Call Me Ishtar

by Rhoda Lerman

  “Where did you hear about boiling clothes?”

  “It’s something I’ve known a long time.”

  “And the pizza cutter?” he asks, underlining and labeling capital A, capital B.

  “That’s a secret. Robert should not have told you my secret.”

  “Dear … we have no secrets between us if I am to help you.” He smiles.

  “Do you masturbate?”

  “No.” He is lying. An elastic thread snaps on his sock in sheer frustration.

  “From a Chinese acupuncturist.” I do not lie. He thinks I do.

  “A pizza cutter?”

  “You killed your wife with your freedom of choice. Here, please take a Cupcake. It will help. You ought to do something for your socks. It isn’t fair to just leave them. Let not the testimony of a woman be admitted on account of the levity and boldness of her sex. Moses. He said that.”

  “You see”—he puts his hands together in prayer and swivels— “part of this mmm malady is that at times you are perfectly rational.”

  I kiss his forehead and take my seat again, adding, “And at other times, irrational but always perfectly. Tell me, M.C., what you recommend.”

  He looks at the ceiling and lectures about being a good wife. I borrow his pencil and legal pad to take notes. He doesn’t mention the roles of mother, maiden and harlot. You didn’t think he would, did you?

  “Tell me now, dear, what you want.” I give him back his pad and pencil.

  “Well, as you know, aside from the fact I am Robert’s wife and the mother of my son and most attractive to other men, I am the Queen of Heaven. You know that, do you not?”

  “Uh, no, Robert never mentioned that.”

  “Yes, public image: Queen of Heaven. Privately, I am other things. What I am doing, M.C., is co-ordinating full and well both my divine and mortal roles as a woman. And I am doing very well at it.”

  He pushes a button on his cassette. I speak of Erich Neumann, pronouncing the Neu as Noy correctly. I speak pedantically and slowly for the recording. “Some of Neumann is accurate. He acknowledges my pre-existence. Lady of the Beasts, Lady of the Southern Sycamore, Lady of the Plants, etc., etc.”

  “Do you ever feel you want to harm people?”

  “There have been times when it is necessary. You are contemplating my commitment to a psychiatric unit. Perhaps I should harm you.” I stand to full glory and kick out the plug on his cassette. He presses an intercom and describes my affliction for an outsider as I roll my tongue, smile at him and stretch out one eye until it reaches my hairline and shrink the other into a Gog slit, terribly. He fumbles for a button. I take his hand. “Would you like a Cupcake. Believe me, it would help.”

  He shakes his head. I am stepping on his hand.

  “Do you like eclipses?” I produce, without fanfare, a total eclipse. He strains to turn on a light. Shaking his head he presses a button kneewise beneath his desk. I have seen enough movies to understand his action. I offer him a view of my feathers. “Do you like feathers?” I ask.

  “Put down your skirt.”

  “Do you like feathers? Do you like my eclipse? You’re so negative.” He is very negative.

  “Yes. I like feathers. Please put down your skirt.” His face is ashen now.

  “Shall I boil your socks and shoes? It will help you.” I drop my skirt. He hands me his socks and shoes. His socks are damp. I receive his garters, his belt, his shirt. I stop him at his wristwatch and prepare a neat bundle (that was I in my son’s tomb wrapping the clothes), bless him and leave, pausing, however, to display once again my feathery finery to the receptionist and an unhappily married couple in the waiting room.

  I think maybe it’s time to start packing.

  21

  “LADY, WE GOTTA PUT YOU UNDER ARREST.”

  “The charges, sirs?” Ishtar asked politely.

  “Indecent exposure?” the policeman answered, shrugging his shoulders.

  Ishtar watched the flight of a pigeon above her head and walked, following the arresting officer, toward a patrol car. It would be unfitting, she felt, if this were indeed a final scene, to walk in humiliation or even in humility, which was hardly her style, whining that her father had forsaken her. As others had done. They had cried for their fathers because they knew full well it was their mother leading them to their ends, usually irrevocably and with justification. The men at the golden oak booking desk asked Ishtar if she wished to call her lawyer and her husband.

  “They are the same.”

  “Is your husband a lawyer?”

  “In the strictest sense.”

  “Don’t book her yet. Wait until he shows,” the arresting officer advised a clerk who seemed to be fascinated by Ishtar’s hem. The police were exceedingly embarrassed. She had wished them to be impressed.

  “I’ll stay. Really. Please write my name, Ishtar, Queen of Heaven, in the book. The charges, bail and all that. As I have seen it on television.”

  She had hoped also for something if not dramatic at least melodramatic, something cruel and heartless that would make for good text and legend when the police records would be demanded by the populace and would be iconized in small golden houses to be carried into whatever wilderness was left.

  “No, we’ll wait for your husband. We’d rather he took the responsibility.”

  Ishtar grew powerfully angry and twisted the knob from a golden oak chair, until, unable to remain still, she stood on the chair and addressed the startled group, arms raised above her head to the large fan on the ceiling. “I, even I, Queen of Heaven, take the responsibility for the bursting of the factory, for the disorganization of your schools, for the death of a rabbi, hanging quite strangled in his cloakroom, for the organ at the Temple, which has burst its pipes and caused considerable damage, for the radical activities within your churches, for the ecstatic states of your children. All of it. Furthermore, my own husband, Robert, has grown impotent from fear of my power. That also, which I regret, I have done.”

  “Lady, is this a confession? Come down. Do you want this to be a confession?” The clerk lifted his pen.

  Ishtar beat upon her chest. “I confess to no one. It is truth I speak.” They shifted on their feet. “I am responsible. I would like a record made at what time I came in and at what time I went out. I want it on your blotter.”

  “You’re not responsible for anything you say unless your lawyer is here,” the arresting officer advised her, his teeth grinding behind his cheek meat. Something shorted in the electric overhead fans, which began to whine fearfully from their stations in the ceiling.

  “I, even I, Queen of Heaven, am responsible. Utterly. You do not believe me.” Angry amber tears coursed over her cheeks. “You do not believe me. Here, I will show you.”

  It was just as Robert pushed open the double doors, his rep tie sailing behind him in the wind and behind that a small friend-of-the-family judge, that Ishtar lifted her skirts and, howling, displayed her feathers. But the men had looked away at the doors and the clerk hid his face and she went unnoticed. She stomped her foot in the chair and aimed two golden acorn knobs through a windowpane. It shattered convincingly.

  “Are you all right, baby?” Robert, his hands shaking to his shoulders, questioned her, and gently, albeit palsied, guided her to sit. She allowed him to guide her.

  “I’m well. I have done all of these things. Do not call me baby.”

  The night before, when the starter broke on her small car, Ishtar had attempted to push it with Robert’s many horsed station wagon and had shattered the rear end of the small car twice, while Robert, his face incredibly contorted in the rearview mirror, held the wheel of the small car. They had not succeeded in starting the small car, although Robert had succeeded in sitting quite still as she drove the large car into the small car many times. They argued on the road about Ishtar’s incredible mechanical incompetence. He knew her as incapable. But she could see in his eyes, in the courthouse, above the neatly striped tie, the gray flecks o
f his supernatural rising toward the centers of his sharp black pupils. He blinked. Between his blinks she saw everything of his nightmares and visions that he remembered from high school Macbeth and he removed his glasses to cleanse the lenses on a navy blue handkerchief which was torn. Ishtar dismissed the touch of guilt she felt for the torn handkerchief. She was pleased, however, with the disintegration of his rationality.

  “I’m a notary public.” Robert turned to the judge, seated now before the golden oak desk. “If that helps.”

  “If you take her home in your custody, we won’t have to take further action tonight.”

  “Robert, I wish them to write my name in the book. When I came in and when I went out.”

  “In the morning,” the judge murmured. “Women, Robert, often want to take the responsibility for major events. They come in here and confess to every murder, fire, theft. Even suicides. I’ve had three women at once confessing to the same suicide. Your good wife wishes to confess to many things. Her charge is indecent exposure. She may have been suffering from a temporary instability. Come here, dear.” The family friend judge addressed Ishtar.

  “I chose to expose myself.” Ishtar fought the petulancy in her voice. She was frightened that she would, in some grotesque turn of justice, be saved.

  And denied.

  She stood before the small judge, passing her hands over his head and withdrawing a sack full of ashes and three large acorns. “We’ll get this straightened out. As soon as the excitement dies down.” He leaned across his desk to pat her head. “I’ve known your husband since he was a boy.” She sprayed Easy-Off into the eyes of the judge.

  Ishtar spat the three acorns, one after the other, at his shining forehead and, squinting at him, laughed low, deeply and crookedly within herself. The judge gestured for a cloth for his eyes. To the arresting officer, Ishtar solemnly, as Robert led her out, awarded the screws from the fans, the large oak chair and a particularly manic grin. Claire stood outside with a zoom lens camera, photographing the event. Ishtar threw her a kiss and an acorn. Behind her the fans were blowing ashes into the courthouse, filling the rooms and covering the faces of the people. There would be no Youth for Christ this time to clean up after this exposure, which, although not indecent, was real.

  Snow covered Robert’s lenses. Ishtar and he walked toward the car. He wiped his lenses with trembling hands. They did not speak to each other in the car. Ishtar nodded her head to the beat of the windshield wipers. Robert’s eyes were totally gray now, the flecks floating to the surface as he blinked. Along the highway, the fields were covered thinly with snow and the late afternoon sun, in pale streaks, lay across the snow. Ishtar asked to stop at Carrol’s for her son’s dinner. They stopped.

  “I don’t think you’re crazy, honey.” Robert returned with the red and white striped bags. The red light of an approaching snowplow flashed on his sugarcube false front tooth. Ishtar did not speak. She was considering the giving of the breath of life to cars.

  “But the lawyers, bail bonds, psychiatric examinations. Do you know what this means, honey, what it’s going to cost me?”

  “When the back seat breathes heavily, Robert, the windshield wiper is having an orgasm. When good food turns you on, turn into Carrol’s.”

  “Can’t you take anything seriously?”

  “Oh, yes.” She touched his sleeve. “People who can’t take jokes.”

  “This isn’t a joke, Ishtar. You have a child to consider.”

  “Robert, it will cost me something too, won’t it?”

  “I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t think of that just now.”

  “Perhaps, Robert, you are mad. Perhaps you are crazy. Listen to the back seat.”

  “No one in their right mind would do what you did, Ishtar.”

  “Then I did it?”

  He didn’t answer her. She traced dot to dot the freckles on his trembling hands.

  “Come now, Robert. Did I do it?” His flesh danced under her touch.

  “I guess … I guess so.”

  Ishtar leaned over and kissed his damp cheek. “Thank you, Robert. Thank you.” She began to hum, murmuring. “Out of the East I come, unsparing of fang and sharp of tooth. Out of the dark behind the moon and I see my lover on the Argive plain and I bare my breast, exposing my thigh and I greet him … and I greet him. Aaah, stop here!” The brakes of the rosewood metal Plymouth station wagon screeched at the road’s shoulder. And, as Robert expected her to, from all the terror of his childhood and his Halloweens, Ishtar jumped, laughing fantastically, as closely as she could enacting the Wicked Witch of the West. She flung her arms up against the graying sky. “I did it, Robert/Moses. I, even I, did it! Recognize all of me!” Then she dropped her voice, shoved the red and white striped bags across the car and whispered: “Feed the boy. The cats get their wormings on Tuesday at four-thirty.” And she raced across the fields. Robert pulled away into the traffic without waiting. Without looking behind him.

  22

  COVERTLY, FROM MY COFFIN AS I LIE IN MY LIVING ROOM, I WATCH Robert. On the day of my funeral he is reading the morning newspaper. Claire’s cello and stand are in position near the piano. She will play later.

  Too long or long enough I had lain in the snow in the field by the Thruway just beneath the Crowley Cottage Cheese Light as a Breeze billboard and the Volkswagen We Grow Better with Age sign and was discovered by Robert, along with the usual winter’s morning bag of split cats and flattened raccoons, with a fine dusting of snow over my body, quite at peace, a tiny smirk across my lips. My obituary reads that I have died of overexposure and I consider their choice of terms amusing although I am grateful that they included my recipes in the column.

  I have at last solved this problem of exposure. It may be, much later when everyone understands and the bobby pins in my underwear drawer become relics, that I have done a number on a Mao-Lenin-Marxist religious quasi-metaphysical something or other. I am quite inept at these definitions. But taken in the light of the twentieth century and its great revolutionary tics, I have distributed my divine wealth in such a way that all people have the secrets. No priests, rabbis, pastors in between us. No teachers, lawyers, policemen with their secret sets of rules. The people will have seen enough of me to believe in themselves and recognize their own divinity and, of course, each other’s. What passes from one person to another person is divine, if only the principle that afforded the passage is recognized. Robert has already come to suspect that I am multiple. Anyone now can bake my Twinkies. Anyone can bake my Cupcakes. As above, below. Nothing says loving like something in the oven, right? All things will rise in joy and the heavens too will be joyous. I am quite certain that things will be better for all of us once I have been recognized and I am looking forward to a nice juicy retirement. I am regretful that I leave still hungry. Men who hold me sacred are frightened to hold me but I am so available. I am God and I am Woman and so are all of you. I was available. My juices have been taken, quite temporarily, but definitively, and I must wait.

  Robert, of course, is functioning perfectly. Although he does not now and never will have an understanding of death, I appreciate today his great capacity to face my death with his usual blind power. I sense that he is truly relieved. I was a little much. I have always been. I have always been a source of inestimable confusion, growing composite as I have. He reads the morning paper, waiting for the baked goods and the extra folding chairs to be delivered. The chairs arrive and I watch him lining them up in precise rows, so that the old gold printing property of applebaum’s funeral home, beech street, syracuse, new york, is in perfect alignment with my rosewood fireplace wall. I do not admire the carnations filling the corners of the room. I want roses. Robert’s body moves in graceful bends and dips. I see his pants stretching over his lovely rear end and I wish he were less ethical and had learned from the Egyptians not only monotheism but the beauty of necrophilia.

  Hungry.

  As usual he closes his eyes to my hunger, which for some reason has
always threatened him. Recently though he has been peeking at his own supernatural. This is not easy but it is a beginning. I am not asking him to be totally irrational. The world needs people to plug things in, but I am asking him to understand his own multiplicity. Perhaps, I consider, he could bring me back to life. That would give him something to write home about. I could do the choke on the apple and kiss me bit and wake up. Watching his back and strong hands, I consider masturbating here but it would be really dreadful at the moment to heave and be seen. Muscle spasms? No, it is really in bad taste. And I do not wish to be accused of bad taste. Did I remember to tell you that Snow White’s glass coffin and the tephillin are directly connected in meaning? That girls who carry dolls are the inheritors of women who carried my sacred image?

  The boxes of schnecken arrive, dripping with honey. The community, suspecting my death a suicide, may not turn up in great number and Robert has ordered too many Schnecken. I would have preferred Hostess goods, of course, but production has not quite begun. Soon, if I have done well, Robert will think of nothing but the supply and demand of baked goods. Glory. Under my coffin dress … a cheap Celanese construction purchased for the occasion after a discussion Robert conducted with a telephone order clerk, convincing himself that I’ll only wear it once and it doesn’t have to last so he needn’t spend much money on it … under this rag I hide a zebra black striped notebook with matching pen. I shall record names and remarks. My friends are terrified and ecstatic and better dressed than I am in their Anne Klein outfits. I can not forgive Robert for this. My friends have prepared, in their ecstasy over my end, great mounds of tuna and chicken salad pyred in Lucite and silver bowls with matching servers. Betty’s chicken salad, as usual, has the capers and Eileen’s the green grapes. Someone has used Empress Tuna, waterpacked, and disguised it as chicken. I know because Blue is busy at the Jensen bowl it came in and Blue isn’t allowed to eat chickens because of the eggs. I am leaving Blue, although I love him. Someone has been going through my jewelry, which I consider fairly poor taste also, but I have stuck her in the palms with pins, from this, my distance, and she has stopped her rifling. I have already slipped away my son’s Teddy Roosevelt pin and the two teeth here in my coffin. The teeth are warm against my cold. I heard my closest friend whispering to Robert last night that she would like to straighten my underwear drawer before anyone goes through my things. I appreciate that sort of consideration.