaled—certainly nobody had ever taught Mary how to negotiate—I allowed myself to believe it wasn’t very important.

  “Is it urgent?” I asked.

  “No, Madame,” she said casually.

  “Anyway, yes, you should get your passport,” I said cheerfully, heading out of the room. “We’ll find a time. Don’t worry.”

  * * *

  ————

  Mary was full of stories that got into my imagination and stuck. They were tales of innocent girls from faraway lands and the ruthless men who stalked the deranged streets of a nocturnal city. Awful stories; senseless stories; stories that fell apart on examination. But if you allow that truth can exist even where fact is absent, then you could read from these fantastic tales some truths about the city—and some truths about Mary.

  She told me about a nanny who cried every day because her husband beat her mercilessly. Sold by her parents into bonded labor, she’d spent her childhood working for cruel bosses. “They used to beat hell out of her,” Mary would say. Now this unfortunate lady had failed to get pregnant, so her husband had the right, by communal custom, to demand one of her sisters for sex and progeny.

  More characters:

  The corrupt landlord who killed himself after demonetization because his ill-gotten cash had been rendered useless.

  The teenage maid from Assam who was beaten to death with a cricket bat because she didn’t speak Hindi and couldn’t understand what her boss wanted for dinner.

  The white backpacker junkies who lay like trash in the gutters where Mary lived, kicked and raped and pissed upon by passing men.

  The dowdy middle-aged foreign woman chased into an empty garage and gang-raped while Mary’s neighborhood thrummed on impassively. Mary had tried to intervene. She’d run to a group of cops and begged them to save the woman, but they shrugged.

  “What did she come here for?” the police snapped as they brushed Mary aside.

  That line stuck with me for years. With typical uncanny precision, Mary had conjured the classic image of a white woman getting raped by dark men. The idea that has, above all others, justified white outrages of murder, colonialism, slavery. It hit me like a warning and a plea and even as subliminal propaganda. I was the outsider, I knew, but then so was Mary. What did she come here for? What did the police mean, if indeed they had said that? And if Mary was emb
ellishing, what did she mean? I puzzled over here, because here was a place where outsiders could expect no mercy. Here could be the street, the impoverished neighborhood, New Delhi, or the entire country of India.

  What did she come here for? Tom and I had journeyed here from elsewhere because it was interesting and we had something to gain. We were accidental migrants; we could change course at any time. Mary and Pooja had come here desperate for money. All the world was moving, migrating, seeking, fleeing. The longer I lived on the other side of the planet from my own home, the more this question struck me as profound and unanswerable.

  What did she come here for?

  Mary had already told me the answer.

  What did she come here for?

  Mary’s voice asked, and Mary’s voice replied.

  You came for this.

  Chapter 17

  Mary waited for me that night. Instead of bustling out the door once Patrick went to bed, she sat strangely motionless on the couch. Crescent stains of fatigue hung below her eyes. Birds gathered in the trees outside and screamed with the hysteria of dusk.

  “All night we were awake.” Mary rubbed at her hairline. “That place is full of spirits.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My husband has high fever. His head is paining. Demons are bothering him too much.”

  “Oh.” I considered. “Your apartment is haunted?”

  “Yes.”

  “What will you do?”

  “All night we prayed. We said rosaries, we put holy water. We prayed for that demon to leave us in peace, but that demon is very strong.”

  “Wow.”

  Max sat between us, head bent over a picture book. I studied the back of his neck.

  “Maybe your husband should go to a doctor,” I finally said.

  “He will go,” she said. “His fever is too much.”

  “If you need anything, you can call me,” I said.

  “Thank you.”

  I knew she wouldn’t call. She never called. She relied on friends from church. Sometimes I had the strange idea that Mary sensed my desire to be useful and withheld her problems out of some subversive impulse. She had to work long days in my rooms, fine, but she wouldn’t let me congratulate myself as her benefactor.

  By naptime the next day, she sprawled on the sofa with a dripping towel slung across her eyes. I started to point out she was getting the furniture wet, but something held me. I looked closer.

  “Are you all right?”

  She lurched upright. “I’m not feeling well,” she muttered.

  Patrick’s bellow came through the monitor. I carried him back into the living room, sat down on the floor, and watched Mary blink around. She reached down and pulled Patrick absentmindedly into her lap. Usually the color of a pink rose fading to brown, her skin was ash and mustard. Her eyes had fallen deeper into their sockets. Her face looked almost reptilian in its lifelessness.

  I started to reach for her forehead, then stopped myself.

  “May I touch your head?” I felt foolish.

  “Yes.”

  Heat boiled beneath her skin.

  “You have a fever,” I told her. “A high one.”

  I took Patrick back and nestled his head under my chin.

  “Those spirits—”

  “Mary!” I interrupted. She had been telling me stories again, pulling me into her lurid swirl of superstition and ghosts. But now I snapped to myself and saw the plain facts.

  “Did your husband go to the doctor?”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  “And?”

  “He has typhoid, Madame.”

  “Mary!”

  “Typhoid, you know? They did a test—”

  “Mary!” I cried again. “Why are you here?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “But—how could you—the kids are here, Mary,” I sputtered, clambering unsteadily to my feet and backing away with Patrick in my arms. “If your husband has typhoid, you probably have typhoid, too. And you might give it to the kids.”

  “Oh,” she said slowly.

  I wanted to kick her out forever. I wanted to put her to bed and nurse her to health. Moron, I thought in outrage. If my kids—

  But she was sick; she was so sick.

  I turned around and walked away. I handed Patrick to Pooja in the kitchen. “Mary can’t be near him,” I said grimly. Then I shut myself into the office and found Tom online.

  My hands trembled on the keys. Mary might as well have opened her purse and announced she’d carried a cobra into the living room. She was supposed to take care of the children. Her presence in our house rested on the assumption that she could anticipate and avoid danger.

  “Mary JUST told me her husband has typhoid,” I began. “I Googled typhoid and the first thing to leap off the page was HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS.”

  Three excruciating, unpardonable minutes passed. Then Tom weighed in: “What the fuck?”

  I glared at the screen. This was not an acceptable level of engagement. I let my silence draw him out.

  “Is her husband over it now,” he finally added, “or is he still sick?”

  “Still sick.”

  “Am assuming you already sent her home?”

  “No.”

  Tom has always provoked in me an inconvenient impulse to honesty. This was clearly the wrong answer. But that was the point of involving Tom: He could slice through the clamorous circus of our household and arrive at the only logical next step. It was like consulting with myself, minus the background noise.

  And, too, it was implicit between us that my decisions were often clouded—or at least made uncharacteristically sluggish—by my desperation for writing time. In this case, for example, I simply did not want to accept that Mary might have contracted a terrible disease that could keep her out of the house for an untold stretch of weeks. Her absence translated into my own lost work.

  I got off the computer. I didn’t wait for Tom’s recrimination. Whatever he was going to say, he was right. I was compromised by my own desire to avoid household disruption.

  “Do you feel well enough to take an auto home?” I asked Mary.

  “Yes, Madame,” she said unconvincingly.

  “You need to see a doctor. Do you have a doctor?”

  “There is a clinic in Munirka.”

  “Go today,” I told her. “But Mary—you cannot come back here until you are completely well. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  * * *

  ————

  I didn’t even try to work the next day. After breakfast I took Max to the park. I liked the park, with its beds of hollyhocks and jasmine shaded by jamun and lime trees. But I disliked going there with Max, who was stubbornly indifferent to the flower beds and picturesque nooks and was drawn, inevitably, to the scabbiest edges—dried patches of bare earth near the trash cans, punctuated by rat holes where, we’d been warned, venomous snakes liked to hunt.

  “Don’t you want to go over there?” I asked the top of his head.

  “No.” He clawed at the dirt with his fingernails.

  The phone rang. It was Mary.

  “Did you get the results?” I demanded.

  “She said I have typhoid.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Yes.” Mary hesitated.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “Well, get some rest. Do you need anything?”

  “No, Madame.” She sounded small and weak and very far away.

  “Call me if you need something. Okay? And don’t come back until we’ve agreed it’s okay,” I couldn’t resist adding. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Pacing in the grass, I called the boys’ pediatrician. This doctor had practiced in the United States before returning to India to
set up a children’s clinic on the ground floor of his family home. He was an old-fashioned family doctor who did everything from weigh-ins to vaccinations himself and responded to panicked text messages in the dead of night. He was kindly and tactful, with a gnomish face and a sly sense of humor, and my children loved him.

  Now, as I waited for the doctor to answer, I absentmindedly watched Max poke his fingers in the mud. This scene would have driven Tom wild with anxiety, and so, as usual, I felt I was doing something slipshod behind my husband’s back.

  I knew what Tom would say: The dirt likely contained animal feces and parasitic worms. Max was apt to poke his fingers into a nostril or mouth. And, no, I hadn’t carried any hand sanitizer.

  It’s not that I was fearless—just the opposite. I feared the bands of wild dogs who lolled in the grass. I feared the knots of loitering men who played cards. I feared the speeding cars of my reckless neighbors. I feared the deadly diseases transmitted by a single bite from the wrong mosquito. I feared the cobra that had been spotted in that very park. I had so many fears that I had no fear at all—I felt we were surrounded by so many dangers I could not afford to indulge my fear of any of them.

  That’s because, most of all, I feared raising neurotic children. I imagined shrinking boys who wouldn’t play in the mud without fussing over sanitation. Sickness could be cured, but if my kids were harangued until they shrank from the world, there would be no treatment.

  I’d tried to explain this to Tom, who’d replied with cutting remarks. It was, however, a satisfying conversation to have with the pediatrician, who’d chuckle knowingly and tell me I was right. All of these thoughts trickled through my mind as I waited for him to answer.

  “The nanny has typhoid,” I blurted when I heard the doctor’s voice. “She just told me.”

  “She has a fever?”

  “She has typhoid.”

  “How do you know she has typhoid?”

  “She went to a doctor.”

  “What doctor?”

  “Well—I don’t know,” I said impatiently. “What difference does it make?”

  “It makes a big difference. False diagnosis of typhoid is very common. These people go to some cheap clinic, and the first thing they get told is they have typhoid.”