Hunters and Gatherers

by Francine Prose

  Isis said, “Many women have been healed of allergies by the Goddess. But not, unfortunately, me. I assume it’s karma, punishment for when I used to think that allergies were a delusion of hypochondriacal pussies. This was before I became deathly sensitive to absolutely everything good.

  “Of course, by then academia had made hamburger of my immune system, turned my body into Disneyland for every virus that came along. Thank the Goddess that this was before HIV! For me, the sexual revolution coincided with the energy crisis. I didn’t have the energy to turn the wrong men down, I mean wormy little graduate students at MLA conventions.”

  Martha couldn’t help thinking she’d never had that problem: too many men desiring her and having to reject them. But these grumpy ruminations were mediated by her pleasure at the fact that Isis had actually called her and invited her out to dinner. She poked a stalk of celery into the spicy peanut dip.

  “By the time your generation came along,” Isis said, “desire was no longer a concept. I find now that I can get hotter sitting alone in a room and concentrating on moving my kundalini up through the chakras. It’s what the women saints knew, except they thought they needed Jesus. Mental sex with a deity is so much better than sex with mortals—healthier, always available, less messy in every way.” Isis laughed her abandoned laugh: musical and throaty.

  What if Gretta or Dennis met Isis? What a lunatic they would think her with her spacey affectations, her fluting voice and relentless eye contact. So what! Lots of people would envy Martha at this moment! Every woman on the beach that day at Fire Island would give her lucky crystal for dinner a deux with Isis.

  Well, it was understandable to want to be with Isis. Though the Goddess movement was in theory nonhierarchical, Isis was the leader of a growing organization; at one meeting Starling had announced that ten thousand women were on their current mailing list. There was no denying the draw of celebrity, even if one’s fame was limited to the New Age shamaness population.

  But finally, Isis’s appeal had less to do with position and power than with her simultaneously endearing and maddening personality, with the alternating currents of intimacy and distance, the fluctuations of presence and absence with which she drew Martha in. Half the time she paid Martha no attention at all, causing her to worry that she might somehow have lost Isis’s friendship, a possibility that affected her with a sense of loss so profound that she began to think she cared about Isis far more than she’d suspected. At other times, Isis showed an intensely seductive talent for convincing Martha that she had seen into her secret depths and admired what she saw there. Isis said things about her that were so flattering and (Martha hoped) so accurate that Martha could only conclude that Isis was acutely perceptive, perhaps even psychic. Isis said that Martha was a rare being: cool-headed, concerned with facts, and at the same time empathic in the extreme.

  A few of the women seemed jealous of Martha’s new friendship with Isis. More than once, Starling had echoed what Freya said that first evening about Isis attaching herself to whomever had just rescued her from danger. (Starling told Martha she’d met Isis at an academic conference, over a buffet table of chafing dishes warmed by gas burners, one of which set fire to Isis’s blouse. With unashamed nostalgia, Starling described how she’d wrapped her jacket around Isis’s smoldering sleeve.) Perhaps that did explain Isis’s otherwise inexplicable interest in Martha, and the fact that Martha and Hegwitha had been so swiftly taken up by this privileged coterie of superstar Goddess worshippers.

  But they weren’t all superstars. Diana was a grad-school dropout, Joy an environmental activist with day jobs as a file clerk and a hardware-store cashier. Yet Diana was said to be very smart; Joy was capable, a hothead: qualities the older women seemed to prize and encourage. The principles of affinity operative here were too deep-rooted and knotty for Martha to untangle. Perhaps the group was simply a warm amoebalike blob that had engulfed and digested Martha and Hegwitha.

  Isis’s gaze tracked a celery stalk up to Martha’s mouth and watched as Martha hesitated, trying to forestall or avoid the inevitably loud, awkward crunch. Isis turned away with a shudder, as if from a decapitation. Oh, unfair! Martha hadn’t wanted the celery in the first place. She was eating it not from hunger but to fill a conversational void.

  Isis said, “It’s not as if we all aren’t ga-ga about food. What the women in our group won’t eat would feed the entire Third World. It’s the chief torture implement with which Freya punishes Sonoma, and Diana’s an expert at using her eating disorder to make mincemeat out of Joy.”

  Martha said, “I was just telling my friend about that at lunch the other day.”

  Isis’s delicate wince made it clear that she didn’t want to know about this friend to whom Martha gossiped about the Goddess women’s dietary neuroses.

  “Meanwhile,” Isis went on, “Titania’s convinced that if she’d spent less time on her megabuck cosmetics business and more time making nutritious home-cooked meals for her daughter, the kid wouldn’t have joined the Moonies and run away to Korea.”

  “How awful for Titania!” said Martha. “I knew she had trouble with her daughter, but I didn’t know what it was.”

  “Awful?” Isis said. “I suppose…You know, it’s hard for me to think of her as Titania. I still think of her as Maxine. Oh, gosh. Is the food here already?”

  “Stress Reduction Technique Number One,” said the waitress. “We try to feed you before you get cranky.” Did she mean customers in general or Isis in particular?

  “Cranky…” Isis eyed Martha’s plate. “It would make me cranky to wonder when that chicken was roasted. Presumably not in the blink of an eye since we placed our order.” Isis had ordered something with mustard greens or kale, slimier and more seaweedlike than one would have expected from a restaurant so solidly geared to a picky ten-year-old’s food tastes.

  Martha’s first mouthful of mashed potatoes felt like a soothing hand on her brow. It was stunning, the power of food to comfort and console, even though, like so much else, it was ultimately unreliable. When things were going seriously wrong, even food could turn nasty.

  The last time Martha had dinner with Dennis, she had ordered gnocchi, a dish she would never have considered had she known what the evening would bring. They were in the neighborhood Italian place they’d frequented when they’d first fallen in love, when the romantic dimness made for a smoother transition, going there straight from bed. They’d continued to eat there when they couldn’t think of anywhere else, long after it became irritating to be unable to read the menu. By then Martha was looking for things to be irritated by, particularly things about Dennis: the officious way he ordered pasta, the way he seemed to think that his good looks gave him carte blanche to let his hair get greasy.

  If she’d known what he had to say that night, she wouldn’t have gotten gnocchi, gummy little pillows that would turn to glue in her mouth and make the task of swallowing seem suddenly Herculean. Though perhaps she did know. Why else would she have started off talking about a piece they were doing at Mode about the former girlfriends of convicted serial killers.

  Martha said, “There was one killer whose modus operandi was to empty the joint checking account and then ask his girlfriend to dinner. Twelve of his fourteen girlfriends were never heard from again.”

  Dennis took a sip of wine. The flickering candlelight slalomed down the planes of his handsome face.

  “Well,” he said, “compared to that, I guess this isn’t so bad.”

  “What do you mean this?” said Martha.

  Dennis gulped the rest of his wine. He seemed genuinely distraught, though with an actor one never knew. He took a deep soap-operatic breath.

  “It’s not working out,” he said.

  “What do you mean it?” Martha said.

  “I mean us,” said Dennis.

  No wonder Dennis had asked her to meet him at Nino’s! Didn’t one always hear that tense conversations with volatile lovers should occur in restaurants and
other public venues so the presence of other people would have a calming or shaming effect in case he or she began to scream or make menacing jabs with a steak knife?

  “I’m not hungry,” Martha said. “Do you think I can send back my dinner?”

  “No,” Dennis said. “It’s too late for that, too.”

  Why couldn’t Dennis have told her before she ordered dinner? No matter how much she muscled down, the gnocchi sat there, undiminished, winning a battle to the death between her and potato pasta. Each time she swallowed a mouthful, three gnocchi took its place.

  Maybe the gnocchi were on her side, keeping her mouth glued shut. Because as soon as she’d got the last bit of starch unstuck from her palate, she started talking, begging, coming up with reasons and microadjustments that would enable her and Dennis to stay together forever. She felt as if Dennis were a brick wall she kept running into. Though maybe she only thought that because the restaurant had brick walls—white brick walls that, in the past, she and Dennis could make vanish by staring into each other’s eyes until the room went out of focus…

  “It’s not Titania’s fault,” Isis was saying. “Nor is it Freya’s, exactly. Patriarchy turns the mother-daughter bond into the relation between the seasoned jailbird and the first-time offender, hardened prisoners showing new convicts the ropes of the penal system—and in the process allowing the system to continue. Chinese mothers bind their daughters’ feet. In Africa it’s the mothers who do the clitoridectomies. I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s impossible to watch TV without Barbara Walters blabbing on about female circumcision. For most American men the big news is that women have a clitoris to begin with. For millennia Mom’s been the gal in charge of removing your pleasure button—is it any wonder it’s not a relationship of great trust? What about your mother, Martha? Are you close? Do you get along?

  Martha didn’t want to think about her mother. It had much the same effect on her as thinking about Dennis, although her mother and Dennis weren’t at all alike. Martha wasn’t one of those women who suddenly realize that the men they love are their moms in drag! Dennis was mean and shallow, Martha’s mother was just a mess. When Martha called her mother, they talked doctors, arthritis, TV, money, what the doctor said, what Donahue said, what was on sale at the Pic-Way, what Martha’s dad’s death benefits would and wouldn’t cover. Martha’s mother had nothing in common with Dennis except for a remarkably similar knack for making Martha feel tragic, paralyzed, doomed, and hopeless.

  “She’s in Ohio,” Martha said. “I hardly see her—”

  “The Midwest?” said Isis. “You come from the Midwest? I don’t know why I thought…I had the impression that you were visiting your parents on Fire Island. What a sparrowlike little person you are, Martha. Look how you’re watching me. That quality of watching—it’s one of the things about yourself that you undervalue. You think it’s one of your worst traits, but in fact it’s among your best.”

  Knocked breathless by the accuracy (she hoped) of Isis’s assessment, Martha could only mumble, “Oh, no, those were my friend’s parents who live on Fire Island.” Immediately she felt that she had somehow disappointed Isis—which, as usual, sharpened her craving for Isis’s approval and eradicated any lingering doubts about her eccentricities.

  “What was I saying?” Isis asked.

  Martha tensed. Was this a test? She said, “You were talking about female circumcision. How your own mother did it.”

  “Well, not my own mother,” said Isis. “One’s own mother. Isn’t it interesting how we segued from the subject of food to the subject of mothers and sex? Anyway…we’re just now getting a glimpse of the outer limits of diet, way beyond mood and you are what you eat and getting or not getting cancer. I met this great Romanian nutritionist at the World Healing Conference and happened to mention to her that I was terribly accident-prone.

  “The dietician gave me a fabulous book about gluten’s effect on the pineal gland, which scientists associate with clairvoyance and ESP. Not only was I screwing up my neurotransmitters, I was burning down my psychic telephone lines to the future—say, the moment when the hem of my robe would catch in the ritual fire. Since I changed my diet—it’s been almost two years—I’ve not only been thinner and felt better, I’ve actually been safer!”

  Had Isis forgotten that Martha had saved her from drowning? Sometimes she seemed not to recall where they’d met—that short but nasty paddle in the freezing Atlantic. And should this make Martha feel unappreciated, or hopeful? If Isis didn’t remember, it couldn’t be why she liked Martha.

  “Isn’t that what everyone wants?” Isis asked. “To feel protected? Guided? My favorite holy picture, when I was girl, was the angel watching over those two kids like some kind of weird winged nanny. The children about to cross a broken bridge and the angel pulling them back. Of course, this was before the night when all that changed forever, and my childhood guardian angel was reborn as the Goddess. It’s no wonder so many ex-Catholics wind up in the Goddess movement. Take that blue robe off Mary and what are we looking at?”

  “The Goddess?” Martha ventured.

  “Well, obviously,” Isis said. “And the experience of the miraculous is the same with both. Or at least as I experienced it on that incredible night.”

  There was no way for Martha not to ask, “What incredible night?”

  Isis smiled. “The night I discovered my spiritual nature, which had been concealed from me for my first thirty years. Let’s face it, ours is not a culture in which a girl’s parents consecrate her at birth to the service of the Goddess.

  “I was your basic control-freak, a promiscuous, over-achieving Catholic academic. I’d gone from Fordham to a lectureship at New Haven, and my first book, Freud, Jesus, and Matriarchy, had gotten gobs of attention. Even the media had got into the controversy, which was less about my ideas than a titillating mix of religion, gender, and sex. My academic career went into overdrive; I wasn’t prepared to be famous for all the wrong reasons. Plus I was in personal crisis, stranded between love affairs, which at that point meant I’d been chaste for about two seconds…Anyway, I was asked to take part in that infamous Washington panel on women and the patriarchal paradigm.”

  “Infamous?” said Martha.

  Isis’s lips formed the rippling, mindless smile of a Botticelli angel. “When they sent Daniel into the lion’s den, at least they had the decency not to call it a panel. This one was held in the ballroom of a huge D.C. hotel. The minute I entered I was assaulted by waves of hatred, five hundred old-boy academics whetting their knives and licking their chops. Somehow I managed to find my seat at the seminar table, between a priest, a heavy-duty feminist theorist, and a bigshot Freudian, all of whom had already dismissed my work as garbage.”

  Martha tried to look properly sympathetic and pained, although at that instant she was nearly ecstatic with pleasure in her meal: the sweet-salty crispness of the chicken skin, the airy whipped potatoes, her forays into the side dishes of sweet corn, coleslaw, and creamed spinach.

  “What was your work then?” Martha asked, regretting it at once. “I mean, remind me…Sorry, I’ve forgotten…My memory…”

  Isis waved away Martha’s apology. Why should Martha be held responsible for the details of Isis’s former life?

  “Goodness,” said Isis, “it seems so remedial now. I pushed the envelope of the feminist critique of Freud and Christian culture. The shrink thought it was preposterous to see Freud’s work in the context of the lost matriarchal societies. The feminist had an investment in women not being witches—in our being regular guys who would make great department chairs. The priest thought I was going straight to hell for reading the church fathers as the psychotic misogynists they were; later he dismembered me in a scholarly Catholic journal.

  “As I sat down, all three gave me eat-shit grins. I arranged my water glass and my pen, and then discovered I couldn’t lift my head, couldn’t look at the audience or my fellow panelists. Suddenly I felt…well, a force jerking me
out of my chair and carrying me from the room.

  “The hotel was built on a mountain in the middle of Chevy Chase: billion-dollar landscaping, scary but probably safe. The night was out of a horror film: full moon, fast-moving clouds. I remember thinking I’d become so mired in academia that here was this gorgeous moon, and I hadn’t noticed…And that was more or less the last thing I remember thinking.”

  Isis contemplated her seaweed, then pushed away her plate. “I somehow feel compelled to say: I am not a psychotic. I know I sound like Richard Nixon. But I do worry that people may think I’m nuts when I try to describe that night.”

  Martha hoped her smile conveyed her faith in Isis’s sanity. Isis seemed encouraged and took a deep breath and went on:

  “I know it contradicts our patriarchal, Judeo-Christian notions of causality when I say that on that night, in the middle of the American Society of Academic Psychologists convention, in Washington, D.C., I looked up at the sky and saw…what I thought was a comet. But soon I realized it wasn’t a comet at all. It was…a woman in white, flying across the sky in a chariot pulled by winged white horses.”

  “Whoa,” said Martha. For the first time it crossed her mind that Isis might be clinically insane. Well, she might be a lunatic, but she ran an entire movement, had people taking care of her, owned an Upper West Side floor-through and a house on Fire Island, all apparently without any need to go out and work for a living. Isis had power, money, friends, a great place—places—to live, while Martha had a lousy job, a cramped and grimy apartment. So really, you might ask yourself: Which one of them was crazy?

  “It was a brilliant vision,” said Isis, “and at the same time so ordinary it could have been the Goodyear blimp over the Astrodome. But I knew it was the Goddess: Astarte or Diana. And this was before I’d heard a word about Goddess worship! I myself don’t believe it. I just know what I saw.

  “I knew how I’d been primed for revelation—years of Catholic education. But I also knew that this was real. My life would never be the same. I didn’t have to go back to that seminar room. Or sit on that panel. The consensus in academia is that I suffered a nervous breakdown, psychosis being the only reason to give up tenure-track and a cost-sharing retirement plan. And for the record: my Astarte book has sold one hundred thousand copies more than Freud, Jesus, and Matriarchy!