Wrapping Up My Grandmother
by Maria Speyer
When my grandmother died, I thought she would stop stirring. I thought she would shrink to a manageable size and let herself be packed away into the cold storage of history. But I still haven’t managed to wrap her up, even though she died decades ago. My grandmother resists like one of those odd shapes that paper doesn’t fold around neatly. She is still unmanageable, defiant, and just too big to contain.
I am six or seven years old, and my grandmother towers behind me in a supermarket line in an unfamiliar part of Copenhagen. It’s sometime around 1980. We’ve driven across town, and now I am clutching two bags of sugar. Sugar is on special today with a limit of two kilos per customer. My sisters have also been recruited and are somewhere in the line, but no one speaks or looks at the others. We each hold our two bags.
The bags are smooth and heavy, and they keep slipping in my arms. I’m staring at a little gap at the top of one of them, where the paper threatens to come undone. A few granules have already escaped. I pull the bags tightly towards me, because if I let go, the sugar will surely spill out everywhere. My grandmother’s hand straightens my shoulder and moves me forward.
A ten kroner note is wedged between my fingers, and the lady on the note is looking up at me with gently reproachful eyes. ‘You are spoilt,’ the eyes say. ‘You will never understand how we had to fight.’
My grandmother’s hand steers me to the till now, and I prop the bags up on the counter with just a little gush of sugar drizzling out. ‘How many have you got?’ the man asks. My grandmother interrupts my silence and says, ‘She has two. They all have two.’ The man says nothing and punches in the numbers.
Of course, it never occurs to me or anyone in that line of sullen grand-daughters, that our grandmother’s hand wasn’t always so forceful, or that she wasn’t always so defiant or so big. But in 1918 my grandmother was four years old, and that is when the flu killed her mother (it killed so many). Her family came undone and spilled out everywhere. My grandmother was sent to live with relatives in Aarhus, where she stayed until that city couldn’t contain her anymore.
I don’t ask her why we need so much sugar, but I know this sugar is not an indulgence; it is a necessity. It might save us a few kroner, but more than that – it might save us all. My grandmother will build fortifications with this sugar. Next week she will stack cartons of milk on special, and packets of flour the week after that. I don’t ask who or what we are fighting, because the reproachful eyes are right, of course – I will never understand. I might be enlisted in her supermarket army, but I’m a feeble soldier. I’ll never be as strong as she is and will never be able to contain her or stop her stirring or reduce her to a manageable size.
But I do wish I could wrap her up. I wouldn’t wrap her up in paper, though, and I wouldn’t put her into cold storage. I would wrap her up in a blanket, my grandmother, the four-year-old, and I would do my best to comfort her, and I would try to keep her warm.
Story and artwork © Maria Speyer, 2020