Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Thesmophoria

2019; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 127; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sew.2019.0025

1934-421X

Melissa Febos,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Thesmophoria Melissa Febos (bio) 1. Kathodos Rome, July. The midsummer air thick with cigarette smoke and exhaust. By the time my plane had touched down, I’d been awake for almost twenty-four hours, three of which I’d spent waiting at the airport for a rental car. I’d driven into the city amid bleating horns and darting mopeds. I parked in a questionable spot and wove through the crowded sidewalks until I found the address of the tiny apartment I’d rented. Upstairs, I pulled the curtains shut and crawled into the strange bed with its coarse white sheets. I posted a photo on Facebook of my shiny exhausted face — Italia! — and instantly fell asleep. I woke to three text messages from my mother. You’re in Italy?? My ticket is for next month! Melly??? Months previous, she’d cleared her schedule of psychotherapy patients to meet me in Naples. From there, our plan was to drive to [End Page 274] the tiny fishing town on the Sorrento Coast where her grandmother had been born, and where I’d rented another apartment for a week. I frantically scrolled through our emails, scanning for dates. It was true. I’d typed the wrong month in our initial correspondence about the trip. Weeks later, we’d forwarded each other our ticket confirmations, which obviously neither of us had closely read. The panic I felt was more than my disappointment at the ruin of our shared vacation, to which I had so been looking forward. It was more than the sorrow I felt at what must have been her hours of panic while I slept, or her imminent disappointment as she corroborated the facts herself. It was more than the fear that she’d be angry with me (who wouldn’t be angry with me?) because my mother’s anger never lasted. Imagine a foundation as delicate and intricate as honeycomb, a structure that could easily be crushed by the careless hand of error. Now, atop it, imagine a structure that has weathered many blows, some more careless than others. The dread did not rise from my thoughts but from my gut, from some corporeal logic that had kept meticulous track of every mistake before this one. That believed there was a finite number of times one could break someone’s heart before it hardened to you. ________ My mother, who had been such a lonely child, wanted a daughter. Melissa, she explained to me, as soon as I was old enough to learn the story, means honeybee. Later, I learned that it was the name of the priestesses of Demeter. Melissa, from meli, which means honey, like Melindia or Melinoia, those pseudonyms of Persephone. Is it too obvious to compare us to those two? I don’t know how it feels to create a body with my own. Maybe [End Page 275] I never will. I remember, though, how my mother nursed me until I was nearly two years old and already speaking in full sentences. When I moved to solid food, she fed me bananas and kiefer, whose tartness I still crave. She sang me to sleep against her freckled chest. She read to me and cooked for me and carried me with her everywhere. What a gift it was to be so loved, to trust in my own safety. All children are built for this, but not all parents rise to the task. Not my father, so she left him. We moved in with her mother and then, after several months, to a house full of women who had decided to live without men. One day on the shore, we found our sea captain strumming a guitar, the man who became my real father. From the day he and my mother met, he never knew one of us without the other. Now, whenever I see him, one of the first things he always says to me is, Ah! Just now, you looked exactly like your mother. They dote on the memory of me as a child just as they doted on me when I was a child. Fat and happy, always talking. You were so cute, they...