“Is that chocolate on your face?”
I run to the mirror.
My face is lined like a vampire—amber-brown streaks under my nose and around my mouth. What is on me? “I’ve been walking around the ship like this!”
In the mirror, I see Mom behind me, bent over at the waist, laughing. It becomes the moment I know I don’t have to protect her from my feelings, that I can tell her the worst things and the world will not end.
Suddenly I remember the lilies. “It’s pollen!” Now I’m bent over, laughing.
I scrub at the stains. “It’s not coming off!”
“Use my astringent,” Mom says, but she can hardly get the words out.
Our reaction is worse than when we started the cat-feeding frenzy in the Plaka, and it’s probably as much from the catharsis of our talk as it is from my face.
“Did you see the way the guy looked at me in the elevator?” I cry. “Oh my god, how many people did we pass on the way to our room?”
“I don’t know,” Mom says. “About a hundred.”
Before dinner we pass through the photo gallery to look for the picture the ship photographer took of us at dinner the night before.
Rows and rows of photos are arranged on the walls. We each take a side of the room and search. Mom spots it.
In the photo, we are sitting in the dimly lit dining room, small yellow chandelier bulbs blurred in the background and a tall window behind us splattered with light from the camera flash. We are shoulder to shoulder, smiling, and for the first time I see how true it is. Our faces are remarkably alike.
The clerk drops the photo into a transparent bag and hands it to us. “You share the same face,” he says, and looking at me, adds, “But you have, how do you say . . .”
“Freckles,” I answer.
Mom and I head for the double glass doors that lead outside to the Apollo deck. The sun is setting, the crisp light softening.
We rest our elbows on the rail and stare at the sea until I taste salt on my lips. As we stand there, the horizon turns blue, then violet. My ribs don’t feel like a vise the way they have for most of the trip. I’ve admitted the worst to myself and to my mother: I don’t feel worthy of blessings. I’m depressed. I’m lost. I don’t know what to do with my life. Big, bleak issues I never thought I’d deal with.
We decide we’ll do one lap around the deck before dinner, which should walk off about twenty of the five hundred cookie calories I ate earlier. Near the front of the ship, people have gathered along the rail and are pointing at the water. Dolphins, a hundred of them at least, are leaping and diving along the prow. They skim the surface like silver zippers, slicing open the water. Their breaths spew as loud as the roar of a fountain.
I don’t know why, but I tear up. I press my hands to my eyes to keep the tears in. The dolphins swim beside the ship for several minutes, then turn out to sea. I watch till I can’t see them anymore.
Staring at the swells of water, I’m able to tell myself: I will not go to graduate school. There will be no path that leads me back to Greece. These things are gone. But maybe there will still be something else out there. Something I can give my whole heart to.
Sue
Charleston, South Carolina
Today—February 23, 1999—is moving day, and Charleston has turned crazily cold, sleeting just to the west of us, the sky knotted with dark, threatening clouds. Alone in the new house, waiting for Sandy and the moving truck, I stand at the windows in the upstairs room I’ve claimed for my study and frown at the sky, willing it not to rain. Please. Just then a drop splats on the pane.
The heat ticks and groans in the vent over my head, but beyond that, silence. I look out across the salt marsh. Browned grasses undulate like a field of wheat. The creek cuts through them, swollen with haze and wavy as a brushstroke. I decide I will put my desk where I am standing so I can see the little wetland of wildness and peace while I write.
Turning from the windows, I scrutinize the room. After more than a year in the teeny apartment, writing sporadically in a windowless cubicle otherwise known as the dining nook, the space seems outlandish, as if I am Alice in Wonderland shrunk to the size of a keyhole. I let my eyes drift to several boxes stacked along the far wall and my stomach does a strange, anxious flip. The boxes contain everything remotely related to the novel about the bees. After returning from Greece six months ago, I dove into writing it, but lately the whole novel has stalled. I haven’t written anything since the new year.
When I got back from Greece, people were remarkably responsible about reminding me that I had come back to the real world, though it didn’t seem that substantial to me. I’d returned to the four-room apartment, which was no more than a way station and which pressed around me, confining and cocoon-ish. What had I been thinking, moving into a place so windowless and dark? How deluded had I been to think we would be out of it in no time? As if the betwixt and between of the old life and the new one would be a finger snap.
That I felt migratory and displaced in my physical surroundings was hardly surprising, but I was a little shocked at how displaced I felt inside. So much of my sense of myself had been altered in Greece, far more than I realized. Old understandings of myself as a woman, a mother, a writer, and a person in search of the spiritual were unraveled by my experiences over there, by the places themselves.
I cloistered myself during those months, struggling to sit in the cubicle and type on the keyboard. At one point the computer crashed and I lost every word I’d written. I wished for my desk, which was in storage along with everything else. I wished for some idea of what I was doing and whether it would amount to anything. A dozen times a day, on fire with a hot flash, I ran from the computer to the refrigerator where I stood with the doors thrown open, prickly with sweat, rubbing ice cubes on my arms, face, and neck. An acupuncturist brewed up a Chinese tea for me to drink that smelled like car oil, but it was a worse remedy than the ice cubes. I missed my estrogen.
It was the autumn of menopausal symptoms. Odd palpitations. Seizures of unexplained sadness. There was only one kind of sleep now: interrupted. I would steal out of bed to read and write, or situate myself by the lone window in the living room where I could see the moon. One night I calculated how many more full moons I could see if I lived to be eighty. Three hundred and fifty seven.
My memory began to nod off like a narcoleptic and I would be left with a thought curled up on the tip of my tongue—something like the name of the guy in the movie we’d just seen. (Half an hour later the answer would surface and I would blurt out the name—“Richard Gere”—to anyone standing next to me.)
My mother’s generation summed up menopause in two words: the Change. As a little girl, I only heard the words whispered, as if they could not be spoken aloud in polite company, suggesting a slightly scary and shameful mutation of age. In the world of my grandmothers, menopause was often “diagnosed” as hysteria (from the Greek word for womb: hystera), referring to all kinds of hormonal maladies from night sweats to mood swings, and was treated as pathology and neurosis. As a baby boomer, I fantasized that it would be nice to come up with a new term for the word, like the Awakening or the Becoming. I wanted it to take into account the way every beautiful and dormant potential in you wants to wake up. How you get intimations of being untethered at long last, of power and audacity bubbling furiously on your two back burners. How you start thinking: yes, I do believe women can save the world. But, truth be told, that didn’t tell the whole story either. There was a formidable Change bearing down, though I certainly didn’t think of it as shameful. And I had my tiny bouts of so-called hysteria, or let us say “hormonal expressions,” though I hardly thought they were pathological. That menopause is also an event of biology was never clearer than during that autumn of symptoms.
On the winter solstice, I became officially postmenopausal. Twelve months without menses. There seemed to be fluency in the timing, the solstice being the apex of darkness after which the light gradually returns. It’s don
e, I thought. It seemed like I should mark the occasion. In what I thought would be a celebratory moment of closure, I read Lucille Clifton’s poem “to my last period” aloud to myself and ended up crying my eyes out.
By Christmas, the need to examine my face for lines and sags left me. I recognized the growing permutations as more than the effects of time. They became a poignant history—tracings of my experience and character, the passionate individuality of my soul, the story of lived life written in the tenderness of skin. I began to find a worn beauty in all of that. I knew I could never cut it away.
Those six months between Greece and moving day—marinated as they were in hot flashes and pangs of loss—became a natural descent of body and soul both. I could only sit with it and let it happen. It was a time to molt.
When Ann drops by after work, Sandy and the movers are unloading furniture in the rain and I am cross-legged on the floor, unpacking the boxes that made my stomach do the funny flip-flop. Spread around me are books, files, scribbled notes, a three-ring notebook with my research, and the first fifty pages of the novel tied neatly with a piece of raffia. In my lap rests a collage the size of a small poster.
“So, where’s my room?” Ann says as she plops beside me on the floor. It’s the first house we’ve had without a room for her or Bob, a fact that has not quite sunk in until she asks this, asks it so matter-of-factly that I glance at her to be sure she’s kidding. Her eyes give her away. “Yeah, about that . . . we still have the pup tent,” I say. We laugh a little too long, as if to avoid the acknowledgment implied in all of this—that her leaving is now permanent and concrete. No coming back.
For one elongated minute we sit there and listen to rain pelt the roof. The closeness we discovered in Greece seemed to solidify during the fall. We talked endlessly about the experiences we’d had, pored over trip photographs, read passages aloud to each other from our journals, and picked up the conversations we started over there.
I smile at her. Her hair, pixie-short in Greece, is almost to her chin, her bangs wispy across her forehead. She looks thin to me and I stifle the urge to ask if she’s eating enough. In two days she will be twenty-three.
I realize I’m still trying to work out the boundaries. How to love her without interfering. How to step back and let her have her private world and yet still be an intimate part of it. When she talks about her feelings, I have to consciously tell myself she wants me to receive them, not fix them.
Every woman needs to become self-mothering, I remind myself. To learn to take care of herself, to love herself. Ann has to find a mother in herself. She will replace me. That’s the point now.
She peers at the collage in my lap. “What’s that?” she says, and I’m glad for the diversion.
“It’s a book outline.”
“Very cool,” she says and leans over it, studying the patchwork of pictures.
I started the collage soon after returning from Greece, searching through magazines, catalogs, postcards, photos, and prints, cutting out whatever inspired me. I was supposed to be writing an outline for the novel, and I was cutting out pictures. It didn’t seem to matter whether I understood what the pictures meant or how they fit into the novel; it was enough to be drawn to them in some deep, evocative way. It was pretty much an unconscious process. I told myself I was being creative, turning my play instinct loose to roam around and find what fascinated it. Inside I was thinking: This is nuts.
I ended up culling the pictures to twenty images and randomly gluing them together. Among them: A white girl—fourteen maybe—a sassy smirk on her face, but a hint of something hurt and bruised there, too. A large African American woman, who looks like she could spit snuff and straighten you out at the same time. A bitter-looking white man in overalls. A pretty white woman with wistful eyes. A jail cell. A whirling cloud of bees. A black Madonna wrapped in chains. A shockingly pink house. A trio of African American women. A jar of honey. A banner that reads WALLS FOR WAILING.
I only know what the first half-dozen of these pictures mean and how they might be part of the story. The rest is an enigma.
Ann rests her finger on the girl I’ve placed dead center. “Who’s this? The girl with the bees inside her wall?”
I nod. “Her name is Lily Melissa Owens. She accidently killed her mother when she was four.”
She looks at me. “Killed her mother? Man.”
“Well, it makes things more interesting,” I say.
Ann points to the large woman. “What about her?”
“That’s Lily’s stand-in mother, Rosaleen Daise.”
“What’s her story?”
“She gets into a fight with three racists and gets thrown in jail.”
“Good Lord.”
“Well, I don’t leave her there. Lily breaks her out and the two of them run away together.”
A jail break. By a fourteen-year-old. When the idea came, it felt inspired, but knowing how capable I was of doubt and how cold my feet would get, I wrote a note to myself: Sue, this is a really good idea. Before you dismiss it, remember how you felt when it came to you.
If it hadn’t been for that note, the idea never would have survived. I still wasn’t sure whether it was perfectly ridiculous or ridiculously perfect.
Ann does not laugh or roll her eyes. “So, where do they go?”
This is the part that makes me nervous, the part over which the novel has stalled. “I have no idea,” I say.
That night I awaken in the new house sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 A.M. in a strange room flooded with light. Through the curtainless windows, I see the moon plugged into the black sky, shining on high beam, emphatic as a spotlight.
Sandy sleeps unfazed, but I lie in the lucent, white sheets, in the dazzling room, and think first about the house and what pieces of furniture go where, then slowly wind my way back to the problem of my two runaway characters.
Slipping out of bed, I wrap myself in the green chenille throw and pad up the stairs to my study, where the moon radiates with only slightly less wattage. I pick up the collage. My eyes wander back and forth between the picture of the three African American women and the uproariously pink house. I scan the cloud of bees and the black Madonna in chains.
And boom, it falls out of the night, landing in one unbroken piece in my head. My two runaways will escape to the home of three black sisters, who live in a pink house, keep bees, and revere a Black Madonna.
I consider writing a note to myself about it but decide no, this time I’m going to trust it.
The pink house and its inhabitants are all I think about. It distracts me from the fear that the idea is crazy. I unpack crystal and china, load it into the dishwasher, then stack it in the sideboard in the dining room, while my mind is a thousand miles away picturing shades of flamingo and Pepto-Bismol pink, cooking up ideas.
It is not until I whack two stems of crystal into the countertop and find myself standing in a pile of shards that I realize I’m not present to what I’m doing. I stop, make a cup of tea, and take it to the living room. I recline against the sofa pillows near the hearth and think of all the passages I’ve logged in my journal about hearth and Hestia—a Goddess who doesn’t represent domesticity to me so much as the ability to dwell, to belong to one’s place.
Journeying is the predominant means of developing one’s self in this culture, not the habitation of place. It has been true of me. Always the seeker. Yet at this phase of my life, when I look at my house at the edge of a marsh, I want to learn how to be in it. I want to behave like a finder as much as a seeker. The irony is that I had to go on an elaborate journey to figure this out. So much of my growing older seems to be about paradoxes. The reconciliation of opposites. The bringing to balance.
For my fiftieth birthday, Sandy gave me a card with the moon on it. He handed it to me when I got home from Greece. It read: “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” It’s true, I wasn’t. Yet the rest of the story is that it’s just as possibl
e not to be the same after seeing it over my backyard. At fifty, I want to be a finder of the commonplace moon.
Later, as I unpack a carton marked MISCELLANEOUS, I come across a photo of my seventy-seven-year-old mother. It was taken the month before at a workshop I co-led with my friend Terry titled “Maiden, Mother, Crone.” It wasn’t about chronological phases in a woman’s life, but about an internal process of becoming. I’d invited my mother, wanting to spend time with her, and she’d jumped at the chance. The photo has captured her standing beneath a tree in a semicircle of women who are being led in a simple dance. Her arms, like the arms of all the women, are stretched out in front of her, palms up, as if she’s waiting for something to be dropped into them. Her head is cocked slightly to the side in a gesture I recognize.
Someone snapped the picture and sent it to me. It arrived as I was packing up the contents of the apartment. I did not look at it closely then, but I do now. I study her arms stretched toward the camera in a gesture of beseeching and receptivity and I’m completely arrested by it. My mother, dancing. The closing line in her letter to me about Dissident Daughter comes to mind: Oh, Sue. I don’t want to miss the dance.
Shortly after the photo was taken, Terry and I invited the group to call out the names of women who had made an impact on their lives or on history itself. The moment was designed to be a “dinner party” of female names. As we took turns around the circle, I started off the litany with the name Sojourner Truth. From around the circle came Georgia O’Keeffe, Virginia Woolf, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth Blackwell, interspersed with the names of someone’s mother, sister, grandmother. My mother, who had been quietly listening, suddenly spoke up. “My daughter, Sue,” she said.
Still holding the photo, I go to the phone and dial her number. When we have finished all the small talk about moving, I say: “That day at the workshop when we called out the names, I never thanked you for what you said.” Before she can respond, every bottled up thing comes out—how I have not valued her Hestian world, not been able to fully find that world for myself, how it has separated me from her in some internal way that has been almost too subtle to realize. “I know all the things you do at home, the way you’re so content there, is your art, like writing is mine. I just want to find an experience of home now.”
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