Hunters and Gatherers (23 page)

At last she found a sandstone volleyball, almost entirely round. Perhaps its perfect shape might compensate for its perfect dullness. It rolled out of its niche in the sand, declaring itself her rock, and she and her rock joined the phalanx of women lugging stones down the mountain.

How long had they been up there? And how, in that short time, could Rita have built a whole structure, a sturdy igloo with a frame made of branches covered with hairy brown blankets and a blue plastic shower curtain? Scotty was picking up animal hides and handing them to Rita, who passed each one through the sage smoke before layering it onto the sweat lodge. The women’s faces brightened when they caught sight of the hut, but darkened an instant later when they noticed Scotty.

Scotty said, “You can dump them rocks here.” The women did as they were told. Rita hefted the rocks and took them, one by one, into the sweat lodge.

“Look, no hands!” Scotty laughed and held up his hands, palms out, high over the rocks. “The slightest contact with my nasty male vibrations could blow the entire operation. That’s what Rita tells me. And I’m sure you girls agree.”

Diana said, “It’s crummy we don’t get to watch Rita build the sacred fire pit inside the hut.”

Scotty said, “It gets pretty jammed in there with everyone moving around that tiny space. Especially with Rita carrying enough rock to crush someone’s foot. Shit happens.”

Rita was praying over a stone, thanking it for coming. Each woman watched her own rock, as each child at a birthday party focuses on her gift to see how the birthday girl receives it. Rita seemed satisfied with each stone, and Martha was relieved when her rock vanished inside the sweat lodge.

When all the rocks were gone, Rita said, “Now we will gather kindling to heat our stones and bring water to pour on our sacred fire pit, so the power of the Great Spirit will cleanse our bodies of toxins and negativity. The sweat lodge entrance is narrow and low, and when we enter and leave, it is like being reabsorbed and born again through the birth canal.”

“Wow,” said Bernie and Diana.

“Oh, sick,” Sonoma said.

Martha knew absolutely: she wouldn’t be able to do it. She would panic and not be able to strip and crawl up the birth canal. Once, in high school, she and her friends had gone to a water park at which you climbed a high rickety ladder and corkscrewed into a shallow puddle. It was rumored that a girl from a nearby town had broken her spine on the water slide and wound up quadriplegic. Martha’s friends seemed nervous, but Martha was so sick with fear that at the last possible minute she bolted and ran and bought cotton candy. She waved as her friends hurtled past, and later, when they said it was fun, she was sure they despised her no matter how neutral they sounded. But the moment she’d stepped out of line was worth all their contempt. How erotic and swooning it was, succumbing to her fear.

Now she affected a distracted look, as if listening to distant voices. Then she cried out, “Oh, no!” and hurried off to her cabin.

She could simply have sat on the bed for a plausible length of time but instead went through the charade of going into the bathroom and taking down her jeans. Who did she think was watching? Was her gesture pure self-consciousness, propitiatory magic, or her version of how the faithful experienced the omniscient nearness of God? She hoped no Higher Being was present as she sat on the toilet, so weak with superstitious dread that she fully expected blood: abnormal bleeding, instant punishment for having lied about her body.

She had no faith in a Higher Being but believed only in retribution and in an ironic destiny, mischievous and malicious. She was playing at Goddess worship, but she had her own religion; the church of fear without comfort, of nemesis without God.

On her way back to the ramada, she passed the women heading back up the hill to gather kindling. No one said hello or asked why she was going the opposite way. Rita stood near the sweat lodge, engaged in an animated but one-sided conversation with Scotty, who gazed morosely out at the desert.

Martha said, “Rita, can we talk?” Humiliation zoomed her back to being fifteen and buying tampons; the boy at the cash register (it was always a boy) was always around her age.

Rita said, “Yeah. What?”

“In private?” Martha said.

Scotty curled his lip and shrugged. “Shit, man, I’m out of here.”

When he was gone, Martha said, “Rita, the most awful thing happened. I just got my period. It’s like…five days early. I’m so sorry. I’m so disappointed. I’m really really upset.”

Should Martha have said “moon time”? She couldn’t have spoken the word. Finally Rita seemed to catch on, raised one eyebrow, and smiled wryly. Either she knew that Martha was lying or, worse yet, believed her and was about to assign her a solitary ritual involving sand and menstrual blood.

Martha always assumed that one should act as if menstruation made no difference: deal with small or large amounts of blood and get right back to work. She recalled Rita’s warning about women ignoring their moon time, and tried not to dwell on the dire fates Rita had described. What a burden to put on women, to threaten disaster unless they underwent a monthly period of enforced isolation, while protecting the male population from their filthy female bodily fluids. And yet this seemed to be a law that women were enforcing, and what was wrong with a week every month to contemplate the eternal? But shouldn’t you—not your ovaries—schedule your vacation?

But Rita wasn’t thinking up a designer menstrual ritual. Overseeing two ceremonies—Martha’s and the sweat lodge—would have been a lot to take on. Besides, it wasn’t necessary. Rita had sized up the group and surmised: Martha wasn’t a major player. Martha could be safely ignored, which was what Martha wanted. Rita smirked at Martha. She knew that Martha wasn’t sorry about having to miss the sweat lodge. In fact, she knew Martha was faking and wanted Martha to know that she knew.

Rita said, “Tonight you must be very careful. Because when we are in the sweat lodge all kinds of energies and bad spirits are set free. Do not leave your cabin. If you do, you must come to me before sweat lodge begins and get a sacred power object.”

“A power object?” Martha repeated.

“Something to protect you,” Rita said, “to keep the bad spirits expelled in the sweat lodge from entering your body.” Her tone reminded Martha of threatening chain letters that attempt to blackmail their recipients into compliance with news of the sudden, violent deaths of those poor fools who broke the chain.

B
Y LATE AFTERNOON EVERYONE
had heard that Martha would not take part in the sweat lodge. Rita must have told them; Martha’s paranoia deepened. The women gave her consoling pats and promised she’d get another chance. But they seemed eager to get away from her, and were clearly relieved when, near sunset, Martha went to her cabin.

Now, just after twilight, Martha lay dressed on her bed. Who cared how many creepy crawlers wriggled into the sheets. Stuffing the pillow over her face she thought, I’m Othello
and
Desdemona. Then she recalled the rehearsal at which she’d guessed about Lucinda: how she’d hated Dennis for enacting Othello’s jealous pain and being so oblivious to Martha’s. Later, Martha had said, “Don’t you think Lucinda’s a little shrill?” And Dennis said, “She’s got that high-strung female quality lots of guys find sexy.” So much for the power of art to make you a better person!

Drumming and chanting blew in on the warm night air. Then the music stopped. After some time Martha heard a muffled thrum—from inside the sweat lodge, she guessed.

What a blessing to be spared the suffocating heat, the claustrophobic darkness, the headache-inducing drums. The idea of it made Martha want to rush out and get some air, though normally she would have preferred to stay, safe and comfortable, in her room. Another reason she wanted to leave was that Rita had told her not to go out unless she got a power object—which, of course, she hadn’t. Was Martha trying to prove that there were no dangerous spirits abroad, that the sweat lodge was nothing more than a fuzzy homemade sauna?

Martha stood in the doorway. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, furiously but without hope. The half-light turned the cactus and hills into flat black silhouettes. Just then the moon rose, so large that Martha could see its goofy encouraging wink. She took a deep breath and ventured outside, a friendly overture to which the moon responded by growing smaller and more distant.

Martha sat at the picnic table and gazed across the ramada toward the hut. Light shone through the blankets and skins not covered by the shower curtain, dimming and then brightening when the fire inside flared up. Smoke ascended from the hole in the top: a white pillar in the moonlight. In silhouette the sweat lodge looked menacing and organic, like a large dozing bison it would be smarter not to wake.

Suppose they were all asphyxiated? The drumming and chanting went on. Martha had to trust that Rita knew what she was doing, in which case Martha shouldn’t be outside without a power object.

After some time a bulky figure stumbled out of the sweat lodge. Martha assumed it was Rita, come to fetch water or wood, and tried to make herself invisible so Rita wouldn’t see her.

But it wasn’t Rita. Someone else lingered near the entrance, performing the clumsy balletic steps of dressing in the dark…

“Sonoma!” Martha called out.

Sonoma froze.

“Don’t be scared,” Martha called. “It’s me. Martha.”

Even from a distance, Martha could see the postures of anomie and contempt slithering in to fill the gaps left by the fear draining out of Sonoma.

Sonoma finished dressing, sauntered over, and sat on the bench. “God, it was gaggy in there. No wonder they didn’t let us eat, everyone would be heaving chunks. Everybody sweaty and naked. Yuck. Cellulite and drippy underarm hair. I was in better shape than anyone, and I have a disgusting body.”

“You certainly do not have a disgusting body,” Martha heard herself say.

“Yeah,” said Sonoma. “Nothing thirty pounds of liposuction wouldn’t fix.”

“Come on,” said Martha. “It’s part of being the age you are—everyone goes through thinking they’re ugly and fat. Everybody feels that way—even boys.”

Had Sonoma never heard these platitudes about adolescence? Were they what anyone needed to hear, and were they even true? Martha wished she could say, “You’ll grow out of it,” and promise that there would come a time when confidence and experience would make Sonoma feel pretty. But Martha was afraid of sounding unconvincing—or unconvinced.

“Save it,” said Sonoma. “Everyone thinks they have to tell me how great I look because my mom is always giving me shit about my weight.”

“I’m not talking just about you,” Martha said. “I’m talking about how everyone feels at your age.”

“Really?” said Sonoma, skeptical but curious, like a child hearing a fairy tale from an unreliable adult. Did the witch really give Snow White the poisoned apple? Did Rapunzel really let down her hair for the prince to climb up? “This boy in my class calls me Elephant Girl. I know I’m totally bloated. I think I look a little better from not eating dinner.”

“Everyone your age feels ugly,” repeated Martha, searching for an exemplary anecdote from her own adolescence. All sorts of relevant wounding ordeals came cooperatively to mind, but what kept her from mentioning them was that she couldn’t remember how she had gotten through them.

“I ought to kill myself, really,” Sonoma said. “Or at least run away for a while. Then my mom would be sorry. Or maybe she wouldn’t notice, and the joke would be on me.”

Poor Sonoma! Flooded with pure sympathy, for once unalloyed with annoyance, Martha reached out to hug her but wisely pulled away, sparing them both an awkward exchange that would only have estranged them.

Whooping cries rose from the sweat lodge.

“Jesus,” said Sonoma, “I did not get out of that pit one minute too soon. When I got up to leave, Rita told me I should get a power object from her. I think it’s so disgusting, what we’ve done to the Native Americans to turn them into morons like Rita. Rita said I was leaving myself open to the bad spirits of the night, but I think she just wanted me to come over so she could grope me or something.”

Martha had forgotten the evil nocturnal spirits. This was the closest she had ever come to a conversation with Sonoma and, as far as she knew, the only sustained conversation Sonoma had ever had with another human being. How could that be evil?

“God,” Sonoma was saying, “I had no idea my dad lived around here. I’d really like to go see him and maybe get some answers.”

“Answers?” This struck Martha as the very definition of a mission doomed to failure. Martha was thinking of the kindest way to tell Sonoma to forget it, when they saw someone creep out of the sweat lodge and shake herself like a wet dog. Obviously in no hurry to dress, she stood naked in the moonlight, then rose on her toes, tipped back her head, and flapped her arms at the moon.

Martha and Sonoma watched Isis’s moon-worship rite, which involved a great deal of genuflecting and swaying and flailing her arms. At last Isis wrapped herself in a blanket, then turned toward the ramada, and called very softly, “Sonoma?”

“Goddamnit,” said Sonoma. “If it’s not my mom, it’s her.”

Isis kept calling Sonoma’s name in a voice that soon lost its low vibrato and grew so vexingly insistent that Martha hissed, “Answer her, Sonoma!”

“Huh?” Sonoma’s reply was more of a grunt than a question.

“Oh, thank the Goddess,” cried Isis, running over. “I was so worried. Your mother shouldn’t have said those awful things when we were all sitting there nude and defenseless. The sweat lodge is a place to leave behind our negative feelings, not somewhere we go so our moms can reinforce them.”

“Forget it,” said Sonoma.

“Oh, hello, Martha,” said Isis.

“Hello,” Martha said.

“Sonoma, dear,” said Isis. “Are you coming back to the sweat lodge or not?” Isis knew that impatience wasn’t helping her case, which only made her more desperate to have things settled at once. Martha understood the impulse. She’d had a bad habit with men: when she felt they were ceasing to love her, she began asking questions that were veiled requests to get her feelings hurt. Near the end, she’d asked Dennis if something was wrong with her laugh, and Dennis had looked at her strangely and said, Well, it was sort of tight.