Traveling with Pomegranates (9 page)

Hunched over my journal in the wan light of the cathedral, I look over the experiences with Mary that I’ve collected—the motif of leaving her behind; the recognition she could be larger than the human Mary, unconfined by religion and imbued with meanings that have long been associated with the ancient Goddess; how she showed up as a dark, feminine divinity, a Black Madonna; and finally, the way she was connected to my desire to write fiction.

Mary crying in my dream, living impoverished and quarantined in my soul, reminds me suddenly of Mary in the Tinos icon, begging to be dug up from the uncultivated field. I can’t deny the inner behest in all this. It seems more than possible that the piece I’m missing in my spiritual life is a single image of devotion. Is Mary my “grain of sand”?

If I penetrate to the center of Mary’s image, perhaps I will find a new center of myself. Isn’t that what iconic images are meant to do—bring us into encounters with our own deep selves? My heart and my gut tell me that the night-skinned, fierce-eyed, tree-loving Mary will help lead me to the inner sanctum of the Old Woman, that she has something to do with my rebirth as an older woman. I can’t explain this to myself. I only feel in intuitive, indeterminate ways that she will have a part in whatever renaissance might lie in my aging, perhaps opening me to the deeper, more primal layers of creativity I yearn for, and at the same time, taking me down to an irreducible essence, all the way to the severity of my own dying. Down to the gnawed bone.

Light sweeps across the slits of windows in the dome of the cathedral, sparking the air with bits of coppery brightness, and I look up for a moment and feel the spaciousness of wonder. And then a kind of guilt. How long have I been sitting here? An hour? Where is Ann? As I jump up, I see her walking toward me. “Did you see the bones?” she says.

I must have looked at her quizzically.

“St. Philothei’s bones.”

“Oh.” I shake my head.

“They’re over there,” she tells me and points to a silver reliquary on the altar.

We stand beside it and stare at the bones. We stand with our shoulders touching, without saying anything, and I can think of nothing now but Ann.

I have one of those stabbing, crystalline moments when it’s as if I’m outside of myself, observing. I see myself almost fifty and my daughter unrecognizably grown, and I wonder:
How did this happen? Where did all the time go? Where did
we
go—those other selves?
Then the moment passes and I’m back, staring again at the bones, these tiny sticks of enduring.

The hotel concierge recommends a restaurant in the Plaka. He writes the name on a piece of paper bearing a watermark of the Grande Bretagne and tears it off the tablet.

“We need good directions,” I tell him. “We’ve been lost in the Plaka once today.”

“All the streets there look alike,” he says and pulls a map from behind the desk. Using a yellow highlighter, he draws a spiraling path from our hotel to the restaurant.

“The yellow brick road,” I say. For no apparent reason.

“The road isn’t brick,” he explains.

Mom smiles.

“Right,” I say, deciding to stop while I’m not ahead.

“There is music and dancing,” he informs us as he marks the destination with a big star.

“Oz,” Mom says.

I give her a look that says
very funny
, as the concierge hands her the map. Everything on her face—mouth, eyes, eyebrows, especially her eyebrows—turns up as she looks at it, and I know she’s thinking this is a great way to spend the evening: music and dancing, a real Greek experience. She’s right; it’s a tradition that goes back centuries and there’s nothing more Greek than dancing—but I feel the wary beginnings of a stomachache.

We follow the swath of yellow on the map until Mom stops suddenly on the sidewalk. I’m already a few paces ahead of her when I hear her say, “Look, this is the same store. And it’s open.” When I turn back, she’s pointing into the window at glass pomegranates in a bird’s nest. We’d passed by them earlier today, but the shop was closed.

The place sells just about everything: key chains, worry beads, Byzantine icons, Zeus beach towels, miniature statues of the Olympian family members. Mom goes over to the nest and plucks out a pomegranate. It has an eye on top to slip a chain through. On the bottom, the glass is fluted out like the knotted end of a tiny red balloon.

I learned about Persephone and the pomegranate reading Edith Hamilton’s
Mythology
in middle school. As I recall, it boiled down to three things: Persephone ate the pomegranate seeds that Hades offered her in the underworld; this guaranteed she and her mother would be separated a third of every year; and that was how winter came into the world.

“I’m going to buy a pomegranate for each of us,” Mom announces.

“Thanks,” I say, but frankly I’m wondering,
why pomegranates?

At the register, Mom fingers through the colorful bills in her wallet—cream, aqua, and orange. Our new charms cost 1900 drachmas, about seven or eight American dollars. I pull out several hundred-drachma bills, but Mom tells me to save my money for something else. As I slide the money back, I notice the lavender-tinted Athena on one of the bills, wearing her plumed helmet. In Greece, she is everywhere. At home, with the exception of my left ring finger, she is nowhere to be found.

I dreamed about her once. She emerged from a dark nowhere, a distant black hole in the universe, growing bigger and closer until she was right beside me. She wore a robe that was lit with actual stars from the cosmos. “You can see me anytime you want,” she said. “All you have to do is dream.” Then she was gone. It was one part divine, one part Everly Brothers. That was over a year ago; I hadn’t been able to conjure her again.

I’ve been reading about her, though. I think for a moment about her unusual birth story, how she emerged fully grown from her father Zeus’s head. It’s interpreted as having cut Athena off from her feminine roots. She’s described as a “father’s daughter” who portrays masculine traits. But I think of Athena’s qualities of bravery and autonomy, even her warrior energy, as inherently feminine, right along with her wisdom and creativity. I always return to the idea of her virginity, how it symbolizes self-belonging. I believe the possibility of that exists in a woman. It’s the territory I keep trying to define for myself.

I wander through the shop, inspecting the T-shirts displayed on the wall, thinking I’ll buy one for Scott. I try to picture what he’s doing right now. Probably tracking tropical storms, looking for the beach with the best surfing. He has promised to teach me to surf one day. Scott has a way of pulling me into the
Wide World of Sports
. . . and maybe into the wide world itself.

I spot a T-shirt with Aphrodite laid out like a fish on ice, completely naked. “Why not just put some bunny ears on her?” I say to my mom, who looks at the shirt and rolls her eyes. I pick a blue one with HELLAS printed in white letters.

As the clerk rings it up, Mom hands me a small plastic bag with my pomegranate inside. I watch as she takes off the silver chain around her neck and slips her pomegranate onto it. Her chain already has a bee charm on it. I’m not sure what the bee is about, but it’s not unusual for my mother to find inspiration in nature. At the moment, I’m not wearing a necklace so I slip my pomegranate inside my shoulder bag along with Scott’s shirt.

A block later, we stop again so I can sign a petition requesting that the British Museum return the Elgin Marbles to Greece. I write my name and where I live into the thickly bound book sitting on a wooden stand on the sidewalk, then glance at the addresses of the other names recorded on the page: Frankfurt, Barcelona, Houston. Now, Charleston. I love the place, but I walk the rest of the way trying not to think about how I ended up there.

I spot a body shop with rolling garage doors, then across the street, a restaurant. Mom points at it. “That’s the one.”

“I don’t believe it. I’ve been to that restaurant before!”

“No kidding,” Mom says, sounding surprised.

How is it possible that in a city the size of Athens we’ve come to the very restaurant I ate in when I was here before? It’s so unlikely it feels almost purposeful, and for a few seconds I have the feeling I will walk inside and bump into the ghost of myself seventeen months ago—the girl who came to Greece and figured out how to belong to herself and feel at home in the world. The doorway is low. Mom and I duck our heads as we slip into a waiting area the size of a walk-in closet.
Yes, the same place
.

“Is this where you danced with . . . what’s his name?” Mom says.

“Demetri.” I’m slightly embarrassed that she’s brought him up. “I met him somewhere else,” I explain. “
This
is where Dr. Gergel brought a few of us on the first night we were in Athens.”

I’d told Mom about Demetri before we left home. I had to—in the last letters that Demetri and I exchanged, we had arranged to meet during the trip. The plan is for him to call me tomorrow afternoon at the hotel and for us to go back to the place we met. The name of that place is about the only detail from my first trip that I can’t remember. It’s not like me to forget, and it drives me crazy because that was one of the happiest nights of my life.

“Maybe we’ll dance again,” Demetri had written. Maybe we will, but it won’t be in the same way. We may have started with a romance, but now there is Scott. Through our letters, through time and distance, Demetri and I are developing a friendship. That is all our relationship can ever be.

I keep indulging in the hope that being in Greece, and only that, will solve everything for me. Even when I woke this morning, before I opened my eyes, I lay in bed luxuriating in that particular fantasy.
I’m going to walk out of the hotel lobby onto the sidewalks of Athens and that alone is going to make me happy.

There’s relief in moments like those, but when they’re gone I always return to my New Normal—a state of semiterror at the thought of failing, looking stupid, getting hurt, or being rejected. For me, normality has become the act of retreat, of being afraid the world will find me and slip like smoke beneath the door. All of which fills me with sadness that I’m missing out on my own life. I know girls from my graduating class who are starting new jobs, MBA programs, law school; girls with five-year plans; girls who want to take on the world. Post-rejection letter, I’ve preferred hiding in plain view, like one of those insects camouflaged as a stick.

A man greets us, holding an armful of menus.
“Yassas, kalispera!”

His name, Yiannis, is embroidered in red thread on the front pocket of his shirt. We follow him into the dining room where a band is playing “Lara’s Theme” from
Doctor Zhivago
. It is just as I remember: The stage with the oversized painting of the Parthenon hanging behind it. Long, narrow tables, plates of cucumber, tomato, feta, bowls of
tzatziki
, platters of chicken souvlaki, moussaka, shish kebabs, black olives. Wine the color of dark cherries. Pastry drowned in honey. I have lost all direction for my life, but I have not lost my appetite.

Yiannis leads us to two seats directly in front of the stage, then hops up to the microphone to introduce the next performer. A heavyset woman wearing a blue sequined gown with tassels on her shoulders walks into the spotlight and sings a song that seems to be about losing someone and hoping he’ll come back.

She is followed by a belly dancer with a sword. Her outfit is a shimmery bra and a sheer purple skirt that falls to her ankles with slits cut to her hips. Her spine is an octopus tentacle. When she balances the sword on a spot above her belly button, I think to myself,
I could never be this woman.
Finally, the room explodes with lively Greek music. Everyone claps. Some stomp their feet. Men shout and let out long, curling whistles. Women roll their shoulders and snap their fingers over their heads.