Traveling with Pomegranates (17 page)

This is the moment when I realize I’ve been hating myself for a long time.

I cannot hold back anymore. I drop my head on the table and cry. I feel Mom’s hand on the back of my head and I cry harder.

It is whole minutes before I can stop. I use the napkin to wipe my nose. The waitstaff is having a whispered conversation that I can only imagine:
Crazy girl on deck. Call the ship’s doctor
. Mom scoots forward in her chair.
Now she knows
.

“Ann, listen to me. I understand how the rejection letter snow-balled into a rejection of yourself and how depressed you became. It’s hard to feel like you deserve anything when that happens. But all those things you love about Athena that you found in yourself before—they’re still in you. I promise. They just seem lost to you right now. Okay?”

I nod. I know Mom wants to say the right thing to me. I can see how hard she’s trying. Going slowly, measuring her words, her eyes brimming. I don’t know if those things I found in Athena are still in me, but it does help to think she believes it. I want to tell her she doesn’t have to say anything, that her hearing all this is what matters. But then she says, “You deserve to love yourself.” And it hits me suddenly how true that is.

“I love my girl,” she says.

“I love you, too.”

Standing in front of the elevators on our way back to the room, Mom pushes the up button. Beside the doors is an arrangement of lilies, their aroma maple-syrup sweet. I sink my face into it. Inside the elevator, we watch the floor numbers light up, stopping once to let on a ship employee pulling a cart of wineglasses. He glances at me with the slightest upturn of his lips, then looks at his feet for the rest of the ride.

In the cabin, I sit on the edge of the bed and take off my sandals. When I look around, Mom is staring at me with a look of perplexity.

“
What?
” I ask.

“Is that chocolate on your face?”

I run to the mirror.

My face is lined like a vampire—amber-brown streaks under my nose and around my mouth.
What is on me?
“I’ve been walking around the ship like this!”

In the mirror, I see Mom behind me, bent over at the waist, laughing. It becomes the moment I know I don’t have to protect her from my feelings, that I can tell her the worst things and the world will not end.

Suddenly I remember the lilies. “It’s pollen!” Now
I’m
bent over, laughing.

I scrub at the stains. “It’s not coming off!”

“Use my astringent,” Mom says, but she can hardly get the words out.

Our reaction is worse than when we started the cat-feeding frenzy in the Plaka, and it’s probably as much from the catharsis of our talk as it is from my face.

“Did you see the way the guy looked at me in the elevator?” I cry. “Oh my god, how many people did we pass on the way to our room?”

“I don’t know,” Mom says. “About a hundred.”

Before dinner we pass through the photo gallery to look for the picture the ship photographer took of us at dinner the night before.

Rows and rows of photos are arranged on the walls. We each take a side of the room and search. Mom spots it.

In the photo, we are sitting in the dimly lit dining room, small yellow chandelier bulbs blurred in the background and a tall window behind us splattered with light from the camera flash. We are shoulder to shoulder, smiling, and for the first time I see how true it is. Our faces are remarkably alike.

The clerk drops the photo into a transparent bag and hands it to us. “You share the same face,” he says, and looking at me, adds, “But you have, how do you say . . .”

“Freckles,” I answer.

Mom and I head for the double glass doors that lead outside to the Apollo deck. The sun is setting, the crisp light softening.

We rest our elbows on the rail and stare at the sea until I taste salt on my lips. As we stand there, the horizon turns blue, then violet. My ribs don’t feel like a vise the way they have for most of the trip. I’ve admitted the worst to myself and to my mother: I don’t feel worthy of blessings. I’m depressed. I’m lost. I don’t know what to do with my life. Big, bleak issues I never thought I’d deal with.

We decide we’ll do one lap around the deck before dinner, which should walk off about twenty of the five hundred cookie calories I ate earlier. Near the front of the ship, people have gathered along the rail and are pointing at the water. Dolphins, a hundred of them at least, are leaping and diving along the prow. They skim the surface like silver zippers, slicing open the water. Their breaths spew as loud as the roar of a fountain.

I don’t know why, but I tear up. I press my hands to my eyes to keep the tears in. The dolphins swim beside the ship for several minutes, then turn out to sea. I watch till I can’t see them anymore.

Staring at the swells of water, I’m able to tell myself: I will not go to graduate school. There will be no path that leads me back to Greece. These things are gone. But maybe there will still be something else out there. Something I can give my whole heart to.

Today—February 23, 1999—is moving day, and Charleston has turned crazily cold, sleeting just to the west of us, the sky knotted with dark, threatening clouds. Alone in the new house, waiting for Sandy and the moving truck, I stand at the windows in the upstairs room I’ve claimed for my study and frown at the sky, willing it not to rain.
Please.
Just then a drop splats on the pane.

The heat ticks and groans in the vent over my head, but beyond that, silence. I look out across the salt marsh. Browned grasses undulate like a field of wheat. The creek cuts through them, swollen with haze and wavy as a brushstroke. I decide I will put my desk where I am standing so I can see the little wetland of wildness and peace while I write.

Turning from the windows, I scrutinize the room. After more than a year in the teeny apartment, writing sporadically in a windowless cubicle otherwise known as the dining nook, the space seems outlandish, as if I am Alice in Wonderland shrunk to the size of a keyhole. I let my eyes drift to several boxes stacked along the far wall and my stomach does a strange, anxious flip. The boxes contain everything remotely related to the novel about the bees. After returning from Greece six months ago, I dove into writing it, but lately the whole novel has stalled. I haven’t written anything since the new year.

When I got back from Greece, people were remarkably responsible about reminding me that I had come back to the
real
world, though it didn’t seem that substantial to me. I’d returned to the four-room apartment, which was no more than a way station and which pressed around me, confining and cocoon-ish. What had I been thinking, moving into a place so windowless and dark? How deluded had I been to think we would be out of it in no time? As if the betwixt and between of the old life and the new one would be a finger snap.

That I felt migratory and displaced in my physical surroundings was hardly surprising, but I was a little shocked at how displaced I felt inside. So much of my sense of myself had been altered in Greece, far more than I realized. Old understandings of myself as a woman, a mother, a writer, and a person in search of the spiritual were unraveled by my experiences over there, by the places themselves.

I cloistered myself during those months, struggling to sit in the cubicle and type on the keyboard. At one point the computer crashed and I lost every word I’d written. I wished for my desk, which was in storage along with everything else. I wished for some idea of what I was doing and whether it would amount to anything. A dozen times a day, on fire with a hot flash, I ran from the computer to the refrigerator where I stood with the doors thrown open, prickly with sweat, rubbing ice cubes on my arms, face, and neck. An acupuncturist brewed up a Chinese tea for me to drink that smelled like car oil, but it was a worse remedy than the ice cubes. I missed my estrogen.

It was the autumn of menopausal symptoms. Odd palpitations. Seizures of unexplained sadness. There was only one kind of sleep now: interrupted. I would steal out of bed to read and write, or situate myself by the lone window in the living room where I could see the moon. One night I calculated how many more full moons I could see if I lived to be eighty. Three hundred and fifty seven.

My memory began to nod off like a narcoleptic and I would be left with a thought curled up on the tip of my tongue—something like the name of the guy in the movie we’d just seen. (Half an hour later the answer would surface and I would blurt out the name—“Richard Gere”—to anyone standing next to me.)

My mother’s generation summed up menopause in two words: the Change. As a little girl, I only heard the words whispered, as if they could not be spoken aloud in polite company, suggesting a slightly scary and shameful mutation of age. In the world of my grandmothers, menopause was often “diagnosed” as hysteria (from the Greek word for womb:
hystera
), referring to all kinds of hormonal maladies from night sweats to mood swings, and was treated as pathology and neurosis. As a baby boomer, I fantasized that it would be nice to come up with a new term for the word, like the Awakening or the Becoming. I wanted it to take into account the way every beautiful and dormant potential in you wants to wake up. How you get intimations of being untethered at long last, of power and audacity bubbling furiously on your two back burners. How you start thinking:
yes, I do believe women can save the world
. But, truth be told, that didn’t tell the whole story either. There
was
a formidable Change bearing down, though I certainly didn’t think of it as shameful. And I had my tiny bouts of so-called hysteria, or let us say “hormonal expressions,” though I hardly thought they were pathological. That menopause is also an event of biology was never clearer than during that autumn of symptoms.

On the winter solstice, I became officially postmenopausal. Twelve months without menses. There seemed to be fluency in the timing, the solstice being the apex of darkness after which the light gradually returns.
It’s done
, I thought. It seemed like I should mark the occasion. In what I thought would be a celebratory moment of closure, I read Lucille Clifton’s poem “to my last period” aloud to myself and ended up crying my eyes out.