Hunters and Gatherers by Francine Prose Page B

moment when the hem of my robe would catch in the ritual fire. Since I changed my diet—it’s been almost two years—I’ve not only been thinner and felt better, I’ve actually been safer!”
    Had Isis forgotten that Martha had saved her from drowning? Sometimes she seemed not to recall where they’d met—that short but nasty paddle in the freezing Atlantic. And should this make Martha feel unappreciated, or hopeful? If Isis didn’t remember, it couldn’t be why she liked Martha.
    “Isn’t that what everyone wants?” Isis asked. “To feel protected? Guided? My favorite holy picture, when I was girl, was the angel watching over those two kids like some kind of weird winged nanny. The children about to cross a broken bridge and the angel pulling them back. Of course, this was before the night when all that changed forever, and my childhood guardian angel was reborn as the Goddess. It’s no wonder so many ex-Catholics wind up in the Goddess movement. Take that blue robe off Mary and what are we looking at?”
    “The Goddess?” Martha ventured.
    “Well, obviously,” Isis said. “And the experience of the miraculous is the same with both. Or at least as I experienced it on that incredible night.”
    There was no way for Martha not to ask, “What incredible night?”
    Isis smiled. “The night I discovered my spiritual nature, which had been concealed from me for my first thirty years. Let’s face it, ours is not a culture in which a girl’s parents consecrate her at birth to the service of the Goddess.
    “I was your basic control-freak, a promiscuous, over-achieving Catholic academic. I’d gone from Fordham to a lectureship at New Haven, and my first book, Freud, Jesus, and Matriarchy , had gotten gobs of attention. Even the media had got into the controversy, which was less about my ideas than a titillating mix of religion, gender, and sex. My academic career went into overdrive; I wasn’t prepared to be famous for all the wrong reasons. Plus I was in personal crisis, stranded between love affairs, which at that point meant I’d been chaste for about two seconds…Anyway, I was asked to take part in that infamous Washington panel on women and the patriarchal paradigm.”
    “Infamous?” said Martha.
    Isis’s lips formed the rippling, mindless smile of a Botticelli angel. “When they sent Daniel into the lion’s den, at least they had the decency not to call it a panel. This one was held in the ballroom of a huge D.C. hotel. The minute I entered I was assaulted by waves of hatred, five hundred old-boy academics whetting their knives and licking their chops. Somehow I managed to find my seat at the seminar table, between a priest, a heavy-duty feminist theorist, and a bigshot Freudian, all of whom had already dismissed my work as garbage.”
    Martha tried to look properly sympathetic and pained, although at that instant she was nearly ecstatic with pleasure in her meal: the sweet-salty crispness of the chicken skin, the airy whipped potatoes, her forays into the side dishes of sweet corn, coleslaw, and creamed spinach.
    “What was your work then?” Martha asked, regretting it at once. “I mean, remind me…Sorry, I’ve forgotten…My memory…”
    Isis waved away Martha’s apology. Why should Martha be held responsible for the details of Isis’s former life?
    “Goodness,” said Isis, “it seems so remedial now. I pushed the envelope of the feminist critique of Freud and Christian culture. The shrink thought it was preposterous to see Freud’s work in the context of the lost matriarchal societies. The feminist had an investment in women not being witches—in our being regular guys who would make great department chairs. The priest thought I was going straight to hell for reading the church fathers as the psychotic misogynists they were; later he dismembered me in a scholarly Catholic journal.
    “As I sat down, all three gave me eat-shit grins. I arranged my water glass and my pen, and then