Fictional Women by Kristina Ryan Tate
Inspired by the myth of Proserpina, Melissa decides to visit Rome on impulse, but she is accompanied by her truculent cousin.
Melissa is leaning against the pool's edge, glancing out at the valley, about as alone as she's been in the past two weeks of traveling with her stepmother's family, when her body finds the jet. Nobody's here, she thinks as she moves over it. Everyone else - except cousin Phil who's been hiding in his room this whole trip - went to Florence for the day.
It's nice, relaxing at first, sending a slight pulse vibrating down her legs. As her body tenses, her ass cheeks clench, she pushes her pelvis against the jet stream, remembering an old boyfriend. Press harder, she was always telling him. Don't move, hold it there, right there, like there was something she wanted him to press out of her, to squish her so hard against the mattress that she might disappear, until... starbursts explode behind her eyelids. Finally, when Melissa opens her eyes, giggling, she peers around the pool deck. Still, there is no one around.
As she climbs from the water, drying off under the bright canvas awning, Tuscany's green hills yawn, and the idea comes to her in the exhale: I want to go to Rome.
"By yourself?" Aunt Ruth asks at dinner later that night. The family returned from Florence wine-drunk and glistening, and now they're sitting on the patio enjoying cured meats while the sun sets in the distance.
Grandpa's forehead is sunburnt, but his eyes sparkle for his dashing bride. The story goes they met at 16, fell in love at 18, and were married at 20. They're each other's first, each other's everything, and now they're here, sparing no expense to celebrate their marriage of 50 years.
After a week in Venice, they'd landed in Tuscany, where the red and orange stucco house is tucked in the hills of the Tuscan Valley, the pool overlooking rolling vineyards dotted by villages. Next they'll go to Cinque Terre, but they'd never had plans to visit Rome.
"It's only a couple hours by train," Melissa says, accepting the wine refill Aunt Ruth offers. "There's a couple of days before we go to Cinque Terre. I could go to Rome and then meet you there."
Melissa studied English in college. She met that boyfriend in Roman Lit, and it was in that class that she'd first become acquainted with Ovid's Metamorphoses. She can't believe she'd forgotten Metamorphoses. In college, she'd yearned to walk the ancient streets of Rome, to wonder at the history in those walls - to see Bernini's statue - and now that she is finally here it seems absurd that she should miss it. "Italy isn't just wine and salami," she half jokes, which to her delight, makes Ruth laugh.
Aunt Ruth is the fun aunt. The only single, childless one of her stepmother's sisters, and the one Melissa most wants to be like. Since Ruth's divorce was finalized earlier in the year, she's been especially jubilant. Her generosity pours over her like she's taken a dip in the fountain of youth. Each time she showers her nieces and nephews with gifts, Melissa swears Aunt Ruth comes out looking just a little bit younger.
Melissa's father and stepmother couldn't make the trip - they've got a new baby at home who isn't sleeping through the night, much less a 15-hour flight - so Ruth has been keeping a close eye on Melissa. Ruth's close eye means ensuring Melissa's cup is always full and that she has cash to spend in the shops. In each town they visit, Ruth presses crisp twenties into Melissa's palm. "Get something shiny," she whispers. It's a generosity Melissa has never known, the kind that doesn't come with strings or expectations.
Back in Venice, the two had shared a hotel room. While the couples - her grandparents and aunts and uncles - went for massages, Ruth and Melissa got drunk. Over cheese and salami, aged to perfection, they exchanged stories about Ruth's ex-husband who she'd married in her early twenties. Unlike Ruth's parents, whose love had only strengthened over the years, there was nothing but love lost between Ruth and her ex, and now she won't let anyone forget - she is free.
"Melissa wants to go to Rome," Ruth says to her sister, Carol, who joins them, reaching toward the prosciutto. Ruth waves her wine glass toward the rolling vineyards. Rome is over there, somewhere. She can tell Ruth is thinking about it, working out how it might be possible to give Melissa what she wants.
"By herself?" Carol raises her eyebrows under a burnt forehead, like her father's. She has her father's nose too, a strong arch, wide nostrils and none of Ruth's jubilance.
"Have you seen Phil today? Has he been out here?" Carol gazes across the veranda as if she'll see her only son standing there, but they all know he's likely still hiding in his room like he's been doing most of the trip. Melissa wonders why he's come at all, if he doesn't actually want to see anything.
At the other end of the table, Grandpa and Uncle Thomas are talking, their heads bent together. Melissa can't hear them, but she knows they're probably talking about golf or wine. Suddenly another two days of this is unbearable.
"So what do you think?" Melissa prods, bringing the discussion back to Rome. "I've already checked, there's a train from here."
"I don't know if going alone is wise," her aunts agree.
Melissa laughs. "You guys know I'm 25, right?"
The Tuscan sun has finally passed behind the vine-covered wall, turning the beige stone patio a burnt orange. A light breeze cools them all. Aunt Ruth reaches for one of the platters, moving slices of prosciutto and salami onto Melissa's plate before calling down to her parents. "Mom! Mom! Try the prosciutto." She gets up and carries the tray over.
"You'll miss Ruffino, and we're probably going to go to Prato," Carol says.
"But I'll get to see the colosseum, and the Vatican, and the Proserpina statue."
"The who?" Ruth says, returning with the tray. The three women are slightly drunk, their voices escalating as they talk over one another.
"A statue?" Carol cries.
Melissa says, "The Bernini -"
"You're not going to go into the Vatican," Ruth jests. She knows Melissa's qualms with religion. "It's so sexist," she'd complained to Ruth back in Venice when they'd passed a church that required women cover their shoulders and knees. "Men have to cover them too," Ruth had said, ignoring Melissa's argument that these rules were specifically targeting women because it was women's clothing that was designed to show off those parts in the first place. If they really wanted to be all-encompassing, they'd let everyone in, no matter what they were wearing.
"No, but I still want to see the gardens." Melissa hopes this is convincing. What she needs is a break. "I promise I'll be safe." She refills Aunt Ruth's wine this time. "You don't have to worry."
"Take Phil with you," Aunt Carol says, and Aunt Ruth readily agrees. "That's a great idea!"
In Metamorphoses, the Roman poet, Ovid recounts the tale of Ceres and her daughter Proserpina, adapted from the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. Like Demeter, Ceres' life is defined by the presence and absence of her only daughter, its pivotal moments told around those of Proserpina's kidnapping and rape by lord of the underworld, Pluto.
After being shot by one of Cupid's arrows, Pluto supposedly feels love for the first time. He returns to the surface world where he sees Proserpina with a group of nymphs, and he must have her. Pluto loads Proserpina onto his chariot and whisks her away to the underworld.
The story goes that Ceres' grief is so large that she abandons everything to search for her daughter. With only a torch to guide her, Ceres roams all of Italy, heartbroken, devastated, until she reaches Sicily, where she finds Proserpina's belt with the nymphs. As the goddess of agriculture, Ceres puts a curse on the land, to be lifted only when her daughter is found. She did not know yet where Proserpina was, but condemned all the lands, and called them thankless and unworthy of her gift of corn.
The first time Melissa read Metamorphoses, she was 18, a college freshman, embarking on her own life. She was enthralled with Proserpina, not because of the kidnapping or the rape, or even the supposed love for Pluto, which came later, but because it was hard for Melissa to imagine a mother's love so fierce that she'd light the world on fire.
It's hot in the station, and crowded, a busy Sunday. The board tickers down endlessly, raucous screeches and clangs echoing through the ancient concrete halls as passengers scuffle from one end to another. "Where do we go?" Phil asks, standing behind her like an ogre. He's at least 6'2", lanky limbs held authoritatively, a gesture to keep from appearing as vulnerable as he feels.
"I'm not sure," Melissa says, hesitating. Melissa studied Spanish in college, but although Spanish sounds a lot like Italian, it's not. Sometimes when Melissa overhears bits of a conversation, a small piece reveals itself to her, a word or phrase that she recognizes and it's like the rest of the sentence unlocks, but she isn't sure if she's making reasonable enough assumptions to get them to Rome, or if her assumptions are more like guesses that will land them on the other side of the country.
"Let's ask someone," Melissa says, confident she can piece enough language together to get them there. They only have 24 hours in Rome and the Bernini statue is in the Borghese Gallery, which is closed on Mondays. Today - Sunday - is their only chance, if they get there in time.
"Why?" Phil asks. "The board is right here. Roma Termini, clear as day." His blond hair is disheveled, like he just woke up, though Melissa knows he's been up for hours. Back in Chicago, he's a bartender, and a college dropout.
"Phil, you don't speak Italian."
"I don't need to speak Italian to know it says Rome."
"That train doesn't leave for another four hours, I'd like to get there faster because we don't have much time."
"We're going to platform seven. It's clear that train goes to Rome."
"That just says Rome because Rome is the final destination," Melissa says. Phil's face is hard to read. Is he annoyed or worried? She softens a little. "There might be other trains that stop in Rome on the way to somewhere else."
"I know how trains work, Melissa."
Technically, Melissa and Phil aren't blood related. They're step-cousins, but nobody in the family talks about it in those terms. "We don't use the word step," Melissa's stepmother likes to say. When Melissa was eight and she and Melissa's father flew the girls to Illinois for the wedding, her new grandmother told Melissa, "When Julie showed up with you and your sister, it was like she'd given birth to two new grand babies."
It might have been true in all ways, except when it came to Phil. Phil is the real grandchild - golden - the first grandchild and the first boy. He's four years older than Melissa and when he enters the room, everyone's faces light up, even if he smells like BO and weed, even when he fails out of school or gets fired, even if he sleeps through their entire vacation.
"Can we ask?" Melissa calls after Phil who's just announced they're going to platform seven. He doesn't turn around.
In high school, Phil got Melissa and her sisters high for the first time. He'd pulled weed out of his jeans pocket that he'd smuggled onto the plane and the four of them had huddled onto their patio passing around a thin, paper joint. It was Melissa's stepmother who'd caught them, and Melissa's older sister who'd been blamed. Phil with his hands shoved in his pockets and his eyes on the floor said nothing to correct her.
"Phil," Melissa calls after him. "Wait." She runs to catch up.
After Proserpina was held captive for weeks, the gods had a meeting to decide her fate. Ceres' devastation was causing problems for everyone. Crops had not returned, people were dying. Jupiter sent Mercury to Pluto with a demand: Return Proserpina to her mother or else. Pluto promised that he would, but he had stipulations. He'd free Proserpina only if she did not consume any piece of the underworld.
This is where the stories fracture, branch off after centuries of telling and retelling. In some versions, Pluto played a trick on the other gods, on Ceres, on Proserpina herself. He convinced her to consume a handful of pomegranate seeds, which in turn meant that she belonged to the underworld forever. In other versions, Proserpina willingly took that risk, choosing to eat those seeds out of a desire to stay with her captor.
Either way, she paid the price. A compromise was made. It was decided that Proserpina would spend half the year with her mother on the surface and the other half in the underworld with Pluto, forever.
When Proserpina is with her mother, it's spring and summer. The two frolic through fields of flowers in the sunshine. And during fall and winter, she is plunged into darkness. And now the goddess, Proserpina, shared divinity of the two kingdoms, spends so many months with her mother, so many months with her husband. The aspect of her face and mind alters in a moment.
Melissa loves the duality of Proserpina's story, the seemingly contradictory idea that someone can be half light, and half dark, that the change can happen anytime. When Proserpina is in the underworld, where she becomes queen, she rules alongside her husband, Pluto, and her mother mourns above, turning the earth to fall and winter, cold and deserted.
And this is why we have seasons.
Rome is sweltering, its difference from Tuscany is a shock to Melissa and Phil. They weave through foot traffic, carefully stepping along marbled cobblestone streets as cars honk. Beside a crumbling ancient building there's a shiny McDonalds, the lit up menu inside looks strangely familiar yet foreign, Italian written beneath a Big Mac, a Happy Meal.
Phil wants to go directly to the hotel to drop their things. Despite it being the opposite direction of the gallery, Melissa agrees. Although she's packed light, her back is already sweating, soaking through to her backpack, and jeans weren't the right choice.
"Let's hit the Colosseum first. We can walk to Vatican City from there," Phil states after they've locked their hotel room, which is more like a large closet, two twin beds crammed inside, and are standing on the street outside. Traveling with the family may have been lavish, but traveling as two 20-somethings who work in the restaurant industry, Melissa and Phil are now on a tight budget. After paying for their hotel, they have $200 between them, both pocketing a $100 bill that Ruth had handed them at the train station that morning.
"I think the museum stops letting people in after 5pm," Melissa says. It's noon.
"Museum?" Phil glares at her open-mouthed as though hearing this for the first time.
"Ya, that's where the Proserpina stat-"
"Nah, fuck that, I didn't come to Rome for less than a day to spend it in a museum."
"Well, then let's split up."
"No way, my mom said to keep an eye on you." Phil returns his attention to the map.
He has to keep an eye on her? "You've never even been out of the country," she blurts. There'd been a whole hoopla before leaving for Italy because Phil hadn't ordered his first ever passport yet. Luckily he'd been able to fast track it, and it had arrived the week they left. Melissa, on the other hand, has a passport full of stamps. She'd backpacked through Central America and Southeast Asia after college, by herself. Although she doesn't consider herself an expert by any stretch, and she hasn't done enough research on Rome to understand it thoroughly, it's hilarious that Phil is supposed to look after her.
Still, Melissa doesn't want to fight. She'd like to see the Colosseum too. "What direction?" she asks, calculating how much it might cost to take a cab to the museum from there.
Phil circles his finger around the cartoon colored map in his hand, bright yellow arrows highlighting the sights. "There's a whole shitload of stuff around here."
A slight correction: Melissa's favorite thing about Proserpina's story is its missing pieces. The unanswered questions, like: Why did it take Ceres so long to locate Proserpina? Didn't the nymphs know that Pluto had taken her? And why did Proserpina go so willingly? Did anyone actually ask her?
Some say that Proserpina chose hell, as much as hell can be chosen. That she let Pluto take her to the underworld and then keep her there. She wanted to escape her mother, Ceres, who was overly possessive and controlling; she wanted to escape what was expected of her; maybe she just wanted to feel good, to feel dangerous, or maybe she wanted to be in control of her own life.
What would have happened if she'd stayed with her mother all year long? Would her life have been better?
After they tour the stalls where gladiators once fought to the death, Melissa and Phil head to the Vatican where, just as Aunt Ruth predicted, Melissa doesn't want to go inside. Phil, who was raised Catholic and is now a self-declared mother fucking atheist, doesn't either, so they wander the intricate gardens, a labyrinth of bushes and flowers that remind Melissa of something out of Alice in Wonderland. They're sweaty, the sticky Roman heat is a cross between humid and the oven. Melissa offers Phil sunscreen, but he refuses, saying something about it being poisonous that makes Melissa laugh.
They walk so far and so long that Melissa's legs start to ache, and the spot where her sweaty arm has been rubbing against her tank top is chafed. There's still time to make it to the museum, if they hurry, but Melissa doesn't bring it up. She knows Phil will put up a fight and she doesn't have the energy to stand her ground. Next time, she promises herself.
When night hits, the colosseum is lit from the inside, glowing against the dark sky. Melissa takes picture after picture, moving her camera just before the snap of the shutter so that the colosseum is blurred across the screen like it's dancing.
"Go talk to people," she tells Phil who sulks in the back. They'd received flyers for a pub crawl that started outside of the colosseum earlier in the afternoon, and surprisingly, she hadn't needed to convince Phil to come, but now that they're here, he doesn't seem like he's having fun.
Music bumps from a stereo on a rock and the pub crawlers sway to the beat. A man in a red v-neck keeps climbing atop the rock every fifteen minutes announcing that the crawl will start in another hour, half an hour, fifteen minutes!
"Do you dance?" A German asks Melissa at the first bar. His name is Max. His hair is black, and he smells like anise, wafting from the absinthe in his hand.
"I do!" she exclaims, letting him lead her to the small dance floor. Melissa is a terrible dancer, all lanky limbs and no rhythm, but in Rome, no one knows this about her. She hangs her head back and loves the way her hair dangles against her low back. Sweat forms behind her ears and her shoulders vibrate. She's dancing in Rome! How many people can say that?
"Your hotel, is it near of here?" Max's breath is warm on her neck. He's her age, she guesses, cropped hair and he's wearing eyeliner, which Melissa decides is just weird enough for her taste. Maybe she'll make out with him later.
She nods and then releases a breathy laugh. "You can't come home with me!" she says, leaning against him. She wishes she had her own room.
There's a tap on her shoulder. "I'm tired," Phil says. "Let's go back to the hotel."
Melissa gives a polite nod to Max. "My cousin," she whisper-screams in his ear.
"What's up?" she asks Phil, when they've stepped away from the crowd. She doesn't go far. Max is a hot commodity in a place like this and the pub crawl could head to the next place any minute. At the same time, she scans the dance floor for the little red sign their leader holds bobbing over the crowd to help everyone keep track of the group, and she spots it in the corner near the bar. If any of the pub-crawlers get lost, all they have to do is look up.
"I'm tired," Phil says again, his tone is barbed. He seems more than tired. His arms are tense, folded in a way that suggests something may have happened. Maybe he'd asked a girl to dance and she'd said no.
"What about the girls over there?" Melissa asks, pointing to a group dancing near the bar. "They look fun. The tall one is laughing, a lot."
Phil shakes his head, and grumbles something like, "This is lame."
She puts her hand on Phil's shoulder, but realizes immediately that this was the exact wrong thing to do when he flinches back. "Let's go," he says.
"What's the matter with you?" Melissa snaps, feeling her irritation rise. He's like a petulant child. Hides in his room, sulks at the bar - it doesn't matter where he is, he's the same bore. "Why did you even come to Italy?" she asks. If he hadn't, she could have come to Rome by herself, gone to the museum like she'd wanted, seen the statue of Proserpina.
"What?"
"You said you didn't come for museums. In Tuscany, you hid in your room all week. You barely seemed to notice the Colosseum today. You didn't go into the Vatican. And now you want to go home and it's not even midnight." It is Melissa's turn to cross her arms in front of her chest. She's never had a brother - only a sister - but if this is what it is like, she doesn't want one.
"You go," Melissa finally says when Phil doesn't give her a response. She turns to head back to the dance floor where she can see Max gravitating dangerously close to another group of girls.
There's a hand wrapping around her elbow, pulling her back. Phil. "We're leaving. Now."
"Ow!" She twists from him. "No! You're leaving!" When he reaches for her arm again, she wrenches free and turns toward the bathroom. It's co-ed, a long line of stalls where men and women are washing their hands at one long porcelain sink, a red glow illuminating their faces in the mirror.
Melissa rushes into a stall and locks it behind her. She has never seen Phil act like this. The flash of anger in his eyes is alarming. She rubs her arms where he's grabbed her, it's red and already aching with the dull throb of a new bruise. OK, maybe he was better when all he did was sleep in his room, Melissa thinks, realizing she doesn't know Phil all that well. As step-cousins go, they've only spent a handful of days together, always with family.
"Where is she? Did you see that girl? Melissa?" Phil's voice is steely, short and sharp, like darts at a board. "Melissa, you can't stay. Melissa, come out now."
Slowly, she lifts her feet up onto the toilet so he can't see them. "I'll find my own way back," she hears herself say. Her voice is shaky. Even if she were to leave, she won't leave with him.
"You can't," Phil says, "This is Rome. You'd be alone."
Melissa presses her palms against the sides of the stall to counter her weight. Then I'd be safe, from you. "Max will walk me," she says, thinking this might appease him.
"Who the fuck is Max?" Phil follows her voice. He's standing outside her stall. "Open the door."
Melissa doesn't answer. He knocks harder, rattling the hinges. She can see his tattered Vans beneath it. Will he crawl under? Drag her out? She'll scream.
He gives the door another hard bang. "I'm going to call your parents!"
This startles Melissa. She does a quick calculation. It's midnight in Rome, so it would be what? 4pm in Arizona? They'd be sitting down to dinner, maybe, feeding the baby. "I don't care!" she yells back at Phil, hoping he's bluffing. It would be another family story, where she would shoulder the blame.
"Whatever. Go be a slut!" Phil's feet shuffle off.
Melissa waits another ten minutes crouched over the toilet seat until her heart slows to an even pace. Is he really gone? She's already moved from shock to anger. No one will believe that Phil acted this way. They'll blame her. They'll assume she started it. The story will get twisted in the telling, depending on who it's coming from. No mother will come to save her.
She leaves the stall. She washes her hands at the porcelain sink, hiding her face from the mirror, trying to stop shaking. The water is warm. It looks red in the bathroom light, but diluted, like water mixed with blood. Did the girl beside her hear? Did the boy in the other stall wonder what she'd done to deserve it? If they had, they didn't act like it.
Back in the bar, the bass makes her chest vibrate. The crowd is pulsing, like nothing happened. She lingers by the bathroom to confirm he's really gone. The hairs on her arms pulse with each beat. She doesn't see him. She doesn't see Max either, or the little sign of the pub crawl leader.
Ten years from now, Melissa will get a tattoo of Proserpina. She's not sure she wants to see the Bernini statue anymore - it's another man's perspective in a world full of them - but she'll keep thinking about her, this archetypal woman.
In returning with Pluto to the underworld, in staying there despite her mother's behavior that wreaked havoc on the land and their people, in accepting the pomegranate seeds that Pluto held out in his hand, and most especially in eating them, knowing that consumption of anything in the underworld meant that one belonged there, Proserpina exhibits something few women in these stories ever do - agency - and Melissa will wonder why the story of Proserpina isn't about that. Why isn't it about Pluto and the consequences of his actions. His decisions. Instead, the focus has all been on Proserpina, the rape.
But she'll know. All women know, eventually.
In Cinque Terre, Ruth and Melissa decide to stay a week longer than the group. Ruth extends their hotel stay and they say goodbye to the family headed for flights back to the States. Melissa spends her afternoons lounging at the pool beside the Mediterranean, trying to allow the smell of salt and sea to absorb into her before she heads home to a landlocked state where there is none. Now that Phil is gone, she wants to forget that night, but she can't seem to. Something shook free in Rome, and it's been rattling around inside of her ever since. After he'd left the bar, Phil did call her parents. He left them a voicemail explaining that Melissa was "lost in Rome," and she'd gotten a worried call from her father the following morning.
Did Phil think he was protecting her? It was more like betrayal.
"Well, it sounds like he thought you were making questionable decisions," Aunt Ruth says when she and Melissa sit down for dinner. Her tone isn't accusatory, but direct, matter of fact. A week had gone by before Melissa told Ruth what happened in Rome, but now that she has, they touch on it briefly every night. What version of the story did Phil tell? She can't bring herself to ask.
Nights in Cinque Terre are warm, sticky from the heat of the days, hotter maybe as the humidity settles in. "What questionable decisions?" Melissa says on another night. "I found my own way back just fine."
"He probably thinks you should have stayed with him."
"He flipped out on me."
"If something had happened," Ruth adds. "It could have been bad."
Something did happen, Melissa thinks, but she doesn't say it. She can feel her face growing hot even though she knows her protest is futile. She and Ruth have gone round and round, and each time Ruth's response seems the same - Phil was being protective. In this, Melissa realizes that a woman's agency comes with consequences; when she eats the pomegranate seeds, she's imprisoned in hell for half the year.
Melissa drains her wine glass. "Will you ever get married again?" she asks Ruth. The two women stare out over the Mediterranean. It's an iridescent clear blue up close, but out farther, the water gets darker, blinded by the shimmer of the setting sun. Rather than pay alimony for years after their divorce, Ruth paid her ex-husband a lump sum. It was larger than what she would have owed if she'd have let the legal battle drag on - there were arguments to be made - but she was always going to pay him something, and in the end, Ruth had thought her freedom was worth the extra cost.
"I doubt it," Ruth says after a long while. "More wine?" She lifts the bottle. Melissa slides her glass toward Ruth with a gentle scrape against the table.
"Me neither," she says. They return their attention to the setting sun that has begun to turn the sky a fiery red.
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It's nice, relaxing at first, sending a slight pulse vibrating down her legs. As her body tenses, her ass cheeks clench, she pushes her pelvis against the jet stream, remembering an old boyfriend. Press harder, she was always telling him. Don't move, hold it there, right there, like there was something she wanted him to press out of her, to squish her so hard against the mattress that she might disappear, until... starbursts explode behind her eyelids. Finally, when Melissa opens her eyes, giggling, she peers around the pool deck. Still, there is no one around.
As she climbs from the water, drying off under the bright canvas awning, Tuscany's green hills yawn, and the idea comes to her in the exhale: I want to go to Rome.
"By yourself?" Aunt Ruth asks at dinner later that night. The family returned from Florence wine-drunk and glistening, and now they're sitting on the patio enjoying cured meats while the sun sets in the distance.
Grandpa's forehead is sunburnt, but his eyes sparkle for his dashing bride. The story goes they met at 16, fell in love at 18, and were married at 20. They're each other's first, each other's everything, and now they're here, sparing no expense to celebrate their marriage of 50 years.
After a week in Venice, they'd landed in Tuscany, where the red and orange stucco house is tucked in the hills of the Tuscan Valley, the pool overlooking rolling vineyards dotted by villages. Next they'll go to Cinque Terre, but they'd never had plans to visit Rome.
"It's only a couple hours by train," Melissa says, accepting the wine refill Aunt Ruth offers. "There's a couple of days before we go to Cinque Terre. I could go to Rome and then meet you there."
Melissa studied English in college. She met that boyfriend in Roman Lit, and it was in that class that she'd first become acquainted with Ovid's Metamorphoses. She can't believe she'd forgotten Metamorphoses. In college, she'd yearned to walk the ancient streets of Rome, to wonder at the history in those walls - to see Bernini's statue - and now that she is finally here it seems absurd that she should miss it. "Italy isn't just wine and salami," she half jokes, which to her delight, makes Ruth laugh.
Aunt Ruth is the fun aunt. The only single, childless one of her stepmother's sisters, and the one Melissa most wants to be like. Since Ruth's divorce was finalized earlier in the year, she's been especially jubilant. Her generosity pours over her like she's taken a dip in the fountain of youth. Each time she showers her nieces and nephews with gifts, Melissa swears Aunt Ruth comes out looking just a little bit younger.
Melissa's father and stepmother couldn't make the trip - they've got a new baby at home who isn't sleeping through the night, much less a 15-hour flight - so Ruth has been keeping a close eye on Melissa. Ruth's close eye means ensuring Melissa's cup is always full and that she has cash to spend in the shops. In each town they visit, Ruth presses crisp twenties into Melissa's palm. "Get something shiny," she whispers. It's a generosity Melissa has never known, the kind that doesn't come with strings or expectations.
Back in Venice, the two had shared a hotel room. While the couples - her grandparents and aunts and uncles - went for massages, Ruth and Melissa got drunk. Over cheese and salami, aged to perfection, they exchanged stories about Ruth's ex-husband who she'd married in her early twenties. Unlike Ruth's parents, whose love had only strengthened over the years, there was nothing but love lost between Ruth and her ex, and now she won't let anyone forget - she is free.
"Melissa wants to go to Rome," Ruth says to her sister, Carol, who joins them, reaching toward the prosciutto. Ruth waves her wine glass toward the rolling vineyards. Rome is over there, somewhere. She can tell Ruth is thinking about it, working out how it might be possible to give Melissa what she wants.
"By herself?" Carol raises her eyebrows under a burnt forehead, like her father's. She has her father's nose too, a strong arch, wide nostrils and none of Ruth's jubilance.
"Have you seen Phil today? Has he been out here?" Carol gazes across the veranda as if she'll see her only son standing there, but they all know he's likely still hiding in his room like he's been doing most of the trip. Melissa wonders why he's come at all, if he doesn't actually want to see anything.
At the other end of the table, Grandpa and Uncle Thomas are talking, their heads bent together. Melissa can't hear them, but she knows they're probably talking about golf or wine. Suddenly another two days of this is unbearable.
"So what do you think?" Melissa prods, bringing the discussion back to Rome. "I've already checked, there's a train from here."
"I don't know if going alone is wise," her aunts agree.
Melissa laughs. "You guys know I'm 25, right?"
The Tuscan sun has finally passed behind the vine-covered wall, turning the beige stone patio a burnt orange. A light breeze cools them all. Aunt Ruth reaches for one of the platters, moving slices of prosciutto and salami onto Melissa's plate before calling down to her parents. "Mom! Mom! Try the prosciutto." She gets up and carries the tray over.
"You'll miss Ruffino, and we're probably going to go to Prato," Carol says.
"But I'll get to see the colosseum, and the Vatican, and the Proserpina statue."
"The who?" Ruth says, returning with the tray. The three women are slightly drunk, their voices escalating as they talk over one another.
"A statue?" Carol cries.
Melissa says, "The Bernini -"
"You're not going to go into the Vatican," Ruth jests. She knows Melissa's qualms with religion. "It's so sexist," she'd complained to Ruth back in Venice when they'd passed a church that required women cover their shoulders and knees. "Men have to cover them too," Ruth had said, ignoring Melissa's argument that these rules were specifically targeting women because it was women's clothing that was designed to show off those parts in the first place. If they really wanted to be all-encompassing, they'd let everyone in, no matter what they were wearing.
"No, but I still want to see the gardens." Melissa hopes this is convincing. What she needs is a break. "I promise I'll be safe." She refills Aunt Ruth's wine this time. "You don't have to worry."
"Take Phil with you," Aunt Carol says, and Aunt Ruth readily agrees. "That's a great idea!"
In Metamorphoses, the Roman poet, Ovid recounts the tale of Ceres and her daughter Proserpina, adapted from the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone. Like Demeter, Ceres' life is defined by the presence and absence of her only daughter, its pivotal moments told around those of Proserpina's kidnapping and rape by lord of the underworld, Pluto.
After being shot by one of Cupid's arrows, Pluto supposedly feels love for the first time. He returns to the surface world where he sees Proserpina with a group of nymphs, and he must have her. Pluto loads Proserpina onto his chariot and whisks her away to the underworld.
The story goes that Ceres' grief is so large that she abandons everything to search for her daughter. With only a torch to guide her, Ceres roams all of Italy, heartbroken, devastated, until she reaches Sicily, where she finds Proserpina's belt with the nymphs. As the goddess of agriculture, Ceres puts a curse on the land, to be lifted only when her daughter is found. She did not know yet where Proserpina was, but condemned all the lands, and called them thankless and unworthy of her gift of corn.
The first time Melissa read Metamorphoses, she was 18, a college freshman, embarking on her own life. She was enthralled with Proserpina, not because of the kidnapping or the rape, or even the supposed love for Pluto, which came later, but because it was hard for Melissa to imagine a mother's love so fierce that she'd light the world on fire.
It's hot in the station, and crowded, a busy Sunday. The board tickers down endlessly, raucous screeches and clangs echoing through the ancient concrete halls as passengers scuffle from one end to another. "Where do we go?" Phil asks, standing behind her like an ogre. He's at least 6'2", lanky limbs held authoritatively, a gesture to keep from appearing as vulnerable as he feels.
"I'm not sure," Melissa says, hesitating. Melissa studied Spanish in college, but although Spanish sounds a lot like Italian, it's not. Sometimes when Melissa overhears bits of a conversation, a small piece reveals itself to her, a word or phrase that she recognizes and it's like the rest of the sentence unlocks, but she isn't sure if she's making reasonable enough assumptions to get them to Rome, or if her assumptions are more like guesses that will land them on the other side of the country.
"Let's ask someone," Melissa says, confident she can piece enough language together to get them there. They only have 24 hours in Rome and the Bernini statue is in the Borghese Gallery, which is closed on Mondays. Today - Sunday - is their only chance, if they get there in time.
"Why?" Phil asks. "The board is right here. Roma Termini, clear as day." His blond hair is disheveled, like he just woke up, though Melissa knows he's been up for hours. Back in Chicago, he's a bartender, and a college dropout.
"Phil, you don't speak Italian."
"I don't need to speak Italian to know it says Rome."
"That train doesn't leave for another four hours, I'd like to get there faster because we don't have much time."
"We're going to platform seven. It's clear that train goes to Rome."
"That just says Rome because Rome is the final destination," Melissa says. Phil's face is hard to read. Is he annoyed or worried? She softens a little. "There might be other trains that stop in Rome on the way to somewhere else."
"I know how trains work, Melissa."
Technically, Melissa and Phil aren't blood related. They're step-cousins, but nobody in the family talks about it in those terms. "We don't use the word step," Melissa's stepmother likes to say. When Melissa was eight and she and Melissa's father flew the girls to Illinois for the wedding, her new grandmother told Melissa, "When Julie showed up with you and your sister, it was like she'd given birth to two new grand babies."
It might have been true in all ways, except when it came to Phil. Phil is the real grandchild - golden - the first grandchild and the first boy. He's four years older than Melissa and when he enters the room, everyone's faces light up, even if he smells like BO and weed, even when he fails out of school or gets fired, even if he sleeps through their entire vacation.
"Can we ask?" Melissa calls after Phil who's just announced they're going to platform seven. He doesn't turn around.
In high school, Phil got Melissa and her sisters high for the first time. He'd pulled weed out of his jeans pocket that he'd smuggled onto the plane and the four of them had huddled onto their patio passing around a thin, paper joint. It was Melissa's stepmother who'd caught them, and Melissa's older sister who'd been blamed. Phil with his hands shoved in his pockets and his eyes on the floor said nothing to correct her.
"Phil," Melissa calls after him. "Wait." She runs to catch up.
After Proserpina was held captive for weeks, the gods had a meeting to decide her fate. Ceres' devastation was causing problems for everyone. Crops had not returned, people were dying. Jupiter sent Mercury to Pluto with a demand: Return Proserpina to her mother or else. Pluto promised that he would, but he had stipulations. He'd free Proserpina only if she did not consume any piece of the underworld.
This is where the stories fracture, branch off after centuries of telling and retelling. In some versions, Pluto played a trick on the other gods, on Ceres, on Proserpina herself. He convinced her to consume a handful of pomegranate seeds, which in turn meant that she belonged to the underworld forever. In other versions, Proserpina willingly took that risk, choosing to eat those seeds out of a desire to stay with her captor.
Either way, she paid the price. A compromise was made. It was decided that Proserpina would spend half the year with her mother on the surface and the other half in the underworld with Pluto, forever.
When Proserpina is with her mother, it's spring and summer. The two frolic through fields of flowers in the sunshine. And during fall and winter, she is plunged into darkness. And now the goddess, Proserpina, shared divinity of the two kingdoms, spends so many months with her mother, so many months with her husband. The aspect of her face and mind alters in a moment.
Melissa loves the duality of Proserpina's story, the seemingly contradictory idea that someone can be half light, and half dark, that the change can happen anytime. When Proserpina is in the underworld, where she becomes queen, she rules alongside her husband, Pluto, and her mother mourns above, turning the earth to fall and winter, cold and deserted.
And this is why we have seasons.
Rome is sweltering, its difference from Tuscany is a shock to Melissa and Phil. They weave through foot traffic, carefully stepping along marbled cobblestone streets as cars honk. Beside a crumbling ancient building there's a shiny McDonalds, the lit up menu inside looks strangely familiar yet foreign, Italian written beneath a Big Mac, a Happy Meal.
Phil wants to go directly to the hotel to drop their things. Despite it being the opposite direction of the gallery, Melissa agrees. Although she's packed light, her back is already sweating, soaking through to her backpack, and jeans weren't the right choice.
"Let's hit the Colosseum first. We can walk to Vatican City from there," Phil states after they've locked their hotel room, which is more like a large closet, two twin beds crammed inside, and are standing on the street outside. Traveling with the family may have been lavish, but traveling as two 20-somethings who work in the restaurant industry, Melissa and Phil are now on a tight budget. After paying for their hotel, they have $200 between them, both pocketing a $100 bill that Ruth had handed them at the train station that morning.
"I think the museum stops letting people in after 5pm," Melissa says. It's noon.
"Museum?" Phil glares at her open-mouthed as though hearing this for the first time.
"Ya, that's where the Proserpina stat-"
"Nah, fuck that, I didn't come to Rome for less than a day to spend it in a museum."
"Well, then let's split up."
"No way, my mom said to keep an eye on you." Phil returns his attention to the map.
He has to keep an eye on her? "You've never even been out of the country," she blurts. There'd been a whole hoopla before leaving for Italy because Phil hadn't ordered his first ever passport yet. Luckily he'd been able to fast track it, and it had arrived the week they left. Melissa, on the other hand, has a passport full of stamps. She'd backpacked through Central America and Southeast Asia after college, by herself. Although she doesn't consider herself an expert by any stretch, and she hasn't done enough research on Rome to understand it thoroughly, it's hilarious that Phil is supposed to look after her.
Still, Melissa doesn't want to fight. She'd like to see the Colosseum too. "What direction?" she asks, calculating how much it might cost to take a cab to the museum from there.
Phil circles his finger around the cartoon colored map in his hand, bright yellow arrows highlighting the sights. "There's a whole shitload of stuff around here."
A slight correction: Melissa's favorite thing about Proserpina's story is its missing pieces. The unanswered questions, like: Why did it take Ceres so long to locate Proserpina? Didn't the nymphs know that Pluto had taken her? And why did Proserpina go so willingly? Did anyone actually ask her?
Some say that Proserpina chose hell, as much as hell can be chosen. That she let Pluto take her to the underworld and then keep her there. She wanted to escape her mother, Ceres, who was overly possessive and controlling; she wanted to escape what was expected of her; maybe she just wanted to feel good, to feel dangerous, or maybe she wanted to be in control of her own life.
What would have happened if she'd stayed with her mother all year long? Would her life have been better?
After they tour the stalls where gladiators once fought to the death, Melissa and Phil head to the Vatican where, just as Aunt Ruth predicted, Melissa doesn't want to go inside. Phil, who was raised Catholic and is now a self-declared mother fucking atheist, doesn't either, so they wander the intricate gardens, a labyrinth of bushes and flowers that remind Melissa of something out of Alice in Wonderland. They're sweaty, the sticky Roman heat is a cross between humid and the oven. Melissa offers Phil sunscreen, but he refuses, saying something about it being poisonous that makes Melissa laugh.
They walk so far and so long that Melissa's legs start to ache, and the spot where her sweaty arm has been rubbing against her tank top is chafed. There's still time to make it to the museum, if they hurry, but Melissa doesn't bring it up. She knows Phil will put up a fight and she doesn't have the energy to stand her ground. Next time, she promises herself.
When night hits, the colosseum is lit from the inside, glowing against the dark sky. Melissa takes picture after picture, moving her camera just before the snap of the shutter so that the colosseum is blurred across the screen like it's dancing.
"Go talk to people," she tells Phil who sulks in the back. They'd received flyers for a pub crawl that started outside of the colosseum earlier in the afternoon, and surprisingly, she hadn't needed to convince Phil to come, but now that they're here, he doesn't seem like he's having fun.
Music bumps from a stereo on a rock and the pub crawlers sway to the beat. A man in a red v-neck keeps climbing atop the rock every fifteen minutes announcing that the crawl will start in another hour, half an hour, fifteen minutes!
"Do you dance?" A German asks Melissa at the first bar. His name is Max. His hair is black, and he smells like anise, wafting from the absinthe in his hand.
"I do!" she exclaims, letting him lead her to the small dance floor. Melissa is a terrible dancer, all lanky limbs and no rhythm, but in Rome, no one knows this about her. She hangs her head back and loves the way her hair dangles against her low back. Sweat forms behind her ears and her shoulders vibrate. She's dancing in Rome! How many people can say that?
"Your hotel, is it near of here?" Max's breath is warm on her neck. He's her age, she guesses, cropped hair and he's wearing eyeliner, which Melissa decides is just weird enough for her taste. Maybe she'll make out with him later.
She nods and then releases a breathy laugh. "You can't come home with me!" she says, leaning against him. She wishes she had her own room.
There's a tap on her shoulder. "I'm tired," Phil says. "Let's go back to the hotel."
Melissa gives a polite nod to Max. "My cousin," she whisper-screams in his ear.
"What's up?" she asks Phil, when they've stepped away from the crowd. She doesn't go far. Max is a hot commodity in a place like this and the pub crawl could head to the next place any minute. At the same time, she scans the dance floor for the little red sign their leader holds bobbing over the crowd to help everyone keep track of the group, and she spots it in the corner near the bar. If any of the pub-crawlers get lost, all they have to do is look up.
"I'm tired," Phil says again, his tone is barbed. He seems more than tired. His arms are tense, folded in a way that suggests something may have happened. Maybe he'd asked a girl to dance and she'd said no.
"What about the girls over there?" Melissa asks, pointing to a group dancing near the bar. "They look fun. The tall one is laughing, a lot."
Phil shakes his head, and grumbles something like, "This is lame."
She puts her hand on Phil's shoulder, but realizes immediately that this was the exact wrong thing to do when he flinches back. "Let's go," he says.
"What's the matter with you?" Melissa snaps, feeling her irritation rise. He's like a petulant child. Hides in his room, sulks at the bar - it doesn't matter where he is, he's the same bore. "Why did you even come to Italy?" she asks. If he hadn't, she could have come to Rome by herself, gone to the museum like she'd wanted, seen the statue of Proserpina.
"What?"
"You said you didn't come for museums. In Tuscany, you hid in your room all week. You barely seemed to notice the Colosseum today. You didn't go into the Vatican. And now you want to go home and it's not even midnight." It is Melissa's turn to cross her arms in front of her chest. She's never had a brother - only a sister - but if this is what it is like, she doesn't want one.
"You go," Melissa finally says when Phil doesn't give her a response. She turns to head back to the dance floor where she can see Max gravitating dangerously close to another group of girls.
There's a hand wrapping around her elbow, pulling her back. Phil. "We're leaving. Now."
"Ow!" She twists from him. "No! You're leaving!" When he reaches for her arm again, she wrenches free and turns toward the bathroom. It's co-ed, a long line of stalls where men and women are washing their hands at one long porcelain sink, a red glow illuminating their faces in the mirror.
Melissa rushes into a stall and locks it behind her. She has never seen Phil act like this. The flash of anger in his eyes is alarming. She rubs her arms where he's grabbed her, it's red and already aching with the dull throb of a new bruise. OK, maybe he was better when all he did was sleep in his room, Melissa thinks, realizing she doesn't know Phil all that well. As step-cousins go, they've only spent a handful of days together, always with family.
"Where is she? Did you see that girl? Melissa?" Phil's voice is steely, short and sharp, like darts at a board. "Melissa, you can't stay. Melissa, come out now."
Slowly, she lifts her feet up onto the toilet so he can't see them. "I'll find my own way back," she hears herself say. Her voice is shaky. Even if she were to leave, she won't leave with him.
"You can't," Phil says, "This is Rome. You'd be alone."
Melissa presses her palms against the sides of the stall to counter her weight. Then I'd be safe, from you. "Max will walk me," she says, thinking this might appease him.
"Who the fuck is Max?" Phil follows her voice. He's standing outside her stall. "Open the door."
Melissa doesn't answer. He knocks harder, rattling the hinges. She can see his tattered Vans beneath it. Will he crawl under? Drag her out? She'll scream.
He gives the door another hard bang. "I'm going to call your parents!"
This startles Melissa. She does a quick calculation. It's midnight in Rome, so it would be what? 4pm in Arizona? They'd be sitting down to dinner, maybe, feeding the baby. "I don't care!" she yells back at Phil, hoping he's bluffing. It would be another family story, where she would shoulder the blame.
"Whatever. Go be a slut!" Phil's feet shuffle off.
Melissa waits another ten minutes crouched over the toilet seat until her heart slows to an even pace. Is he really gone? She's already moved from shock to anger. No one will believe that Phil acted this way. They'll blame her. They'll assume she started it. The story will get twisted in the telling, depending on who it's coming from. No mother will come to save her.
She leaves the stall. She washes her hands at the porcelain sink, hiding her face from the mirror, trying to stop shaking. The water is warm. It looks red in the bathroom light, but diluted, like water mixed with blood. Did the girl beside her hear? Did the boy in the other stall wonder what she'd done to deserve it? If they had, they didn't act like it.
Back in the bar, the bass makes her chest vibrate. The crowd is pulsing, like nothing happened. She lingers by the bathroom to confirm he's really gone. The hairs on her arms pulse with each beat. She doesn't see him. She doesn't see Max either, or the little sign of the pub crawl leader.
Ten years from now, Melissa will get a tattoo of Proserpina. She's not sure she wants to see the Bernini statue anymore - it's another man's perspective in a world full of them - but she'll keep thinking about her, this archetypal woman.
In returning with Pluto to the underworld, in staying there despite her mother's behavior that wreaked havoc on the land and their people, in accepting the pomegranate seeds that Pluto held out in his hand, and most especially in eating them, knowing that consumption of anything in the underworld meant that one belonged there, Proserpina exhibits something few women in these stories ever do - agency - and Melissa will wonder why the story of Proserpina isn't about that. Why isn't it about Pluto and the consequences of his actions. His decisions. Instead, the focus has all been on Proserpina, the rape.
But she'll know. All women know, eventually.
In Cinque Terre, Ruth and Melissa decide to stay a week longer than the group. Ruth extends their hotel stay and they say goodbye to the family headed for flights back to the States. Melissa spends her afternoons lounging at the pool beside the Mediterranean, trying to allow the smell of salt and sea to absorb into her before she heads home to a landlocked state where there is none. Now that Phil is gone, she wants to forget that night, but she can't seem to. Something shook free in Rome, and it's been rattling around inside of her ever since. After he'd left the bar, Phil did call her parents. He left them a voicemail explaining that Melissa was "lost in Rome," and she'd gotten a worried call from her father the following morning.
Did Phil think he was protecting her? It was more like betrayal.
"Well, it sounds like he thought you were making questionable decisions," Aunt Ruth says when she and Melissa sit down for dinner. Her tone isn't accusatory, but direct, matter of fact. A week had gone by before Melissa told Ruth what happened in Rome, but now that she has, they touch on it briefly every night. What version of the story did Phil tell? She can't bring herself to ask.
Nights in Cinque Terre are warm, sticky from the heat of the days, hotter maybe as the humidity settles in. "What questionable decisions?" Melissa says on another night. "I found my own way back just fine."
"He probably thinks you should have stayed with him."
"He flipped out on me."
"If something had happened," Ruth adds. "It could have been bad."
Something did happen, Melissa thinks, but she doesn't say it. She can feel her face growing hot even though she knows her protest is futile. She and Ruth have gone round and round, and each time Ruth's response seems the same - Phil was being protective. In this, Melissa realizes that a woman's agency comes with consequences; when she eats the pomegranate seeds, she's imprisoned in hell for half the year.
Melissa drains her wine glass. "Will you ever get married again?" she asks Ruth. The two women stare out over the Mediterranean. It's an iridescent clear blue up close, but out farther, the water gets darker, blinded by the shimmer of the setting sun. Rather than pay alimony for years after their divorce, Ruth paid her ex-husband a lump sum. It was larger than what she would have owed if she'd have let the legal battle drag on - there were arguments to be made - but she was always going to pay him something, and in the end, Ruth had thought her freedom was worth the extra cost.
"I doubt it," Ruth says after a long while. "More wine?" She lifts the bottle. Melissa slides her glass toward Ruth with a gentle scrape against the table.
"Me neither," she says. They return their attention to the setting sun that has begun to turn the sky a fiery red.
The technique of the fugue between two stories—one ancient and one contemporary—is one you don't see employed often enough in fiction. Probably because it's hard to get right. Here, though, the juxtaposition between Melissa's experience in Rome and Proserpina's katabasis works quite well. Probably because Proserpina's struggle for agency mirrors the protagonist's own modern day struggle for the same. Melissa doesn't descend into Hell, but the red-lit bathroom with the lout banging on the door sort of comes close. I also got a bit of Proustian recall reading this as it reminded me of my own time spent in Italy as a child, with my uncle (a Navy man in Napoli). I'm such a philistine, though, that it came when the author described being in McDonald's and seeing all the familiar items with their prices listed in Lira and the food descriptions in Italian.
ReplyDeleteWell-done, regardless, and a good reminder of the old saying that myths aren't stories that were never true, but rather stories that are always true. Of course, their immanence is easier to feel when you're in Rome than say, Ohio.
We're not told the time frame of Kristina's story, but it is perhaps significant that no one brandishes a cell phone. This might account for the neolithic attitude of Melissa's family toward her visiting Rome by herself at age 25. Is it life imitating art in the allegorical similarities between Proserpina and Melissa? One call well imagine so well-educated a young woman as Melissa drawing the connection. I liked this story the farther I got into it. Good one, Kristina!
ReplyDeleteA very entertaining story. In the early eighties, I traveled in Italy alone frequently. The men swarmed around like flies. However, I never felt threatened. In the seventies, as a child, I also took buses into downtown Washington DC. to get to school. Fortunately, nothing ever happened, either. It was a different time. I was also surprised at this family's over protective attitude. However, all cities have become much more dangerous in the last decade. Like Bill, I was not quite sure when this story took place. But that didn't matter. Phil, a distant family member, turns out to be more problematic than the strangers in the bar. Weaving in the Greek myth was inspiring. Very well done, Kristina!
ReplyDeleteA thought-provoking story. I was most intrigued by the short flash-forward scene in which Melissa gets the Proserpina tattoo and muses about agency--and the inevitable pain it entails.
ReplyDeleteThis coming of age story most excellently captures that moment between youth and adulthood when a person begins to claim their own narrative.
ReplyDeleteIt is also an amazing exploration of autonomy, desire, and the tension between familial obligation and personal freedom.
Well done!
I loved the exploration of Proserpina's story here and, more specifically, Melissa's exploration of why it's so important to her. So significant (and so annoying) that a man assigned to protect her is the reason she didn't get to the statue!
ReplyDelete