Traveling with Pomegranates (4 page)

My own post-World War II mother, still alive and well, worked for a time doing secretarial work in my father’s business, but she was a consummate Demeterian woman. Growing up, I didn’t witness expressions of feminism in her. Indeed, not even in my adult-hood. The image she conjured in me was not the Madonna in Conflict, but
Maria Lactans
, the breast-feeding depiction of Mary contentedly offering her child the milk of her life. I asked her once: “When you were a girl, what did you dream of growing up to be?” She did not hesitate. “A mother,” she answered. She had four children, and if there was ever conflict in her mothering, none of us glimpsed it. It seems revealing of my mother and me, and maybe of our generations, that she was the one who got the “Mother of the Year” award, while I got the “Career Woman” plaque.

I’d always adored my mother. I soaked up her plush maternal spirit. Yet I wanted to differentiate myself from her. In the sixties, as I was coming of age, I knew I would be a mother—yes, absolutely. But
differently
.

I walk to the hotel window and peer through a slit in the curtain at Syntagma Square directly across the street, then east to the Greek Parliament House where I can just make out the Presidential Guard. Ann informed me earlier that the short, white skirt they wear is called a
foustanella
. I imagine she read that once in a book, probably two years ago. Ann forgets nothing. Her mind clicks like a camera, storing memories and fine details.
Remember when we were at the beach when I was three and you had on a red bathing suit and I almost stepped on a jellyfish?
Hearing such a careful rendering, I stare at her, thinking what red bathing suit, what jellyfish?

A flock of pigeons takes off from a grassy area in the square and, watching them, I think of Ann with everything before her, everything becoming, the white moon perched over her head waxing in grandeur, and it reminds me that my moon will start its long wane any day now. This comparison with its darker implication of enmeshment and envy repels, then humbles me. It is an awful truth.

Noticing my journal on the bed, I sit down and record my dream. As I write the part about dropping to my knees, my thoughts reel back to the museum, to Ann’s little dance with her camera, the way she dipped to her knees before snapping the shutter. At the time, it reminded me of something I couldn’t call to mind. Was it rustling the memory of Ann on her knees in the drugstore?

Suddenly I understand my dream in a new way. Just as I saw my own self in Ann’s kneeling figure in the drugstore aisle, I now see myself in the daughter who has fallen through the hole in the kitchen floor. The dream is about Ann and me, yes, but it’s also a snapshot of me on the eve of my fiftieth birthday, bereft over the loss of my younger self. That
other
Persephone in danger of being wrenched away.

To borrow a phrase from Dylan Thomas, Persephone is the “green fuse” in the soul, the regenerative energy. She’s the bright, invisible sap within that must rise after fifty. But just how that happens I have no idea.

Without warning, my mother’s face blazes up. It crosses my mind that I’m not only Demeter in search of Persephone, but—God help me—I’m Persephone in search of Demeter, too. When
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
was published, I sent my mother a copy. I didn’t hear back from her about it for two months. I had no idea what to make of that. I knew the tumultuous journey I described in the book would seem alien to her. Oddly, that was what concerned me most about writing the book—not so much taking on an entire religious tradition, but the reaction of my mother down in Georgia.

Then a letter arrived. She never wrote me
letters
. Inside, I found her account of reading the book. She told me that my “dance of dissidence and search for self ” had proved difficult for her at first, but she had felt its truth. I’ve committed her last sentences to memory: “I am seventy-five years old,” she wrote, “and all I can think is that I want to take care of myself so I can live long. Oh, Sue, I don’t want to miss the ‘dance.’”

I have to tell myself what is true, that I didn’t follow up on that bright opening the way I might have. My relationship with my mother, like the one with my daughter, has no history of fireworks, only the necessary loss and then the loving congeniality. Yet I wish for a deeper connection with her, too.

Outside, the heat of Athens dissolves into dusk. It sifts from yellow and gold and parched brown into the colors of the sea. On the other side of the room my daughter naps. Across the world my mother is probably sleeping, too. I sit still on the bed and let the longing fill me.

As we climb the path to the top of the Acropolis, my mom stops every five minutes to admire something in the distance—the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the Theater of Dionysus, the Hill of the Muses. She has the guidebook out and a red leather journal tucked under her arm. A pen is wedged between her teeth, so when she asks, “Is that the Hill of the Nymphs,” it sounds like “Is that the Will of the Wimps?”

“Yep, the Will of the Wimps,” I tell her, and we laugh.

Yesterday when we left the archaeological museum, the heat had been so awful we’d retreated to the hotel and gone to bed. Today is better, but not much. I look toward the crest, trying to judge how long before we get to the top. I’m in no hurry. The thought of being up there again unnerves me.

Seventeen months ago I came to Greece as a twenty-one-year-old history major participating in a college study tour—an experience that changed me. I realize everybody says that, but I promise, something deeply altering happened to me during that trip. It was supposed to be about earning college credit but instead turned into a kind of unraveling of myself. The culmination had taken place on top of the Acropolis in what I still refer to as
my moment
because I don’t know what else to call it. I do know that when it happened, it seemed like all the dangling wires of my future came together to throw a spark I thought would last forever. I came down from the Acropolis with a vision for my life, destiny in hand, a big, jubilant fire warming my insides.

Recently, though, all of that had more or less fallen apart. Now, not only have I not explained any of this to my mother, but my feelings around it are so confused and filled with pain, I’ve been unable to face them myself. At this moment they are stuffed in a small, lightbulb-less closet in the back of my chest. Trudging up the hill with Mom, I wonder how I can be up there again without the door bursting open and everything falling out.

Near the peak, the steps leading up to the Propylea become clogged with people, a huge throng of multicolored fanny packs. We shuffle along, forced to take baby steps. Finally, squeezing through the colonnade, I catch a glimpse of the Parthenon glowing fluorescent in the sunlight, throwing long, symmetrical shadows, and I go a little weak in the knees.

“I think I’ll wander around for a while by myself,” I tell Mom, not wanting her to see how sad I feel all of a sudden. She gives me a look, so I add, “You know, like it suggests in the guidebook.” There’s an entire paragraph in it about the “necessity” of a moment alone to let the sight of the Parthenon break over you.

“Sure,” she says. “Good idea.” She starts to walk away, then stops, turns around. “Are you happy to be back?”

“You must be joking!” I smile at her.

All my life I’d been
the quiet, happy girl
. Now I’m the quiet girl
pretending
to be happy. Every day is an acting class.

Hurrying toward the Parthenon’s western pediment, I glance once over my shoulder and see Mom headed in the opposite direction.
Who am I kidding? She’s on to me
.

With surprising ease I locate the same slab of marble I sat on when I was last here. Until recently I’d kept a photograph of it on my desk. The marble is long and narrow and tilts slightly upward, reminding me, as it did then, of a surfboard that has just caught a wave.

I sit on it, feeling the coolness hit my bare legs.

Right before I left on that college study tour to Greece, my boyfriend of four years, the one I thought I would marry, called and broke up with me. Out of nowhere.

“One day you’ll find someone and he’ll be the luckiest guy in the world,” he told me. I think he intended for this to make me feel better, but come on, the
luckiest guy in the world
and he didn’t want to be that guy. So, when I should’ve been making big Xs on a countdown calendar, buying travel-size shampoo and watching
Shirley Valentine
and
Zorba the Greek
, I sat on the blue sofa in the apartment I shared with my best friend Laura in a state of shocked disbelief—what birds must feel after flying into windowpanes. That was followed by a period of pure heartache. I abandoned mascara and retreated into class lectures, cafeteria gossip, and the absurdly watchable
Days of Our Lives
that played in the student lounge, feeling my life rub against routine, against the lives of other people, but oddly disengaged from it. Laura gave me postbreakup pep talks, attempting to pull me back into the living world.