The Marble Road

Written for a class during Autumn, edited for my English application.

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Irene was almost to Ephesus by the time the news reached her. Her watch face glowed like a moon in the dark as the phone in her hotel room rang shrilly, a cool voice from the lobby informing her that she had a call waiting from the United States. She almost didn’t accept the call; it might have been her agent asking after her errant manuscript, a battle she was not prepared to fight at 4 am. But it hadn’t been her agent. It had been her sister, Anne. Mother had passed on. Arrangements, Anne said carefully, had been made already, but it would mean so much to her- to everyone- if Irene could make it home as soon as possible. They had been trying to reach her for several days now, but Irene had left no forwarding address at her former apartment in Rome. Irene could hear the reproach rearing like a snake in Anne’s voice, coiling through the powder blue phone in the kitchen of their childhood home (it must be that one, for there was no other phone in that house) seeping into the wires, separating into particles to travel across the Atlantic, across miles and miles of deep blue water, reaching her in the tiny room in Ephesus where she lay, ten hours earlier and miles away. “Alright,” she said. “I’m coming.”

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We are never granted knowledge of the moment something will change us. It is the nature of our minds to, in retrospect, color our memories with some unearthly knowing; that upon hearing her laugh, of course we knew that that was the woman we were destined to love; that on getting out of bed, we knew that was the day our lives would change. It is difficult for any of us to admit how pedestrian life is, how frequently our most important moments arrive like the mail and exit like the recycling: colorless and routine. But that was the manner in which Irene had found Mary, and the road to Ephesus. A family friend had invited Anne along to Mass with her, and Irene had tagged along, curious.

All through the strange service, Irene had felt Anne shift in discomfort, unable to get used to the idea of a female divinity. Anne had always been accustomed to ‘Our Father, Who Art in Heaven’ and had found comfort in that: the maleness and obscurity, like their own father, away on a perpetual business trip with a stern warning to behave while he was gone. Women were different. Women could not be lied to, smiled at and fooled with a laugh. A female deity was a new and disturbing idea. Anne felt nervous, without really understanding why; Irene, knowing her sister, did.

Irene had been absorbed by the smell of incense, the pooling of melted wax on the altars, and the rich oily black smoke that coated the windows. She loved the gold and silver, the opulence of tradition layering upon itself. This was as distant and exotic as the Arabian Nights from the sparse and clean white clapboard church her parents had taken her to on Christmas and Easter. At the end of the service, Anne bolted towards the doors, Irene trailing farther behind. She paused by a small altar near the entrance. It held only an icon and a small bowl of floating candles in front of it. Mary, robed in rich blue and gold and smiling down at her child, surrounded by the hosts of angels announcing his birth. The background was flat and golden, and these angels were only inference, feathers pressed into the still wet gold and painted over, the impression of intricate and identical wings in infinite number. One small crescent shaped indent was pressed in at the base of the feathered wings. The fingernail of the artist, impressed into the wet gold hundreds of years ago. Irene stared until Anne called her impatiently from outside. She turned back towards the massive wooden doors and followed her into the sunlight.

We tend to relate things temporally, stringing events together like beads to make some sense of the past. Irene didn’t know it herself at that moment, but that small golden window stayed with her, those feathers and that fingerprint. She did not meet Mary again until college, when, in a darkened lecture hall, the drone of Hellenic and Hellenistic differentiation falling on deaf ears, a line from the textbook caught her eye. “Mary, mother of God. Virgin. A corruption of the Latin and Greek Andro Gynne, meaning in its most archaic form, “One who is already whole; in no need of completion.”

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Anne had picked her up from the airport, despite Irene’s protestations about renting a car. You won’t recognize the city, Anne had insisted, you’ll get lost instantly. Irene hated to admit it, speeding past the newest shopping centers and office buildings that made her own home foreign to her, but Anne had been right. Nothing looked the same.

Anne tapped a staccato rhythm on the dashboard, her long pale arm snaking out the turn on the radio. Loud country music briefly filled the car before she snapped it off again impatiently.

“Was it a nice flight?”

“Yes, I suppose so. As far as flights go.”

Anne smiled wryly. “I’m sure.”

Anne had only ever been on a plane when they were very little, to go on a trip to Disney Land. She’d hated every minute of it. Unsure of what else to say, Irene turned to look out the window.

Irene had thought once that she would buy a house here. She would marry someone from town, have children, grow old and die here. Many of her high school friends were well on their way to accomplishing this, and it appeared from her distant vantage point to be working out well for them. Anne seemed happy enough, at any rate. Irene watched her from the corner of her eye. Anne had always been graceful and slender. The new baby had only added dark circles under her eyes, but somehow this trait only made her pale face more striking and unearthly. Motherhood had taken none of her old grace.

“How is your book coming along?”

“It’s coming.”

“What’s this one about?”

“Well, it’s exploring depictions of Mary in late Medieval Christian art.”

“Hm. Why does that require a trip to the Middle East?”

“Turkey isn’t the Middle East, Anne.”

They reached the small city center. Irene was unnerved by how little downtown had been changed, while the entire area around her childhood home has been swallowed by new housing and development projects. The field behind the house where she had once played had become another cluster of homes, the newly developed Doe Meadow Properties, Inc. Each house had the same layout, slightly individualized with different shutter styles and trim detail, but otherwise identical, the same pattern copied and printed over and over like a stamp.

Anne dropped her off in front of the house. She took the key to the front door off of her own key ring and pressed it into Irene’s palm. Running her fingers through her chestnut hair, she glanced at the dashboard clock.

“I left Brian by himself with the baby, and we both know the man can’t take care of a potted plant for more than an hour without something going wrong.”

They both laughed, awkwardly, and then stopped. It didn’t feel right to laugh, not yet. Anne hadn’t said it, but Irene appreciated the privacy that she was granting her. This was her first time coming home in years. They hugged. Irene could still smell formula and some other sweet, unidentifiable smell on Anne’s sweater. Irene made sure the key worked in the lock, but she waited until Anne’s car had crested the hill and her taillights had faded into the night before she pushed open the door to her childhood home.

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She flicked the light switch in her old bedroom. The posters she had tacked up had been taken down to reveal the beige pink walls, and a sewing table was now tucked into the corner where her desk had been. There were a few boxes marked with her name, haphazardly strewn with adolescent belongings and clothes that didn’t fit. Other than that, nothing had changed. Her mother hadn’t moved anything since her last trip out here to pick up some belongings and to see Anne and Brian’s wedding.

She had made a career out of living from a suitcase, and how it unnerved her, trying to sleep in a house she knew too well, the walls brimming with living memory. In hotel rooms, people fought and loved and dreamed, but no one was ever there long enough to leave a distinctive imprint; it was always bleached away by the time she arrived. Here, thoughts had had time to settle, and each new scent, each footstep on the heavily padded carpet sent waves of nostalgia over her.

She gingerly stepped down the hall and pushed lightly on her mother’s bedroom door. Nothing was changed yet. The walls were still the same color, the same floral patterned bedspread, the same white bedroom set. All across the room were framed pictures of angels: fat baby cherubs, baby-cheeked little pucci’s playing lyres, sleeping, blowing horns. They were familiar, and awful.

She looked as long as she thought she could, and turned back down the hall to find her old bedroom. Travel weary, with her sense of time still in Ephesus, she fell asleep in her old bed.

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It was late afternoon by the time she woke up. The coffee in the pot was cold. She poured in milk until it was tepid and then heated the mixture in a saucepan on the stove. The rain outside the window fell in odd bursts, scattering the last of the leaves that had until then tenaciously clung to the bottom branches. It sounded like a drum beat, the leaves hitting the pavement in heaps. She rinsed out her mug and set it back on the draining board. The radio was on, though she was only half listening; the newscaster was swearing that if something or other occurred, then inevitably something else would happen. He seemed unaware of what Irene had only recently learned; that there was nothing new under the sun; that everything that could happen already had. She grabbed her coat and boots from the mudroom and set out.

The air smelled clean, washed of that rotting smell that permeates fall. The rain had stopped some time after she stepped out, and now only drops fell from the dripping trees. She could see the sky reflected in the puddles on the ground, the reflection repopulating the skeletal branches with the molding leaves lining the edges of the cracked sidewalk.

It was September. In Ephesus, it would be been sunny and warm, but here fall had begun. She had headed to Ephesus on a whim, at the end of her studies in Rome and Istanbul. Her next book was on the changing portrayals of Mary in iconography and in Western art. When her research had ended, she still had some funds left over, and thought she would visit the place where Mary was said to have died. It was the place of Mary’s Ascension, yes, but it was also where she had lived out the end of her long life; childless, save for her adopted son John, given to her by Jesus. It was a puzzle to her; Ephesus, where the most sacred woman in the world had ascended into the next, was also where the oldest known advertisement existed, a thousand year old sign for a brothel depicting a footprint, a woman’s face, and a heart. There was no conclusive evidence, but it was popularly believed to be directional, where one could go to find a ‘women’ seeking ‘love’. She wasn’t sure what she had been seeking in Ephesus; it mattered little now, in any case. Her manuscript was overdue already, and there was no way to return to Ephesus by the time she would submit it.

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Her walk took most of the afternoon as she wandered, reacquainting herself with the neighborhood. Anne had said she would be back by eight to pick her up for dinner, and to help her pack some boxes. It was early still, but already getting dark. She went into the kitchen to get a glass of water, and stopped by the window.

The sun had completely set now, the deep blue sky hemmed at the edges with gold. Though the warped glass, she could almost imagine the blue mountains that lay strewn like a veil, although she could no longer see them hidden behind the newly constructed houses. A small feather was curled on the glass, stuck by rain. Something called out in the night indistinctly, and all down the street, porch lights were turning on. She rinsed her glass and placed it on the draining board, but stayed by the window for a moment.

That small feather clinging to the window pane. On the ledge, she could see the tiny indent left by her mother’s wedding ring, a crescent left in the white paint where she had once rested her hand while looking out the window. That old view was completely obscured now. Tracing with her fingers, she could still find the vague outline of the field behind the house where she had played when she was young. It was covered now with other houses, the smell of lumber and paint still lingering in the fall air. The sun had completely set now. Where the fields had once been completely dark at night, the lights of the other houses now lit up the backyard in a faint glow, making the kitchen window a mirror. She turned the kitchen light off, throwing her own reflection into sharper relief. The yellow walls behind her gleamed a muted gold, and her own face was a calm and obscure as a Byzantine icon. She started at her own inscrutable face for a moment, before turning back towards the lighted hall.

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In her dream, she was on the Road. It was night, but the marble stones felt sun-warmed beneath her bare feet. The pale moon was shrouded over with clouds, the velvet sky an impossible shade of blue. Beyond the broken white columns that lined the road, a procession of hemlock trees shivered in the wind, their distinctive apologetic bows melting into the skyline. Slowly she felt her way down the road, headed towards Ephesus.