Free Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd Page B

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.

Sue

    Sanctuary of Demeter-Eleusis
    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