The Leavers(53)

Some days I would clean you, change your poopy diaper, put on your shoes and socks and hat and little jacket, haul you in the stroller down three flights of stairs, only to have you start howling the moment we turned the corner. Time to go back up with the stroller, three flights of stairs, change your diaper and clean you and put your clothes back on, and by then I would have lost any desire to go out. You poked me, wanting to show me the same thing for the tenth time, a roommate’s pink shirt, a coin you’d found; you’d wail as you banged a spoon against the kitchen floor. I had only been Polly for such a short time, and Polly was already slipping away. There was so much of the world I would never see.

Weeks, months, drifted by in a haze, blending into one long, soupy day in which I never got enough sleep. Ice formed on the windowpanes and the sun refused to fully come up. It was too cold to go on walks now, too much hassle to ride the subway with a baby, so we stayed inside for days, moved between bedroom and kitchen and bathroom and bedroom, confined to our pen. I sang silly songs about chickens and goldfish and told you stories of fishing boats and banyan trees and Teacher Wu. I watched television when my roommates were at work. My closest friends were the actors on a Spanish show who fought and made up like clockwork, tiny lean women stuffed into high heels and short dresses and shiny men in collared shirts and pressed pants. I wanted a bedroom to myself like the actors had, to spread out in a bed big enough for four. The apartment got smaller and smaller.

Then it was spring, and then it was summer, and I’d been in New York for almost a year. You grew longer and heavier, energetic and curious, and once you were crawling I had to watch you all the time or else you’d be dipping your hands into the toilet and into your mouth, finding a rotten food dropping in a corner to eat, offering up a dead roach to me like a twenty-dollar bill. My money was gone. I didn’t want to take out another loan, but if I returned to work, I would have to pay someone to watch you. My roommates were right. There was too much debt, and I was behind. I had yet to send Yi Ba any money. Yet Didi’s nail salon salary fed her whole family in her village. Even Jing-John had bought his mother a house.

Didi asked her boss if she’d hire another nail technician, and her boss said they didn’t need one, but maybe soon. I couldn’t hold out for that. Had to pay off my loans, and that would take another seven or eight years, less if I got a higher-paying job, preferably one that didn’t involve pulling on a ba wa. Waitressing was the best job, especially in a Japanese or Thai restaurant, which paid more than a Chinese restaurant, even though Chinese people ran all of them. But it was tough to get a waitressing job without the right connections.

I got a job at a factory with shorter shifts, sewing shirts for six hours a day, enough to meet the minimum payments to the loan shark. The interest had gone up, and I still owed so much. I’d fall asleep while giving you a bath, waiting until my roommates had used the bathroom first, days since I’d had a shower myself. I smelled like a foot. Except for Didi, there was no more cooing over baby toes. Now my roommates hurried out of the room when you began to cry.

Didi said she’d look after you when I was at the factory, and I tried to line up my shifts to coincide with the times she wasn’t working, but when I couldn’t, I had to stay home. Hetty had told me about a babysitter, and I visited her, twelve kids inside a two-bedroom apartment that smelled of mold, most of them crying, a few of them coughing. The woman had sat and smoked as one kid swatted another in the face. I wasn’t going to leave you in a place like that. I couldn’t even afford her on my salary. Imagine what a cheaper babysitter would be like.

Then it was fall. Didi’s mother was sick. There were medical bills to pay back home, and Didi needed to take on more hours at the salon.

“It’s not a problem,” I said. “I can take him with me.”

As soon as I walked into the factory you started to cry. Can’t say I blamed you—the room was packed and windowless, a quarter of the size of the room I’d worked in back at the Fuzhou factory. Your wails chorused along with the sewing machine motors, and I held you close, tried to avoid the other women’s nasty looks.

I put a bag of diapers and bottles beneath my machine. “What are you thinking?” hissed the woman to my left. “That baby came out of your pussy last week.”

I placed some scraps of fabric inside an empty box and set you down in it, hoping the noise would mask your crying.

A mass of shirts awaited me. My job was hems. Fold the fabric, run it through the serger. A job that required focus and steady hands, things I’d always prided myself on, fold, press, sew, fold, press, sew. Each shirt bringing me closer to zero debt.

Today, the hours that usually passed with a numbing dullness were crawling by even more slowly than the longest day in the history of school. I kept thinking about when I’d have to feed you, and where I could go to do that. There were no breaks in a six-hour shift. The woman at the next machine shot me incredulous looks as you wailed ceaselessly—as if the noise and heat had given you permission to cry even louder—and my hand slipped. The thread veered sideways off the hem, the fabric violently bunched.

I tossed the ruined shirt and picked up a new one. My mind was running in half-time, hands twitching from not enough sleep, and again the needle staggered away from its path. “Damn it!”

The woman next to me clucked her tongue. According to the clock on the wall, only ten minutes had passed.