Back at the hotel, we stop outside the doors. He gives me a hug.
“Good-bye, then,” he says.
“Bye.”
He walks back in the direction we came from.
I watch him for a few moments, then head through the lobby and onto the elevator, pressing the button that will take me to the rooftop.
Soon this spot atop the hotel will be crowded with people sipping drinks and watching the sun slump over Athens, but right now I have the place to myself. I have the whole city and a postcard view of the Acropolis.
I take the chair by the rail. Propping my feet on a planter of marigolds, I gaze at the eastern end of the Parthenon. The bare rock of the Acropolis seems to pare things down to what feels irreducible and true.
I picture Demetri walking away on Nikodimou Street and try to understand just who he was to me.
I feel some sadness. This visit with him was an ending—I know I’ll never see him again. I feel a strange happiness, too, as I begin to see my relationship with Demetri for what it is: an event in time and an event in the soul. Our experience together is more than moments in a restaurant or on a dance floor, more than a brief romance. It’s about what I learned that night and what became freed inside of me. Demetri helped me break through my self-imposed limitations, my smallness, my pathological safety. I cherished him because he introduced me to myself, he caused me to fall in love with my own life. That’s what carries the charge, and that’s what will go on in me. It’s so easy to mix that up with the person.
The sun has slipped behind the clouds, hidden except for a haze of yellow. As the beeping of car horns fades on the streets below, I rummage through my bag until I find the graduate school rejection letter I’ve been carrying around since we arrived in Greece.
Two years ago, the letter felt like a dead end. It eventually came to represent my entire historical collection of rejections and failures. I brought it all the way over here in order to tear it up. I wanted to do it here. That seemed fitting. But now that the letter is in my hands, I see that it was really a catalyst, a beginning, and I decide I will keep it. I am who I am because of what the letter set off in me.
The tint over the city turns to bronze. As the lights around the Parthenon blaze, I feast on the sight, then head downstairs, thinking of home and everything waiting.
Sue
Sanctuary of Demeter-Eleusis
Trailing Ann into the ruins in Eleusis, I study the green velvet ribbon on which she has strung her red pomegranate, how it’s tied at the back of her neck, green like spring foliage. I’m wearing my pomegranate, too, but on a plain silver chain, drab by comparison.
I touch the tiny glass orb with my finger, remembering when I spied the charms through a store window on our first trip, how later our matching necklaces seemed to magically convince the taxi driver to bring us to this same site, when our verbal pleading failed. After that, we joked that we were wearing our myth on our sleeves—Demeter, Persephone; mother, daughter; the saga of loss, search, return—though, honestly, no one except the Greek driver ever seemed to notice it. Once, a woman in a restaurant asked us quite seriously if we were promoting pomegranate juice.
Ann’s green ribbon is a brand new touch, just for this trip. I cannot stop telling her how pretty it is. She told me she got the idea from Little Women—meaning, I supposed, that it was inspired by the pendants that dangled on velvet ribbons around the March girls’ necks. Ann loves Little Women. Especially Jo March, the feisty one who wants to be a writer. But as I take in the shoots of green breaking over the back of Ann’s coat collar, I ask her if she wasn’t also thinking about Persephone.
“She’s why I chose the color green,” she tells me.
We’ve had numerous conversations about Persephone’s so-called “green fuse,” a catchphrase we use to describe her regenerative essence.
It is the chilliest day of the trip. Overhead, cloud patches have pieced themselves into a gray quilt with scraggly blue seams. The light glooms noticeably as we cross the broken pavements with the other women, moving past the toppled columns and tympanums. Wind whips up the scent of dry weeds and musty old stones, pulling me back once again to our first visit . . . to Ann and me roaming this bonepile of ruins.
I wish I did not remember how lost and depressed she was then, but it wells up suddenly and a sharp sensation twists through my stomach, as if the memories are archived in the cells of my body and have been viscerally retrieved. I look at Ann striding ahead of me in her Persephone-Jo March ribbon and remind myself that while the memory of that period still stabs, she’s no longer in the dark place she was two years ago.
Ann has told me that when we visited Eleusis before, she began to view her confusion, disillusion, fear, and depression in light of the myth, identifying them with Persephone’s sojourn in the underworld. She began to see meaning in her descent. It became a search for a new sense of herself and a place for that self in the world. She found them, it seems to me now, in the daily confrontations with her darkness.
Just ahead, the women have begun to gather around the Well of the Beautiful Dances, peering into the dry, empty hole where I previously tossed a lock of my hair. The place where I capitulated.
I have another pang, though considerably milder, as I recall my own feelings of loss the last time I was here—the pulverizing moments I spent by the well, pondering the lost daughter: Ann, yes, but also the one inside.
Slipping into the circle of women, Ann and I stare at the stone well like two people gazing at the ocean, hushed by the sight of it.
“It is so different, being here this time,” Ann says.
I nod, aware that the sadness and angst I felt here before are gone. Used up. What is left is the emotion stirred up by memory. And even that seems spent at the moment. Those natural losses of womanhood had craved expression and I am glad now for giving in to them. A kind of contented acceptance has grown up in their place, and this is a knowledge I have not fully possessed until now.
Earlier this morning during breakfast, while reviewing the itinerary, I realized today was our tenth day of traveling. That would have been an unremarkable fact except that I also remembered that in the myth, Demeter searched for Persephone for nine days and on the tenth, she found her.
I looked across the table at Ann, who was munching her toast, and I had the feeling there was meaning in the small synchronism. Where was I now in the scheme of the myth? Had I arrived not just at the tenth calendar day of the trip, but at the mythic “tenth day”?
As the waiter cleared our plates, I suddenly thought of the gift Ann had given me two years ago for my fiftieth birthday. It was a photograph she’d taken at Eleusis, one of the many she took of me when I wasn’t looking. In it, I stand in the cavelike opening where Persephone returned to her mother, my white sundress no bigger than a postage stamp in the stark shadows. In the matting of the framed picture, Ann had inserted a paraphrased passage from the Demeter-Persephone myth in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: As Persephone emerged from the underworld, Demeter ran out to meet her daughter as swiftly as a Maenad runs down the mountain side. Persephone sprang into her arms and was held fast there.
For twenty-six months that photograph and caption had hung on the wall of my study. After a time, I hadn’t really seen them any more, in that way familiarity breeds invisibility, but sitting at the breakfast table, I realized the picture was an image of the “tenth day”—of me in the role of Demeter as she arrives at the entrance of the underworld at the end of her quest, knowing the deal for her daughter’s return has been struck with the Gods.
I told Ann about “the tenth day” as we left the hotel dining room. Smiling, she paused in the middle of the room, and the two of us stood there for a long moment and looked at one another, seeming to comprehend together that the seeking had turned into finding.
We comb the jigsaw of ruins, as our guide Letta points out the remains of this and that—the inner sanctuary, the ruts worn into the floor over the centuries by mass
ive doors—hundreds of moldering objects passing by as if on a conveyor belt, bearing history. I try to concentrate on each one, but the feeling at breakfast—the vision of Persephone bounding into her mother’s arms and the awareness of a similar convergence happening in me—bleeds through all of it. I walk along as cameras click, and voices murmur, and the wind jousts with the cypresses on the hill, and I am . . . elsewhere.
I think about my mother. I phoned her not long ago and asked if she would like to go to France with Ann and me next spring. Recently, I decided to co-lead one more of these trips just for that possibility. “It could be a grandmother-mother-daughter trip,” I told her.
“Well, isn’t that nice,” she said, using the tone she always gets in her voice when she’s simultaneously astonished and pleased. I pictured her standing with the phone in the kitchen, over at the window where she could see the scuppernong vines looping along the fence.
I waited for her to say something more. When she didn’t, I asked, “Do you need to talk to Dad first before you decide?”
“Oh no, I’m going,” she replied. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything on earth.”
“Me either,” I told her, and the words felt large inside, not just something to say.
At breakfast this morning, when I thought about the photograph Ann gave me, I was picturing myself as Demeter, identifying with the mother part of the myth, but now that I’m here, it has also flipped around and I’m the daughter. I’m the one returning to my mother. If I confided this to her, I feel like she would say: Returning? But I never felt like you left. She would be right, I was always there, but this is a different kind of closeness. As if a hidden aperture has opened. It’s entirely possible that some of the new intimacy I perceive between us comes from a subtle variation in myself—the shift that began when I opened myself to her Hestia world.
The next time I called Mother, just to say we were off to Greece, she was at the gym. As our group processes past the ruins of Hecate’s temple, I get a vision of my mother, seventy-nine years old now, going to town on the treadmill in her Reeboks and light blue warmup pants, and it provokes a spontaneous promise to myself: I will grow young like that.
Bending down, I pick up a stone the size of my thumbnail and squeeze the vow into its white surface. I’m leery of New Year-ish pledges to exercise and eat right, as I’ve left most of them behind like a trail of broken crockery, but this one seems forged in a deeper place. Since turning fifty, I’ve been initiated into a whole new relationship with my body. All that concern about what I see in the mirror has begun to leave; more and more what remains is simply the powerful need to take care of myself.
The high blood pressure readings have not returned. I did not even bring the blood pressure machine on the trip this time. “What? You didn’t bring the Alarm Clock?” Ann asked the first morning in Crete. She bestowed this pet name on the machine last year in France because the whining and beeping woke her nearly every morning.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to wake without the benefit of my medical equipment,” I told her.
Her face rearranged into seriousness, and she said, “Do you think it will come back—your hypertension, I mean?”
Did I? I told her my blood pressure spoke fluently to me about the struggle between doing and being that was lodged at my core, and I imagined it would always be my severe teacher, spiking when I lapsed into my old bad habits. Several nights later I had an oddly terse dream—just a voice speaking out of the silence, making a surprising pronouncement: When you become an old woman, you won’t have blood pressure problems anymore.
The irony was that our group was in Delphi when I had the dream, the land of oracles and Sybils. In actuality, we had tromped up the mountain earlier that day to what’s left of Apollo’s temple, composing questions for the Delphic oracle in our heads—the sacred game that pilgrims there always engage in. Something about all this must have primed me to dream what sounded like a foretelling.
I recounted it to Ann when we woke. The dream was hopeful to me, but cryptic, too. I suppose I wanted to take it literally. Now, though, I understand the voice was not referring to chronological years, but archetypal ones. It was talking about the Old Woman.
Dropping the rock into my bag, I slide out my journal. I scribble questions awkwardly, standing up, while the group moves on, leaving me behind. What was it about the Old Woman that could be healing for me? Freedom? The repose of belonging to oneself? Was it the wise and curative ways of being? The release that happens when you suspend the ego and turn your attention to the soul of the world? Was it simply coming to the tenth day, no longer driven by “what else,” but a finder of “what is”?
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 mir
ror 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.
AFTERWORD
September 2008
Ann
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.