I SIT IN the ashes of the hearth, staring at the large black pot swinging from its peg, listening to the boiling of the soup. Occasionally I stir the strong-smelling mixture, my arm circling in the same motion I have seen my mother make.
I have no father. My mother says that she has known no man. She always smiles when she tells me this, her few teeth gleaming. She is immaculate, she says, just like the one she was named for, Maria, and that is why she named me Christiana. I am a child of God, sister of Christ. I used to pray hopefully to my Brother to come visit me. He never did. And I wondered if my mother had been joking.
Last week, after my thirteenth birthday, my friend Toula from the village whispered to me, “Who is your father? Babies cannot be born without the help of men. My mother says Lefteris is your father.”
I’m sure that is not possible. Lefteris often smiles at me, but only as he smiles at everyone. He can only smile — emptily, innocently — as he walks the cobblestones begging for food and drink and announcing the end of the world. “It is coming, it is coming,” he cries daily. “Pray that you will be saved. Line up, good people, at my right hand. Come to my left, evil ones, and I’ll push you to Hell.” If someone gives him food, he blesses that person: “You are saved.”
Is this my God, author of my immaculate conception? I seek out my reflection in the well. Is there emptiness in the eyes, a flaccid openness of the mouth? Not yet, but there is a look of him, something I don’t understand, a look of never having been touched.
Mamá is unhappy this week. Someone has stolen her icon.
“My friend is gone,” she says, weeping — her friend, the Virgin, with whom she converses almost unceasingly. “Who would do such a thing?”
Yesterday she ran all over the village yelling about her loss. People came to their windows, but only shrugged their shoulders. They do not love my mother, but they respect, even fear her somewhat. Without her help, many of them would die of disease or of evil spells. They are polite to her, so that she will not curse them. But no one knew anything about her icon.
Mamá is mysterious today. This morning she stretched a cloth across two sticks and tried to draw the Virgin with coal, until, frustrated, she threw her picture into the fire. She sketched faces over and over in the dirt of our floor, then rubbed them out.
“I must have her,” she cried.
She runs into the house now, grabs me, and shakes me by the shoulders. “Christiana. You. You must do it. Only a virgin . . . you are a virgin, are you not?
“Yes, Mamá, of course.” I am shaking.
“Here.” She gives me a pen, a pot of ink, and a tablet of paper. I stare. I have never seen anything like this before.
“Where did you find these, Mamá?”
She smiles. “Never mind. Draw me the Virgin. For me, my love.”
I turn the pen around, confused, until she puts my fingers around it and helps me make my first mark. I make another, then another. I look at the black pot hanging over the fire and copy its form.
“That is a pot, not my Virgin. That pot is not a Virgin, it has been heated many times.”
“I must practise on something first, something from our household. The Virgin is so pure — what if I smudge her?”
So I practise. I draw our hut, its inside and outside. I draw the clouds in the sky, the cypress tree, my reflection in the well. I feel music and light come through my fingers. But how can I make the Virgin?
“Why must I do this, Mamá?”
“She is needed. Aleko has asked me to save his wife and baby. The baby cannot come out, and they will both soon die. I must have my Panayia to help me. Try, my child, try.”
I draw all night, while my mother coaxes. After the sun comes up and the rooster crows, Mamá goes out to the well for a moment — the Virgin leaps from my fingers onto the paper.
“Here she is, Mamá.”
She takes the drawing and runs to Aleko’s house.
I wait for two hours, then walk down to the village. Through the window I see Aleko’s wife in bed — sleeping, I think, not dead. There is a cradle next to her. Yes, the child is breathing. In the corner is an icon — a real icon — the Virgin smiles.
My mother comes out now.
“You didn’t need my drawing,” I say. “They have an icon.”
“No,” she smiles, “that is yours, you made it.”
“But look!” I point inside.
“I know. Magic. The magic of Christ. Christiana.”
I don’t understand, but I say nothing. We go home, to eat and to make medicines for tomorrow’s callers. We go to bed, but I cannot sleep. A shadow at my window frightens me.
“Maria.”
“No, it is me — Christiana.”
Lefteris puts his head inside the window. He lowers inside the bag he carries everyplace, reaches down to open it.
“I am sorry that I borrowed your mother’s icon. I wanted her to worry a little.” I can see his eyes shine in the moonlight, his teeth sparkle, and he winks. “Here you are. Goodbye.”
I am holding an icon. I light the candle to see it better — it feels too light. I am looking at my drawing of a smiling Virgin. She smiles at me. I quietly put her on the table. In the morning, will the Virgin be made of blue ink on paper, or of bright paints in a frame? I take my pen and paper and draw a baby wrapped in a warm blanket. It looks like Aleko’s baby. It also looks like the baby I will have someday. I see that it is my baby. I place the drawing on the table next to the Virgin. I smile contentedly in my sleep, for I am untouched.
Christy’s birthday it was Christy’s birthday her thirteenth lucky unlucky thirteen and she whipped round and round on the tilt-a-whirl her eyes shut tight her head leaning on the shoulder of the dark-haired boy. He was eighteen and wanted to whirl with her. She was happy little chills ran through her new body she was tall and curvy. She could hear Elvis Presley’s voice —“ooo—ooo—ooo—ooo—ooo—ooo— I’m all shook up,” and imagined his swively body.
The ride stopped and he wanted to take her home. But her mother was there waiting for her. “No. He’s too old for you. Don’t you know what he’s after? They all want the same thing.” She grabbed Christy’s arm and walked her home.
Christy dreamed about the dark-haired boy for nights, but he ignored her in school and was always holding hands with a blonde girl whom people said was “easy.” Then he was killed in a car crash. She cried in bed that night and then forgot him.
“I want to be a writer,” she thought. She always said that to herself when she was depressed. She tried to see life as a writer would and searched for metaphors. “Life is a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end,” or “Life is like a tilt-a-whirl, with twists and turns, threatening to cut your head off but only making you throw up” or “Life is a poem that ends in a couple of gasps” or “Life is a comedy and God a stand-up comic who sometimes muffs his lines.”
She hadn’t thought about writing in a long time only about boys their smooth hips and long legs. Her body felt nice. But her mother wouldn’t let her go to parties or dances or movies with boys.
“I wish I had a father.” Her father had died in the War, and all she knew of him was from the glazed-eyed picture on the piano. Her mother hardly talked to men now, and almost every day she would say to Christy, “They’re all after the same thing.”
Christy wrote down a dream she had had once. Her mother was the Virgin Mary and she was the baby Jesus crying in her lap.
Mama you are too pure you are too clean.
Then her mother turned into a lascivious whore a slut dressed in red, winking.
no mother no where is my father
you have no father child only God
so far away so bodiless
sex my child is like a cooking pot the more you are heated the blacker you get
One day a strange man came to the door. Oh where had she seen him before his dark eyes his black hair. Her mother knew him, but wouldn’t let him in. He came back again and again, wanting to see Christy, until he was allowed to step inside, smile, and pat Christy’s head.
“Who is he?”
“An old friend.”
“But who?”
She began to see him in the restaurant where she and her friends had Cokes after school. He was waiting until she was alone.
“Hi, Christy. I’ve missed you, you know.”
“Who are you?”
“Hasn’t she told you yet? Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’m your dad.”
“No, you’re not. You can’t be. My Dad was killed in the War. He’s dead. Dead as a doornail. Dead as a torpedoed rat. Or are you his ghost?”
“That was your mother’s husband. He died before you were even conceived. She should have told you. You’re old enough now.”
Christy ran home. He couldn’t be her father he wore ragged old clothes stained with paint had holes in his jeans he was an artist or something. She looked in the mirror. Did she look like him? The image blurred on her she could never see what she really looked like if only she could be someone else looking at her.
Her mother had to tell her the truth now. “I was an evil woman, Christy, and I deserve to be punished. I wouldn’t blame you if you hated me. But I want to make you into a better woman than I am. You don’t help me any, the way you shake your hips when you walk.”
A story jumped out at Christy, a story about a pure woman who decided never to have relations with men, but one day she found a baby in her bed and a note that said, “Happy Birthday. Love, God.” Christy wrote it all down, describing the baby in great detail until she could see it, almost feel it in her arms.
“You are my own child,” she said to the story, “my own forever. And you will never hurt me.”
I have turned thirteen many times; thousands of years ago, or a long way inside myself, is an image of thirteen that has been repeated time after time, perhaps person after person. The face looks into a well, a mirror, or another face, and says, “Is that I?” and then “That is I.”
Now I am three times thirteen and my daughter is thirteen. She blows out the candles all at once and yells, “I’m a teenager!” She jumps and dances around the room.
I help her brush her hair and we look in the mirror at ourselves and each other. Her hair is lighter than mine, her face fuller, her eyes less black. For once, there is no petulance to the shape of her lips, no gloom in her eyes. She will always be shorter than I am — that’s good. But I was once she. She will be I.
I know that tonight she will tease her boyfriend until he kisses her. I know that she will slap him when he tries to touch her slightly below the breast. I know that she will defiantly come home one-half hour late, because she will wait outside for that long before she comes in. Then she will smile and say, “Don’t worry. I’m a big girl now.” Or her eyes will say it.
But there are many things I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of mother I have been, what kind of mother she will be, what I have made her into. I have tried to be the opposite of what my mother was. I have never said “Sex is dirty” or “Men are no good.” I have called sex “dangerous” and men “over-anxious.” I often say, “Come home early” or “Be careful.” I am nervous about tonight, her first date. She is only thirteen.
“Well, have fun. Be . . . have a good time. Come home at 11 o’clock.”
“Sure, Mom.”
Then she hugs me. “I love you, Mom.”
The doorbell rings.
“Are you going to be alone tonight, Ma? No dates?”
“No.”
“Heck. We’ll stay here with you and watch TV.”
She clutches my hand. She is perspiring.
“Get out of here!” I stick out my tongue and nudge her, until she runs to the door.
In the mirror I see myself at thirteen — a face vulnerable, shy, pretty but unformed — and over it another face — older, somewhat creased, heavier, more interesting. I take out my sketch pad and draw us blurred together, two people — no three — my daughter is here, too, and countless other girl-women.
I tack the picture up on the wall of my studio and walk through the house, a house of many doors and windows, of many mirrors. My own house. A house belonging to the woman in my sketch, the many myselves, and to my daughter in all her ages. It is not a house for men. Widowed, never again married, I don’t expect that a man will ever live here permanently. My daughter’s stay is temporary, too. When will she leave? How long will I be here?
But tonight I am thirteen again, changing, turning, growing, looking at my newly-developed self . . . until she comes in the door, flushing and breathless. I go out and another comes in. We wait for our next thirteenth birthday.