Hunters and Gatherers (7 page)

Isis said, “The Goddess isn’t about deprivation. She wants us to recreate the matriarchy, when everyone worshipped Her and lived in peace and gentleness toward one another and the Earth.”

“Joy,” Diana muttered. “What a fucking misnomer.”

“Diana,” said Isis. “Please.”

Joy stared hostilely at the Talking Stick, not knowing what to do with it when no one made a move to take it.

Starling said, “How come whenever we pass the Talking Stick, it always turns into a bitch session? No one ever wants to take the stick when they have something good to say.”

Joy said, “I never understood why it had to be a stick. Why can’t it be a Talking Egg?”

“Well, it’s tricky,” said Bernie, “to share our happy and positive feelings.”

“That’s how we were brought up,” Diana said. “Women aren’t programmed to be happy. We’re meant to be sacrificial victims—”

“Perhaps one of the new women would like the stick?” Isis said. “Only if you want to. We all know it’s scary at first, but like so many scary things, worth it…”

Martha shot a glance at Hegwitha, hoping she would demur, and then Martha could refuse as well: they would be in this together. But Hegwitha was already reaching for the stick and only stopped when she saw Martha watching.

“Mind if I go first?” she asked.

“Not at all,” said Martha.

Hegwitha pressed the Talking Stick against her chest and concentrated so hard that her face got mottled. Finally she opened her eyes and said, “Maybe it’s appropriate that Isis started off talking about almost dying in the ocean because, as some of you know, that’s what I want to talk about, too. I’ve been battling cancer, Hodgkin’s, for the last three years…”

There were gasps. Then Diana said softly, “How did you find out you had it?”

“I was buttoning my shirt,” Hegwitha said. “I felt this lump on my neck.”

“Yikes,” said Joy.

“Blessed be,” said Isis.

“It could happen to anyone,” Hegwitha said. “That’s why no one can stand to—” Isis and Bernie hugged Hegwitha, who’d begun to cry. Martha felt her own eyes fill with sympathetic tears.

Hegwitha said, “No one wants to know what it’s like, waiting for the diagnosis, trying to get through the weekend till some doctor gets the results, waiting in radiology, hour after hour. You’d think it might be less lonely because I work in radiology and know everybody there. But that makes it worse somehow. Whatever control you thought you had is totally taken away…

“If you try to keep your spirits up, people tell you you’re in denial. I had to quit my first cancer support group because they were all such bitches. And if you try to say, ‘Listen, I’m dying, I’m scared,’ everyone acts like you’re being a wimp…” Hegwitha was weeping again. “Everybody pretends to care. But they’re really just glad that it’s me and not them.”

Hold on there! thought Martha. That’s not true—but, of course, it was. Better Hegwitha than her. Much better. Besides, the fact of Hegwitha being ill seemed, deceptively, to shrink the odds of the same thing happening to Martha.

“We’re here for you,” said Isis.

“Let it out, Hegwitha,” said Bernie.

Fat tears slipped down Hegwitha’s cheeks. Titania, Joy, and Diana wept, too. The rest of the women were silent, white-lipped, and tense.

“I’m in remission,” Hegwitha said through her tears. “I’ve really got to quit smoking.”

There was a long silence. “There’s nothing to say,” began Isis. “Except to remind you, Hegwitha, that this isn’t your fault. Goddess religion isn’t like phallo-psychiatry, it doesn’t try to tell you you’re responsible for your cancer. You didn’t bring it on yourself, the Goddess has Her reasons. And we’ll always be here for you, Hegwitha, any time you need us.”

“Thank you,” murmured Hegwitha. “I mean it. Thank you.”

And she passed the Talking Stick to Martha.

What was Martha supposed to say after Hegwitha’s story? Breaking up with your boyfriend was not exactly like dying of cancer. Martha knew that, she knew that. And yet she was so unhappy. Maybe she should tell them that her problems were hardly worth discussing—that is, compared with Hegwitha’s. But wouldn’t that sound self-congratulatory and make Hegwitha feel even worse?

Martha took the Talking Stick and shut her eyes for what she hoped would pass for a moment of silent prayer. Then she said, “I hate my job. I’m a fact checker at
Mode
, and I’m wasting my life chasing down details I don’t care about—”

“A fact checker at
Mode
?” said Starling.

“What qualifies as a fact there?” said Joy. “Like, do blondes have more fun?”

“Face-lift prices. Collagen lawsuits,” said Titania. “The price of the new swivel eye pencil and the colors it comes in.”

“Exactly,” said Martha. “My supervisor, Eleanor, is a maniac and a sadist. She makes me call and check facts any sixth grader would know—”

Martha was gearing up to trash Eleanor when she noticed Isis waving her arms, as if Martha were an airplane she was flagging in for a landing.

“Come on,” said Isis. “Tell us what’s really bothering you. The Talking Stick knows when you’re talking
around
your issues—”

“There isn’t anything, not really,” Martha said.

Bernie said, “What’s his name?”

Titania said, “Ed? Ted? Fred? Rumpelstiltskin?”

“Or
her
name,” Joy said. “Polly? Molly? Holly?”

Martha filled her lungs and heard herself say, “Dennis.”

Diana said, “Doesn’t it make you sick to consider how many women are driven into the arms of the Goddess by some schmuck named Dennis?”

Isis said, “Come on. Hush. Martha has the Talking Stick.”

In fact, Martha found that the interruptions had made talking easier—more like conversation, less like ritual confession.

“Who was he?” said Titania. “How did you meet?”

“Who cares?” said Joy. “I mean, really.”

“Go on,” said Isis.

Martha said, “He’s an actor. He fixes appliances for a living. He came to repair my refrigerator. I was in a foul mood, I was missing a day of work. I was shocked when I opened the door. He was so handsome that I was embarrassed. He looked at me when I talked to him, intense but completely unsleazy…like he cared deeply, up to a point, what was wrong with my fridge.”

What an enormous distance between the sweet, attentive Dennis who’d shown up to fix her refrigerator and the Dennis who suggested she spend more time at the beach. Contemplating it was like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and it left Martha light-headed, deoxygenated, and breathless to take credit or blame for such cataclysmic transformation.

“Go on,” Bernie urged.

Martha said, “The entire time he was checking the fridge, I hung around the kitchen. I’d never had so many domestic chores. I washed each dish forty times.”

But how could she explain what had seemed like an optical phenomenon: her entire peripheral field had slowly blurred and narrowed down to one bright pinpoint of light, and that pinpoint was Dennis. If she couldn’t see, how could she have moved from one room to another? The safest, the only thing to do was to stay near Dennis. It was as if some new gravity were pinning her in the kitchen and she couldn’t resist any more than she could have chosen to leave the earth’s surface.

Surely these women could understand this most basic human experience, the miracle everyone wanted, this sudden unwilled falling in love. And yet Martha suspected that they all had learned to distrust and fear it. (All except Sonoma, who might think it was disgusting.) And who was to say that they weren’t right? Martha should have distrusted it, too, and meekly paid the repair bill and thanked him and gone off to work.

But it was already too late by the time he said her freezer needed defrosting, and his statement hovered in the air like some vile double entendre. They stared at the kitchen floor.

Martha noticed a stuck-on parsley leaf right where he was looking.

“I asked if he wanted some coffee,” Martha said. “We sat at the kitchen table. It was four in the afternoon before we got up again. I knew that hours were slipping by; it felt dangerous and risky. Blowing off work, shooting the day—I remember his beeper kept beeping. And I was thrilled that a guy being paged would keep on talking to me.”

Were they asking themselves why he—why any man—would be so entranced with Martha? Probably they were beyond wondering about anything men might do. Martha wished there were a way of subtly letting them know that Dennis didn’t date every girl whose refrigerator he defrosted. “Once he told me that what he liked about me was that I was always right there. Whatever he said, I
got
it, I understood, though women often didn’t—”

“Watch out,” Titania said. “Watch out when a guy tells you what most women don’t get, or what he doesn’t like about most women…except, of course, for you.”

“Men,” said Joy. “Their definition of intelligence is when we understand them.”

And yet there had been times when she and Dennis were out with his friends, and he would say something smart or funny, and hers was the face he sought out to see if he’d impressed her, if he’d made her laugh. What a distance he’d traveled from loving her for being right there to hating her for being (as he’d said) on some other planet completely. And if she was, hadn’t he driven her there, sent her into orbit to escape his perpetual criticisms and the hulking shadow of Lucinda?

“We were together a year,” Martha said. “Then he just lost interest. He seemed less happy to see me. I used to think of all the things he didn’t do anymore, like hooking my neck in a friendly way when we used to walk down the street.”

“You let a guy get you in a headlock?” said Joy. “Serious safety error.”

“It didn’t seem to matter that I understood what he said. I’d hear him telling other people things he’d already told me. I’d ask myself what I used to do right that I’d started doing wrong. Everything about me began to seem grotesque.”

“Like what things?” Bernie asked in her most gently prodding, therapeutic tone.

“I don’t know,” lied Martha.

One day she’d let herself into Dennis’s apartment when he was on the phone. And though Martha liked to believe that she had principles about respecting people’s privacy, not listening in on their conversations or opening their mail, the compulsion to eavesdrop was so overwhelming that Martha realized she
did
have the normal human urges that Dennis had been implying she lacked.

Dennis was laughing strangely. It wasn’t Dennis’s laugh. Then she understood. He was imitating her: a hideous equine snort. Whom was Dennis talking to? She heard him say, “I can’t stand it.”

Perhaps she was being oversensitive, he was just doing a funny laugh. Actors practiced lots of things besides parodies of their girlfriends. Once she’d heard Dennis describe how he’d watched an old man walk in the rain and had remembered that walk for years until he got the chance to use it. That was when they were first together, and hearing Dennis say that had made her feel quite light-headed with desire and adoration. Imagine: a man who listened and watched with such sweetly empathic attention! But hearing Dennis imitate her had made Martha despise the sound of her own voice…

“Like what?” repeated Bernie.

She would tell them the next worst thing. “Finally, I asked him if something was…you know, wrong. And he said it was getting old, dating the Little Match Girl.”

Sonoma whistled. “Nasty. He
said
that?”

“Sonoma, how do you know about the Little Match Girl?” Freya said. “I’m always stunned when you can access that sort of cultural information.”

“Dad read it to me,” said Sonoma. “You never once read aloud to me the whole time I was a kid.”

Isis clapped her hands. “Please, ladies. Control yourselves. Martha still has the Talking Stick.”

“Martha, what did you
hear
when he said that?” asked Bernie.

“What did I hear?” said Martha. Exactly what Dennis had told her: that she was just like that pathetic girl in the fairy tale, always standing out in the snow, looking into windows, spying on warm crowded rooms, parties, family dinners, except that Martha was worse than that, because she secretly believed that it was
better
to be alone, shivering in the cold, and not with loud sweaty people so vulgar they actually wanted to have fun…

“What else, Martha?” Isis said.

“Isn’t that enough?” said Martha. Although she was new to the group, she was hogging the limelight, making them spend more time on her failed romance than on Hegwitha’s illness.

Isis said, “We must remember it’s hard for men to love. They weren’t brought up to do it, they were brought up
not
to do it. Love aversion therapy. A wire was hooked up to their heart at some point between Boy Scouts and Basic Training, and every time they had a caring thought, they got a teeny electric shock.”

“Dennis was loving,” Martha said. “He just stopped loving me.” How pitiful to defend a man who everyone in the room now knew had called her the Little Match Girl.

And then, to Martha’s astonishment, tears came into her eyes. As she hid her face in the crook of her arm, hands stroked her hair and shoulders.

Through it all she heard Isis’s voice. “Every woman in this room has experienced rejection. The patriarchal culture is
about
rejection. The abusive or absent father, rejecting us, turning his back on us no matter how much we need him. Why would anyone want that hopelessness, that impossible love? What I’d like to know is: Why would anyone choose to suffer like that?”

Isis lifted Martha’s damp face and gave her a dazzling smile, then rose to her feet with a grace that made her seem to expand like a genie emerging from the mouth of a bottle.

“I’m going to bed,” said Isis. “There’s tons of food and wine left. I love you all. I’m exhausted.”

I
N ACCATONE, THE MIDTOWN
restaurant where Martha met Gretta for lunch, every trick of lighting and decor was employed to make you feel rich and northern Italian. But the syrupy low pinkish light, designed to conceal and excuse, telegraphed to the whole restaurant that Martha’s attempt to be stylish had failed. As she and Gretta followed the pencil-thin hostess to their table, Martha’s downtown black, her men’s tuxedo jacket, her tights and lace-up ankle boots made her look like a circus hobo foundering in a sea of Armani. Every woman in the room had hair the color of mink or honey, except for Martha, with her nail-scissored shreds of garish skinned-knee orange.