The lady
The Postpartum Lady arrived at our house exactly twenty-four hours after we returned from the hospital the day before. I should say, her title was Month Uncle's Wife, but she had a name, and it was the same as my mothers- Cao. I called her Auntie Cao, but for the purpose of this story, she will be called The Lady.
The Lady did not know our names. She did not know our child's name. She did know our child's gender. She did not care.
When she walked through our front door wearing a black lace dress, she said, HAND ME THE BABY WHERE IS THE BABY.
And we gave her the baby, and she sat down and took inventory immediately. It was four days old, very tiny, and cold. "Why is this baby not wearing clothes?" she asked, and immediately put an onesie on her and changed her diaper.
She called me. Mom. She called Paul Dad. She called Esme "Son" or "Baby"
One of the first thing she asked us was how much our house was worth. She guessed the number and it was about astonishingly close. "It's a nice house," she said, "But it's too small."
Then she forced me to take a nap and I woke up to a huge feast of bland meaty foods and two different fish soups, white and milky with fresh tofu skin floating on top. Then she said.
Mom, she said, go take a nap. Dad, go buy these list of ingredients, which included everything from dried abolone to beans to live fish every, single, day. To make room for all these new things, she threw away almost everything in my refrigerator. Ice cream cake goodbye. Kimchi. Anything spicy or strange colored.
Then she made any member of my family buy ingredients. They bought dragon fruits and apples and ribs and chickens and pig trotters, pig HANDS only not feet, and noodles, thin ones, thick ones, and also medium ones.
We had to clear a space on top of the washing machine for more dried goods. most of which she made into water or soup for me to drink, which I drank constantly, until I was literally busting open with breast milk.
After we ate, she went to take care of the baby, and Paul was in charge of cleaning the kitchen. It was like a war zone. All the burners would have been on, all day, full level, with soups boiling over and and crusting over each night.
Around this time I noticed that she wore a shirt that said TAP OUT in block letters filled in with green camouflage. It was exactly on brand. When did we tap in though? When did we tap in?!
She slept with the baby, which she was sleep training from the moment she held her, so that she slept 2 hours, then 3 hours, then 5 hours a night by the third night she stayed with us.
While she slept with the baby, we were hiding in our room, hiding from her, eating the snacks we originally brought to eat at the hospital. "could I pay her money not to talk to me?" said Paul.
What she said, was mostly about stuff that we needed to buy, or the things around the house, the ricecookers, the pots and pans, who were not up to snuff, and should be thrown out and repurchased. She encouraged us to buy a 700 rice cooker. She showed us Yeezys that she purchased for her son.
When Auntie Cao first came to this country from Tianjin on a tourist visa. Back home she had been a city bus driver. In America she wanted to be a long distance truck driver. Back home she'd driven a city bus, and thought she'd be great at the job. She didn't like sleeping, she wanted to earn a million RMB as fast as she could, then go back home and open a restaurant.
Then because she didn't know English, she couldn't pass the exams for trucking, and became a masseuse, a cleaning lady, and then became a nanny. Then she found out the thing she was really good at, babies.
Had it not been for corona virus, we wouldn't have been able to book her, she told us. She was booked months, sometimes, a whole year in advance. When babies are born in Washington DC, she goes. Seattle, you bet. New York? Are we talking Manhattan or upstate? Because she could name a few towns. Look, here's a picture of her at Niaguar falls, a young couple in Michigan took her there as a thank you.
But the place she knows the most is the bay. She started in the game with tech money. All the Moms and Dads being employees are Google, Apple, Facebook, who needed someone to take care of their newborn so they could still make that tech money. money money money, it soon became her favorite topic. "she keeps flexin' on me" Paul said, as he purchased, on amazon, bottle sanitizers and pots and pans, and japanese sizers and whatever else she told us the google people had that made them better than we were.