Hunters and Gatherers (11 page)

“Infamous?” said Martha.

Isis’s lips formed the rippling, mindless smile of a Botticelli angel. “When they sent Daniel into the lion’s den, at least they had the decency not to call it a panel. This one was held in the ballroom of a huge D.C. hotel. The minute I entered I was assaulted by waves of hatred, five hundred old-boy academics whetting their knives and licking their chops. Somehow I managed to find my seat at the seminar table, between a priest, a heavy-duty feminist theorist, and a bigshot Freudian, all of whom had already dismissed my work as garbage.”

Martha tried to look properly sympathetic and pained, although at that instant she was nearly ecstatic with pleasure in her meal: the sweet-salty crispness of the chicken skin, the airy whipped potatoes, her forays into the side dishes of sweet corn, coleslaw, and creamed spinach.

“What
was
your work then?” Martha asked, regretting it at once. “I mean, remind me…Sorry, I’ve forgotten…My memory…”

Isis waved away Martha’s apology. Why should Martha be held responsible for the details of Isis’s former life?

“Goodness,” said Isis, “it seems so remedial now. I pushed the envelope of the feminist critique of Freud and Christian culture. The shrink thought it was preposterous to see Freud’s work in the context of the lost matriarchal societies. The feminist had an investment in women not being witches—in our being regular guys who would make great department chairs. The priest thought I was going straight to hell for reading the church fathers as the psychotic misogynists they were; later he dismembered me in a scholarly Catholic journal.

“As I sat down, all three gave me eat-shit grins. I arranged my water glass and my pen, and then discovered I couldn’t lift my head, couldn’t look at the audience or my fellow panelists. Suddenly I felt…well, a
force
jerking me out of my chair and carrying me from the room.

“The hotel was built on a mountain in the middle of Chevy Chase: billion-dollar landscaping, scary but probably safe. The night was out of a horror film: full moon, fast-moving clouds. I remember thinking I’d become so mired in academia that here was this gorgeous moon, and I hadn’t noticed…And that was more or less the last thing I remember thinking.”

Isis contemplated her seaweed, then pushed away her plate. “I somehow feel compelled to say: I am not a psychotic. I know I sound like Richard Nixon. But I do worry that people may think I’m nuts when I try to describe that night.”

Martha hoped her smile conveyed her faith in Isis’s sanity. Isis seemed encouraged and took a deep breath and went on:

“I know it contradicts our patriarchal, Judeo-Christian notions of causality when I say that on that night, in the middle of the American Society of Academic Psychologists convention, in Washington, D.C., I looked up at the sky and saw…what I thought was a comet. But soon I realized it wasn’t a comet at all. It was…a woman in white, flying across the sky in a chariot pulled by winged white horses.”

“Whoa,” said Martha. For the first time it crossed her mind that Isis might be clinically insane. Well, she might be a lunatic, but she ran an entire movement, had people taking care of her, owned an Upper West Side floor-through and a house on Fire Island, all apparently without any need to go out and work for a living. Isis had power, money, friends, a great place—places—to live, while Martha had a lousy job, a cramped and grimy apartment. So really, you might ask yourself: Which one of them was crazy?

“It was a brilliant vision,” said Isis, “and at the same time so ordinary it could have been the Goodyear blimp over the Astrodome. But I knew it was the Goddess: Astarte or Diana. And this was before I’d heard a word about Goddess worship! I myself don’t believe it. I just know what I saw.

“I knew how I’d been primed for revelation—years of Catholic education. But I also knew that this was real. My life would never be the same. I didn’t have to go back to that seminar room. Or sit on that panel. The consensus in academia is that I suffered a nervous breakdown, psychosis being the only reason to give up tenure-track and a cost-sharing retirement plan. And for the record: my Astarte book has sold one hundred thousand copies more than
Freud, Jesus, and Matriarchy
!

“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.

T
HE 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 wound 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.