Traveling with Pomegranates (33 page)

Getting the novel published is “better,” yes, definitely. The dazed sensation I had in the optometrist’s office gives way to joy and wonder, which will always be the most pervasive feelings I have about it, but I also possess a modicum of mild terror at the prospect of pulling it off.

As spring flies by, I lie in bed too many nights and flip back and forth about whether I should have waited until life was calmer before sending my work out there. But when is there any guarantee of that? Anyway, it’s irrelevant. I leaped, and now I have to put my head down and
do it.

To compound the matter, Terry and Trisha and I decided to put together another trip. Next October in Greece. When I asked Ann if she wanted to go, considering she would be a newly-wed then of only four months, she said, “Of course I want to go!”

I’m excited to have at least one more trip with her, but there is work involved—itineraries, travel arrangements, research, lectures.

There’s no time for egret watching or other sorts of wise loitering. No time for contemplative thoughts about anything, much less about Ann getting married and what that might mean as an event in my own soul.

Each day I sit at my desk and plug away on the book. The work moves with painful slowness. When the agent mentions that the publisher would like to see my outline for the final half, I have to explain there is not one, that I have no idea from day to day what will happen in the story. Worse, an old voice is back, popping up every time a new idea emerges, explaining to me why it is stupid. I regress to a place I’ve passed through before. I do not trust what comes to me.

By mid-May I am not on any sort of reasonable pace to complete the book on time, and I’m too much of a novice to imagine I can miss the deadline, as if at midnight on September 1 everything goes back to pumpkins, mice, and cinder rags.

The one leniency I allow myself is long, weekly phone conversations with my mother. More than nice respites, they become moments to weave our lives together. We talk about the wedding—the junior bridesmaid dress she’s sewing, her progress hand-tying white bows on two hundred small bells for the guests to ring instead of throwing rice, whether we should have crab cakes at the reception—but our discussions inevitably drift to other topics. She tells me about her osteoporosis, which she has reversed with weightlifting. I disclose worries about my blood pressure, how it sweeps up and down and up, which I can’t seem to reverse at all. She asks me about Ann’s and my travels, about Mary and the Black Madonna. I ask her about her fifties: “Did you have hot flashes?” “Did you gain seven and a half pounds the first year after menopause?”

She jokes, “I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it. When I was fifty, I still had an eleven-year-old!”

“Good point,” I tell her. And it
is
a good point. Who has time to think about this stuff?

One day Mother says, “It must be special for you that Ann is wearing your wedding dress.”

“Yes. Yes, it is,” I say, and change the subject, but not before I realize the words have made a tear in the dike.

Then one morning, two weeks before the wedding, I wake at day-break with a feeling of overwhelming sadness. In those first, amorphous seconds, the grief overtaking me is so strange and dislocating I wonder if I have forgotten some terrible happening. It takes a moment to understand that life is the same, but I have somehow awakened into a depression.

My body feels weighed down on the bed. I have little will to get up. I force myself into the bathroom. Close the door. Sit on the stool before the mirror. I try to get my bearings, shake myself out of it, but it is like something inside of me has dropped anchor.

On the surface, the sudden melancholy shocks me, but deeper down, I’ve almost been expecting it. I’m guessing that what commandeered my soul during the night has to do with me, Ann, and the dress.

At times like this, I feel the small curse of my introspective nature and its obstinate demands, how it wants to be allowed, wants my unhurried and undivided attention, how the moments of life insist on being metabolized and given expression. As usual, having failed to stop and tend to this unmitigated part of myself, it has stopped me.

My eyes fall upon the cup beside the sink, and my dream from last night instantly replays. . . .

Tears come. The anguish I felt in the dream sticks to me as though I’ve walked through a cobweb.

Everything ceases. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, the sadness is unremitting. I sit for hours on the dock beside the marsh, watching the tides migrate. I try to come to terms with what Ann’s marriage means for me inside. I let myself feel what I feel. I write it down, trying to understand and give it form, acquiescing to the inner transaction I seem to need. These acts quench the thirsty places inside I’ve neglected. They are a small mercy I bestow on myself. Like dispensing water.

It feels like I am finishing the process I started in Eleusis, Greece, when I sat by the well where Demeter grieved and first confronted the dying of my motherhood and my younger womanhood. As much as I would like to believe that confrontation is over and done, it’s clear that remnants of longing for those aspects of myself are vividly present in the Persephone-like image of Ann in my wedding dress. The image takes me back to the time I was young and setting out into a new life, and at the same time it thrusts me forward toward the life ahead. I am stuck somewhere between clinging and fear.

There is nothing to do but stay with the whole miserable process, believing that if I hold the feelings, tensions, and conflicts as fully as I can, a shift of some sort will happen.

And so it is that a week before the wedding, I have a dream:

When I wake, I am flooded with lightness, like a fever breaking. I open my eyes, aware of how still the room is, the wood blinds drawn open on the window, a pale sky, and an awed, numinous feeling spreading through me. The movements and feelings in the dream seem astonishingly real, as if they’ve actually happened. They linger in my body like memories—my arm linked in Ann’s, walking, dancing, trying to keep up with the Old Woman as she leads, the whole mystery of her alive and regenerating.

Lying there, I remember that the well I sat beside in Eleusis is called the Well of the Beautiful Dances, and suddenly, the dream feels like a consummation, like a coalescing of the last two years. The walk with Ann toward the altar seems like a final acknowledgment and letting go of my old self, while the encounter with the Old Woman feels like an integration, the commencement of a new dance inside.

I met the Old Woman, I think. This time, in myself.

On June 3, at six o’clock, I am at the rear of the rose garden, gazing at the wedding aisle—a dirt path that leads to the mammoth oak beside the Ashley River.

The guests are congregated under the branches, the sun hangs behind the clouds, and three musicians, with oboe, cello, and flute, sit in chairs on the riverbank and play
Ave Maria
. It is perfect, and for a moment the sight of the soft light coming across the river and the strains of music pierce me with such happiness, such beatitude, I think I might cry. But as Bob has already pointed out to me, I cannot walk down the aisle dressed in black and my eyes running with mascara. I suppress a laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Ann asks. She stands between Sandy and me, radiant in her white gown with crimson roses popped open all around her.

“Bob,” I say. “He told me if I cried at your wedding, I would look like Morticia in
The Addams Family
.”

This cracks her up, but then everything he says cracks her up, his sense of humor being even more acerbic than hers.

I smile at her. “You look beautiful.”

“You, too,” she says.

There are a few seconds of quietness, then Pachelbel’s
Canon
floats across the garden. I watch the groomsmen move along the aisle, focusing on Bob as he takes his place in the lineup near an urn of flowers. I smile at him, aware that the letting go between mother and son is every bit as important, and yet different.

When the “Bridal Chorus” starts, Sandy leans over and kisses Ann’s cheek. I kiss the other one. The three of us start down the aisle, arm in arm toward the minister. I give myself admonitions:
don’t trip, breathe, smile
. I gaze at my bouquet of calla lilies, where I’ve tucked the sprig of wheat that Ann found at Eleusis and presented to me as we left the cave where Persephone returned. Demeter’s wheat.

Then those thoughts are gone, and I see the tree and the river and feel Ann beside me. I hear the slight jingle of what I think might be the medals of Mary from Rocamadour and Le Puy pinned beneath the bodice of her gown.

At five minutes after six, the chamber trio plays “Here Comes the Bride.” Standing in the garden, about to walk down the aisle, I decide I’m no longer worried about the 20 percent chance of thunderstorms the Weather Channel has called for all day.