Traveling with Pomegranates (40 page)

Trailing Ann into the ruins in Eleusis, I study the green velvet ribbon on which she has strung her red pomegranate, how it’s tied at the back of her neck, green like spring foliage. I’m wearing my pomegranate, too, but on a plain silver chain, drab by comparison.

I touch the tiny glass orb with my finger, remembering when I spied the charms through a store window on our first trip, how later our matching necklaces seemed to magically convince the taxi driver to bring us to this same site, when our verbal pleading failed. After that, we joked that we were wearing our myth on our sleeves—Demeter, Persephone; mother, daughter; the saga of loss, search, return—though, honestly, no one except the Greek driver ever seemed to notice it. Once, a woman in a restaurant asked us quite seriously if we were promoting pomegranate juice.

Ann’s green ribbon is a brand new touch, just for this trip. I cannot stop telling her how pretty it is. She told me she got the idea from
Little Women
—meaning, I supposed, that it was inspired by the pendants that dangled on velvet ribbons around the March girls’ necks. Ann loves
Little Women.
Especially Jo March, the feisty one who wants to be a writer. But as I take in the shoots of green breaking over the back of Ann’s coat collar, I ask her if she wasn’t also thinking about Persephone.

“She’s why I chose the color green,” she tells me.

We’ve had numerous conversations about Persephone’s so-called “green fuse,” a catchphrase we use to describe her regenerative essence.

It is the chilliest day of the trip. Overhead, cloud patches have pieced themselves into a gray quilt with scraggly blue seams. The light glooms noticeably as we cross the broken pavements with the other women, moving past the toppled columns and tympanums. Wind whips up the scent of dry weeds and musty old stones, pulling me back once again to our first visit . . . to Ann and me roaming this bonepile of ruins.

I wish I did not remember how lost and depressed she was then, but it wells up suddenly and a sharp sensation twists through my stomach, as if the memories are archived in the cells of my body and have been viscerally retrieved. I look at Ann striding ahead of me in her Persephone-Jo March ribbon and remind myself that while the memory of that period still stabs, she’s no longer in the dark place she was two years ago.

Ann has told me that when we visited Eleusis before, she began to view her confusion, disillusion, fear, and depression in light of the myth, identifying them with Persephone’s sojourn in the underworld. She began to see meaning in her descent. It became a search for a new sense of herself and a place for that self in the world. She found them, it seems to me now, in the daily confrontations with her darkness.

Just ahead, the women have begun to gather around the Well of the Beautiful Dances, peering into the dry, empty hole where I previously tossed a lock of my hair. The place where I capitulated.

I have another pang, though considerably milder, as I recall my own feelings of loss the last time I was here—the pulverizing moments I spent by the well, pondering the lost daughter: Ann, yes, but also the one inside.

Slipping into the circle of women, Ann and I stare at the stone well like two people gazing at the ocean, hushed by the sight of it.

“It is so different, being here this time,” Ann says.

I nod, aware that the sadness and angst I felt here before are gone. Used up. What is left is the emotion stirred up by memory. And even that seems spent at the moment. Those natural losses of womanhood had craved expression and I am glad now for giving in to them. A kind of contented acceptance has grown up in their place, and this is a knowledge I have not fully possessed until now.

Earlier this morning during breakfast, while reviewing the itinerary, I realized today was our tenth day of traveling. That would have been an unremarkable fact except that I also remembered that in the myth, Demeter searched for Persephone for nine days and on the tenth, she found her.

I looked across the table at Ann, who was munching her toast, and I had the feeling there was meaning in the small synchronism. Where was I now in the scheme of the myth? Had I arrived not just at the tenth calendar day of the trip, but at the mythic “tenth day”?

As the waiter cleared our plates, I suddenly thought of the gift Ann had given me two years ago for my fiftieth birthday. It was a photograph she’d taken at Eleusis, one of the many she took of me when I wasn’t looking. In it, I stand in the cavelike opening where Persephone returned to her mother, my white sundress no bigger than a postage stamp in the stark shadows. In the matting of the framed picture, Ann had inserted a paraphrased passage from the Demeter-Persephone myth in Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology
:

We comb the jigsaw of ruins, as our guide Letta points out the remains of this and that—the inner sanctuary, the ruts worn into the floor over the centuries by massive doors—hundreds of moldering objects passing by as if on a conveyor belt, bearing history. I try to concentrate on each one, but the feeling at breakfast—the vision of Persephone bounding into her mother’s arms and the awareness of a similar convergence happening in me—bleeds through all of it. I walk along as cameras click, and voices murmur, and the wind jousts with the cypresses on the hill, and I am . . . elsewhere.

I think about my mother. I phoned her not long ago and asked if she would like to go to France with Ann and me next spring. Recently, I decided to co-lead one more of these trips just for that possibility. “It could be a grandmother-mother-daughter trip,” I told her.

“Well, isn’t
that
nice,” she said, using the tone she always gets in her voice when she’s simultaneously astonished and pleased. I pictured her standing with the phone in the kitchen, over at the window where she could see the scuppernong vines looping along the fence.

I waited for her to say something more. When she didn’t, I asked, “Do you need to talk to Dad first before you decide?”

“Oh no, I’m
going
,” she replied. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything on earth.”

“Me either,” I told her, and the words felt large inside, not just something to say.

At breakfast this morning, when I thought about the photograph Ann gave me, I was picturing myself as Demeter, identifying with the mother part of the myth, but now that I’m here, it has also flipped around and I’m the daughter.
I’m
the one returning to my mother. If I confided this to her, I feel like she would say:
Returning? But I never felt like you left
. She would be right, I was always there, but this is a different kind of closeness. As if a hidden aperture has opened. It’s entirely possible that some of the new intimacy I perceive between us comes from a subtle variation in myself—the shift that began when I opened myself to her Hestia world.

The next time I called Mother, just to say we were off to Greece, she was at the gym. As our group processes past the ruins of Hecate’s temple, I get a vision of my mother, seventy-nine years old now, going to town on the treadmill in her Reeboks and light blue warmup pants, and it provokes a spontaneous promise to myself:
I will grow young like that
.

Bending down, I pick up a stone the size of my thumbnail and squeeze the vow into its white surface. I’m leery of New Year-ish pledges to exercise and eat right, as I’ve left most of them behind like a trail of broken crockery, but this one seems forged in a deeper place. Since turning fifty, I’ve been initiated into a whole new relationship with my body. All that concern about what I see in the mirror has begun to leave; more and more what remains is simply the powerful need to take care of myself.

The high blood pressure readings have not returned. I did not even bring the blood pressure machine on the trip this time. “What? You didn’t bring the Alarm Clock?” Ann asked the first morning in Crete. She bestowed this pet name on the machine last year in France because the whining and beeping woke her nearly every morning.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to wake without the benefit of my medical equipment,” I told her.

Her face rearranged into seriousness, and she said, “Do you think it will come back—your hypertension, I mean?”

Did I? I told her my blood pressure spoke fluently to me about the struggle between doing and being that was lodged at my core, and I imagined it would always be my severe teacher, spiking when I lapsed into my old bad habits. Several nights later I had an oddly terse dream—just a voice speaking out of the silence, making a surprising pronouncement:
When you become an old woman, you won’t have blood pressure problems anymore.

The irony was that our group was in Delphi when I had the dream, the land of oracles and Sybils. In actuality, we had tromped up the mountain earlier that day to what’s left of Apollo’s temple, composing questions for the Delphic oracle in our heads—the sacred game that pilgrims there always engage in. Something about all this must have primed me to dream what sounded like a foretelling.

I recounted it to Ann when we woke. The dream was hopeful to me, but cryptic, too. I suppose I wanted to take it literally. Now, though, I understand the voice was not referring to chronological years, but archetypal ones. It was talking about the Old Woman.

Dropping the rock into my bag, I slide out my journal. I scribble questions awkwardly, standing up, while the group moves on, leaving me behind.
What was it about the Old Woman that could be healing for me? Freedom? The repose of belonging to oneself? Was it the wise and curative ways of being? The release that happens when you suspend the ego and turn your attention to the soul of the world? Was it simply coming to the tenth day, no longer driven by “what else,” but a finder of “what is”?