Hunters and Gatherers

by Francine Prose

  “Go on,” Bernie urged.

  Martha said, “The entire time he was checking the fridge, I hung around the kitchen. I’d never had so many domestic chores. I washed each dish forty times.”

  But how could she explain what had seemed like an optical phenomenon: her entire peripheral field had slowly blurred and narrowed down to one bright pinpoint of light, and that pinpoint was Dennis. If she couldn’t see, how could she have moved from one room to another? The safest, the only thing to do was to stay near Dennis. It was as if some new gravity were pinning her in the kitchen and she couldn’t resist any more than she could have chosen to leave the earth’s surface.

  Surely these women could understand this most basic human experience, the miracle everyone wanted, this sudden unwilled falling in love. And yet Martha suspected that they all had learned to distrust and fear it. (All except Sonoma, who might think it was disgusting.) And who was to say that they weren’t right? Martha should have distrusted it, too, and meekly paid the repair bill and thanked him and gone off to work.

  But it was already too late by the time he said her freezer needed defrosting, and his statement hovered in the air like some vile double entendre. They stared at the kitchen floor.

  Martha noticed a stuck-on parsley leaf right where he was looking.

  “I asked if he wanted some coffee,” Martha said. “We sat at the kitchen table. It was four in the afternoon before we got up again. I knew that hours were slipping by; it felt dangerous and risky. Blowing off work, shooting the day—I remember his beeper kept beeping. And I was thrilled that a guy being paged would keep on talking to me.”

  Were they asking themselves why he—why any man—would be so entranced with Martha? Probably they were beyond wondering about anything men might do. Martha wished there were a way of subtly letting them know that Dennis didn’t date every girl whose refrigerator he defrosted. “Once he told me that what he liked about me was that I was always right there. Whatever he said, I got it, I understood, though women often didn’t—”

  “Watch out,” Titania said. “Watch out when a guy tells you what most women don’t get, or what he doesn’t like about most women…except, of course, for you.”

  “Men,” said Joy. “Their definition of intelligence is when we understand them.”

  And yet there had been times when she and Dennis were out with his friends, and he would say something smart or funny, and hers was the face he sought out to see if he’d impressed her, if he’d made her laugh. What a distance he’d traveled from loving her for being right there to hating her for being (as he’d said) on some other planet completely. And if she was, hadn’t he driven her there, sent her into orbit to escape his perpetual criticisms and the hulking shadow of Lucinda?

  “We were together a year,” Martha said. “Then he just lost interest. He seemed less happy to see me. I used to think of all the things he didn’t do anymore, like hooking my neck in a friendly way when we used to walk down the street.”

  “You let a guy get you in a headlock?” said Joy. “Serious safety error.”

  “It didn’t seem to matter that I understood what he said. I’d hear him telling other people things he’d already told me. I’d ask myself what I used to do right that I’d started doing wrong. Everything about me began to seem grotesque.”

  “Like what things?” Bernie asked in her most gently prodding, therapeutic tone.

  “I don’t know,” lied Martha.

  One day she’d let herself into Dennis’s apartment when he was on the phone. And though Martha liked to believe that she had principles about respecting people’s privacy, not listening in on their conversations or opening their mail, the compulsion to eavesdrop was so overwhelming that Martha realized she did have the normal human urges that Dennis had been implying she lacked.

  Dennis was laughing strangely. It wasn’t Dennis’s laugh. Then she understood. He was imitating her: a hideous equine snort. Whom was Dennis talking to? She heard him say, “I can’t stand it.”

  Perhaps she was being oversensitive, he was just doing a funny laugh. Actors practiced lots of things besides parodies of their girlfriends. Once she’d heard Dennis describe how he’d watched an old man walk in the rain and had remembered that walk for years until he got the chance to use it. That was when they were first together, and hearing Dennis say that had made her feel quite light-headed with desire and adoration. Imagine: a man who listened and watched with such sweetly empathic attention! But hearing Dennis imitate her had made Martha despise the sound of her own voice…

  “Like what?” repeated Bernie.

  She would tell them the next worst thing. “Finally, I asked him if something was…you know, wrong. And he said it was getting old, dating the Little Match Girl.”

  Sonoma whistled. “Nasty. He said that?”

  “Sonoma, how do you know about the Little Match Girl?” Freya said. “I’m always stunned when you can access that sort of cultural information.”

  “Dad read it to me,” said Sonoma. “You never once read aloud to me the whole time I was a kid.”

  Isis clapped her hands. “Please, ladies. Control yourselves. Martha still has the Talking Stick.”

  “Martha, what did you hear when he said that?” asked Bernie.

  “What did I hear?” said Martha. Exactly what Dennis had told her: that she was just like that pathetic girl in the fairy tale, always standing out in the snow, looking into windows, spying on warm crowded rooms, parties, family dinners, except that Martha was worse than that, because she secretly believed that it was better to be alone, shivering in the cold, and not with loud sweaty people so vulgar they actually wanted to have fun…

  “What else, Martha?” Isis said.

  “Isn’t that enough?” said Martha. Although she was new to the group, she was hogging the limelight, making them spend more time on her failed romance than on Hegwitha’s illness.

  Isis said, “We must remember it’s hard for men to love. They weren’t brought up to do it, they were brought up not to do it. Love aversion therapy. A wire was hooked up to their heart at some point between Boy Scouts and Basic Training, and every time they had a caring thought, they got a teeny electric shock.”

  “Dennis was loving,” Martha said. “He just stopped loving me.” How pitiful to defend a man who everyone in the room now knew had called her the Little Match Girl.

  And then, to Martha’s astonishment, tears came into her eyes. As she hid her face in the crook of her arm, hands stroked her hair and shoulders.

  Through it all she heard Isis’s voice. “Every woman in this room has experienced rejection. The patriarchal culture is about rejection. The abusive or absent father, rejecting us, turning his back on us no matter how much we need him. Why would anyone want that hopelessness, that impossible love? What I’d like to know is: Why would anyone choose to suffer like that?”

  Isis lifted Martha’s damp face and gave her a dazzling smile, then rose to her feet with a grace that made her seem to expand like a genie emerging from the mouth of a bottle.

  “I’m going to bed,” said Isis. “There’s tons of food and wine left. I love you all. I’m exhausted.”

  IN ACCATONE, THE MIDTOWN restaurant where Martha met Gretta for lunch, every trick of lighting and decor was employed to make you feel rich and northern Italian. But the syrupy low pinkish light, designed to conceal and excuse, telegraphed to the whole restaurant that Martha’s attempt to be stylish had failed. As she and Gretta followed the pencil-thin hostess to their table, Martha’s downtown black, her men’s tuxedo jacket, her tights and lace-up ankle boots made her look like a circus hobo foundering in a sea of Armani. Every woman in the room had hair the color of mink or honey, except for Martha, with her nail-scissored shreds of garish skinned-knee orange.

  “I’m Enzio,” said their waiter, a strikingly handsome person of somewhat indeterminate racial origin and gender. He (that much was fairly certain) addressed himself to Gretta and smiled into her eyes, as if t
hey were deeply in love. Would he notice Martha if she were dressed, like Gretta, in perfect fawn-colored cashmere that kept slipping off one plump shoulder?

  Martha was wearing the wrong clothes. And what was even worse was that she was wasting her lunch with her friend, worrying about what she was wearing. For someone with such grand ideas about the meaning of fashion, Martha had a lot of trouble just getting dressed in the morning. How perfect that she should wind up at Mode, where the attitude toward style was at once superior, ironic, detached, and obsessive. O lucky Goddess women, marching to the beat of a different drummer!

  “Martha,” Gretta said. “Are you listening? Enzio’s just told us the specials.”

  Already it was Enzio! Gretta’s new best friend! One thing to be said for the Goddess women was that they didn’t compete for men. In fact, they didn’t seem to know that there were any men to compete for. But when had the Goddess group become a source of reassurance, something to put her mind on to make herself feel better? Martha had been planning to ask Gretta for reassurance that her new friendship with the Goddess women didn’t mean she’d lost her mind completely.

  Since Dennis, Martha had felt like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole. But the Goddess women had broken her fall or at least distracted her enough so that hours might go by, precious intervals during which she almost forgot that she was falling. These past weeks were the first time that Martha had ever felt included, gathered into an inner circle. She was dazzled by the speed with which she’d been accepted. It was so flattering, so pleasant to be taken up by a community that it seemed ungrateful to wonder if it was a group you wanted to join. She liked it that the women—especially Isis—seemed to want her around, though she recognized disturbing echos of the mind-control techniques that suckered unstable teens into cults. But the Goddess women weren’t Moonies or Hare Krishnas. They were Jungian therapists, writers, scientists, academics…

  “Earth to Martha,” said Gretta. “What is with you today?”

  “What are you having?” said Martha.

  “The pasta with pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes,” said Gretta. “The grilled vegetables. And the green bean salad.”

  “Make that two,” said Martha.

  “Two it is,” Enzio told Gretta.

  “And bring that wine now, please,” said Gretta.

  “Pronto.” Enzio danced away, turning to wink at Gretta.

  “This is something new,” said Gretta. “Some kind of foreign-guy charisma. It must have something to do with Xavier. Something’s rubbing off.”

  “What’s the matter?” Martha said. “You look sort of tense.”

  “Oh, nothing,” Gretta answered. Enzio brought her a glass of wine and grudgingly gave one to Martha.

  Gretta took three large gulps and then told Martha a story about how they’d gone to a party last week, and Xavier had spent the evening flirting with another woman. It was a very long story and contained many details about the party and the woman, and many pauses during which Gretta waited for Martha to say that Xavier really did love her, but he was just being Xavier. Finally Gretta paused and said, “So how are the Wicca women?”

  “Not Wicca women,” Martha said. “Goddess worshippers.”

  “Same difference,” said Gretta.

  “Not really,” said Martha. “They’re not really such flakes. Listen, I stopped at a bookstore, and there was a huge selection of Goddess books.”

  Martha knew she was signaling Gretta that Goddess worship was a happening thing, so Gretta wouldn’t think that it was just Martha and one lone coven of crazies. This was how Martha used to convince her mother that something was all right: lots of people did it, especially popular kids. It was also how Mode decided that a subject had interest and value. The right people were doing it, and doing it right this minute.

  Gretta lunged her empty wine glass at a passing waiter, not theirs. “Goddess books are out of my department, my sub-department, and any sub-subdepartment I could imagine getting into.” Gretta was assistant publicity director at a publishing house. Every Monday—for as long as they didn’t catch her, she said—she took Martha to lunch.

  Martha said, “Isis has five books in print. Bernie’s written a big trade paperback about Jungian archetypes. I even found Freya’s overproduced coffee-table book about the Goddess in art history, culminating in Freya’s work.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Gretta. “Lord, oh Lord. How can you read that dreck?”

  “Come on,” said Martha. “It’s interesting, sort of. Don’t you wonder what the world would be like if women ran it? The Goddess women say we’d be nicer and more loving. But when you mention Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi, they say: Those are women with male values, and we can’t know what we’ll do until we evolve past that. But what if they’re right? How could things be any more screwed up than they are right now?”

  Why was Martha making the Goddess women sound like a bunch of philosophy graduate students and leaving out the embarrassing rituals, the Talking Stick and so forth, the truly bizarre discussions of whether rapists deserve to be hexed, the charged allusions to some ritual with a pomegranate and a dagger? Martha had plenty of doubts about their corny rites and wacky historical notions. But to listen to Martha defending them to Gretta, anyone would have thought that she was just like Hegwitha, happy to be accepted, without reservations or doubts, and with a total, unwavering faith in a kindly nurturant Goddess.

  “They’re not so bad,” said Martha. “They’re kind of smart. They’re strange. They seem to like me.”

  “That’s pathetic,” said Gretta. “Lots of people like you. I like you.”

  “Name someone else,” said Martha. Was she hoping that Gretta would, despite everything, say Dennis?

  “My parents,” said Gretta. “They said to tell you that they really liked your visit.”

  Was Gretta lying? Had her parents lied? Martha said, “I felt so badly for them. They were so sweet but so terribly lonely.”

  Martha stopped. She’d seen Gretta flinch, and she was instantly sorry. What was the use of empathy if it came after the fact, too late to prevent you from hurting your best friend? What had Gretta done to deserve being made to feel guilty about her parents? Poor Gretta was the only person Martha knew well enough to treat badly—not counting Martha’s mother, whom she hardly saw and who was, in any case, too fragile to withstand the mildest abuse.

  Enzio appeared out of nowhere, and now Martha was grateful as he chivalrously offered Gretta her vegetables and flung Martha’s across the table.

  “They’re mostly nice to each other,” Martha said. “The Goddess women, I mean.”

  “We’re nice to each other,” Gretta said. “Nicer than guys are to us. With the exception of Xavier, who can be very nice.”

  “We’re not the issue,” Martha said. “And neither is Xavier.”

  “How refreshing,” said Gretta. “As far as Xavier’s concerned, Xavier is always the issue.”

  “With Dennis—” said Martha.

  “Oh, spare me.” Gretta held up one hand to silence Martha till the waiter had finished sprinkling their plates with pepper. After he left she counted the items of food on her dish. “It’s a good thing we each got our own salads and grilled vegetables. Otherwise we’d have got exactly three haricot verts apiece. Some sous-chef back there is counting. I thought pricey starvation went out with the eighties, and the nineties were about meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and gravy. God, don’t you hate those places that pretend to be like a diner, or Mom’s, except organic and very expensive?”

  Martha bit through the creamy eggplant flesh to the oily succulent skin. “Of course, the Goddess women are nuts on the subject of food. Freya and Sonoma struggle over every bite Sonoma eats; Joy’s always on Diana’s back about her anorexia; Titania says Isis has graduate-student food-and-wine tastes…”

  “Titania?” Gretta snapped up a green bean thin as a blade of grass. “Which one is she? Which reminds me: who are we today? For the purposes of today’s Am
ex receipt, you are: Editor, Mode.”

  Martha hated being reminded that she wasn’t an editor. She wished Gretta could take her out to lunch without playing this game of figuring out what sort of business expense Martha could pass for that day. She resented being made to feel compelled to work for her food.

  “I heard a joke,” she said.

  “Goody,” Gretta said.

  “What do you do when a pit bull humps your leg?”

  “Tell me,” said Gretta.

  “Fake orgasm,” Martha said.

  Martha waited for Gretta’s loony laugh. “That’s funny,” Gretta said coolly. “Is that New Age feminist-separatist witch-goddess humor?”

  Martha supposed that’s what it was and liked the joke a little less. She’d heard it in Joy’s minivan on the way to Isis’s apartment.

  Every Thursday evening Joy picked up the women in her old VW van with its bumper sticker MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOMSTICK. The trip started at Joy and Diana’s apartment in Park Slope, stopped in Brooklyn Heights for Freya and Sonoma, on West Eleventh for Bernie, Twenty-eighth and Lex for Martha, and then snaked around the Upper West Side, where the others lived, before winding up at Isis’s West Seventy-sixth Street brownstone floor-through.

  The joke about the pit bull was funnier in the van, in the dark, in the rain, in the company of women who were either gay or celibate by default or choice. Some of them actively hated men, others had just given up, and with blighted affection or genuine rancor, they joked about the male body and brain.

  Did Gretta think that laughing at the joke would be disloyal to Xavier? When Martha fell in love with Dennis, Gretta had been between boyfriends. Now Martha wished she’d gloated less and been more sympathetic. One thing she remembered about love was that it narrowed the population to two: two lone humans on a planet of unfeeling robots. Once, when they’d first got together, Dennis and Martha spent a country weekend with friends and, when their hostess stepped out, they made love all over the house, ending up on the living room couch. Well, not friends, exactly: their hostess was Dennis’s former girlfriend.