Traveling with Pomegranates (36 page)

When I reach the counter, I watch the manuscript disappear into the envelope, trying to imagine what gift I will take to the dark Madonna, what Ann will think when she lays eyes on Mary propped in the tree.

2000

I’m thinking,
these are the planes that always crash, the prop planes, the island hoppers, the ones that shudder on takeoff like the screws and bolts are shooting out of the wings
. Sitting in a window seat over the left wing, I try to calm myself, but the captain has come on the speaker with an announcement about turbulence. My fear of flying shows up only when the cabin lurches, when the unidentified noises start, all the strange thudding and creaking.

I close my eyes and do the visualization I use when I’m sure my plane is going down. I’m on the Flying Dumbo ride with Bob at Disney World and he has control of the little knob, swooping us up and down in a herky-jerky, but harmless, motion.

The propellers make a muffled roar, as if we’re at a deafening rock concert with cotton in our ears. I elbow Mom. “I’m starting to get nauseous.”

“What?” she yells.

“I’M GETTING SICK.”

She digs out the Dramamine, then points at her watch, a gesture that says it won’t be long till we land in Crete.

Popping the yellow pill into my mouth, I lean my head back against the vibrating seat and close my eyes again.

It’s Greece. It’s worth it
.

On the first day of the trip, the bus drops off our group of twenty-five women in the countryside of Crete beside a blue street sign that reads PALIANIS NUNNERY in both Greek and English. The convent is just up the hill, the same one Mom visited on her trip here in 1993. According to her, a myrtle tree grows inside the walls with an icon of the Virgin Mary in the branches. She, Terry, and Trisha revamped the tour schedule to get us here. I pull my camcorder from my shoulder bag and zoom in on the blue sign, then pan the surrounding hillsides terraced with olive groves and grape orchards.

As we walk toward the convent gate, I film a whitewashed chapel alongside the road, its fluted terra-cotta roof tiles and prayer bell, then turn the camera on the women in the group, who tromp up the hill in clumps of twos and threes.

When I hit the stop button, one of them asks, “How’s married life treating you?” The question I got most in France was “What do you do?” Now, it’s the one about married life.

“Fine,” I say. “It’s great.”

Four months into our marriage, the one thing that has plagued me is just what I anticipated: that question of love and freedom. It crops up in the negotiation of daily stuff. Who grocery shops and who cooks? Who does the laundry and who folds it? Will we clean the apartment first thing Saturday morning or will Scott go surfing? On Sunday, will we spend time together or will I write? We work it out, though at times it takes a little doing.

I don’t tell the woman any of this, of course. Instead, I go into a rendition about Scott giving me surfing lessons this past summer. No reflection on his teaching, I say, but I spent most of the time lying on the board, floating, worrying a shark would mistake me for a seal. He was good about it, I add. He kept me company by floating, too.

My story prompts her to divulge memories of her own newly-wed days. “But just wait till you have kids,” she says, smiling like she possesses a secret I don’t.

Her comment about children brings back the conversation Scott and I had on the Saturday before I left. I’d attempted a Greek feast in our tiny kitchen, billing it as the official farewell dinner and setting the table with candles and the good wedding china. Between the
horyatiki
(Greek salad) and the
kotosoupa avgolemono
(chicken lemon soup), Scott turned to me and said, “Let’s get a puppy.”

I went through all the reasons this was a bad idea just to keep us from flying out the door right then to get one. The apartment is too tiny; a dog needs a backyard with a fence; puppies equaled house training, vet bills, chewed-up stuff—but it was too late. In my head I was already trying out dog names.

“Get thee to a nunnery,” the woman quips as she catches up with her friends. It was the joke that got passed around the bus on the way here.

“Is that from
Monty Python
?” I ask Mom in all seriousness.

She tries not to laugh, but her voice cracks apart when she tells me, “It’s
Shakespeare
.”

It takes us all the way to the top of the hill to get the Monty Python comment out of our systems.

The entrance to the convent is four tall, wooden doors with an arched mosaic tympanum of the Virgin wearing an indigo-blue robe. It is flanked, weirdly, by two blue and white striped poles that remind me of pictures of the candy-cane mooring poles in Venice. They have small crosses on the ends. I stare at them while Trisha knocks.

Mom has told me her story of being here, about asking the Virgin for the thing at the bottom of her heart. Every time I think of doing that myself, I get an expectant feeling inside, a chemical reaction bubbling over a beaker in the pit of my stomach. What lies in my heart. It seems like I’ve spent two years trying to solve that puzzle. What’s really in there and what does it mean? Everybody deserves to ask those questions. I finally came to a conclusion about what to do with my life while kneeling before the Black Virgin of Le Puy, and it only seems to have solidified since then. This time, returning to Greece has not stirred up any of the old yearnings for a career in ancient Greek history. No ambivalence, no self-doubt. I still have an exceptional love for Greece and its past, but I’m sure I can find some avocation as a Grecophile through books, art, travel, and the occasional Greek feast in my kitchen.

I zoom in with the camera on the Virgin in the indigo robe over the door, on the gold polychromatic spattering behind her, then on her outstretched hands. I notice she has a yellow star on her forehead and one on each shoulder, just like the Queen of Heaven fresco I saw in the monastery at Meteora during my college trip. That fresco had initiated me into a world of Mary that I didn’t know. Now, she has become part of a trinity for me, along with Athena and Joan.

Last year, I found a lump in my breast. I was in the shower and there it was, a tiny hard lump. I turned off the water and, wrapping a towel around me, stood at the sink trying not to panic. I recalled every story I’d ever heard about breast cancer striking women early in their lives. In their twenties.

After examining me, the doctor ordered a mammogram. After that, an ultrasound. Hardly believing the lump had taken me all the way to the radiologist’s office, I lay on the table that day, perspiring despite how cold the room felt.
You do not have cancer
, I told myself.
You are not going to die
. But I didn’t know, and the longer I lay there not knowing, the more I started to pine for all the things I wanted that hadn’t happened yet. My wedding. My first anniversary. Motherhood. Writing. Another trip with Mom. I felt incapable of calling up the strength I needed to keep me from falling apart.

The treatment room was dark and quiet. I listened to the nurse’s comfortable shoes barely making noise on the floor and felt dizzy with fear. I wanted to feel loved. To be reassured and comforted. To find the resources inside myself to hold it together.

“This won’t hurt. Just relax,” the nurse told me. “Think about the beach.”

I closed my eyes, but I didn’t see waves and sand. Spontaneously, I pictured my mother on one side of me and Mary on the other. It was no surprise that my mother turned up in my image and no big shock Mary was there either. Since I’d felt her presence bent over my life in the cathedral at Le Puy, I’d thought of Mary as my spiritual heart, my ability to love myself.

You’re scared, I know, but the three of us can handle this
, I imagined Mary telling me. Gradually I felt myself grow calm. Mary and my mother held my fear until the doctor was able to tell me the lump was benign.

I’m hesitant to say this incident became a huge turning point in my life, but afterward I was very conscious of life’s gifts. I seemed to cherish the people I love more. I was a little more forgiving and appreciative, for a while anyway, though I don’t think the new cherishing I felt ever wore off completely. My writing pursuits intensified, too. Life seemed fragile, and this knowledge may have been in the back of my mind when I left my job at
Skirt!
a couple of months before this trip in order to write full-time. It was a risky decision—Scott and I would have to sacrifice financially. But life seems too short now not to pour myself into the work I love.

After the breast lump, I also felt more aware of my connection to Mary. I have faith that when I approach the icon in the tree and ask Mary for what lies in my heart, someone is listening. I don’t believe every prayer I toss out will be answered, but I like the idea of handing it over to someone. In my case, Mary. Whenever I pray now, it’s second nature to turn to her.