Free Hunters and Gatherers by Francine Prose Page B

everything, say Dennis?
    “My parents,” said Gretta. “They said to tell you that they really liked your visit.”
    Was Gretta lying? Had her parents lied? Martha said, “I felt so badly for them. They were so sweet but so terribly lonely.”
    Martha stopped. She’d seen Gretta flinch, and she was instantly sorry. What was the use of empathy if it came after the fact, too late to prevent you from hurting your best friend? What had Gretta done to deserve being made to feel guilty about her parents? Poor Gretta was the only person Martha knew well enough to treat badly—not counting Martha’s mother, whom she hardly saw and who was, in any case, too fragile to withstand the mildest abuse.
    Enzio appeared out of nowhere, and now Martha was grateful as he chivalrously offered Gretta her vegetables and flung Martha’s across the table.
    “They’re mostly nice to each other,” Martha said. “The Goddess women, I mean.”
    “ We’re nice to each other,” Gretta said. “Nicer than guys are to us. With the exception of Xavier, who can be very nice.”
    “We’re not the issue,” Martha said. “And neither is Xavier.”
    “How refreshing,” said Gretta. “As far as Xavier’s concerned, Xavier is always the issue.”
    “With Dennis—” said Martha.
    “Oh, spare me.” Gretta held up one hand to silence Martha till the waiter had finished sprinkling their plates with pepper. After he left she counted the items of food on her dish. “It’s a good thing we each got our own salads and grilled vegetables. Otherwise we’d have got exactly three haricot verts apiece. Some sous-chef back there is counting. I thought pricey starvation went out with the eighties, and the nineties were about meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and gravy. God, don’t you hate those places that pretend to be like a diner, or Mom’s, except organic and very expensive?”
    Martha bit through the creamy eggplant flesh to the oily succulent skin. “Of course, the Goddess women are nuts on the subject of food. Freya and Sonoma struggle over every bite Sonoma eats; Joy’s always on Diana’s back about her anorexia; Titania says Isis has graduate-student food-and-wine tastes…”
    “Titania?” Gretta snapped up a green bean thin as a blade of grass. “Which one is she? Which reminds me: who are we today? For the purposes of today’s Amex receipt, you are: Editor, Mode .”
    Martha hated being reminded that she wasn’t an editor. She wished Gretta could take her out to lunch without playing this game of figuring out what sort of business expense Martha could pass for that day. She resented being made to feel compelled to work for her food.
    “I heard a joke,” she said.
    “Goody,” Gretta said.
    “What do you do when a pit bull humps your leg?”
    “Tell me,” said Gretta.
    “Fake orgasm,” Martha said.
    Martha waited for Gretta’s loony laugh. “That’s funny,” Gretta said coolly. “Is that New Age feminist-separatist witch-goddess humor?”
    Martha supposed that’s what it was and liked the joke a little less. She’d heard it in Joy’s minivan on the way to Isis’s apartment.
    Every Thursday evening Joy picked up the women in her old VW van with its bumper sticker MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOMSTICK. The trip started at Joy and Diana’s apartment in Park Slope, stopped in Brooklyn Heights for Freya and Sonoma, on West Eleventh for Bernie, Twenty-eighth and Lex for Martha, and then snaked around the Upper West Side, where the others lived, before winding up at Isis’s West Seventy-sixth Street brownstone floor-through.
    The joke about the pit bull was funnier in the van, in the dark, in the rain, in the company of women who were either gay or celibate by default or choice. Some of them actively hated men, others had just given up, and with blighted affection or genuine rancor, they joked about the male body and brain.
    Did Gretta think that laughing at the joke would be disloyal to Xavier? When Martha fell in love with Dennis,