Traveling with Pomegranates (32 page)

As we descend the stairway, I tell Mom that since we only have two more nights in France, we should go all out on the meals. No hamburgers. Bring on the baguettes. The cheese plate. Steak au poivre. Champagne.

Then, after a few moments of wondering, I come out and ask her, “What did you pray for back there on the kneeler?”

“You,” she answers, and peels off her coat again.

I read the paragraph in the yellowed newspaper clipping while waiting for Ann to come out of the alterations fitting room where she’s trying on the gown. The article, from my hometown weekly newspaper, has been tucked away in a box for the last thirty-one years, and I’m sure I have not looked at it for the last twenty-five. I’ve forgotten how earnest the wedding coverage could get in 1968 in my hometown. It goes on for half a page and even includes a passage about my “going-away” outfit: a white, knit two-piece suit (
knit!
) with a navy-and-white-striped jacket, a navy straw hat, and white gloves with navy “monogramed” initials (monogrammed, I notice, is misspelled).

This morning I pulled out the article, reasoning that if the seamstress needed to remake any part of the dress, such details would be useful. It barely survived the “acid treatment,” which has left the organza white as snowflakes but nearly as fragile. A tiny tear has appeared in the skirt like a run in a pair of hose.

With my reading glasses perched on the end of my nose—a new and necessary nuisance these days—I smooth the clipping out a bit further across my knees and stare at my bridal photo. The bertha cape dipping to my elbows, the endless train, the bouffant veil, the single strand of pearls, the young woman with the beaming face.

Across the room, Ann’s bare feet are visible below the curtain drawn across the dressing room cubicle. I watch as she stands on one leg to slip on her panty hose and does the wobble-hop-hop as she loses her balance, then tries again. I fold up the article and slip it back into my purse.

It is a warm, bright day in early February, three and a half months since Ann and I returned from France. The matter of my blood pressure goes on unresolved like a small, daily trauma. Each morning after breakfast, I wrap the cuff around my arm and stare disconsolate at the readout. “That can’t be right,” I’ll say to Sandy, then take it again, only to find it’s worse and becoming a self-perpetuating stress all its own. I am in the midst of yet another medication change. I exercise, visualize, watch my diet, take my supplements, and excise all sorts of things from my schedule, trying to
do
less, but nothing seems to lower it for long.

Now wedding plans have begun in earnest—invitations, florist, musicians, caterer, wedding cake, a morass of details—though quite honestly I am delighting in them, savoring this time with Ann. Lately, we’ve been writing her marriage ceremony together, using the beautiful old liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer as a guide, but adding inclusive language and touches of feminine sacredness. Last Saturday we sat in the wicker chairs on the screen porch and penned the opening prayer:

I read the finished version of the prayer out loud, then we sat and stared at the oak beside the marsh.

When I can, I work on the novel. Instead of launching the second half of it, I rewrite and polish the first seven chapters, telling myself I should send them off like I envisioned in France. Not only have I not done so, I notice that when I finish sprucing up chapter 7, I start over again at chapter 1. As if I cannot see through what I am doing.

A sewing machine starts to hum just outside the fitting room, a sound I cannot hear without thinking of my mother and the music she made with her Singer. It played all through the house as she sewed clothes for herself, for me, and even for my dolls, who had fur-trimmed ice skating suits, poodle skirts, lounging pajamas, and dozens of other creations she dreamed up. She gave me my own Singer sewing machine when I got married. I eagerly sewed three pairs of overalls for Bob when he was an infant, an enterprise that involved so many tortured, ripped-out little seams I retired the machine to the closet, along with any desires I may have had to follow in her accomplished footsteps.

“You must be the mother of the bride,” a voice says, breaking into my thoughts, and I look up to find the seamstress beside me with a pincushion on her wrist like a bracelet.

“And what are
you
wearing to the wedding?” she says after we’ve dispensed with every other wedding-related topic and Ann is still in the dressing room.

“A black dress,” I answer. “Floor-length, silk—it’s very simple with a sheer matching jacket.”

I sound like the newspaper clipping.

“Black?” she says.

Which is exactly what the salesclerk said when I tried on the dress last week in a shop on King Street. It was just the opposite of now:
I
was in the fitting room while Ann sat outside waiting for
me
to emerge. I paraded out in mint green, aquamarine, persimmon, lavender, champagne—perfect colors for the mother of the bride at a garden wedding in Charleston in June. I disliked every one of them with an intensity I could not account for.

In the yellowed article, the preposterous fashion coverage had extended to my mother’s dress, which was “blue crepe with a jeweled and lace yoke,” and to my mother-in-law’s, “rose pink with a scalloped neckline.”

“The black dress fit perfectly,” I tell the seamstress, “which isn’t the easiest accomplishment anymore.” I wonder why I am explaining myself to her. The truth is the dress simply felt right the moment I put it on, and it wasn’t because of the fit; it was because of the color.

“You don’t think it’s too . . . somber?” I asked Ann. “Because that’s the last thing I feel.”

“It’s great,” she said. “And it’s the one you like; you should get it.”

Now, stepping from behind the curtain in the wedding gown, Ann holds the billowing sides of the skirt under her arms like two small, white barrels, dropping them around her as she steps onto the platform in front of the mirror.

I watch as the seamstress fusses with the bodice—aware of how I force away the image of myself in the wedding dress. The way my daughter takes me back, against the ferocity of my will, to what was.

On February 14, as the sun sets over the marsh behind the house, the creek turns dark magenta and the egrets lift out of the tall grass and fly home. I watch this familiar circadian rhythm from the windows in my study. Sometimes I think I should never have faced my desk toward the creek. The view is a constant distraction from work, but with the birds moving like flares of white in the gathering dark, I know the desk is exactly where it should be. There is wisdom in this sort of loitering. I watch until the egrets are gone, until the light becomes a piece of fringe on the horizon.

Downstairs in the kitchen, I hear Sandy beating a wooden spoon in a mixing bowl, cooking Chicken Biryani—my Valentine’s Day present—which has spiced up the whole house with turmeric, cumin, and minced gingerroot. “Dinner in half an hour,” he shouts up the stairs, used to me tarrying at my desk.

I’ve been tampering with the novel all afternoon, changing words and changing them back. I glance at the picture of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour that I keep propped on a stand atop my desk—the beautiful old black Mary face—and I think about the piece of chain I left in her chapel.

My mind winds back to that time, years ago, when I unveiled the first chapter at the writer’s conference and got the tepid reception, the teacher saying its potential as a novel was small. For a long time I believed the teacher was right. Now I think he was right
and
wrong. He saw a truth, regardless of how he interpreted it—my work wasn’t ready then; I wasn’t ready.

But sitting at my desk with the windows glazed dark and black Mary staring at me with her bold, impenetrable look, I know the first half of the novel is probably as ready now as it will ever be and maybe I am, too, because nothing is perfect and I should lay down my ego and let happen what will happen. It is just life. It’s time to settle more fully into my own condensed truth and find my strength and boldness in
that
.

I print out the pages, stick them into a big padded envelope, and address it to Virginia Barber, the literary agent I met three years earlier.

The next morning I hand the envelope to Sandy as he leaves for his office. “Could you mail this for me today? Overnight express.”

He tucks it under his arm and steps through the door.

“If I call you before you get to the post office, don’t answer.”

“Right.”

“I mean it.”

“Consider it mailed,” he says.

Several days later, the phone rings and Virginia Barber is on the other end, asking if she can represent me. She wants to send my half-novel to several publishers. I say yes, while simultaneously having a silent talk with myself about not getting my hopes up.

After two weeks of vacillating between hoping and not hoping, I am in the waiting room of my optometrist’s office, poking through a pile of magazines, when I receive a second call from the agent. She has found a publisher.

“Congratulations,” she says.

I impersonate a woman who seems to know more or less what to say—
How exciting . . . I never imagined . . . I’m thrilled . . . Thank you so much . . . I really appreciate it
—but in reality, I am walking deliriously around the empty waiting room silently mouthing the words
holy shit
.

She concludes the conversation by saying, “The publisher wants the rest of the novel by September first.”

I count on my fingers.
Six months
.

A few minutes later in the examination room, I stare through the lens while the eye chart letters float into the circle of light on the far wall. E D F C Z P.

“Which is better?” the optometrist says, flicking back and forth between the settings. “This . . . or this?”