“I think they represent the four seasons,” I tell him, “because this one has flowers, and this one is holding wheat. Spring and fall, right?”
I sit down beside him and rub my arms to settle the chill bumps. I had dressed for heat, but the sun never came out. We sit there without talking. Scott reaches into his pocket. When he pulls his hand out, he’s holding a tiny box.
Inside is a diamond ring. It gleams in the light while I stare at it.
“Will you marry me?” he says.
I had expected we would get engaged in the future—future being the operative word. I assumed I would know about it beforehand, as if the proposal was something we would plan together, then enact, preferably in a garden setting like this with all the seasons of life looking on. I hadn’t expected to be surprised.
My brain is sending signals to my mouth, informing it what to say, but astonishment has created some sort of interference. I can only look at him. In those paralytic moments, I don’t wonder if I’m too young or if I should wait till I figure out my career. Instead, what goes through my mind is that I’ve always been sure about him.
I nod.
“Is that a yes?” he asks.
“Yes!” I say, laughing, finally able to talk.
Scott breaks into a smile and reaches for my left hand, and there’s my Athena ring on the finger that’s reserved for engagement rings.
“I know what she means to you,” Scott says. “We’re not replacing her.”
I work the Athena ring over my knuckle, then move it to my right hand, and Scott slides the engagement ring onto my finger.
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
When I get home, I call my mother. “Guess what? Scott and I are engaged!”
There are about three seconds of stunned silence and then: “Ann, I’m so happy for you! Congratulations! Oh my God.” Now I hear sniffles. “You must be so excited.”
“Yeah, I am,” I say.
“Did you talk about when the wedding might be?”
“Next June, I think.”
“Are you thinking of a church wedding?”
“I’m wondering about getting married under the oak tree at Middleton Place.”
SEARCH
France / South Carolina
1999 -2000
Sue
Jardin des Tuileries, St.-Germain-des-Prés, Louvre-Paris
The Tuileries Garden in Paris seems filled with old women. Or is it just that I notice them more these days? Three of them sit in green metal chairs beside a fountain and talk with their hands waving around in the air. Another sips coffee beneath the red umbrellas. Two more stroll arm-in-arm through the corridors of tall, skinny trees. It’s as if I’ve only now developed the rods and cones in my retina that allow me to see them.
It is October 15, 1999, our first afternoon in France, one filled with glinting light that glazes the hedges and the marble statues and the helium balloons tied to the baby strollers. Ann and I are here with eighteen other women who make up a small tour I am co-leading with my friends Trisha and Terry. I have arrived in France, fifty-one, soon to be mother of the bride, a woman who has spent a great deal of her time over the last six months sitting out in the marsh with the birds and the tides, writing a novel about a girl’s search for her mother, and cooking up this trip to France with my two cohorts. The three of us conspired to create a way for women to travel together in quest of sacred feminine images in art and history, and I’m sure in the back of my mind I was also thinking it would be a way for Ann and I to go on traveling together, too. It’s been over a year now since our trip to Greece.
At the moment, the group is cutting through the vastness of the Tuileries, sixty-two acres which run from the Carrousel du Louvre all the way to the Arc de Triomphe. We are on our way to St.-Germain-des-Prés, the oldest church in Paris. Ann and I trail the others mainly because I am trying to walk and write at the same time, a ridiculous enterprise that does justice to neither. My observations in the seventeenth-century gardens move in squiggly, uneven lines across the page of my journal, shorthand notes about this and that old woman.
I nudge Ann and point to one old woman with a little white dog and a black beret yanked over her stubby gray hair. The openings of her high-top maroon shoes are trimmed in yellow fur. They bring to mind the ruby slippers that Dorothy clicked together in Oz in order to get home, and I wonder if the elderly woman wears them as her own special conveyance to freedom. Or, maybe they are the shoes her daughter left behind in the closet, which the woman forces onto her feet like a stepsister in “Cinderella” in a desperate act of clinging to her youth. Or—and this is the scenario I prefer—they are her cunning way of not being invisible. It is also possible they are just shoes.
One of the women has spectacular white hair that reminds me of my paternal grandmother, Ruth. I think of how she wore it swept back and pinned with rhinestone combs, of her red lipstick and the indulgent ways she loved me.
When I was eight, she caved in to my pleas for a puny, violet-dyed chick which was in the window of the Golden Seed and Feed store, and which she then allowed me to set loose in her very grand parlor. I spread a carton of Quaker Oats across the handwoven rug, upon which the chick left the stain of its lavender droppings for all eternity. After the fracas, she would say to my shocked father, “But Sue wanted to play with the chick in the parlor.”
The last time I saw her, she was propped in bed, eighty-nine years old, tiny as a sparrow in a pale blue bed jacket, and, looking at her, I got a searing flash of that pastel chick. Her hair, which she’d let me brush when I was a child into every sort of concoction, was all askew. I took her brush with the worn, lopsided bristles and combed it. I said, “Do you remember when you let me play with the chick in the parlor?” After a long pause, she nodded, but I was never quite sure if she did, or if she only wanted to please me. She died a week later.
My maternal grandmother, Sue, died at ninety-nine. During her last years, she told me about a time in 1918 when my grandfather, a World War I flight instructor, took her on a flying spree in a two-seat open-cockpit biplane. “He wasn’t supposed to take civilians up,” she said, and turned to gaze out the window, where the sky was lapis blue. “I really wanted to go up there, though, and see what it was like, so I dressed up in his roommate’s leather jacket, goggles, and the cap—the funny one with the flaps on the side—and we took off. We were up there doing loop-de-loops and all kinds of things.”
All I could think was that Wilbur and Orville Wright had only invented the airplane a few years before this. I couldn’t decide what astonished me more—her subterfuge or the aerial acrobatics.
“You weren’t scared?” I asked.
“Well, sure I was,” she said, looking at me like I was daft.
It surprises me that my grandmothers have turned up like this, and even more that the elderly women in the garden occupy me so. I am trying to work out my fears and hopes about the Old Woman—who she is, what’s she like, what’s she’s capable of.
These days when I walk into a public place with Ann—like the brasserie today at lunch—eyes gravitate to her and I get a taste of being invisible. I’ve waved away such moments, uncomfortable that I’ve even noticed them, but today I paused to see exactly what it was I felt. It wasn’t envy, I realized. Rather, it felt like I’d just handed off my youth baton and now I get to go sit on the bench.
On the bus, driving to the hotel, I missed untold French wonders sweeping by while I wrote about it in my journal. “Does it bother me or relieve me?” I asked myself. Truth be told, I’ve found freedom in these little tastes of being unseen; it’s a relief not to be compelled so much by how I look, to have that part of my life become more or less passé. It reminds me a little of getting downsized out of a high-profile job and discovering it’s a blessing in disguise—now you can go do the thing you really want to do. But I also feel an unease about it, as if the invisibility of my appearance might extend to my work, my voice, my relevance. Am I afraid of disappe
aring, of shrinking into my bed jacket? Will I have to buy yellow-furred shoes?
My mind goes to the classic moment in the tale of Snow White, when the mother is eclipsed by the daughter. The queen consults her magic mirror: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” She expects to hear her own name called as usual, but her stepdaughter has recently become a young woman and the queen is getting crow’s feet. “Snow White,” the mirror blurts, and zap! the queen is dealt her first shock of age.
Perhaps all mothers of daughters possess a secret talking mirror that announces when their young womanhood begins to fade and their daughters’ begin to blossom. As in the fairy tale, the experience can unleash a lacerating jealousy in some mothers, which turns up like poison apples on the daughter’s doorstep. It can also usher in fears that I would’ve sworn I’d never have. Of invisibility, anonymity, irrelevance. And deeper down, fears of decline and death.
I watched a television piece not long ago about an art gallery featuring paintings and drawings of women. “Here you will see every variety of the female form,” the male reporter said, “from the young woman to the old hag.”
“Did he say hag? Did he?” I ranted to Sandy. “When did the opposite of young female become old hag? For God’s sake!”
A year and a half before this trip, I got my first intimations that the young “variety of the female form” was beginning to pack up to leave me. I’d felt it through the dramatic changes in my body, the onset of thoughts about my mortality, the spiritual vacuity that set in, the way the sap leaked from my writing. It was evident, too, in the way the word hag set me off, betraying my fear that I would not find the potency to generate the third act I wished for. Now and then a dread rose in me—this irrational and passing thing—and I would succumb for a moment to the illusion that it was all diminishing now, the best of my life.
As Ann and I hurry along the Avenue du Général Lemonnier, trying to catch up to the others, I realize what a strange in-between place I am in. The Young Woman inside has turned to go, but the Old Woman has not shown up.
My new journal is green. When I purchased it, expressly for this trip, I thought of the quote I inscribed at the front of the red journal I took to Greece—“Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys”—and I wondered if there were words that belonged at the beginning of this one. It was Ann who gave them to me. Her e-mail popped into my in-box not long before we left: “Have you seen this quote by George Sand? ‘The old woman I shall become will be quite different from the woman I am now. Another I is beginning.’”
I copied the quotation on page one of the green journal. The fact that it came from a French writer born here in Paris and a subversive woman of courage was mere gravy.
Another I is beginning.
We cross to the Left Bank at Pont Royal and walk along the Quai Voltaire, winding to Rue Bonaparte and coming finally to the church. Our group stands in a cluster on the sidewalk with our necks hinged back and our mouths parted, staring at the eleventh-century tower of St.-Germain-des-Prés. From the corner of my eye, I notice someone taking a photograph, not of the thousand-year-old belfry, but of us gaping up at it.
Trisha, our religious art scholar who lived for a time in Paris, informs us that the church was founded in 542 and was part of a flourishing abbey built on the site of a former temple to Isis. Supposedly a statue of black Isis was worshipped here as the Virgin Mary until 1514, when it was destroyed by the abbot.
My guidebook emphasizes the church’s Romanesque architecture, several sixth-century marble columns, the fire during the French Revolution, along with the bewildering detail that a king of Poland is buried inside. Nothing about a mysterious Black Madonna who descended from Isis.
Since returning from Greece, I’ve read everything I could about dark Madonnas. Only several hundred still exist in Europe, the majority here in France, where they call her Vierge Noire, the Black Virgin. Sometimes she’s referred to as the other Mary, a tantalizing reference to her pagan family tree.
Ann and I move along the ambulatory until we come to the small, circular chapel of St. Anne. I’ve been drawn to her since I discovered the prolific image of her holding her grown daughter Mary in her lap. There’s a legend that St. Anne’s body was brought to France by Mary Magdalene fifty years after her death and her bones were revered at Apt in Provence, but I can’t imagine anyone takes it seriously anymore.
We stare at the exquisite marble altar in her chapel. Someone has left a creased photograph on it of a dark-haired girl around three years old. I point it out to Ann, sure it’s someone’s grand-daughter. Anne is the patron saint of grandmothers. For an instant I try to imagine myself as a grandmother, a woman called Grandma, or Nana or Granny, but it feels foreign and other, like trying to imagine myself as an astronaut.
I look around for an image of St. Anne in the chapel, but there isn’t any. When painted as an older woman, she was often given a green cloak, like the mantle of spring, which is somehow unexpected. Her emblem is a door. Probably because she was the doorway for Mary, but my mind fidgets with the idea that she could represent other thresholds, too. A Grandmother door . . . the Old Woman door . . . some passage to the other side.
Ann photographs the picture of the little girl left here for St. Anne’s safekeeping, while I plop down on a bench and pull out the postcard I tucked inside the back cover of my journal. It depicts Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror. I first saw the painting in the Museum of Modern Art in New York many years ago and was affected by it, though I couldn’t have told you then why that was. I bought the postcard in the museum gift shop, but eventually lost track of it. It surfaced again when we moved, and since then I’ve kept it out on my desk.
It portrays a young woman, haloed in light, gazing into an oval mirror. Her pink, unblemished profile merges with a frontal view of her face that’s painted in bright yellow and shaped like a crescent moon. But the mirror is a wrinkle in time, and the image staring back at her reveals the young woman not as she is, but how she will one day be. The woman in the glass appears old and dark, her face shaded in violet and red, her eyes grown hollow, her body beginning to shrink.
What touches me is how the younger woman’s arms reach out for her older self, as if trying to embrace the rather formidable mystery she has glimpsed. And curiously, her older self reaches back to her. Whatever Picasso may have had in mind when he painted this (at the age of fifty, for what it’s worth), I see an aspect of the Demeter and Persephone reunion in it—the reunion of the Young Woman and the Old Woman within.
I show the postcard to Ann, who studies it and says, “What is it—two sides of one woman?”
“That’s what I think,” I say and go on for a moment about the young woman with her vitality, fertility, and sense of beginning and the old woman with her wisdom and creative and spiritual powers.
“Don’t you love how they’re both reaching for each other?” As I say this, I understand for the first time that I’m looking at the I I want to find. It is not captured solely in the dark older woman or in the bright younger one. It is composed of both of them, conjoined and integrated. It happens in the embrace.
I listen for a moment to voices, females voices, somersaulting along the Gothic vaults. “I have a photograph back home of my mother on her wedding day,” I tell Ann, excited that I’ve suddenly remembered it. “I don’t know if you’ve seen it. She’s sitting at a dressing table in her white gown, looking into a mirror. My grandmother is standing at her shoulder.”
Ann shakes her head.
“It’s Mother’s face the camera catches in the mirror.”
“Like the painting,” Ann says.
Except it’s reversed—the old woman is looking into the mirror and seeing the young woman’s face.
That night in the hotel bathroom, I stand at the sink, exhausted. Tired from the flight and the walking. I just want to go to bed.
I squirt toothpaste onto my toothbrush, and when Ann appears in the doorway with her cos
metic bag, I step over to make room for her at the sink. As we stand side by side and brush our teeth before the mirror, I gradually become aware that despite my fatigue, I am watching her face.
Mirror, mirror.
She is so beautiful.
We spend the next morning in the Louvre, gazing at paintings of Mary. There are more paintings of her in the world than of any other woman, and a preponderance of them seems to be right here. They flow along the walls like a moving picture of her life—of both the human Mary and the divine Mary.
What I notice, almost as much as the paintings themselves, is the way certain incidents in her life are repeated over and over: annunciations, nativities, flights into Egypt, pietàs, assumptions to heaven. . . . Each event feels like a universal story, offering points of entry into my own experience.
When I visited Mary’s House in Ephesus, during Ann’s and my first trip, the theological polarization I felt about how to relate to Mary began to be resolved. Over the past year, I have been slowly coming to understand her not only within a biblical and human context, but also as a living symbol of the Divine Feminine, a spiritual presence able to hold large archetypal mysteries. Why then shouldn’t the paramount occasions in her life create a guiding story for women?
As I move through the Louvre, I begin to record notes about the paintings and what they might be suggesting:
Annunciation—the summons from within to bring forth something new, particularly one’s own spiritual and creative life.
Pregnancy—the season of waiting, incubation, holding the tensions of the process.
Visitation with Elizabeth—seeking community and support from other women; telling the story.
Nativity—the labor to bring forth what has been conceived from within.