Call Me Ishtar

by Rhoda Lerman

  “I care about the spoon.” I am desperate to agree. I have no heart to fight with Robert today. I am deathly tired after my appearance Friday night. I would rather make love and restore my energies while the child is in the family room. I do not wish to fight with Robert over Mack, which I will have to do, or with the Waste King now wrestling like the Angel Michael over the strangling spoon. I am prepared to believe Robert will blame me or Mack in some way for the event in Buffalo and he can not really know my responsibility. He has no significant reason yet to know doubt. He does not yet know my powers. As all men do, he suspects them. The boy comes up again.

  He asks for more milk. I pass my hand through the steam of the teakettle, preparing water to add to the cocoa mix. Robert drinks no stimulants. He is dynamic and can not sleep easily. “How do you account for the destruction? You were there.”

  I shrug. Droplets of steam course from under my breasts to the lollipop elastic. “Act of God.” I speak meekly.

  “Bull shit. We both know better.”

  The boy’s fingernails on the milk glass are bloody. I am not supposed to react about his teeth. I am supposed to react about the spoon. Robert continues to rave about an Act of God and his inability to collect on one. The boy is trying to show me his fingers. He draws little bloody lines on the white of my lollipops, fingerpainting his pain.

  “Sit down, Buddy,” Robert tells him, “while your mother and I are talking.” The boy stands near me. “I said to sit down,” Robert repeats, and I can see the inside silver of Robert’s teeth. One fell out once, the day I met him, in a college cafeteria. It came out planted in a crust of Italian bread, a land claim in the name of the Queen. I was overjoyed. But he mumbled and pocketed the tooth, which was false anyway, and I did not see him again until it had been properly replaced. We never mention it. Instead, he gave me a fraternity pin and later a diamond ring. You know what it was I really wanted. Right now I want to leave. I am tied to the fake beams of the Spanish kitchen with anvils on my ankles. “An Act of God could be worked up into a good gimmick, but you and I know it was drugs and somehow your friend was messed up in it because he’s a mess.” He smiles at me, baring his teeth once more. “Your mother will make you some eggs.” I flip my tail at the stove. I obey for now.

  But I am not going to sacrifice either Mack or my son to the power of this man.

  “I want a poptart, Mommy.”

  We compromise. “While you eat these golden scrambled eggs, I will demonstrate how mother chickens lay eggs. I will draw a picture with my mons veneris, for where and what is the word de—mon—strate if not lines taken from the mons? So.” Robert raises an eyebrow over his financial page.

  I squirm. I cackle. I sigh. I dip. I rise. I cackle once again. I moan. He chews. He swallows. Robert reads, unbelieving. The plate before my son is clean and I, in a penultimate cackle, slip a Grade A from my bathrobe pocket and twist it victoriously between my thumb and forefinger. Astonished, my son runs with it to the refrigerator. “If you make more, Mommy, we can sell them.” I do not like that remark. He leaves, returns, dressed to play outside, and tell his friends of the newest marketable wonder at home. He pauses.

  “How come you couldn’t make the others into chickens if you can lay eggs?”

  It is a consistent Godhead these people need. They do not understand absurdity as a function. “Perhaps the cold.”

  He removes the egg from the refrigerator egg tray. His eyes change, shifting. He wears down-lined, star-decorated warm-up pants and a Mighty Mac jacket, a young Orion, holding the world egg, twisting it as I had. He says nothing.

  “Perhaps it was the machine,” I offer. “The shells became too hot and broke.”

  He resembles his father, who smiles benignly at his son’s great cleverness. I hate. I am glad I have my son’s teeth in the plastic box around my neck.

  “Perhaps it is a time of sterility. The eggs were not fertile. The mule does not spring upon the jenny. The wadis run dry.”

  “Ishtar,” Robert remonstrates. “You are going to confuse the boy.”

  He is not confused, this son of mine. He pronounces slowly with the familiar Mosaic menace: “Animals with tails do not lay eggs. It is a Law.” And he throws the egg against the ceiling.

  His father laughs loudly. The egg ricochets from the Spanish beams. The albumen, stalactitic, hangs, and I laugh venomously. I laugh as only a Medusa laughs. I rattle the teeth at my son. It is the only way to deal with his logic.

  “Snakes!” I scream, shattering their laughter. “They were serpent eggs from New Jersey. They were serpent eggs, green and spotted speckled serpents eggs. Thousand of snakes died in your hatchery like sperm, dying, squirming, under the globe. Snakes!” He draws away. His father shows horror.

  Let him, my son, have a supernatural and let me feed it well.

  The albumen reproduced itself asexually, sadly, from stalactite to stalagmite, rising on the carpet of the kitchen floor. The yolk remained above.

  My son jumps fitfully in the snow. The poptart patriarch of the Jews becomes the Patrick of the Irish stamping out the snakes. “Don’t go under the apple tree with anyone else but me!” I, Mother of All Things and Source of Lamentation, scream from my window. There is a picture scratched and painted in a South-West African cave wall of European women with delicate Saxon profiles. They are Amazons with raised bows from the stone age. They have tails. If it were necessary, I am certain they could have laid eggs. If it mattered.

  A lament he made, a song.

  About his going away and sang

  Our Mother

  The Goddess with the mantle of snakes

  Is taking me with her as her child.

  “If you serve me well and are worthy of such gifts,” I scream at my son, and pull the window shut. I will take them both, my son and Mack. Mack with his fruitful beauty will give me much pleasure. Mack, who knows his female soul and his male soul, is what I hope my son to be. Neither of them will I allow Robert Moses to forge in his brazen image. It will be more difficult than bringing life to rotten eggs. Already Robert provides Mack with young girls. Already Robert has taught Mack the red and black ways of the account books. Already Robert advises Mack on his loves and his cars and offers him money.

  “If you can’t fuck it, sell it. If you can’t sell it, fuck it.”

  Sorrowing, I have watched Mack, sleepy-eyed, a shadow of beard on his face, glancing slyly at me in the kitchen from the dining room. He sits for hours with Robert at the slate dining table and tallies small sums of monies and clips Thruway and motel receipts for the records. He is learning the Law too. Robert will get neither one of them. I will fight him.

  As I fight to bring men to their manhood, I will fight to bring Mack and my son to the fullness of theirs. In fullness they will know power. In fullness they will know me. For I have been the Chaos, Tiamat, who preceded and fashioned all. I know the patterns. I have been the skin Marduk sat in after he slew me. I have been the skin of the Tabernacle and the loins of the Torah and I have been the jungle hut where the boys became men, and I have been the sukka hung with the gourds of my breasts and the grapes of my nipples and the figs of my vulva and the Tree of Life. I have been and I will be and Here I am Again in the omphalos of Eleusis, in the underground of the Pythian, in the penetralia of the living Leviathans who would seek me for their circumcision, who would seek me to be men. My Star fell and left only the Evening Star and the Morning Star to which I sing a song and no one can put Humpty Dumpty together again. Except me.

  So flay yourself, baby, for the Great Mother has returned. Come, Mack, I will say to him, what hurts you? Come, sit in my vulva and I will heal thee and you shall know ecstasy. I descend. I wash the floor of its egg.

  Robert turns pages in his paper rapidly. “Do you want anything else to eat?” I ask from the floor because I am amused.

  He is too intelligent “From you?” He walks out, calling for the boy to shovel snow with him because the band is coming over at noon.

 
I watch them in the snow working together. I will have to remove the child. An Act of God, it will be. One cannot jail or sue or condemn an Act of God. It is. An Act of God is beyond the Law. I am beyond the Law. And I am beyond Moses. Eventually, which is cruel and unfortunate, I will be called upon to prove that I am the God his Law refers to.

  There was snow on Robert’s long and kinky hair when he came inside. Ishtar moved against him and twisted the hair into two tiny horns. She had been forgiven for he touched her waist with his icy hands. “Come, Horny Hardhat, it’s your hour. Let’s pretend.” The boy had crossed the street to play with a friend. Robert led her into their bedroom. Ishtar, lying back across the bed, considered appearing at the sergeant’s desk in a metropolitan police station in a class B movie, Mack’s bail folded tightly into an evening purse. She sees him behind bars. She knows she loves him. He is sallow and pained. He is released from the jail into which Robert placed him on his turn in a pusher campaign. She takes him with her. “Why are thy cheeks so wasted? Is sunken thy face. Is sad thy heart.”

  “And I better not catch you taking anything either.”

  The wind whips through their coats as she and Mack walk away from the police station to find a class B hotel. They chew roots in the mussed bed on stiff torn sheets.

  “No drugs, Ishtar.”

  Ishtar fought the temptation to laugh at Robert, standing above the bed, his pants off, his arms crossed to pull his T-shirt over his head and his lips lemon shrunk again pronouncing his commandments. Under her bed even now was a Bendel’s box filled with mandrake roots.

  “Come, pluck me, Robert.” She closed her eyes and imagined Mack touching her as Robert was. Mack has not lost altogether that which is soft and valuable and is given by woman. I could teach him to heal. I will teach him to sing when he loves me. I am tired of grunters. Robert grunts.

  The Italian Hour gives way to the Manon Forum. Robert collects the hopeless wads of Kleenex from the bedroom floor and leaves to read the financial section in the den. Ishtar washes herself. She hears the Moloch disposing of shells and rinds, belching noisily and rattling crystal in the cupboard above. Robert rewarded her, she realized, by finishing the dishes.

  Outside, in his red-plaid Pendleton with his wife in black mink and rabbit après-ski boots, the Republican Chairman of Ishtar’s County walks past her house in the frozen morning as he does every Sunday, along the still street where apple trees and unbending willows line the perfect lawns. Stands of pines form barriers between the two acre plots. The Chairman frowns at the pair of silver Thunderbirds and the red Cadillac sedan in Ishtar’s upper driveway. The Chairman and his wife stare at the shivering coterie of young men on Ishtar’s porch and the young men look back curiously. The black mink wife twists her mouth in distaste and continues to walk to the fields at the end of the road.

  Ishtar’s willow tree, around which the upper driveway circles, had fringed and knotted quipu riddles in the snow at its base during the night—delicate mysterious lines and unknown histories. Now its fingers lie absolutely still against a periwinkle noon sky. Her star and tulip magnolias and rosebuds are boxed in redwood winter coffins. The two orange cats in agreement leap from the upper reaches of a pine tree, spring across the snow, paws meeting in midair, and bound onto the flagstone porch. They rub their luxurious coats against the thinly clad legs of the boys on the porch, who ring the doorbell a second time. Robert strides through the mushroom, moongray living room and Ishtar listens to the muffled voices of the boys and the plaintive miaows of the cats beyond the double doors.

  I do not stay with the men while they discuss the contract they will not sign. Often I carry in coffee and cakes. There are sandwiches laid out in the kitchen. I wait for Nino to come to me with his pants to alter. I do not know quite why his own mother does not do this for him unless it is either a recognition of my motherhood or an invitation to touch him and I am glad to touch him. At last he knocks on the bedroom door with his old pants over his small arm and his new loose pants on him. I have my pincushion waiting. It is an apple.

  I beckon to him to stand on a velvet padded stool before my mirror. He balances himself with one hand on my shoulder as I crawl around the stool.

  I smooth my hands over the corduroy which lies smooth and flat under my touch.

  “We don’t want that contract,” I tell him as I touch him. “It is not a good one.” I place my thumb in imprimatur on his buttock. He will not support the contract any longer. His buttock is not as tight as I had expected. I enjoy men. I mold my hands in the air, recording his shape in lines. He is a bantam man but he has come to me and I am pleased.

  “That’s too long. They should break over my shoes.”

  He bends to touch me once. I push at his knees for his straightening. I pin around both cuffs, smooth the fabric from waist to ankle and I know him. I remove the pins from my mouth. I have not swallowed any. His nails are digging into my shoulders. It is no longer for balance. I understand what it is he wants and since everyone else is quite taken with the contractual efforts, I shall make one of my own. I proceed, although his nails still dig uncomfortably into my skin and I wish he could stand still and in balance without hurting me. I do not understand this need to hurt while I am thus giving pleasure to his body. There is something desperately incorrect.

  “Oh!”

  I draw away. I am deeply shocked. He persists in pressing me down again but his power is not like mine and I very gently replace his member and examine his eyes. They are hidden. “I am sorry, Nino. I did not understand this before.”

  The sides of his jawbone twitch.

  “You do not have to tell me.” I sit on the edge of the bed. He stands before me and I offer him my arms. He covers himself. “Sit, relax.”

  “No.” He shifts one leg forward, posing. “It doesn’t make any difference. It’s better this way. You can enjoy it forever.”

  I speak, in wonderment. “It is unlike anything I have seen, yet quite perfect, beautiful in its perfection. But it does not function. Aah, that is why it is always erectile. It is bone.”

  He wears bangs across his forehead and his hands are delicately veined.

  “Well.” His chin is high and rugged now. “It never stops, Baby.”

  “Don’t consider me as Baby. I think that you suffer greatly and you do not enjoy then your personal life.” I begin to cry for him. I am also crying for me.

  “Well, now you’ve seen it. I gotta go.”

  “Nino,” I grab his thin arm. “Where does it come from? How is it done?”

  He can not pry my viselike grip from his arm. He grows very angry. “Rib. Okay? I’ll show my scars when they turned my cunt inside out. You can cry over that too and get your kicks.”

  “It is nothing to be ashamed of. It is very fine. From the rib of the Goddess was made man. It is that way. You are significant of a new beginning.”

  “And if you want some copy”—he had not listened—“you can just tell them that Twentymiles, the best hung rock star in the Northeast, has a clit. Okay? You tell em. What a gimmick. Twentymiles, he never comes. Just goes on forever. Okay? You think they’ll enjoy that?” He is watching himself over my head in the mirror. He is fascinated with his image. “You can make me a clown and you can make a fortune off me. I’ll even give you the name of my doctor. Maybe you can get some before pictures for the album cover. I could write a book too when I retire from show biz, huh? About me and Mack.”

  He slams the door and white chips of paint fall to the olive green carpet.

  “Oh.”

  I stick pins into my apple. There are deadly secrets in apples, in trees, in snakes. I know the secrets. I will not cure this person, who, whatever he is, man or woman, is not whole. And he shall stay far from Mack with his poisoned half-ness. I tear the pants I am to hem into shreds and flush them away. I hear Robert call out sharply about the septic tank bubbling but I do not respond.

  10

  IT IS IN MONDAY THAT ISHTAR FINDS DELIGHT.

&
nbsp; On Mondays, her cleaning lady leaves the house vapored with Pine Sol, the semen of pine. On Mondays, she anoints herself in Jean Naté oil, rubs her body with Mentholatum and waits for the phone call. Monday is obscene phone call day. Ishtar’s picture is often in the Sunday papers as Cook of the Week (a shortcut with veal cutlets), collector of artifacts and Welder of Metals (she is shown with her torch). Because she understands loneliness, she welcomes the stranger on the telephone dutifully, speaking gently to him through the slice of crystal quartz lying between his heavy aspirations and he receives the power of her words.

  “Remember me, baby?” the stranger asks huskily. He is lying down.

  “Aah, I shall remember you, stranger. I shall renew your member until it is strong and lives once again. Remember. Yes, this is she. Have no doubt. I used to call Santa Claus when I was a child. I understand. Yes, I wear bras. You are hooked on bras? That is quite amusing. I am also. Yes, I cut out the nipples. Oh, you saw my picture and you have it pasted on the ceiling of the bunkroom aside the stable? Up to Pompey? The sacred stall for the sacred goat? Bring me your goat and I’ll divine your future by his heart and his liver and you will always be remembered. No, I don’t shave my legs. All the way up until you reach the feathers. I pluck.

  “That’s right and I make little bunches and fasten the stalks with tight green rubber bands, snapping rubber bands. Come under my shell. Lift the tab, gently, and I’ll change you into an egg and bury you in the sand with my sandy claws and you will be born again. I lay eggs and I brush my teeth with Pristeen, almond flavored, and place a pomegranate between my breasts. Do you happen to know a good dentist? Oh white, everything white. And I just cut away the bra and wear only the straps for snapping like rubber bands because I am the Great Mother Snapping Turtle. Come, come. I will heal thee.

  “Is that enough? More? Of course. Allow me a word of advice while you’re getting your towel ready. Wear lipstick when you drink coffee. It tastes better because a greasy mustache improves the taste of food. I have always wanted a man with a mustache to go down on me. You aren’t listening but I can hear your breathing. Og, Ishullanu, I placest thou in the midst of Mother Bell’s crystal web and thou can not go up and thou can not go down. Ready yet? Go, go down, go down and while you’re going down, oh, Moses, I’ll just take hold of the Tablets of Fate and the horns of your goat and your Snake Banner and when you call me again, call me Ishtar. Return to the Breast of the Great Mother. That’s where it all hangs out. Snap. I cut away the straps and just wear the nipples.”