Traveling with Pomegranates (7 page)

Catching my eye, she waves and begins to wind her way toward me through the other tourists. I wonder why I can’t tell her what I’m going through. When it came to the letter back home, still in the drawer with my gym socks (why did I keep it, this evidence against myself?), certainly I didn’t think she’d reject me. Perhaps the shame of failing is not my only reason for not talking to her about it. We’ve been close since childhood, but I feel a kind of partition between us now, not anger or aloofness, but a room divider that properly marks the space: this is your territory, this is mine. I did not confide intensely personal matters to her. Are the particulars of your own darkness something you describe to your mother or your best friend?

But it wasn’t just the darkness I secreted, was it? Why did I give her only the postcard version of my first trip to Greece?
Ran a race in Olympia, visited Athena’s Tholos, saw the Charioteer, sat beside Parthenon, danced in a restaurant with some locals, bought a pretty ring . . . having a great time—wish you were here.
Obviously she knew I’d been affected enough to want to spend my life teaching ancient Greek history, but I’d left her to sense for herself the deeper imprint those experiences had made on me. Maybe it was the particulars of my soul—the experiences, feelings, and inner thoughts I held close—that I kept from her.

As I sit here, I feel the depression closing in.

“Help me,” I pray, barely moving my lips.

I suppose I sought out this spot again in the hope I would have a revelation, like before—that lightning would strike twice and I would know what to do with my life. Or, that something inside of me would get completely rearranged and my depression would evaporate.

None of this happens.

The last thing I want is to seem ungrateful or make my mother feel like bringing me here was a mistake. How can I possibly tell her the whole trip feels mournful? And if I do tell her that, how can I possibly expect her to believe the other side of that truth—that there is nowhere else I’d rather be.

“Let me take your picture,” Mom says. She focuses the camera.
Click
. I already know I’ll put the photo on my dresser and compare it to the one that was taken of me on this spot the year before, the one in which I am grinning with abandon while massive chalky columns beam up behind my head.

I’m afraid of becoming invisible again.

We walk in a dusty loop around the Parthenon toward the Acropolis Museum. There is a sculpture relief inside I want to see called the
Mourning Athena
. In it, Athena holds her spear upright with her head bent against it as if she’s mourning. The other name for the relief is
Contemplating Athena
. When I saw the image in a book, though, Athena did not appear to be in deep thought. To me, she appeared to be grieving, like the fight had gone out of her.

The museum, we discover, is closed for renovation. I stare at the notice on the door, twisting the Athena ring on my finger.

“Next time,” we joke.

Mom glances at her watch. “Ready to go?”

I nod and suddenly my eyes fill with tears.

“Ann?” Mom says. “What is it? Are you okay?”

“It’s—it’s just my hair,” I say, putting one hand on the back of my bare neck and managing a smile. “I miss it.”

Ann and I wander through the Plaka, threading the convoluted tangle of shops and restaurants. The streets twist and coil, occasionally doubling back on themselves. I realize we’re lost the third time we pass the bearded young Orthodox priest in black robes standing outside a jewelry store.

“If we loop by him one more time, he’s going to think we’re stalking him,” Ann says.

I smile. Like her brother, she has always been funny, cracking us up with her wry observations. It’s a relief to hear her making a joke. Earlier today on the Acropolis she had been distant and pulled into herself, even tearing up for a moment when we left. As we walked down the path the word
depression
came to me for the first time. Could she be . . . depressed? I pushed the thought away. But now as we move through the narrow, stone streets of the Plaka, the word darts again at the edge of my thoughts.
Depression
.

A corkscrew of alarm twists in my abdomen. I have a ferocious urge to swoop in like a mother hen, gather Ann under my flapping wing, and say,
Look, I’m not oblivious. I’m your mother. Something’s wrong. Talk to me. Let me fix it
. But I know my impulse to tear open the closed, secret place in my daughter comes from a need to stave off my own fear. When is the impulse to help an adult child a wise intervention and when is it self-serving and prying? I have an uneasy feeling I will have to carry the question around for a while like some grating pebble in my shoe.

I tell myself Ann is a young woman who needs to find a separate sense of herself in the world, who’s trying to stand fully in her own life. Let it be. For now.

As we pause before a shop window, a cluster of shining red baubles catches my eye. No, not baubles—what are they? Leaning closer, squinting into the glare, I realize I’m looking at glass pomegranates. They’re piled like ruby eggs into a nest of twigs. “Look,” I say.

“They’re in a bird’s nest,” says Ann.

It appears to be a real one. I imagine the shop owner finding the nest on a limb in her garden and thinking:
Oh, perfect for displaying pomegranates!

I think of Persephone eating the fruit in the underworld. How the flesh splits open to reveal a small, secret womb and the seeds spill out like garnets.

The door to the shop is locked. Closed for lunch. Ann and I cast one last look at the pomegranates and walk on, famished now, ready to find our way out of the maze. After consulting several shopkeepers—one of whom follows us to the door holding a plaster-cast statue of Poseidon, cajoling, “You buy, yes?”—we emerge into a familiar, open square that buzzes with tourists, spared another lap around the priest.

We slip into an outdoor taverna and are barely seated when two scrawny cats appear and stare at us with pleading eyes. They lick their paws like they’ve sized us up perfectly and are preparing for a banquet. “So what would the cats like us to order?” I ask.

“
Kotopoulo
. Or
psaria
,” says Ann, then translates: “Chicken. Or fish.”

She has been studying Greek. It began over a year ago after her college trip. She came back full of purpose, with a plan to teach ancient Greek history. You couldn’t have missed the new vividness about her, as if being over here had flipped on a light inside of her that no one had quite noticed was off. Before the trip, her own pursuits had seemed overshadowed by her relationship with her boyfriend, a subtle eclipse I noticed only in retrospect. Even Sandy, a professional counselor, didn’t have a name for what had happened to her in Greece. “She seems to have ‘found herself,’” he remarked. And this “finding” had not faded, not for all this time. Until now.

“Listen to you,” I say, trying to appear lighthearted. “You speak Greek.”

“Just Greek
food
,” she says.

I remember at thirteen she went through the refrigerator and pantry, calling out the contents in Spanish. I remember her then—the perm that didn’t work, the braces on her teeth, giggling as she recited
la leche, el pastel.
It shocks me how I wish for all of that again, for what is lost and cannot come back.

We eat roast chicken and Greek salad in silence. Idly, I begin to feed the last of the
kotopoulo
to the cats and instantly a dozen or so other cats materialize out of nowhere. They swarm around our table, mewing, jockeying, possibly multiplying. Waiters rush over, waving trays, snapping crisp, white napkins, and shouting in Greek. Cats hiss and scatter. It’s a dazzling eruption that hushes the taverna. Everyone turns. And there we are, Ann and I—stupid, cat-loving, American women—smiling sheepishly, bits of roast chicken sprinkled about our table.

“Check, please,” I say.

We slink out, head straight to the nearest bench, and collapse in laughter. We laugh until it’s not about the cats anymore. Our laughing takes on a life of its own, making us cry. Every time we think we’ve composed ourselves, one of us looks at the other, her mouth twitches, and we’re gone again.

Gradually, though, we get hold of ourselves, and gazing around the square, I see a large church the color of oatmeal. It has two bell towers, three arched entrances, and one shining, cinnamon-tinted dome. We resort to our guidebooks and discover we’re staring at the Mitrópoli, the “Annunciation cathedral.”

“It’s Athens’ largest Greek Orthodox church,” Ann says, reading from the book. “‘ Dedicated to the Annunciation of the Mother of God in 1862 by King Otto and Queen Amalia.’ Hey, listen to this—the bones of St. Philothei are in there. She was martyred in 1589 for rescuing women enslaved in Turkish harems.”

“Well, the least we can do is go in and pay our respects to somebody who did
that
,” I tell her.

Entering the narthex of the cathedral, I consider the extreme laughing Ann and I have just done, how buoyant I feel, and I see how laughing can become a “narthex” in its own right—a space of divesting. The laughter has cracked the heaviness that formed around us like tight, brittle skin, and even now delivers me peeled and fresh to this moment, to Ann, to myself.

Standing near the entrance, I watch a young woman bend over and kiss an icon of Jesus, leaving a firm, heart-shaped blotch of lipstick on the glass. She licks the back of her thumb and rubs the cherry smudge as if scrubbing ink off a child’s face. When it’s spit-cleaned to perfection, she drops a coin into a wooden box, lights a candle and drones her prayer, half-whispered, into the bronze light. I have left so much of traditional religion behind, but the scene tugs at me, the whole lovely encounter.

Inside the sanctuary, the air is dusky. A sweet, acrid scent drifts like vapor. I notice the altar screen at the end of the aisle holds a series of icons. From this distance I cannot tell whose images they portray; I can only see the shining swatches of jeweled colors. I’m drawn to them almost magnetically. Ann slips into a pew near the back while I head down the aisle toward the icons.

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I’d come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how do you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?

Maybe in the end, the big thing we call God can only be experienced in concrete particulars, not unlike William Blake’s vision of the whole world in a grain of sand.

Was there an image—a mere grain of sand—that could be a symbol for me of this ineffable, divine presence? What amazes me, what makes me almost break down and cry in the aisle of the cathedral, is how much I hunger for this.