Traveling with Pomegranates (21 page)

1999 -2000

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 disappearing, 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.