Women Led by Love and Steel
I come from a line of women made of half love and half steel, though at first glance you wouldn’t know the steel is there. We’re trick mirrors, the women in this family. You don’t know what you’re seeing.
My mother, sister, and I were made to recognize this piece of ourselves in each other — the steel that hides underneath our unassuming exteriors and connects us, like an invisible thread — and it’s the thing we recognize in others, too.
We’re tapestries woven together with threads from all the women who have come into our lives and the women who have been there all along. The women made with love and a little steel.
1.
Maja signs her name at the bottom of the postcard and flips it over to look at the front.
The Birthday, Chagall. Two lovers fly, dreamlike, stretching toward each other for a kiss. Whether they are floating toward the window to fly away together or dancing mid-air around the room she doesn’t know, and the painting has always been her favorite for that reason. There’s joy in the image, whimsy and playfulness in the way the lovers lift off the ground, in their bodies fantastically twisting toward one another, in the bright red of the carpeted room and the popping bouquet of flowers in the woman’s hands. But to Maja, there’s melancholy also. The woman wears a flowing black dress in contrast to her pale skin; she looks ghostly, an apparition, as if the artist knew he wouldn’t have her forever. She floats upward and he twists unnaturally to reach her, though he doesn’t have arms to hold her with. Maybe that’s the beautiful thing — neither of them are holding the other down, but drifting up and away together.
She could look at the painting for hours and still wonder about the two lovers. Sometimes she feels their euphoria and love, and other times she feels only a bittersweet nostalgia.
The postcard itself she purchased from Chagall’s museum in Vitebsk. What could it have felt like, she wondered as she took in his colorful and dreamlike work, to have to flee with your wife and child and watch in horror as your hometown is destroyed and you cannot return? To watch as the poets, the artists, the writers, the musicians, the doctors are hunted down?
“May this be one of the most amazing, significant and important years of your life,” she had written on the postcard. She thinks about the home she carries with her in her heart, the one she left in Poland years ago to come to the bustling east coast of the U.S., and feels a kinship with the artist. A mixture of nostalgia, loss, love, melancholy, and joy.
2.
María knows Miguel doesn’t treat her right. She knows.
She blames herself for some of his anger — her words are quick and dancing like the Spanish she speaks, coming out rapid-fire in that brutally honest way of hers. Enough, he says during an argument, but she has more to say and doesn’t stop.
He’ll disappear for weeks at a time. She calls anyway, knowing he won’t answer, feeling lead in her belly each time he doesn’t.
Once, when he was drunk and they were fighting, he grabbed her chin roughly.
He doesn’t treat her right, she knows that, but she can’t quit him. Usually she leaves men within weeks, months at the most. She made her way to the U.S. from Mexico City in her early twenties and lived here for years on her own until her sister finally followed, so she knows what it’s like to be alone. Living in a new country with foreign sounds and words buzzing around her head, asking questions she can’t answer, sending her documents she can’t read. Unable to go home to the people who know and love her, the foods that taste right, the smells that wrap her in warmth and comfort.
When people tell her she shouldn’t be with Miguel, she answers that sometimes you need love. Warm arms around you. Someone to call or see when it’s dark and cold outside.
Her friends and her sister don’t agree, but it’s not their life, is it?
When she needs the morning after pill, Miguel doesn’t come with her. Unsure where to go and how to navigate buying it in a second language, she texts her English tutor, a woman half her age who laughs a lot and has become something like a friend. The tutor doesn’t mind talking about life throughout their sessions, and she’s open-minded and kind.
The younger woman texts back quickly. Tells María where to get the pill, how much it will cost, the side effects.
Ask for it at the pharmacy.
María pauses, suddenly panicked.
I have to ask in English? How?
I can get it for you, María. I can meet you somewhere with it in an hour.
No, no, no.
No, thank you. I appreciate it though. How do I take it? With food or without?
She gets it herself from CVS while saying as little as possible to the pharmacist and takes it with water in her car. A little pill on her tongue, cold water from a bottle filling her mouth, swallow, done. Gone.
She sits quietly for a few minutes with the engine off. Leaves are curled and brown on the streets, racing away from the bitter wind. Strangely enough, she loves winter. It feels like permission to stay in and rest, to move slowly, to scale back to the simplest of joys like good food and smiles.
At home she finds her sister cooking in the kitchen and her niece at the table bent over homework. Sunlight streams in through the windows, lighting little particles of dust dancing in the air, and the house is warm and smells of chili and cinnamon.
She curls up on a twin-sized bed under her niece’s pink sheets after dinner to help with her homework. María and the little girl speak to each other in a mixture of Spanish and English, dancing between languages, and the moment is one of those precious and rare ones when María doesn’t feel like she’s living between two worlds. Instead of feeling untethered, unmoored, longing for Mexico and a life she left behind, she feels herself here. Firmly planted. Weighted to the ground by this home that smells of spice and comfort, the food that tastes right, her niece’s laughter, and by love from the people that know her.
3.
It’s a Saturday night in Brooklyn and Jaclyn is up late again, her face bathed in the blue light of a screen.
She’s hunched over, biting at a ragged fingernail, cold forgotten coffee sitting next to her on the desk as she re-reads the same passage for the fourth time. The word choice, the grammar, the punctuation — it all has to be right.
The stories poured in this time. Women from all over the world sent her their words— essays and poems and shorts — about motherhood, selfhood, childhood trauma, mortality, all filled to the brim with vulnerability and courage and love and grief and hope.
This is the first year she can afford to make print copies of the magazine, and she’s been pulling all-nighters for the better part of a week to make sure everything is perfect. Which story should be the opening? Which should close? Should she stagger poetry throughout to break up the essays? How many times has she looked over the grammar and punctuation and sentence structure in each of the 54 pieces, and asked the writers to check their work even once more?
She leans back in the chair and stretches her arms overhead. A light rain taps at her apartment window. The story she’s editing is a sweeping essay written by a young woman grappling with her own mortality in the face of her grandmother’s diagnosis. The author muses about what we all might do if we weren’t faced with a constant “running out of time” narrative — would we wander slowly through forests and take in the birds, the trees; would we paint more, luxuriate more, hurry less?
But then there’s the disorienting thought of eternity, and how an endless, unfathomable amount of time would affect the way we experience life. Moments are precious because everything is fleeting, fragile, uncertain.
The essay makes Jaclyn feel strange. She thought about death often at a young age and vowed not to waste time, which now seems sweetly naive. Of course she ended up wasting time — hell, if not a single person purchases this magazine, all these sleepless nights could be considered wasted time. She could have been out dancing instead, feeling the music and freedom in her body, meeting someone for the night, making memories with new friends.
The rain taps gently and she leans over to open the window. Cars glide across the streets and a siren wails faintly somewhere. The night smells wet and clean and she keeps her face near the window for a moment to feel the cool air against her skin.
The young woman’s words lay on the screen like a river. They flow and bend and wander. Jaclyn’s eyes run over them and scattered fragments of phrases and words conjure images in her mind, telling pieces of a story just as gorgeous as the whole. Purple flowers. Sand in an hourglass. Dancing bodies, strong and broken and beautiful. Coffee cups with silver handles. A yellow house filled with memory. All these thoughts and memories that belong to someone else were sent to her to read, to feel, to share.
Jaclyn tucks her legs up to sit cross-legged on the chair, breathes in the fresh air from her open window. She has a few paragraphs left to edit on this essay before she sleeps.
4.
A woman sits at the edge of a bed, lacing up her boots. It’s already hot in central Kenya and early morning fingers of light stretch from a hazy red sun into the small room.
It touches everything, the light. A pinkish-gold hue makes the leaves and water shimmer outside, catches the dust dancing in the air.
The woman listens to a symphony of birds and insects and other creatures of the savannah as she gets ready. She isn’t religious but she sees what some might call the face of God here — in the glittering sunlight, in the animals, in the wild morning full of heat and life. That sense of consciousness and unity among all living things.
She slips outside with just a small pack strapped to her back. A mud-splattered vehicle and guide are waiting, ready to take her to the plains. Zebra herds will be out there, and gazelle, watchful for predators hiding in the tall grasses. She’ll watch the sky for vultures, knowing they mark where a pride of lions sleep off the night’s meal.
She checks her phone once and notices an email that found its way through spotty signal into her inbox. It’s from a young woman on the other side of the world, asking for advice on getting to East Africa to explore the wildness.
Logistics would be the first thing — it’s more difficult than most people estimate to get around such a vast continent.
I’ll tell her she needs at least two to three weeks in East Africa if she can swing it, the woman thinks, otherwise she might end up terribly disappointed to not have enough time for that last game drive, or a last visit to see the baby elephants, or any of the other myriad of gorgeous experiences this place has to offer. Sometimes it’s best to fully immerse ourselves without cramming everything in.
Next would be guides — the people who you can trust to get you close to the wild while keeping you safe.
I’ll introduce her to the operators I’ve worked with. They’ll take her to explore parts unknown and bring her home breathless and vowing to return, all the while handling the questions and forms and paperwork that can be daunting to first-timers.
She thinks about what else she can tell the young woman. Her life changed course the day she decided to come here, and she would do it all over again in a heartbeat. This place reminded her how beautiful it is to be alive.
She should know this is something that will change her forever, in the best possible sense. That’s something not easily explained.
She zips the phone back into her pack, vowing to respond this evening. The wild and rugged Masaai Mara waits.
5.
Nana is driving on a bright spring day, the sky painted with wisps of white clouds as if a flick of the wrist sent them feathering across the deep blue.
At sixty, she’s still slight and young-looking with curly black hair and green-gray eyes. Her mother, who grew up during the ’20s and whose husband died when she was only in her forties, was nicknamed Hot Rod Katie for a job she took driving cars off the assembly line. Made with the same fire and appetite for life, Nana took a chance on love and followed the road west with her husband all the way to the sunny blue skies of California, back to the hustle of the east coast and Boston, and then down to the slow, easy beaches of Florida. Here she watches the sunset and walks along the sand collecting seashells. She makes enough chicken tacos to feed everyone in their rental complex for lunch, and, after spending all morning in a bright kitchen, enjoys herself with a cold beer and new friends for company.
Nana is driving on a bright spring day with her two granddaughters in the backseat, the sky painted with wisps of white clouds, and as they glide across the road in her silver Lincoln Town Car she slides a tape into the cassette player. Enya. She loves Enya and the light, ethereal feel of her music, and she sings along while driving up and over a bridge, crossing over cars on the highway below. The world opens up and she can see the sweeping, deep blue of the water and white crests marking its wildness.
She looks in the rearview, dark sunglasses covering her eyes, and a small smile plays at the corner of her mouth when she sees her curly-haired granddaughter looking out the window with a look of awe on her face as the ocean comes into view and the music soars.
6.
The three of them sit by the water, side by side. Summer’s shimmering heat settles into hazy tranquility in the evening, all dusky pink and indigo, and the chirping of crickets saturates the space around the women — mother and daughters— as they quietly look up at the sky, at the water, at their feet sending ripples across the surface.
The sisters are home for a few precious days, here in this place cocooned by the cool green of trees and grass, and by love. It hasn’t always been this way, the three of them sitting comfortably side by side. Not all the memories in that house are good ones.
The youngest turns to look at her older sister. Sometimes there’s a distance between them that feels tangible, crouching in spaces they can’t close and silences they can’t fill. But looking at her sister now, watching her kick at the water with her feet and look up at the sky with a small, happy smile on her face, she feels like the years have peeled away and she can see, so clearly, the beautiful person that has been more than a best friend to her for the entirety of her life. She sees her sister as both the child she grew up with and the woman she is now. Innocent, protective, carefree, doubtful, brave, a little afraid, full of love. Always has she been full of love.
Already well into their thirties now, it has taken both of them a long time to see that the best parts of themselves come from their mother. The same eyes, the same laugh, the same smile, the same full heart. The same resilience.
She taught them, consciously or unconsciously, that trusting in themselves is the most beautiful and necessary thing they can do. That they must listen to the whispers of intuition that call them and be willing to cast off, to step into the abyss, to walk through the dark and the unknown with only the guiding light of their own faith and trust that on the other side are the women they are meant to become. That usually there is no feeling ‘ready,’ but they should do the thing anyway, and, even after the darkest and most difficult moments, they will find themselves emerge from the ruins standing on their own two feet with more than they ever thought was possible. More love, more faith, more hope, more depth, more strength. Her charge to them was this: trust yourself, the woman that you are and the woman you want to become, and that trust will set you free.
She sits between them on this summer evening filled with twinkling light, always the center, the rock, the warmth that pulls them in and steadies them no matter where they go or how they change, a reminder of where they came from and who they are. When they let themselves be led by that core of love and steel, let it carry them like a river, along the way they are drawn to other women full of the same light.