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.
After the honeymoon, I begin my second writing class. I read books about becoming a writer by authors like Brenda Ueland, Natalie Goldberg, Anne Lamott, and Julia Cameron—sensible advice that sounds good in theory. For example, “Write every day.” I cannot argue with this, except I’m working at the Skirt! offices every day. Once home in our new apartment, there’s dinner to worry about, which is not so bad because I actually like to cook. By 7:30 the joy I found trying out the marinara sauce turns to fatigue, and I don’t want to sequester myself in the second bedroom that I’ve turned into my writing room. What I want is to stretch out on the sofa and watch The West Wing.
Tonight I forgo the sofa. I sit at my desk, staring at the images I’ve placed around the room. Beside the computer is the red pomegranate charm, a postcard of the Black Virgin from Le Puy, and the little Athena helmet with the owl feather. The fragment of the David Whyte poem is thumbtacked to a bulletin board—Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Next to it, the photograph of me with Harry the horse, a reminder that when circumstances appear beyond me, it’s possible to rise to the occasion.
I need all the inspiration my collection of sacred objects and incantations can provide, since becoming a writer seems like it could take a hundred years. When I got back from France, I assumed that doing what one is meant to do would come more easily. During the first writing class, I wanted near-perfect drafts from the start. When that didn’t happen, I felt myself retreating. I would want to quit, even when Mom’s logical example about Beethoven came back to me. But quitting wasn’t an option.
One day I thought: what if I approached learning the craft of writing as if it were an apprenticeship? Just do myself a favor and accept that it’s going to be a process, a slow, laborious process. In the Middle Ages, an apprenticeship lasted seven years. That was believed to be the minimum amount of time it took to learn a craft. I started to think of myself as an apprentice. I would tell myself, Relax, you’ve got seven years.
Even so, it doesn’t stop my critical voice from droning on, but it does give me a way to go on working whether or not I like what I write, whether or not I think I have anything important to say, and whether or not my words sound like they come from someone I don’t know. Which is often. I’ve only written one story I felt slightly comfortable reading aloud in class, and afterward, I wished I hadn’t read it. In this respect, Mom says, I sound like a writer to her. She continues to hand me chapters of her bee novel, asking me to read with an editorial eye. I read them when I get into bed at night, unaware how my editorial eye is being trained. Mom reads drafts of my articles for Skirt! and even my class homework, then we talk about the works’ strengths and problems and how to fix them. She marks them with a red pen. “It’s bleeding,” I told her the first time she handed back one of my papers.
“It’s the best way to learn,” she said. I suppose I would rather hear criticism from her than anyone, and who else could I ask to use a different color pen? Purple. Green. Anything but red. From my desk, I hear the TV in the den. Sounds like Iron Chef night. I love the show, but I’m trying to go at my writing determinedly, à la Joan of Arc.
“Can you turn that down a little?” I yell to Scott. I hear “Chef Morimoto” and “abalone battle,” then the sound fades, and the silence of being alone envelopes me.
I pick up one of the writing books and turn to a page I’ve flagged. It suggests that I see the value in composing one short paragraph no matter what it is. At the end of my six lines, I wonder if there is any value in a paragraph about why I don’t want to write the paragraph.
“Did Morimoto win?” I holler.
“It’s not over.”
I stare at the blinking cursor on the monitor and remember a writing exercise my second-grade teacher taught us. I don’t know how it has come back to me, but I take it as payoff for sitting in the chair. It was St. Patrick’s Day and Mrs. Seaborn gave us five words and asked the class
to create a story with them: Leprechaun, pot-of-gold, rainbow, hat, sky.
I type five words: Parthenon, Athena, girl, dancing, moon. I have a way to begin. My story opens at the Acropolis in Athens. The Caryatid porch on the Temple to Poseidon, the olive tree nearby, tourists milling around the Parthenon. I decide abruptly that Athena is telling the story. I write without worrying about the words, the structure of my sentences, or who’s winning Iron Chef. In the story, the moon comes out, and Athena, who sees everything that goes on in the city named for her, watches a girl learn to dance in the Plaka. When I look at the clock, it is one in the morning.
Sue
Charleston, South Carolina
When rain falls on the tin roof over the dock, it sounds like thousands of those windup monkeys beating drums and clapping cymbals over my head. Weirdly enough, the effect is calming. I sit in the Adirondack rocker, facing the creek, and listen to the clatter.
The month of July is nearly over. In the eight weeks since the wedding, I have been in some sort of flow. I’ve spent my days moving back and forth between my desk and the dock, alternatively writing for a couple of hours, then sitting out here, doing nothing. Back and forth. The rhythm has suited me.
A tiny barge of reeds floats by, swept on the tides, and behind it, the dorsal fin of a dolphin breaks the surface, its shiny body curving up, followed by the spew of wet air. I recognize the fin, which is partially missing from an old wound. This dolphin comes like clockwork to feed. I time my visits to be here.
Surprisingly, my blood pressure has normalized. No elevated readings all summer. I cannot say I understand this or that I expect it will stay this way. The stabilization seems like a beginning, but I know there is a shift going on inside of me. A deceleration. I can feel the striving leaking out of my work. It’s like I’m just figuring out how to lean back into the simplicities of being. It reminds me of the first time you try to learn to float, the way you have to keep letting go and rest in the moment, believing the water will hold you, that it is enough, that it is everything. And then you sink and you have to sputter back and start again. I can trace much of this straight back to Gavrinis. Since my experience at the tumulus, I am tending time differently.
More startling to me than the blood pressure drop is the simultaneous surge of creativity I’ve felt. The writing has poured out. I try not to think too much about why I’m having this fertility spurt, I’ve just let it happen. Sometimes, though, I revisit my dream of dancing with the Old Woman and wonder if the spurt is not a fluke, as I fear, but the continuation of that dance in my waking life. Where does the improvisation, the freedom, the hint of new authority and potency come from? Images well up in me more spontaneously, trailing along a stream of ideas, memories, feelings, and symbols, and I feel connected to a sourcelike place in myself.
It seems to me now and then that the dance in my dream was the beginning of a new center inside myself—the feminine matrix that the Old Woman seems to represent—but it’s hard to know. I can only watch the rain fall into the creek and repeat the line in Sarton’s poem that has been the most enigmatic to me: Old Woman . . . Under the words you are my silence.
Out in the creek, in the blur, the dolphin with the deformed fin goes about her unhurried moments.
I stand in line at Kinko’s, holding a white box containing the manuscript of my novel. Four hundred and three printed pages. I took the liberty of typing THE END on the last page, which is probably the mark of a neophyte, but it gave me so much pleasure I didn’t care.
It is the day before the appointed deadline, the last pickup for Federal Express is twenty minutes away, and five people are ahead of me in line. I glance incessantly at my watch, recalling that at one point in my novel, the main character, Lily, quips that Rosaleen is moving with the speed of a bank vault door. That seems fast compared to this.
I know I’m imposing an artificial and ridiculous sense of urgency upon the situation, but I keep thinking Surely I have not written through the summer, composing the last line a slim hour ago, and arrived here only to miss the deadline. I am flush with nervousness, which, truth be told, is more about how the publisher will react to what’s in the box. I haven’t let myself think about that for twelve weeks.
Dawdling in line, feeling the weight of the manuscript in my arms, I’m hit full in the chest with the realization I’ve completed it. A sensation washes over me, some odd combination of elation, relief, and stunned incredulity.
My mind sweeps back to October 1993, to the convent at Palianis in Crete—me, slipping beneath the low, twisted branches of the myrtle tree, standing before the icon of the dark-faced Mary. Panagia Myrtidiotisa, the Virgin of the Myrtle. I hear the Greek nun: “You ask her for the thing at the bottom of your heart, yes? The Virgin will give it. Then you give to her something.”
I felt a little cynical about the nun’s words that day, at least at first. Then I thought, why not give up the attitude, the arrogance; there are, after all, mysteries in the world. I would like to be a novelist . The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that—an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.
Only one person is in front of me in the Kinko’s line now. The Federal Express driver has pulled up out front, and there’s no way he’s getting out of here without my package. And it’s about now that it occurs to me: the prayer—it was answered.
Was it a coincidence? Was it a matter of coming to terms with what I really wanted and giving over to it? Is there something to the saying by Joseph Campbell that when you follow your bliss, unseen forces come to your aid? Was the nun right about Mary working wonders? Could a surrender of self, mingled with a little faith, will, and self-honesty, account for it? Are there just mysteries in the world?
I don’t know. It seems like all of these things could be true. Then you give to her something. The last part of the nun’s entreaty comes back again—reminding me of the custom of returning to the Panagia Myrtidiotisa with a gift after she answers a prayer.
Seven years spin full circle. I have a tiny thunderstruck feeling as I realize I am about to go back to Greece. We leave in October, only six weeks from now, and a brief part of the trip will be spent in Crete.
How is it that life has arranged itself this way?
There’s no question—I have to return to Palianis convent and leave a gift. I don’t remember where on Crete the place is located, whether it is remotely close to anything on our tight itinerary, but I will call Trisha and Terry and explain why I need to reroute the trip. They will love this, I think ruefully—then realize, no, they will. They will actually love this.
When I reach the counter, I watch the manuscript disappear into the envelope, trying to imagine what gift I will take to the dark Madonna, what Ann will think when she lays eyes on Mary propped in the tree.
RETURN
Greece
2000
Ann
Palianis Nunnery-Crete
I’m thinking, these are the planes that always crash, the prop planes, the island hoppers, the ones that shudder on takeoff like the screws and bolts are shooting out of the wings. Sitting in a window seat over the left wing, I try to calm myself, but the captain has come on the speaker with an announcement about turbulence. My fear of flying shows up only when the cabin lurches, when the unidentified noises start, all the strange thudding and creaking.
I close my eyes and do the visualization I use when I’m sure my plane is going down. I’m on the Flying Dumbo ride with Bob at Disney World and he has control of the little knob, swooping us up and down in a herky-jerky, but harmless, motion.
The propellers make a muffled roar, as if we’re at a deafening rock concert with cotton in our ears. I elbow Mom. “I’m starting to get nauseous.”
“What?” she yells.
“I’M GETTING SICK.”
She digs out the Dramamine, then points at her wat
ch, a gesture that says it won’t be long till we land in Crete.
Popping the yellow pill into my mouth, I lean my head back against the vibrating seat and close my eyes again.
It’s Greece. It’s worth it.
On the first day of the trip, the bus drops off our group of twenty-five women in the countryside of Crete beside a blue street sign that reads PALIANIS NUNNERY in both Greek and English. The convent is just up the hill, the same one Mom visited on her trip here in 1993. According to her, a myrtle tree grows inside the walls with an icon of the Virgin Mary in the branches. She, Terry, and Trisha revamped the tour schedule to get us here. I pull my camcorder from my shoulder bag and zoom in on the blue sign, then pan the surrounding hillsides terraced with olive groves and grape orchards.
As we walk toward the convent gate, I film a whitewashed chapel alongside the road, its fluted terra-cotta roof tiles and prayer bell, then turn the camera on the women in the group, who tromp up the hill in clumps of twos and threes.
When I hit the stop button, one of them asks, “How’s married life treating you?” The question I got most in France was “What do you do?” Now, it’s the one about married life.
“Fine,” I say. “It’s great.”
Four months into our marriage, the one thing that has plagued me is just what I anticipated: that question of love and freedom. It crops up in the negotiation of daily stuff. Who grocery shops and who cooks? Who does the laundry and who folds it? Will we clean the apartment first thing Saturday morning or will Scott go surfing? On Sunday, will we spend time together or will I write? We work it out, though at times it takes a little doing.
I don’t tell the woman any of this, of course. Instead, I go into a rendition about Scott giving me surfing lessons this past summer. No reflection on his teaching, I say, but I spent most of the time lying on the board, floating, worrying a shark would mistake me for a seal. He was good about it, I add. He kept me company by floating, too.
Traveling With Pomegranates Page 21
