Hunters and Gatherers (22 page)

“Gosh,” said Bernie. But what impressed Martha was that Rita had found this hive in the vast expanse of desert, which did seem to indicate that she knew where she was going.

The hike proceeded without incident, except for one bad moment when Rita unwrapped a stick of gum and tossed the wrapper onto the ground. Appalled, the women watched the wadded-up silver foil and green paper tumble like sagebrush over the sand.

Otherwise, the walk went so pleasurably and quickly that they were shocked to discover that Rita had brought them full circle back to the camp. They laughed when they came over the hill and saw the trailer and the cabins.

Hurrying ahead, Rita disappeared into the trailer, from which she emerged with a pail of ice and individual bottles of Gatorade. Rita held up a jar of purple liquid and said, “Native healers have understood for centuries what white doctors know only now about replacing fluid electrolytes.”

The women’s brief resistance was less about the drink’s toxic color than about their disappointment at not being offered some organic bark infusion. But they overcame their reluctance and fell on the Gatorade, which Martha had never tasted, and which hardly had a taste: cold liquefied grape candy.

As the women sat at the picnic table, swigging their fluid electrolytes, Rita asked how they’d enjoyed the walk.

“It was so beautiful,” Isis said, and the others nodded.

Diana said, “I feel I got centered just from that practice hike. I can’t wait till it’s time to go out on our solos.”

Rita rolled her eyes. “Later we will talk about vision quest. Now we are talking about desert walk.” She asked if any of the women had questions from the walk. “But don’t expect me to answer. Folks are always disappointed when they think I have answers. But it’s good to say our questions out loud and counsel together about them.”

Hegwitha timidly raised her hand. “I’m interested in healing? And in what you said about herbs? Do indigenous people know ways of curing…the life-threatening illnesses that more and more people seem to be getting these days?”

“For every disease,” said Rita, “there is an herb that will cure it.”

“Cancer?” Hegwitha asked.

“Naturally,” Rita said.

“Then if the Native people know it,” said Hegwitha, “why aren’t they sharing that knowledge with—”

Rita cut her off. “Because no cure is as simple as the right herb and the right dosage. There are reasons we get ill, things we think and say and do, ways we get out of alignment with the Earth, our Mother.”

Everyone watched anxiously to see how Isis would deal with the fact that Rita was contradicting what she always said: Hegwitha hadn’t caused her illness. Isis stared at Rita, oblivious to the others’ stares.

Finally Joy said, “I have a question about something that happened on our walk. I’m sorry to bring this up, but as a group we’re pretty conscious…No matter where we go, we try not to impact on our surroundings. But we saw you throw out that gum wrapper, and I can’t help wondering how that fits in with respecting the Earth, our Mother.”

Rita looked at Joy as if at a creepy crawler—put off but grimly determined to honor its repulsive tiny spirit. She said, “The Earth Mother will heal herself. She is woman, giver of life. She isn’t finished with us yet. She will make her changes, do her shifting. Oh, yes. She will heal herself.”

“In a rat’s ass,” mumbled Joy.

“Rita’s insane,” whispered Titania.

“And now,” Rita said, “we will talk about the sweat lodge. Tonight we will counsel with the Great Spirit and the powers of the four directions. We will gather rocks for our altar and willow for our fire, and strip naked to rid ourselves of the white man’s negativity. We will enter our sweat lodge and ask the Great Spirit for healing visions and guidance.”

Rita smiled regretfully and after a moment cleared her throat. “This is a difficult subject that has caused many problems for my white sisters. But there are rules from the time of the ancients that Native people respect. One is that we ask our sisters who are having their time of month not to come and sweat with us because it is not the Great Spirit way.”

“And
why
not, may I ask?” said Joy.

“Because,” Rita explained, “we believe that at a woman’s moon time, the Great Spirit is helping her eliminate poisons and negativity, and she should be off by herself for a personal ceremony alone with Mother Earth.”

“Hear, hear!” cried Diana.

Sonoma gave her a withering look.

From the beginning, Martha had hated the prospect of being shut in with the others, naked. Her hesitance was partly from modesty and partly from fear that her body would cave in at a heat that hardly bothered anyone else. While they were merrily chanting and seeing lions and jaguars, she would be off, unnoticed, suffocating and dying.

Rita said, “I’d like the sisters who are having their moon time to please raise their hands.”

Rita was providing the perfect excuse, the ready-made escape. Martha could pretend to be having her period and not have to strip and subject herself to the heart-stopping heat. And yet she couldn’t raise her hand. She was sure she would be found out, and besides, it seemed unlucky, like getting out of something by pretending you were sick. It was irritating after all these years to still have to fake your period, just as you did in high school to be excused from gym or swimming, on those rare days when your hair looked good and you didn’t want to ruin it.

None of the women lifted a hand. Martha was surprised. Even if Titania and Bernie were past menopause, the rest of the women were still menstruating, and the odds were that one was now.

Rita said, “Are we sure? There are no secrets in the sweat. Nothing can be hidden. Not even a tampon string!”

“Ugh, gross,” said Sonoma.

“Rita,” said Diana. “I’m glad you brought this up. Because our little sister Sonoma has recently come into her moon time, and I know that there are traditional rites that Native women do to mark this passage.”

“Yes, there are,” said Rita, warming to the subject and to the fact that Diana seemed to be on her side. She must have encountered plenty of menstruating women who resented missing ceremonies they’d paid good money to take part in.

“In some tribes a girl goes off to a special house called the moon lodge. She puts a deerskin over her head and asks the spirit of the sun to help her be reborn. After ten days the other women join her and sing ancient songs. The girl prays to be purified and promises that all her life, until her moon time stops, she will spend ten days a month renewing herself in the moon lodge.”

“Ten days a month!” said Bernie. “Most Anglo women are still fighting for maternity leave.”

“It’s
like
maternity leave,” Rita said. “Necessary for health. Many cases of female sickness, tumors, and infertility result from women skipping their moon-time ceremony.”

“Hear that?” Diana asked Sonoma.

“Stop it, please,” said Freya. “Diana, I’m tired of you telling my daughter to go out in the desert! You do it if you want to—but leave Sonoma alone! It’s sick, your pressuring a child into getting lost or killed.”

“Well!” Titania said. “The maternal instinct asserting itself! Who would have suspected, Freya?”

“What do you mean?” Freya turned on her. “Just because you drove your daughter into the arms of the Moonies…”

“Oh, dear,” said Isis, laughing. “What is this? The feminist Goddess-worshipping
Lord of the Flies
?”

“All right,” said Rita, “if there are no more questions, we’ll break for lunch.”

Lunch was baked beans from an institutional-sized can, heated lukewarm over the fire, and a stew of slimy okra and gummy cornbread pillows. Rita called it pozole: an ancient recipe from her Aztec brothers and sisters.

Martha chewed the yellowish squares that wadded up in her mouth. Tucking a soggy mass into the pocket of her cheek, she brooded on the gnocchi dinner that marked the end of her romance with Dennis. She’d felt that everyone in the restaurant knew what Dennis was saying, that the insinuating young waiters were enjoying every minute and left the accusing plate of gnocchi before her long after it was obvious that she wouldn’t be able to eat it.

“After lunch,” Rita said, “you may take time to meditate or walk and get in touch with the Earth Spirit. But, please, ladies, no more food till tomorrow night. We are fasting for our sweat.”

More food? Where would they find it? Did Rita mean prickly pears?

“At five,” said Rita, “we will regroup to find stones for our sacred fire.”

I
NSIDE THE COOL DIM
cabin, Titania was in bed, propped against the thin pillow, reading
Middlemarch
.

“My idea of heaven,” she said. “Forget the happy hunting ground. This is like a cruise or mountain vacation or being sick as a kid. There’s nowhere I can go, nowhere I have to be, no way anyone can reach me, nothing to do besides stay in this room and read this terrific novel.”

Martha was shocked to realize that she hadn’t brought a book. There were times when she’d traveled with a library for fear of having nothing to read. Had
Mode
destroyed her pleasure in the written word, turned each sentence into a slippery eel that had to be chased down and dissected? A stab of covetousness for Titania’s copy of
Middlemarch
made her long to grab it and escape to that verdant English village.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” Titania said, “not to have a telephone?”

“It sure is,” Martha said. But whom would she have telephoned, and whose calls was she avoiding? Such thoughts led down a murky well of self-pity and sorrow, the black hole of her jobless, loveless situation. She
was
the Little Match Girl. All right, the Little Match Woman.

Titania sat up and sighed. “I can’t believe we’re not getting dinner. I just have to
think
I’m missing a meal and it feels like the end of the world. Oh, listen. Attention! There’s Rita’s dreary bell.”

Once more Martha came late, and Freya and Starling turned to watch her arrive with barely concealed vexation. Rita was explaining how to hear the voices of those stones volunteering to be part of the sacred fire circle.

She said, “The ten lost tribes of Israel knew how to listen to the stones. That’s why the pyramids have lasted to this day.”

“Amazing,” said Isis.

“Amazing,” Starling agreed.

“I believe it,” said Titania. “First they listened to the giant boulders and then they schlepped them hundreds of miles with some Egyptian slave master whipping them along.”

“Each rock is alive,” Rita said, “and has energy at its center. That is why we cannot recycle rocks that have already taken part in our sweats. They have given their lives for us, their vibrations have entered us. Some rocks must be avoided; they don’t want to work with humans, and they try to harm us by exploding in the sweat lodge.” Rita held up an example of one such lazy, hostile rock, and the women passed around the reddish stone, holding it at arm’s length. How dangerous it suddenly seemed to send out amateurs who might, through inexperience, bring back murderous hunks of granite.

“These rocks are our allies,” Rita said, passing around more stones. As soon as they left Martha’s hands she forgot what they looked like and only hoped the others were paying closer attention. “Whenever we get a rock for our fire pit, we apologize to the rock family for moving it from its home and to any bug people we might be disturbing. If the rock’s too heavy—it means it didn’t want us. Now let us go out with the help of our spirit guides and find the stones that want us!”

“Yo,” cried the women and got to their feet for a round of slapping each other high fives. They managed to gaze into each other’s eyes and at the same time unfocus their own, so as not to confront the tensions and slights of the last few days. Martha tried to relax so she could hug and be hugged. But no one touched her, not even Hegwitha.

Though she knew she was being paranoid, she wondered if they’d planned this. Yet she couldn’t imagine any one of them suggesting the group freeze her out. They were basically good-hearted; she had done nothing wrong. This was not the eighth grade, where girls treated each other like that, exiling and embracing on a whim, calibrating their powers.

No one smiled or slapped her hand as she went out to find a suitable stone, neither ostentatious nor pathetic. What should have been deep communion between herself and the earth had instead become a rock beauty contest in which shape, size, and color counted.

The other women laughed and joked as they headed up the trail. Martha hurried to catch up to Joy.

Joy said, “Can you believe that shit about the ancient Hebrews listening to rocks? I can just imagine the pharaohs letting them do that.” But she didn’t wait for Martha’s reply and rushed ahead to walk with Freya.

Isis was at the head of the line, a few steps in front of Sonoma, whom she grabbed for each time Sonoma’s slick-soled cowboy boots fishtailed on the gravel.

Martha let the others go ahead, then ducked behind a boulder where she could pretend to search for that special rock. Her dread of the sweat lodge was so intense that gathering the rocks inspired morbid thoughts of massacre victims forced to dig their own graves. A sauna was not mass murder! Even Martha knew that. People
paid
to take steam baths at intimidating health clubs.

Luckily, the first rock Martha saw had a fossil imbedded inside it, a creepy crawler fully preserved in all its segmented beauty. Martha felt a surge of happiness or at least consolation. Maybe Rita’s spiritual boot camp wasn’t so bad if it had made her notice this minor miracle she might otherwise have missed.

Martha scraped around the rock with her fingernails, then, using her wrists as fulcrums, tried to pry it out of the ground. She kept on scrabbling and had nearly given up, when the stone shifted slightly and, a few minutes later, rolled over.

She gasped as a head poked out of the sand, followed by a wriggling insect that looked like a large yellow banana-pepper with two fat rubbery antennae. The bug snapped its lips and shuddered, probing the dirt for a way back to its hiding place. How could Martha replace the stone without crushing the bug? Nothing could have induced her to touch that rock again, nor did she have any intention of engaging this hideous creepy crawler as her spiritual teacher. This was not her rock, after all. That’s what Rita would have said.