Call Me Ishtar

by Rhoda Lerman

  “What, child? I can’t hear your question.”

  “Eve?” I spit into the projection bowl and curtains of green light shiver unnaturally around the scene on the walls. “She was the second wife. Adam produced an image of woman he could deal with and subdue. I am first. Not that maidenly simpleton, see her? Adam created her from the lower parts of his hairy beastie body. He had little knowledge left and could not create beauty. See that nunsuch face. Mincemeat. Botcher. See how she hides her parts in false humility. Miserable wretched usurper. That sweet cowering dumdum, children, is the major source of your problems today. She is sin. Eat all the apples you want, Eve. They won’t work on you. Do you understand, children?”

  The children clap. Now I diffuse a creamy lactescent light through the room. The children wonder at it and reach to touch. They cannot. They applaud. “I am the apple,” I shout happily over their heads for want of anything better to shout. “Eat me. I am the body of wisdom. Know me. I am back.”

  “More,” they shout. I adore an audience. I am a Star again.

  I cannot lead them ahead unless I begin where they are. To show them Ur, to show them Babylon, to show them my glories would be of no avail. They don’t know the words. Decisively, I turn the walls into the golden living walls of the First Temple in Jerusalem. I make the walls flow with Cherubim and palm trees and sinuous snakes intertwined in divine copulation as the children shout in awe and astonishment. I show them the bronze doors of the Eastern Walls and drape the seven precious veils from the ceiling of the dance hall to the stage. I carve the Eastern Gates with light and place the great golden chalices and silver hangings on the ark of sittum woods on the stage. The children turn from wonder to wonder until I bring in very gently, my hands trembling, the two Cherubim, their golden wings intertwined in love, their faces turned to each other glowing with joy. The Cherubim gaze calmly at the walls of the dance hall. One winks at me. They look upon the children and smile upon them. Then they turn and fold their golden wings decorously over each other.

  “They’re real,” many say to each other. One child reaches out to touch them through the thin veils. I am forced to throw a terrible electric charge with my furca into his curious hands. I magnify my voice. “Touch not the Holy Ones. They are the angels. I bring them to you and I bring to you the beauty of love. Clap your hands for the Holy Ones. Help them.”

  The children clap obediently. A few seem to be crying. The Cherubim change the rhythm of their embraces to the rhythm of the children’s hands. The children’s rhythm quickens. The holy act reaches toward consummation. I rupture the embrace.

  “Don’t stop!” they protest. “Let them finish.” There are angry fists reaching toward the wall of the projection room.

  “Pray then, children,” I advise softly. “Pray for their happy consummation. Pray that they be together in love and the heavens will be right.”

  I can see the magenta veils moving as the children’s lips move in broken half-remembered prayers. They have no words. But they are sincere. A few are on their knees so the others behind can see. I rest my chin on my elbows over the projection room and abandon the light show. My tears I feel streaming across my cheeks. My tears land in the oil basin and mix with the paints and dyes and the Three-in-One oil. I sigh mightily. I am lonely. There is no god to lie with. As I watch, the Cherubim, vague and amorphous now behind the sunset of the shimmering veils, consummate the act to the children’s prayers.

  The children cry and shiver. I do not wish to terrify them with the destruction and the carrying of the Cherubim in cages of ridicule in the streets of Jerusalem. But it is all over. I splash blood from the wolf-hound’s stomach into the oil basin. It is not until the walls begin to bleed of themselves, the temple scene fading from them, that I flash on the images of tortured monks and decapitated saints and then at last Mary, looking very much like Eve, holding her bloody son in her lap.

  “It’s real. It’s really real,” a girl screamed in the proper hysteria. All the children were on their knees. “I felt her.”

  My voice thunders cataclysmically. “This is not real. Now you will see what is real!” And I turn the projection machine on my own face and play myself in triumph on the walls as whore, mother and hag of death. “That, kids, is real. I’m Mother.” I turn my voice into a calm commercial tone. “Hope you enjoyed the show.” There are a few giggles, evidently of relief. I had frightened them too much.

  I can still hear the echo of the girl protesting. “It’s real. I touched her.”

  Older children begin to laugh at her. The laughter is doubtful but necessary.

  I turn Mary and Jesus to Marilyn and W.C. I put Popeye up again and I stamp out my small fire. I throw rags on the hound’s body and flee. There is not time to clean up and I am sorry. As the manager comes running down the steps, I trip him and he clatters in agony downward. He will heal properly.

  I escape. The band begins to play. I hope Robert doesn’t hear about this. I’ll blame it on the feathers.

  8

  ISHTAR, HER GOWN GREASY WITH THREE-IN-ONE OIL AND STUCK with clumps of dog fur, rounded the warehouse, howled back at a passing freight train and strode mightily, smugly, along the uneven sidewalk toward her motel. She picked at the fur on her gown.

  “Hey! Wait up!”

  Ishtar stopped. She did not wish her contemplation interrupted. The voice came along the dark sidewalk, then embodied itself as the ugly groupie under a streetlight. Ishtar was curious. The groupie ran, gangly, grasping a cello by its neck, like a dead brother, banging its tailpiece over the sidewalk cracks. Ishtar leaned against a store window and waited. The girl was impressive. A velvet cape of black with mutton sleeves flapped around her as she ran, its hems spread and gathering sidewalk slush. The girl’s face was hawklike, un-softened by cosmetics, sharpened by corrugated hair, sticking out, two black washboards, from the sides of her head. Over the neck of the cello, her hands were white and big, ugly and powerful. She was not pretty as the others were. Ishtar, who had her own images, wrinkled her nose in distaste as the girl bent on her knees before her, covering the sidewalk with her cape in a large dirty circle and breathing heavily. Ishtar waited, not unkindly. She felt sorrow for this half-woman who fit so poorly into the scheme of present things. The girl unscrewed the tailpiece of her cello.

  “I guess I broke my tailpiece.” She removed it from its socket, stuck a clot of gum from her mouth into the socket, tucked the gum around the hole and patted the cello. “There.” Masking tape and flag-striped bandaids held the bottom of the instrument together.

  “I am hurrying.”

  “I’ll keep up with you.”

  “And where are you going, child?”

  The girl laughed and stood up, smoothing the cover of her cello over the wood. Her laughter carried into the night. “I’m twenty. No child. I catch a bus near here. But I’ll go where you’re going.” Her eyes were brazen, unabashed.

  I do not wish to be with this person. But there is something powerful in her hands and her laughter, riding as it does into the night, something that was not in her aura when she sat with the groupies. “We will talk here. We will wait for your bus together.”

  She leaned her cello against the window of the drugstore. Inside a clerk watched them. The cello was soft and rounded. The girl’s body was angular. Ishtar waited. The girl squeezed moisture from the filthy hems of her cape. “You manage that band, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  The girl busied herself with the cape. Ishtar grew annoyed. She examined a pyramid display of vibrators in the drugstore window. They were black and white and rainbow striped. They seemed hopeful. The clerk grimaced obscenely at her. Ishtar surpassed him with a few subtle maneuvers of her fingers.

  “I want to be in the band. I’m good.”

  “It is my band.”

  “I just want to be in it. I don’t have to take it from you, do I?”

  “Which young man do you want?”

  “That’s not it.”

 
“I have seen you with the groupies. You and they know only the worship of the phallus. They and you disgust me and turn my bowels into clay. I have waited for you here. You will tell me the truth.”

  “Okay.” She covered her cheeks with her hands. Ishtar hoped she was discomfited. “Mack.” There was something alluring about the movement.

  “You may not be in the band. You may not have Mack.”

  The girl examined Ishtar closely. Ishtar stood still. “I want both things. I don’t look like you. I don’t look like the other girls. But it doesn’t mean I’m not interested.” She grabbed Ishtar’s arm. She was very strong. Ishtar grew curious, as though standing on the edge of a distant precipice. “I’ve done it. I mean, they think that’s what I want because I hang around and once in a while I get picked up. But it’s no good.” Her grip tightened. “I mean, is it good?”

  The Queen of Heaven shrugged. “Depends.”

  I do not wish to share anything with this dirty-hemmed girl. I am one. It is my band. I shall have Mack. I am jealous. That has always been a fault of mine, but how can I, who is one, whose name is one, be less than a jealous goddess? But there is something new glinting inside that face. It is something I recognize in my own face. But not Mack; Mack is mine. Yet she is strong, too strong, for the other half-men. Women have not been sisters for millenniums. I am wrong to trust her. I do not like her. She has not been loved by someone who knows love. No one has been initiated yet. I myself have chosen Mack. I do not like this person.

  “One of your breasts seems uneven.”

  The girl was silent.

  “You would do well to shorten your cape. It is stiff with filth.”

  “I can pick up Mack’s amplifiers with my hands.” She splayed her hands over the drugstore glass. “You have a husband. Mack and I talk a lot. We have to stand in corners or in the kitchen by the beer cases so no one can see us. Because I am ugly. He doesn’t say that. I know. He talks to the others but he’s just doing it for effect. He told me himself he has nothing to say to them. I told him I’d sleep with him or do anything for him, even blow him, if he wants, but he just kind of looks at me. Just looks. Why? I can pick up his amplifiers. I can drag him away. I have very strong hands. I play the cello so much that my right breast is all muscle. There is hair around the nipple.”

  “Who are your parents?”

  “My father he makes glass. He installs it, I mean. And my mother, she’s at home a lot and she’s disappointed in me because she was beautiful. At least she says she was. You can’t tell anymore. All the men in my father’s family way back made glass. His name is Glazier. I just call myself Claire. I don’t use a last name. I thought the musicians would be better in bed because they have feelings. No way. I watch you a lot. I want to be like you.”

  “Come, I will buy you one striped like the rainbow.”

  The girl pocketed the vibrator within the folds of her coat. The bus rumbled out of the night. The girl pulled her cello by its neck, racing down the sidewalk, her coat trailing in the dirty snow. “Shorten your coat,” Ishtar yelled after her.

  Ishtar fixed her hair in the drugstore window.

  I do not like her. I do like her. She has strength. Her nose is strong. Aah, but I am so much prettier than she is. So much. And then, smiling, chiding herself, she walked on thoughtfully to the motel. She would have been, in another age, a great beauty, this girl. I suppose she will have to have Mack. But I am first. First. That at least. And my breasts, of course, are even and smooth. Foolish child, there must be ritual.

  “Dig super cool,” Nino announced at breakfast in Buffalo.

  “Make like you know me.” A newly bearded young man in purple pants and orange shirt slid into a seat at the long table. “You guys the Demons?

  “Don’t look at me,” Sonny, the trumpet player, answered. “I was doing U-turns under the sheets all night long.”

  “Heard you had some light show. Who does it for you?”

  “I’m the leader. We were on break. You a cop?”

  “How’d you guess, Mack, how’d you guess?” Nino hissed, and waved a weak wrist in contempt.

  “Look, you guys are in trouble. Not with us. They tore down the Inferno last night. Burned it to the ground.”

  Ishtar laughed loudly and then stopped as everyone stared at her.

  “Hundreds of cats, old, young. Piece by piece carting it away and they’re in the churches now calling for the Mother of God. They’re telling the bishops they seen Her. We’re gonna get you out of town before they tear you to pieces.”

  “Anybody want my undies for a relic?”

  “Do they claim also that the walls bled?” Ishtar asked politely.

  “Yeah. Some kids say they tasted it and it was blood.”

  “See,” Ishtar addressed the group. “They always claim blood. Lourdes, Fatima, Glendalough. It can’t be Jesus unless it bleeds. So they convince themselves by making it bleed. No god is stupid enough to come down and get ripped up just to prove himself. What for? This is …” She touched the orange sleeve. “Mass hallucination, War of the Worlds, that kind of thing.”

  “That’s what downtown’s saying. I’m Polish Catholic myself and I never seen anything like it. Some in wheelchairs. They even took beer cans for relics. And then the folks who believed started to fight with the … well, it was pretty bad and we want you guys out of town before anything picks up again.”

  “Would you tell us how the people described the show?”

  “Look, some kids swore they touched two angels which were, uh, observed to be fornicating.”

  “Fornicating, I do declare.”

  “Shut up, guys, he’s helping us.” Mack glanced at Ishtar, who held a beatific smile on her face and closed her eyes. “These strobe images. You get pictures flashing on at a sixty-fourth of a second, all you do is hold the basin, swish the stuff around. It’s just a dish. Nothing weird about it. The bar, the heat, the music … chicks get hysterical when Nino takes off his shirt for Christ’s sake.”

  “Listen, the owner’s dog got cut up. That’s for real. And they say the dame told them to go to their priests and tell them there’s no original sin because the sin was knocking off the mother and now she’s back. That’s what’s cooking at the churches. You guys better go. They won’t give you time to explain it if they find out who you are.”

  “Yes,” Ishtar agreed, opening her eyes. “It is time to pull out. Withdraw. Who ran the show? Did you mention that?”

  “I told you. The kids said it was the Mother of God.”

  “Aren’t they stupid? After all that. God is a mother.” She stood up and smoothed her skirts. “Thank you for helping us.”

  The boys followed her out. Ishtar was proud of her band. She was more and more concerned about breaking the contract. Robert would not view the event lightly.

  9

  IT IS SUNDAY. ROBERT WAITS, A THUNDERHEAD, AT MY KITCHEN, dark and threatening. He must know about Buffalo. Sunday is not my day. This Sunday will be most unpleasant. I am squeezing navel oranges and not pulling enough juice. Robert enjoys fresh orange juice on Sunday mornings and it is the least I can do for him particularly since he seems so silently angry. How much he knows I can not now deduce. Because the juice burns the inner skin of my fingers, I walk naked except for my fur slippers, my underwear and the long red-brown hairpiece from a Kyoto geisha shop. The hairpiece I have attached to the inside of the elastic band of my lollipops and my tail swings invitingly at my calves while I prepare my family’s breakfast. I am threatened by Robert’s silence. The Italian hour plays softly. My son takes his cereal bowl. He does not want me to cook for him. Robert’s silences are more threatening today than his words.

  Sunday is a day of rest for Robert only. He has not asked me yet to drive to the factory. Angry as he is, he will likely not ask that I go with him but will be angrier that I don’t. Later, if the black and white stepped pattern of the Times crossword puzzle pleases me in its design, I will fill in the words. Words are edible, pow
er sources. I work my mouth around them and derive their energies. Sentences do not interest me particularly. For instance, while I am squeezing these oranges, Robert has been saying in stark groaning chains of words such things as “I will not break the law. You will not break the law. We will not break the law.”

  These pronouncements may refer to the taking of drugs and the destruction at Buffalo, or they may be an answer to my suggestion of worldwide Cupcake factories using specific Sumerian ingredients that I spoke to him of earlier in the morning when he had awakened in a gentle mood. There is a lull between his sleep and his waking. He does not fight. He is loving and he nestles his head in my soft parts and I speak to him. Then suddenly he is awake, lunging around the bedroom dangerously, looking for things which I pray from under the blankets are where they ought to be. These are not godlike pronouncements he is making, although he sits above the breakfast table tapping cigarettes, reading the comics and waiting for me to serve him. He in fact sounds rather petulant. He has never enjoyed my feeding him. It is perhaps why I am such a good cook, having at least attained countywide note with my quiche lorraine and cabbage soup. It is a torture for him to be physically dependent upon my skills, good graces and putting away his clothes in the correct places. It is why he is quick to find fault, for he hates the dependency.

  The yellows will not run when he jabs the eggs I will soon give him. They will be too hard. I do not like the jabbing for I know what eggs are. They should not be eaten lightly. I and my son do not eat eggs, considering the eating of running foetus quite unbearable.