Traveling with Pomegranates (34 page)

It’s a typical hot day in June. As my father wipes his forehead with his handkerchief one last time, I am aware of his presence, not only beside me now, but throughout the whole of my life. He’s the one who taught me to whistle, tie my shoes, ride a bike, love baseball, and make basil pesto. The one who built my
stuffed
puppy an actual wooden doghouse, who came to my rescue when my kindergarden teacher critized my penchant for coloring outside the lines, who labored patiently with me over math homework, and who drove me to weekend slumber parties. Dad bestowed on me not just freckles, but an exorbitance of love. I put my arm through his, careful not to jostle loose the hydrangea blossom from France that I’ve stuck into my bouquet. Faded to lavender, the dried petals are easy to distinguish among the roses and other plump, blue hydrangeas. Mom rests her hand on my elbow, and I feel her fingers pat my long cotton glove.

I try not to step on my hem, stare at my feet, or worry about dragging the long train through the dirt. As we walk, I focus on the tree with its canopy of shade and on Scott in his morning suit, standing in front of a dipping oak limb, smiling at me, and looking as relaxed as I’ve ever seen him.

On a big safety pin attached to my bra are the small medals of the Black Virgins from Le Puy and Rocamadour, my Athena ring, and the little glass pomegranate. I slipped them on and fastened the pin over my breastbone where it wouldn’t cause a lump beneath the bertha cape. The sum of my objects has become a comical topic among my immediate family.

When I told Mom I had medals of French Mary but no Greek Mary, she offered me her small icon of the Virgin Mary from Tinos, which had come to her so mysteriously. I took it to the florist along with Mom’s childhood Bible so they could both be attached to my bouquet. The florist joked that maybe I needed a wagon for all my “stuff.” I thought:
Lady, you don’t even want to know what’s going into my bra.
Despite that, when I left the shop, I realized I’d left out Joan of Arc. All I had was a postcard of her. I figured she would understand me omitting the card. I had to stop or else I’d end up hauling that Radio Flyer down the aisle.

My eyes scan the guests standing on either side of the walkway. The ceremony is such an intimate and private undertaking that it strikes me as weird that Scott and I have assembled one hundred and twenty people to watch.
Don’t overthink
, I tell myself. I see faces. They click like slides in a carousel. Dr. Gergel, the professor who led my college tour to Greece. My close friend Marla. Trisha, from our trip to France. My three grandparents.

Certain memories have returned to me lately, a flow of mental snapshots. My grandmother at the stove, stirring a beat-up pan of sugar, butter, and milk while dictating to me the secrets of her caramel icing like the host of a cooking show. My “Biggie” (as we call my dad’s mother), allowing me to paint her fingernails various shades of pink—watermelon, raspberry, tutti-frutti. That time my grandfather (not my mother, or my grandmother, but my
grandfather
) took me shopping at the mall. How we scoured the racks for the special outfit he insisted on buying for my tenth-grade class trip to President Clinton’s inauguration. That houndstooth blazer with a suede collar we chose.

Halfway down the aisle, I see Bob lined up with the groomsmen, watching me and our parents coming down the aisle. On his face is an expression of pure affection, a look I would have killed for when I was eleven and he fourteen. Last night I stayed at my parents’ house, adhering to the tradition of not seeing the groom, which seemed kind of silly, considering that Scott and I live together. Bob and I stayed up late, in a magnificent regression, watching old MGM cartoons on television. During a cartoon of monkeys singing “Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil,” Bob fell asleep.

I turned off the TV and wondered if this was the last time we would act like kids in our parents’ house. Childhood seemed far away, like a country I would not return to. And I sat there a moment with the clicker in my hand and the screen gone dark, with a wash of images born of nostalgia, but also from a recognition—I think maybe my first real one—that everything ends, life passes, it is all changing. Getting married tomorrow would take me across the border, into a new country, one that seemed beautiful, and unmapped.

Right then, I felt perfectly positioned between two worlds. I tried to say to myself what they were—old and new, childhood and grown-up-hood, going solo and going duet,
madame
and
mademoiselle
. I wasn’t sure, but the in-between-ness swept over me with wonder and sadness and excited anticipation.

Last week, my parents took Scott and me to a Spanish restaurant in the Old City Market downtown. Mom handed me a small box. Our wedding gift, she said. Inside lay three linked pieces of chain. I remember Rocamadour:
what’s with Mom and the chain?

I read the card:

We toasted our upcoming wedding and sipped sangria. I joked to Scott that his link was the surfer. Mine, he said, was the traveler who would go off to Greece in four months.

Now, as the flute sings its last notes, my parents and I reach the tree. Quietness drifts up. I hear the insects hum. Two egrets are gliding down to the grasses at the river’s edge in slow motion. I smile at Scott as Cathy, the minister, reads the prayer.

Eternal Spirit, Mother, and Father who art in earth and heaven
. . .

Before the ceremony, we dress in an upstairs room of the Rice Mill House near the Butterfly Lake. Mom follows me inside with the veil draped over her outstretched arms like she’s bearing the queen’s jewels. Trailing behind her is my grandmother, then Laura, my maid of honor, followed by my three other bridesmaids, carrying their sea-foam-green dresses.

I turn the knob of the window air-conditioning unit to a promising shade of blue and hang my wedding dress on the back of the bathroom door. Settling into a chair in front of the blast of cold air, I pin the assortment of sacred objects onto my bra, which is more like an unforgiving corset contraption.

Everyone is busy. Ironing, applying mascara, plugging in curlers, unboxing bouquets. I sit still a moment, watching the flurry.

Spotting my dress across the room, I try to picture the nineteen-year-old my mother was when she wore it, a girl I never knew. Wearing the dress honors the bond between us—that’s how I’ve thought of it—but what I think about when I look at it now is the essence of my mother’s life, from the nineteen-year-old to the fifty-two-year-old, all that she has lived and become, and that makes me eager for the possibilities in my own life.

I finish dressing by the air conditioner, stepping into the gown and standing in front of the mirror while Mom crisscrosses four bobby pins in my hair to hold my veil. It is wired with white rosebuds and blue delphinium. I’ve never worn flowers in my hair before, and gazing at them with the white tulle falling down my back, I feel like a real bride. Mom stands behind me and smiles. Later, this configuration will make me think of the photo she has kept on her desk since France, of her mother and grandmother in this same pose.

The wedding ceremony took a year to pull off and lasts twenty-five minutes.

As Scott and I walk into the reception, one of the band members heralds us in a booming Barry White voice—“Ladies and Gentlemen, the newly married couple . . . Scott . . . and . . . Ann,” and “It Had to Be You” starts to play. The spotlight dance is the only part of the wedding I’ve dreaded. I set my bouquet on the cake table and follow Scott to the center of the dance floor, which suddenly seems like a stage with the curtain going up, the audience hushed, lights dimming, and one big spotlight in the center. But in fact, the whole room is ablaze with light. We are in a large glass-walled pavilion on the grounds, not too far from the tree. It is filled with candle flame and palm trees strung with tiny white lights, all of which reflect in the glass.

I do not know if I will ever make my peace with The Spotlight.

But I’m out here. As we dance, I have a soundtrack in my head:
Tune everyone out. Focus on Scott. We’re the only ones here. We’re the only ones here.

When it’s over, I sit down, take off my shoes, and eat chocolate wedding cake, followed by a plate of Charleston food—shrimp, crab cakes, sweet-potato biscuits, country ham, mango chutney, and benne wafers, eating like I do not have on the corset contraption. When Scott and I chose the songs from the band’s list, we had crossed off “Play That Funky Music,” but there it goes, pulsing through the speakers. I look up and see Bob dancing to it with our grandmother.

A guest drops by the table to ask, “Did you know an alligator swam by in the river during the wedding?” She has a concerned look, as if this is an omen.

“No,” I tell her, thinking, if it’s an omen, it’s a good one.

We leave to the sound of ringing minibells. Slipping outside, the two of us alone now, moving across the lawn in the darkness, the night sounds rise up: tree frogs and crickets and the rhythmic call of a whip-poor-will. When I turn and look back, I see the glass pavilion gleaming with light. I see Bob talking to Mom, making her laugh. My dad channeling James Brown on the dance floor to the muffled sounds of “I Feel Good.”

Scott and I climb into the car and drive off with my wedding gift to him strapped onto the top of the Honda. A new surfboard.

The thunderstorms begin sometime after midnight on the first day of my married life. I’m not implying any sort of sign or portent. It simply rained. It is, however, a deluge. We are staying in one of those impeccable five-star inns around Charleston before departing for our honeymoon destination, and I wake to the crash of rain and the wind howling in the oaks and pines. Lightning from far away fills the room with faint, vibrating light. The Carolina Lowcountry has its quick summer storm bursts, but this one sounds apocalyptic. I lie in the four-poster rice bed, which is so tall it has its own set of steps to get to the mattress, and I listen to the thunder.

There is the saying—a favorite of my grandmother’s—“Into every life a little rain must fall,” and while I don’t think the barrage outside means anything particular, I allow it now to have meaning in general. Something about the way life is. Taking the severities as part of it. About the weather patterns in the new country.