Hunters and Gatherers (6 page)

What bliss it would be to surrender your griefs, your passions, and your will, to trade them in like an old car for confidence and calm, to become like the Goddess women and float on a cloud of faith that a broken answering machine was a message from your guardian angel sent to teach you heavenly patience and spare you annoying calls that might otherwise ruin your day!

For weeks after Dennis left, Martha called home from work every hour to see if he had phoned, though this made no sense at all; he could have called her at
Mode
. The computer male voice said, “No messages,” with what began to sound like triumph. Holding the receiver, Martha had sat very still as prickly shudders of disappointment coursed from her scalp down to her toes…

“Okay, forget it,” Isis said. “Let’s lose the moment of silence. The best thing about priestess ritual,” she informed Martha and Hegwitha, “is, if it doesn’t work, bag it. There’s no rule book, no expectations, and we’re writing our own sacred text every minute of our lives.”

The women laughed, gravelly caws of relief, and once more Martha was pleasantly surprised to find that her personal insufficiency was, in fact, a collective event.

Isis said, “I’d like to start by welcoming you on this Harvest Night, which by Goddess’s grace falls on Labor Day weekend, so we can honor the harvest and our grandmothers who fought for the labor unions. And every woman who has ever been in labor birthing a child—which, the sisters tell me, isn’t called labor for nothing.”

“You can say that again,” Titania agreed.

“Blessed be,” chorused the women.

“Goddess,” said Isis, “tonight you have sent us two new priestesses.” The women smiled at Martha and Hegwitha, genuinely welcoming, though welcome came more easily to some of them than others. It was a stretch for Freya and teary-eyed Diana, but all except Sonoma were trying, and Martha felt grateful and moved. How little it took to make one feel fractionally less unhappy!

“This is not a sorority,” Isis went on, “with a torture initiation. No one swallows goldfish or gets naked and streaks town. Nor is it a convent; nobody shaves her head. Nor Esalen, where gangs of balding, paunchy New Age guys think initiation is getting to grope our tits. This is a priestess circle empowered by the feminine, by kindness and awareness of others’ feelings.”

True, Martha thought, women hadn’t invented goldfish-swallowing or war. But women had other cruel rituals and barbed weapons at their disposal. Look at little girls in the schoolyard! And just last week, on the bus, she’d heard a woman telling her friend, “That gray hair looks good on you. I mean it, you look younger. We were all wondering when you would stop dyeing it that toxic dog-doo brown.”

“Women,” said Isis, “are like the child in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ We see the truth and say it, no matter what the cost. One of the things we know is,
any
initiation is torture. The double horror of being new—and being put on the spot!

“So let’s just go around the circle and say our names. I’m Isis Moonwagon.” The women laughed—they knew that!

Isis. Joy. Diana. Starling. Titania. Freya. Sonoma. Bernie. The women introduced themselves, some with shy, retiring smiles, others aggressive or brazen. Luckily Martha knew their names, because she could hardly hear them through the fog of anxiety generated by the prospect of having to say her own.

Hegwitha said, “My name is Randi, but my Goddess name is Hegwitha.”

Under the murmurs that greeted this, Martha mumbled, “I’m Martha.”

“Beautiful,” said Isis. “May the Goddess protect us all. Let’s start tonight with the Talking Stick…” Several women applauded. Joy whistled through her teeth.

“Like so many of our rituals,” Isis said, “the Talking Stick derives from Native American ceremony. It’s something we’re always mindful of—the indigenous people who lived here before the white man stole their land. In this ritual we pass the Talking Stick, and no one is allowed to talk except the person holding the stick. As long as we have the stick, we can freely share our hopes and fears and dreams. But when we don’t, our work is to listen and be caring and not judge.”

Not judge, not judge, not judge, Martha thought, repeating it like a mantra until the words melted into gibberish, and maybe that was the point. You gave up fine distinctions that were really just reasons to feel superior, gave up watching from the edge of other people’s lives and surrendered and shut your eyes and jumped into the warm gooey center. But wait a minute! Martha made her living by making fine distinctions, and some part of her—a large part of her—thought they should be made.

“First,” Isis said, “I’m going to light a little smudge, Little Sister Sage, the herb Native people use as medicine smoke. Smudge removes the kind of negativity we pick up every day in city traffic. It’s a bit smoky—is everyone fine with breathing?”

Martha nodded, and Hegwitha said, “Can I inhale?”

Isis lit the incense: a bundle of twine tied with string. Cupping their palms, the women wafted the smoke toward their faces and hair, greedily sucking in the acrid, smoldering-mattress smell. Then Isis raised a war club decorated with feathers and cloth scraps. “Great Goddess,” she prayed, “help us find our voices.” She looked around. “Okay. Who wants to start?”

Freya reached for the stick, but Isis whisked it out of her grasp and said, “Let me say one thing.”

She held the stick in both hands and bowed her head. “I want to share how lucky I feel for having been saved from drowning. I thought I’d had it out there. I was terrified, choking, and then I felt the most amazing peace, and I knew the Goddess was with me.”

It took hearing this a second time for Martha to realize it wasn’t true. The panicky woman she’d rescued hadn’t found the peace of the Goddess. But why was Martha being so small? Did she want more credit? Recognition for how tough it had been to save the struggling, flailing Isis? Probably Isis was trying to make the others feel better, reassuring them with the good news about her serene near-death moment—while the cold little fact checker, Martha, was insisting she stick to what happened.

“Blessed be,” said the women.

Isis surrendered the Talking Stick to Freya, who pressed it to her bosom.

“A miracle occurred this week,” Freya said. “My daughter began to menstruate.”

Bernie squealed with joy and leaned over to pat Sonoma, who shrank from her touch.

Freya said, “I was shocked by how blown away I was. When she told me, I burst into tears. I was amazed that my daughter’s body was a woman’s body. And we were women together, with all the mess and hopes and fears.”

Martha didn’t dare meet anyone’s eyes. Already she had realized that she would probably never have much sympathy for Freya. That was why Martha didn’t belong in this, or any, religious group—her heart had already turned against some, if not all, of its members. Martha tried to imagine how it would feel to be Freya seeing her daughter grow up. But all she could think of was how it would feel to grow up with a mother like Freya.

“It was like giving birth to her all over again,” said Freya. “But with a new sort of joy and pain, an affirmation of the feminine. I felt I was giving birth to myself, to my own reawakening womanliness—”

“This sucks,” said Sonoma. “It’s my body.”

“Excuse me, dear,” said Freya. “I was speaking.”

“Sucks,” Sonoma repeated. “I can’t believe you told them.”

“
I
have the Talking Stick,” Freya reminded her.

“Sonoma’s right,” said Bernie. “It’s Sonoma’s personal stuff. But it’s complicated, Sonoma. Because your mom was telling us something about
herself
, not just about you.”

“It’s my body,” Sonoma insisted.

“We know it’s your body, Sonoma,” said Isis. “And we know your body is an issue between you and your mom that you’ll both have to work on. Still you must admit that your mom’s weeping because you got your period is better than her bugging you to lose weight and get superthin.”

Several women smiled at this. Sonoma wasn’t among them.

Isis said, “This should prove that your mom
does
care—”

“Wait! Listen.” The women turned and stared: gloomy, silent Diana was speaking. “Lots of indigenous societies have fabulous first-menstruation rituals. Wouldn’t it be great if we could do something like that here? Some matrilineal Native American tribes had actual vision quests. At menarche girls go off alone into the desert to meditate and fast until they meet their spirit guide.”

“That would suck, too,” said Sonoma.

“The weird thing is,” Diana continued, “it’s kind of why I left graduate school. I kept trying to discuss this with my thesis adviser. I was saying it was so tragic that we had no initiation rites. And he said: We have our rituals. We have kids chugging six-packs and wrecking their cars on prom night.”

“Cynical shit,” said Titania.

“What an asshole,” Hegwitha said.

“Thank you,” said Diana, smiling at Hegwitha, and Martha sensed a ripple of jealousy emanating from Joy.

“Well, we do have our initiation rites,” Bernie said. “Mine was my dad getting furious when he found out I’d got my period, which meant he couldn’t molest me for a couple of days each month. So I started hoarding bloody pads and leaving them in the bathroom so he’d think I had it even when I didn’t.”

“That never stopped my dad,” Starling said. “He kept on, right through.”

“Mine, too,” said Joy. “That son of a bitch. Afterward I could hear him washing off the blood.”

After a silence Diana said, “Sonoma should have a ritual. Something private to mark this new stage and invoke the Goddess whose blood flows with the cycles of Earth our Mother—”

“No way,” Sonoma said.

“You know,” Titania mused, “I have a problem with this subject. Sometimes I feel like the gynocentric cultures were saying that we should give up everything and spend a week in the menstrual hut every month.”

“I hear you,” said Bernie. “And sometimes I agree. Other times I wonder if it’s just because I’m menopausal—”

“I rest my case!” said Titania. “We’re still calling ourselves menopausal when we’re supposed to be crones, wise women, respected for our ancient knowledge. Hah!”

“Freya has the Talking Stick,” Isis reminded them. “But first let’s finish with Sonoma. Sonoma, this is about what
you
want. Maybe you could have a private ritual. Your period is going to come every month, you’ll have to live with it somehow. Not that you need go overboard. In the seventies there was a frenzy for slide shows of dirty tampons and a fairly extremist thing about tasting menstrual blood—”

“Oh,
gross
,” said Sonoma, wincing so sharply that Martha recoiled, too. Sonoma knew it was creepy to be spending Labor Day weekend with her mother’s uncool friends, discussing menstrual blood. But if she wanted to be cool, why was she dressed like that? Why couldn’t she be outrageous in a more conventional way: ripped jeans, green spiked hair, her face pierced in five separate places?

Freya said, “If I have the Talking Stick, why are we still on Sonoma?”

“The thing to remember,” said Isis, “is that each month sends us a reminder of our power, the power to give birth—”

“I don’t ever want to have kids,” said Sonoma. “Everyone knows my generation is the end of the line.”

“But you could have a daughter,” said Starling.

“Like really great.” Sonoma’s pink face was like the skin formed by boiling milk, in this case over a bubbling caldron of pure exasperation. It was both touching and frightening to see a girl so young, so angry.

In the silence they heard Joy say to Diana, “Vision quest bullshit. The thing
you
like about it is the fasting for a week.”

“Maybe
you
two need the Talking Stick,” said Isis.

“I don’t know…” said Diana.

Joy said, “
I
do,” and seized the stick. “Things between Diana and me haven’t exactly improved. She quit eating for three days; I caught her slipping her dinner to the dog. I’m sick of the obsessiveness, the excuses about carcinogens, the steamed broccoli meals, no smoking, no drinking, no sex. I’m a Catholic school survivor myself, and it’s like I’m back where I started. Catechism, confession—but now the sin is eating instead of sex!”

Isis sighed. “The church had some of us in its stranglehold for years. It imprinted us like ducklings. No matter how we raise our consciousness, it’s hard to undo our training: learning to worship the man on the cross, the man in the sky, the man in the confessional who wouldn’t be there if girls weren’t nasty and dirty. But it’s only the sky god who wants us to be ashamed and punish our bodies for our desires. The Goddess wants us to celebrate the holiness in ourselves and in each other.”

Once, in bed, Dennis told Martha that men and women would never speak the same language because women saw sex as a sacrament while for guys it was recreation. But wasn’t there something holy about love, no matter how misdirected? Love was something to focus on, to give your rapt undivided attention. There had been a time when Martha had only to think about Dennis and the chatter around her would stop, and she would experience the silence and peace she imagined people got in church. Clearly, it was stupid to choose an object of veneration for whom you were interchangeable with a nitwit named Lucinda.

Isis said, “Martha, are you with us? You look positively stricken.”

“I’m fine,” said Martha, flattered that Isis was paying attention.

Isis said, “Since we’re on the subject of food and sex—”

“What other subjects are there?” interrupted Titania.

“What foods do we put on the Goddess’s altar?” Isis asked rhetorically. “Think. What are the Goddess’s favorite foods?”

“Milk and honey and eggs,” said Starling.

“Precisely,” answered Isis. Then the women began to laugh—knowing, yet quietly astounded: the way the religious marvel at new evidence of the divine.

The God of First Lutheran’s favorite food was macaroni and cheese, with jello-marshmallow salad running a close second. He was a stern but forgiving, reasonable god, very quid pro quo, not a god who made you do penance or starve yourself to death, but neither did He encourage you to celebrate your body.