Andra Emilia Fenton

Motherlands

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2022: VOL. 37.

La Güera

Your grandmother was unashamed to admit what she wanted: a handsome man, a rich man. In her life, she had both. But ultimately, she died surrounded by her children with no handsome husband in sight, and her paper-thin body was taken away in a modest coffin and made into ash at the end of a dirt road.

Making your own money and cultivating whatever physical beauty you might be able to drum up in yourself became your goals. Preferable goals, because they hinged more on your ability than your hope. And yet, you still envy her for thinking she could have anything she wanted. What could possibly be more powerful than that?

Grandma Jean

Your grandmother, Jean, had seven kids and a millionaire husband, Don. Your grandparents were not always rich though. They had both grown up poor, on farms in southern Minnesota.

Until her death, Jean cut coupons every day on the plastic tablecloth of her dining room table. Sometimes, for Christmas, she gave you clothes with missing buttons. It would take years for you to understand that someone had owned them before you had.

She was almost always at home, raising all those kids, while your grandfather was out making more of what she believed they didn’t need. When she died, you worried that your grandfather would not survive without her. Had he ever cooked a meal, washed a dish, turned the dial on the old dryer in the basement?

For many years, Don wanted to buy a mansion that was down the street from their house. Jean had forbidden it. Oh, Don, what do you need a house like that for? Well, I’m not gonna clean it.

So, when Jean died, he went ahead and bought it.

In those days, the mansion was your grandfather’s biggest joy, going there, talking to the workers, seeing the progress from the previous day. There was a contractor in charge of the renovation, and your grandfather spent most days with him getting even the smallest detail right. New finishes, walls torn down and built up elsewhere, a deck replaced, new cabinets installed, the windows made larger so that there could be more light, so more of the lake could come in through the glass.

Then, there was a pandemic. A nurse lived across the street from the mansion; she was married to the contractor. When she got the virus, he got it too and brought it to the mansion and it took your grandfather’s life.

Maybe Jean was right, he shouldn’t have bought that house. And yet, you remember him so clearly there, walking through its hallways with a measuring tape in hand. And a year later, shuffling along the polished floors on his new walker. All the while, smiling from ear to ear.

You

You work at a bank, you’re something like a psychologist for how people use money. You like learning about how brains work, and you need money, and yet you know nothing about how people behave when it comes to the heart.

You have found no man. You use the money you make at the bank to freeze your eggs. You wonder whether it would be more sensible to quit, go outside, and just have a man put a baby inside you. But what you want is not the baby, but the man, and the possibility of a family, your family.

You think you should edit the earlier sentence to say you have found no man, yet. You wonder if you have not yet found him because, if you had, you wouldn’t know what to do with him. Primarily, because you need so much space and time alone and you might need these even more if when the man arrives.

You spend Valentine’s day with your lover; he doesn’t mention it’s that day because he is a lover and not your man. Another man who would like to be your man brings you orchids in a bed of two dozen roses a few days later. You want your lover to be more like the orchid-rose man and vice versa. (Are you the problem?) You want an excuse to start looking for a new apartment, to not freeze your eggs. To live through your body more than through your brain that studies money in order to make money but spends all day thinking about your heart.

When you find your man, you will need a large apartment or maybe even a house (think big), because if he is the right man, there will be three bodies. So many bodies, where will you possibly go to get away?

You wish you thought you could have anything you wanted. You wish you had seven kids and a husband to blame. And yet, you’re alive. What could possibly be more powerful than that?