Hunters and Gatherers Read online

  Intent on what she was saying, Titania had stopped walking and, from politeness, so had Martha. Now they had to hurry to catch up, and as they neared the gate, they found the others involved in some sort of fracas at the check-in counter.

  “What do you mean you put us in the smoking section?” Starling was demanding of a young man with a clipped reddish mustache. “We made reservations years ago for nonsmoking seats.”

  “Smoking and nonsmoking,” said the man, “cannot be reserved in advance.”

  “On what planet is that?” Starling’s voice shot up an octave, partly to compete with a broken light buzzing behind a crumbling ceiling panel dribbling crumbs of asbestos.

  The clerk said, “There is legislation pending that will, make all domestic flights nonsmoking. But for now the last eight rows are still reserved for smokers.”

  “The last eight rows!” Isis paled visibly. “Oh, I get awfully airsick.”

  Hegwitha said, “Smoking won’t be so bad…And it’s safer, sitting in the back…”

  Starling regarded Hegwitha first with incomprehension, then horror, then flung one arm around her shoulders and dragged her up to the counter.

  “We have sick people with us,” Starling said. “This young woman has a critical illness. Several of us have asthma and could have potentially fatal reactions to cigarette smoke.”

  “Do they have medical clearance to fly?” the young man asked threateningly.

  “Of course not!” said Starling. “It’s not like that at all!”

  “What is that frightful noise?” said Titania.

  “Broken light, ma’am,” said the clerk. “Sorry. We’re working on it.”

  “Ma’am,” Titania mimicked, but the clerk gave no sign of hearing as he counted the women in the group.

  “I have ten tickets here,” he said. “Are there two more traveling with you?”

  “They’ll be here any second,” said Starling.

  “I hope so,” he said. “We’ll be boarding in about twenty minutes. As soon as you board, tell one of the flight attendants that there’s a problem, and whoever has time will try and switch you with a passenger in nonsmoking.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Joy. “Someone is really going to volunteer to get lung cancer so we can ride together up front.”

  The young man shrugged. Turning, they followed his transfixed gaze and saw Freya and Sonoma running toward them.

  “Blessed be,” said Bernie.

  “Blessed be,” said Diana and Hegwitha.

  “What the heck are they wearing?” said Joy.

  Freya had on a safari suit in a flowing buff-colored silk. Sonoma was decked out in Western boots, a fringed vest, and an Australian bushmen’s hat, and was trussed into her white satin miniskirt and gleaming cowboy shirt.

  “Check this out,” whispered Joy. “Ernest Hemingway and Buffalo Bill.”

  “Please,” said Titania. “Isak Dinesen and Annie Oakley.”

  “I can’t believe it,” said Diana. “The whole point of our trip is to study with Native Americans, and Sonoma’s done up like some nympho cowgirl. Is she aware that cowpokes were not exactly the Native Americans’ best friends?”

  “Of course she isn’t,” said Freya, who by now had reached the group and was fervidly kissing the air near the other women’s faces. “Unfortunately my daughter is too old for me to rip the cowboy hat off her head. What is that awful buzzing?”

  “Broken light,” Martha said.

  “Sisters, let’s not trash each other for our fashion choices.” Isis seemed to have regained some of the presence she’d lost on hearing they might have to ride in the last eight rows.

  Sonoma said, “Oh, duh, Mom. How retarded do you think I am? I know what I look like, I know about cowboys and Indians. That’s why I put on this stuff—to, like, call attention to it. This whole trip is middle-class white bullshit. You talk about respecting the Native Americans and remembering whose land it was. But we’re not doing anything to help the Indians get back their land. We’re just paying them to let us hang out with them in some nowhere desert town.”

  It was the longest, most articulate speech Sonoma had ever given. The women listened in stunned silence, at once humbled and annoyed to be receiving moral instruction from a thirteen-year-old. Martha thought of Jesus preaching to the elders in the temple. It was hard to picture the pre-adolescent Jesus as anything like Sonoma—resentful, uncommunicative, impossible to reach. Once, at Isis’s beach house, Martha was left alone in a room with Sonoma, who had refused to speak and seemed to enjoy Martha’s deepening discomfort.

  Bernie said, “Sonoma, that’s marvelous. We really had no idea that you were so politically conscious.”

  Sonoma’s rare smile was triumphant. It was daunting to watch her add the weapon of moral argument to her standing arsenal of youthful recklessness and sullen intractability. “We’re hitting all the tourist sights, like the Indians are Disney World. We’re flying out to see them, they’re not flying to see us. Most of them probably couldn’t even afford to travel by plane—”

  “Maria takes lots of planes,” said Isis. “She flies absolutely all over the place to do conferences and workshops. I saw her in Bolinas and the next week in Atlanta. She says her career is the equivalent of the seasonal tribal migrations—”

  “I’ll bet the unemployed alkies on her reservation aren’t traveling so much,” said Sonoma.

  “Right on, Sonoma,” said Joy.

  “Unemployed alkies,” said Freya. “Sonoma, I love it, where did you learn this?”

  “Sonoma really is conscious,” said Bernie. “Very good, Sonoma.”

  “Oh!” said Diana. “Speaking of conscious. Freya and Sonoma, we forgot to tell you: Joy and I aren’t a couple anymore!”

  “Cool,” Sonoma said.

  “Should we say we’re sorry?” Freya asked. “Or should we say we’re happy for you?”

  Just then they heard the voice of the man at the check-in desk, his peevish impatience amplified by the hoarse speaker system. “Due to a slight mechanical malfunction, departing flight 407 will be briefly delayed.” He expressed his airline’s apologies for any passenger inconvenience.

  “Briefly?” said Starling. “What’s briefly?”

  Titania said, “Fuck that. What’s a slight mechanical malfunction?”

  With a dizzy lurch of panic, Martha thought: I don’t want to die with these people! She longed desperately to find a telephone and call Dennis, then her mother, then Gretta. Or maybe she’d call Gretta first, then her mother, then Dennis.

  Dennis and her mother didn’t know she was going to Tucson. They would not think to seek her name among the lists of dead and missing. They would believe she was safe at home, or in her cell at Mode, when in fact she was ash and bone, sprinkled over the desert. She imagined a news photo of charred luggage scattered for miles, in this case the baggage she’d traveled with in the back of Joy’s van. She imagined phoning Dennis…and Dennis not taking her call…

  Isis said, “Let’s take a moment to lift ourselves out of the negativity we’re into and try to get centered and back in harmony with our higher Goddess minds.”

  Only then did Martha notice the other passengers in the waiting area: the elderly couples in matching pastel madras, making their winter escapes with the maximum carry-on luggage; a dozen teenage army recruits, whose pinfeather hair made Martha reach up and ruffle her own. A deaf couple argued in sign language; the woman gave the man the finger. Parents carried young children, sleeping in their arms, as if taking babies on a dangerous plane were a reasonable thing to do.

  Just behind Starling was a handsome Latino couple and their two children. At one point the mother looked stricken, and, handing the baby to her husband, scrabbled frantically in her purse and at last came up with the tickets. The father lifted the baby and sailed it through the air, bringing its smooth wide forehead in for a landing against his lips.

  Isis herded her group into an empty corner, where they sat in the closes
t approximation of a circle that the fixed plastic seats would allow. From her Tibetan shoulder bag Isis produced a large pink crystal, which the others passed around.

  When it was Titania’s turn, she looked into the crystal and said, “This beats a magazine!”

  “Blessed be,” said the women.

  Starling had been delegated to negotiate the seat change, but as soon as the no-smoking light went off, anarchy erupted, with the women gasping and coughing more than was possibly warranted and pounding their stewardess call buttons and squirming in their seats.

  “A gag-in,” cried Joy. “Excellent!”

  The flight attendant dispatched to deal with this volatile situation was the chilly evil twin of the man at the boarding gate. At first he insisted that their problem couldn’t be helped, but finally offered to see about it and, after some time, returned. Apparently he had managed to find eight flexible or greedy passengers who, in return for some undisclosed bribe, had agreed to inhale passive smoke for five lung-destroying hours. But nothing could dislodge two last selfish travelers, so that two of the Goddess women had to ride all the way to Tucson in a carcinogenic miasma.

  Hegwitha had already produced her crumpled pack of American Spirit cigarettes when Martha offered to join her. Martha felt compelled to do so, felt that it was expected, because she alone among the women hadn’t paid for her ticket. Giddy abandon swept through her as she volunteered, but when her offer was accepted, her eyes filled with self-pitying tears.

  The scattershot seating arrangement complicated the meditation that the group had planned to begin as the plane readied for takeoff. Their aim was to pray for the spirits of the other passengers, the crew, the pilot, and the copilot, and from there to let their positive vibrations extend to the plane itself, to the engines and panel controls and sensitive radar equipment, and beyond that to the clouds outside and the earth below. Luckily, Isis had distributed Xeroxed instructions, which each woman, separated from the rest, could follow on her own. Martha tried to beam healing love down to a damaged planet, but was distracted by Hegwitha, breathing loudly beside her.

  Isis had promised that the meditation would make them one with the plane and calm whatever normal fears they might have about flying. But Martha’s attempts to find inner peace only sharpened her awareness of how high above the ground they were, how fast they were traveling. She yearned for a magazine, for its powers of distraction, its ability to make you think of shampoo instead of fiery death. If she found herself reading pieces for the fact-checking challenges they must have presented, even that would replace her dread with a more manageable set of concerns.

  The other problem with Isis’s airplane meditation was that Martha didn’t know when to stop or how to decide if the earth had soaked up enough positive healing vibrations. Perhaps this would have been clearer had they all been together. Possibly this question was addressed on Isis’s Xeroxed instructions. But to find the directions and read them would end Martha’s meditation, regardless of whether it was safe yet to do so.

  Hegwitha was groping in the sides of her seat cushion, presumably for her cigarettes. Oh, predictable Hegwitha! Silently Martha thanked Hegwitha for releasing her from the airplane meditation, for once again having piloted her through a minor procedural snarl. From the start, Hegwitha had been her guide in the most basic Goddess matters. Guiltily, Martha knew that one reason she could so freely ask Hegwitha’s help was that she cared so little about Hegwitha’s good opinion.

  Martha much preferred the abstract idea of Hegwitha—stolidly facing down the world and even death itself—to the less heroic and more irritating reality of her presence. Martha still felt accountable and implicated, charged with an almost familial responsibility for Hegwitha’s well-being, despite her secret suspicion that Hegwitha didn’t much like her, though she continued to represent herself as Martha’s dearest friend.

  Hegwitha took several deep pulls on her cigarette before acknowledging that Martha was watching.

  “Listen,” she said, “I have to tell you something. It’s really heavy duty. So tell me now if you can’t handle it.”

  Martha instinctively inched away, then made herself move back toward Hegwitha. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know if I can lay this on you.”

  “I’d be happy to listen,” lied Martha.

  “Happy?” repeated Hegwitha. “Whatever. All right. I think I’m having a recurrence. I mean, I know I am.”

  It took Martha an instant to figure out what Hegwitha meant. Then she felt slightly weightless and queasy, as if the plane had suddenly lost altitude.

  “Are you sure?” she said.

  “I’ve got a tiny lump in my neck,” Hegwitha said. “I don’t know what else it could be.”

  She leaned toward Martha, showing her neck. Did she mean for Martha to touch it? Martha couldn’t even look. “Maybe it’s a swollen gland. I had this fat cyst once, on my arm—”

  “I doubt it,” Hegwitha said. “I’m pretty sure it’s Hodgkins again. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll die—though I guess it could come to that. But the bottom line is that it guarantees more doctors and chemo and shit.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Martha, so sincerely sympathetic that her voice caught in her throat and sounded strained and insincere.

  “What I wonder,” said Hegwitha, “is if I should tell the group. I mean, their healing energy might help me, plus it would be a major drag for me to pretend that nothing was wrong. On the other hand, I’d feel weird about taking up everyone’s time, so that this retreat that’s meant to be about learning from Native medicine might get dragged down to being just about my cancer.”

  Hegwitha was right on all counts. Scientists admitted that no one knew how body and mind were connected. And if Hegwitha even imagined the group could help her recover, how could Martha tell her to hide her illness from them? Besides, the sick and dying had the right of way, their wishes were granted first. Meanwhile, Martha’s less noble self was recoiling from the prospect of how grim it would be if Hegwitha’s health became the focus of the trip.

  “Tell people if you want,” said Martha. “I mean, if you think there’s even a chance that talking about it will help. Look, I’m sure everything’s going to be fine—”

  “What would you know about it?” Hegwitha snapped.

  “Nothing,” Martha admitted.

  “Sorry,” said Hegwitha. “I just don’t know if I’m ready to deal with it so openly. Maybe I could use a week of meditation to start to handle it myself…”

  But how could Hegwitha get through a week before she called her doctors? Would the delay make a difference, and didn’t she want to know?

  Just then, Joy appeared, lurching down the aisle on the lighter cast she’d gotten from her doctors.

  “If either of you wants to switch seats,” she offered, “I’d be glad to sit here. That is, for around five minutes tops—my absolute total tolerance for nicotine, benzene, carbon monoxide, and all the other free-circulating poisons.”

  “No, thanks.” Having just heard Hegwitha’s confession, Martha could hardly rush off. “It’s not so bad,” she added, defensively.

  “That would be great,” said Hegwitha and, to Martha’s shock, got up and left.

  Joy flopped down with as much abandon as her cast allowed. “Well, here we are at thirty thousand feet in a giant jet-propelled penis. I don’t think aeronautics is a female preoccupation. If we ruled the world, time travel might have preceded travel in space. Wouldn’t you love to be able to hop a ship and hang with an ancient shaman priestess in a cave with a tribe of hunter-gatherers somewhere in the South of France?”

  “The South of France would be great,” murmured Martha, in the vague tone of someone making a date she has no intention of keeping.

  Joy said, “Wouldn’t it have been neat to have lived before we knew the planet was dying? How do people get through the day knowing it’s going to happen and not doing something or hating themselves for not doing more? I know ec
ologic selfishness isn’t just a male thing—I like my van and my washer-dryer. But I can’t understand why only people like us are panicked about it, why everyone else tools along…”

  Martha said, “You should be the last one to worry about not doing enough. Getting your leg broken by a train carrying nuclear wastes—”

  Joy said, “I hate myself every minute I’m not lying down in front of the train. By the way, I think your friend Hegwitha is putting the moves on Diana.”

  “You’re kidding,” Martha said. “What makes you think that?” She had never seen Hegwitha as a sexual being and could not imagine her putting the moves on anyone—a gross example of prejudice against those outside the narrow norms of good health and good looks. Maybe Joy was paranoid, jealous, and suspicious, faults Diana had often accused her of in their public fights. Pity the unfortunate lover whom no one believes and who so often turns out to be an oracular source of truth. Martha recalled the quiet rage in the eyes of Dennis’s ex-girlfriend, whom they’d visited in the country and on whose couches and living room floor they’d made love whenever their hostess stepped out.

  Joy said, “Oh, paranoia. Plus lots of tiny things I’ve noticed. Like Hegwitha always sticking up for Diana. Nothing you’d pay attention to unless, someone was siding with your lover against you.”

  Hegwitha was so often grouchy and disapproving, Martha hadn’t registered her as being on anyone’s side. But now, as she considered it, Hegwitha and Diana seemed made for each other. They were both prone to melancholy, chronically aggrieved—at least Hegwitha had good reason. You could picture them fanning each other’s smoldering resentments until the heat of passion cooled and they turned their peevishness on each other.

  Often, one heard stories about the dying falling in love. Martha hoped that Hegwitha was putting the moves on Diana. She stifled the urge to tell Joy the bad news about Hegwitha’s health. But it wasn’t gossip to pass on for a dramatic reaction, or to console a nervous lover, or even to lighten the burden of being the only one who knew. It was Hegwitha’s secret, hers to confess or conceal.