The woman was alone in the immense, brightly lighted space, which felt to Fan more like a testing laboratory than a place to prepare anything edible. A steady draw on the air made it cool and dry and odorless. When Mala saw her, she smiled and motioned for Fan to come forward. Why don’t you help me? she suggested. She was making various canapés and gave Fan the cookie press to cut out the last few rounds of cheese and smoked meats and toasts. They assembled the components on the toasts as well as on slices of cucumber, and once they filled the appetizer tray, Mala asked Fan to bring it out to the others.
Mister Leo was delighted at the sight, giving her an approving clap-clap, and saying that if she would rather keep Mala company than look at boring art she should. Fan nodded. When she returned to the kitchen, Mala was on to getting one of the dinner courses ready, a salad of tomatoes and fennel and fresh mint. Fan must have paused, for the produce surely originated from a place just like B-Mor, if not B-Mor itself, and if she wasn’t recalling how Reg would test the ripeness of the fruits with his long, skinny fingers and in his joking drawl announce Yup or Nope or Maybe, how could she not think about the members of her household and their tireless labors in the facilities? She missed them and had even cried once early on at the Smokes after spooning out dinner from yet another blackened can, her heart heavy for the clinging odor of fry oil in their cramped row-house kitchen, but the truth was that she missed her own work of diving in the tanks just as much, if not more; it was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don’t mean gaining “self-knowledge” or understanding one’s “true nature” but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology; in the water she felt fine-tuned, most thoroughly alive, for she could gauge the hardness and pH and trace salinity simply by how it played between her fingers, how it tingled her cheek; she could tell by how the fish were schooling whether they were hungry or stressed or content. And if all of us thought of our work more like this, wouldn’t we be better off? Although certain wider questions can needle if you let them: How did this ecology come to be? Is it the one we wish to endure?
Mala was surprisingly talkative as she readied the other dishes for dinner, going over unprompted how she had prepared each one with careful attention to healthfulness. It was all very fresh and vibrant and delectable looking, but afterward Fan had to say that none of it was half as tasty as she expected it to be, though she couldn’t exactly say why. It was seasoned enough and not unusually bitter or sweet, but there was something fundamentally sterile about it, as if the food had not been touched by human hands. Mala, of course, was touching it, and now so was Fan, having been enlisted to chop some herbs to sprinkle on the pasta, and ladle a dollop of sauce on the chicken pieces. Mala seemed to know that she was originally from a facility and didn’t ask about it or why she was with Quig and Loreen, only inquiring whether it was still the case that facility couples were encouraged to have at least four children and received special bonuses for having more, which Fan informed her was no longer so, given the gradually declining need for workers since the worldwide recession began, now quite a number of years ago. In fact, new couples were taxed on the third child and thereafter to offset the costs of health care and schooling and training. This seemed to intrigue Mala, and Fan wondered if she had been born in a production settlement, too. She was an Asian of some kind but her skin was quite dark and her hair wiry and thick and she didn’t look like she was of New Chinese blood. There were some facilities that had experimented with bringing in groups from places like Vietnam and Indonesia and the Philippines but that didn’t continue, often because there was trouble integrating them with our clans, both in the neighborhoods and on the facilities floors. They were eventually forced out, and there was a period of much strife and even violence and some bloodshed, worse than what happened between the natives and originals way back when, but soon enough it was done. Yet Fan still couldn’t help but feel an affinity for this woman, maybe it was the one-piece uniform so much like what Reg and his workmates wore; or her simple, unassuming expression; or that she chewed on a strip of dried ginger, just like Fan’s grandaunt used to do, her breath always spiced and aromatic. Mala also had these wonderfully petite hands like Fan’s, much smaller than it seemed they ought to be given her otherwise normal size, though looking very sturdy as well, like they could manage whatever task or operation that might be necessary.
While they arranged the food on separate platters — this was an informal dinner and so would be served as a buffet — Fan asked if she lived in the house all the time. It was an odd question to pose, but something about Mala seemed hidden to Fan, and she couldn’t help but ask. Mala told her that she lived here at the house twenty days in a row and on the twenty-first she spent the day and night away. The next morning she returned for another twenty before going away for a full day again. That was the schedule for the last seventeen years.
Where do you go?
Outside.
To the open counties?
Mala nodded. She was carefully layering the fruit and berries on the cheesecake and did not stop until she was finished.
You’re going to ask where I stay.
Yes, Fan said.
I will tell you. It’s nothing not to tell. I stay with my family. With my husband and my children.
They must miss you.
We’re accustomed to the schedule.
And apparently, Mala went on to describe, to the money, too. She had no need of any funds when she was working, and what she was paid went very far in the counties, enough that her daughters and her son could attend a tutoring center four days a week and her husband could have a dependable car to drive them there. Naturally, he didn’t have his own job, as he had to take care of and safeguard the children and the house. He was a good man. There was a rough period of adjustment but they made it through. Only once was the house not cleaned and vacuumed and the meals prepared for her day at home, when he was already drunk when she arrived in the morning and asked what happened, and he shouted, You’re not the king! She did not argue with him and went about picking up the toys on the floor and gathering the laundry and washing the dishes when he knelt before her at the kitchen sink and with tears in his eyes begged her for forgiveness. He was so lonely it made him crazy. She told him he was a man and should act that way, and that as long as he was faithful in his heart nothing else mattered. After that he was fine. And her children were fine, too, although she worried that they spent too much time on the handscreens she’d bought them last Lunar New Year, rather than studying. But the truth was where would that studying lead them, especially her son? Because of her work, her daughters, now sixteen and thirteen, would at least have sizable dowries they could offer to suitor families. But her son was eleven years old and disliked his tutors and shirked his studies, and she had little hope he’d do well enough on any tests to have a chance at one of the few corporation jobs. What would he have to do? Could he sell enough of something to make a living in the counties or else with mixed fortune marry someone like her?