Traveling with Pomegranates (28 page)

Over the last year, I’ve thought a lot about what makes revealing myself so scary. I realize I hide my real self because I’m afraid of being rejected. Lately I’ve tried to confront the fear by asking myself: so what if I am rejected? I can’t count how many times I’ve gone back to the moment when Mom and I were on the ship near Patmos and everything spilled out. All my self-hatred and fear. And I hear her gently say, “You deserve to love yourself.” I remember how that hit me right between the eyes, right in the chest. I know it all goes back to that—loving myself. Believing I deserve to.

We notice the other women starting to trickle out of the garden, making their way back to the bus. Mom and I get up and walk down the hill. At the bottom, I focus the camera for one final picture of the Venus, getting her all in, head to toe. There are still so many decisions to make for the wedding, but what goes through my head as I stare through the camera at the seven-foot Venus is a series of decisions that had been gathering in me while we sat up there in the sachets of lavender. I’m going to ask my college chaplain to perform the ceremony. I want my father
and
my mother to walk me down the aisle. I don’t want the minister to ask, “Who gives this woman?” because I don’t want to be
given
away. I don’t want to be announced at the reception as Mr. and Mrs. Scott Taylor. Ann and Scott will be fine. Mom and I will write the ceremony ourselves and include God, the Mother. As for my name, I will be Ann Kidd Taylor. No hyphen.

I sling the strap of the camera over my shoulder and start to leave the garden, hoping that when I’m back home and the Venus is only a memory, I won’t lose my conviction about these decisions.

I am almost to the exit when I turn around and sprint back to the hydrangea bushes. I break off a sprig. Blue petals with a violet center. It is going in my bouquet.

On the bus, riding through the Périgord region of France, Mom and I sit next to each other and share a bag of roasted almonds. In my lap is the blue hydrangea I picked two days ago at Quinipily, wrapped carefully in tissue paper and tucked inside a ziplock bag. My mission is to get through the rest of the trip without squashing it.

It is raining, the cold, wet pellets hitting hard against the windows, and the road is slick and black. We are on our way to Font-de-Gaume to visit a fifteen-thousand-year-old cave. The thought of being underground inside a cave makes me uneasy, even though I’m not claustrophobic. At least the cave is dry. Or so I hope. Apparently, it has a gallery of art inside—wall paintings by late-prehistoric people. I imagine them in there drawing by torchlight while woolly mammoths roam around outside.

We stop for lunch in Montignac and find a café, where three brown dogs are curled up in a single clump of fur just inside the front door. Sitting at a table with Terry and Trisha, Mom and I warm our hands around mugs of hot tea. Mom and Trisha order
croques-monsieurs,
toasted, open-faced ham and cheese sandwiches, but in what must be a bad case of American nostalgia, Terry and I order the hamburgers. “
Hamburger, s’il vous plaît
,” I tell our waitress and feel ridiculous saying those words together.

Mom and Trisha’s sandwiches arrive like something from the Cordon Bleu, cheesy and golden. The hamburgers are the size of biscuits and sizzle inside the plastic bag in which they were microwaved.

When I cut the plastic open, a puff of steam escapes. “
Bon appétit
,” Mom says, and we all burst out laughing.

Terry and I order two
croques-monsieurs
. The waitress smiles. On the way out we feed the microwave hamburgers to the dogs, who wag their tails as if to say, Oh good, the Americans have ordered the hamburger again, our lucky day.

Back on the bus I write the most obvious thing ever in my journal: when in France, order French.

By the time we arrive at Font-de-Gaume, the rain has stopped. It is only one of a vast number of prehistoric caves that dot the region, shaped by cliffs, rock overhangs, and valleys. I remember being in an art history class and seeing several slides of paintings from the Lascaux cave, which is not far from here. The horses in the slides had looked flat and primitive, stirring nothing in me like the images of ancient Greek sculpture had. I understand the paintings in Font-de-Gaume are renowned, but unless one of them depicts Wilma Flintstone vacuuming with an elephant trunk, I don’t expect to be blown away.

After a short climb from the bottom of the valley up a rock-crusted hill, we reach the cave opening. Our French guide, who has a red bandana tied around her hair, turns on her flashlight and leads us inside.

“Watch your step,” she calls.

Ground lighting projects low, shadowy beams up the cave walls, but it is still too dark, and I flip on my flashlight, too. Soon a lot more circles of light are bouncing along the cave floor.

“There’s enough oxygen down here, isn’t there?” I ask Mom.

“I guess,” she says.

She guesses? I was kind of joking around, and she
guesses
?

We inch along one hundred and thirty yards into the main gallery in silence except for shoes shuffling on the walkway and an unusual amount of throat clearing. The walls are covered with paintings of bison, horses, mammoths, reindeer, oxen, goats, felines, rhinoceros, a bear, a wolf, a man, and four human hands.

As we stop beside a painting of horses half-hidden beneath a layer of calcite, I think of Harry yet again. As if the scene depicts his great-great-great-great (and on) grandparents. In the picture Mom took of me sitting in the saddle after Harry’s runaway episode, my blue jeans are hiked above my ankles, revealing thick, red socks, and my smile is full of braces. I appear to be a pleased and happy twelve-year-old. It was such a geeky, awkward phase, but I wish for that girl’s bold spirit, red socks, and all.

The group gathers around a frieze where five well-preserved bison are painted on vanilla-colored limestone. The guide asks us to turn off our flashlights, then flicks on two cigarette lighters beside the painting. As the flames wave, the animals seem to come alive. Shadows cut back and forth, creating an uncanny image of running bison.

“The artists who created this would have painted by fire and they would have seen the bison just like this,” the guide says. “Look at how the natural relief of the wall was used to give volume to their bodies. The animals were drawn firmly and without the slightest hint of hesitation.”

As I listen to her wax on about the confidence of the cave painters, I consider my own lack of it. I stare at the bison. Whatever it is I’m born to do, my fear of failing at it has almost become greater than my desire to figure out what it is.

I make out Mom’s silhouette five people ahead and think about the bee novel she’s writing. She has fears that it won’t be published, but she’s writing it anyway. Over the last few months, she has handed me chapter after chapter to read. The most recent is about a wooden statue of Mary that the women in the story dance around, touching her heart. Mary fills them with fearlessness, and if they ever grow weak, they have only to touch her heart again. I love this passage.

Every time I read a new chapter, I tell Mom, “This is
really
good.” And she says, “Well, I don’t know.” It isn’t false modesty; she actually doesn’t know. She thinks I’m biased, and okay, I’m biased, but still I see it. Why can’t she?

I’m crazy about Mom’s main character, fourteen-year-old Lily, who is wounded but brave and funny. She takes control of her life and goes searching for her mother, but really, it seems, she is looking for love, trying to find out if she’s worth loving. Lily ends up in a pink house with the sisters, which turns into a kind of mothering refuge. I’m always telling Mom to hurry and write the next chapter; I need to find out what happens.

Once Mom told me, “I don’t know if this novel will ever see the light of day, but I’m doing it.” All I can think as I see her in the cave is how determined she is to do it in spite of herself.

I remember my prayer to Joan of Arc in the chapel at Notre Dame—
I want to know what I was born for. I want the courage to do it
. I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels, stuck between the need I have to blaze my own path, doing something that doesn’t resemble my mother’s work, and the inclination I have toward writing. Earlier, on the bus, I was thinking about those dreams I had about
The Yellow Wallpaper
, but it isn’t until right now, standing in the damp darkness with all these women, that it hits me finally: the character in the story was cut off from her
writing
.

I’d been so concentrated on the character’s loss of herself in her marriage that I’d glossed over the colossal detail that she’d lost her writing.

Nearby, the guide is talking and the group is horseshoed around her, but I don’t hear a word. I’m asking myself: was the prohibition against writing part of the reason I dreamed about the story? Twice? Later I would wonder why Mom didn’t point this out. She has a remarkable acuity when it comes to dreams. There’s no way she didn’t notice it.

Could Gilman’s cooped-up wife represent
both
my worry about my independence and my fear that I have cut myself off from a genuine desire to write? As I ask myself this, I recognize the truth and well up with tears. Yes, it’s both.

Ever since I began working on my articles for
Skirt!
, I’ve treated writing a little like the Rebound Boyfriend, a fling not to be taken seriously, considering how it followed my breakup with ancient Greece. I’ve resisted writing because I thought there had to be more to it than these intimations and impulses I keep having, or the fact that I enjoy doing it, or even the belief I might become reasonably good at it. But now I’m wondering if all these things are the very ways my true self speaks—signs that they come from a real place inside of me.

How many times have I heard Mom refer to writing as her “necessary fire”? The first time I heard her use those two words was during a talk she gave at my college. She was standing behind the pulpit in the chapel and I sat in the front row. I don’t recall her exact words, but the message has stayed with me: look within and find your “necessary fire,” a phrase she attributed to the novelist John Gardner. To me, this idea meant finding work with which I had a deep compatibility, a true affinity, yet work that also held the possibility to bring me alive.

A fire was ignited in me on that first trip to Greece, but I can’t say now that it was the necessary one. Groping along with the others in the cave, I admit to myself that if the university called me today and said, Oh, about that letter of rejection, it was a big mistake, we want you after all, I doubt I would go. Graduate school has lost most of its combustion, and it’s not just the disappointment that dampened it. I’m beginning to see it differently. When I separated the romance of teaching ancient Greek history from the daily demands of the job, I realized it was never teaching I wanted; it was Greece. I did not have a deep compatibility with teaching, and chances were it would not bring me alive.

Writing. Growing up, it’s all I wanted to do. Now I feel the way it pulls at me. Not like a dramatic allurement, but like I’ve been away from home and have returned to the quiet things I love.

Our hotel, Le Relais de Moussidière, turns out to be a country manor house surrounded by woods, ponds, and old-looking sundials. Inside, we are greeted by the manager and his two sleek Afghan hounds, who prop their front paws on the desk and wag their tails like we have microwaved hamburgers in our pockets.

Rolling my luggage along the corridor to our room, I notice Mom and I both are covered in dust from the cave. It could be moon dust for how far away that subterranean world seems now.

Suddenly I feel exhausted. Like I may have to lie down in the hallway. Right now, I can’t tell whether my speculations about writing made it out of the cave with me. It’s funny how different things seem aboveground. When we clambered out of the cave into the blinding daylight, to the guide broadcasting that the gift shop was down the hill to the left, I felt yanked back to a more pragmatic reality. The
Aha!
about writing and the feelings that flared up in me underground are faint and untraceable, like those paintings on the cave wall after the light is extinguished.