Call Me Ishtar

by Rhoda Lerman

  Bear witness, then, with me, in this rear bathroom with a view of the hallway and the kitchen. I am burdened with hatred and motherhood. I feel old as I perch on the curved rod, the phantom of the shower curtain, my wings tucked beneath, and I watch Claire of the Unmatched Breasts enter the dingy but spotless hall. She wears a dreadful pink plush jumper under the dark cape and stands, bends, removes an encrusted hiking boot. Its sole shatters mud on the Congoleum. One-legged, still, her face burning flamingo pink, she watches Grace wipe the floor with a sheet of newsprint. There is yet another boot with which to deal and I am enjoying this. With extended teacup finger, Grace accepts the dirty cape. Mack, who removed it from Claire’s shoulders, is ashen pale. At last, Claire puts down her foot, bravely removes the second encrusted boot and smiles shyly at Mack. Cunt.

  I perch. I hate. I brood. I rip the corners from my cue cards.

  Grace enters the bathroom with the cape and tosses it over my curtain rod. I squawk in indignation. She washes her hands many times in hissing waters and Lava soap.

  “Grace,” I call. “Up here.” I present her with the three sardonyxes in the goldfish container. “Each of you must wear these at your shoulder. They will by their beams indicate my presence even at the most remote of distances. Tell the children.” And then, seeing the perspiration on her forehead and the blood of a dozen sauces on her terry cloth Vera apron, I cackle loudly at her.

  She drops the cape in the tub and turns on steaming water. “It ain’t easy to give up my son to this weirdo.”

  “Ahh, do you mean to poison her then with all of the sauces?” I tip my wing to the palette of smears on her apron.

  “Listen, Ishtar, I don’t have to tell you dirt is poison. I’m cleaning her up.” Grace pours Axion, Pine Sol and a quart of milk over the cape.

  “Milk?”

  “Removes the fishy smell.”

  “Oh, thank you.” I lift my skirt in a measure of respect for the basic intelligence of this woman and from my height, display my fine and feathered pudenda. She lifts the towel attachment on her Vera, a female Mason, to her eyes. It was once, this gesture, a form of recognition among those who worshiped the Goddess. “In my basket was just such a pudendum as mine which men rubbed across their bodies to be born again.”

  “Say.” She has dropped her apron. “Is that right?”

  “Of course,” I answer, easing into the dialogue. “Same as a horseshoe.”

  “But feathers.”

  “Oh yes, particularly.”

  “That’s something. They all worshiped that?”

  “It’s been so long ago, Grace, I don’t remember clearly myself.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  We shrug, two old women trying to forget our glories. Grace leaves me. She passes by again with a cat wrapped in a sheet of newspaper and tosses the package to the outside porch, explaining as she returns to the kitchen: “Hair. Gets in the food.”

  For as to these stones, which we told you before the high-priest bare on his shoulders, which were sardonyxes (and I think it needless to describe their nature, they being known to everybody) the one of them shined out when God was present at their sacrifices; I mean that which was in the nature of a button on his right shoulder, bright rays darting out thence had been seen even by those that were most remote; which splendour yet was not before natural to the stone. For God declared beforehand, by those twelve stones which the high-priest bare on his shoulder and which were inserted into his breastplate when they should be victorious in battle; for so great a splendour shone forth from them before the army began to march, that all the people were sensible of God’s being present for their assistance. Now this breastplate, and this sardonyx, left off shining two hundred years before I composed this book, God having been displeased at the transgression of his laws. Of which things we shall further discourse on a fitter opportunity; but I will now go on with my proposed narration.

  Josephus, History of the Jews

  They are preparing to eat now. She calls to me. “You want some food?”

  “No, thank you. I will hang here and suffer.”

  “You don’t have to, Ishtar. You could eat with us.”

  “I prefer hanging here,” I answer haughtily. “This is my hanging time. There is a time for planting, a time for reaping, a time for …”

  Grace shrugs and melts butter in a double boiler. As it melts she sprays Lysol into the corners of the kitchen, behind the refrigerator, and then, stealthily, opening wide their mouths, into Claire’s hiking boots.

  The kitchen is small. Grace, without moving her chair, can serve from the stove, empty food onto platters and deposit pots into the sink to hiss. She serves generously. Claire, stupidly, accepts all that Grace offers, often asking for more. The tablecloth is black and white check, strewn with linoleum daisies of yellow. Fringe surrounds the field, and under the fringe the dear young couple hold hands. In the center of the table sits a swan napkin holder and three unmatched salt shakers. I need not remind you but I shall, for I wish to draw comparison between style and necessity, of the munificent welcome Solomon afforded me when I arrived as his bride to his palaces. Actually the events bear no comparison.

  I hear Claire sucking, a Kali on the lobster tails. Mack is silent and suffering. Claire shall be grossly unhappy in her bowels. I sit here unhappy in my heart above the steaming and soaking cape. I watch as another tiger kitten laps up the hot milky water. The kitten will die from the Pine Sol, an offering, I suppose, for the sacrament of marriage. I had untold numbers of white oxen offered, but then times were different and meat is expensive now. I am bored by this and find it an effort to pass the kitten on gracefully with proper benediction.

  “You play the big violin, huh?” Grace asks of Claire while the kitten climbs the shower curtain in agony.

  There is no answer. She may have shook her head, her mouth full.

  “You want some more gnocchi?” Plates move. Claire sucks. “You know Lara’s theme? I have a jewelry box. I open it, it plays Lara’s theme.”

  “I could try, sometime.” Claire’s mouth is full.

  “Oh, you mean you’re gonna be around here, again, huh?” Grace wins.

  There is no response. Claire shovels food onto her plate. I hear the scraping of spoon against china. Grace has been too harsh.

  At last she speaks to Mack. “Marry this one. No more clap.”

  I think that Grace is super.

  The cat passes on, slipping silently from the shower curtain into the caldron of the cape. Claire approaches. She does not walk straight.

  I sing at her pain. I warble at her illness. “Here comes Claire. Here comes Claire. Bent over double, her stomach in trouble. Here comes Claire.”

  “Go to hell,” Claire mutters. I don’t know if she is addressing Grace or myself.

  I sing.

  “Oh, God!”

  “Claire, Time is the energy of the female principle. It may be said, verily, Time is Woman. How about that?”

  Claire groans. She bends over in pain. “Hey, Claire,” I call from the curving section of the acetate shower curtain. “If you screw too much, you’ll walk crooked.”

  She attempts to ignore me as she strains to defecate the poisons she has stuffed her uppers and lowers with.

  “I’ve had him and he’s only fair. Only fair.”

  “Shut up, Ishtar.”

  I am quiet as she strains. I cackle, however, and hum my ditty from time to time.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Actually,” I continue, having been thusly addressed, “he isn’t half bad.”

  “I don’t like you, Ishtar.”

  “That’s no big deal, Claire.” She groans. I seek my cue cards. They are rubberbanded. I refer to them and read.

  “Half good as a matter of fact, with his tellurian testicles and his antediluvian terror of what to do with it, where to put it, that drives him drumming into nightmare alleys and dismal swamps, a lizard sac, red and pulsing and no place to go. Where to put it,
dear, oh, dear. Ask Claire.”

  “Shut up. I don’t want to think about that.”

  “That, in a way, is progress. Now hearken and remember. You must be patient. You have millions of years on him. His poor lonely privates are simply a gross exaggeration, a quirk of nature, of the finely tuned and far more civilized clitoris.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Just remember, the bigger the penis, the worse the constipation. Jams you all up.”

  “Ishtar, lay off.”

  “My final words: don’t be impressed, delightful as it may be at times, it is simply a mutated extended clitoris fashioned for our amusement. It is also his own particular albatross. Don’t, whatever you do, let it be your albatross.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “That’s all right, darling daughter, hang your clothes on a hickory sticky but don’t bite off myrrh than you can chew.” I tuck my cue cards away. “Furthermore, Time is Energy.”

  She pauses to write, with a purple Flair, my axiom, on her forearm.

  “Claire, you okay in there?” Mack is back.

  She is too busy to answer.

  “Learn also that one can neither deliver a child while panting nor speak while defecating.”

  “Claire, you okay?” The bridegroom knocks.

  I unbend, slipping a graceful hand through the curtain while I hang slothlike by my fine narrow feet and punch her in her blocked bowels. “Last tag!” I cackle wildly. They bang on the door. “She is not ready, you people. A moment, please.”

  “Darling daughter,” I continue as she eases quite suddenly her plight, “although the bowels of the earth open and he takes you into his underworld in his flaming chariot, no matter. You will have a young and tormented soul to cure, adjust and balance so that he may evolve into a whole man. What you, Claire, do is fearfully important. Others shall follow you. What you become together will be the joy and nourishment of mankind forever after. It shall be written of you and Mack and your children and your children’s children. So don’t fuck up.”

  “Why should I?”

  You bring them up to be independent and they are independent and it hurts. A little.

  “Hey, Claire, hurry up.”

  “I’ll be ready soon, Mack.”

  “Wash your hands,” I admonish Claire, who is more interested in the smoothness of her cheeks. “Shame.”

  She washes and I bless. I fill her pockets with marjoram and cakes of many navels, fennel stalks and balls of salt and sesame cakes, my holy things, fig branches I lay in her lap and whisper, “You do not need to marry him, this serpent of the underworld. You are my daughter and therefore holy.” But I am burdened with ambiguity and I, although I truly love her as a daughter, sorta, I despise her for her young cheeks and the joy she will have from the serpent and her firstness, this kore. “Don’t eat the pomegranate.” But truly, deeply, I wish to be gone, to find a god to lie with across the night sky and loose the bonds that tie me, divine as we all are, to the tedia of mortality. Let her stay. A daughter is a doctor—the words are disarmingly close—and she, this child, must heal and cure and teach the torn and troubled soul and bring him to wholeness as must her sisters. Round cakes and poppies, ivy leaves and the woman’s comb to be worn atop the man’s cock. Ah, and these are my symbols among others and I display with a wink my pudenda to Grace and Mack, who have forced the door, “And it shall be as a sign between your legs that you are a mother and worship the great Demeter, da mutter,” I mutter and utter the benediction. “I bless the mushrooms of your cellars and the seedlings of your flatbeds and the hairs on your chinny chin chin and I leave you to each other, the rays on your shoulder sardonyxes fading as I depart the family scene.”

  “She’s clean,” I pronounce to Grace over my shoulder. “Guaranteed clean.”

  18

  THE SEVEN MUSICIANS WERE DRESSED ALIKE FOR THE BAR MITZVAH gig, having been offered fine suits for the appearance at the Temple. They wore tightly fitted plaid yellow bellbottoms. They wore navy linen jackets with golden buttons, pale yellow wide collared shirts and full cravats of navy and yellow stripes. Ishtar kissed each of them on their clean-shaved cheeks as she twisted boutonnieres into their lapels. Two, who were mechanics, had fingernails so short they were hooded by a drop of skin. One had monkey body hair which stuck out of his cuffs and above his collar. Nevertheless, nails cleaned, sideburns flattened, they were ready for the bar mitzvah.

  As the equipment truck pulled into the elm-lined parking lot, the seven Demons and Ishtar arrived in a rented limousine. Children waited for them on the broad steps. Mack and Nino circled around to the organ loft; Ishtar sat in a rear pew and trembled with excitement. She dug her fingernails into her palms. It had been a long time since she had been in a temple. She wore a gown of finely woven white linen and a coat of the same rich cloth. The ark opened. Ishtar bit her lips.

  The rabbi and cantor, both exceedingly short, stood on tiptoes to remove the Torah. They stripped it of its silver dress and jewelry and unrolled its two scrolls on the pulpit. Ishtar leaned back in her pew and coughed loudly. The rabbi introduced the quaking bar mitzvah boy and he began, in a faltering manner, his speech.

  “Today I stand here. This is where my father stood as a bar mitzvah boy before me and my grandfather stood here before him. Just as the rabbi teaches us, Judaism is a link between father and son. And so today …”

  “Wait.” Ishtar bellowed from the back. “You have forgotten your mother!” As her words rang through the temple and people turned to her, she walked, a majestic bride, down the center aisle. Nino shook his sistrum in the choir room above the altar. Behind her the door opened and the remainder of her band and their friends streamed in, arranging themselves in two lines under the stained glass memorial windows on either side of the hall.

  I pass the boy’s mother. She recognizes me as a Mah-Jongg partner years before the supermarket change. I watch as she beats upon her husband’s chest and her mother beats upon her husband’s chest accusing them of inviting strangers. The men attempt to catch the flying wrists. Beverly, the mother, wears a magnificent pin and turquoise watered silk with tiny covered buttons from neck to hem. Her head is absolutely clouded with matching bird of paradise feathers and her face covered with a lustrous pink pearl foundation. Behind me, a flank of ushers is massed at the rear. They are surrounded by the children I have invited. The rabbi and cantor are subdued as is the plan. Mack plays “Go Down, Moses,” from above and I, lifting my skirts, step onto the pavilion. From my shopping bag, I withdraw two cans of Three-in-One oil. I anoint the forehead of the holy men and chant quickly. The rabbi’s eyes are dreadful. They are predatory fish eyes, thyroidic and clear. They oscillate, involuntarily, in nystagmic horror. “Wait, I would speak,” I tell the congregation. There are polite coughs. They respect the richness of my clothes and my inherent manner. Beverly is not impressed. She screams, however, in an impressive high note. Sonny, the trumpeter, sits upon her. She continues to scream from beneath her feathers and the trumpeter’s Buddha bulk. Soon her pitch becomes involved with Mack’s chords and they are together. The lights gleam on the ringlets of hair on my white back.

  “Boy, what is your name?”

  “David.”

  “Is it all right with you, David, if I speak for a few minutes with your congregation? I am the Star of David.”

  The boy leans on the pulpit. His father calls to him. My own band, formidable and elegant, carrying fold-up croziers, tomp them as bishops. They walk and form a phalanx at the altar.

  “David,” the father screams as he clutches his heart. “Don’t speak to her!”

  “Ten minutes, David. We’ll play for free … no charge for the music.”

  “Okay.” He is in conflict. He does not know what is right. He just saved his father nine hundred dollars.

  My band, who collect money, begin to signal me. I ignore them. David raises his eyebrows at his bar mitzvah class in the side aisles.

  “David, you are being initiated
into manhood today. How exactly will this happen that you will become a man?”

  The boy shuffles his feet. I am not pleased. “Speak!” I call loudly. Beverly screams in a different note.

  “I, uh, read from the Torah and then I’m blessed and I get a Bible. And of course presents, you know. And …”

  “How will you know, then, David, when you are a man?”

  Politely, his face scarlet, he bends and whispers to me. I nod.

  “And when do you expect this to happen?”

  He shrugs.

  I turn with disdain to Beverly. “Beverly, have you arranged for this? Do you know who and where? Or are you satisfied with an unclean person on the back seat of your Bonneville?” Dear Mack adds subtly to the variations of her response.

  “David.” I turn to him. “I, the Queen of Heaven, am here to make you a man today.”

  He rubs his smooth chin. “I mean, couldn’t we do it someplace else?”

  “No, that won’t do. This is a ceremony dedicated to your manhood. It is to be done correctly, properly under the eye of your friends, parents and congregation.” Beverly watches the equipment truck setting up mikes and speakers in the parking lot beyond the memorial windows. “Beverly,” I call. “Woman is the connection between father and son. She is the connection. You also could be.”