Traveling with Pomegranates (18 page)

By Christmas, the need to examine my face for lines and sags left me. I recognized the growing permutations as more than the effects of time. They became a poignant history—tracings of my experience and character, the passionate individuality of my soul, the story of lived life written in the tenderness of skin. I began to find a worn beauty in all of that. I knew I could never cut it away.

Those six months between Greece and moving day—marinated as they were in hot flashes and pangs of loss—became a natural descent of body and soul
both
. I could only sit with it and let it happen. It was a time to molt.

When Ann drops by after work, Sandy and the movers are unloading furniture in the rain and I am cross-legged on the floor, unpacking the boxes that made my stomach do the funny flip-flop. Spread around me are books, files, scribbled notes, a three-ring notebook with my research, and the first fifty pages of the novel tied neatly with a piece of raffia. In my lap rests a collage the size of a small poster.

“So, where’s
my
room?” Ann says as she plops beside me on the floor. It’s the first house we’ve had without a room for her or Bob, a fact that has not quite sunk in until she asks this, asks it so matter-of-factly that I glance at her to be sure she’s kidding. Her eyes give her away. “Yeah, about that . . . we still have the pup tent,” I say. We laugh a little too long, as if to avoid the acknowledgment implied in all of this—that her leaving is now permanent and concrete. No coming back.

For one elongated minute we sit there and listen to rain pelt the roof. The closeness we discovered in Greece seemed to solidify during the fall. We talked endlessly about the experiences we’d had, pored over trip photographs, read passages aloud to each other from our journals, and picked up the conversations we started over there.

I smile at her. Her hair, pixie-short in Greece, is almost to her chin, her bangs wispy across her forehead. She looks thin to me and I stifle the urge to ask if she’s eating enough. In two days she will be twenty-three.

I realize I’m still trying to work out the boundaries. How to love her without interfering. How to step back and let her have her private world and yet still be an intimate part of it. When she talks about her feelings, I have to consciously tell myself she wants me to receive them, not fix them.

Every woman needs to become self-mothering, I remind myself. To learn to take care of herself, to love herself. Ann has to find a mother in herself. She will replace me. That’s the point now.

She peers at the collage in my lap. “What’s that?” she says, and I’m glad for the diversion.

“It’s a book outline.”

“Very cool,” she says and leans over it, studying the patchwork of pictures.

I started the collage soon after returning from Greece, searching through magazines, catalogs, postcards, photos, and prints, cutting out whatever inspired me. I was supposed to be writing an outline for the novel, and I was cutting out pictures. It didn’t seem to matter whether I understood what the pictures meant or how they fit into the novel; it was enough to be drawn to them in some deep, evocative way. It was pretty much an unconscious process. I told myself I was being creative, turning my play instinct loose to roam around and find what fascinated it. Inside I was thinking:
This is nuts
.

I ended up culling the pictures to twenty images and randomly gluing them together. Among them: A white girl—fourteen maybe—a sassy smirk on her face, but a hint of something hurt and bruised there, too. A large African American woman, who looks like she could spit snuff and straighten you out at the same time. A bitter-looking white man in overalls. A pretty white woman with wistful eyes. A jail cell. A whirling cloud of bees. A black Madonna wrapped in chains. A shockingly pink house. A trio of African American women. A jar of honey. A banner that reads WALLS FOR WAILING.

I only know what the first half-dozen of these pictures mean and how they might be part of the story. The rest is an enigma.

Ann rests her finger on the girl I’ve placed dead center. “Who’s this? The girl with the bees inside her wall?”

I nod. “Her name is Lily Melissa Owens. She accidently killed her mother when she was four.”

She looks at me. “Killed her mother?
Man.
”

“Well, it makes things more interesting,” I say.

Ann points to the large woman. “What about her?”

“That’s Lily’s stand-in mother, Rosaleen Daise.”

“What’s her story?”

“She gets into a fight with three racists and gets thrown in jail.”

“Good Lord.”

“Well, I don’t leave her there. Lily breaks her out and the two of them run away together.”

A jail break. By a fourteen-year-old. When the idea came, it felt inspired, but knowing how capable I was of doubt and how cold my feet would get, I wrote a note to myself:
Sue, this is a really good idea. Before you dismiss it, remember how you felt when it came to you.

If it hadn’t been for that note, the idea never would have survived. I still wasn’t sure whether it was perfectly ridiculous or ridiculously perfect.

Ann does not laugh or roll her eyes. “So, where do they go?”

This is the part that makes me nervous, the part over which the novel has stalled. “I have no idea,” I say.

That night I awaken in the new house sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 A.M. in a strange room flooded with light. Through the curtainless windows, I see the moon plugged into the black sky, shining on high beam, emphatic as a spotlight.

Sandy sleeps unfazed, but I lie in the lucent, white sheets, in the dazzling room, and think first about the house and what pieces of furniture go where, then slowly wind my way back to the problem of my two runaway characters.

Slipping out of bed, I wrap myself in the green chenille throw and pad up the stairs to my study, where the moon radiates with only slightly less wattage. I pick up the collage. My eyes wander back and forth between the picture of the three African American women and the uproariously pink house. I scan the cloud of bees and the black Madonna in chains.

And
boom
, it falls out of the night, landing in one unbroken piece in my head. My two runaways will escape to the home of three black sisters, who live in a pink house, keep bees, and revere a Black Madonna.

I consider writing a note to myself about it but decide no, this time I’m going to trust it.

The pink house and its inhabitants are all I think about. It distracts me from the fear that the idea is crazy. I unpack crystal and china, load it into the dishwasher, then stack it in the sideboard in the dining room, while my mind is a thousand miles away picturing shades of flamingo and Pepto-Bismol pink, cooking up ideas.

It is not until I whack two stems of crystal into the countertop and find myself standing in a pile of shards that I realize I’m not present to what I’m doing. I stop, make a cup of tea, and take it to the living room. I recline against the sofa pillows near the hearth and think of all the passages I’ve logged in my journal about hearth and Hestia—a Goddess who doesn’t represent domesticity to me so much as the ability to dwell, to belong to one’s place.

Journeying is the predominant means of developing one’s self in this culture, not the habitation of place. It has been true of me. Always the seeker. Yet at this phase of my life, when I look at my house at the edge of a marsh, I want to learn how to
be
in it. I want to behave like a finder as much as a seeker. The irony is that I had to go on an elaborate journey to figure this out. So much of my growing older seems to be about paradoxes. The reconciliation of opposites. The bringing to balance.

For my fiftieth birthday, Sandy gave me a card with the moon on it. He handed it to me when I got home from Greece. It read: “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” It’s true, I wasn’t. Yet the rest of the story is that it’s just as possible not to be the same after seeing it over my backyard. At fifty, I want to be a finder of the commonplace moon.

Later, as I unpack a carton marked MISCELLANEOUS, I come across a photo of my seventy-seven-year-old mother. It was taken the month before at a workshop I co-led with my friend Terry titled “Maiden, Mother, Crone.” It wasn’t about chronological phases in a woman’s life, but about an internal process of becoming. I’d invited my mother, wanting to spend time with her, and she’d jumped at the chance. The photo has captured her standing beneath a tree in a semicircle of women who are being led in a simple dance. Her arms, like the arms of all the women, are stretched out in front of her, palms up, as if she’s waiting for something to be dropped into them. Her head is cocked slightly to the side in a gesture I recognize.

Someone snapped the picture and sent it to me. It arrived as I was packing up the contents of the apartment. I did not look at it closely then, but I do now. I study her arms stretched toward the camera in a gesture of beseeching and receptivity and I’m completely arrested by it. My mother, dancing. The closing line in her letter to me about
Dissident Daughter
comes to mind:
Oh, Sue. I don’t want to miss the dance
.

Shortly after the photo was taken, Terry and I invited the group to call out the names of women who had made an impact on their lives or on history itself. The moment was designed to be a “dinner party” of female names. As we took turns around the circle, I started off the litany with the name Sojourner Truth. From around the circle came Georgia O’Keeffe, Virginia Woolf, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth Blackwell, interspersed with the names of someone’s mother, sister, grandmother. My mother, who had been quietly listening, suddenly spoke up. “My daughter, Sue,” she said.

Still holding the photo, I go to the phone and dial her number. When we have finished all the small talk about moving, I say: “That day at the workshop when we called out the names, I never thanked you for what you said.” Before she can respond, every bottled up thing comes out—how I have not valued her Hestian world, not been able to fully find that world for myself, how it has separated me from her in some internal way that has been almost too subtle to realize. “I know all the things you do at home, the way you’re so content there, is your art, like writing is mine. I just want to find an experience of home now.”

There’s an awkward silence. Then I hear her laugh. “Sue,” she says, “what you do, your writing—it opened me up to things I never would’ve thought about. So, I guess it goes both ways.”

She has been the keeper of home for me, and I have been the keeper of journey for her. And now we look for the lost portion in each other.