"I was thinking of Nick," she says, and her voice is almost soft. "He's been with us a long time. He's loyal. I could fix it with him."
So that's who does her little black-market errands for her. Is this what he always gets, in return?
"What about the Commander?" I say.
"Well," she says, with firmness; no, more than that, a clenched look, like a purse snapping shut. "We just won't tell him, will we?"
This idea hangs between us, almost visible, almost palpable: heavy, formless, dark; collusion of a sort, betrayal of a sort. She does want that baby.
"It's a risk," I say. "More than that." It's my life on the line; but that's where it will be sooner or later, one way or another, whether I do or don't. We both know this.
"You might as well," she says. Which is what I think too.
"All right," I say. "Yes."
She leans forward. "Maybe I could get something for you," she says. Because I have been good. "Something you want," she adds, wheedling almost.
"What's that?" I say. I can't think of anything I truly want that she'd be likely or able to give me.
"A picture," she says, as if offering me some juvenile treat, an ice cream, a trip to the zoo. I look up at her again, puzzled.
"Of her," she says. "Your little girl. But only maybe."
She knows where they've put her then, where they're keeping her. She's known all along. Something chokes in my throat. The bitch, not to tell me, bring me news, any news at all. Not even to let on. She's made of wood, or iron, she can't imagine. But I can't say this, I can't lose sight, even of so small a thing. I can't let go of this hope. I can't speak.
She's actually smiling, coquettishly even; there's a hint of her former small-screen mannequin's allure, flickering over her face like momentary static. "It's too damn hot for this, don't you think?" she says. She lifts the wool from my two hands, where I have been holding it all this time. Then she takes the cigarette she's been fiddling with and, a little awkwardly, presses it into my hand, closing my fingers around it. "Find yourself a match," she says. "They're in the kitchen, you can ask Rita for one. You can tell her I said so. Only the one though," she adds roguishly. "We don't want to ruin your health!"
[32]
Rita's sitting at the kitchen table. There's a glass bowl with ice cubes floating in it on the table in front of her. Radishes made into flowers, roses or tulips, bob in it. On the chopping board in front of her she's cutting more, with a paring knife, her large hands deft, indifferent. The rest of her body does not move, nor does her face. It's as if she's doing it in her sleep, this knife trick. On the white enamel surface is a pile of radishes, washed but uncut. Little Aztec hearts.
She hardly bothers to look up as I enter. "You got it all, huh," is what she says, as I take the parcels out for her inspection.
"Could I have a match?" I ask her. Surprising how much like a small, begging child she makes me feel, simply by her scowl, her stolidity; how importunate and whiny.
"Matches?" she says. "What do you want matches for?"
"She said I could have one," I say, not wanting to admit to the cigarette.
"Who said?" She continues with the radishes, her rhythm unbroken. "No call for you to have matches. Burn the house down."
"You can go and ask her if you like," I say. "She's out on the lawn."
Rita rolls her eyes to the ceiling, as if consulting silently some deity there. Then she sighs, rises heavily, and wipes her hands with ostentation on her apron, to show me how much trouble I am. She goes to the cupboard over the sink, taking her time, locates her key bunch in her pocket, unlocks the cupboard door. "Keep 'em in here, summer," she says as if to herself. "No call for a fire in this weather." I remember from April that it's Cora who lights the fires, in the sitting room and the dining room, in cooler weather.
The matches are wooden ones, in a cardboard sliding-top box, the kind I used to covet in order to make dolls' drawers out of them. She opens the box, peers into it, as if deciding which one she'll let me have. "Her own business," she mutters. "No way you can tell her a thing." She plunges her big hand down, selects a match, hands it over to me. "Now don't you go setting fire to nothing," she says. "Not them curtains in your room. Too hot the way it is."
"I won't," I say. "That's not what it's for."
She does not deign to ask me what it is for. "Don't care if you eat it, or what," she says. "She said you could have one, so I give you one, is all."
She turns away from me and sits again at the table. Then she picks an ice cube out of the bowl and pops it into her mouth. This is an unusual thing for her to do. I've never seen her nibble while working. "You can have one of them too," she says. "A shame, making you wear all them pillowcases on your head, in this weather."
I am surprised: she doesn't usually offer me anything. Maybe she feels that if I've risen in status enough to be given a match, she can afford her own small gesture. Have I become, suddenly, one of those who must be appeased?
"Thank you," I say. I transfer the match carefully to my zip-pered sleeve where the cigarette is, so it won't get wet, and take an ice cube. "Those radishes are pretty," I say, in return for the gift she's made me, of her own free will.
"I like to do things right, is all," she says, grumpy again. "No sense otherwise."
I go along the passage, up the stairs, hurrying. In the curved hallway mirror I flit past, a red shape at the edge of my own field of vision, a wraith of red smoke. I have smoke on my mind all fight, already I can feel it in my mouth, drawn down into the lungs, filling me in a long rich dirty cinnamon sigh, and then the rush as the nicotine hits the bloodstream.
After all this time it could make me sick. I wouldn't be surprised. But even that thought is welcome.
Along the corridor I go, where should I do it? In the bathroom, running the water to clear the air, in the bedroom, wheezy puffs out the open window? Who's to catch me at it? Who knows?
Even as I luxuriate in the future this way, rolling anticipation around in my mouth, I think of something else.
I don't need to smoke this cigarette.
I could shred it up and flush it down the toilet. Or I could eat it and get the high that way, that can work too, a little at a time, save up the rest.
That way I could keep the match. I could make a small hole, in the mattress, slide it carefully in. Such a thin thing would never be noticed. There it would be, at night, under me while I'm in bed. Sleeping on it.
I could burn the house down. Such a fine thought, it makes me shiver.
An escape, quick and narrow.
I lie on my bed, pretending to nap.
The Commander, last night, fingers together, looking at me as I sat rubbing oily lotion into my hands. Odd, I thought about asking him for a cigarette, but decided against it. I know enough not to ask for too much at once. I don't want him to think I'm using him. Also I don't want to interrupt him.
Last night he had a drink, Scotch and water. He's taken to drinking in my presence, to unwind after the day, he says. I'm to gather he is under pressure. He never offers me any, though, and I don't ask: we both know what my body is for. When I kiss him goodnight, as if I mean it, his breath smells of alcohol, and I breathe it in like smoke. I admit I relish it, this lick of dissipation.
Sometimes after a few drinks he becomes silly, and cheats at Scrabble. He encourages me to do it too, and we take extra letters and make words with them that don't exist, words like smurt and crup, giggling over them. Sometimes he turns on his short-wave radio, displaying before me a minute or two of Radio Free America, to show me he can. Then he turns it off again. Damn Cubans, he says. All that filth about universal daycare.
Sometimes, after the games, he sits on the floor beside my chair, holding my hand. His head is a little below mine, so that when he looks up at me it's at a juvenile angle. It must amuse him, this fake subservience.
He's way up there, says Ofglen. He's at the top, and I mean the very top. At such times it's hard to imagine it.
Occasionally I try to put myself in his position. I do this as a tactic, to guess in advance how he may be moved to behave towards me. It's difficult for me to believe I have power over him, of any sort, but I do; although it's of an equivocal kind. Once in a while I think I can see myself, though blurrily, as he may see me. There are things he wants to prove to me, gifts he wants to bestow, services he wants to render, tendernesses he wants to inspire.
He wants, all right. Especially after a few drinks.
Sometimes he becomes querulous, at other times philosophical; or he wishes to explain things, justify himself. As last night.
The problem wasn't only with the women, he says. The main problem was with the men. There was nothing for them anymore.
Nothing? I say. But they had…
There was nothing for them to do, he says.
They could make money, I say, a little nastily. Right now I'm not afraid of him. It's hard to be afraid of a man who is sitting watching you put on hand lotion. This lack of fear is dangerous.
It's not enough, he says. It's too abstract. I mean there was nothing for them to do with women.
What do you mean? I say. What about all the Pornycorners, it was all over the place, they even had it motorized.
I'm not talking about sex, he says. That was part of it, the sex was too easy. Anyone could just buy it. There was nothing to work for, nothing to fight for. We have the stats from that time. You know what they were complaining about the most? Inability to feel. Men were turning off on sex, even. They were turning off on marriage.
Do they feel now? I say.
Yes, he says, looking at me. They do. He stands up, comes around the desk to the chair where I'm sitting. He puts his hands on my shoulders, from behind. I can't see him.
I like to know what you think, his voice says, from behind me.
I don't think a lot, I say lightly. What he wants is intimacy, but I can't give him that.
There's hardly any point in my thinking, is there? I say. What I think doesn't matter.
Which is the only reason he can tell me things.
Come now, he says, pressing a little with his hands. I'm interested in your opinion. You're intelligent enough, you must have an opinion.
About what? I say.
What we've done, he says. How things have worked out.
I hold myself very still. I try to empty my mind. I think about the sky, at night, when there's no moon. I have no opinion, I say.
He sighs, relaxes his hands, but leaves them on my shoulders. He knows what I think, all right.
You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better.
Better? I say, in a small voice. How can he think this is better?
Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.
I lie flat, the damp air above me like a lid. Like earth. I wish it would rain. Better still, a thunderstorm, black clouds, lightning, car-splitting sound. The electricity might go off. I could go down to the kitchen then, say I'm afraid, sit with Rita and Cora around the kitchen table, they would permit my fear because it's one they share, they'd let me in. There would be candles burning, we would watch each other's faces come and go in the flickering, in the white flashes of jagged light from outside the windows. Oh Lord, Cora would say. Oh Lord save us.
The air would be clear after that, and lighter.
I look up at the ceiling, the round circle of plaster flowers. Draw a circle, step into it, it will protect you. From the center was the chandelier, and from the chandelier a twisted strip of sheet was hanging down. That's where she was swinging, just lightly, like a pendulum; the way you could swing as a child, hanging by your hands from a tree branch. She was safe then, protected altogether, by the time Cora opened the door. Sometimes I think she's still in here, with me.
I feel buried.
[33]
Late afternoon, the sky hazy, the sunlight diffuse but heavy and everywhere, like bronze dust. I glide with Ofglen along the sidewalk; the pair of us, and in front of us another pair, and across the street another. We must look good from a distance: picturesque, like Dutch milkmaids on a wallpaper frieze, like a shelf full of period-costume ceramic salt and pepper shakers, like a flotilla of swans or anything that repeats itself with at least minimum grace and without variation. Soothing to the eye, the eyes, the Eyes, for that's who this show is for. We're off to the Prayvaganza, to demonstrate how obedient and pious we are.
Not a dandelion in sight here, the lawns are picked clean. I long for one, just one, rubbishy and insolently random and hard to get rid of and perennially yellow as the sun. Cheerful and plebeian, shining for all alike. Rings, we would make from them, and crowns and necklaces, stains from the bitter milk on our fingers. Or I'd hold one under her chin: Do you like butter? Smelling them, she'd get pollen on her nose. Or was that buttercups? Or gone to seed: I can see her, running across the lawn, that lawn there just in front of me, at two, three years old, waving one like a sparkler, a small wand of white fire, the air filling with tiny parachutes. Blow, and you tell the time. All that time, blowing away in the summer breeze. It was daisies for love though, and we did that too.
We line up to get processed through the checkpoint, standing in our twos and twos and twos, like a private girls' school that went for a walk and stayed out too long. Years and years too long, so that everything has become overgrown, legs, bodies, dresses all together. As if enchanted. A fairy tale, I'd like to believe. Instead we are checked through, in our twos, and continue walking.
After a while we turn right, heading past Lilies and down towards the river. I wish I could go that far, to where the wide banks are, where we used to lie in the sun, where the bridges arch over. If you went down the river long enough, along its sinewy windings, you'd reach the sea; but what could you do there? Gather shells, loll on the oily stones.
We aren't going to the river though, we won't see the little cupolas on the buildings down that way, white with blue and gold trim, such chaste gaiety. We turn in at a more modern building, a huge banner draped over its door—WOMEN'S PRAYVAGANZA TODAY. The banner covers the building's former name, some dead president they shot. Below the red writing there's a line of smaller print, in black, with the outline of a winged eye on either side of it: God Is a National Resource. On either side of the doorway stand the inevitable Guardians, two pairs, four in all, arms at their sides, eyes front. They're like store mannequins almost, with their neat hair and pressed uniforms and plaster-hard young faces. No pimply ones today. Each has a submachine gun slung ready, for whatever dangerous or subversive acts they think we might commit inside.
The Prayvaganza is to be held in the covered courtyard, where there's an oblong space, a skylight roof. It isn't a citywide Prayvaganza, that would be on the football field; it's only for this district. Ranks of folding wooden chairs have been placed along the right side, for the Wives and daughers of high-ranking officials or officers, there's not that much difference. The galleries above, with their concrete railings, are for the lower-ranking women, the Marthas, the Econowives in their multicolored stripes. Attendance at Prayvaganzas isn't compulsory for them, especially if they're on duty or have young children, but the galleries seem to be filling up anyway. I suppose it's a form of entertainment, like a show or a circus.
A number of the Wives are already seated, in their best embroidered blue. We can feel their eyes on us as we walk in our red dresses two by two across to the side opposite them. We are being looked at, assessed, whispered about; we can feel it, like tiny ants running on our bare skins.
Here there are no chairs. Our area is cordoned off with a silky twisted scarlet rope, like the kind they used to have in movie theaters to restrain the customers. This rope segregates us, marks us off, keeps the others from contamination by us, makes for us a corral or pen; so into it we go, arranging ourselves in rows, which we know very well how to do, kneeling then on the cement floor.
"Head for the back," Ofglen murmurs at my side. "We can talk better." And when we are kneeling, heads bowed slightly, I can hear from all around us a susurration, like the rustling of insects in tall dry grass: a cloud of whispers. This is one of the places where we can exchange news more freely, pass it from one to the next. It's hard for them to single out any one of us or hear what's being said. And they wouldn't want to interrupt the ceremony, not in front of the television cameras.
Ofglen digs me in the side with her elbow, to call my attention, and I look up, slowly and stealthily. From where we're kneeling we have a good view of the entrance to the courtyard, where people are steadily coming in. It must be Janine she meant me to see, because there she is, paired with a new woman, not the former one; someone I don't recognize. Janine must have been transferred then, to a new household, a new posting. It's early for that, has something gone wrong with her breast milk? That would be the only reason they'd move her, unless there's been a fight over the baby; which happens more than you'd think. Once she had it, she may have resisted giving it up. I can see that. Her body under the red dress looks very thin, skinny almost, and she's lost that pregnant glow. Her face is white and peaked, as if the juice is being sucked out of her.
"It was no good, you know," Ofglen says near the side of my head. "It was a shredder after all."
She means Janine's baby, the baby that passed through Janine on its way to somewhere else. The baby Angela. It was wrong, to name her too soon. I feel an illness, in the pit of my stomach. Not an illness, an emptiness. I don't want to know what was wrong with it. "My God," I say. To go through all that, for nothing. Worse than nothing.
"It's her second," Ofglen says. "Not counting her own, before. She had an eighth-month miscarriage, didn't you know?"
We watch as Janine enters the roped-off enclosure, in her veil of untouchability, of bad luck. She sees me, she must see me, but she looks right through me. No smile of triumph this time. She turns, kneels, and all I can see now is her back and the thin bowed shoulders.
"She thinks it's her fault," Ofglen whispers. "Two in a row. For being sinful. She used a doctor, they say, it wasn't her Commander's at all."
I can't say I do know or Ofglen will wonder how. As far as she's aware, she herself is my only source, for this kind of information; of which she has a surprising amount. How would she have found out about Janine? The Marthas? Janine's shopping partner? Listening at closed doors, to the Wives over their tea and wine, spinning their webs. Will Serena Joy talk about me like that, if I do as she wants? Agreed to it right away, really she didn't care, anything with two legs and a good you-know-what was fine with her. They aren't squeamish, they don't have the same feelings we do. And the rest of them leaning forward in their chairs, My dear, all horror and prurience. How could she? Where? When?
As they did no doubt with Janine. "That's terrible," I say. It's like Janine, though, to take it upon herself, to decide the baby's flaws were due to her alone. But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
One morning while we were getting dressed, I noticed that Janine was still in her white cotton nightgown. She was just sitting there on the edge of her bed.
I looked over towards the double doors of the gymnasium, where the Aunt usually stood, to see if she'd noticed, but the Aunt wasn't there. By that time they were more confident about us; sometimes they left us unsupervised in the classroom and even the cafeteria for minutes at a time. Probably she'd ducked out for a smoke or a cup of coffee.
Look, I said to Alma, who had the bed next to mine.
Alma looked at Janine. Then we both walked over to her. Get your clothes on, Janine, Alma said, to Janine's white back. We don't want extra prayers on account of you. But Janine didn't move.
By that time Moira had come over too. It was before she'd broken free, the second time. She was still limping from what they'd done to her feet. She went around the bed so she could see Janine's face.
Come here, she said to Alma and me. The others were beginning to gather too, there was a little crowd. Go on back, Moira said to them. Don't make a thing of it, what if she walks in?
I was looking at Janine. Her eyes were open, but they didn't see me at all. They were rounded, wide, and her teeth were bared in a fixed smile. Through the smile, through her teeth, she was whispering to herself. I had to lean down close to her.
Hello, she said, but not to me. My name's Janine. I'm your wait-person for this morning. Can I get you some coffee to begin with?
Christ, said Moira, beside me.
Don't swear, said Alma.
Moira took Janine by the shoulders and shook her. Snap out of it, Janine, she said roughly. And don't use that word.
Janine smiled. You have a nice day, now, she said.
Moira slapped her across the face, twice, back and forth. Get back here, she said. Get right back here! You can't stay there, you aren't there anymore. That's all gone.
Janine's smile faltered. She put her hand up to her cheek. What did you hit me for? she said. Wasn't it good? I can bring you another. You didn't have to hit me.
Don't you know what they'll do? Moira said. Her voice was low, but hard, intent. Look at me. My name is Moira and this is the Red Center. Look at me.
Janine's eyes began to focus. Moira? she said. I don't know any Moira.
They won't send you to the Infirmary, so don't even think about it, Moira said. They won't mess around with trying to cure you. They won't even bother to ship you to the Colonies. You go too far away and they just take you up to the Chemistry Lab and shoot you. Then they burn you up with the garbage, like an Unwoman. So forsret it.
I want to go home, Janine said. She began to cry.
Jesus God, Moira said. That's enough. She'll be here in one minute, I promise you. So put your goddamn clothes on and shut up.
Janine kept whimpering, but she also stood up and started to dress.
She does that again and I'm not here, Moira said to me, you just have to slap her like that. You can't let her go slipping over the edge. That stuff is catching.
She must have already been planning, then, how she was going to get out.
[34]
The sitting space in the courtyard is filled now; we rustle and wait. At last the Commander in charge of this service comes in. He's balding and squarely built and looks like an aging football coach. He's dressed in his uniform, sober black with the rows of insignia and decorations. It's hard not to be impressed, but I make an effort: I try to imagine him in bed with his wife and his Handmaid, fertilizing away like mad, like a rutting salmon, pretending to take no pleasure in it. When the Lord said be fruitful and multiply, did he mean this man?
This Commander ascends the steps to the podium, which is draped with a red cloth embroidered with a large white-winged eye. He gazes over the room, and our soft voices die. He doesn't even have to raise his hands. Then his voice goes into the microphone and out through the speakers, robbed of its lower tones so that it's sharply metallic, as if it's being made not by his mouth, his body, but by the speakers themselves. His voice is metal-colored, horn-shaped.
"Today is a day of thanksgiving," he begins, "a day of praise."
I tune out through the speech about victory and sacrifice. Then there's a long prayer, about unworthy vessels, then a hymn: "There Is a Balm in Gilead."
"There Is a Bomb in Gilead," was what Moira used to call it.
Now comes the main item. The twenty Angels enter, newly returned from the fronts, newly decorated, accompanied by their honor guard, marching one-two one-two into the central open space. Attention, at ease. And now the twenty veiled daughters, in white, come shyly forward, their mothers holding their elbows. It's mothers, not fathers, who give away daughters these days and help with the arrangement of the marriages. The marriages are of course arranged. These girls haven't been allowed to be alone with a man for years; for however many years we've all been doing this.
Are they old enough to remember anything of the time before, playing baseball, in jeans and sneakers, riding their bicycles? Reading books, all by themselves? Even though some of them are no more than fourteen—Start them soon is the policy, there's not a moment to be lost—still they'll remember. And the ones after them will, for three or four or five years; but after that they won't. They'll always have been in white, in groups of girls; they'll always have been silent.
We've given them more than we've taken away, said the Commander. Think of the trouble they had before. Don't you remember the singles' bars, the indignity of high school blind dates? The meat market. Don't you remember the terrible gap between the ones who could get a man easily and the ones who couldn't? Some of them were desperate, they starved themselves thin or pumped their breasts full of silicone, had their noses cut off. Think of the human misery.
He waved a hand at his stacks of old magazines. They were always complaining. Problems this, problems that. Remember the ads in the Personal columns, Bright attractive woman, thirty-five… This way they all get a man, nobody's left out. And then if they did marry, they could be left with a kid, two kids, the husband might just get fed up and take off, disappear, they'd have to go on welfare. Or else he'd stay around and beat them up. Or if they had a job, the children in daycare or left with some brutal ignorant woman, and they'd have to pay for that themselves, out of their wretched little paychecks. Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers. No wonder they were giving up on the whole business. This way they're protected, they can fulfill their biological destinies in peace. With full support and encouragement. Now, tell me. You're an intelligent person, I like to hear what you think. What did we overlook?
Love, I said.
Love? said the Commander. What kind of love?
Falling in love, I said. The Commander looked at me with his candid boy's eyes.
Oh yes, he said. I've read the magazines, that's what they were pushing, wasn't it? But look at the stats, my dear. Was it really worth it, falling in love? Arranged marriages have always worked out just as well, if not better.
Love, said Aunt Lydia with distaste. Don't let me catch you at it. No mooning and June-ing around here, girls. Wagging her finger at us. Love is not the point.
Those years were just an anomaly, historically speaking, the Commander said. Just a fluke. All we've done is return things to Nature's norm.
Women's Prayvaganzas are for group weddings like this, usually. The men's are for military victories. These are the things we are supposed to rejoice in the most, respectively. Sometimes though, for the women, they're for a nun who recants. Most of that happened earlier, when they were rounding them up, but they still unearth a few these days, dredge them up from underground, where they've been hiding, like moles. They have that look about them too: weak-eyed, stunned by too much light. The old ones they send off to the Colonies right away, but the young fertile ones they try to convert, and when they succeed we all come here to watch them go through the ceremony, renounce their celibacy, sacrifice it to the common good. They kneel and the Commander prays and then they take the red veil, as the rest of us have done. They aren't allowed to become Wives though; they're considered, still, too dangerous for positions of such power. There's an odor of witch about them, something mysterious and exotic; it remains despite the scrubbing and the welts on their feet and the time they've spent in Solitary. They always have those welts, they've always done that time, so rumor goes: they don't let go easily. Many of them choose the Colonies instead. None of us likes to draw one for a shopping partner. They are more broken than the rest of us; it's hard to feel comfortable with them.
The mothers have stood the white-veiled girls in place and have returned to their chairs. There's a little crying going on among them, some mutual patting and hand-holding, the ostentatious use of handkerchiefs. The Commander continues with the service:
"I will that women adorn themselves in modest apparel," he says, "with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array;
"But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.
"Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection." Here he looks us over. "All," he repeats.
"But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
"For Adam was first formed, then Eve.
"And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.
"Notwithstanding she shall be saved by childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety."
Saved by childbearing, I think. What did we suppose would save us, in the time before?
"He should tell that to the Wives," Ofglen murmurs, "when they're into the sherry." She means the part about sobriety. It's safe to talk again, the Commander has finished the main ritual and they're doing the rings, lifting the veils. Boo, I think in my head. Take a good look, because it's too late now. The Angels will qualify for Handmaids, later, especially if their new Wives can't produce. But you girls are stuck. What you see is what you get, zits and all. But you aren't expected to love him. You'll find that out soon enough. Just do your duty in silence. When in doubt, when flat on your back, you can look at the ceiling. Who knows what you may see, up there? Funeral wreaths and angels, constellations of dust, stellar or otherwise, the puzzles left by spiders. There's always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.
What we're aiming for, says Aunt Lydia, is a spirit of camaraderie among women. We must all pull together.
Camaraderie, shit, says Moira through the hole in the toilet cubicle. Right fucking on, Aunt Lydia, as they used to say. How much you want to bet she's got Janine down on her knees? What you think they get up to in that office of hers? I bet she's got her working away on that dried-up old withered—.
Moira! I say.
Moira what? she whispers. You know you've thought it.
It doesn't do any good to talk like that, I say, feeling nevertheless the impulse to giggle. But I still pretended to myself, then, that we should try to preserve something resembling dignity.
You were always such a wimp, Moira says, but with affection. It does so do good. It does.
And she's right, I know that now, as I kneel on this undeniably hard floor, listening to the ceremony drone on. There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. In the paint of the washroom cubicle someone unknown had scratched: Aunt Lydia sucks. It was like a flag waved from a hilltop in rebellion. The mere idea of Aunt Lydia doing such a thing was in itself heartening.
So now I imagine, among these Angels and their drained white brides, momentous grunts and sweating, damp furry encounters; or, better, ignominious failures, cocks like three-week-old carrots, anguished fumblings upon flesh cold and unresponding as uncooked fish.
When it's over at last and we are walking out, Ofglen says to me in her light, penetrating whisper: "We know you're seeing him alone."
"Who?" I say, resisting the urge to look at her. I know who.
"Your Commander," she says. "We know you have been."
I ask her how.
"We just know," she says. "What does he want? Kinky sex?"
It would be hard to explain to her what he does want, because I still have no name for it. How can I describe what really goes on between us? She would laugh, for one thing. It's easier for me to say, "In a way." That at least has the dignity of coercion.
She thinks about this. "You'd be surprised," she says, "how many of them do."
"I can't help it," I say. "I can't say I won't go." She ought to know that.
We're on the sidewalk now and it's not safe to talk, we're too close to the others and the protective whispering of the crowd is gone. We walk in silence, lagging behind, until finally she judges she can say, "Of course you can't. But find out and tell us."
"Find out what?" I say.
I feel rather than see the slight turning of her head. "Anything you can."
[35]
Now there's a space to be filled, in the too-warm air of my room, and a time also; a space-time, between here and now and there and then, punctuated by dinner. The arrival of the tray, carried up the stairs as if for an invalid. An invalid, one who has been invalidated. No valid passport. No exit.
That was what happened, the day we tried to cross at the border, with our fresh passports that said we were not who we were: that Luke, for instance, had never been divorced, that we were therefore lawful, under the law.
The man went inside with our passports, after we'd explained about the picnic and he'd glanced into the car and seen our daughter asleep, in her zoo of mangy animals. Luke patted my arm and got out of the car as if to stretch his legs and watched the man through the window of the immigration building. I stayed in the car. I lit a cigarette, to steady myself, and drew the smoke in, a long breath of counterfeit relaxation. I was watching two soldiers in the unfamiliar uniforms that were beginning, by then, to be familiar; they were standing idly beside the yellow-and-black-striped lift-up barrier. They weren't doing much. One of them was watching a flock of birds, gulls, lifting and eddying and landing on the bridge railing beyond. Watching him, I watched them too. Everything was the color it usually is, only brighter.
It's going to be all right, I said, prayed in my head. Oh let it. Let us cross, let us across. Just this once and I'll do anything. What I thought I could do for whoever was listening that would be of the least use or even interest I'll never know.
Then Luke got back into the car, too fast, and turned the key and reversed. He was picking up the phone, he said. And then he began to drive very quickly, and after that there was the dirt road and the woods and we jumped out of the car and began to run. A cottage, to hide in, a boat, I don't know what we thought. He said the passports were foolproof, and we had so little time to plan. Maybe he had a plan, a map of some kind in his head. As for me, I was only running: away, away.
I don't want to be telling this story.
I don't have to tell it. I don't have to tell anything, to myself or to anyone else. I could just sit here, peacefully. I could withdraw. It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Fat lot of good it did her.
Why fight?
That will never do.
love? said the Commander.
That's better. That's something I know about. We can talk about that.
Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could he have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, a whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going. It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.
Or sometimes, even when you were still loving, still falling, you'd wake up in the middle of the night, when the moonlight was coming through the window onto his sleeping face, making the shadows in the sockets of his eyes darker and more cavernous than in daytime, and you'd think, Who knows what they do, on their own or with other men? Who knows what they say or where they are likely to go? Who can tell what they really are? Under their daily-ness.
Likely you would think at those times: What if he doesn't love me?
Or you'd remember stories you'd read, in the newspapers, about women who had been found—often women but sometimes they would be men, or children, that was the worst—in ditches or forests or refrigerators in abandoned rented rooms, with their clothes on or off, sexually abused or not; at any rate killed. There were places you didn't want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.
But all of that was pertinent only in the night, and had nothing to do with the man you loved, at least in daylight. With that man you wanted it to work, to work out. Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for the man. If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.
If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
It's strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives. I was like that too, I did that too. Luke was not the first man for me, and he might not have been the last. If he hadn't been frozen that way. Stopped dead in time, in midair, among the trees back there, in the act of falling.
In former times they would send you a little package, of the belongings: what he had with him when he died. That's what they would do, in wartime, my mother said. How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say? Make your life a tribute to the loved one. And he was, the loved one.
Is, I say. Is, is, only two letters, you stupid shit, can't you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?
I wipe my sleeve across my face. Once I wouldn't have done that, for fear of smearing, but now nothing comes off. Whatever expression is there, unseen by me, is real.
You'll have to forgive me. I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it. Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain those distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep. Weeping is what it is, not crying. I sit in this chair and ooze like a sponge.
So. More waiting. Lady in waiting: that's what they used to call (hose stores where you could buy maternity clothes. Woman in waiting sounds more like someone in a train station. Waiting is also a place: it is wherever you wait. For me it's this room. I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.
The knock comes at my door. Cora, with the tray.
But it isn't Cora. "I've brought it for you," says Serena Joy.
And then I look up and around, and get out of my chair and come towards her. She's holding it, a Polaroid print, square and glossy. So they still make them, cameras like that. And there will be family albums, too, with all the children in them; no Handmaids though. From the point of view of future history, this kind, we'll be invisible. But the children will be in them all right, something for the Wives to look at, downstairs, nibbling at the buffet and waiting for the Birth.
"You can only have it for a minute," Serena Joy says, her voice low and conspiratorial. "I have to return it, before they know it's missing."
It must have been a Martha who got it for her. There's a network of the Marthas, then, with something in it for them. That's nice to know.
I take it from her, turn it around so I can see it right-side-up. Is this her, is this what she's like? My treasure.
So tall and changed. Smiling a little now, so soon, and in her white dress as if for an olden-days First Communion.
Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there.
But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn't that a good thing? A blessing?
Still, I can't bear it, to have been erased like that. Better she'd brought me nothing.
I sit at the little table, eating creamed corn with a fork. I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife. When there's meat they cut it up for me ahead of time, as if I'm lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That's why I'm not allowed a knife.
[36]

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