Right about now, if I let myself, I could get yanked into skepticism. I could entertain thoughts about the efficacy of what they’re doing, what I’m doing. Sending prayers into the universe. Are they heard? Can they change anything? Are our supplications a form of magical thinking? I don’t know the answers. In recent years, my praying has grown more meditative, a kind of sitting in silence. It has been a long while since I’ve made a concrete petition, but as I linger, waiting for my own moment with Mary, it is faith I wish for. I wish to shape my needs into specific, well-considered words and offer them to my own particular image of the Loving Mystery, believing like a wise child.
Poised beneath the arch, I look down to find myself standing on a dark, gray tile different from the others. Identified as the spot where excavators uncovered charred fragments of marble and stone, it is the location of the original fireplace.
Mary’s hearth.
Perhaps she once stood here, tending it. Mary-Hestia.
I decide I will make my prayer right here, standing on the hearth, the center of the house, the center of me. The place of my mother. I can picture her stamping out her Easter cookies, and I feel again the hunger to let go of my striving and find the ability to become content and still, intentionally “superfluous,” as writer Helen M. Luke puts it. I want a refuge from my old conquering self. Let it be. Mary’s words at the annunciation come to me, and I realize this, too, is part of the passage into my fifties—the cultivation of being.
But how in the world do I reconcile it with my fierce need to write, the deep clamor to bring forth a new creative flowering in myself? It almost bereaves me to think of unrealized potentials dying inside, the small miscarriages of self. I want to be a novelist. It has been five years since I made that pronouncement to Mary beneath the myrtle tree, and it is not happening. I think of the image of the girl and the bees and I don’t know what to do with it.
The two most powerful impulses in my life have been the urge to create and the urge to be—a set of opposites—and they have always clunked into each other. How very like them to do so right now.
I am good at pushing things into either-or corners. A moment ago it was faith or rationality. Now, being or creating. I close my eyes and try to shift how I come at it. Both, I think, and start to imagine the hearth not only as a place of being but as one of creating. Why couldn’t it stand for tending the present moment and also for the fiery combustion of my work? The words contemplative writer form in a slow, measured way across my mind, as if being arranged on a Scrabble board. They give me the barest glimpse of a wholeness shining behind my divisiveness, the possibility of union.
I pray in a silent stream of words. Help my daughter. Help me hold the losses I feel inside and not run away. Show me the ways of being. Give me courage to find a new creative voice. When I look up, I am alone in the house.
I walk through the last room and out the side door. The brightness hits my eyes, a shattering kind of light after the dimness in the house. Ann waits beneath a tree. “I was about to come look for you,” she says, very motherly, strapping on her backpack and striding toward me across the yard.
As we walk toward each other, a honeybee lights on my left shoulder. I come to an abrupt stop, watching it from the corner of my eye. Perhaps this visitation is nothing, but it feels purposeful. As Ann approaches, she reaches out reflexively to wave the bee away and I put up my hand, shaking my head, as if to say, no, it’s a bee. A bee.
She steps back as she remembers our conversation and the connection dawns in her face. “Oh,” she says.
We stare at the bee, trying to be stock-still, glancing at each other, making surprised faces. The bee is a mystery, a metaphor, a pure synchronicity. I tell myself it is the imaginative eloquence of Mary.
It does not make the ache inside me go away. Or change the necessity of loss. It does not mean I do not have to go dig up the Old Woman’s bone. I know this even as I stand there. I know the bee probably has multiple meanings which will unfold with time. The real awe now is how personal it feels, how intentional. The awe is that the bee has come at all. Minutes go by. Five, six, perhaps more.
It occurs to us we could miss the tour van. We walk down the hill to join the rest of group, who are drinking the holy water that flows into taps from a nearby spring. The bee rides along.
“What’s with this bee?” Ann says, genuinely affected. “It’s like it has adopted you!” Not until I stoop over and scoop spring water into my hands does it fly away.
I look at Ann. “I’m going to write the novel about the bees,” I tell her.
Ann
Aboard Ship -Patmos, Turkey
Our ship, the Triton, is docked at the port of Skala just off the island of Patmos in the southeastern part of the Aegean Sea. Outside on the Apollo deck, we sit at a round table, our journals in front of us, shielded from the glare by a cerulean umbrella which flaps steadily in the breeze. Even from far away, the island of Patmos appears rugged, its edges unsmoothed by the sunlight crashing against its steep slopes. White churches and villas are scattered brightly across the hills. The whole of it looks a little golden, as if dusted in curry powder.
Mom and I have three excursions to choose from: a tour of the town of Chora, an afternoon swimming off the shores of Patmos, or a tour of the monastery of St. John the Divine and the Grotto of the Apocalypse. We sift through the brochures that were provided for us in our cabin. We’re intrigued by the Grotto because supposedly it’s where the apostle John received his visions and wrote the Book of Revelation. We kid around that maybe if we go there, we’ll have a revelation, too, though it seems to me Mom has already had one.
The pictures of Chora look inviting except that they show tourists riding donkeys up a hill. “I think we could tour Chora without you having to ride a donkey,” Mom jokes.
My one stipulation for seeing any of the islands was that I would not have to ride a donkey, a mode of transport that seems to be like the Gray Line bus tour over here. One of the first things Scott and I did after moving to Charleston was take a carriage ride downtown and I’d spent the entire time worrying about the horses. Were they tired? Did they need a drink of water? Wasn’t it too hot for them to be laboring for the sake of my entertainment?
“Let’s skip Chora,” I say.
“Okay,” she agrees.
The sound of the water smacking against the ship is slightly hypnotic. I feel as though I’ve been poured into my chair and rendered shapeless.
“I don’t really want to swim either.”
“Me either.”
“And I’m fine not going to Patmos,” I tell her.
She eyes me. “Okay.” She glances around. “We’ll have the whole ship to ourselves.”
She’s right. It looks abandoned. We decide to take in Patmos from the Apollo deck. We sit there. Mom draws in her journal while I stare at the water. Pieces of myth that Kristina had told our group back in ’97 wander in and out of my thoughts. Poseidon has a crystal palace sitting on the ocean floor. . . . Apollo travels the sea riding on a dolphin. It’s funny how often her words come back to me. “When you look at the light shining on the water’s surface,” she said, “you are seeing the reflection from Poseidon’s palace. The whitecaps are the manes of his horses pulling his chariot. The dolphins are Apollo’s favorite creatures, which he believed were guides to other worlds and the embodiment of undisguised joy.”
Kristina didn’t expect us to believe any of this was fact, of course—only to believe it was part of the Greek story, another way to experience the world, a poem filled with metaphors. Whitecaps, dolphins, and spangles on the water. Even the pomegranate seeds we swallowed at Eleusis.
A waiter comes by and hands us menus. “You are not going on the island today?” he asks.
“We’ve decided to stay on the ship,” Mom says.
“Well, you have a beautiful view.” Stepping back, as if to take in both of our faces, he says, “You are sisters, no?”
Mom laughs. “No.??
? I can tell what she wants to say is “Yeah, right.” Instead she explains politely, “This is my daughter.”
I smile at him to acknowledge the fact, one he seems intent on disbelieving. “Ah, well,” he says, “you have the same faces.”
And we dressed alike this morning. I showered and put on a black sundress in the small bathroom of our cabin, and stepped out to find Mom wearing her black sundress. We laughed, and I changed clothes.
From behind my sunglasses, I study my mother’s face. I look for the resemblance, but I can’t see it. As a little girl, I wanted brown eyes and black hair like hers. She has always been dark and beautiful to me, the unique onyx in our family of blue eyes and brown hair that Bob and I inherited from my dad. I got the freckles from him, too—a heavy sprinkle across my nose. As I grew up, I accepted my eyes and hair. I’m still working on the freckles, which carry a cuteness I would just as soon shake off. I don’t feel cute.
We order tea. The waiter brings a platter of cookies along with it. I reach for the cigar-shaped one dipped in chocolate on one end. Mom puts her pencil down to unwrap her tea bag and I notice she’s sketched a bee on a page of her journal, its wings small and gray. I’m still in disbelief—make that awe—about the bee yesterday. She prayed and Mary gave her a sign. It helped her finally decide to write her novel about bees. I’ve heard of muses before, but this one takes the cake.
“I don’t think things like that can happen to me,” I blurt. Mom releases the tea bag from between her fingers and it plops into her cup.
“Things like what?” she asks, looking up at me.
“Things like that bee,” I nod toward her pencil sketch on the page. I realize, too late, I’ve started something and maybe that’s what I wanted when I weaseled us out of the tours, but the words have tumbled out unexpectedly, slipping like a glass from my hand, the slivers lying there for me to step around and clean up.
Mom adjusts her chair so her eyes are out of the sun, then takes off her sunglasses. She looks at me. Seriously looks at me. Her eyes are locked on mine, the expression of someone who knows she has happened upon a moment of impending truth and is not about to retreat from it.
“What do you mean, Ann?” she says.
I stall, looking past her toward Patmos in the distance, scanning for the other Dodecanese islands. The lightness I felt moments ago thinking of Poseidon’s crystal palace and Apollo’s dolphins drains out. I fight the urge to say that I don’t know what I mean. I know good and well what I mean.
I say, “Bees don’t land on me. I don’t get signs—except I half expect a bird to shit on my shoulder. After I got back from Greece last year, I had a dream about Athena. She told me I could see her any time, if I dreamed about her. I can’t even do that.”
I press my fingers against the corners of my eyes and decide I will not cry. I stare at my napkin, blue like the umbrella. As soon as I look up, a silent transmission will pass between us that could only happen with her. She will finally know how sad I am, and I won’t be able to spare her anymore. I force myself to meet her brown eyes.
She gives me a small, sad smile. For one or two seconds, I can tell she sees me in a way I cannot see myself. My eyes fill and her face goes blurry. I fight for composure. I’m afraid that if I start to cry, I won’t finish till the ship docks again in Athens. I get it together, but I can’t look at her. I cut my eyes to the platter of cookies and stare at them in what looks like an ardent attempt to memorize every crumb and crystal of sugar.
She reaches for my hand. I could go on and on without saying anything, but right now it feels like staying quiet would be more painful than talking.
“It’s okay, just tell me,” Mom says.
Suddenly the words are in my mouth and I’m saying them. “I—I’m just depressed.”
Her fingers tighten on mine. Like I’ve fallen overboard and she’s determined to hold on. “I knew something was going on. I’m sorry; I should’ve asked you about it.”
She loosens my hand, and I pull it free and take another bite of cookie. Eating a cookie—how normal.
“When did all this start?” Mom asks.
“When the letter came,” I tell her.
She wrinkles up her forehead. “The letter . . .”
“The grad school letter. The one confirming my inadequacies.” I hear the smart-ass tone in my voice, but for some reason it helps to keep me from falling apart.
“But that was last March,” she says and her eyes widen.
“Yep.”
For the next hour it all pours out, the whole miserable thing: what it was like the day I got the letter, how I hid it in my sock drawer, the way things went from bad to worse, the depression taking over. I tell her that I went over it in my head a thousand times—whether to reapply to the University of South Carolina or to look for another school that had courses in ancient Greek studies, but I always came back to the fact that no matter how much I wanted that life, it didn’t seem to want me, and now I’m having my own doubts about it, not sure I want that life at all. Half the time, I feel like what I’m saying doesn’t make sense, but Mom just lets me talk, and I go on and on, laying my confused thoughts on the table. They are like the toothpaste you can’t get back in the tube, but I feel a huge relief having it out there despite how messy it is. For the first time since this all started, I don’t feel completely alone.
Finally I say, “I guess I’ll just stick to the plan and go to the College of Charleston.”
“Is that what you really want?” she asks.
“What else am I going to do?” I say, even though I know attending a grad program in American history feels plain wrong. Why can’t I just say that? Why am I always easing into the truth like it’s a scalding bath? What’s true is true and it’s not going to change whether I admit it now or twenty minutes from now. Deep down, I think I belabor it for Mom’s benefit. Shocking her in little increments instead of all at once seems kinder. And I do it for me. Because I don’t have the courage to just jump in.
Mom says, “I don’t know, but your heart needs to want it.”
It’s true. I’ve always wanted to do something with my life that I feel passionate about.
“Remember how you felt after you transferred to Columbia College? It was the best move in the world for you because your whole heart was in it.” Mom grins. “So what if you lost a full scholarship?”
The wind whips up around us and Mom slides her jacket on. I rest my head against the back of the chair. I know I shouldn’t aim my life in a direction I don’t want to go, but I’ve indoctrinated myself with the idea that studying American history is better than nothing. It is at least a plan. Without that plan, I would be back at square one. Back to “nothing.”
We are silent for several moments, but I feel her watching me. Finally she says, “The dream you mentioned about Athena—it’s beautiful. I figured she’s important because of your ring.”
I’ve worn the ring every day for the last seventeen months. Athena, and all those things I love about her—her bravery and wisdom, her fierce independence—have been like a North Star for me. “Yeah, I guess she was what I needed to find in myself.”
“And you did.”
“For a while, anyway.” I look at the wind dissolving into the water. All I can think is underworld. I say, “I’m begging for Athena or Mary or God or somebody to help and it’s dead silent.” I take a breath and hear it stutter through my chest like it might turn into a sob. “I think it took me seeing the bee to realize it’s not that miracles don’t happen, they just don’t happen to me. I don’t deserve them.”
I tell my mother how afraid I am inside, how lost, how rejected I feel. When I say the word rejected out loud, something snaps into place, a truth that has eluded me. Yes, I had a dream and it didn’t work out, and while that may have started my slide into depression, it is hardly the whole story. The real story is the rejection itself. It had unearthed my own self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness.
Then the anger started,
along with the shame that I was not good enough.
This is the moment when I realize I’ve been hating myself for a long time.
I cannot hold back anymore. I drop my head on the table and cry. I feel Mom’s hand on the back of my head and I cry harder.
It is whole minutes before I can stop. I use the napkin to wipe my nose. The waitstaff is having a whispered conversation that I can only imagine: Crazy girl on deck. Call the ship’s doctor. Mom scoots forward in her chair. Now she knows.
“Ann, listen to me. I understand how the rejection letter snow-balled into a rejection of yourself and how depressed you became. It’s hard to feel like you deserve anything when that happens. But all those things you love about Athena that you found in yourself before—they’re still in you. I promise. They just seem lost to you right now. Okay?”
I nod. I know Mom wants to say the right thing to me. I can see how hard she’s trying. Going slowly, measuring her words, her eyes brimming. I don’t know if those things I found in Athena are still in me, but it does help to think she believes it. I want to tell her she doesn’t have to say anything, that her hearing all this is what matters. But then she says, “You deserve to love yourself.” And it hits me suddenly how true that is.
“I love my girl,” she says.
“I love you, too.”
Standing in front of the elevators on our way back to the room, Mom pushes the up button. Beside the doors is an arrangement of lilies, their aroma maple-syrup sweet. I sink my face into it. Inside the elevator, we watch the floor numbers light up, stopping once to let on a ship employee pulling a cart of wineglasses. He glances at me with the slightest upturn of his lips, then looks at his feet for the rest of the ride.
In the cabin, I sit on the edge of the bed and take off my sandals. When I look around, Mom is staring at me with a look of perplexity.
“What?” I ask.