Free Hunters and Gatherers by Francine Prose

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.”

I N 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 they 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