Hunters and Gatherers (2 page)

“Oh,” said Martha limply.

“What I wonder,” mused Hegwitha, “is how far they’ll let us take this before they start burning witches again. But I suppose it’s important to let all that negativity go—and focus on the positive. Tonight is a Druid holy night, a late-summer revel and gathering-in of female force. All over the world women are honoring the harvest and Persephone’s return from Hades to rejoin her mother. In Sicily there’s a lake that was Persephone’s passageway to the underworld. And guess what Italian men have done? Built an auto track around it!

“Look! The harvest witches!” Hegwitha pointed to four women in white; each carried a long wooden post. Tied to each post was a scarecrow, a human-sized corn-husk doll.

“Check out the dolls’ dresses,” Hegwitha advised. “They’re really special, they come from us all. Each woman can contribute a scrap from her personal life-experience attic. I cut a piece of an old lab coat from the hospital where I work.”

“You work in a lab?” said Martha, but Hegwitha was not to be distracted by the facile seductions of job talk.

“The crucifix and the maypole,” Hegwitha said, “were sacred symbols of the Goddess until male religion made them instruments of torture and death—”

Suddenly, she grabbed Martha’s arm. “Look! There’s Isis Moonwagon!”

But Martha had already sensed some new current of alertness rippling along the beach, so that even the women who’d drifted away from the group and stood facing the sea now felt the crackle and abruptly ended their dialogues with the ocean. Hugs and conversations trailed off as everyone craned for a better look.

“The one in red,” Hegwitha said.

Martha saw a tall angular woman with a halo of blond curls, her crisp, girlish prettiness blurred only slightly by fatigue and middle age. Her suntanned face had the crinkled buttery softness of an expensive doeskin glove and seemed to float above a spectacular robe made from patches of red Chinese silk, a costume not unlike the dresses on the cornhusk dolls, though the attic
it
suggested was that of some dowager empress. Tied behind her head in a bow with many loops and streamers, red ribbon banded her forehead as if her cranium were a gift. Smiling beatifically, she was speaking to a circle of women but had to pause every few seconds when someone came up for a hug. Though each hug lasted forever, the other women waited calmly, beaming.

Martha moved a few steps closer. This seemed to annoy Hegwitha, who lit another smoke. She thrust out her cigarette lighter so that Martha couldn’t help but observe: on both sides were holograms of a Hindu deity.

“I live in an Indian neighborhood!” Martha volunteered. “Lexington and Twenty-eighth.” On holidays her landlord’s children brought Martha trays of neon-colored sweets topped with shreds of silver foil, agony on her fillings.

“It’s Kali, the destroyer Goddess,” said Hegwitha. “Perfect for a lighter. I know the Goddess religion is supposed to be nonhierarchical. Power’s not supposed to matter, we’re all priestesses together. But what do you do about someone like Isis who’s so incredibly special? Not only is she a really centered priestess-shaman healer, she was a heavy-duty academic philosopher before there was Women’s Studies and the only females on campus were secretaries and dieticians. She knows everybody. She knew Mother Teresa before she was even famous. Of course, when we meet in covens in someone’s house we’re all equal together, but I guess in a group this size that could get pretty out of control.”

At that moment, Isis lifted one hand and tentatively wiggled her fingers, as if waving at someone who might not be the person she thought. Within seconds, the women had all joined hands and formed a circle.

Hegwitha’s hand grasped Martha’s, its hot, damp pressure firm enough to keep Martha from bolting. When escape no longer seemed possible, Martha felt a lurch of queasy terror that the group would do something embarrassing that she would be forced to do, too.

“It’s all right,” Hegwitha was saying. “This ceremony is really loose. It’s just about feeling the spirit in every living thing. You don’t even have to believe in the Goddess—or in anything, for that matter.”

The women fell silent and shut their eyes. Martha kept hers open but found it too upsetting to witness the expressions of great strain or great peace. She closed her eyes and felt herself gradually unclenching. Then Hegwitha hissed, “This is about getting centered,” and every muscle tensed again.

After that, Martha waited fretfully until the women raised their joined hands and cried, “Yo!” and burst out laughing.

“Blessed be,” Isis Moonwagon said.

“Blessed be,” the women chorused.

Several women glided along the inside of the circle. In their outstretched arms they carried abalone shells from which smoldering incense sent up clouds of smoke. A deserty smell of burning sage drifted over the beach.

And now, it seemed, Martha had progressed from junior high dances to high school parties. She recalled marijuana smoke wafting up from finished basements and the chill of dread she felt going down those carpeted steps. She smoked dope from water pipes along with everyone else, but never got high enough to laugh at the puzzling jokes or to marvel at the farfetched connections everyone thought so amazing.

The sun was setting rapidly. Martha imagined Gretta’s parents waiting for her for dinner, keeping warm a comforting pot of veal
paprikás
and dumplings.

Suddenly Martha shivered. Oh dear God, it was autumn. Why did autumn evenings always make her think that the rest of the world was cozy and happy at home or dressing to go to parties to which she wasn’t invited?

Four robed women set a card table in front of Isis and, with the feline grace of stagehands, covered it with a red cloth and an array of objects: a shell, a branch, an animal skull, fruit, feathers, candles, statuettes, a blue glass vase stuffed with dried flowers. Bowing her head, Isis joined her hands so her fingertips pointed down. Then she stepped in front of the table, knelt, and scooped up some sand.

“I call upon the Goddess of the west, the Goddess of the earth,” she chanted.

In unison the women repeated, “I call upon the Goddess of the west, the Goddess of the earth.” Isis tossed the sand into the air, and the women said, “Blessed be.”

Isis said, “I salute the Goddess of the east, the Goddess of the water,” and waded into the frothy edge of the waves, knelt, and flung up some foam.

“The ocean’s freezing,” Martha whispered, proud to know one thing Hegwitha didn’t. “Plus there’s a killer undertow. I’m a pretty strong swimmer, and I lasted about five minutes.”

But the cold and the undertow were only part of why Martha had got out of the water so quickly. She’d had a depressing fantasy about accidentally drowning and everyone, including Gretta, assuming she’d killed herself.

Martha said, “Naturally, I was an idiot for thinking I’d found my own private beach, for not knowing that everybody was swimming elsewhere for a reason—”

Hegwitha said, “I love this ceremony, don’t you? If men had invented it, the ritual would probably involve dismembering tiny babies and tossing them into the ocean.”

“Oh, I don’t know…” said Martha. “I mean…” The awkwardness that made Hegwitha seem supercilious and censorious, together with her great eagerness to be informative and helpful, so intimidated Martha that she could hardly speak.

“Get real,” said Hegwitha. “You know you wouldn’t have just wandered into a group this size of men.”

Isis was waving an eagle feather, saluting the Goddess of air. Finally she raised a fetish that looked like a bandaged drumstick and turned out to be a torch she ignited with a silver lighter. The torch flared up with a startling whoosh. Isis turned to face the north and invoke the Goddess of fire.

Now Isis motioned to the white-robed women, who again picked up the scarecrow dolls and waded into the ocean, along with four more women, each of whom carried in her arms a light balsa-wood canoe. They set down the boats at the edge of the sea and laid the scarecrows in their hulls. The women knelt in unison and gave the boats a push. Isis, still bearing aloft her torch, followed the boats into the ocean.

Soon the soaking hem of her robe dragged against her legs, which, along with the undertow and the resistance of the water, made Isis falter. The crowd barely breathed as she paused, rocking gently with the waves, then regained her balance and trudged farther out.

The balsa boats and their scarecrow passengers had floated beyond her, but Isis pursued them doggedly, plowing through the water, while the breeze played mischievous games with the torch and her hair. There was a flurry among the boat-and-scarecrow bearers, clearly asking themselves and each other if they should go help Isis. But, as if she’d sensed this, Isis turned toward shore, her face a stony gargoyle of rage and concentration. She grasped the torch in both hands. No one took a step.

Her hesitation had given the boats even more of a lead, and once more Isis charged after them into the mounting waves, which by now were waist-high and strong enough to knock her backward. Martha was struck by the zeal with which Isis pursued the boats: courageously, unflinchingly, unworried by how she must look.

Then one of the women cried, “Blessed be,” and a murmur went up, “Blessed be,” because the waves had died down, and the boats bobbed in place, as if waiting for Isis. With an eerie gull-like shriek, Isis cut through the water, reached out and grabbed the boats, and set the scarecrows aflame with her torch.

As the effigies and then the boats caught fire, a cry went up from the onlookers, the shrill warbling with which Arab women send their men into battle. Perhaps the difficulty of making this noise was what distracted the women and made them slow to realize that the waves had started up again and were tossing the boats in toward Isis, who was dodging and leaping backward to stay clear of the fiery ships.

Once more Isis shrieked, more genuinely than ceremonially. The women gasped as they watched her sink beneath the water. An instant later she resurfaced, a billowing red flower, then vanished and reappeared again, farther out to sea.

Before anyone else seemed to understand that Isis was in real danger, Martha braced herself against the cold and dived into the water. Chilly, unafraid, she swam toward the burning boats. The ocean felt like panels of silk, slipping along her body, and the salt in her mouth and on her skin was stinging and delicious. Only now did she recall how much she loved to swim, the freedom from thought and self-consciousness that was always denied her on land, the sense of having found at last an element where she belonged, and where all that mattered was buoyancy, breath, and forward motion.

Martha swallowed water a few times until she got beyond the waves, which were neither so high nor so strong as they had appeared from shore, nor was Isis so far out to sea as Martha had imagined. Martha found her easily, though she’d floated away from the burning boats. What drew Martha was the red of her robe and the frantic, windmilling splashing, the helicoptering spray and foam of a huge water bird taking off. Then Martha was inside the waterspout, deflecting Isis’s punches.

Senior Lifesaving came back to her, and she remembered how in extremis you were permitted to haul off and slug the struggling victim. Each time Isis hit her, Martha wanted to hit her back. Instead she hooked her arm around Isis’s neck and towed her in toward shore.

The girls she’d saved in lifesaving class had been compliant and weightless, but Isis was like an elephant that had made up its mind to drown. Soon, though, Isis understood that she was being helped, stopped resisting, and, when Martha looked at her, managed a watery, terrified smile. Isis’s teeth were chattering, her hair was plastered to her skull. The red ribbon had slipped off her forehead and dangled around her neck.

By now they were in water so shallow that they had to stand. Martha put a steadying arm around Isis as they waited for a wave to wash over them. All at once the shoals were crowded with running, splashing women, jumping in the water with ecstatic abandon; their joy came from Isis being safe and from the thrill of flinging themselves into the icy sea. Laughing, sputtering, embracing, they surrounded Isis, gently guiding her in toward the beach, gently elbowing Martha away.

Slumped across their shoulders, Isis staggered forward. Gracing them with wan, luminous smiles, she thanked them and told them she loved them. Then all at once she stopped so short that there was an awkward pileup, and she looked around her, theatrically searching the crowd.

Finally, she found Martha and beckoned and stretched out her hand. She made everyone wait until Martha came forward and took her place in line and joined the long column of women marching arm-in-arm out of the sea.

I
SIS MOONWAGON’S BEACH HOUSE
was a massive shingle-style Victorian, encircled by swirling verandas and spiked with cupolas and turrets. Climbing roses covered the fences, and a vegetable patch bordered the garden path—red chard, collards, dark green kale, Brussels sprouts twisting on giant stalks like the eyeballs of undersea creatures—rioting over the edge of the walkway, luxuriant but controlled.

Interplanted cabbages, lavender, and nasturtium narrowed the path so that the small group who’d come up from the beach had to break into smaller groups to get from the garden gate to the porch. Martha was struck by the grace with which the women avoided minicollisions and oversolicitous stalls, just as she’d been impressed before by the wordless ease with which these women had winnowed themselves from the crowd on the shore.

How unlike the Darwinian scramble of daily life at
Mode
! Every year, the magazine gave a chic, high-profile Christmas party at which, just when the merriment was reaching a crescendo, Martha would spot some celebrity hostess moving from group to group, whispering invitations into the ears of the chosen few, who would later go on together to some marvelous dinner. Sometimes they whispered into ears that in theory were listening to Martha, who was not supposed to mind, just as she was not supposed to mind when
Mode
gave other, still more chic and exclusive parties to which fact checkers were not invited.