Samba Woman
by Victoria Sterling
April 11, 2018
Santana plays through the apartment rooms, the space finally mine for a couple hours. I had been folding clothes just the way Mom taught me. Halve the article of clothing vertically first, then halve again to cut the length. Fold sleeves under the body, or tuck in drawstrings, collars or straps. My hands know the protocol. The fabrics now lay uniformly across my bed, sorted by category. With an army green plaid shirt between my fingertips, the music was about a minute into “Samba Pa Ti.” My hips and shoulders moved with the ease of my hands at work. Each second was sobering.
How much fun I was having shocked me at first. I quickly thought, should I feel badly for enjoying domestic chores? My mind wandered through history, trying to imagine all the women who had been unable to escape their reality of the household, only doing so in the small moments they could savor. I felt connected to a soft happiness that can be found along with suffering.
The image in my mind, synchronized with my body moving, shifted away from being placed in other women’s shoes across time and into my own. My imagination couldn’t breach the experience of all women. I just can’t say how they felt.
Guitar rifts tamper through me. Maybe to enjoy life for yourself implies it’s for nobody else. Me, a single woman in her twenties dressed in head-to-toe black, sways with a distinct flash of independence.
I recognized I had this moment to myself, which passed with twenty seconds of the guitar. Maybe this narrative, either Santana’s or the memory they conjure, is devoted to a misplaced, unifying past — a record siren symbolizing the black magic woman within. Maybe this narrative is my creation, like a hedonism expressed with minimal affect, and that’s not to be exploited. Maybe this is how my mother feels.
Mom nearly rushes to fold the laundry, cooly working the mechanics of seam lines and crisp folds while looking serene. Her skill makes a bottom sheet neatly square. To avoid my mistakes as I child, I was tasked with matching socks. But I always imagined her and Grandma doing the same, perhaps folding Grandpa’s green and blue plaid shirts together. My grandmother worked in a seam-stressing factory in Scranton, PA around the forties and fifties, and my great-grandmother worked as a hotel maid after immigrating from Poland in the early twentieth century but I never met Babcia.
Every time I trifold a bath towel or tuck the top sheet as a tailored corner of the bed, I wonder whose hands are really doing the work. These feelings, the flooding nostalgia of many generations, have a distinct Kalinowski flair. As my body sways, and I finally let go, it feels like I do belong to all women. My mind, for better or worse, seems like a household entirely of its own, at least in the way it rifts.