Guest Post: Somewhere On Earth

In which Maija Fiedelholtz considers the Hamptons, a secret marriage proposal, three generation of powerful women, and the lure of an unnamed beach

Somewhere, right now—perhaps even on the wave you see above, in Costa Rica—Maija Ariele Fiedelholtz is paddling for a wave. A native of Brooklyn, a product of a very fine private school there, the daughter and granddaughter of powerful women who thrived before her, a faithful surfer, Maija entered my class with an already developed sense of what writing could be and how she planned to deliver.

I think I saw her change a lot in ten weeks.

It’s one thing to have confidence, to know your life is a thing that can make for a good story. It’s quite another to be open to finding a surprising and new way to deliver on that story.

I think Maija found her way, and with this final project, you’ll see a few moments when she employs a particularly light touch.

Maija has a huge personality, a firehose of charm and smarts and instincts. She’ll no doubt go far.

But what makes this new work so distinctive, and what was so fun for me to watch happen, was how she came to embrace a quieter, more introspective, more difficult and harder to express interior. Or at least that’s the way I see it.

Enjoy!

Somewhere On Earth 

By Maija Ariele Fiedelholtz 

I. Birgitta 

I went to the Bay Beach in East Hampton in my grandmother’s 1990 Mercedes-Benz. It had a new car smell even though it wasn’t really a new car anymore by the time I was seven or eight (the new car smell never seemed to go away). Her car had leather seats so tan they were almost orange. Just windy roads and sea grass and afternoon sunshine—that’s what I remember from our rides to the Bay Beach. 

My grandmother (Birgitta) took me there to collect shells as a kid. Going to the Bay Beach was a once in a blue moon occurrence (my mom loves this phrase—“once in a blue moon”—I hear her voice when I write it). The Bay Beach wasn’t the real beach and it was closer to her house. The Bay Beach doesn’t have a name I can remember like the ocean beaches “Atlantic” or “Georgica” or “Indian Wells.” Just Bay Beach—a good enough name in my opinion. At the Bay Beach there were more shells than there were at the real beach. There weren’t any waves to carry the shells away at the Bay Beach. The water at the Bay Beach was nutrient dense since the water didn’t move and the algae would bloom, and therefore, there were many shell-dwelling creatures that lived and died there. 

I was only ever alone with my grandmother when my mom wasn’t there. My mom frequently went on business trips for weeks at a time when I was between the ages of two and, well, even now. I remember hearing the Kooks’ song “Seaside” play one time just as I sat my butt back down on the hot leather car seat at the end of one of our excursions. I watched the seagrass move. I stuck my fingers out the window to feel the air. I watched the skin on the nape of my grandmother’s neck closely. My grandmother’s gold eyes met mine. “Maija, put your hand inside the car, I am going to roll up the windows.” My grandmother put the car in drive. Now I know what the Kooks’ album cover looks like, but I always picture the inside of my grandmother’s car when I hear the song. We gathered the shells we needed and we were on our way back to the house she bought with her pseudo-best-friend lesbian lover in 1999 (we’ll get to that later). We collected many shells: conch shells, purple swirly shells, lady slipper shells, mussels, clams, oysters—all the shells one could find on the East Coast, really. 

One time my grandmother helped me hot-glue some of these shells to a canvas picture frame which I painted with blue oil paint. I never put a picture in it, but I think my grandmother did. It was a beautiful picture frame, and it makes me feel uncomfortable when I think about the fact that I don’t know where it is now. She always told me that oil paints were very nice paints, and that I was lucky to be able to use them. I learned about the different kinds of paintings from my grandmother: self-portraits, abstract self-portraits, landscapes. She taught me how to sew. She taught me how to knit. I felt sad when my mother was away, and my grandmother taught me to get creative. I observed that she was doing it for herself too. 

*** 

I must have been around 10—I can’t quite remember. I was crammed in the back of my uncle Edward’s Honda Odyssey minivan with my cousins amongst the beach chairs and towels. I overheard Edward’s conversation with his wife, Tracy, about my grandmother’s medication while he was parking the car at the real beach. Atlantic. I don’t know where my family was at this point. I was in the backseat of Edward’s minivan with all of his kids. I was the oldest. Why did she need medication? She was healthy. Nothing was wrong with her. My grandmother on my dad’s side of the family was the one who was actually sick. Parkinson’s. Eventually I brought this up in conversation with my mom who explained my grandmother, her mother, was always sad. “She takes medication for it; she has manic depression, Maija.” 

Now I wonder if this has anything to do with the series of traumatic events that is my grandmother’s life. I go over the list of evidence in my mind. She was abused as a child. She immigrated to America in her late teens from the Finnish village of Porvoo. The first in her family. This explains the way she says “Mercedes-Benz” in her signature accent. She went to Harvard. She married a man named George and had two kids, my mother, Liisa (spelled with two i’s) and her full brother, Edward. This man left her when my mom was two years old. She married another man and had another two kids with him. He died of brain cancer when my mom was starting her career and her half-brothers were teenagers. 

Sometime between 2001 (the year I was born) and 2010, my grandmother married a woman named Leslie behind the backs of the entire mom’s side of my family on her living room couch. According to my uncle Isak, they embraced and exchanged rings (we’ll get to him later). Leslie and my grandmother moved to East Hampton together in 1999. I wonder if they moved to East Hampton as some kind of twisted escape. East Hampton is pretty much the perfect place to be inaccessible to almost everybody. I wonder if my grandmother was with Leslie while she was with her second husband, or if she at least had romantic feelings for her during this time. I call Leslie “Nana Leslie” per my mom’s request to honor their partnership. I have never liked how this rolls of my tongue. This is just because I don’t like addressing relatives by their titles (don’t worry I’m not homophobic like my mom’s brothers). Except for my grandmother, I just prefer to use the name. “Uncle Edward” is really just Edward to me. Same with Isak. 

Leslie was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s during the first COVID lockdown in the spring of 2020. When I visited their house in East Hampton for the first time during lockdown, when I saw the two of them together at the house for the last time on the front porch—from a distance with a mask on—Leslie didn’t quite recognize me. She thought I was my younger sister, Ani. She also started laughing because of all of the “little people” who were apparently playing in the patch of forestry in front of the house. My mom later explained that “these deluded visions” were a “part of the Alzheimer's.” I visited Leslie a couple months later at an assisted care facility in New Jersey before returning to LA to live in my first apartment. 18. She thought I was my cousin Samantha. 20. My mom tells me that Leslie does not even recognize my grandmother. 

“They have to sell the place in East Hampton,” my mom explained to me. Before the house became the property of a real estate agency, my sister and I roamed each hallway. I opened each closet, looked in each mirror, shuffled through drawers. My sister and I played some music on the grand piano in the living room and sang a song I can’t remember. I wished I had taught myself to play piano during the times when I would stay at their house. 

When Leslie was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, my parents and my mom’s brothers decided my grandmother and Leslie should move because Leslie needed more help than my traumatized grandmother. While examining my grandmother’s assets in this process, my parents discovered that my grandmother was in tens of thousands of dollars of debt. Apparently, she had been “giving money” to my mother’s half-brothers to combat the “destruction in their lives” resulting from the “death of their father at such a young age.” She had “no money left.” She was a math teacher at an elementary school in New Jersey. 

My mom forced my grandmother to sell the house that was bought with Leslie’s money to pay off her debt. By ‘force’ I mean that my mom had my grandmother’s psychiatrist get behind her in some kind of ploy to convince my grandmother to sign away her power of attorney to my mother. 

But this destruction transcends the debt and my grandmother’s life trauma. 

First off, my mom’s half-brother, Isak, had a manic episode in which he left his dog in a random hotel room somewhere on Long Island and the JEEP he couldn’t afford caught on fire. He was subsequently diagnosed as bipolar—similar to, but not the same, as my grandmother’s manic depression (I don’t know the medical difference between the two, but my mother makes this distinction). Then Isak went on Instagram Live and announced that he was driving to the house in East Hampton to save my grandmother from “Elder Abuse” and the Suffolk County police department got involved. For the record, this also happened during the first COVID lockdown. 

If that wasn’t enough, my mom’s half-brother Aren is a drug addict (and truck driver). He’s been to jail multiple times since he was a teenager. About a month prior to his brother’s manic episode, he was taken into custody because one of his girlfriend’s children ran away from home and then hit Aren in frustration, and Aren hit him back. Aren dates women who don’t have any teeth. He doesn’t believe in science. He’s anti-Semetic. This is probably obvious at this point, but he voted for Trump. My mom converted to Judaism to marry my dad. My immediate family isn’t allowed to see Isak or Aren anymore. 

I imagine this is all incredibly devastating to my grandmother, but I wonder how it compares to the other trauma she has experienced. How do you compare death to abandonment? How do you compare abandonment to Alzheimer’s? How do you compare death to Alzheimer’s? Where does childhood abuse come into the picture? What about leaving a house you’ve lived in for decades? I guess she did that a lot in her life, though. And, where do I come into the picture? How can I absolve my grandmother of her sadness? My mother tells me, “it is not your responsibility.” 

II. Liisa 

My mom is incredibly successful. I find this to be particularly impressive given her life circumstances and the fact that she never graduated college. She is essentially the CEO of ROSS STORES. I feel proud when people say they “love ROSS.” 

Before ROSS, she worked at Ann Taylor/Loft for twenty plus years. The company folded and was bought by Ascena Retail Group. My mother was paid out for her stock options. 

My mom never got home before 9pm when I was a child except on Friday’s when she had a half-day and sometimes got home at 6pm and would eat takeout with my dad in bed. They usually ordered from this Mexican place near Newkirk Plaza, our subway stop in Brooklyn on the BQ line, called Don Burrito. Sometimes my mom would give me a piece of the chicken from her salad or a chip with guacamole. Sometimes she would have my dad order burritos for me and my brother and a quesadilla for my sister for dinner too, on a Friday night. 

My mother is the liaison in every part of her life. 

At work, for the past twenty years she has overseen sourcing and supply chain which means she is the middle-woman between factories and the respective companies she has worked for. She negotiates to get the right fabrics on time for the fall sweater collection and the spring and summer dress collections. She makes spreadsheets. She makes phone-calls. She knows business executives and artists alike. Her Linkedin is a goldmine for an aspiring intern like myself. 

At home, she is the middle-woman between me and my father when we are angry with each other and fail to communicate. My grandmother calls her several times a week to talk about how miserable she is. My mother consoles her. My mother is my grandmother’s therapist. My mom’s brothers call my mother to talk to her about what is going on with their mother. She consoles her brothers. 

When I was in seventh grade my mother moved away from Brooklyn for a year and a half to work in Hong Kong. My parents sat me and my younger brother and sister down at the dining room table and told us that she was going away for the following year. I traced the grooves in the wood of the table. I remember my face felt hot. I pressed my knees up against the wood of the table. 

To an extent, I have come to terms with her decision. Leaving meant an opportunity to advance in her career. So she could make more money to send me and my siblings to fancy private school in Brooklyn and then fancy colleges. I have to “feel grateful for this,” my dad tells me. I shouldn’t “make my mother feel bad for making this decision.” 

Now, I call my mother on the phone at college, and she doesn’t pick up. I send the same text message three times in a row. She doesn’t respond. 

I guess this time I’m the one who left. Occasionally my mom is suddenly present at her convenience. Maybe my grandmother's having a good week. Maybe my mom has a break between work calls. Our conversations of substance feel so memorable that I keep a record of them in my head. 

15. When I bring up the only romantic interest I’ve ever had in my entire life to my mother, she tells me that I “should adjust my expectations” in regards to my friends who are boys, “they’re wired differently.” 16. 17. “You’re making an idea of him up in your head that isn’t real—Miles sees you as a friend.” 18. “Maija, I know he tickled your feet when you were surfing and brought you a bagel one time, but he has a girlfriend.” 19. “Miles is bad news,” she says after I tell her that he’s coming to visit me in LA. “Miles is a waste of your time and energy. Don’t give it to him.” 

20. “There are some people we just can’t speak to, Maija.” I took her advice. 

I wonder if I’ll ever go back on my decision. 

*** 

Sometimes I imagine I’m like Sophie, the daughter in Mamma Mia and my mother is nurturing. No, not nurturing, just present more often. Just there. Just available to talk to me when I want to talk. She would paint my toenails before my wedding day like Meryl Streep does in the movie. People say my mom looks like her. 

She is very pretty. Prettier than Meryl Streep. She has arched eyebrows, blue eyes, high cheekbones, full lips, and long, wavy blonde hair. Whenever any of my friends saw my mother at an after-school event as a kid, which was slightly rare considering she couldn’t attend most of the time, they always commented something along the lines of “your mom is really pretty.” 

I think this is because my mom doesn't carry herself as a mother. She didn’t cut her hair and “become asexual” and “only wear brown” after having kids (these are her words). She wears high heels and tight dresses and sometimes she wears top hats or creepers or a skirt with lots of colors. She wears bikinis in the summertime and on the family vacations she pays for. Her back is covered in tattoos: a koi fish pond at the small of her back transforms into hibiscus flowers which bloom at her shoulders. She lets the cellulite on her butt and thighs jiggle around, and again, in her words, she “doesn’t try to hide.” She’s right, she does stand out. When I see her in a crowd, I am undoubtedly proud she is my mom. 

I often consider getting a tattoo but I don’t know what I would get. I look for my mom’s approval of the things I wear. She delights in being able to buy me clothes I love. I feel similarly proud when I do well on an assignment I have worked particularly hard on, or when I get an interview for an internship I have applied for. 

But when I look at my mom, close-up, or from a distance, I feel different than she is. 

She is two inches shorter than me. Her hips are wide and her boobs are big. My sister resembles my mom in that way. I don’t. You can see my mom in my face but I’m more my brother’s twin than my sister’s. I’m more my father’s daughter than my mother’s. My legs are slim, my arms are long and strong. My face is asymmetrical in my opinion. 

Sometimes I wish I was shorter and had bigger boobs and more of a round feminine shape like my mom and my sister so I could feel closer to them in regards to the way they experience the world in the bodies they have. Being sexualized by the same kind of men. Being shy about how big their breasts are. Not liking sports. 

I don’t feel this way at all. 

Would I look like my mother if I gained 20 pounds? Maybe if I were pregnant my body would adopt a feminine form. I look at my body in the bathroom mirror and contemplate what my life would be like if I looked more like a real woman. I study the five to 10 pounds I gain each winter and how the weight falls on my body. I imagine this is what it would feel like to live inside my mother’s body. 

III. Maija 

A couple weeks ago it was Friday night. Friday night happens every week in college and all the time. Friday night has some kind of big reputation. But this particular Friday night was not the kind of Friday night where you want to be shit-faced with your friends in a room full of strangers and some acquaintances. 

I am curled up on the living room couch in my lavender hoodie which I kind of hate and my go-to comfy harem pants. My toes are shoved underneath the couch cushions. The string of the hoodie is in my mouth. I’m chewing it. My roommate walks in the door with her date. They had just picked up Magnum bars. There are three Magnum bars in each pack. They each had one. There was one left. He offered one to me— “OMG, thank you so much!” Lame. 

I’m chewing it. My other roommate walks in the door with her boyfriend. His name happens to be the same as my forever crush. “Forever crush”—what a phrase. And that’s merely a coincidence—potentially something to write about in the future. 

As they all blabber amongst themselves I remind Miles that he has yet to have gotten me a treat as long as we have known each other. “Take notes Miles.” I point to the Magnum bar. 

I’m fifth-wheeling. 

*** 

I go upstairs to escape, but my roommate and her boyfriend are occupying the space in my roommate’s bed across from me in my room. I am turned away from them but I have a vivid picture of the two of them behind my eyes. She says to her boyfriend in a voice she thought was a whisper: “I love you baby.” I often hear snip-its from their little whisper-world conversations from my bed across the way. Sometimes they talk about how “yummy” their dinner was, or one of them asks the other for a back scratch or tells the other their “tummy hurts.” They always ask each other if they’re “comfy.” 

I’m happy for them, I tell myself. This is what I have to hope for. Things get better. The universe has something great in store for me. I hear that mantra a lot. I’m here. I’m not even three-feet away from you two. Hello. 

*** 

I imagine a future in which I’m suspended in the ocean and it’s late afternoon. I can feel the sun on my cheeks and my long wavy hair crawling into my armpits and down my back. My toes break the surface of the water. Maybe I’m at the Bay Beach. Maybe I’m at the real beach. Maybe I’m at some tropical destination. I’m somewhere on this earth. I close my eyes and place my hands on my belly. My belly is the shape of a balloon. In the water I can finally escape from the added pressure of the unborn child on my organs. As soon as I get into a good floating position, my hair is stuck on the nose piercing I got at 19 when that Backseat Lovers song “Kilby Girl” was my favorite and I was hanging out with the 23-year-old band manager who wanted nothing to do with me. Shit. I can’t untangle the hair without losing my balance and twisting underneath the water. I look up. My eyes smile. A pair of hands reaches down and untangles my hair so I don’t have to break my float.