Because I Said So (31 page)

By now Marta was fully entrenched in our lives. I was part of this community of white women shuttling nannies who stood at bus stops and gas stations, wearing Salvation Army parkas, waiting for
la patrona
to pull up in her big car. I’d grown used to the luxuries of a nanny as well: the conflagration of messes that were instantly cleaned up, the beds made, countless gestures and chores that I was spared, that would have weighed me down immeasurably. One day, nearly a year into her job, I stumbled on a photo of Marta from her early days and was shocked to see how much younger she looked. She had clearly aged while taking care of my kids—new lines on her face that were meant for my face, the toll of this life. Meanwhile, we continued to live together, waking up and falling asleep at the same hour. Over the months I noticed that we were even menstruating at the same time, aloft on the same jet streams of pheromones. And yet our worlds would never really meet. On the day the World Trade Center collapsed, I stood at the TV and beckoned Marta to watch. She stood beside me with her broom in hand, taking it all in. After a while she seemed restless. “Where is that?” she asked.

That evening,
like every night after her bath, Marta spoke with her husband, whom she saw on weekends. She sometimes talked for hours, and I wondered what on earth she could possi-210

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bly have to say after a long, repetitious day of caretaking. And then I’d feel shame. Because, of course, beyond the walls of my home, this woman had a life. They all had lives. One day my friend opened the medicine cabinet in the bathroom that her nanny, Ana, shared with her children and found a bottle of herbal aphrodisiac. “Oh my God,” my friend exclaimed. “Ana has a sex life!” Yes, they all have sex lives, we discover, and different sexual credos as well. Marta did not approve when my son ran around naked, his little
zakette
flopping around. Likewise, she thought it was insolent to let Celeste go to bed without underwear. “Marta, it’s not healthy to wear underwear to bed,” I said. “You don’t go to bed with underwear yourself.” To which she looked at me, a bit perplexed. “Of course I do.” That night I dreamt that I came home unexpectedly in the middle of the day. I walked into the bathroom and there, in the bathtub, my son and Marta were making love. Marta looked at me, horrified. “Oh my God,” she cried out. And the dream ended. The next morning I could barely look her in the eye.

Like kids who are surprised to discover their teachers outside the classroom (“What are you doing
here
?” my son asked when we bumped into his kindergarten teacher at a supermarket one day), we’re surprised to see our nannies in their own personal habitat. In fact, we rarely do. But my daughter was now supremely interested in doing so. “Can I go to Marta’s apartment?” she asked. “Please?” I am loath to admit that my first response was conflicted. If I let my daughter spend time with Marta at her home on weekends, would I shift the emotional barometer in Marta’s favor, give her too much power, too much latitude? But the implications of not letting Celeste see Marta’s world were just as inglorious: my daughter, growing up in a lily-white world, with private patrol cars, suburban values, and no clue as to how the “other half” lives.

How the other half lives. I had a glimpse once, nearly forty years ago, of the place where Martas and Marias come from. It was the sixties. My mother, in a gesture of immense goodwill and naïveté, was determined to help our housekeeper, Maria—not as
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her employer, but as a mother. And so she told my two siblings and me to pack our duffel bags and get ready for a trip. With no papers and no husband, Maria stayed behind while we boarded a Greyhound bus and journeyed into the heart of Mexico, to bring Maria’s children back to the States.

Somehow my mother found them, a little boy and a girl.

Here’s what I remember: One room divided by a shower curtain.

Neighbors living in discarded appliance boxes. A dusty, corn-yellow sky in a sad place of troubling Otherness. Preparations were made in a flurry of movement and muffled Spanish. The same Greyhound bus retraced its road northbound a few days later. We were now a family, an ad hoc family of five. After an interminable night drive, North America beckoned just over the horizon. Freedom—and
mama
—was just a stone’s throw away.

But once we were in Tijuana, two border police greeted my mother and her five children: three white faces, two dark faces.

Who are you? The mother? Of all these children? Where is the
father? Where are their papers?

What was she thinking? My mother was a bad liar.

Confronted with these basic questions, she couldn’t improvise her way out of her own best intentions gone awry, nor could she cross the tremendous divide between her world and Maria’s.

Overwhelmed with remorse, she realized that the doors to freedom that had opened just a crack were now being irrevocably shut. The girl, in a paroxysm of grief, broke down. Her brother was stoic; the good graces of simple people prevailed. The bus driver assured my mother that he would get Maria’s children back home. The border police didn’t press charges. When we said good-bye, the little boy was holding his sister, who had collapsed in his arms. “It will be okay,” my mother heard him repeat over and over to his sister. “It will be okay. It will be okay.” He was all of seven or eight years old. Decades later, the emotional resonance of that moment still haunts my mother. “I’ll never know if I did the right thing,” she said.

• • •

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“Mommy, Marta lives
far away,” my daughter said. “She lives very, very, very far away.” This was true. I had dropped Marta off at her place on weekends but had never met her entire family. On her dresser in our home the faces of her two children were framed: her son standing in a colorful but shabby living room, her daughter in a blue satin dress posing for her Sweet Sixteen. They were both being brought up by sisters or aunts thousands of miles away, and Marta had not seen them in six years. I could not imagine the economic hardships that had compelled her to leave them, never mind the emotional ones she now had to shoulder. I probed only tentatively, protected by our language barrier, because I was certain that the truth would be too painful.

So how could I reproach her when other mothers commented that she was not “bubbly” enough? How could I bother her when she stared out the window at times, introspective and brooding?

Could I blame her if there was a transference of love from her children to mine? For she had become like a second mother to Celeste, responded to her with effusive affection, indulged her with candies and tortillas despite my protestations. “It is good when little girls become
gordita
,” she said. But I didn’t want my daughter to become a
little fatty
. I was aware of a contemptible sentiment, but there it was: I adored Marta for her effusive love, but I was wary of our worlds overlapping. Conversely, I was aware of Marta’s quiet disapproval of me—of my need to establish boundaries, to define certain limits as my children grew. “My daughter slept in my bed until she was ten years old,” Marta said. “What is wrong with that?” I didn’t answer. Instead, I asked her to lock her bedroom so that Celeste would not run into her bed if she woke up at night. If anything, I wanted her running into
my
bed.

“Can I go to Marta’s house? Can I?” my daughter continued to ask. “One day,” I said. But one day we traveled to a different place. It was the dinner hour, and Celeste was having a tantrum, with all the fiery histrionics of a two-year-old on a rampage. She threw her food across the kitchen. I spoke to her in a sharp voice; Mommy was clearly not happy. She ran out of the kitchen and
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headed for Marta’s room. Before I could grab her, Marta had scooped her up. “
Chickie-tita
,” she said. “
Mama-linda
.” She stroked her hair. “What is wrong with my baby?” Celeste hung onto Marta with a defiant look as if to say,
Come and get me
.

And that is precisely what I did. “Marta,” I said. “Give Celeste to me.” Celeste wrapped her legs harder around Marta, then strained past her at the lure of the TV. Marta held Celeste and did not move. “Marta,” I repeated. “Give me Celeste.” And in that fleeting moment Marta did the one thing she should never have done: She did not give my child back to me.

And so we were finally at this place: a pinnacle where the slippery slope of love and power divided us, the ground zero of our true distrust and suspicion. All of the sociocultural complexities behind our relationship fell away, and what was left was a weighted sense of loss and displaced motherhood. I had implicitly asked Marta to love my child like her own but never to cross that invisible line. But she did. Could I reproach her for that as well? I was unsettled by the need to reassert my role as both mother and employer. Later we spoke at length and found a truce, but something had definitively shifted. There was distrust on both sides now: not only mine of Marta, but Marta’s of me. For what mother makes her child cry like that? What mother does not immediately and unconditionally console? What mother, by extension, dresses her girl in boys’ shorts or lets her kids run around naked? Perhaps, underneath it all, there was also the unconscious questioning of our mutual predicament, in all its cruel and relentless irony. For what mother lets her children be raised by other people? And the answer is: mothers just like us.

The ensuing days were strained. I felt like I’d ripped out a little piece of Marta’s heart, and this sadness moved me to do something I’m loath to admit: One day I went into her room and rummaged through her affairs. Why was I here? Was I trying to understand Marta in some way? Or get closer to her? There was her faded blue purse. A small phone book with numbers written with curious childlike precision. A half-used tube of Ben-Gay (a reminder that caretaking is backbreaking work). I pulled open the drawer of her
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bedside table, and there was her
Libro Catolico de Oraciones
. I noticed that Marta had underlined several verses in red. I don’t read Spanish well, but I got the drift: the prayers, the yearning for salvation and God-like intervention. This was such a different world from mine, a world of painful crowns of thorns, flaming red hearts, resurrections. I imagined Marta at night, exhausted after a long day cleaning house and watching Celeste. With her Bible and her Ben-Gay, she was praying for a better life.

I didn’t know if she would get this better life. But inevitably the time came: Celeste was rapidly approaching preschool age and soon, I would no longer need Marta’s services. I dreaded the moment, for I’d grown to care deeply for this woman—even the confrontations and the strain had become a source of connection between us. But now there was the queer sensation that she was already fading into memory even as she stood in front of me; that she was already moving into that oneiric place where all Martas and Marias and Anas went—dark-skinned women and mothers who shepherd our children through some of the most pristine moments of their lives. I had my own memory of our housekeeper, Maria—a strange but faded confluence of images from the sixties: there was
Gilligan’s Island
, Black Panthers, flower power

. . . and Maria, ironing, chasing us through a messy house. What had ever happened to Maria? Did she ever reunite with her children, whose lives were marked by that effusive and naïve American
patrona
so long ago? And what would happen to Marta? What would Celeste remember of her as Marta slowly dissipated from the urgency of the moment?

Six months after she stopped working for us as a live-in nanny, Marta still comes by to clean our house. When she crosses paths with Celeste en route to preschool they are overjoyed to see each other. Paradoxically, a new closeness has developed between the two of us in the absence of our live-in relationship, with all its emotional gray zones. Marta has still not found a new full-time job and she worries. She needs the money: Her son in Belize has health problems. Her daughter, who was accepted to medical school in Juarez, is pregnant. Now Marta wonders—and the
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irony does not escape her: Who will take care of my daughter’s child? Who will take care of my grandchild? Meanwhile, she continues to look for new work and does lots of housecleaning. One woman gave her a handwritten list of instructions broken down in great detail. Marta showed it to me:
Toilet bowls, tubs, showers, and sinks in bathrooms must be scrubbed with Clorox prior
to use of antibacterial deodorizer. Floors mopped with Lysol
kitchen cleaner and Clorox used on counters, stovetop, refrigerator, and all cabinetry prior to use of appliance cleaner. Iron sheets
and towels in addition to designated clothing.
Marta sighed. “It’s a lot of work.” “Yes,” I said, “but at least you know exactly what you’re getting yourself into.” She smiled as if it were consolation, though we both knew that it was not.

Iranian Revelation

K a t h e r i n e W h i t n e y

I was six months pregnant
with our second child when Farhad and I finally got married. Technically we’d been married for seven years, but this was our religious wedding, uniting us as Muslim husband and wife, and the necessary first step of a journey to visit Farhad’s family in Iran. As Farhad’s Muslim wife, I was entitled to an Iranian passport, which would facilitate my travel in Iran. Without it, the authorities wouldn’t recognize us as married. Bound by the laws that segregate unrelated men and women, Farhad and I couldn’t even stay in the same hotel room.