There’s an awkward silence. Then I hear her laugh. “Sue,” she says, “what you do, your writing—it opened me up to things I never would’ve thought about. So, I guess it goes both ways.”
She has been the keeper of home for me, and I have been the keeper of journey for her. And now we look for the lost portion in each other.
When the contents of the house are in place and the pictures hung, I am tired and frazzled and get it in my head to visit Mepkin Abbey, a Trappist monastery near Charleston. Even though the spring equinox is still weeks away, I want to walk through the monastery gardens along the Cooper River and sit for a while in the church where the monks pray. I thought I was going because what goes on inside monasteries is a cultivation of being that I’ve come to associate with the metaphor of home, but it will turn out to be for another reason.
When I arrive at the abbey at 1:00 P.M. the day is warm. By the time I reach the gardens, however, the sun has barricaded itself behind the clouds and the wind picks up, flapping over the river and straight through my thin corduroy jacket. By 1:20, I am alone in the church, which is white-walled and without flourish, distilled to a Cistercian simplicity.
I walk between the choir stalls toward the statue of a woman around three feet tall. Drawing closer, I notice her figure blends into a block of wood near the hem of her skirt. The grayed wood is severely scarred; deep crevices on her face make her look elderly, if not ancient, and both of her arms are broken off at the elbows. Two unlit candles stand in front of her. Is this Mary?
It seems to be, but she wears a dress with a ruffled Peter Pan-ish collar, a string bow at the neck, and a nineteenth century-looking cape. Her hair is bobbed around her face and shoulders. And no baby Jesus.
There is no chair or pew, so I sit on the floor and begin to sketch her in my journal, gradually realizing that she’s shaped like a figurehead from the prow of a ship.
Flop, squish, swish. The sounds come from the opposite end of the church. A young man, wearing sandals, sweatpants, and a black T-shirt with PHANTOM printed across the front, mops the floor, pushing around a yellow bucket on wheels. He seems not to notice me, and when I approach him from behind, he jumps.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I was just wondering about the statue over there. Who’s it supposed to be?”
“It’s Mary,” he says, then qualifies his answer. “Well, she’s not really Mary—at least she didn’t start out that way. She became Mary when she got here.”
I give him a puzzled look and he launches into the most extraordinary story. He’s a postulant, it turns out, who tells me he was present four years ago when the monks debated whether or not to consecrate the statue as Mary.
“It’s actually a ship’s figurehead,” he tells me, “that washed up somewhere, maybe the Caribbean, I can’t recall. It wound up in Charleston and was purchased by some group for the monastery.” I blink at him as if he has just told me the statue appeared miraculously in a tree like the dark Panagia had done at the convent in Greece.
“Some of the older monks really love her,” he adds and slaps the mop back into the pail.
I return to the statue, thinking of the image of the Black Madonna in my collage. It’s a postcard I brought back from Greece, picturing an icon of a dark-skinned Mary wrapped in chains. Legend says she was kidnapped several times by the Turks from a convent on the island of Crete but always escaped back to her homeland. Finally the Turks chained her up. Undeterred, Mary broke free and returned home, wearing the chains. The Greek nuns left them on the icon as a reminder of what Mary was capable of.
As I stand there, the Greek Mary in chains melds together in my imagination with the figurehead Mary in South Carolina. The fusion creates the Mary I want to inhabit my novel, the one who will live in the pink house with the sisters. She is a Black Madonna of the American South, an African American Mary. I close my eyes and I can see her—floating up on the shores of Charleston during the time of slavery. Not really Mary—at least she doesn’t start out that way; she becomes Mary. A Mary who breaks chains.
I imagine her with a history of inspiring freedom and subversion among the slaves, of being handed down through the generations and coming finally to the sisters in my novel. I picture her in the pink house with her fist raised in authority, a heart painted on her breast full of consolation. I see a semicircle of women dancing around her. They wear hats with feathers and veils. They touch their hands to her faded heart. She is their mother.
I sit down again on the brick-colored squares of the floor and write it all down. When I read it back, I understand that the tale of the monastery’s Mary is my story, too—that of a dark, older Mary lost for centuries, washing up on the shores of my consciousness, followed by the debate about whether to take her in.
I touch my hand to the figurehead, on the place I imagine a heart would be if anyone thought to paint one.
It is a balmy day in March when I imagine I see sprigs of green pushing up in the marsh grass. As the afternoon darkens, I walk out onto the dock with a handful of red camellia petals in my pocket. My intention is to make a ceremony with them, a homecoming ritual.
It’s an impromptu idea spurred by a housewarming party I once attended in which guests tossed rose petals across the thresholds of each room as a blessing. Today, when I saw the camellia blossoms in a vase, I filled my pocket with petals. I picture myself tossing them onto the water in the creek. A blessing. Why not?
When I reach the end of the dock, the sky is pink and gold from the sunset and pelicans cut through the spatter of colors in long strands, flying home. The tide is almost all the way out, exposing the roots of the spartina grass and mudflats pocked with crab holes.
I stand out here and think of the Old Woman. I sense her in the brown grass and the hidden life teeming inside the pluff mud. Mostly, she is in the tide as it ebbs, stripping everything before it sweeps back full of generativity.
When I pull out the red petals, I see they have shriveled a little. I toss them onto the water and watch as they move with the tide toward its nadir.
Ann
Charleston, South Carolina
“You haven’t seen the gardens at Middleton Place?”
I’ve heard this six or seven times now from people who are unable to believe I’ve lived in the Lowcountry for an entire year and still haven’t visited the oldest landscaped gardens in America. I try to tell them I’ve taken the ferry to Fort Sumter, walked the Battery, and seen Frankenstein at the Dock Street Theater on Church Street. “Oh, but you haven’t seen the gardens at Middleton Place!” they say.
“Apparently, it’s the holy grail of horticulture,” I tell Scott. “We’re going to have to go.” We drive out there on a Saturday in May, starting early to avoid the afternoon heat. When we arrive, it is 9:30, cloudy, and overcast. I pick up a brochure at the gate and skim through a short history of the place: National Historic Landmark . . . Eighteenth-century plantation . . . Home to a signer of the Declaration of Independence . . . Rice Mill . . . Eliza’s slave house . . .
I linger over the part about the gardens. Ornamental ponds . . . Classical sculpture.
We walk across an expansive lawn, which we share with grazing, dusty-colored sheep. I consult the map in the brochure, noting the reflection pool on the left and the ruins of the main house directly ahead.
“The house was destroyed in 1865 by Sherman’s army,” I inform Scott. “Then an earthquake toppled what was left of it in 1886.”
“Earthquake? We have earthquakes and hurricanes here?”
“There hasn’t been an earthquake since the one in 1886.”
He looks at me from under the brim of his Braves baseball cap. “So, what you’re saying is, we’re due.”
A shrill, Wild Kingdom-like noise breaks into the quietness of sheep chewing grass. “What was that?” I ask.
“I have no idea,” Scott says, glancing around, vowing to find the source of it.
I go back to the map, matching the markers to their numbered d
escriptions, the same thing I did at Eleusis, the Acropolis, and all over Greece. It’s been nine months since Mom and I returned. Nine months into my job at Skirt! magazine, nine months further into depression, nine months of being no closer to what I want to do with my life.
I savor weekends with Scott—Saturday morning doughnuts from Krispy Kreme, going to the movies, going to the beach. We share an apartment now, and most Sunday mornings I wake up to coconut-scented surf wax mixed with the smell of coffee brewing and find Scott waxing his surfboard on top of the kitchen table. All week he works hard managing real estate properties for his company, but on surf days he’s like a kid out there, floating in the waves, unaware of an entire afternoon passing. Sometimes, sitting on the beach, I’ll gaze up from my book and watch him and wish I could know about the rest of my life the same way I know about Scott. Yes, he leaves wet bath towels on the bed and shakes his electric razor out in the sink, but these annoying habits are not a big deal in light of the love I feel when I’m with him.
My depression is sort of like a miserable allergy, in that some days are better than others but it never quite leaves me. I function all right until something comes along to rile it up. Like a TV show on ancient Greece, in which professors wax on about the Golden Age of Athens and about Pericles like he is their close cousin. At moments like these, I withdraw to my desk where I keep a collection of mementos by the computer monitor: the red pomegranate charm, a small replica of Athena’s helmet, and an owl feather—a reminder of Athena’s mythic companion. I sit there and stare at them because I don’t know what else to do.
Being in Greece did not resolve the big questions for me, but I did discover some things. I learned how easy it is to give up and become draperies while everyone else is dancing. I learned there is a name for how I feel—depression—and I had to face up to that. I learned that Persephone does eventually come back from the underworld and that maybe I would, too. That I could talk to my mother. That while I have no idea what to do with my life, I am not a total loser.
When I’m sitting there like that, an awful desperation gets going in me. It’s like a balloon expanding in my chest until it pops, and out pours nothing but sadness. Then the next day, I get up and go to work. Maybe Scott and I meet my parents for supper. I swing by the grocery store for coffee filters. Take a day trip to Middleton Place. Life goes on while I try to figure out what to do next. In all of this, I am glad for my mother and the talks we have. And for Scott, who seems to ride through life the way he takes the waves—with a steady, even keel. I worry sometimes he may grow tired of my sadness and confusion . . . disappointed that I’m not the girl he first met.
As a full-time assistant at the magazine, I answer the phone as instructed—“Skirt!, this is Ann”—but I can’t quite spit it out without the words running together.
“Skirt!, thisisZan.”
“Who?” people ask.
“Ann. I’m new here.”
“New to Skirt! or new to Charleston?”
“Both.”
(“Have you seen the gardens at Middleton Place?”)
Then there are the calls that begin with me telling an advertiser the amount of his or her overdue bill, which elicits a variety of responses: “The check is in the mail,” or “Sorry, it has been tough lately, what with the business going under and all,” or “Don’t ever call me again and tell me I owe you money! I’m well aware of it!” To the latter I want to reply, “Perhaps, however, you are not aware that rudeness is a misdemeanor in Charleston.” Instead, I say, “Yes, I understand. Have a nice day.”
A few months ago, I began to read article submissions. After the editor’s initial reading, she will hand me the manuscript and say, “Read this and tell me what you think.” Afterward, I always get the impulse to write something myself. It fizzles out quickly, though, almost like I never had the thought. What do I have to say? How could it possibly be any good? Impulse going . . . going . . . gone.
Lately, the editor has been encouraging me to submit an article. Does she think I inherited my mother’s writing genes? Does she know that the last essay I wrote was an academic paper about the Peloponnesian War? I tell her I’ll think about it, which is a polite way of saying no.
I grew up thinking I wanted to be a writer. My writing experience amounts to a batch of stories, comic strips, family newspapers, and embarrassing poetry I began in elementary school, plus two writing competitions. The first was a seventh-grade fiction contest, in which I won first place in my school. My prize was a trip to Columbia, South Carolina, to attend seminars by local authors. Whatever happened to trophies? I didn’t want to go. My mother, who didn’t really have a history of insisting I do anything extracurricular, insisted. She drove me there herself and in the end I was glad I went. Then, in the tenth grade I placed third in a Halloween story contest sponsored by the local newspaper. This time I won a white beach towel with the newspaper’s weather mascot on it—the Weather Hound, a gangly dog, standing on two legs and wearing a cape. My brother, Bob, teased me about it. “Are you going to hang it on your wall?” he’d say. I don’t think the editor at Skirt! would be impressed by my grade-school contests or my cutting-edge poems about teddy bears and skyscrapers.
Scott and I hear the Wild Kingdom sound again. This time we track it to the stable yard and find a peacock draped on top of a fence, its iridescent plumage folded up like a Chinese fan. We look at each other and laugh. Mystery solved. I will discover later that the peacock is associated with Hera, Goddess of marriage, the way the owl belongs to Athena.
Behind the plantation house, we walk down wide grassy terraces onto a straight, manicured path that cuts between two lakes, which are shaped like the open wings of a butterfly. “We’re on the butterfly’s back,” I say, suddenly realizing the layout. From here we have a clear view of the Ashley River, the marshes and rice fields. It took one hundred slaves close to ten years to build this butterfly and just about everything we’ve seen.
Strolling into the gardens, I see hydrangeas bloom everywhere, violet-blue and pink. We stop before a giant live oak, estimated to be five hundred years old. Rooted on the banks of the Ashley River, it is massive—eighty-five feet tall and thirty feet around the trunk. The limbs spread out one hundred and forty-five feet in twisting tangles. Moss hangs from the branches like old Christmas tinsel that has been slung on impatiently.
Dwarfed beneath the branches, Scott and I cannot resist the urge to touch the trunk. We stand there for a few moments with our hands pressed against the bark, as if to say, Yep, it’s a tree, all right, though this could never be perceived as an ordinary tree. I think about all the things that must have gone on around it in five hundred years, all the terrible history—slavery, Sherman’s army, earthquakes, and hurricanes—but mostly I just feel the enduring beauty of the tree. I actually feel peaceful in its presence. The feeling hits me like the kerplunk of a stone splashing into the river and sending out its ripples.
Scott says, “This tree is amazing, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I say. I love that he gets this tree.
After I returned from Greece, I wrote Demetri a letter. I told him I hoped he could forgive me for not seeing him in Athens. I did not mention the part about purposely not answering his phone call. How could I? I had not even attempted to explain it further to my mother. In the letter, I merely said I’d missed his call and that we’d left Athens the next day.
No letter came in return.
Then one afternoon when I was alone in the apartment, folding laundry, the phone rang.
“Ann?”
I saw the Acropolis over his shoulder—a world away.
“Demetri?”
“Ann, how are you?”
“Fine. I’m fine. How are you?”
“Good. I just got your letter. I’m sorry, too, that I did not see you.”
“Oh.” I paused.
“I’m not mad at you.”
“Good,” I said. “I was worried you might be.”
“Ma
ybe there will be a next time.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.
He said, “I will write to you and you write to me, okay?”
“Okay.”
He let out a breath.
“Well . . . it is nice to hear your voice.”
“It’s good to hear your voice, too.”
After we hung up, I sat on the floor beside the laundry basket. He was on another continent, but his voice was still in my ears. I picked up a hanger and draped Scott’s dress shirt over it, unnecessarily fastening every single button until I reached the collar.
Demetri and I continued to write letters. Sometimes Scott picked up the mail and hand-delivered them to me. “You’ve got a letter from your pen pal,” he’d say, jokingly. And I would tell him, “It was thousands of miles from here, a long time ago. We’re just friends.”
Once, when he dropped the envelope with the Greek stamps into my lap, I remembered the movie Shirley Valentine, which I’d watched at least twice now. Shirley goes to Greece and meets a handsome Greek man. She sums up her experience by saying, “I didn’t fall in love with him, I fell in love with life.”
I wondered if that was what had happened to me.
Scott and I decide to end our day at Middleton Place in what the map refers to as “The Secret Gardens.” When I see them, I understand how they got their name. Two large, square-shaped enclosures are surrounded by tall, English hedges, thick as walls.
In one of the gardens, a marble statue of a woman stands in each corner. Scott sits on a wooden bench while I take a closer look at them.
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