Hunters and Gatherers Read online

  “We’d love to!” cried Hegwitha.

  Isis awarded each of them a separate lambent smile. “It’s always so icky to ask: Are you two…together? This is the last place to feel self-conscious about it. As priestesses, we’re free to love whomever we wish. Some of us are gay, straight, asexual. I’ve been celibate for years. I’ve been working to achieve total omnisexual receptivity, so that just walking around is like having sex with the rocks and trees and plants—”

  “No, we’re not together!” said Martha, so vehemently that Hegwitha and Isis flinched. “I should tell you…I didn’t even know Hegwitha…or anyone…I was just hanging out at the beach, and I saw the women gathering, so I decided to come over…”

  Isis smiled. How absurd of Martha to imagine that she’d decided. “Don’t we think the Goddess sent you? I don’t suppose there can be any doubt about that, do you?”

  Of course not! Martha shook her head. Then she said she wasn’t sure she could stay over, she was visiting a friend’s parents, she would have to call and—

  “Well,” Isis interrupted. “We can play that by ear. For now, you two go and find empty rooms. When you’re dry and comfy, come have some hot mulled wine.”

  Isis directed Martha and Hegwitha down a corridor, past closed doors through which floated an aquatic murmur of voices. At last Martha found an open door and an empty bedroom. Hegwitha slipped in after her.

  “No point messing up two rooms,” Hegwitha said. “Especially if you’re not staying.”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t staying,” Martha snapped. “I have to make a phone call.”

  “Whatever,” said Hegwitha. She shrugged and turned her back and crossed her arms and lifted her T-shirt. She was facing the mirror, and before Martha could turn away she saw, reflected in the glass, Hegwitha’s large pillowy breasts and an immense lumpy scar bunching up the center of her chest, like a pulled seam the length of her rib cage.

  Martha slipped on Isis’s robe, which capaciously swallowed Martha’s body and spit out her head. Before sliding her arms into the sleeves, she reached up under the robe and shucked off her wet shirt and swimsuit.

  Hegwitha regarded her with disdain. “I know what kind of girl you were. One of the prissy girls who knew how to change in the locker room so nobody saw an inch of skin, while the rest of us tripped on our underpants and flashed the entire gym class.”

  How repressed and pathetic this made Martha sound: modest, prudish, withholding. And how unfair to be blamed for what wasn’t her fault. Some people liked showing their bodies; others simply didn’t, and covering up was as natural as blinking in bright light. Summers, during college, Martha’s friends had gone skinny-dipping. You were not supposed to be ashamed; you went numb and took off your clothes as if you were at the doctor’s, until the water covered you, hid you, and you were safe. You were not supposed to look, though Martha’s boyfriends always did—not at her, whom they could see any time, but at other girls. No wonder Martha liked swimming. It was like sex, in a way: a brief respite from self-consciousness—from consciousness altogether!

  Dennis had loved to look at Martha, who always found it flattering until the morning she’d awakened to find him staring at her thigh. She craned her neck to see what he was gazing at: a small tangled nest of blue veins that he continued to scrutinize, and they watched together as her white flesh curdled and puckered in front of their eyes.

  “In the matriarchies,” Hegwitha said, “everyone ran around naked. The fig leaf was a male sky-god invention. Men despise female bodies, they’re the ones who have made us ashamed…”

  But if modesty was a conditioned response for which they could thank the male sky god, why had Hegwitha mocked Martha for wanting to hide her body? And hadn’t Isis said that these chafing and all-concealing black caftans were a female creation? Martha lightly struck her forehead to silence the pesky fact checker blithering away behind it.

  “What’s the matter?” Hegwitha said.

  “Nothing,” said Martha. “Really. Saving Isis was exhausting, I guess. Even though I’m a pretty good swimmer…”

  Hegwitha sneered dismissively—and with good reason, thought Martha, embarrassed to have boasted about her athletic ability.

  “I must be really out of shape,” she said.

  “I’ll leave you alone,” said Hegwitha. “That’s obviously what you want.”

  “No, not at all,” lied Martha.

  But Hegwitha was already gone.

  Martha glanced in the mirror at her pale globule of a face with its cap of iodine-colored hair bubbling up from the neck of her caftan. Then she took a deep breath and left the room and nearly plowed into a woman lurching down the hall on crutches.

  Martha had noticed her earlier, coming up from the beach. Sinewy, boyish, with metal-rimmed glasses and steely short hair, arrested at indeterminate age between twenty-five and forty, she wore a baseball cap turned backward, black jeans, and a T-shirt printed with Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. She backed up and shut her bedroom door with the tip of a crutch.

  “Gangway,” she called to Martha. “One-legged dykes from hell!” She leaned her weight on the crutch and held out her hand. “Good to meet you. I’m Joy.”

  Martha said, “I’m Martha.”

  “Right. Gotcha,” said Joy.

  Joy’s eyes followed Martha’s to the cast on her leg. “I took a little nap,” she explained. “In front of an oncoming train. The train happened to be carrying nuclear waste, the ultimate testosterone breakdown product. Speaking of hormones: it was really heroic, your jumping in to save Isis.”

  “I don’t know about heroic,” Martha said. Only now did she wonder why she’d reacted first—after all, she was a stranger who’d drifted into this crowd of believers who should have followed Isis blindly through harrowing trials by water and fire. Maybe it was just that: Martha’s detachment had freed her to jump into the sea while the others were stuck in the mire of their own fantasies and preconceptions, the history they had to slog through before they could get to the ocean. Or maybe what inhibited them was their jewelry, their jeans and long dresses—whereas Martha had been wearing only a bathing suit and shirt.

  “Bullshit,” said Joy. “We all saw what happened. But people are going to give you a hard time because you beat them to the punch. You dove in and rescued her while they were standing there scratching their butts. I can afford to say that: there was nothing I could do. Plus, having been pretty heroic myself, and with this cast to prove it, I’m not threatened by courage, I can respect it in other women.”

  “Thanks,” said Martha.

  “Thank you,” Joy replied.

  Martha was motioning for Joy to precede her down the hall when Joy’s door flew open and a willowy young woman appeared, glaring, in the doorway. She had red hair caught in elaborate pre-Raphaelite loops and a pale, tear-streaked face.

  “Diana, Martha,” Joy said. “Martha, Diana.”

  “Good to meet you,” said Martha.

  “I know her name is Martha. I was there on the beach today. How stupid do you think I am, Joy? Just because I…” Diana’s lower lip trembled.

  “Sor-ree, babe,” Joy said. “Diana thinks every conversation is about her leaving grad school and having a shitty job now like the rest of the world, and everyone assuming she’s stupid—”

  “Not everyone,” said Diana. “Just you, Joy.”

  “Oh!” said Martha. “Diana, what were you studying in grad school?”

  “Anthropology,” said Diana.

  “How interesting,” said Martha.

  “Après vous.” Joy pointed her crutch along the hall.

  Making an awkward quarter-turn, Martha continued down the hall, followed by Joy’s tapping crutches and, after her, Diana.

  In the living room a half-dozen women sat on the pillows around the low round table. They partly stood and smiled when Martha and her new friends walked in.

  At that moment a clock chimed. Everything stopped till it struck six. The t
all clock was painted with planets, stars, and faux-medieval landscapes.

  “Our grandmother clock,” Diana said.

  Martha ventured into the room, expecting the others to follow, but they stopped in the doorway and left Martha to enter alone. She wandered over toward Isis Moonwagon—the only person she knew by name.

  Isis was talking to a substantial woman with a mop of curly gray hair and a flowing pantsuit in blue-and-purple tie-dye.

  “Titania, dear,” Isis was saying, “we’ve been through this before. Pollution is pollution, and it makes no difference who puts it in the river, low-caste Hindu women who have been dyeing saris for centuries or a petrochemical plant in Gary, Indiana—”

  “I’m from Indiana,” Martha said.

  “Not Gary, certainly?” the tie-dye woman said.

  “No,” said Martha. “Bloomington.”

  “Oh,” Isis said. “I’ve lectured there. Were your parents academics?”

  “No,” said Martha. “My dad sold insurance. I mean, until he died.”

  “What a terrible job,” said Isis. “Trafficking in fear. No one wanting to pay premiums or getting any returns till something devastating happens, and having to deal with everyone’s pain for some faceless corporation…”

  How did Isis know the tragedy of Martha’s father’s life? People assumed that selling insurance was just a boring job, but they hadn’t heard her father at dinner, his nightly litany of bad luck, illness, house fires, and head-on collisions. No wonder he had stopped talking much—and had a heart attack at fifty. He had died on the front lawn, on the riding mower; everyone said it was fortunate that he hadn’t been run over but had fallen off before the mower slammed into the hedge. After five years, Martha still couldn’t think about his death without experiencing a great shocking jolt of bewilderment, grief, and sorrow. It was awful to lose someone in a way that seemed odd or funny. She almost never told anyone the part about the mower and would certainly not tell these women, who might say that having a coronary while mowing the lawn was the inevitable outcome of typically compulsive, type-A male behavior.

  The woman in tie-dye said, “Isis doesn’t miss a chance to dump on corporations.”

  Isis said, “Martha, this is Titania. Titania is the founder and CEO of Love’s Body, which, as I’m sure you know, earns a trillion dollars yearly from ecologically sound bubble bath—”

  “Not just bubble bath,” said Titania. “We put out a whole line of—”

  “Martha works for Mode,” said Isis.

  “You do?” said Titania. “I think we advertise in Mode. That is, I think we used to before the recession set in. Now we mostly stick with the New Age rags whose rates are a bit less inflated.”

  “I’m just a fact checker, really,” said Martha.

  “I see,” Titania said.

  A silence fell. Then Martha asked Isis if she could please use her phone.

  “Of course,” Isis said. “I’ll show you to my study where you can talk in private.”

  “It doesn’t have to be private,” Martha said. “I’m just calling my friend’s parents.”

  But Isis was already breezing through the white high-ceilinged rooms until she reached a wood-paneled library lined with shelves of books artfully spaced around niches displaying more geodes, skulls, and figurines. Martha skimmed the spines of the books: anthropology, mythology, women’s history, philosophy.

  “Academia.” Isis sighed. “What a teensy little world and everyone viciously defending their progressively teensier little fiefdoms. My former colleagues still can’t get over the fact that a woman with a dual doctorate in social anthropology and philosophy and significant classical Freudian training could have ditched it all for what they imagine as lesbian full-moon orgies, riding naked on a broomstick!

  “I got so sick of having to justify my ideas to those phallocentric Freudian morons who think that female spirituality is a synonym for penis envy. Penis worship, that is. They think we adore their dicks just like they do! Meanwhile the feminists hated me, too, for suggesting that women were anything more than men in drag. Academic feminists have such a warped investment in the sexes being identical except for their reproductive organs. As if the womb was nothing more than a baby incubator, as if it didn’t connect us to a more cyclical life process. It’s not just for lack of opportunity that women don’t rape and start wars.”

  Isis had a confiding manner that assumed you thought just as she did, though from time to time she paused for your opinion, or, more accurately, your concurrence.

  Was Martha’s opinion being asked? She thought men and women were different. Different bodies, different lives—surely that counted for something? Though women were no less intelligent, as men so often seemed to believe, even men who knew perfectly well that they weren’t supposed to believe this. Martha liked and disliked individual women and men, not entire genders, though it was undeniably true that only men broke your heart, unless of course you were lesbian and gave women an equal chance. Martha’s women friends were nicer to her, they seemed to genuinely like her. At worst they were inconsiderate, but never purposely cruel.

  She’d be glad to see women running the world, at least for a change. They could hardly make things worse than they already were! On the other hand, the indignities of daily life at Mode suggested that a world run by women might not be heaven on earth.

  Isis interpreted Martha’s silence as a sign of agreement—perhaps such profound agreement that Martha had lost the power of speech. She said, “It’s such a rarity to be around people who understand your work. Our work.”

  But Martha’s work, fact checking at Mode, was instantly comprehensible. The point was simple clarity, truth in its lowest form, facts, and the first and most obvious fact was that no one liked hearing from Martha: not the librarians she bothered with tedious research questions; not the publicists whose clients a writer had quoted, often wrongly; certainly not the writers themselves, who had gone on to other projects and often hadn’t any idea what article Martha meant.

  Only Eleanor, Martha’s boss, didn’t realize how unwelcome Martha’s calls were. She saw no reason why Martha shouldn’t intrude on someone’s private moment to verify some name or date that every schoolchild knew. The best thing about the job was that it taught Martha not to take rejection personally. That is, she’d thought it had, until Dennis mused aloud that it might be good for them to start dating other people.

  Martha knew which other people he meant: a woman named Lucinda, a strapping, square-jawed preppy girl with thick yellow hair like a doll’s. Lucinda and Dennis were doing Othello in their acting class. Inspired by Dennis’s Othello, Lucinda was pouring the full force of her talent into her Desdemona: three acts of bovine adoration, and then compliantly dying. At an open rehearsal, Martha noticed how much grabbing and pushing it took to smother Desdemona, though in other versions she’d seen, the murder was almost surgical, like etherizing a frog. And of course it had occurred to her that Dennis just wanted to touch Lucinda.

  “Are you all right?” said Isis. “You look positively fried.”

  “I’m fine,” Martha said. “Really.”

  Isis gave Martha’s elbow a squeeze. “I’ll leave you alone,” she said. “Make your call.”

  Martha watched Isis warring with herself—and losing. “I assume it’s a local or credit-card call. I feel vile for even asking. But there have been real nightmares: people calling Seoul, Korea!”

  “Calling Korea?” said Martha.

  “Well,” said Isis. “Trying.”

  “Island Pines,” Martha said. “Is that local?”

  “Right up the beach,” replied Isis. “You could practically do it by tom-tom.”

  Gretta’s mother answered the phone in a high voice, clenched for disaster. Martha’s news—that she might stay over with friends—was hardly the catastrophe she’d imagined.

  “Good,” she said, audibly relieved that she and her husband could have dinner without having to entertain an unsatisfactor
y substitute daughter. She didn’t ask who were these friends Martha had just met. She wasn’t Martha’s mother. And what if she were? Her own daughter was currently engaged in a forty-eight-hour sexual marathon with Xavier.

  She said, “We leave the key in the mailbox. Don’t worry about waking us. Watch TV, please, if you like.”

  Martha’s vision of herself in Gretta’s parents’ condo was lit by the icy glow of their TV, flickering like the northern lights. That was what persuaded her to spend the night at Isis’s. It would be more uncomfortable and complex, but far less boring and lonely.

  In the living room the women had got up from the low Turkish table and were warily circling a buffet of wine and cheese—not the hot mulled wine Isis had promised but California jug. Already, used paper cups were grouped in unsightly arrangements, wine beading up like droplets of blood on their waxy skins.

  As Martha filled a cup, a woman behind her whispered, “Cheapo Chianti. Winewise, Isis is still carrying baggage from her graduate student days.”

  It was Titania, the organic cosmetics tycoon in the tie-dyed pantsuit. “Every time I come here, I bring a case of something good. Nothing special, a modest ten-dollar Chardonnay. And Starling spirits it away, so to speak, and we drink this stomach acid. Have you met Starling, Isis’s secretary? Of course, we’re all supposed to believe she’s just Isis’s watchdog, bodyguard, and best friend. I’ve known Isis forever, but even I wouldn’t know the truth if we didn’t share an accountant. Though I guess the fact that Isis pays the bills doesn’t prove they’re lovers. Isis claims to be celibate, but no one ever actually is. Except me. And not by choice, so I’m not boasting.

  “Probably Starling saves the good wine for her and Isis to scarf down weeknights. I’ve brought it up with Isis. She says gallon jugs are more ecological. Don’t you hate it when people use the planet to make a point? Ecologically, we should all be drinking out of pig bladders.”