The Door
Dianna Vagianos Armentrout
Caves have no doors.
In Kalamoti, Chios, I photograph doors. Some have chipped paint. Green. Brown. Blue. New doors. Ancient doors.
The stenakia* are so narrow I back into the wall of a house to let a small car drive by. When my father grew up in Greece in the 50s and 60s, when my Despinaki grew up in the 20s, people rode donkeys down the streets, past doors and windows. Neighbors and relatives came and went through doors of houses and churches, walking up and down the streets. They lived together, raising their children together. They baked bread in large outdoor ovens together.
I am a divorced woman walking along the streets of my island people for the first time at 38 years old. Pregnant without a husband, but I don’t know this yet.
I’ve always lived inside a door.
In my crib I see the door close. Bright yellow walls. Circus linoleum on the floor. A lion on a stool. A tamer holding a whip. Sirens wail back and forth to the hospital around the corner. Were there acrobats and monkeys? Light enters through two windows. One a gateway to one tree in every season. Boys play basketball in the cement courtyard of the larger apartment building I see from my window. The noise annoys me. I watch the moon as a child from my bed, but first I sleep in a crib until my sister is born.
At night the door is ajar when I try to sleep, eyes wide open. I see a sliver of light coming from the kitchen past the square hallway into my bedroom. My mother talks to her friends on the phone. Sometimes she tells them things about me. I learn shame early.
The door opens. The door closes. Shame comes through the door and stays.
At the church my mother wants to run away. Seventeen. 300 people invited to the wedding. She walks through the wooden double doors with her father. If you go to college you won’t marry a Greek, he says. She walks down the aisle and marries, resenting her father and husband for decades.
She tells her young girl children, If you are ever about to get married, and you don’t want to go through with it, throw your flowers on the ground, pick up your dress and run. Don’t think about the people, the parents, the party, the money. Run.
Matina used to wear Red Door perfume.
In Astoria, Queens, after a man holds up Pappou in the garage and takes the money he carries from the restaurant, my grandparents install a black gate in front of the brown door. Black bars on the windows
In Athens my aunt’s balcony door opens to jasmine, gardenia.
In war, in occupation, my ancestors scurry inside when Turks, Italians, Germans come. They shut their doors. Hungry, dirty women and children hide behind doors of small family houses, pantries empty. Sometimes they hide behind doors of churches. They want to close the doors of their bodies and keep out the fathers, the soldiers, the uncles, the priests. Sometimes the husbands.
I enter the doorway of motherhood screaming. Native peoples say when a woman births she stands at the threshold of life and death. The soul enters this world from the other world.
Boy child, then girl child. The second time I stand in the doorway of our bedroom in Virginia, round and sad. Centuries sad. I walk through knowing that once she is born she will die in my arms. Blood and mucus in the birthing pool, an oak tree outside my window. I straddle two worlds. One for the living. One for the dead. I push.
The door to my heart is open wide after Mary Rose dies, even after I weep on the floor. I ugly-cry, as Shereen says, milk coming in, my world shattered because I walked through the door of the child and said, Yes. I’ll be your mother in life and death.
The ocean has no doors. You enter, you threshold in the waves, you walk through to the deep.
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* narrow streets
DIANNA VAGIANOS ARMENTROUT is a writer, teacher and workshop facilitator. Her memoir Walking the Labyrinth of My Heart: A Journey of Pregnancy, Grief and Newborn Death was published in 2016. Dianna’s writing appears or is forthcoming in The Vermont Literary Review, For Women Who Roar, The Connecticut Review, UnchasteAnthology Volume 3, Into the Void and Inkwell among others. She is finishing her novel about her female Greek ancestors, and is seeking a publisher for her first poetry collection. She blogs at www.diannavagianos.com.