Hunters and Gatherers Read Online Free PDF Page A

knew how to change in the locker room so nobody saw an inch of skin, while the rest of us tripped on our underpants and flashed the entire gym class.”
    How repressed and pathetic this made Martha sound: modest, prudish, withholding. And how unfair to be blamed for what wasn’t her fault. Some people liked showing their bodies; others simply didn’t, and covering up was as natural as blinking in bright light. Summers, during college, Martha’s friends had gone skinny-dipping. You were not supposed to be ashamed; you went numb and took off your clothes as if you were at the doctor’s, until the water covered you, hid you, and you were safe. You were not supposed to look, though Martha’s boyfriends always did—not at her, whom they could see any time, but at other girls. No wonder Martha liked swimming. It was like sex, in a way: a brief respite from self-consciousness—from consciousness altogether!
    Dennis had loved to look at Martha, who always found it flattering until the morning she’d awakened to find him staring at her thigh. She craned her neck to see what he was gazing at: a small tangled nest of blue veins that he continued to scrutinize, and they watched together as her white flesh curdled and puckered in front of their eyes.
    “In the matriarchies,” Hegwitha said, “everyone ran around naked. The fig leaf was a male sky-god invention. Men despise female bodies, they’re the ones who have made us ashamed…”
    But if modesty was a conditioned response for which they could thank the male sky god, why had Hegwitha mocked Martha for wanting to hide her body? And hadn’t Isis said that these chafing and all-concealing black caftans were a female creation? Martha lightly struck her forehead to silence the pesky fact checker blithering away behind it.
    “What’s the matter?” Hegwitha said.
    “Nothing,” said Martha. “Really. Saving Isis was exhausting, I guess. Even though I’m a pretty good swimmer…”
    Hegwitha sneered dismissively—and with good reason, thought Martha, embarrassed to have boasted about her athletic ability.
    “I must be really out of shape,” she said.
    “I’ll leave you alone,” said Hegwitha. “That’s obviously what you want.”
    “No, not at all,” lied Martha.
    But Hegwitha was already gone.
    Martha glanced in the mirror at her pale globule of a face with its cap of iodine-colored hair bubbling up from the neck of her caftan. Then she took a deep breath and left the room and nearly plowed into a woman lurching down the hall on crutches.
    Martha had noticed her earlier, coming up from the beach. Sinewy, boyish, with metal-rimmed glasses and steely short hair, arrested at indeterminate age between twenty-five and forty, she wore a baseball cap turned backward, black jeans, and a T-shirt printed with Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein. She backed up and shut her bedroom door with the tip of a crutch.
    “Gangway,” she called to Martha. “One-legged dykes from hell!” She leaned her weight on the crutch and held out her hand. “Good to meet you. I’m Joy.”
    Martha said, “I’m Martha.”
    “Right. Gotcha,” said Joy.
    Joy’s eyes followed Martha’s to the cast on her leg. “I took a little nap,” she explained. “In front of an oncoming train. The train happened to be carrying nuclear waste, the ultimate testosterone breakdown product. Speaking of hormones: it was really heroic, your jumping in to save Isis.”
    “I don’t know about heroic ,” Martha said. Only now did she wonder why she’d reacted first—after all, she was a stranger who’d drifted into this crowd of believers who should have followed Isis blindly through harrowing trials by water and fire. Maybe it was just that: Martha’s detachment had freed her to jump into the sea while the others were stuck in the mire of their own fantasies and preconceptions, the history they had to slog through before they could get to the ocean. Or maybe what inhibited them was their jewelry,