Hunters and Gatherers Read online

  “The Goddess was ready to enter my life, and I had to make room. I steeped myself in Goddess lore and religion, from the early Mithraic and Cretan cults to the European Wicca faith; the persecutions that drove matriarchy underground and allowed the rape of Mother Earth; the change from worshipping the female principle to blindly adoring the phallus—” Isis smiled at Martha. “Have I got kelp on my teeth?”

  Martha shook her head no, and Isis said, “Speaking of making room…are you having dessert? Go on. It’s my treat. I know you can’t afford it.”

  Martha almost protested that she could afford it, though the prices on the menu were many times what she was willing to pay for apple-blueberry crisp. How typical of Isis to graciously buy her dinner and temper her generosity by referring to Martha’s relative poverty. That mix of kindness and smallness, of compassion and meanness—it did seem to run through the Goddess group in unusually high concentrations. But why should that surprise her? Didn’t Martha contain all that in herself? And weren’t things always complicated when money was involved? Gretta never let Martha forget who had the expense account.

  “Go on,” Isis urged. “Order the hot fudge sundae, the gooey treat your child self wanted and wasn’t allowed to have. It’s so important to give our former selves what they were denied.”

  Frankly, Martha’s adult self wanted the peach pie with brandy sauce. Nonetheless she heard herself order the hot fudge sundae that her child self could have had any time it wanted. Her parents had been indulgent with her, when they could afford it.

  Martha’s mother had been a good cook, but her father’s nightly litany of recompensable or unrecompensable death and disaster had leached all the flavor out of the food. Her father had been a depressive. Martha saw that now. Could he have intuited that he would soon be dead on a riding mower? Depression was hereditary. Everyone knew that. Maybe Martha’s existence—her job, her romantic troubles, Dennis, her involvement with the Goddess women—was nothing more than a case of predetermination by DNA. Given the choice, Martha would rather believe in Isis and her vision than in that grim reductive version of life.

  Sipping her chamomile tea, Isis watched Martha mine the volcanic eruption of whipped cream, nuts, and syrup. She beamed at her like a mother—not a punishing mother, not Freya, but a loving mother who wants only to see her child enjoy dessert.

  “You know what I’m saying,” Isis said. “That’s what’s so appealing about you, Martha. A person need only look at you to know you understand.”

  The startling echo of Dennis made Martha put down her spoon and suddenly see her sundae for the inedible joke that it was. Hadn’t Martha reported in a Goddess meeting that Dennis used to say that? Yet Isis must have forgotten the context in which she’d heard it and believed that she was the first to make this observation—another shining trophy retrieved from the wreckage of Martha’s psyche.

  THE WOMEN HAD RETURNED to Fire Island to celebrate the autumnal equinox. Just the inner circle this time, they’d come back to the beach to participate in a ritual involving much antiphonal chanting about preparing for the coming dark by embracing the darkness within them.

  “What season is coming?” Isis intoned.

  “The season of shadows,” chanted the women.

  “Where are the shadows?” sang Isis.

  “Within us,” chanted the women.

  “Goddess of darkness,” Isis prayed, “find us in your cave.”

  The landscape had changed appallingly over the past weeks. Shivering in the clammy salt air, Martha felt as if she were visiting a beloved invalid who’d taken a horrid turn for the worse. The vegetation looked stepped-on, brownish, jellied, translucent. Who would believe that sane people once swam in that inky sea?

  Isis turned from the ocean to the celebrants on shore. “The season of grief is coming, the melancholy time. We must accept the sadness but not let sorrow overwhelm us.”

  Overhead, a vee of geese-honked concurringly. Really, thought Martha, trying to keep up one’s spirits would be like grabbing a broom and trying to sweep the waves back into the sea.

  Perhaps that was why the service seemed rushed. Maybe the women were eager to return to the warmth of the house and get on with the more cheering reason they’d come—to discuss their upcoming retreat, their timely escape from the autumn chill to the Arizona desert. They were all going to study with Maria Aquilo, a Native American medicine woman and healer Isis had met at a conference in Bolinas.

  Back at Isis’s beach house, Martha ducked into the bathroom. By the time she rejoined the group, Isis was telling yet another story about the wonders she’d seen Maria Aquilo perform:

  “A group of conference faculty went up a mountain for a picnic. After lunch we were talking, and suddenly Maria started making this turkey grumble. Everyone fell silent as we tried to figure out what she was doing. And then, out of nowhere—four eagles appeared in the sky! They swooped in and circled overhead. Everyone was blown away, but Maria acted like it was some party trick every Native healer can do, nothing compared to the wild stuff that goes on when they have chanting and sweat lodge. The sad thing was: Maria had been sort of dating Johnny Red Bear, this cute young shaman from Vancouver. But when she called the eagles it freaked him out, and soon after that they broke up.”

  “Competitive,” said Titania.

  “Just like a guy,” said Starling.

  Bernie said, “It gives me chills to think we’ll be learning medicine ways from Maria, who lives so much closer to a culture that still has female goddess and spirit figures—Spider Woman, Changing Woman, Clay Lady, Buffalo Calf Woman.”

  Hegwitha said, “I’ve been reading up on Native American myths. That bibliography you gave us is really helpful, Diana.”

  Martha dreaded this conversation. She hardly knew where to look when the subject of the trip to Tucson arose. If she asked to come along, as Hegwitha had, she would be perfectly welcome. But Martha hadn’t been invited outright, and something kept her from asking. She supposed it was the memory of those gloomy Sundays when Dennis would pick up the Sunday travel section and say, I’d like to go to Bali or Copenhagen or Prague, never once using the first-person plural, never including Martha, until Martha bleated pathetically, Hey, can I come, too?

  It was comforting to consider the nightmare of group travel: constant friction, Byzantine complications, everyone’s whims, fears, hurt feelings. Imagine walking into a desert truck stop with a dozen Goddess women, half of them dressed like Mama Cass and all with bizarre dietary restrictions.

  Already there was tension about what the retreat would involve. This much was agreed on: They would fly into Tucson, where they’d lease a four-wheel-drive van from the dread travel agent, Pete, the Marlboro man with the penchant for phoning in the midst of priestess rites. Then they’d head for the desert where Maria Aquilo lived. There was less consensus about how much time they would spend in Tucson.

  Titania said, “What did we decide about Tucson?”

  Groaning, the women dutifully geared up for the unavoidable discussion, tedious but integral to the democratic process.

  Bernie, who’d been to Tucson, thought that two days weren’t enough. “Tucson’s a marvelous city with a rich multicultural mix that we, as Eastern canyon-dwellers, could learn an enormous amount from.”

  Joy said, “Oh, Bernie, only a liberal could imagine that there was real multiculturalism in any American city.”

  Freya said, “The Tucson Art Museum offered me a show. I was terribly overcommitted. I had to turn them down.”

  Sonoma said, “I can’t stand how you’re always bragging about things you had to turn down. Why don’t you tell the truth, Mom? You turned them down because you thought Phoenix was the happening city in Arizona, and when you found out it was Tucson you had a total fit.”

  “Oh ha ha,” said Freya mirthlessly, and as Martha watched, a tiny twitch of satisfaction tugged at Sonoma’s impassive face. So childish in so many ways, Sonoma was prodigiously adult in her ability to wou
nd her mother with weapons sharpened in self-defense over the course of a lifelong struggle.

  “What I can’t understand,” said Diana, “is how we can talk about returning to earth religion, leaving city religion, and not only do we live in the city but we’re spending our retreat time hanging around another city.”

  “Trust me,” said Starling. “We’ll be spending most of it out—way out—in the desert.”

  “Speaking of spending,” said Titania, “and of being out in the desert…am I the only one concerned about our lodgings? Considering what we’re shelling out, there should be some assurance that our adorable rustic hogans will have indoor plumbing. I wish this didn’t feel like an age thing. When I was your age, Sonoma, it was easier to put up with discomfort.”

  But Sonoma was the last one to forgo her creature comforts. “No bathrooms? What is this? Mom? No way. I’m not going.”

  “I’m as old as you are, Titania, dear,” Bernie offered.

  “Hardly,” said Titania. “There is a universe of difference between fifty-eight and fifty-two.”

  “Who’s counting?” said Bernie. “And besides, Titania, are you saying I should feel guilty for being six years younger?”

  “Navajos live in hogans,” said Joy. “Maria is a Papago. And what do earth wisdom and medicine have to do with plumbing?”

  “Well, actually,” said Freya, “didn’t Ram Dass have that guru, that Brooklyn housewife who was in the bathtub practicing her reducing-class yogic-breathing exercises, and she overdid it and had a vision of a sweet little Indian man sitting on the toilet? In that case, I think, enlightenment was closely allied with plumbing.”

  “Speaking of visions…” said Diana.

  Joy rolled her eyes. They all knew what was coming next. From the start, the most rancorous contention had surrounded the question of whether the retreat would include time for solo vision quests, for going into the desert alone and contacting their spirit helpers.

  Diana said, “I can’t think of anything more important than a real aloneness experience, than communion with Mother Earth, gazing into the mirror of nature, praying for a vision.”

  “In the Sonoran Desert?” said Titania. “This is not Fire Island, Diana. This is cactus. Scorpions. Rattlesnakes. This is walking up the wrong arroyo and dying of flash floods and thirst and starvation.”

  “Serial killers,” said Joy.

  “You’re not kidding,” said Starling. “The whole Southwest is full of crazed drifters with private arsenals.”

  “What’s wrong with snakes?” said Diana. “They were important symbols in the ancient Goddess religions. The matriarchy embraced all of nature and didn’t privilege one creature above another.”

  “That’s right,” said Hegwitha. “It was patriarchy that gave the snake a bad rap because of men’s neurotic conflict about their penises.”

  “Penis,” said Joy. “Singular. Martha, you’re awfully quiet.”

  “I don’t mind the idea of snakes,” Martha said. “I just don’t want them near me.”

  Sonoma said, “I wouldn’t go out in the desert alone. Not for a million bucks.”

  “No one’s asking you to,” said Freya. “In fact, you’re not allowed to, young lady.”

  “Not allowed by who?” growled Sonoma.

  “By whom,” corrected Freya.

  “It would be great for Sonoma,” said Diana. “A menstruation ritual vision quest. When a Papago girl comes into her moon time she goes to what they call a little house, and the grandmothers educate her in female magic, and the village dances all night.”

  “Diana, darling,” said Titania. “We’ve been over this ad nauseam. That Papago girl doesn’t go to the little house just to learn female magic. She goes away so the sight of her won’t make all the husbands impotent and sour the milk and ruin the crops.”

  “Titania’s right!” said Bernie, with a conciliatory smile meant to smooth over their little tiff on the subject of age.

  Freya said, “Some tribes bury pubescent girls in pits of hot stones for three days. I did a lot of reading about this when I did my Biocycle-Sphere Menstrual Hut installation in Edinburgh.”

  “Not the Navajos,” said Diana. “They have a four-day party.”

  “When you have a daughter,” said Freya, “you send her into the desert.”

  What personal stake did Diana have in Sonoma’s vision quest? Why did she keep mentioning it, though Sonoma showed no interest and grew more sullen than usual when Diana brought it up?

  “Can we stop harping on this?” said Sonoma. “I am not going out in the desert.”

  “Diana’s projecting,” Joy said. “She’s the one who wants to do the vision solo. She wants to go into the wilderness where she doesn’t have to eat for three days and no one will criticize her and she can feel good about it.”

  “Stop it, Joy,” said Diana. “You know, Goddess worship is supposed to be so nonhierarchical, but when real decisions have to be made around here it’s always Isis and sometimes Starling. If they want to do a solo, the rest of us will do solos, too. And if they don’t…”

  Hegwitha leaned forward. From that first day on the beach, Martha had noticed that questions of power and hierarchy were of great interest to Hegwitha, who often seemed to be weighing her ideals of a purely egalitarian Goddess-centered society against the more practical exigencies of life in New York and Fire Island. The nearness of death had done nothing to help her transcend all that. But who could say how anyone would or should act in Hegwitha’s situation?

  “Reisefieber,” said Isis.

  “Excuse me?” Starling said.

  “Reisefieber,” Isis repeated. “Travel anxiety. Freud coined the term. One of the very rare occasions on which he got it right. It was based on his observation that everyone gets nervous before a trip, because every journey is linked in our minds to the final journey of death.”

  “Air travel especially,” Titania said.

  Isis said, “Katherine Mansfield wrote in her journals that whenever she left for a journey she would get her house in order as if she were never coming back.”

  “Cool,” said Sonoma.

  “That’s so beautiful,” Bernie said.

  “A little morbid, if you ask me,” said Joy.

  “I don’t know,” said Isis. “The point is, we don’t have to struggle about vision work now. There will definitely be alone time. No one’s going to make anyone stay with the group every minute. But Maria has so much to teach us, our time with her will seem too short, and we won’t want to go off and miss this great opportunity. If the rest of you had met Maria, you’d know what I mean. Anyway, Goddess religion was never about individual vision so much as about the collective healing power of the group.”

  “That’s fine for you to say, Isis,” said Diana. “You’ve already had your vision.”

  “Yes, well.” Isis sighed. “We’re not in competition about this. And the vision experience can be overrated. I realize I’ve said this before, but when I saw the Goddess in her chariot over the ASAP convention, it seemed somehow so Ordinary, so integrated with the rest of life, it could have been the Goodyear blimp—”

  “That reminds me,” interrupted Freya, “I heard the funniest story. There’s this immensely overweight woman sculptor—you’d recognize the name. She was working in her garden, and she heard some workmen across the way saying: Look at the Goodyear blimp! She ran inside and got her husband, and he came out, all set to punch out the workmen for insulting his wife. But just then he looked up at the sky—”

  “And saw the Goodyear blimp,” said Titania. “Fabulous. I love it.”

  Sonoma said, “Why are you always telling fat stories? Why can’t you do anything but torture me about my weight?”

  “I’m sorry, Sonoma,” said Freya. “I thought it was a funny story.” To the other women, she said, “Her father had no sense of humor either.”

  “Look who’s talking,” said Sonoma. “Laugh-a-minute.”

  “Sisters,” said Isi
s, “be kind to each other. Please.”

  Joy said, “I know this trip will heal us in important ways. Just getting out of the city, back to the natural world—or as close to natural as the lack of ozone allows. And being around wise women who live in harmony with Turtle Earth, women respected in their tribal cultures, passing wisdom from mother to daughter. How could that not be good for Freya and Sonoma? And for me and Diana, to be around women living together—”

  Diana said, “Joy makes Native American religion sound like couples therapy.”

  “I don’t,” said Joy. “You know I’m not into couples therapy. You always find the thing I hate most and tell me that’s what I’m into.”

  Isis said, “If you’d met Maria you’d know that anything is possible. There were people at Bolinas who swore that they’d seen her turn into an eagle, which of course is her spirit guide and the sacred name of her clan. She is so charismatic! You want to throw yourself at her feet. The first time I met her she told me that for a thousand years before the coming of the white man, her people had a song, and its lyrics said the white men would come and kill the earth, and Native people would not be able to stop it. Needless to say, I just nose-dived into a pit of white-woman guilt. But Maria said the most liberating thing. She said, ‘Were you at Little Big Horn, Isis? Why should you feel guilty?’

  “After that I felt completely empowered, capable of anything. This was at the ’89 Bolinas Conference on Earth and Spirituality. After I met Maria, I volunteered to teach a second Goddess workshop for free.”

  Bernie said, “We don’t doubt that Maria’s terrific. But I worry that some of us may be bringing unrealistic expectations to this trip.”

  Joy said, “That’s therapy talk.”