Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “They did a test.”

  “A blood test?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which test?”

  “I didn’t examine her medical records.”

  “Well, you need to,” the doctor said in his relentlessly reasonable voice. “I don’t trust this diagnosis.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “Wash your hands a lot. Wash everybody’s hands.”

  I waited for more. No more came.

  “That’s it?”

  “Anyway, she shouldn’t be in your house if she has a fever.”

  “Right,” I said. “She’s not.”

  “So you wait. Wash hands. Watch the children for any signs of illness.”

  “When can she come back to work?”

  “She has to be completely clear of fever.”

  “I can’t believe this,” I groaned.

  “I can,” he said. “Next time, take her to the doctor yourself.”

  “I didn’t know any of this. I’m not used to—” I groped to finish this sentence. Nannies? Motherhood? India? “Typhoid,” I finally choked.

  “Look, I could tell you so many stories. There is no concept of health or medicine or even hygiene. You can’t underestimate the ignorance of these people. There is a reason they are our maids and gardeners.”

  I ignored this last comment, which I considered unworthy of our doctor.

  “So?”

  “Just wait,” he said. “There’s nothing else you can do.”

  * * *

  ————

  Mary stayed home. I tried not to think of her misery—she and her husband turning with fever, long days in the dead air of a stultifying flat by the airport, the ceaseless roar of the lucky ones cutting tracks through the clouds overhead, steel birds on the skies of delirium.

  I didn’t lose as much writing time as I’d expected. Pooja kept the house clean and the meals fresh, and still found time to help mind the kids. We washed our hands constantly. She didn’t get sick, and neither did I, and, most important, neither did the children.

  We never found out whether it was typhoid, but Mary recovered and came back to work to announce that prayer had vanquished the demons.

  Soon the entire incident melted away into the mists of our household. Nothing ever stayed the same; everything was always changing. Threats reared up, only to recede. Sometimes I sensed that our family was about to slide off the edge of stability into something truly apocalyptic. I dreamed nightmares; stood completely still while panic crawled over my skin; woke up full of dread. But somehow each day rolled into darkness and morning always came. This typhoid scare went away, too. Another crisis would soon take its place.

  I knock on wood as I write; I knocked on wood then. I knock on wood every day. I avail myself of every rite of the religion I’ve abandoned: I cross myself. I sleep with a rosary under my pillow. I keep a Bible in the boys’ room. I sprinkle the rooms with holy water from Mary’s church. I write formal entreaties to the djinns of Delhi and shove them into the cracks of the caves where the spirits are said to dwell. I was born superstitious long before children and India, but now I am hopelessly ritualistic. It’s the stabbing gut fear of motherhood. It’s living in a place crowded with overlapping religions and tableaus of human desperation. I knock on wood, I fill my wallet with four-leaf clovers, I wish on stars and numeric coincidences. I fast and I bargain and I pray.

  It may not help, but it doesn’t hurt.

  Chapter 18

  By daylight, in our rooms, we all swung along the arcs of our assigned orbits. I am sure Mary, Pooja, and Tom each sometimes found their roles stultifying. I know I did. Still we got up and performed our duties; they gave our days a frame and a meaning.

  But every sun reaches its peak and then plunges to earth, and when night came we mercifully split from one another. I slipped into the wildness of sleep, into the private space of my bed with my husband, the arguments we had, the love we found. The children tucked away in the glow of night-lights, everybody wrapped in dreams.

  And Pooja and Mary broke forth into the world, to deal or dream or drink, to resume living as the people they had always been, their unchangeable selves, the people I could not know. All of us played our parts in the light; reserved our honesty for the darker hours.

  The worst things happened at night, and the best things. All the truth came at night.

  * * *

  ————

  I slammed out of sleep that morning, lurched awake. What woke me, why? Darkness stood thick in the rooms. I took my phone in hand to check the time—five a.m.—and read the text message from Pooja with the afterclingings of dream still draped like cobwebs over my eyes.

  2:30 am.

  Mam I have to go back to Darjeeling. Please send my salary to my sister’s bank acct. I need it desperately. I’m sorry mam try to understand.

  Now I was vertical. Back to Darjeeling, in the middle of the night, with no warning? It wasn’t right; it didn’t make sense. Something had happened. What could have happened?

  We’d just been together. She’d stayed late the night before, playing with Patrick while I put Max to bed. Then she’d wrapped herself in a bulky sweater and headed home. She didn’t have far to go: windows and walls split the space, but she slept about fifteen yards from us.

  I sat in the dark and tried to understand. The sudden disappearance would have been improbable at any time, but to leave now, with monthly payday coming? No, even if she hated us, she wouldn’t go now. There must be some emergency, somebody sick, but why didn’t she say?

  I dialed her number; her phone was switched off. I tried her sister and then her husband; nobody answered. I sent text messages. I’m worried. Have Pooja call me, please.

  “Tom,” I hissed.

  “Huh!” He jerked out of sleep.

  “Something’s wrong. Pooja’s gone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. She sent me a text in the middle of the night—”

  “Something happened last night,” he murmured, eyes still closed. “I heard something—”

  “What?”

  “People were shouting. A woman was screaming.” He propped himself up on an elbow, frowning to remember. “The dogs were barking.”

  Fear spilled fast and liquid through my belly.

  “Did it sound like Pooja?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you do something?”

  “It didn’t even cross my mind that it would be Pooja.”

  “I’m scared,” I said. “I’m going to her room to check.”

  I tugged a cardigan over my pajamas, turned on my phone flashlight, and tiptoed downstairs. The dying night stank of trash fires and cold diesel steam. I turned away from the iron spikes of the front gate. I was not seeking my usual exit, toward the park and the main road. This time I headed in the other direction, around the back of the driveway, dodging moldering stacks of abandoned construction materials and a squat toilet, dragging open the rusting gate to the brick-paved alley. I had almost reached the cramped dormitory of the servants’ quarter when I realized I wasn’t even sure which door was hers. I should know, I thought. Why don’t I ever come back here? I was shivering in the alley, trying to remember, when I noticed a mess of broken dishes. Smashed teacups; a salt shaker; a cheap little plate painted with candy-colored apples, all heaved down from the window above. The small physical bits of Pooja’s life, scraped together through years of work in other people’s homes, dashed now on the bricks. Darkness held fast, and the silence was terrible. I listened to the emptiness of a sleeping street and understood that Pooja had gone.

  I wanted to see her rooms anyway. I was drifting into investigative mode, half afraid I’d find blood, a body, God knows. I couldn’t be sure she’d sen
t that text message. Maybe somebody had taken her phone, maybe the text was meant to distract and mislead, to buy time for escape…

  A battered mutt sprawled over the dirty stairway to her room. Scars and stains covered the dog’s hide; stinking and snoring, he lorded over the stairs like the hound of Hades. I knew the residents of the quarter had fattened him on food scraps and trained him to attack strangers. This dog was their security guard against the night. Still I tried to pass. As I wedged a foot over his haunches, a chesty rumble erupted. I froze. He growled again and snapped his teeth. I backed away, spun, and ran.

  Back in the bedroom, I turned to Tom and named the fear that had been gathering itself since I’d first read the text from Pooja.

  “What if he killed her?”

  * * *

  ————

  The absence of Pooja filled the house as we moved through the routines of daybreak. Diapers, bowls of fruit, coffee, showers. I watched the clock, waiting for Mary to cross the city by bus. Everything was now contingent upon Mary. She’d know something, or she’d suggest a course of action. She was the only remaining guide who could lead me back to Pooja.

  I told her about the text message, the screams, and the smashed crockery. I wanted to call the police, I said, but Tom was against it. Notoriously corrupt and abusive, Indian police are never summoned casually.

  “Let me see,” Mary said firmly. “I’ll go and check.”

  She came back important with news.

  “The neighbors say there was a big fight,” Mary reported. “I moved all her things upstairs. Everything was lying in the street. They were smashing everything, throwing things out the window.”

  “What else did they say?”

  “A very bad fight,” Mary repeated impatiently. “She and Varun were fighting.”

  “Is anybody there now?”

  “In Pooja’s room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nobody is there.”

  “You opened the door, or you knocked?”

  “The door was open. They didn’t lock it.”

  “I’m afraid she might be dead.”

  “No,” Mary said unconvincingly. “We will find her.”

  “Did you call her?”

  “Her phone is off.”

  Tom went off to his office, Max went to school, and Mary took Patrick to the park. I paced, tried to write, gave up, and waited. The day passed slowly. I ordered pizza for lunch—an exaggerated reaction to the missing cook.

  In the afternoon, Mary came to me in the kitchen.

  “Madame,” she announced. “I talked to Pooja.”

  “What?” A rush of relief—Pooja was alive! “Where is she?”

  “At her sister’s.”

  “She’s all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t she call me?”

  “She will call you,” Mary said. “I told her,” she added imperiously. Mary had won this round, that much was understood.

  Instead of waiting, I called Pooja.

  “I thought you were dead,” I said when she answered.

  “It’s not like that.”

  Pooja had fled, but not all the way to Darjeeling. She was exhausted and sore and it was too much to accomplish in the middle of the night—to buy a ticket and cross India by rail, broke and alone. Instead she took a motorcycle rickshaw to Delhi’s outskirts, where her sister worked as a cook for another foreign family. There she stopped. Afraid to come back to our place, but hesitant to leave Delhi, she hung in limbo, a guest in yet another staff quarter.

  * * *

  ————

  A few days later Pooja came back to talk. We sat in the living room beneath the high clean ceiling and crystal chandelier, before the wide, tall window letting onto thick clots of green leaves. A shudder of March heat stole into the room. It was the first time we’d sat formally together since her job interview. It felt serious and unnatural.

  We all looked at each other: me and Tom, whose presence added moment to the meeting, and Pooja and her sister, brought along for moral support.

  Pooja perched awkwardly on the edge of an armchair. Varun had uprooted fistfuls of her hair and blackened her eye. Tears caught at the bottom of her glasses and leaked down her bruised face. Her cheeks shone like seashells, soaked and shellacked in days of salt water.

  She told us how it started: Varun suspected Pooja of sleeping with the water deliveryman. He couldn’t fathom her explanation for the deliveries: Why would her boss send water to her door, why should we care? He was furious that Pooja let a strange man into their rooms while he was off working.

  “He said, ‘You’re sleeping with that water guy. You’re calling him when I’m away,’ ” Pooja said.

  I was so amazed by the improbability of this suspicion that I could hardly listen to Pooja talk. I wasn’t even sure the person who brought the water had reached the age of legal manhood—he was a skinny slip of a teenager in scuffed sandals and grubby clothes. His body odor made Pooja and Mary titter and groan behind his back. My imagination couldn’t conjure the image of him and Pooja in a passionate embrace.

  “I tried to tell him, ‘They won’t deliver the water at night.’ But he just got angrier. He called me horrible names. Accused me of everything. Then I got mad and started to shout back. Then he beat me.”

  “He’s beating her all the time.” Her sister leaned across, a barricade of flesh between us and Pooja. “Tell them,” she prodded Pooja.

  “He does like that,” Pooja agreed weakly.

  “We want you to come back,” I said. “But we’re trying to figure out whether it’s safe. And even whether you want to come back.”

  “How can I face the neighbors?” Pooja said. “Everybody saw me. They just stared at me. Nobody helped.”

  The memory brought fresh sheets of tears.

  “This shame is for them,” Tom intoned sternly. “The shame belongs to the people who stood by while you were beaten.”

  This was a voice he assumed on assignment, a slow, menacing tone suited to unpredictable militiamen or intransigent hotel clerks. These declarations wouldn’t help Pooja when she overheard muttered taunts from packs of drivers and security guards; when women avoided her eyes; when she sat embarrassed in her dingy room. I knew that. Pooja knew that.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  I was irritated by everybody: by Tom’s pronouncements and Pooja’s fixation on the gossiping neighbors and by myself, most of all, for having nothing to say. I hated the banality of it all—the complaints and inconvenience and wasted time that thrived on the assault like scum on stagnant water. My irritation grew, I knew, from smothered despair. Pooja had been hurt. Maybe she would be hurt again. We could make gestures, but we couldn’t protect her. Maybe she would be murdered; maybe everybody who worked for us would come to ruin; maybe we would go to hell for sitting as spectators to this misery. I’d been all around the world, and I’ve never yet found a place where women aren’t hit and exploited and hated. Men needed us, but God, they hated us, too. Deeply, chronically hated us.

  Pooja had given us all the bounties of her sardonic, generous mind and spirit—but we had to take the rest of her, too. And I wasn’t sure I could stomach it. The fragile membrane that had separated the harrowing existence of the vulnerable women we employed from our quiet domestic life had finally burst. This was my house, but I couldn’t control it. The seamy disputes and bottomless despair I had subconsciously hoped Pooja and Mary and Xiao Li would drop at the threshold when they kicked off their street shoes—all of that had now exploded into our living room. It was in the bruises, in the way Pooja slumped while I held myself erect, trying to exist both inside the room and above, lingering back in a place where such things didn’t happen—at least not close enough that I had to get involved.

  I was annoyed, too, by Pooj
a’s sister, who leaned into the conversation with the haughty, round-eyed air of a blameless bit player in a royal scandal. She’d catch my eye and hold it without any particular expression. When Pooja spoke, her sister followed along like a stage mother who’s memorized the script. She kept interrupting.

  “He said he would kill her,” the sister interrupted now. “Tell them,” she prodded Pooja.

  “He always says like that,” Pooja said slowly. “But this time I feel scared. I feel he may do anything. Because he didn’t really expect me to leave him.”

  Tom and I looked at each other.

  “Do you think it’s a good idea for you to stay in your quarter alone?”

  “I don’t know. I’m afraid he’ll come back.”

  “Can he get in? The dog—”

  “He feeds the dog,” she said. “That dog is a friend of his.”

  “But the guard—”

  “The guard will never mind.”

  “In the end,” I said, “you have to decide.”

  “And,” added Tom, “you really need to think.”

  Then we explained our conditions. Pooja could come back to work, but only if she got rid of Varun. He would be forever banned from our house, including the quarter.

  She had time to decide. We agreed that she’d hide out for a few weeks at the high-security apartment complex where her sister worked. We’d tell everybody she’d gone back to Darjeeling. Pooja must tell nobody about this plan. Not even Mary; especially not Mary. Everybody had to think that Pooja had gone to her village—and to repeat this story, over and over, to Varun.

  We all wandered down to the park, where Mary had taken the boys. “Pooja is leaving,” I told Mary.

  “For good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.” She paused. “Why?”

  “It’s not safe for her to stay.”

  “Nothing will happen,” she exclaimed. “Don’t worry! She will settle down.”