Traveling with Pomegranates (10 page)

Our food arrives just after the band takes a break. Mom and I have barely spoken, but I really think it’s because the party has been so loud. I stab a piece of the pork souvlaki on her plate and she spoons
tzatziki
from mine. “You can’t have too much of this,” she says, spreading the yogurt sauce onto a piece of pita, and in this uncomplicated exchange I think I might tell her everything.

I want to say: Did you know that Dr. Gergel asked me if I wanted her to find out why my application to graduate school was turned down and that I said
no
? I don’t want to know the reasons because the reasons are my defects. And did you know she suggested I reapply? But how do you go through getting turned down by the same school twice? There are other ancient history programs out there, but I haven’t looked into them. What are the odds of another program accepting me if the first one didn’t? It’s as if the rejection letter has uncovered a terrible truth about myself that I didn’t know, don’t want to know.

I glance at my mother unable to form any of this into words.

I haven’t done the things Dr. Gergel suggested because I’m afraid—okay, I gave up. I tell myself that studying ancient Greek history in graduate school is my road-not-taken thing, so get over it. But there have been times lately when I’ve asked myself:
Is a person meant to do only one thing in this life? What if I leapt at that road too fast? Should my love of Greece translate into a career? And if not, what do I do with that love?
I don’t know where this devil’s advocate voice comes from or why I wonder about these things when I still feel so attached to the dream.

Mom reaches for the carafe of water, fills her glass and then mine. And another thing, I want to tell her, it was a big mistake for me to enroll in graduate school in American history, but I didn’t know what else to do, and I had to do something.

I don’t say any of that either.

There’s nothing in our history to make me believe my mother would respond to me as if I were a disappointment. She didn’t do it when I was ten and quit piano. And not when I forfeited a full college scholarship my freshman year to transfer to the school I’d really wanted to go to all along. My heart starts to jog the second I think about the school switch.

I had been miserable that first semester of college, but I’d stifled that, too. For four months. How do you tell your parents you want to give up a four-year academic scholarship worth a zillion dollars in pursuit of your own unreasoned happiness? At the end of Christmas break, Mom found me sitting on my bed next to my open suitcase, crying. That’s when I finally told her, explaining the obvious—that what I wanted was selfish and insensible. She surprised me by saying the sensible thing would be listening to my heart. Within two weeks I was enrolled at Columbia College, the school I had wanted to attend.

This was so like my mother. She had a generous spirit, but it wasn’t only that. It was the respect she had for feelings, how she believed it was inimical to the soul to deny them. I’ve watched her follow her own heart countless times in her life, most recently when she convinced Dad they should leave their home of twenty-two years and move to Charleston. I feel a little cheated out of that gene.

I turn and look at her, wondering what I’m so afraid of now. “What?” she says. “What is it?”

The music kicks up again and I shake my head. “Nothing,” I mouth.

Six dancers—three men and three women—move across the stage, holding hands and forming a circle. The men wear
foustanellas
with white wool tights underneath, sashes, vests, and red clogs with big black pom-poms on the toes. They take turns leaping into the air from a crouching position, kicking one leg and slapping their ankles. Each time, the crowd shouts, “Hey!”

This is the men’s show.

Suddenly the dancers fan out into the dining room. My stomachache returns. I know what is about to happen—
audience participation
.

One of the female dancers pulls a man, who looks about seventy-five, out of his chair onto the stage. He makes a small show of resisting, then throws up his hands in a what-the-hell gesture.

Everyone laughs. The troupe pulls others from their seats—a teenage girl, a forty-something man. I hold my camera up to my face and stare at the scene through the tiny glass square. Then the square goes black. I lower the camera to find one of the dancers leaning over me, holding out his hand. He is asking me to join the others.

It’s as if my fear of this very thing has turned on me and summoned him over. His face is sweating. He smiles at me.

I can’t move. I want to want to.

I shake my head. “No.”

He looks at me like no one has ever turned him down before.

It’s not you, it’s me
, I want to tell him.

He moves on to another girl with long brown hair. I pick up my camera. Through the lens I watch this girl take his hand and follow him to the stage. She studies the dancers’ feet, stepping left when she should go right, laughing at herself. I think maybe she is the ghost of me seventeen months ago, that she’s here after all. But, sadly, I don’t think I could be this woman either.

God, I’m draperies again
.

“You didn’t want to dance with him?” Mom asks. Her tone matches the expression I saw on his face. It has a slight “that’s too bad” ring to it. I taste the tanginess of pennies and realize I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek. It is actually bleeding a little.

“Not really,” I say, shrugging it off.

I can tell she’s worked up about me. I’m worried she might ask me what’s wrong and I’ll have to lie, or worse, tell her the truth.

When the dance ends, I muster all the energy I have just to clap my hands.

We take a taxi back to the hotel. In the backseat I can see the Acropolis lit up, the Parthenon floating at the top. I reach inside my bag for the room key and feel the small lump of the glass pomegranate.

The Parthenon slips out of view and I’m left staring at my reflection in the window. I look like a girl, once wild, who’s been utterly tamed.

Last night, we ended up at a restaurant that Ann had gone to on her first trip to Greece, a considerable coincidence that seemed to excite her at first, but as the evening wore on and the Greek dancing grew more delirious, I could feel her retreating to some unreachable place. I had the impression it had to do with her being in the same restaurant again, with the overlap of then and now, but I could make no sense of that.

She remained quiet all the way back to the hotel, staring through the car window seemingly at nothing. “You okay?” I asked, hoping I did not sound like a broken record.

“Just tired,” she said.

Now, this morning, she stands on the sidewalk outside the hotel with guidebooks and camera, appearing refreshed and eager, but something is off. I feel it.

Our taxi pulls up at 10:15—the same white Mercedes that rescued us from the heat a couple of days earlier. I read the driver’s name on the card I’d saved. Alexander. From the moment I stumbled into the myth of Demeter and Persephone in the museum, I knew we would have to make this trip, but when I tell him we want to go to Elefsina, the modern-day name for Eleusis, he balks.

“I can take you anywhere in Athens,” he tells us. “Olympic stadium, the Agora, the statue of Harry Truman. We will go up the Hill of the Muses. You can see everything from there.”

“But we really want to go to Elefsina,” I say.

He is not impressed with our sightseeing skills. From the driver’s seat, he twists around to face us. “It is twenty kilometers. There is nothing much to see.”

“But there’s the Sanctuary of Demeter. And the museum—”

He shakes his head and turns to stare over the steering wheel, as if waiting for us to remove ourselves.

It occurs to me
no
taxi will take us there, that we will not get to Eleusis at all. I offer Alexander more money. He politely refuses. As Ann and I open the doors to climb out of the car, he watches us in the rearview mirror, noticing the newly bought pendants that dangle from chains around our necks.

“You are wearing pomegranates,” he says abruptly. “You are mother and daughter?” I pause halfway out the door. “Yes,” I tell him. “Mother and daughter.”

“Demeter and Persephone. All right, then.” He motions us back inside and starts the car.

We drive northwest out of Athens into a yellow-gray haze. Elefsina/Eleusis is wreathed with ugly industrial slums, cement factories coughing up white, phlegmlike smoke. The sky droops with pollution. Ann reads from one of a half-dozen guidebooks that we have lugged across the Atlantic Ocean, while I stare through the window at the sun being swallowed into grainy clouds, disintegrating into pinpoints.

The Demeter-Persephone myth had been enacted at Eleusis annually for around eighteen hundred years. Thousands of initiates came from around the Panhellenic world to go through secret rites of death and rebirth known as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

These involved a symbolic going down into the underworld, called the
kathodos
, and a rising up to new life, known as the
anados
. Eleusis had been one of the greatest religious centers in all antiquity, and at the heart of it was not a divine father and son, but a divine mother and daughter.
How extraordinary is that
, I thought when the notion of visiting Eleusis popped up. What I did not consider, not even when I woke from the dream of Ann falling through the cavity in the kitchen floor, was that traveling here would evoke my own version of
kathodos
and
anados
. I lean my head back on the seat and close my eyes.

Ann conveys a stray piece of information from the book. “The earliest of the ruins go back to the fifteenth century BC. That’s,” she computes in her head, “
more than three thousand years
.” A couple of miles later, she says, “Did you know that everyone who went through the Mysteries at Eleusis experienced a secret that made them no longer afraid of dying?”

The air is brighter once we reach Eleusis, some of the Attic blueness of Greece breaking through the foul crust. As I step from the car, I drop my unzipped bag in the street and out rolls the big red pomegranate that had been on the breakfast buffet at the hotel, part of the decorative centerpiece. To Ann’s embarrassment, I had convinced the server to wrest it from the display and give it to me. Alexander stares at it lying beside the car tire.

Ann’s look says
UN-believable
.

I grab the fruit and stuff it back into my floppy purse.

“I’ll wait for you,” Alexander tells us. “You cannot get a taxi back to Athens from here on Sunday. How long do you need? One hour?”

“Three,” I say.

“Two,” he tells me firmly, and I don’t argue.

I am floored by the vastness of the ruins. They are strewn across the slope of a hill which is hedged by the Bay of Eleusis on one side and mountains on the other three. It’s as if there has been a volcanic eruption of stone and marble—toppled columns and rooftops, remnants of temple walls, chunks of altars and statues. Ann and I clutch the brochures and maps we picked up at the gate and stare into the morass of sacred debris. An abandoned mother-daughter continent. We are the only ones here.