In my fifties, I feel too enclosed within the walls of my small self.
As this awareness comes to me, here in Gavrinis, I realize that the truest approach to death is, in fact, the gradual shift within from the external self to the True Self, loosening the hold of my ego and coming to identify with the billion lights within and all around—with what is larger than I. The thought brings me a deep, uncanny relief.
Outside, on the path to the ferry, I hurry to catch up with Ann. I stare at the back of her short black raincoat, her brimmed indigo hat, her profile as she turns her head. One day she will be in the world and I will not, and for a second the thought catches me off guard, but then fills me with such extravagant love I abruptly stop walking.
A tiny, green fern grows close to my feet, its tendrils fluttering in the air, and I am caught by a sensation close to joy, but not quite joy—what I feel is more powerful, more inflamed, that exultant wildness in the heart that comes with the dilation of life. It’s not the fern that stirs these sudden, expansive feelings, though I have never been more sure in my life that the plant, like everything on this earth, is a singular glory in its own right—rather, it’s that I am seeing the fern at all, seeing it as it should be seen.
How peculiar, yet obvious, that I would be invaded by the presence of aliveness.
On the ferry, I sit beside Ann, letting my hand rest on her gloved fingers. The wind slices sideways, making gashes on the water. The grayness comes down in sheets of brightness.
After dinner, in the hotel room, we are tucked in our twin beds, journals open on our laps. We nearly always end the day like this, revisiting our experiences, holding them up like prisms, writing them down, telling them to one another. I love this part of traveling with Ann as much as anything—the quiet pajama party.
Tonight, though, she is subdued. I think she’s worried about me. Practically every morning since we arrived in Paris, she has hovered nearby as I took my blood pressure, then quizzed me about the reading. Twice today she asked me if I was okay. And why wouldn’t she ask? I spent most of the afternoon aloof, preoccupied, noticeably glum.
My heaviness, though, has given way to a feeling of lightness. The aliveness, that sense of inhabiting the moment that invaded me after being inside the burial chamber, has not entirely faded. Common moments still have all this poignancy about them. I am not sad. I am—what? I read the last two lines I wrote in my journal: I feel tender. Life feels tender. I struggle to express what I sense: the way to leave my small self is through a simple return to love. . . . Readiness for dying arrives by attending the smallest moment and finding the eternal inside of it.
“You’re so quiet,” I say.
She stops writing. Her eyes drift to the blood pressure machine on the bedside table. A miffed-looking frown gathers on her face. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“What? Oh, no, it’s not like that.”
“But you seem really worried about yourself. I just wondered . . .” She drops back against the pillows as her voice trails off.
“Look, I’m okay, I promise. I’m not hiding anything. Sometimes when I get a high reading, I get anxious about it. I start to obsess that I won’t be able to get it under control. But, honestly, I believe it’ll be fine.”
She regards me for a moment. “You were freaked out by Gavrinis, weren’t you?”
“Freaked out? No—” I protest, then stop. “Okay, a little . . . The thing is—I’m moving into the last third or fourth of my life, and I’ve started thinking I won’t be here forever. It comes with getting to this place in life, I guess.”
I take in her face, the hot, bright look in her eyes.
“What happened in the tumulus,” I say, “was that I tried to come to terms with it—accept that death is part of life. It sounds grim, but it was actually a good thing.”
I try to explain to her that I re-found my faith in the part of us that goes on, and maybe even more in the part that is right here.
She comes over, curls up beside me on the bed, and lays her head in my lap. “I like you being right here,” she says, her voice drifting into sleep.
Ann
Garden of Venus de Quinipily, Font-de-Gaume Cave
The caretaker at the Garden of Venus de Quinipily, near Baud, is an elderly Frenchwoman with cinnamon-colored hair. She greets us at the garden entrance, jubilantly waving brochures as if we’re the first tour group to come through here in ages.
On the bus, driving through rural Brittany, it took me ten entire minutes to locate Baud on my Michelin map. Out-of-the-way is not the word for this garden. Obscure, maybe. Secluded. Unheard-of. But there’s a Venus inside, a Goddess statue with a history.
“Bonjour, mesdames,” the caretaker cries, then her eyes light on me, and she adds, “Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
I rub my thumb over my engagement ring and think, Not for long. In eight months, I’ll be a Mrs., a madame. People will call me Mrs. Taylor. I think of Scott back home. We haven’t really been apart since we were engaged.
On the bus, I wrote him a postcard, then practiced writing my soon-to-be new name on a page in the back of my travel journal, experimenting with different possibilities:Ann Taylor (drop the Kidd)
Ann Kidd Taylor (no hyphen)
Ann Kidd-Taylor (hyphen)
Ann Kidd (leave off the Taylor)
I felt ten years old doing this, as if I were writing my first name in imperfect cursive and attaching the last name of my fourth-grade crush. Except back then there was only one imaginable choice, the one in which you drop Kidd completely and become Ann Whatever-His-Name-Is.
The name issue has weighed on me. For weeks I’ve gone back and forth about it. But not until the caretaker called me mademoiselle did it dawn on me that the way I’m addressed will change, too.
Scott will go on being Mr., while I’ll go from Miss to Mrs.—a new classification. How is it that he is addressed according to his gender and I am addressed according to my marital status? Well, that’s unfair, and now that I’m looking at becoming Mrs. Taylor, it feels personal. Which, of course, is why Ms. came into practice, to give a woman an alternative to being recognized by her marital status, and thereby known as herself. How do I want to be known?
I wish it didn’t matter so much to me. I tell myself I’m being nitpicky. It’s just another technical hoop women jump through when they marry. I should just accept that this is the way the world is. Except . . . that’s not how I feel. It’s not a small thing to give up your name, change it, hyphenate it.
“Ann.” Hearing my name, I look up to see Mom gazing back at me from the end of the pebble walkway. Even the caretaker is over her excitement and walking back to her little house.
The garden is bordered with rose hedges and old stone walls tangled in ivy. It’s not unkempt; it’s natural, and profuse, and slightly untidy, like a manicure that’s starting to wear off. Pink and yellow flowers bloom in uneven spurts, and here and there a flowerpot sits on a rock with a mix of plants, some alive and some dead. The opposite end of the garden slopes up a steep hill covered in lavender.
The fragrance is strong, and suddenly I remember digging through my mother’s slip drawer when I was a child, finding a sachet of lavender buds. The way it smelled—like her, like this garden. I had secreted it away to my room, hiding it in my own drawer.
The Venus stands on a pedestal atop a massive fountain, which is built into a wall that skirts the hill. Her arms are wrapped around her column-like figure, and her eyes are huge and egg-shaped. Solid granite, she must weigh a few tons and looks it, appearing taller than her seven feet. She’s named for the Roman Goddess of love, as so many statues from antiquity are, but archaeologists debate whether she’s an Egyptian Isis statue, a Celtic deity, or the Roman Mother Goddess, Cybele. I tell Mom, if she’s Cybele, then her Greek counterpart is Rhea, mother of Demeter and grandmother of Persephone.
Her age is a mystery, too. Originally she was located on a hill at Castennec in the Roman settlement of
Bieuzy-les-Eaux, where she was revered by peasants. In 1661, the bishop became so outraged about the pagan veneration, he ordered her thrown into the Blavet River. Three years later, her devotees defiantly dredged her up and revived their worship of her, but in 1670, the Venus, who would also come to be known as the Iron Lady, was mutilated and thrown into the river again. This time it took twenty-five years to recover her. She was resurrected from the river bottom and eventually came to be here in the gardens, presiding from the pedestal above the fountain. There’s some question about this statue’s authenticity, whether it’s the same one that was resurrected, but, replica or not, she was revered as a Goddess.
“She looks so heavy,” I say to Mom. “I wonder how they managed to toss her into the river?” The bishop must have been desperate.
“Think of the poor people that pulled her out,” she says.
They must have been desperate, too.
As we listen to the water spill into the trough below the fountain, I notice the stone wall behind it is lined with hydrangea bushes. I walk over and examine the blossoms. Their colors range from faint pink, to ivory, to bright blue. Middleton Place had been swamped with blue hydrangeas the day Scott and I became engaged.
Before coming to France, I had the same dream twice. In it, I sit in my college English class, reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella The Yellow Wallpaper, aware there is some elusive facet of the story I need to discover, a key piece of information.
That’s the entire dream—just that one brief scene.
I had, in fact, read the book in English class. It’s a haunting story about a woman suffocating from the stifling social conventions and restrictions of marriage in the late nineteenth century. Losing not just autonomy but her whole sense of herself, she is diagnosed with “a nervous depression,” confined to the nursery, and forbidden to write, which had been a kind of lifeline for her. This was the so-called “rest cure” often used for women with this condition.
In the novella, the character sees no recourse but to comply with her husband, saying: “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?”
Prohibited from writing, the character goes mad. Soon, she is “creeping” along the floor, scraping the yellow wallpaper off the walls of her room.
What a thing to dream, considering I was about to be married.
Dreams have always been part of the conversation in the Kidd household—a kind of unique, and weirdly wonderful, family trait. Growing up, I watched Mom write down her nightly dreams. She and my dad, a marriage and family counselor, would get into long Jungian discussions at the dinner table about dream symbols, boring Bob and me out of our minds. We would heckle them—Look, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But later on, the whole mysterious landscape began to intrigue me. I started to throw my dreams into the pot and to get a feel for my own personal symbols. From time to time I would write my own dreams down. I didn’t have an inkling what they meant, but I felt like there was wisdom in them, whether I could divine it or not. Mom has had some truly life-changing dreams. Me, I’m in the Dreams for Dummies stage.
When I told Mom about my yellow wallpaper dream last August, she said, “Why don’t you read the story again? A recurring dream really wants to be heard.” I took her suggestion.
By the time September came, I’d reread it. Mom and I were consumed by wedding plans then. I didn’t mention the dream to her again, but I came to believe that the missing piece of the story I was trying to discover in my dream was my own simmering fear about losing myself in the marriage.
I started thinking maybe I wouldn’t change my name. But then, what about any children we had? They would share Scott’s last name, not mine. And what about the fact that, technically, my last name is my father’s, and my mother’s maiden name is her father’s? It began to feel like taking the lid off a box, only to find a box inside another box. Maybe it was too complicated. Maybe I should leave it alone.
I explained to Scott my jumbled feelings about changing my name. I didn’t want him to confuse that with how I feel about him; I just needed him to understand my perspective. “I mean, do you want to become Scott Kidd?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“But, it doesn’t mean you don’t love me.”
He smiled a little. “You won’t get any pressure from me about changing your name. I’ll be okay with whatever you do, but yeah, if I’m being honest, I would like it if you took my name.”
Mom and I walk up the hill and easily step over the stone wall right onto the roof of the fountain. Walking around the base of the pedestal, we stare up at the Venus, still dwarfed by her size. She’s covered in dark splotches from her age and possibly all those years in the river, but here she is—untamed and uncompromised. I photograph her from below, unable to get all of her in the frame, then flip on the telephoto, sweeping the lens across the French countryside: rolling hillsides, cedars rising like green parapets, sharp, pointy light, and then, on a distant rise, a tiny wooden stable with a white horse peering through the open half of the door. Thinking of Harry, the horse from my girlhood, I take the picture.
Later, sitting on the grass near the crest of the hill, Mom and I stare down at the garden, and I think about the conversation I had with Scott, the names I’ve written in the back of my journal. I can’t deny that I’m afraid the independent girl I’m trying to find inside will end up on the river bottom. I just want to be me and married, and I wonder if that’s possible.
“Remember when I had that yellow wallpaper dream?” I say to Mom.
“Yeah, of course.”
“I went back and read the story. Why would I dream about a woman losing herself in her marriage if I’m not worried about it happening to me?”
“I’m not too worried about that happening to you as long as you’re asking the question. When I got married, I didn’t even think about this,” she says. “It wasn’t until much later.” Then she tells me about a comic strip she kept for a long time, an old Hagar the Horrible that she cut out of the paper. A bride chirps to Hagar’s wife, Helga, that “marriage is when two become one.” Helga, wearing her horned Viking helmet and pigtails, gives her a knowing look and asks, “Which one?”
“For you, it’s about love and freedom both,” Mom says. “It eventually was for me, too. It’s not easy to balance them, and I’m not sure it ever really comes out perfectly.”
We talk about the question of wanting love and freedom, how even on the verge of a new millennium women are still dealing with it. Not like the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper, obviously, but in more complex ways—like the matter of names, the pursuit of career, the division of chores, the care of children, the making of time for oneself, the intricacies of choosing and deferring. I think of Athena for a second. How she has come to represent freedom to me. The part of myself that belongs to me alone.
Once, after one of our wedding planning sessions at the table in Mom’s kitchen, I looked through her wedding album to see what choices she had made for her wedding day. I’d seen the photographs before but couldn’t recall the details. I stared at Mom in her wedding dress (now, our wedding dress). Her arm was linked through my father’s. She had on hardly any makeup, just a little mascara and a rosy color on her lips.
Pointing to her bouquet in the picture, she told me her very first Bible was attached to it and that my grandmother’s dime was in her shoe. The dime was a custom that started with the Victorian rhyme: “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a sixpence in her shoe . . .”
I liked the idea of carrying on the tradition of the Bible and the dime, but now, sitting here among the tufts of lavender on the hillside, I decide I also want to add something of my own.
“I think I’ll take my Athena ring and the pomegranate charm down the aisle with me,” I tell Mom.
“And I’m n
ot taking any vow of obedience,” I joke. “If I did, I would end up peeling wallpaper for real.”
“Believe it or not, I took the vow,” she says.
She has got to be kidding. “You?”
“Well, in my defense, it was 1968,” she says. “The vow was part of the wedding ceremony—it never occurred to me to change it. The women’s movement hadn’t made a dent in small Southern towns like mine.”
I joke that her writing Dissident Daughter left no doubt now about where she stood on the obedience vow. The memoir about my mother’s feminist spiritual search had prompted a few angry letters to the newspaper in the town where we’d lived then. Even now, over two years after the book was published, letters still showed up in her mailbox with personal attacks on Mom. I always remember the one that began, “Dear Whore of Babylon.” It made Mom laugh—I think it was the “Dear” part. She’d been pretty unflappable, but I knew dealing with all that hadn’t been easy.
My mother’s experience had prompted me to examine my own religious experience. Not long after I arrived at Columbia College, I called her and said, “Guess what—the chaplain is a woman.” In my whole Baptist childhood, and later as an Episcopalian, I’d never seen a female priest or minister. What did I think about church doctrines that marginalize and exclude women? Could I live with them? What did I believe? I didn’t question God so much as how God had been defined. When I was growing up, God was a “he,” but I came to understand that was only one picture. I remember my religion teacher saying, “God is he, she, neither, and both,” and that still seems right to me.