Hunters and Gatherers Read online

  “So let’s just go around the circle and say our names. I’m Isis Moonwagon.” The women laughed—they knew that!

  Isis. Joy. Diana. Starling. Titania. Freya. Sonoma. Bernie. The women introduced themselves, some with shy, retiring smiles, others aggressive or brazen. Luckily Martha knew their names, because she could hardly hear them through the fog of anxiety generated by the prospect of having to say her own.

  Hegwitha said, “My name is Randi, but my Goddess name is Hegwitha.”

  Under the murmurs that greeted this, Martha mumbled, “I’m Martha.”

  “Beautiful,” said Isis. “May the Goddess protect us all. Let’s start tonight with the Talking Stick…” Several women applauded. Joy whistled through her teeth.

  “Like so many of our rituals,” Isis said, “the Talking Stick derives from Native American ceremony. It’s something we’re always mindful of—the indigenous people who lived here before the white man stole their land. In this ritual we pass the Talking Stick, and no one is allowed to talk except the person holding the stick. As long as we have the stick, we can freely share our hopes and fears and dreams. But when we don’t, our work is to listen and be caring and not judge.”

  Not judge, not judge, not judge, Martha thought, repeating it like a mantra until the words melted into gibberish, and maybe that was the point. You gave up fine distinctions that were really just reasons to feel superior, gave up watching from the edge of other people’s lives and surrendered and shut your eyes and jumped into the warm gooey center. But wait a minute! Martha made her living by making fine distinctions, and some part of her—a large part of her—thought they should be made.

  “First,” Isis said, “I’m going to light a little smudge, Little Sister Sage, the herb Native people use as medicine smoke. Smudge removes the kind of negativity we pick up every day in city traffic. It’s a bit smoky—is everyone fine with breathing?”

  Martha nodded, and Hegwitha said, “Can I inhale?”

  Isis lit the incense: a bundle of twine tied with string. Cupping their palms, the women wafted the smoke toward their faces and hair, greedily sucking in the acrid, smoldering-mattress smell. Then Isis raised a war club decorated with feathers and cloth scraps. “Great Goddess,” she prayed, “help us find our voices.” She looked around. “Okay. Who wants to start?”

  Freya reached for the stick, but Isis whisked it out of her grasp and said, “Let me say one thing.”

  She held the stick in both hands and bowed her head. “I want to share how lucky I feel for having been saved from drowning. I thought I’d had it out there. I was terrified, choking, and then I felt the most amazing peace, and I knew the Goddess was with me.”

  It took hearing this a second time for Martha to realize it wasn’t true. The panicky woman she’d rescued hadn’t found the peace of the Goddess. But why was Martha being so small? Did she want more credit? Recognition for how tough it had been to save the struggling, flailing Isis? Probably Isis was trying to make the others feel better, reassuring them with the good news about her serene near-death moment—while the cold little fact checker, Martha, was insisting she stick to what happened.

  “Blessed be,” said the women.

  Isis surrendered the Talking Stick to Freya, who pressed it to her bosom.

  “A miracle occurred this week,” Freya said. “My daughter began to menstruate.”

  Bernie squealed with joy and leaned over to pat Sonoma, who shrank from her touch.

  Freya said, “I was shocked by how blown away I was. When she told me, I burst into tears. I was amazed that my daughter’s body was a woman’s body. And we were women together, with all the mess and hopes and fears.”

  Martha didn’t dare meet anyone’s eyes. Already she had realized that she would probably never have much sympathy for Freya. That was why Martha didn’t belong in this, or any, religious group—her heart had already turned against some, if not all, of its members. Martha tried to imagine how it would feel to be Freya seeing her daughter grow up. But all she could think of was how it would feel to grow up with a mother like Freya.

  “It was like giving birth to her all over again,” said Freya. “But with a new sort of joy and pain, an affirmation of the feminine. I felt I was giving birth to myself, to my own reawakening womanliness—”

  “This sucks,” said Sonoma. “It’s my body.”

  “Excuse me, dear,” said Freya. “I was speaking.”

  “Sucks,” Sonoma repeated. “I can’t believe you told them.”

  “I have the Talking Stick,” Freya reminded her.

  “Sonoma’s right,” said Bernie. “It’s Sonoma’s personal stuff. But it’s complicated, Sonoma. Because your mom was telling us something about herself, not just about you.”

  “It’s my body,” Sonoma insisted.

  “We know it’s your body, Sonoma,” said Isis. “And we know your body is an issue between you and your mom that you’ll both have to work on. Still you must admit that your mom’s weeping because you got your period is better than her bugging you to lose weight and get superthin.”

  Several women smiled at this. Sonoma wasn’t among them.

  Isis said, “This should prove that your mom does care—”

  “Wait! Listen.” The women turned and stared: gloomy, silent Diana was speaking. “Lots of indigenous societies have fabulous first-menstruation rituals. Wouldn’t it be great if we could do something like that here? Some matrilineal Native American tribes had actual vision quests. At menarche girls go off alone into the desert to meditate and fast until they meet their spirit guide.”

  “That would suck, too,” said Sonoma.

  “The weird thing is,” Diana continued, “it’s kind of why I left graduate school. I kept trying to discuss this with my thesis adviser. I was saying it was so tragic that we had no initiation rites. And he said: We have our rituals. We have kids chugging six-packs and wrecking their cars on prom night.”

  “Cynical shit,” said Titania.

  “What an asshole,” Hegwitha said.

  “Thank you,” said Diana, smiling at Hegwitha, and Martha sensed a ripple of jealousy emanating from Joy.

  “Well, we do have our initiation rites,” Bernie said. “Mine was my dad getting furious when he found out I’d got my period, which meant he couldn’t molest me for a couple of days each month. So I started hoarding bloody pads and leaving them in the bathroom so he’d think I had it even when I didn’t.”

  “That never stopped my dad,” Starling said. “He kept on, right through.”

  “Mine, too,” said Joy. “That son of a bitch. Afterward I could hear him washing off the blood.”

  After a silence Diana said, “Sonoma should have a ritual. Something private to mark this new stage and invoke the Goddess whose blood flows with the cycles of Earth our Mother—”

  “No way,” Sonoma said.

  “You know,” Titania mused, “I have a problem with this subject. Sometimes I feel like the gynocentric cultures were saying that we should give up everything and spend a week in the menstrual hut every month.”

  “I hear you,” said Bernie. “And sometimes I agree. Other times I wonder if it’s just because I’m menopausal—”

  “I rest my case!” said Titania. “We’re still calling ourselves menopausal when we’re supposed to be crones, wise women, respected for our ancient knowledge. Hah!”

  “Freya has the Talking Stick,” Isis reminded them. “But first let’s finish with Sonoma. Sonoma, this is about what you want. Maybe you could have a private ritual. Your period is going to come every month, you’ll have to live with it somehow. Not that you need go overboard. In the seventies there was a frenzy for slide shows of dirty tampons and a fairly extremist thing about tasting menstrual blood—”

  “Oh, gross,” said Sonoma, wincing so sharply that Martha recoiled, too. Sonoma knew it was creepy to be spending Labor Day weekend with her mother’s uncool friends, discussing menstrual blood. But if she wanted to be cool, why was she dre
ssed like that? Why couldn’t she be outrageous in a more conventional way: ripped jeans, green spiked hair, her face pierced in five separate places?

  Freya said, “If I have the Talking Stick, why are we still on Sonoma?”

  “The thing to remember,” said Isis, “is that each month sends us a reminder of our power, the power to give birth—”

  “I don’t ever want to have kids,” said Sonoma. “Everyone knows my generation is the end of the line.”

  “But you could have a daughter,” said Starling.

  “Like really great.” Sonoma’s pink face was like the skin formed by boiling milk, in this case over a bubbling caldron of pure exasperation. It was both touching and frightening to see a girl so young, so angry.

  In the silence they heard Joy say to Diana, “Vision quest bullshit. The thing you like about it is the fasting for a week.”

  “Maybe you two need the Talking Stick,” said Isis.

  “I don’t know…” said Diana.

  Joy said, “I do,” and seized the stick. “Things between Diana and me haven’t exactly improved. She quit eating for three days; I caught her slipping her dinner to the dog. I’m sick of the obsessiveness, the excuses about carcinogens, the steamed broccoli meals, no smoking, no drinking, no sex. I’m a Catholic school survivor myself, and it’s like I’m back where I started. Catechism, confession—but now the sin is eating instead of sex!”

  Isis sighed. “The church had some of us in its stranglehold for years. It imprinted us like ducklings. No matter how we raise our consciousness, it’s hard to undo our training: learning to worship the man on the cross, the man in the sky, the man in the confessional who wouldn’t be there if girls weren’t nasty and dirty. But it’s only the sky god who wants us to be ashamed and punish our bodies for our desires. The Goddess wants us to celebrate the holiness in ourselves and in each other.”

  Once, in bed, Dennis told Martha that men and women would never speak the same language because women saw sex as a sacrament while for guys it was recreation. But wasn’t there something holy about love, no matter how misdirected? Love was something to focus on, to give your rapt undivided attention. There had been a time when Martha had only to think about Dennis and the chatter around her would stop, and she would experience the silence and peace she imagined people got in church. Clearly, it was stupid to choose an object of veneration for whom you were interchangeable with a nitwit named Lucinda.

  Isis said, “Martha, are you with us? You look positively stricken.”

  “I’m fine,” said Martha, flattered that Isis was paying attention.

  Isis said, “Since we’re on the subject of food and sex—”

  “What other subjects are there?” interrupted Titania.

  “What foods do we put on the Goddess’s altar?” Isis asked rhetorically. “Think. What are the Goddess’s favorite foods?”

  “Milk and honey and eggs,” said Starling.

  “Precisely,” answered Isis. Then the women began to laugh—knowing, yet quietly astounded: the way the religious marvel at new evidence of the divine.

  The God of First Lutheran’s favorite food was macaroni and cheese, with jello-marshmallow salad running a close second. He was a stern but forgiving, reasonable god, very quid pro quo, not a god who made you do penance or starve yourself to death, but neither did He encourage you to celebrate your body.

  Isis said, “The Goddess isn’t about deprivation. She wants us to recreate the matriarchy, when everyone worshipped Her and lived in peace and gentleness toward one another and the Earth.”

  “Joy,” Diana muttered. “What a fucking misnomer.”

  “Diana,” said Isis. “Please.”

  Joy stared hostilely at the Talking Stick, not knowing what to do with it when no one made a move to take it.

  Starling said, “How come whenever we pass the Talking Stick, it always turns into a bitch session? No one ever wants to take the stick when they have something good to say.”

  Joy said, “I never understood why it had to be a stick. Why can’t it be a Talking Egg?”

  “Well, it’s tricky,” said Bernie, “to share our happy and positive feelings.”

  “That’s how we were brought up,” Diana said. “Women aren’t programmed to be happy. We’re meant to be sacrificial victims—”

  “Perhaps one of the new women would like the stick?” Isis said. “Only if you want to. We all know it’s scary at first, but like so many scary things, worth it…”

  Martha shot a glance at Hegwitha, hoping she would demur, and then Martha could refuse as well: they would be in this together. But Hegwitha was already reaching for the stick and only stopped when she saw Martha watching.

  “Mind if I go first?” she asked.

  “Not at all,” said Martha.

  Hegwitha pressed the Talking Stick against her chest and concentrated so hard that her face got mottled. Finally she opened her eyes and said, “Maybe it’s appropriate that Isis started off talking about almost dying in the ocean because, as some of you know, that’s what I want to talk about, too. I’ve been battling cancer, Hodgkin’s, for the last three years…”

  There were gasps. Then Diana said softly, “How did you find out you had it?”

  “I was buttoning my shirt,” Hegwitha said. “I felt this lump on my neck.”

  “Yikes,” said Joy.

  “Blessed be,” said Isis.

  “It could happen to anyone,” Hegwitha said. “That’s why no one can stand to—” Isis and Bernie hugged Hegwitha, who’d begun to cry. Martha felt her own eyes fill with sympathetic tears.

  Hegwitha said, “No one wants to know what it’s like, waiting for the diagnosis, trying to get through the weekend till some doctor gets the results, waiting in radiology, hour after hour. You’d think it might be less lonely because I work in radiology and know everybody there. But that makes it worse somehow. Whatever control you thought you had is totally taken away…

  “If you try to keep your spirits up, people tell you you’re in denial. I had to quit my first cancer support group because they were all such bitches. And if you try to say, ‘Listen, I’m dying, I’m scared,’ everyone acts like you’re being a wimp…” Hegwitha was weeping again. “Everybody pretends to care. But they’re really just glad that it’s me and not them.”

  Hold on there! thought Martha. That’s not true—but, of course, it was. Better Hegwitha than her. Much better. Besides, the fact of Hegwitha being ill seemed, deceptively, to shrink the odds of the same thing happening to Martha.

  “We’re here for you,” said Isis.

  “Let it out, Hegwitha,” said Bernie.

  Fat tears slipped down Hegwitha’s cheeks. Titania, Joy, and Diana wept, too. The rest of the women were silent, white-lipped, and tense.

  “I’m in remission,” Hegwitha said through her tears. “I’ve really got to quit smoking.”

  There was a long silence. “There’s nothing to say,” began Isis. “Except to remind you, Hegwitha, that this isn’t your fault. Goddess religion isn’t like phallo-psychiatry, it doesn’t try to tell you you’re responsible for your cancer. You didn’t bring it on yourself, the Goddess has Her reasons. And we’ll always be here for you, Hegwitha, any time you need us.”

  “Thank you,” murmured Hegwitha. “I mean it. Thank you.”

  And she passed the Talking Stick to Martha.

  What was Martha supposed to say after Hegwitha’s story? Breaking up with your boyfriend was not exactly like dying of cancer. Martha knew that, she knew that. And yet she was so unhappy. Maybe she should tell them that her problems were hardly worth discussing—that is, compared with Hegwitha’s. But wouldn’t that sound self-congratulatory and make Hegwitha feel even worse?

  Martha took the Talking Stick and shut her eyes for what she hoped would pass for a moment of silent prayer. Then she said, “I hate my job. I’m a fact checker at Mode, and I’m wasting my life chasing down details I don’t care about—”

  “A fact checke
r at Mode?” said Starling.

  “What qualifies as a fact there?” said Joy. “Like, do blondes have more fun?”

  “Face-lift prices. Collagen lawsuits,” said Titania. “The price of the new swivel eye pencil and the colors it comes in.”

  “Exactly,” said Martha. “My supervisor, Eleanor, is a maniac and a sadist. She makes me call and check facts any sixth grader would know—”

  Martha was gearing up to trash Eleanor when she noticed Isis waving her arms, as if Martha were an airplane she was flagging in for a landing.

  “Come on,” said Isis. “Tell us what’s really bothering you. The Talking Stick knows when you’re talking around your issues—”

  “There isn’t anything, not really,” Martha said.

  Bernie said, “What’s his name?”

  Titania said, “Ed? Ted? Fred? Rumpelstiltskin?”

  “Or her name,” Joy said. “Polly? Molly? Holly?”

  Martha filled her lungs and heard herself say, “Dennis.”

  Diana said, “Doesn’t it make you sick to consider how many women are driven into the arms of the Goddess by some schmuck named Dennis?”

  Isis said, “Come on. Hush. Martha has the Talking Stick.”

  In fact, Martha found that the interruptions had made talking easier—more like conversation, less like ritual confession.

  “Who was he?” said Titania. “How did you meet?”

  “Who cares?” said Joy. “I mean, really.”

  “Go on,” said Isis.

  Martha said, “He’s an actor. He fixes appliances for a living. He came to repair my refrigerator. I was in a foul mood, I was missing a day of work. I was shocked when I opened the door. He was so handsome that I was embarrassed. He looked at me when I talked to him, intense but completely unsleazy…like he cared deeply, up to a point, what was wrong with my fridge.”

  What an enormous distance between the sweet, attentive Dennis who’d shown up to fix her refrigerator and the Dennis who suggested she spend more time at the beach. Contemplating it was like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and it left Martha light-headed, deoxygenated, and breathless to take credit or blame for such cataclysmic transformation.