by Alina Zollfrank

She usually shuffled around her living room, my grandma. One hand on the massive eating table, the other out in space as if to invite balance. Balance, and the pain-free gait from another life. Oma slow-motioned – no, swam, really – through her own dimension and would get there when she would. Often, she’d pause at the table’s corner, fingers grasping the plastically clothed edge, tips stroking raised patterns while she took a break from her not-so-merry march and regaled me with a tale she’d heard on the radio. The real challenge, then, would be the chasm between table and credenza, when, for an eternity, her hands rippled in open air, and she teetered either toward the striped armchair or successfully clasped the sideboard with both hands before willing the next step.

Covered by her polyester full-length apron, the one with large pink-purple flower motifs, she tried to hide the pain sounds that escaped her whenever someone was in ear shot. She had given up on stockings, socks, and shoes a long time ago; her torso seemed disconnected from anything involving her waist and below. On a visit to the home country, my spouse sat by her feet on the brown-on-brown patterned carpet and massaged her calloused toes while her open shin wounds wept copiously in shades of eggplant and yolk. I wanted to drape a damask tablecloth over them, wrap her whole body up in soft cotton, and in cotton candy, forever.

***

She ambled around the sterile table, my mom. The hottest September on record in Thuringia, and my grandfather had dropped my mom off at the hospital in his Škoda, a geranium box with four wheels constructed of East-bloc pride and joy. Thanks to her trademark strategic planning, or maybe thanks to serendipity, Mama’s parents popped by when I was about to make my entrance into the world. Their car ride spared her a late-night waddle to the bus stop and a wait in the wee Monday hours for something or someone to deliver her to the Saalfeld hospital for the delivery of me.

Now, she and three other melon-swollen women are shuffling around the rectangular table in a tiled room, white with blue accent lines, I imagine, and all she can think about is that the sun is rising and she needs a good breakfast. Just ten hours prior, she’d swum in a local lake to beat the heat; I, ensconced in my/her fluid; she ensconced in lukewarm lake fluid, we had floated together. At this moment, she places one foot in front of the other, skates her fingertips around the perimeter of the table and feels excitement, or so I’m told. I don’t know if there is pain or fear, gore or tears.

About my birth she tells little – just one big social “Kreissaal” experience – such a strange word for a non-round medical parlor, as if all the pregnant women arranged on hospital beds in a communal circle mimic the shape of a castle’s dancing hall, sans dance, plus groans. My mom, parked in the hallway after my rapid birth – induced, without a doubt, she feels, by her vigorous march around said table – demands food and receives two Brötchen halves — a split white roll slathered in butter and strawberry jam. Until this day she insists she deserved this for her excellent labor and rejoices in the memory of the satisfaction of this delicious meal.

I am somewhere in another room, wrapped in the hospital-ordained baby uniform in my lone crib, flailing about, clawing at great nothingness. At very regular intervals, I, and all the other newcomers to the planet, visit our respective maternal vessels for a predetermined length of nursing time. All my life, I wish someone would wrap me like a bread loaf to keep my arms from losing themselves and then tuck me into a space not so bright, not so loud, and rub my feet.

***

At times, I hold on to sturdy edges to keep myself upright. Other times, I tell stories that spring from things my loved ones have said or done, have had said unto them or had done unto themselves.  Whether my feet, in comfy walking shoes, pound neighborhood pavement or sigh gratefully on soft wooden trails, whether I’ve got my ankles propped up as I type furiously, or whether I am cross-legged on a meditation pillow and breathe to slow a spinning world and spinning words, I carry the movement of other women within me.

Ordinary, maybe, for a woman to grapple with pain every day for half of her life and yet keep lighting up with fireworks when family comes to visit. To tell stories and serve cake with a scoop of compassion. Ordinary, maybe, for her to be cooped up in an apartment up two flights of stairs and only participate in communal living from her solitary window perch, to not make it to the outside unless carried by others’ hands. To live the burden not of self but of inaccessibility, of a hostile environment of sharp steps and rolled-up carpet rims, of things that fall and infest and weep.

Ordinary, too, for another woman to paint childbirth through the veil of comfort and predictability, systemic care and responsibility. To relinquish instinct at the behest of society and sketch cherished memories based on the smallest of sensory things. And possibly ordinary for me to sense a prickling urge to commemorate these beings with flighty words, to not minimize their existence. Neither to sugarcoat or embellish but to accurately write the facts, and the flaws, and the dignity with which each one lived her days — the endless, boring ones, and the exquisite, monumental ones, too. I’m not putting up stones for either. I’m putting down words and hope that someone, sometime, will connect my steps to theirs.

***

Last night, we walked through the wet evening, not far from the salty sound, my firstborn and I. Holiday lights were still strung up. We existed in that odd liminal chapter between old and new, hopeful and hopeless. My child, once a she, now a they, in a chatty mood. Our steps in sync, we exhaled moisture and inhaled chimney smoke and spoke of the state of the world and the state of my patched, re-cracked heart and the state of our family’s, and all families’ future. We walked. We talked. And we stumbled upon a mansion’s flawed holiday display. Three metallic white deer, blazing lights, red-ribboned necks. A tall one mid-trot, plus a fawn gazing up at her. And a large one gone to ground. Just quiet right there on its side, still lit, but stiff hoofs pointed at nowhere, gaze pointed beyond. Beyond to something, maybe.

It stopped me in my walking tracks, this sight, and after thinking for a short while, I said to my kiddo and the ghost women, or maybe I just imagined saying this: At times, we are wrapped up in pain or aloneness. Our own bodies. The weight of expectations. The overwhelm of life. We might even hit the ground or let go of supportive edges. But we don’t walk alone. We keep on walking and we hold on when we need to because we can choose when we go, and where, and how, and who gets to come with us.

Such women walked before, each in their own way, their own time. Decades of women, shuffling, marching, bouncing, telling tales, more or less accurately, and experiencing their distinctive moments, more or less acutely. They ran and trod in places that were friendly and hostile, equal and not, respectful of their bodies and choices, and not. And they still run and tread and march. They still run and tread and march.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash