Wilma shook her blocky head ponderously. "The Great Mother would know. And She wouldn't like it." When Edwina first had set up Peez in the New York City office of E. Godz, Inc., she'd provided her daughter with everything needed to run the business smoothly, including this short, stocky, monolithic secretary. There was something so very, well, not earth-y so much as earth-en about the woman that Peez had spent most of her first week at work on the phone to her mother making Edwina swear again and again, on a stack of talismans, that Wilma was not actually a golem in disguise.

Now Peez stared at the impassive face of her recalcitrant secretary and gritted her teeth in silent frustration. Too bad she's not a golem, she thought. At least a golem obeys orders. With the sigh of the much put-upon she replied, "If it weren't for me, Wilma dear, you'd never have discovered the Way of the Great Mother and you'd still be doing those dreary covered-dish suppers at that former church of yours. I'm sure that if you do me this one itsy-bitsy favor, She'll forgive you. She's good that way."

"She's not good, She's just Great." Again that slow, weighty, side-to-side turning of Wilma's almost cubic head on her nigh-nonexistent neck. Peez found herself marveling at the fact that her secretary's terra-cotta-colored hair shed real dandruff and not flakes of dried clay. "You can't guarantee that She'll forgive me," Wilma intoned in a voice so husky it spoke of a three-box-a-day cigar habit begun some time in kindergarten. "She might even get angry. You know what happens when the Great Mother gets angry."

Peez sighed again, bringing this one all the way up from the soles of her plain black ballet flats. Of course she knew what happened when the Great Mother got angry. So did Wilma, having just achieved the rank of Junior High Priestess of the Sacred Grove, cum laude. However, Peez reasoned, if she took the time to enumerate the various afflictions