Hunters and Gatherers Read Free Page B

understand that Isis was in real danger, Martha braced herself against the cold and dived into the water. Chilly, unafraid, she swam toward the burning boats. The ocean felt like panels of silk, slipping along her body, and the salt in her mouth and on her skin was stinging and delicious. Only now did she recall how much she loved to swim, the freedom from thought and self-consciousness that was always denied her on land, the sense of having found at last an element where she belonged, and where all that mattered was buoyancy, breath, and forward motion.
    Martha swallowed water a few times until she got beyond the waves, which were neither so high nor so strong as they had appeared from shore, nor was Isis so far out to sea as Martha had imagined. Martha found her easily, though she’d floated away from the burning boats. What drew Martha was the red of her robe and the frantic, windmilling splashing, the helicoptering spray and foam of a huge water bird taking off. Then Martha was inside the waterspout, deflecting Isis’s punches.
    Senior Lifesaving came back to her, and she remembered how in extremis you were permitted to haul off and slug the struggling victim. Each time Isis hit her, Martha wanted to hit her back. Instead she hooked her arm around Isis’s neck and towed her in toward shore.
    The girls she’d saved in lifesaving class had been compliant and weightless, but Isis was like an elephant that had made up its mind to drown. Soon, though, Isis understood that she was being helped, stopped resisting, and, when Martha looked at her, managed a watery, terrified smile. Isis’s teeth were chattering, her hair was plastered to her skull. The red ribbon had slipped off her forehead and dangled around her neck.
    By now they were in water so shallow that they had to stand. Martha put a steadying arm around Isis as they waited for a wave to wash over them. All at once the shoals were crowded with running, splashing women, jumping in the water with ecstatic abandon; their joy came from Isis being safe and from the thrill of flinging themselves into the icy sea. Laughing, sputtering, embracing, they surrounded Isis, gently guiding her in toward the beach, gently elbowing Martha away.
    Slumped across their shoulders, Isis staggered forward. Gracing them with wan, luminous smiles, she thanked them and told them she loved them. Then all at once she stopped so short that there was an awkward pileup, and she looked around her, theatrically searching the crowd.
    Finally, she found Martha and beckoned and stretched out her hand. She made everyone wait until Martha came forward and took her place in line and joined the long column of women marching arm-in-arm out of the sea.

I SIS MOONWAGON’S BEACH HOUSE was a massive shingle-style Victorian, encircled by swirling verandas and spiked with cupolas and turrets. Climbing roses covered the fences, and a vegetable patch bordered the garden path—red chard, collards, dark green kale, Brussels sprouts twisting on giant stalks like the eyeballs of undersea creatures—rioting over the edge of the walkway, luxuriant but controlled.
    Interplanted cabbages, lavender, and nasturtium narrowed the path so that the small group who’d come up from the beach had to break into smaller groups to get from the garden gate to the porch. Martha was struck by the grace with which the women avoided minicollisions and oversolicitous stalls, just as she’d been impressed before by the wordless ease with which these women had winnowed themselves from the crowd on the shore.
    How unlike the Darwinian scramble of daily life at Mode ! Every year, the magazine gave a chic, high-profile Christmas party at which, just when the merriment was reaching a crescendo, Martha would spot some celebrity hostess moving from group to group, whispering invitations into the ears of the chosen few, who would later go on together to some marvelous dinner. Sometimes they whispered into ears that in theory were listening to