Hunters and Gatherers

by Francine Prose

  Now that Martha was no longer in love—correction, no longer loved—her higher sympathies had returned, working overtime and retroactively back to consider how Gretta must have felt when Martha had just met Dennis. No wonder the Goddess women had no patience for romantic passion. It was like a cult of two, and one had to be deprogrammed.

  “I don’t know,” said Martha. “The Goddess women make me feel less miserable. Even about Dennis…”

  “Dennis Dennis Dennis,” said Gretta.

  Martha had broken up with men, she should know better by now. But in this case repeated exposure had failed to make Martha immune; on the contrary, it left her more vulnerable and more gravely ill. There were nights when she lay awake, thinking of Dennis and weeping. And Gretta was tired of hearing about it…

  “At this Goddess meeting the other week, I brought up the subject of Dennis, and Isis said how crazy it was to choose to feel so much pain when it was so much smarter to be with friends who valued and appreciated you. She asked, Why would anyone want to suffer like that? And the minute she said that, it just made so much sense.”

  In fact, when Martha awoke at night, the clean simplicity of that question sliced through the mists of regret, if only for a minute, till the fog rolled in again. Still, in that brief clearing, Martha could sometimes fall asleep. It was better than Valium, with its guilt-inducing visions of prescription-drug dependence.

  “I’ve been telling you that for years,” Gretta said.

  “Months,” Martha corrected her.

  “Months,” said Gretta. “Where’s Enzio? Are we having dessert?”

  Martha said, “The Goddess women even help me deal with Eleanor.”

  Gretta gave a little shudder and speared a last thin oval of grilled zucchini remaining on her plate. Her feelings about Martha’s boss mirrored her attitude toward Dennis. Martha’s complaints were justified—but really, enough was enough.

  “Yesterday Eleanor made me call a writer and ask where he’d got the idea that our ordinary social exchanges were like baboon dominance rituals. The writer said, ‘It’s my opinion. Just say it’s my opinion.’”

  “Oh, humiliating!” said Gretta.

  “I said I’d figured that, I was just checking. Eleanor was standing over me while I made the call. Usually I’d have wanted to kill her, but now I looked up at Eleanor’s face…”

  Eleanor’s husband was leaving her after a long marriage; a teenage son was in a pricey boarding-school dry-out clinic. “I saw that Eleanor was in pain. And I understood that her making me call was her primitive magic, her way of imposing order on the chaos around her.”

  “This is nothing new,” said Gretta. “You’ve always had sympathy for Eleanor. Too much sympathy, actually. Lack of sympathy is not your problem. Too much sympathy is your problem. You’ve got so much sympathy for Dennis that you would be the first to explain why he had to treat you like shit.”

  Startled, Martha sat up straight. She couldn’t remember telling Gretta about those white nights when just before dawn she realized that Dennis was right: anyone would have gotten sick of Martha’s plodding fact-checker’s soul, her chilly cerebral remove, her skinny aging body, the cocker-spaniel eagerness with which she had listened, practically panting, to Dennis’s every word, her hypersensitivity to imagined slights, her braying equine laugh. Not once, with the Goddess women, had her laugh sounded like a snort. Long ago, Martha’s mother advised her that whenever she saw her friends, afterward she should ask herself, Did she feel better or worse? That was a simple formula to tell her who her real friends were. Martha thought of her mother, drinking vodka, watching TV, the whispery husk of the energetic woman who used to tuck her into bed…

  “Martha?” said Gretta. “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Martha said. “Maybe none of it makes any sense. But maybe that’s the point. Isis says the first step is accepting the irrational, embracing things that don’t add up.”

  “That would be a stretch for you,” Gretta said. “You’re not a fact checker for nothing. And, frankly, I’m not sure it’s a stretch I want to see you make.”

  “Maybe I want to,” Martha said. “All I know is, when I looked at Eleanor’s face, I saw that she was suffering. I thought of the Goddess women and how damaged they are. Joy, Bernie, and Starling were abused as kids. I always doubt the statistics, but that’s three out of ten. Hegwitha’s got cancer. Bernie’s husband died five years ago, and she’s still grieving. Titania’s daughter won’t talk to her. Freya and Sonoma despise each other—”

  “Well,” said Gretta, “you’re not exactly dealing with an average cross-section of the female population.”

  Martha said, “The Goddess tells them it’s okay, that they’re connected to something outside themselves—”

  “Crème brûlée,” said Gretta. “Or, wait. I’ll settle for the tiramisu. Where is the waiter, anyway? Isn’t that typical of men? First the guy’s halfway down my throat and then he disappears.”

  “What do you think?” said Martha. “About this Goddess thing? These women?” But why was she asking Gretta? She hadn’t told her enough of the truth for her to have an informed opinion. Anyway, what was the truth? Martha’s impressions of the Goddess women were like a column of figures, dauntingly long and complex; each time Martha added them up, the total was always different.

  “Well…” said Gretta. “Anything that helps you make it through the day.” It was the tone a person takes when a friend’s mind can’t be changed and the wisest course is to show good will and gracefully change the subject. Gretta scooped a forkful of tiny carrots onto Martha’s plate—a gesture in which Martha recognized the distillation of all Gretta’s love and concern.

  “Come on, hon,” she said. “All you have to do is survive a few months till you fall in love with someone else. If you’ve got to go through some cult thing, fine. If it helps you, fine. Just promise me not to get into anything seriously weirder than this.”

  BUT THAT NIGHT, ON the way to Isis’s for the Witches Sabbath, weirdness thrummed with an aboriginal twang beneath Joy’s van’s many problem noises. One by one the women climbed in the van, said hello and blessed be, then hunched their shoulders and lowered their heads and burrowed under their hair.

  No wonder they wanted to hide! They had gone to impressive lengths to make themselves look frightful. Witches’ Sabbath, said Isis, was a celebration of the inner darkness that women of all ages shared with the ancient hags and crones: a night on which to remember their dead, to honor the witches burned at the stake, and to have their feelings about the dead and dying. Martha had asked Hegwitha how often they held Witches’ Sabbaths. Hegwitha referred her to Starling, who said, “I don’t know. When we need to.”

  An anticipatory buzz had grown steadily in advance of the evening. Isis had urged them to be creative in turning themselves into witches, smearing hag paint on their faces, obliterating their vanity, mocking the culture that valorized male standards of feminine beauty. So now, as each woman got into the van, there was considerable rubbernecking to see how far she had gone in her pursuit of hagdom and cronehood.

  Sonoma’s makeup job was pure rock-and-roll science fiction. Bernie and Titania had streaked charcoal on their foreheads and cheeks. Diana’s face was painted in some femme apotheosis: part Betty Boop, part Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Joy had a furry beard and mustache. Freya wore a skull mask and a hooded cloak and said, “I’m Death from an early Bergman film.”

  Martha had used pale powder and black smudgy rings of kohl, and in her bathroom mirror appeared dismayingly unchanged except that her teeth looked yellow. So what! It felt good to look so bad, liberating and subversive, after years spent fretting about her clothes and face and hair, years of thinking she looked all wrong—even for lunch with Gretta!

  On Amsterdam and Ninetieth, the van stopped for Hegwitha. The roof light went on when she got in, and the women gasped. Hegwitha had painted her entire face an opaque neon green.

  Diana
said, “Hegwitha, you win the prize.”

  “Thanks, Diana,” Hegwitha said shyly.

  Starling answered Isis’s door in black jeans and a black T-shirt. Entering the dark living room, Martha saw a circle of small low tables, on each of which a candle burned inside a translucent, convincingly lifesized, but not, she hoped, authentic, human skull.

  “Welcome, witch sisters.” Isis emerged from the gloom in a flowing black velvet robe with a hood, a garment that could have been amicably shared by Dracula and Scarlett O’Hara. Her hag paint was dramatic and glamorous: white rice powder and Kabuki-like swirls of pink-and-purple eye shadow.

  There was an audible intake of breath. “Blessed be,” someone said.

  Tonight there was no time for chat; the women got down to business. Each knelt on a cushion in front of a skull. On each table was a vintage cardboard matchbox painted with Turkish harem girls. Martha waited to see what the others did, then knelt in front of a skull which no one had chosen and which seemed to be plaintively eyeing her. The women picked up their matchboxes. Martha did the same.

  “Night of death, night of darkness,” Isis intoned. The women blew out their candles.

  “In cavelike darkness…” Isis began.

  Martha recalled how, as a child, she’d gone to Virginia with her parents and toured a cave hung with eerily lit, dripping phalluses made of rock. Near the end of the tour, their guide instructed them to hold their hands near their faces and then extinguished all the lights, and (this was the point of the exercise) they couldn’t see their hands. The blackness lasted long enough for Martha to fear they’d been left there forever. By comparison, Isis’s apartment was reassuringly bright: there were streetlights outside, a faint kitchen glow, a blinking answering machine.

  “Now,” said Isis, “we will each light our candle to the dead spirit we want to honor.”

  The women lit their candles quickly; they’d given the subject some thought. It took Martha a while to decide to light hers to her father. Five years had passed since Martha’s mother phoned to say he was dead. It wasn’t till Martha came home for the funeral that she heard about the lawn mower. At the time, Martha had thought that grief was something she couldn’t live with. But now, though the memory of him could still make her briefly quit breathing, that sticking pain was mostly replaced by a dull intermittent ache. Still, whenever Dennis had been mean to her, she’d missed her father’s love and protection. Why hadn’t his spirit lurked nearby, making Dennis be nice?

  She stared into the glowing eyes of the skull: crockery cobwebbed with hairline cracks, the sort of object one might find at the bottom of a fish tank. How much time had passed? Minutes? Hours? Starling turned on the lights.

  Isis said, “Listen, ladies! I actually contacted the spirit of Cleopatra and heard all sorts of yummy stuff about the Goddess Queens of Egypt.”

  “Oh, Isis,” said Joy, “that’s so sickeningly positive. I’ve always thought Witches’ Sabbath shouldn’t be about dead heroines but about people who should be dead, or if they are dead, should stay that way.”

  “Joy,” said Bernie, “that’s negative magic!”

  “I guess I feel closer to the dead,” said Hegwitha, her green face glowing, “being closer to death myself.”

  “Beautiful,” said Diana.

  Martha was annoyed at Hegwitha for always using her illness to turn conversations to herself and smooth over troublesome rough spots. Then she was annoyed at herself for feeling that way about Hegwitha. She liked Hegwitha, or anyway admired her for her resilience and for how bravely she elbowed her way through this thorny patch in her life.

  “I lit my candle to Jim Morrison,” volunteered Sonoma.

  “Jim Morrison?” cried Freya. “Don’t you get it at all?”

  “Get what?” said Sonoma.

  “That the Witches’ Sabbath is about our inner darkness and communicating with the spirits of the witches who preceded us.”

  “Oh, well,” drawled Sonoma. “Jim Morrison is dead, and he was pretty satanic. Anyway, I didn’t light it to Jim Morrison. I lied. I lit it about my dad.”

  “You’re lying now,” said Freya. “You’re just saying that to pull my chain. Anyway, your dad is alive. Theoretically.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Sonoma.

  “Fathers!” said Joy. “They’d all be better off dead—”

  “Men in general,” said Hegwitha. “The male of the species may turn out to be a bad idea that the human race can still evolve beyond—”

  “I lit my candle to Stan,” said Bernie. Stan was Bernie’s dead husband; he’d been a therapist, like Bernie. “And I could feel Stan telling me it was okay to let go. So if it’s all right with the rest of you, I’d like us to quit trashing men for a minute, considering—”

  “Ladies! Ladies!” cried Isis. “It’s always a heavy occasion. I think we need a cleansing fire to purge the demonic residue that’s clinging to us from brushing so close to our dead.”

  “In the apartment?” said Starling. “Isis, not indoors…”

  Isis went to the kitchen and returned with a metal wok. She began tearing scraps from a ream of copy paper and handed them out along with a tray of pencils. “I want everyone to write down the names of the good and evil dead, the loved and hated dead. Let’s put them all in the fire that purifies and destroys so it can burn off the negativity and bring the loving dead closer…”

  By now the women were scribbling and tearing. Whose names were they writing? Martha couldn’t summon the name of one dead person except, of course, her father, and that was too serious for this: too important for burning copy paper in a wok. Her father’s death had made her realize she didn’t believe in God. There was no higher power to comfort her. There was no order, no plan, no reason for a good man to die on his riding mower.

  The wok was overflowing when Isis lit the scraps. Within seconds, the flames shot out of control. Why didn’t the others stop Isis before she got anywhere near fire or water? Starling ran for a bucket and sloshed water over the fire. A plume of acrid smoke spiraled up.

  “Blessed be,” said the women.

  Martha contemplated what Freya had said about Isis always having to be rescued and promptly attaching herself to whomever had saved her last. Probably Starling had saved her too many times for it to count. Were Starling and Isis lovers? It was hard to tell, as it was with everything concerning Isis’s sexuality. Maybe Isis did have sex with the rocks and trees. In any case, there was a sexual charge in how she bestowed her attention, attention she often focused now, flatteringly, on Martha.

  “Thank you, Starling,” said Isis. Wisps of black debris from the burning scraps fluttered around her head.

  EVER SINCE SHE WAS a girl, Martha could never enter a dark room without closing her eyes and keeping them shut until she’d turned on the light. What was she afraid of seeing? Or what was she hoping to see? What ax murderers or malevolent ghosts was she politely allowing to leave?

  Tonight (it had been almost a week since the Witches’ Sabbath) Martha returned from a perfectly grisly and ordinary day at Mode and knew exactly what she would rather not see, here in her own apartment: the squalor, the dirty clothes, the half-empty teacups, each with its pale bloated lemon slice floating like a dead fish in a tank. Martha’s decor reminded her of films in which the set telegraphs the fact that a lonely-guy substance-abusing cop is toughing out a messy divorce.

  For a long time she’d existed with the barest essentials: cooking equipment, chairs, a table, the futon she could jettison at a moment’s notice, which meant—though she would have insisted that this was not what it meant—an invitation from a suitable man to relocate elsewhere. But in recent years, Martha’s mother had been divesting herself of possessions in preparation for her death, although she was in good health and might live on for decades. Martha’s apartment began to fill with items of Fifties decor—two tall orange ceramic lamps in the shape of elongated cats, pulled like taffy; segmented lazy Susans for parties Martha would never give
; kidney-shaped ashtrays so essential for the nonsmoker—articles that might have been newly chic but for their contaminating association with Martha’s childhood.

  At first Martha kept these objects safely contained in packing crates, but Dennis had discovered them and gleefully unwrapped them. With Dennis around, they’d had no power to harm her. But as soon as he left, the ceramic cats had regrown their claws: memento mori, grim reminders of time passed and passing.

  The apartment smelled of curry, a spice Martha used to love, but which over time had become a reproachful message from her neighbors, a comment on Martha’s rootless solitude and failure to have clamorous children for whom to cook hot vegetarian meals. Reflexively, Martha turned on the TV and caught several minutes of a documentary about a professional magician dedicated to exposing bogus healers and psychics. She watched long enough to hear the magician say, “I came to see that I would have to live without the comforts of faith.” Then Martha switched off the television and stared at the empty screen.

  Just at that moment, the phone rang.

  “Martha,” said Isis. “Have you eaten? Let’s meet near my place, in an hour.”

  Martha and Isis met for dinner at Sell Grit! on Columbus in the Eighties. Well-scrubbed beaming waitresses carried platters of mashed potatoes and gravy, biscuits, organic chicken, and menus that vouched for the wholesomeness of the chicken’s entire life. Country kitchens throughout the heartland had been raided for the decor: bare wood, gingham, oak hutches, homespun napkins the size of dishcloths, thick crockery of a mossy, unappetizing gray.

  The waitresses all knew Isis and her dietary guidelines, more complex and purer than those of the restaurant itself: no salt, no wheat, no dairy, tight restrictions on glutens. Martha ordered the corn-fed baked chicken, whipped potatoes, and gravy.