Hunters and Gatherers (26 page)

Starling reddened and burst out crying. Bernie and Isis rushed over to sandwich her tightly between them.

Martha was next in the circle. As if the stick were glowing hot, Martha tossed it from hand to hand, thinking she’d hold it a second, mumble, and pass it on. But something stopped her and she said, “I’ve also been having a memory…”

“Share,” said Bernie, and the others said, “Oh, yes, do, yes, do,” welcoming this chance to gather Martha back into the fold and offer her the healing she’d missed by sitting out the sweat lodge.

“It’s about my old boyfriend. Dennis.”

Joy said, “Oh, no, not
him
again!”

“Joy!” said Isis. “Martha has the stick. One awful thing about psychic suffering is how often it lasts beyond the point at which our friends hate hearing about it. Martha, please, go on.”

Martha gave Isis a grateful smile. “I keep thinking about the time Dennis was playing Othello—”

Bernie said, “Was your boyfriend black? I don’t think I knew that.”

“No,” said Martha. “He was white.
Is
white.”

“Didn’t they have a black person in the class?” Diana said.

“I don’t know,” said Martha.

“
Othello
!” said Joy. “Another great Dead White Male classic about battering and killing women.”

Martha gripped the Talking Stick. “All during rehearsals, Dennis seemed to be getting sadder. Until one night we were eating at an Italian restaurant and I finally got the nerve to ask him what was wrong. He said Othello was depressing him. He said it made him jealous, playing a guy who loved his woman so much that he would kill her rather than lose her. It made him realize he had never felt anything
near
that passion for me.”

Titania whistled through her teeth.

“Thank your lucky stars he didn’t,” Starling said. “You could have wound up like Desdemona.”

Joy said, “Didn’t anybody ever tell this guy that
Othello
is a play about two closeted gay men?”

“Really,” said Diana. “Didn’t anyone ever point out that it’s not about a guy who loves his woman so much he kills her, but about repressed homoerotic—”

Isis said, “You’re lucky to be rid of that sadist.”

“Definitely!” said Titania.

“Wait a sec,” said Bernie. “Let me ask you something, Martha. Dennis said he never felt like that about you…but did you feel that way about
him
? Did you feel, for one moment, that you wanted to kill…the woman…What was her name?”

“Lucinda,” Martha said miserably.

“That’s brilliant and helpful, Bernie,” Isis said. And the other women chorused: Brilliant, brilliant and helpful.

Martha didn’t think it was brilliant at all. It was just therapy talk. She hadn’t wanted to kill Lucinda. She had just wanted to die.

“I guess you’re right,” said Martha, and thrust the Talking Stick at Hegwitha.

She knew what she wanted to happen now. She wanted Hegwitha to tell the truth, to say that she was sick again and had let them pray for a lie. That would make them think twice about their self-righteous self-satisfaction, their cheap little therapeutic insights. How small of Martha to want to use Hegwitha’s illness as if this were some kind of trial, Martha vs. the Goddess women…And what was her case against them? What had these women done? Taken her in, treated her well, brought her to Arizona. Did she feel they were losing interest in her and so was preemptively turning against them?

Hegwitha took the stick and said, “I don’t have much to share. I’m so grateful for the healing energy I got last night in the sweat lodge. I feel really positive that I’m going to stay in remission…And like I’ve already taken tons of everyone’s time.”

How could Hegwitha lie about something so important? Martha was appalled and yet unwilling to blame Hegwitha for wanting to be part of the group and not wanting to upset them. It was like those stories one hears about polite guests nearly choking at dinner parties, reluctant to make any trouble.

If Martha had any courage, she would have made Hegwitha tell the truth. That would show Isis and the rest what their religion was about. All their talk about loving and sharing and recovering their spiritual natures, and one of them was dying and didn’t trust them enough to confess. All that talk about getting in touch with Brother Rabbit and Sister Mouse, and some part of them was completely walled off from Brother and Sister Human. But what would that accomplish? It would humiliate Hegwitha and shock the Goddess women without inspiring them to change, or reconsider. And who was Martha to tell them that they should be different or better—Martha, who was willing to sacrifice a sick woman’s privacy to teach these harmless women a lesson, to punish them for having tired of Martha’s judgmental Athena mind?

Hegwitha passed the stick to Rita. The women held their breath as if they shared a single respiratory system; no one exhaled until Rita grabbed it with both hands. Rita’s chin sank to her chest as she closed her eyes and emitted a low hum.

Finally she said, “My dad used to drink a lot. Then he’d come home and beat my mom. I was the youngest of nine, so it had gone on a long time. Then one night—I was three years old—he started wailing on my mom, and I started singing a song, I don’t know where it came from. I sang my song over and over. Dad backed off and got quiet. Later Mom brought me to the elders and made me sing my song, and they said it was a sacred peacemaking song of the ancient ones.

“After that, whenever my dad started in, I used my medicine, I’d sing and put my hand on Dad, and he would fall asleep. Any time a guy on the reservation started beating on his family, someone would come and get me and I would use my medicine.”

“That’s wild,” said Diana. “That people would use this three-year-old…baby to take on a village of drunken batterers.”

Rita smiled proudly. “This is how my people discovered what strong medicine I have.”

“They should record that song of yours,” said Titania. “The uses for it would be legion.”

Rita looked insulted. “My medicine song wouldn’t work unless I was there to sing it.”

“Ignore Titania,” said Starling. “Always the businesswoman.”

For a moment Martha wondered if Rita’s story was true. It was troubling that this woman had begun life in terror and grief and impossible responsibility. But it was just as unpleasant to think she’d invented the perfect story, the legend that these women most longed and needed to hear, a story about female magic pacifying male violence. Martha’s anger at them subsided, leaving her hollow and drained.

Isis took Rita’s hands between hers.

“That’s beautiful,” she said thickly.

H
OW LONG HAD MARTHA
been sleeping? The back of her neck was soaked. She’d awakened in that weightless free-fall she sometimes slipped into falling asleep. She’d been dreaming that she was about to trip down the steps of her childhood house. Young and smiling and healthy, her father was running to catch her. Waking, she realized that he was dead and she had to stop from crying out.

In the other bed Titania tossed and moaned in her sleep.

Martha turned on the lamp and checked her watch. Ten after four in the morning. Her temples throbbed, her sinuses ached. Valley fever, no doubt.

Someone was knocking on the door.

“Titania!” said Martha. “Wake up!” Titania groaned and rolled over.

“Who is it?” Martha called out evenly, as if it were perfectly normal, a visit at 4:00 a.m.

No one answered. There was a louder knock.

Martha thought of Scotty—and now she got really scared. Had she said anything he could have misread as flirtation or encouragement? Had a faint smile crossed her lips when he told his fat joke about Rita? Maybe Scotty had fixed her up with a biker-rapist blind date or the entire membership of the Tucson Hell’s Angels.

“Who is it?” she repeated.

A voice said, “It’s me, Freya!”

Freya stood in the doorway. She said, “Have you seen Sonoma?”

“Since when?” Martha said. “Is she missing?”

Freya just stared at her.

“Obviously,” said Martha. “Sorry.”

She was stalling for time to remember their conversation outside the sweat lodge. Had Martha said something stupid? Driven Sonoma away? Should she have been more discouraging about her plans to visit her father?

“What the fuck?” Titania mumbled from her bed.

“Sonoma didn’t come back tonight,” Freya said. “She wasn’t in the cabin when I got back from the feast. I must have dozed off. When I woke up, she still wasn’t there.”

“I talked to her last night after she left the sweat lodge,” Martha said tentatively. “She was saying something about wanting to go find her dad.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Freya said.

“Freya,” said Titania. “Get a grip on yourself. When did
you
see her last?”

“I don’t know!” Freya cried. “That’s the awful part—I don’t know when I last saw my daughter.”

“She was there when we did Talking Stick,” said Titania.

“I know that, I saw her,” said Freya. “But not after that.”

“Where
is
her father, exactly?” said Martha.

“Oh, who knows?” said Freya. “I thought it was Delphi, that town we passed through. Maybe it’s Delphi, Colorado. Is there a Delphi, Colorado? Could she have gone into town? Looking for her father? How could she have done this after what we said tonight with the Talking Stick? I thought some kind of healing was starting to happen between us. For her to run away after that…But why should I be surprised? I was the one who dozed off without knowing where my daughter was. What kind of mother am I? My first thought was that she’d sneaked off to flirt with Rita’s boyfriend. What was I thinking? Sonoma hardly knows boys exist. I went to Rita’s trailer and stood outside. I heard these rhythmic thumps, like someone being beaten or having S-M sex. Rita answered the door in her bathrobe. Sonoma wasn’t there.”

“
We
haven’t seen her,” Martha said. “Titania, have you seen Sonoma?”

“No,” replied Titania.

“Jesus,” Freya said. “All right, I’m going to look for her. See you. Goodbye. Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

“Is she nuts?” Titania said. “Telling us to go back to sleep when Sonoma’s missing?”

Martha pulled on her jeans and shirt. Only after she’d tied her shoes did she remember Rita’s warning about always checking to make sure that Little Sister Scorpion wasn’t sleeping in their boots. Well, let the scorpion bite her, she wasn’t going to take off her shoes and check. Martha grabbed a sweatshirt and hurried outside.

Sonoma wasn’t anywhere. That much had been determined by the time Martha reached the ramada, where the others were gathered, warming their hands over the fire.

Bernie told Martha, “She left a note. It said: ‘I’m out of here. Love, Sonoma.’”

“She’s run away,” pronounced Isis, a conclusion so self-evident that only Sonoma could have appreciated its full, glorious banality. Martha shivered as a chill of pure fear raised the hairs on the back of her neck, amazing her with the intensity of her concern for Sonoma.

“That’s the best-case scenario,” explained Bernie. “As a therapist, I feel I have to say…Well, given the teenage suicide rate, we can’t not consider that.”

Freya groaned.

“Don’t worry,” Bernie said. “Factoring in Sonoma’s personality and the tone of the note, suicide seems unlikely. It’s more like Sonoma to run away than do anything drastic. Plus, teenage suicides tend to talk about it first, and as far as we know—”

Martha said, “Last night she was telling me about wanting to find her father.”

With a sickening lurch of dread, she remembered: Sonoma
had
talked about killing herself. But before Martha could decide how to mention this without making everyone hysterical, Scotty said, “Let’s get this straight. When was the girl seen last?”

Excuse me? thought Martha. What was happening here? Scotty was playing detective, not the none-too-bright cop that one might expect but the efficient sergeant—cool, competent, and thorough. What was far more unexpected was that the women were allowing this, turning phototropically to the only man present at the scene of a crisis. Joy, Starling, Diana, Isis—with their contempt for male intelligence, their belief that men were only good for making war and donor sperm—were reverting back to some learned response, some primitive form of wiring that, when lightning hit, conveyed the charge to the nearest male. As soon as her daughter disappeared, Freya had stopped praying to the Goddess and instead kept muttering, “Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus.”

“Did she have a flashlight?” Scotty asked Freya. “Could she have gotten a flashlight?”

Freya said, “I don’t know what she has! I have no idea where she’d go. This isn’t like her. I don’t get it.” As she grew more frantic and distraught, Freya aged before their eyes; the furrow between her eyebrows deepened, a wattle flapped under her chin.

Scotty said, “Come on, you’re her mom—and you don’t know where she is in the middle of the night, or where she might go?”

Who was Scotty to lecture Freya on the duties of motherhood? Why weren’t the others defending her against this stranger, this…male wielding his privileged male authority to destroy a woman’s self-worth? Martha sensed a faint stir of satisfaction rippling through the group as Scotty confirmed their opinion of Freya’s maternal capabilities.

Tears left dusty trails down Freya’s face, but her voice was clipped and controlled. “This is no time to evaluate my competence as a mother.”

“Well, excuse me,” said Scotty. “It’s not my kid who split.”

Isis said, “Isn’t it odd that even feminists fall into this trap—when something goes wrong with a child, even feminists blame the mother?”

“Thank you,” Freya said.

Isis went over and put her arm around Freya. “Sonoma’s not an easy kid,” she said. “Anyone could see that. She has lots of issues to work through. When she comes back, it’s going to be hard, and naturally it will take time and a great deal of help from the Goddess.”

Freya said, “It makes me feel better to hear you assuming she
is
coming back.”

Then Freya shrugged off Isis’s arm, blew her nose, and turned on Diana. “You’re the one always telling her to go get lost in the desert, as if it weren’t suicide for a thirteen-year-old New York kid to go be rattlesnake bait. The stupidity, the wickedness of putting that kind of pressure—”