Call Me Ishtar

by Rhoda Lerman

  “Is that clear, Ishtar?” He had spoken. I did not hear. I will agree.

  Into the lilting matrix of the Italian hour, the announcer injects crystalline Anglo-Saxon. “Sears and Roebuck,” and I, cracking an egg, smile at the unwitting wisdom. I do not understand the Italian. I enjoy its flow. Sergio Franchi sings about his mother. Robert waits.

  “We will not be involved in drugs in any way, commercially or privately.”

  I rub Corn Huskers Lotion between my fingers and nodding my head in agreement I sit myself on a golden yellow breakfast stool and drape my tail carefully to one side.

  “And if your precious Mack … if I find anything on him, I’ll have him arrested. I’ll throw the book at him. I’ll have his ass kicked in.”

  Robert continues. His tempo is increasing. My nipples are antennas, grossly exaggerated in the curved reflection of the Sunbeam toaster. They will understand when the toast should pop and will warn me before it burns. Robert, watching the stainless steel nipples, forgets that his juice is freshly squeezed and swallows the pulpy clots, coughing them into his napkin. I smile secretly. He has not yet put down his paper. He is now reading the financial section. Before while I spoke to him of Cupcakes and factories and an entire civilization living on the chocolate and mandrake roots of my Hostess Cupcakes, and like happiness, being sold on every street corner of America, of the world and the mothers of the boys operating the factories while Robert sits far above them all, overseeing and designing new ovens and machines and checking quality control, he laughed suddenly between my words. He was reading Dagwood Bumstead. I continued to spin my dreams of edible records, of spruce beer and pears and happiness and wealth enough for the boys’ contentment and his own peace, of peace between man and woman, of wholeness for everyone and of a connection again to the powers of heaven. He laughed. But what can I expect of him. He went to the bookstore to buy a copy of Intelligent Life in the Universe and when he arrived, forgot the title. He is not the kind to consider other worlds, particularly the inner world of his own dread supernatural. Why does he laugh at Dagwood Bumstead? Dag-wood Bumstead has never been funny. The hatred between the two is abysmal and I wish to remove it. I can.

  Somehow, my mother would say, you must begin at home. I do not think though it will be possible to change Robert without sacrificing too much of myself. And yet I know I must, in the words of the youngsters, get it together, so I can be a goddess in my kitchen and a cook in the universe. Only then will I be happy. I wish to be recognized for all that I am. I believe it is too late for Robert. I must begin someplace.

  We worked with diligence that winter, the three ugly sisters and myself, separating lentils, within which, you understand, were spirits, from the ashes of the world. Often my doves came to help me. The good into a dish to throw. The bad into the crops can go. Later mystics will call this simple process reincarnation. I had to hop all that winter for I had lost my slipper during the night of chaos whence I had dispatched all of these souls. I hopped in order that my holy heel, uncovered, would not touch the ground. Although I had lost my golden slipper, I did not regret the destruction and I was willing, with the help of my fine ugly friends, to clean up and save from the ashes that which ought to be saved. A dismal oil lamp burned eternally in the chimney corner, for it was a poor house, but I was not disheartened with the lentils and the cinders. I was in hiding, you know. And there is no better place than a kitchen for a mother goddess to go unrecognized, particularly a poor kitchen in a poor country house away from the palaces.

  Naturally there were dozens of young slavering hard-on princes scouring the land for me. The kingship was empty; the land barren; the wells dried up. And I, the sovereignty of the land, besmirched and dressed in rags, refused to be bothered with these sweating aspiring princes who came seeking the kingship. I alone had the power to confer this kingship upon them. I needed a rest. I did not have the energies yet to uphold another weak character seeking his manhood, another lover protecting his fragile potency from his fears and I was tired, so tired, of tiptoeing around the cages of the barbaric emotions of these men who needed to rule the world. I was tired of bringing them up to flower. So I changed shape often, from pear tree to dove to swan to gate post until at last I found this good, albeit poor, home. Few men sought the ugly daughters and they could use their energies to save souls from the cinders. Ugly girls, of course, try harder and often have better spirits. I hid. No man would find me, not even the Foot Fetishist.

  Of all the princes, the Foot Fetishist is most aggressive in his search for me, and he, this great perspiring, unconfident, sweat-palmed beast, has always been after my foot. I’m certain it was he who stole my slipper during the night of chaos. The slipper has no power without my foot, but men have been known to busy themselves in odd ways with shoes. It is more than drinking from my shoe that he busies his princely gross self with. I know, in his slovenly closets and besmirched bedclothes, he has deposited many a handful of offering in my name, in consideration of my foot. Often, he calls great palace festivals, rounding up all the women of the countryside and slips my now unclean sacred slipper onto their innocent but mortal feet. Oh, he is ill, this one, and he would do well to be plowed under with the rest of the no-good beans. Often it is his men coming through the green copse beyond our poor home in richly trapped horses carrying jewels and gowns for girls of the neighborhood. He wants only to be my royal footholder and control the power of the land. He has my shoe and I am somewhat weakened. He follows me.

  At last, as was inevitable, for the people needed me, he appeared. He announced yet another dance and counted us. I had to appear. I could not avoid him the entire dreadful evening. I stood tiptoe all night to keep my heel from the ground. He insisted on dancing with me. I hopped away as soon as the music ended and he called into the night behind me: “No other shall become my wife but she whose foot this golden slipper fits.” There were many things I wished to do to this pig of a prince, but he had my shoe and my powers. I raced, hopping through the forests, keeping my naked heel off the earth. I changed shapes all the way home, rabbits, white rats, pumpkins, a horse. He did not find me. But the next morning, his retinue were at the door of our poor cottage. I cowered in the fireplace.

  The good ugly sisters did their utmost to fit that slipper on their feet and save my life from the Foot Fetishist. I will never forget them for their devotion and their sacrifice. One cut off her toe; one cut off her heel. It was without avail. I was found and he, with his yellow pointed teeth, his twitching loins, and sweating palms, took my foot in his hand and slipped the befouled slipper upon it. That was it. Do not think I lived happily ever after at all. The only advantage received from that stage in my career is that I was able to stop hop. ping. You may hear other versions of this tale.

  It is still Sunday. I am still in the kitchen. I am still preparing Robert’s eggs.

  Let us begin, then, with eggs.

  There are no fertilized eggs in Syracuse.

  I have sought them. As you have.

  Near daybreak there shall be a great calm and you shall see the Day-Star arise and the dawning will appear, and you shall perceive a great treasure. The chief thing in it, and the most perfect, is a certain exalted tincture with which the world (if it served God and were worthy of such gifts) might be tinged and turned into most pure gold. Pow.

  Once you gleam the totality of truth, the details will fit. At your point in space, degenerate in knowledge, you do not know what to do with the report of a human footprint in the stone bed of the Pacific Ocean floor or a picture of an adobe house on the moon taken by Apollo 12 or why you buy Easter eggs. You would have to know larger concepts. That Mu, the Motherland, for instance, lying once between South America and India, blew to bits 12,000 years ago and her colonies, Atlantis, Ireland, Britanny, the Basque Highlands, Crete, Dilmun, Catal Huyuk—there were many more—lasted somewhat longer until all the original knowledge and language were dispersed, leaving only that solitary footprint on the sea floor and Easte
r egg hunts on the White House Lawn. You’ve read too quickly. Go back. See the sentence about language and knowledge? I want you to understand that everything came from one source, that language and knowledge were all one and from one. Myself. Civilization is given.

  It is entirely appropriate that you continue to seek the egg at Easter. For Easter is Ishtar’s holiday. I find it offensive that you are reduced to buying sterile eggs at this holiday of regeneration and that I myself must order mine from New Jersey. However, since I have always been the source of knowledge, it amuses me to begin once again with the egg.

  The egg.

  I have twice in this life attempted to produce eggs. Once in mechanically acceptable circumstances with a junior egg hatchery purchased at Chanukah for my son in order that it bring forth on the New Year. And once through private body functionings. The second act was perhaps to justify the failure of the first. I can not however blame the failure on the machine. The failure is to be laid upon the malaise of the milieu. I have never failed at words. Often I have been euphemistically referred to as The Word. I am neither The Word nor The World Egg. I am The Lady who is The Source of All Things.

  “Sorry, lady,” the egg farmer, who was either one of my obscene phone callers or had just dashed in from his henhouse, breathlessly apologized. “I got only this one rooster and he’s running into fourteen, fifteen hunnerd hens a day. No telling when he catches one how many he’s caught before, strain’s so weak. Try the Experimental Farm ferinst Pompey?” Pompey is to the East. Ferinst is Middle English, quite antique, meaning over against.

  I ignored his suggestion, not wishing mutations on my kitchen counter, and ordered two eggs from New Jersey, filling out the coupon attached to the plastic domed hatchery. Check one, chicken, turkey, pheasant, other. Next to other I printed plainly in large letters, goose, golden. Times change. Hope remains.

  It was dead winter. The package from New Jersey sat in my RFD nest for hours. I lay the cold speckled eggs which were neither golden nor goose into the hatchery basins within the dome, filling the third basin with warm water to keep the shells moist. I ought to have placed them between my legs, but I had much walking to do. I prayed over my menorah, which, contrary to Yahwist teachings, represents the seven planets with the top candle none other than the Queen of Heaven. I called down the power of each planet to the eggs. I plugged the cord of the plastic womb into my Universal appliance center and I spoke to, cared for, protected, the clear dome’s contents as if Snow White lay within waiting her time. In order that he raise not his voice nor slam doors near the eggs, I strained Robert’s juice and cooked his eggs to perfection. And no soul, for the entire gestation period, crossed hands, feet or fingers in my kitchen. I myself wore nine needles on a tricolored thread around my neck to magnetize the astral rays toward my kitchen and bring my son’s eggs safely to life. My orange cats, like the Three Old Ones, sat around the womb, heads tilted, watching and listening for hours each day. I felt they could sense something I could only hope for. Luck, who not only is a Lady, but is from the same source word as logos, lucifer and means wisdom, light, power, might bring me a phoenix flapping against my Spanish ceiling beams. Phoenix, by the way, originates from the same source as Venus, Penis, Phoenicia, and Phoenicia is the place where circumcision was first, according to your histories, practiced in my honor.

  “What are they going to look like? When will they get here?” My son inquired daily.

  “At daybreak,” I would answer him. “There will be a great calm. If you have served me well and are worthy of such gifts, they will appear on the first day in the first light of the New Year.” That is a method I employ when I am unwilling to do something prayed for. I patently blame it on your unworthiness. It gets me off the hook. Being much like you, please understand that I at times enjoy wallowing in the same stubborn, lazy, halfhearted trough you often occupy. If you are Olympian, you are necessarily careless.

  At last it was daybreak of the New Year. According to Anderson’s Tales of Paradise, Harvard Classics, Volume XVII, page 311, “there resounded a clap of thunder, so dreadful that no one heard the like and everything fell down. And he opened his eyes and the Star in the distance, the Star that gleamed like the Paradise that had sunk down, was the morning star in the sky.” Do you remember what happened with Moses and myself when you first met us? Venus became a planet. Pieces of her, small stars.

  Whatever manner of pterodactyl horror was within fascinating the cats, I shall never know, for the thin-shelled embryos burst dutifully at dawn perhaps to our digital dial alarms, and scrambled themselves ferinst the plastic dome with a green and red shmear not at all traceable to the archetype of Snow White or the Philosopher’s caskets. Obviously, I had not been served well and my son was not deserving of gifts. The cats leaped to hide in the attic insulation. My needles swung sideways around my neck.

  I stared into the membranes lining the dome. I stared into the pia mater, the mutated pia mater of the plastic dome of the plastic brain and within I saw Herodotus’ Map of the World According to the Brain of Man. I saw The Ventricles as the Abode of the Soul according to Albertus Magnus and The Seven Spirits which Abide in the Brain According to the Museum Hermeticum. Aah, I saw Calvary, the bare skull. I saw Golgotha, the burial place, and I saw the skull of the hoar-frost giant, Ymir, forming the walls of heaven. The world is a large sick body of which you are the cells. And I was sick at the horror in my Universal appliance center and I, like Tiamat, the Great Mother, pulled the plug and tossed the whole mess into the snow below my kitchen windows and raced to my bathtub, where I am able to renew a limb or a psyche. I have learned with bad recipes to throw the whole thing out and start over again. Adding an arm, or kindness, or technical abilities or even oregano, doesn’t help when the original eggs are rotten. Some things are not worth saving. It is all the same, you know. Eggs, cauldrons, craniums, universes, chalices, pools, grails, bathtubs. All attached.

  That you must understand.

  And that you, buying your world eggs at Fannie Farmer, seeking regeneration and power, seeking them under Nixon’s lonely footprint on the White House Lawn at Easter, I lament for you. That you do not know Me, that you are degenerate in the knowledge and lost your connection to the heavens. I come to teach. I come to connect. Reddy Kilowatt. I come to restore the power.

  Can you use ferinst in a sentence yet? You must begin to look backward. The globe, green, steamed in the snow. Soon the early morning’s snows covered it entirely.

  Now I place the eggs on the table. Robert folds his newspaper. He has realized that I am not listening to him. My son, pinked milk running from his chin, looks up at his father and begins to pick at a tooth in the recesses of his mouth.

  “If you’re going to do that, Buddy,” Robert reminds him rather kindly, “leave the table. The boy should eat eggs,” Robert reminds me unkindly.

  The boy takes his cereal bowl. He does not look up at me. He goes to the family room, where he is alone to watch television. I would like to go with him. I would like to help him escape from this pain. Since it is my power, though, which brings him to pulling out his own teeth, a divine demonstration of his power over both his body and my emotions, my helping him to escape would be further destructive. I have found that power must be used with discretion. I do not know why he must prove his power. Robert tells me that it is my fault the boy pulls out his teeth because I am too willful, headstrong, demanding and the boy is rebelling. It is now the plan for Robert to be his friend so that when I am too strong, he can turn to his father. For a while I believed all this until the boy gave me his teeth. Although I am not at all certain of this, I now blame his problems on Robert. Whether I am right or wrong, it is easier this way to bear the gaping holes and the bloody fingers. I believe the boy wishes to defend me and has given me, in this grotesque, thoroughly archaic manner, his pledge.

  Robert asks me a question. “Do you have any explanation for the disturbance in Buffalo, Ishtar?” His nose becomes thin. He is controlling his
anger to derive information from me. It is his way. I give him little.

  “There is unrest among the boys.”

  “You think it’s Mack, Ishtar? I have to bring groupies to him. Don’t you ever notice anything queer about him?”

  “He is kind. He and Nino are fine friends. Nino is so masculine, you know, with that ridiculous penis of his, he would never befriend Mack, if Mack were not a whole man.” I think this is well said.

  Robert is concerned. “Ishtar, who always gets the coffee and doughnuts for the boys? Who do I always have to get the girls for? I tell you, he’s not interested.”

  “There is nothing wrong with him, darling. He is a sweet and gentle person. Perhaps none of the cheap girls are what he wishes. I prefer him to Nino. I find his constant erections offensive.”

  “It’s funny. The kids … well, it’s a hell of a gimmick.” Robert uncovers his eggs and sticks them with his tines. “Don’t start protecting him too. One son is enough.” The eggs do not run. Robert’s upper lip tightens and puckers and his jaw juts forward, Neolithic. Wow. He stands, looks beyond me, and shovels the eggs into the Moloch of the Waste King, where they are eaten along with an unsuspected Design Research spoon. His anger is Captain Marvelous with comic book zigzags of lightning escaping from his body. Waste not. Want not. I waste. I want.

  “I’ll bet he started something in Buffalo. Nobody wants a queer around.”

  I will not blame Mack. I will protect him. For whatever danger it may bring upon me. His gentleness is of value. “It was an Act of God.”

  “That’s another spoon! Don’t you care about the spoon? God damn.” He stands before me. “Do you know what that means? That means I don’t collect on the contract and we’ve lost five thousand dollars because that … that mess in Buffalo has been determined an Act of God.”