Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  “It’s what she wants.” I ignored the implication that the beating was a behavioral eruption on Pooja’s part. “And we think it’s better, too.”

  Pooja walked over, her sister trailing, through the grass and past the jasmine hedge. Pooja and Mary spoke quietly in Nepali. Mary threw her arms around Pooja’s neck, and as their chests parted a jagged cry ripped from Mary’s throat. Just one cry, and then silence. She snuffled back snot and turned her face to the children. I wanted to pull Mary aside and whisper the truth, but I stopped myself. Her cry hung in my ears, and guilt ate my windpipe like heartburn, but I stayed quiet.

  Mary was still Mary. I trusted her with my kids, but I didn’t trust her to keep her mouth shut.

  Pooja and her sister walked off slowly through the afternoon light, moving toward the market and the city beyond.

  * * *

  ————

  Mary called Varun to deliver our ultimatum: he should gather his belongings and get off the premises immediately. The drivers and guards were informed that Varun was persona non grata. True, these men were his friends, but at least now they couldn’t claim they hadn’t known.

  “Do we really have the right to tamper in her private life?” I asked Tom that night. “I don’t like it.”

  “Her private life is part of our private life,” he said. “We can’t have our kids around domestic abuse.”

  The children had been oddly untouched by this crisis so far. They carved their own paths through the house, perfectly present but somehow oblivious to the machinations and compromises of the adults. But their ignorance was fragile.

  “True,” I said.

  Sometimes when Tom and I stretched side by side in bed, having a conversation like this, I’d mentally slip out of my skin to eavesdrop on a couple discussing their servants. It was a disgusting sensation, and I was filled, each time, with a yawning despair. In order to liberate ourselves from the chores, to continue the work we believed was crucial, we had converted our home into a job site. I was a manager—not of a bureau or a newsroom, but of a claustrophobic domestic universe. We held a dismaying amount of power over vulnerable people, and that meant grappling with the ethics, finances, schedules, and personalities. Every time we talked like this—which was often—I disliked Tom and disliked myself and felt a queasy certainty that Tom, too, must share this disgust. For me to be this person with Tom, for Tom to be this person with me, degraded our love affair and sullied our family. And yet it never stopped; every crisis resolved was soon replaced by another.

  The next day our landlord’s driver stopped me in the street.

  “Big problem,” he growled, gesturing angrily back toward Pooja’s room. “Shouting. Throwing. Very bad.”

  Back upstairs, Mary reproached me for whipping up unnecessary drama around a mundane domestic dispute. As far as Mary was concerned, Pooja was behaving with hysterical self-destruction—and I was egging her on.

  “This is family life.” She kept saying that.

  Pooja’s husband had pushed her down the stairs and dragged her into the street by her hair.

  This is family life.

  “I tried to tell Pooja, ‘You’ve been with him ten years, and he never killed you,’ ” Mary said. “He’s not the type.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” Mary said. “Pooja will calm down and say sorry.”

  “Sorry to whom?”

  “To Varun,” Mary replied. “She should be careful. Varun takes good care of her. She won’t find another man so easily.”

  Soon the story spread among our neighbors. I was pulled aside by well-meaning matrons determined to warn the ignorant foreigner about predictable traps. Husbands shouldn’t be allowed in the quarters, they tsked.

  “Always some trouble,” they said knowingly.

  People from northern India always drank too much, they added.

  “You don’t know these people like we do.”

  * * *

  ————

  “Maybe it’s a mistake to let Pooja stay,” Tom said one night.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What if this guy shows up and kills her? That kind of thing happens all the time here.”

  “So”—I fought to keep my voice smooth—“besides getting beaten up, you think she should be fired for getting beaten up?”

  “No, I guess not,” he said slowly. “Well, of course not.”

  We tried to find a solution. Tom suggested Pooja could sleep on a spare bed in the children’s playroom, but I didn’t think any of us—including Pooja—would be willing to give up that much privacy.

  “Maybe it’ll be better in the long run,” Tom sighed, “if she decides not to come back.”

  * * *

  ————

  Mary still believed I was ruining Pooja’s life—or helping Pooja ruin her own life—and she was desperate to salvage the situation. She grew so distressed she even broke the unwritten code regulating the distribution of personal information among employers and employees. She told me one of Pooja’s secrets.

  Varun was not really Pooja’s husband, Mary said. In fact, he already had a wife and child.

  “Pooja didn’t want you to know,” she said guiltily.

  I couldn’t see how this made any difference to our current predicament. But to Mary, this information was key in grasping the danger that Pooja faced. Not only had she kicked out a perfectly good man—she had kicked out a man who had someplace else to go. If Pooja didn’t want him, there was another woman who’d take him back.

  “Pooja doesn’t understand,” Mary fretted. “It’s not easy to be a woman alone.”

  But all was not lost, Mary assured me. Varun had been haunting the surrounding streets and market, asking the drivers and guards about Pooja. He was hunting for her.

  “He doesn’t believe she went back to Darjeeling,” Mary said.

  My stomach was in knots; I chewed my knuckles. If our deception didn’t work, Pooja would have to leave our house. It was a parting I couldn’t stand to imagine.

  “Nothing bad is happening,” Tom told me in bafflement. “Everything is going to be fine either way.”

  Still I woke every dawn with dread in my gut.

  Chapter 19

  Pooja came back to work, but it was all wrong.

  On those long afternoons of early summer, when our rooms steamed and thickened in the syrup of slanting sun, Pooja’s sadness hung like laundry that wouldn’t dry. She and Mary no longer hollered to each other down the halls. They walked soberly; their voices were flat; they whispered in corners. Pooja cried a lot.

  I talked to Pooja about the things of the house. The foods she might cook; the reorganizations she might undertake; the repairmen she should call. “Yes, ma’am,” she said absentmindedly. I pushed her toward Patrick. She cuddled and sang, but when she turned from him, her face slumped back to listlessness.

  “Are you all right?” Obviously, she was not.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I didn’t want to poke at Pooja’s raw wound, so Mary became my surrogate. When Pooja set off to the market, I’d corner Mary and press for information. Was Pooja all right? Was Pooja going to be all right? What did she want, what was happening, what could we do?

  “Pooja isn’t strong,” Mary reported.

  “What does she say?”

  “Pooja doesn’t know what-all happens to a woman by herself,” Mary said. “Her sister gives her bad ideas. I told her, ‘Your sister is young. She isn’t a mother. Think of your son.’ But Pooja doesn’t listen.”

  “He hit her.”

  “Married life is like this.” She shrugged. “Now she is alone.”

  I didn’t insult Mary by pointing out that my husband had never hit me. To pretend that we chose from
the same options; got judged by the same criteria; that I wasn’t swaddled in layers of dense and obvious advantage—I couldn’t do that.

  “Mary,” I finally snapped. “Varun can’t live here anymore. Tom said so. If he comes back, she’ll lose her job.”

  “Oh.” Invoking Tom, the patriarch, always made her go quiet.

  Mary plainly relished the roles Pooja’s predicament offered to her. She was my trusted informant, and Pooja’s life adviser. She was serene and all-knowing. Her circumstances were stable and respectable by comparison, and her insight anxiously sought.

  “I told Pooja, ‘Have faith. God is there,’ ” Mary said. “But Pooja says, ‘I’m not like you. I don’t have a strong heart like you.’ ”

  Mary even tried to take Pooja to church, but here she was overplaying her hand. Pooja was heartbroken, but she wasn’t about to turn to Jesus.

  One day Mary burst in with news.

  “Varun went back to his wife.” Defiant and accusatory, she threw this at my feet. Her head stretched and trembled with the enormity of her ignored warnings; her eyes roamed my face. She wanted to know whether I would finally own up to what I’d done.

  I turned away.

  Pooja was disappearing into silence. She stopped eating, and the weight fell from her bones. Her shoulders hunched sharp beneath her clothes.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right.”

  Now that the worst possible outcome was a fait accompli, Mary turned philosophical.

  “I told Pooja, ‘That woman must have cried a lot when you took Varun from her,’ ” Mary reported. “ ‘Now it’s your turn to cry.’ ”

  I frowned at Mary. “That’s not a very nice thing to say to her.”

  “Pooja should understand how life works.”

  One day I passed Pooja on my way to the bathroom. She was coming out; the flush of the toilet roared behind her.

  “Disgusting,” she muttered.

  “Excuse me?” I swung around, stopping her steps.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I said, ‘disgusting.’ ” Her face was empty. “I have my period, and it’s just—gross.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, it’s just—” We were both on the early edge of middle age. Pooja didn’t need my right-thinking Western warnings against stigmatizing menstruation. But I was surprised. Pooja was matter-of-fact about bodily functions, changing Patrick’s diapers without a wince.

  I continued on my way, vaguely demoralized by what I interpreted as an eruption of self-loathing.

  The days went on, and Pooja sleepwalked through cooking and cleaning and babysitting.

  “She’ll get over it,” Tom said.

  “I hope so.”

  * * *

  ————

  It was just one thing, in the end. A domestic dispute. A fight in the night. The bruises healed. The neighborhood gossips scented a fresher scandal and drifted away. Time swallowed us along. The beating was over—except that it wouldn’t go away.

  We couldn’t sweep up that night or disinfect it or rinse it down the sink. That was the beginning and the end; the start of the great unspooling. We had woken up to find Pooja vanished, but we had assumed her disappearance was reversible. We had tracked her down and brought her back, but she wasn’t the same and it wasn’t right. We had started to lose Pooja, piece by piece.

  On the weekends Pooja drowned her sorrows. She slept at her sister’s place, or her sister spent the night in our quarter. They dressed up and hit the town.

  We’d wake to squeals as they raged home in the small hours before dawn. They’d blast corny dance music and scream like teenagers at a pop concert. I tossed and sighed in bed. I understood that Pooja had spent her true adolescence getting knocked up and widowed, that everything had gotten very serious very fast, and that now, at last, she was enjoying a delayed youth. Warped because she was old for these antics. Dicey because New Delhi is not the place to get drunk and stumble through the streets. Pathetic because it all seemed desperately imitative rather than free and fun. But it was her right.

  Pooja, please turn down the music. We can’t sleep. I texted her around four one Sunday morning.

  The music immediately stopped, but come Monday Pooja feigned ignorance—what music?

  She was changing. Her face was harder. She bought trendy eyeglasses and a new phone. She and her sister combed the Tibetan market for miniskirts that choked their thighs, leather vests too small for their breasts, lipsticks in garish shades of orange and magenta. Pooja chopped her hair to her chin and dyed it red.

  “Some men were bothering us on the metro,” Pooja told me one day. “My sister, you know, she was just screaming at them, ‘You never saw a girl in a short skirt before?’ ”

  “What did they do?”

  “They were shouting back, but it was okay.”

  “Pooja,” I said, “you should be careful.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “People are crazy.”

  “I know, ma’am.”

  “I’m worried about this stupid partying,” I complained to Tom. “I don’t like it.”

  “Pooja has gone through a tough time,” he reminded me. “And she has a right to do whatever she wants on her days off.”

  “You’re right,” I sighed enormously. “You’re right.”

  * * *

  ————

  Monday morning. No Pooja. I cooked breakfast for Max and fed Patrick and still there was no Pooja.

  After many rings, she answered her phone.

  “Pooja.”

  “Yes,” she croaked.

  “Where are you?”

  “What?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Sorry, ma’am, sorry, sorry.”

  She hung up. I called her back.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m just coming.” I heard crashing sounds.

  “Are you at home?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  A few minutes later the key rasped in the lock and Pooja staggered through the door.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” she gasped. “I forgot it was Monday.”

  “What do you mean, you forgot it was Monday?” I was barefoot, holding Patrick, needing more coffee.

  “Sorry,” she said again.

  Patrick and I both regarded Pooja skeptically. Sooty streaks of eye makeup smeared down her cheeks. From the piscine gape of her mouth fogged the stench of rotgut alcohol. She lurched toward the kitchen, toppling into a wall and pushing herself upright again as she passed.

  I didn’t say anything. I just watched. I figured she’d glance into a mirror and realize she hadn’t washed her face. That, or she’d chop off a finger slicing apples.

  Mary arrived and herded the children into the playroom. I found Pooja in the kitchen, very slowly washing breakfast dishes.

  “Do you want to go back home?”

  “No, ma’am,” she muttered. “I’m okay.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But you can’t take Patrick to the park this morning.”

  Her head snapped up; her mouth worked emptily.

  “Why?”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “No.”

  “I can smell it from across the room.”

  “I went out last night but—”

  “You can’t walk a straight line.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Stop it.”

  “Fine.”

  “You didn’t even wash your face!” This, for some reason, struck me as the most glaring insult. “You can stay and cook and clean, but you cannot watch the kids today.”

  I waited until Max was at school and Mary was pushing the stroller under the trees, then followed an ostentatious volley of slamming and banging down the hall to the b
oys’ bedroom. I found Pooja stalking in circles over the bright rubber floor mats, clattering toys and shoving drawers.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I won’t work here anymore,” Pooja choked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If you don’t trust me with Patrick, I won’t work here.”

  “I didn’t say I don’t trust you. I said you can’t babysit when you’re drunk.”

  “I would never hurt Patrick.” Now she was sobbing, and I was losing patience. Bad enough she’d come to work drunk, she was determined to have a scene.

  “Pull yourself together,” I snapped. “What is going on with you?”

  She didn’t answer. I watched her huff and sob for a minute, and then I lost my temper all at once.

  “Go if you want, but if you walk out that door don’t bother coming back!” The words were falling out of my mouth unplanned. “You think I don’t know how much you’re drinking? You think you’re being discreet? You think I’m a fucking idiot?”

  She started to say something.

  “Let me finish,” I roared. “You have your private life. You have your own time. But don’t bring it into this house. Don’t let me see it.”

  “But you drink—” she said.

  “I drink, but not when I’m working. And I don’t get drunk! It’s not appropriate. The next time I see you drunk, you’re fired.”

  She stared at me, speechless, heaving. Looking at her wrecked face I felt another surge of anger.

  “Did you even look in the mirror?” I demanded meanly. “You’ve got mascara down to your mouth, and you smell like old beer.”

  The shame that washed across her soggy face stuck the words in my throat. We stood there staring at each other, breathing ragged, rage spent.

  “Pooja.” I touched her arm awkwardly, then pulled my hand back. “Listen. I know you are going through a bad time. But you cannot come in here drunk. Never. Do you understand me?”

  “All right.”

  * * *

  ————