Traveling with Pomegranates (41 page)

I hurry to catch up with the others at the grotto where Persephone returned from the underworld, where Ann and I ate pomegranate seeds last time.

From a distance, the cave opening appears like a half-moon shadow painted crudely onto the rocks. When I draw closer, I find Ann standing in the center of it. Her back is to me, her hair blowing in static wisps around her head, the hood of her teal nylon windbreaker flapping between her shoulder blades. The way she is framed in the cavernous opening halts me.

I plop down on a block of mottled stone that was once part of a temple wall to Hades, picking an out-of-the-way spot where I can observe my daughter unaware. I watch her inspect a niche in the rock where offerings are left. When she turns, her face is caught in the midday glare and I’m struck by a sweet, choking feeling—that way love blindsides.

She returned. I form the words deliberately in my mind, knowing there was no single point when it happened, only that this is the moment I choose to acknowledge it. We made a reunion.

For over two years, ever since these expeditions of ours started, I’ve tried to understand what the embrace between Demeter and Persephone means. I have come to believe it’s really about that aperture opening. It’s the channel where the souls of a mother and a daughter open and flow as two separate adults, woman to woman. It is, I know now, a place created through necessary loss and necessary search, and a reinvention of the whole relationship.

Spotting me on my perch, deep in my vigil, Ann wanders toward me. As she crosses the grotto, she reaches behind her neck and unties the green velvet ribbon. She slips the pomegranate off and pockets it.

I cannot register what she is doing. I get to my feet, curious, tilting my head to the side in a question.

She holds the ribbon out to me. “You should wear it,” she says.

“Oh no, I couldn’t—” I answer automatically, then break off.

“I want you to,” she says.

And I’m aware suddenly how much
I
want to, too. “All right, thank you,” I tell her.

I have the feeling Ann’s gift is motivated by the conversation we had this morning at breakfast when I told her that today is the “tenth day,” when Persephone returns to her mother. The ribbon must be Ann’s token of that, her way of acknowledging to me that
she
has returned. It takes me a moment longer to grasp another, more hidden implication, one perhaps Ann doesn’t see at all. That the ribbon is also the Young Woman returning to me.

As I unclasp my own silver chain, remove the pomegranate, and thread it onto the ribbon, my mind tumbles back to a different conversation Ann and I had in Paris about Picasso’s painting
Girl Before a Mirror
. The way the Young Woman reaches for the Old Woman in the glass. I haven’t thought about that for a very long time. Or how the reunion of Demeter and Persephone conveys a similar image: the essence of Young and Old coming together in a woman to create new life. A new self.

Ann ties the ribbon for me. “There,” she says, and steps around to look at it. “You have to see it, too.”

I wait while she plows through her backpack for a compact. She pries it open and holds it up to my face. I rise on my toes a little in order to see the V of plush green, the red pomegranate suspended at the hollow of throat. Then my face bounces into the mirror, accompanied by a flash of meeting myself.

As Ann tucks the mirror away and zips the backpack, I hold this moment inside with all the others. All that has happened. All that Ann is to me. This belonging.

When Mom and I returned from our final trip to Greece, I plunged into writing the travel book I had announced to the Madonna in the tree at the Palianis convent. In effect, this very book became my “apprenticeship.” Over the years, I worked steadily on it in a small, L-shaped study over the garage of our new house, surrounded by images of my female triptych—a picture of Mary, a statue of Athena, and an icon of Joan of Arc. My desk was constantly buried beneath travel journals, trip photographs, postcards, research books, and dozens of notes I’d scribbled to myself. Much of the time, I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I deleted five hundred sentences for every one I kept and lost count of how many outlines I created as I struggled to find my voice and probe the places I’d visited—not just the ones on the map, but those in my own interior landscape.

Gradually, as my work progressed, I came to feel that only half the story was being told. I thought about my mom’s experiences during our trips, how she’d defined what it meant for her to become an older woman, discovered a new spiritual focus, and regenerated her whole creative life. It seemed a shame for her not to write about her own metamorphosis. Not to mention, our travels contained not just her individual story, and not just mine, but
our
story—a mother-daughter one that had happened in unison. Our experiences were tightly braided. Just as I could not imagine taking the trips alone, it became impossible to imagine the book without her voice. Mom, however, was immersed in writing her second novel and I had no idea whether writing about our travels even interested her.

In the spring of 2003, shortly after my twenty-seventh birthday, I finally brought the matter up, calling Mom one morning as I lingered at my desk. I told her there was more to the book than just my story. “Why don’t you write it with me?” I said on impulse.

To my surprise, she didn’t hesitate. “I would love to, but I want you to be sure.”

“I’ve been sure,” I told her, and immediately set about trying to re-conceive the book as a joint project.

In September of that same year, I was propped in bed watching
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
over my Big Fat Pregnant Belly. As the character Toula was prevaricating to her date about her family, I felt our baby deliver four hard, even kicks.
That was different.
I glanced over at the wooden cradle across the room. Earlier that day I’d had a feeling the baby was ready to come, and I’d put clean sheets and a blue blanket on the little mattress.

My intuition was right. Later that night, Ben was born. Motherhood was something I’d always wanted, and I fell in love with it the moment Scott put Ben into my arms, not to mention falling in love with Ben himself.

During his first year of life, I wrote very little, content to concentrate on Ben and my new role as his mother. But slowly the pull to work on the book reasserted itself, and I began the long, classic struggle to balance the tensions between tending Ben and tending my creative life. Finally, when he was two, I enrolled him in a preschool program, allowing me time to write other than during his sporadic naps.

I rarely thought about the rejection letter from the university, though I still keep it in a file folder in my desk, slotted between “Future Trips” and “Hurricane Evacuation Plan.” One day, I hope Mom and I will travel together again—I’ve had an idea of taking a Jane Austen tour of England. As for Greece, I imagine returning with Scott and Ben one day, showing them the place that changed me.

The best part of writing
Traveling with Pomegranates
was the time I spent with my mother, brainstorming, editing, and veering off sometimes into completely unrelated topics, discussing the books we read or sorting through fabric samples for sofa pillows.

When I told the Virgin in the myrtle tree that I wanted to write a book about my travels, I did not imagine I would run
over
my seven-year apprenticeship, that it would take eight years from that day in 2000 when I said the prayer at the Palianis convent until this day in 2008, when I sit here at my desk and write the last few lines. But I’ve discovered being a writer is an ongoing apprenticeship, just like everything else in life that matters to me—being a mother, a wife, a daughter, or simply a woman alive in the world, content to be myself. Today at thirty-two, I am glad to wake up each day and begin.

Beyond the window of my study, Scott and five-year-old Ben are playing T-ball in the backyard, our black lab, Luke, chasing after them. Having come to the end of this book, I push back in my desk chair, feeling grateful, and think about the irony of me—the girl who wanted to be invisible—putting my story out there in the world, and aware, too, of the red shoe box beside my desk that holds the collection of images and ideas I contemplate writing about one day. For now, though, I slip on my shoes and head outside.

Back home from Greece, I happily observed Ann at work on her travel book and concentrated on planning the tour I would co-lead to France in the spring of 2001. I entertained no thoughts of writing about the trips myself—indeed, I was eager to start a second novel the moment some compelling idea occurred to me. During the tour of France, however, while standing with Ann and Mother beside an exalted old Black Madonna in the crypt of Chartres Cathedral, I felt a sweep of wonder at my connection to each of them and at the traveling that had helped me forge those connections. In that moment, I realized I wanted to write about my search for the Old Woman and finding not only her but Demeter, Persephone, the Black Madonna, Ann, my mother, and myself.