International Women’s Day Three Ways

by Blossom Gordana Champlain

I am a limp mass of fever and chest pain and milk, able to feed my fat baby but not to stand. I am on the bus from Glasgow to St Andrews to meet the colleague who invited me to keynote. I am at the bus stop at 5:30 a.m., the morning of the third day after they told us Grandmother can no longer swallow.

I told him last night it’s hard to breathe my chest hurts I have a fever so he called the midwife who said you have to let it run its course it’s natural I’ll come in the morning. In the morning I will give the annual lecture on the occasion of International Women’s Day. The bus will drop me off on a square named after a man who built a windmill and predicted the weather but did not predict that I would ever be there crossing his square to walk over the bridge and face the snide glass doors of the nursing home.

In the morning the man who was never really mine says are you OK can I go to work and then goes to work. In the morning I will put on this dress to disguise the woman who has burnt out put on weight lost friends done things wrong and tried to get out so she looks like a woman who gives lectures in wood-panelled rooms as a matter of course. When the staff just starting their morning shift ask me what I want I say we are keeping watch and climb the stairs to the room where Grandmother is going to die today.

***

I am alone on a mattress on the floor with the baby beside me, blithe and hungry, twelve pounds of need and life. I am alone in a hotel room reading what I have written out loud to check for rhythm and simplicity, enough space to breathe and sufficient time. I am alone in the stinking nursing home room where I have spent many hours through the winter, plying my mother-in-law with tangerines and water and clean clothes and clean bedding and clean surfaces and steady streams of firm matronly chatter.

My skull holds only heat and fear like deep water while I squint at the long empty day crouched staring and purring at the side of the bed and say to myself you can still breathe, you still have milk, hold very still so the deep water does not spill over, so the empty day does not pounce. I have made dozens of lists and charts, some for my diffuse son, some for my tenacious self, trying to figure it out, to get something done, to arrive here on the 8^th of March well-prepared and appropriately dressed. For weeks Grandmother would not settle, careening around with her walker saying again and again, we need to sort this out, busting her door down, sneaking into other patients’ rooms in the night to disarrange their things or hold hands.

My hollow screaming chest says you are almost gone now, you will burn and stifle, soon you will sigh down from ember to ash. My host is a scholar of Roman law and nobody’s fool, I wish to sit at her feet and find out the truth, putting out feelers and sending up flares: you can tell me. Once Grandmother came back when I played her beloved Wagner, calling the nurse monsier and congratulating him on his beautiful curly hair, would you like to touch it he says, no that won’t change anything, she says, just as she said when I asked if she would like to have a bra on.

In the hospital the nurses scolded me because my milk was not coming in so I drank gallons of fennel tea only to wake the next morning with the winter-bright sun besieging the room and my breasts the new conquerers of a milky bed. I cross the tiny Scottish town in my little black Oxfords, knowing better than to wear heels where there are cobblestones. When Grandmother could no longer walk I took her out around the neighborhood in her wheelchair, bundled up from head to toe with a blanket around her legs.

The midwife has made house visits to say esoteric things to me and weigh the baby and tell me to put cabbage leaves down my bra if I get mastitis again. In the lecture hall there are oil paintings of important men and a rising tide of rowdy women, hungry for testimony. When Grandmother stopped getting out of bed I pulled a chair alongside, receiving admonitions and exhortations from her as from a dying saint, delivering the information she requested in return: tell me clearly what is essential right now, tell me what is going to happen, tell me how it will be.

When they let me out of the clinic I spend weeks bleeding and making milk by the gallon and minding my stitches and fending off in-laws who come anyway, my loud Croatian mother-in-law looming over my sleeping son and his turtle-face to announce that he looks exactly like her father. I barely need my notes, I soon see pupils dilating and chins all pointing my way, hunger unfurling like blood in the water. I move my chair to the other side of the bed when they turn Grandmother towards the long windows where the thin sun is reaching in.

I am buried too deep in ember and ash to find my feet, to face the fool midwife standing in the street jabbing at my doorbell. I am bombarded with joy and greed in the Q&A, willingly egged on. I stroke Grandmother’s waxy skeleton arms and try to say true things without crying. I say you have walked a long road.

***

The midwife calls the ancient landline, shoving my mind into a ditch where I am also five years old, my ankle is broken and I am alone in the house and the phone is ringing and I cannot get to it, neither to tell some unknown listener what has happened nor to restore the silence of the abandoned room where I have been the sole witness to a precious patch of sunlight sailing across the floor.

Grad students sidle up to me and say thank you for saying this, we saw it but we are always asked not to see it, we would get in trouble. Grandmother is still breathing, pausing, breathing a little more, no longer a human color nor conscious, her dying face in retreat showing the face of my newborn son.

I am a five-year-old alone in a house with a broken ankle, watching the bold sunlight love the floor in front of me, sweeping across it slow and hot, the tender filtering dust asking me questions. I am the guest who has just given a killer lecture, I am paraded about and congratulated. I am attending a long nothingness, only the sunlight everywhere around us, an inexplicable foreign girl now half-old, watching over an old woman’s skin and bones, the final remainder of the kindergartener who fled here from the war with her mother long ago.

I am stifled and burning, watching my baby sleep, asking my feet to find the floor and my spine to fly its flag. I step out of the reception for a moment to look out over the sea, waiting for the fading sunlight to ask its question so I can say yes, yes I remember. When the quiet soaks through the room I am keening, rocking, bursting with tears.

 

Blossom Gordana Champlain is a scholar-writer living in Oslo.