Discussion - The Handmaid's Tale Q&A Guidelines and Instructions Sharing Circle After the due date/time for the individual response, return to the discussion board to begin the Sharing Circle. You'll begin this by taking the time to carefully read and consider each of your peers' Individual Responses. The specific questions and guidelines for participating in the SC are listed below. The SC is an on-going discussion that will continue from Friday night to Sunday night when the week is over. All SC posts must follow these guidelines: • Create one SC post for each peer in your group • Will focus on the specific questions provided • Will be about 100 words in length • Will be a response that is thoughtful, respectful, but challenging • Upload the reaction posts by replying to each peer’s Individual Response As a classroom courtesy and to work toward earning full credit for the Writing Circle, take some time at the very end of the week to give short replies of acknowledgement and thanks to your peers who have posted to your individual response and joined you in conversation. Sharing Circle • Read the Individual Responses of those in your peer group. • Reading others’ writing often leads us to ask questions. What point does your peer make that raises a question for you? Address that question with your peer. As part of your conversation, discuss possible answers to the question that may lead to a better understanding of the topic of the assigned material. • Discuss briefly in your conversation one idea in your individual response that differs from the ideas of your peer. My Discussion: It is a novel written by Margaret Atwood in 1985. It is about a Gilead society that has replaced America. Women in this society have been reduced to sexual objects. It particularly focuses on a group of women, the handmaids whose job is to give birth to elite couples that cannot conceive. All this has been caused by the reduced level of reproduction. This society showcases selfishness and oppression in that, women have been denied of their rights to have careers while men hold the titles. The women in this book also exercise oppression such as Serena, wife to Offred’s commander. She uses her knowledge of the whereabouts of Offred’s daughter to get her to sleep with Nick the chauffeur so that she can conceive on Serena’s behalf (Margaret 198). These women could raise their voices to be heard instead of bowing down to power that is oppressive and selfish as this. According to Atwood in the PBS interview, people are always ready to endure oppression so long as they are allowed a little degree of freedom (Faith & Reason). This describes women such as Serena and aunt Lydia who are compliant with this faulty ruling because they are in a place of power, unlike the rest. This is something that is already happening in the world today. My Classmate’s Discussion: While reading The Handmaid’s Tale and taking my “active reading” notes there were many points I found memorable in this book. I could never imagine living in a life like the women in this book, yet it makes me realize how privileged we are to do what we want with our lives. Having your whole life taken away and watched over every day, to have to do what these handmaids do, would be horrible, at least to me. One part of the reading that has stuck in my head and made me kind of angry was pages 71 and 72 when Janine was in testimony. “It’s Janine telling about how she was gang raped at fourteen and had an abortion”, “But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison. Who led them on? Aunt Helena beams, pleased with us. She did, she did, she did. Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Teach her a lesson, teach her a lesson, Teach her a lesson”(Atwood, 71-72). It just baffles me that any women could do this to another. Humiliating her, punishing her for this horrible thing that happened to her at only fourteen. Also, the book as a whole is pretty disturbing. The part in the Commanders bedroom when they explain how they try to get her pregnant was just wrong to me, hated that honestly. Also being a person that keeps to myself, just the thought of having a room full of women watching someone give birth with the wife sitting above them, is just very disturbing to me. I understand that this is the norm for these women now, it’s just sad and almost sickening that, that is what it has come to. Another memorable part was when she started to become close with the commander. Both of them were breaking the rules and they both enjoyed it. He almost is protecting her and letting her live happier for his sanity. “You want my life to be bearable to me, I say”.. “‘Yes’, he says. ‘I do. I prefer it’”(Atwood,187). Bill Moyers’s 2006 interview with Margaret Atwood relates to some of my reactions while reading her book. She talks about how this is something that could happen in the future, that we have already done everything in her book in the past. “When societies come under stress, these kinds of things happen, people start looking around essentially for human sacrifice, they start looking around for somebody to blame”(Vimeo, 03:42-03:54). She speaks about how it is to show how the human race can change rapidly under certain pressures and that when someone is in power, they want to be the only power. I totally agree. While reading I did not think for a second that this could never happen to us. If we were under the pressures that these people in the book were, I feel as though we could possibly react in the same way. “That society could give up its ideals, its freedom, its values, in an almost frighteningly normal way”, “In a frighteningly rapid way. Conditions change, there's too much turmoil, or fear of some kind than people can handle, and that's the point at which they will trade their liberties for somebody who comes and says im a strong leader i'll take care of it.”(Vimeo, 04:24-04:50). Response and ask one question follow the instruction: INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR The Handmaid’s Tale “A novel that brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections of politics and sex.… Satisfying, disturbing and compelling.” – Washington Post “The most poetically satisfying and intense of all Atwood’s novels.” – Maclean’s “It deserves an honored place on the small shelf of cautionary tales that have entered modern folklore.…” – Publishers Weekly “Imaginative, even audacious, and conveys a chilling sense of fear and menace.” – Globe and Mail “This visionary novel … can be read as a companion volume to Orwell’s 1984 – its verso, in fact. It gives you the same degree of chill, even as it suggests the varieties of tyrannical experience; it evokes the same kind of horror even as its mordant wit makes you smile.” – E. L. Doctorow “Deserves the highest praise.” – San Francisco Chronicle “In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood has written the most chilling cautionary novel of the century.” – Phoenix Gazette “A sly and beautifully crafted story about the fate of an ordinary woman caught o compelling fable of our time.” guard by extraordinary events.… A – Glamour BOOKS BY MARGARET ATWOOD FICTION The Edible Woman (1969) Surfacing (1972) Lady Oracle (1976) Dancing Girls (1977) Life Before Man (1979) Bodily Harm (1981) Murder in the Dark (1983) Bluebeard’s Egg (1983) The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) Cat’s Eye (1988) Wilderness Tips (1991) Good Bones (1992) The Robber Bride (1993) Alias Grace (1996) The Blind Assassin (2000) Good Bones and Simple Murders (2001) Oryx and Crake (2003) The Penelopiad (2005) The Tent (2006) FOR CHILDREN Up in the Tree (1978) Anna’s Pet (with Joyce Barkhouse) (1980) For the Birds (1990) Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995) Bashful Bob and Doleful Dorinda (2004) NON-FICTION Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972) Days of the Rebels 1815–1840 (1977) Second Words (1982) Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1996) Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002) Moving Targets: Writing with Intent 1982–2004 (2004) POETRY Double Persephone (1961) The Circle Game (1966) The Animals in That Country (1968) The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) Procedures for Underground (1970) Power Politics (1971) You Are Happy (1974) Selected Poems (1976) Two-Headed Poems (1978) True Stories (1981) Interlunar (1984) Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976–1986 (1986) Morning in the Burned House (1995) Copyright © 1985 by O.W. Toad Ltd. First cloth edition published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart in 1985. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Atwood, Margaret, 1939– The handmaid’s tale / Margaret Atwood eISBN: 978-1-55199-496-3 PS8501.T86H35 2002 I. Title. C 813′.54 C 2002-902571-0 PR9199.3.A8.H3 2002 We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. The author would like to thank the D.A.A.D. in West Berlin and the English Department at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, for providing time and space. Lines from “Heartbreak Hotel” © 1956 Tree Publishing c/o Dunbar Music Canada Ltd. Reprinted by permission. SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN EMBLEM EDITIONS McClelland & Stewart Ltd. 75 Sherbourne Street Toronto, Ontario M 5A 2P9 www.mcclelland.com/emblem v3.1 For Mary Webster and Perry Miller And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die. And Jacob’s anger was kindled against Rachel; and he said, Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her. – Genesis, 30:1-3 But as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with o ering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal … –Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones. – Sufi proverb CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph I Night II Shopping III Night IV Waiting Room V Nap VI Household VII Night VIII Birth Day IX Night X Soul Scrolls XI Night XII Jezebel’s XIII Night XIV Salvaging XV Night Historical Notes About the Author I NIGHT CHAPTER ONE We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The oor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper owers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light. There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh. We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? It was in the air; and it was still in the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in the army cots that had been set up in rows, with spaces between so we could not talk. We had annelette sheets, like children’s, and army-issue blankets, old ones that still said u.s. We folded our clothes neatly and laid them on the stools at the ends of the beds. The lights were turned down but not out. Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled; they had electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts. No guns though, even they could not be trusted with guns. Guns were for the guards, specially picked from the Angels. The guards weren’t allowed inside the building except when called, and we weren’t allowed out, except for our walks, twice daily, two by two around the football eld which was enclosed now by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The Angels stood outside it with their backs to us. They were objects of fear to us, but of something else as well. If only they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some trade-o , we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy. We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semi-darkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren’t looking, and touch each other’s hands across space. We learned to lip-read, our heads at on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other’s mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed: Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June. II SHOPPING CHAPTER TWO A chair, a table, a lamp. Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the centre of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out. There must have been a chandelier, once. They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to. A window, two white curtains. Under the window, a window seat with a little cushion. When the window is partly open – it only opens partly – the air can come in and make the curtains move. I can sit in the chair, or on the window seat, hands folded, and watch this. Sunlight comes in through the window too, and falls on the oor, which is made of wood, in narrow strips, highly polished. I can smell the polish. There’s a rug on the oor, oval, of braided rags. This is the kind of touch they like: folk art, archaic, made by women, in their spare time, from things that have no further use. A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want? On the wall above the chair, a picture, framed but with no glass: a print of owers, blue irises, watercolour. Flowers are still allowed. Does each of us have the same print, the same chair, the same white curtains, I wonder? Government issue? Think of it as being in the army, said Aunt Lydia. A bed. Single, mattress medium-hard, covered with a ocked white spread. Nothing takes place in the bed but sleep; or no sleep. I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last. I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolour picture of blue irises, and why the window only opens partly and why the glass in it is shatterproof. It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge. So. Apart from these details, this could be a college guest room, for the less distinguished visitors; or a room in a rooming house, of former times, for ladies in reduced circumstances. That is what we are now. The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances. But a chair, sunlight, owers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or. The bell that measures time is ringing. Time here is measured by bells, as once in nunneries. As in a nunnery too, there are few mirrors. I get up out of the chair, advance my feet into the sunlight, in their red shoes, at- heeled to save the spine and not for dancing. The red gloves are lying on the bed. I pick them up, pull them onto my hands, nger by nger. Everything except the wings around my face is red: the colour of blood, which de nes us. The skirt is ankle-length, full, gathered to a at yoke that extends over the breasts, the sleeves are full. The white wings too are prescribed issue; they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen. I never looked good in red, it’s not my colour. I pick up the shopping basket, put it over my arm. The door of the room – not my room, I refuse to say my – is not locked. In fact it doesn’t shut properly. I go out into the polished hallway, which has a runner down the centre, dusty pink. Like a path through the forest, like a carpet for royalty, it shows me the way. The carpet bends and goes down the front staircase and I go with it, one hand on the banister, once a tree, turned in another century, rubbed to a warm gloss. Late Victorian, the house is, a family house, built for a large rich family. There’s a grandfather clock in the hallway, which doles out time, and then the door to the motherly front sitting room, with its eshtones and hints. A sitting room in which I never sit, but stand or kneel only. At the end of the hallway, above the front door, is a fanlight of coloured glass: owers, red and blue. There remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier-glass, like the eye of a sh, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairytale gure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood. At the bottom of the stairs there’s a hat-and-umbrella stand, the bentwood kind, long rounded rungs of wood curving gently up into hooks shaped like the opening fronds of a fern. There are several umbrellas in it: black, for the Commander, blue, for the Commander’s Wife, and the one assigned to me, which is red. I leave the red umbrella where it is, because I know from the window that the day is sunny. I wonder whether or not the Commander’s Wife is in the sitting room. She doesn’t always sit. Sometimes I can hear her pacing back and forth, a heavy step and then a light one, and the soft tap of her cane on the dusty-rose carpet. I walk along the hallway, past the sitting-room door and the door that leads into the dining room, and open the door at the end of the hall and go through into the kitchen. Here the smell is no longer of furniture polish. Rita is in here, standing at the kitchen table, which has a top of chipped white enamel. She’s in her usual Martha’s dress, which is dull green, like a surgeon’s gown of the time before. The dress is much like mine in shape, long and concealing, but with a bib apron over it and without the white wings and the veil. She puts the veil on to go outside, but nobody much cares who sees the face of a Martha. Her sleeves are rolled to the elbow, showing her brown arms. She’s making bread, throwing the loaves for the final brief kneading and then the shaping. Rita sees me and nods, whether in greeting or in simple acknowledgement of my presence it’s hard to say, and wipes her oury hands on her apron and rummages in the kitchen drawer for the token book. Frowning, she tears out three tokens and hands them to me. Her face might be kindly if she would smile. But the frown isn’t personal: it’s the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for. She thinks I may be catching, like a disease or any form of bad luck. Sometimes I listen outside closed doors, a thing I never would have done in the time before. I don’t listen long, because I don’t want to be caught doing it. Once, though, I heard Rita say to Cora that she wouldn’t debase herself like that. Nobody asking you, Cora said. Anyways, what could you do, supposing? Go to the Colonies, Rita said. They have the choice. With the Unwomen, and starve to death and Lord knows what all? said Cora. Catch you. They were shelling peas; even through the almost-closed door I could hear the light clink of the hard peas falling into the metal bowl. I heard Rita, a grunt or a sigh, of protest or agreement. Anyways, they’re doing it for us all, said Cora, or so they say. If I hadn’t of got my tubes tied, it could of been me, say I was ten years younger. It’s not that bad. It’s not what you’d call hard work. Better her than me, Rita said, and I opened the door. Their faces were the way women’s faces are when they’ve been talking about you behind your back and they think you’ve heard: embarrassed, but also a little de ant, as if it were their right. That day, Cora was more pleasant to me than usual, Rita more surly. Today, despite Rita’s closed face and pressed lips, I would like to stay here, in the kitchen. Cora might come in, from somewhere else in the house, carrying her bottle of lemon oil and her duster, and Rita would make co ee – in the houses of the Commanders there is still real co ee – and we would sit at Rita’s kitchen table, which is not Rita’s any more than my table is mine, and we would talk, about aches and pains, illnesses, our feet, our backs, all the di erent kinds of mischief that our bodies, like unruly children, can get up to. We would nod our heads as punctuation to each other’s voices, signalling that yes, we know all about it. We would exchange remedies and try to outdo each other in the recital of our physical miseries; gently we would complain, our voices soft and minor-key and mournful as pigeons in the eaves troughs. I know what you mean, we’d say. Or, a quaint expression you sometimes hear, still, from older people: I hear where you’re coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveller, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is. How I used to despise such talk. Now I long for it. At least it was talk. An exchange, of sorts. Or we would gossip. The Marthas know things, they talk among themselves, passing the uno cial news from house to house. Like me, they listen at doors, no doubt, and see things even with their eyes averted. I’ve heard them at it sometimes, caught whi s of their private conversations. Stillborn, it was. Or, Stabbed her with a knitting needle, right in the belly. Jealousy, it must have been, eating her up. Or, tantalizingly, It was toilet cleaner she used. Worked like a charm, though you’d think he’d of tasted it. Must’ve been that drunk; but they found her out all right. Or I would help Rita to make the bread, sinking my hands into that soft resistant warmth which is so much like esh. I hunger to touch something, other than cloth or wood. I hunger to commit the act of touch. But even if I were to ask, even if I were to violate decorum to that extent, Rita would not allow it. She would be too afraid. The Marthas are not supposed to fraternize with us. Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin. He liked knowing about such details. The derivations of words, curious usages. I used to tease him about being pedantic. I take the tokens from Rita’s outstretched hand. They have pictures on them, of the things they can be exchanged for: twelve eggs, a piece of cheese, a brown thing that’s supposed to be a steak. I place them in the zippered pocket in my sleeve, where I keep my pass. “Tell them fresh, for the eggs,” she says. “Not like the last time. And a chicken, tell them, not a hen. Tell them who it’s for and then they won’t mess around.” “All right,” I say. I don’t smile. Why tempt her to friendship? CHAPTER THREE I go out by the back door, into the garden, which is large and tidy: a lawn in the middle, a willow, weeping catkins; around the edges, the ower borders, in which the da odils are now fading and the tulips are opening their cups, spilling out colour. The tulips are red, a darker crimson towards the stem, as if they had been cut and are beginning to heal there. This garden is the domain of the Commander’s Wife. Looking out through my shatterproof window I’ve often seen her in it, her knees on a cushion, a light blue veil thrown over her wide gardening hat, a basket at her side with shears in it and pieces of string for tying the owers into place. A Guardian detailed to the Commander does the heavy digging; the Commander’s Wife directs, pointing with her stick. Many of the Wives have such gardens, it’s something for them to order and maintain and care for. I once had a garden. I can remember the smell of the turned earth, the plump shapes of bulbs held in the hands, fullness, the dry rustle of seeds through the ngers. Time could pass more swiftly that way. Sometimes the Commander’s Wife has a chair brought out, and just sits in it, in her garden. From a distance it looks like peace. She isn’t here now, and I start to wonder where she is: I don’t like to come upon the Commander’s Wife unexpectedly. Perhaps she’s sewing, in the sitting room, with her left foot on the footstool, because of her arthritis. Or knitting scarves, for the Angels at the front lines. I can hardly believe the Angels have a need for such scarves; anyway, the ones made by the Commander’s Wife are too elaborate. She doesn’t bother with the cross-and-star pattern used by many of the other Wives, it’s not a challenge. Fir trees march along the ends of her scarves, or eagles, or sti humanoid gures, boy and girl, boy and girl. They aren’t scarves for grown men but for children. Sometimes I think these scarves aren’t sent to the Angels at all, but unravelled and turned back into balls of yarn, to be knitted again in their turn. Maybe it’s just something to keep the Wives busy, to give them a sense of purpose. But I envy the Commander’s Wife her knitting. It’s good to have small goals that can be easily attained. What does she envy me? She doesn’t speak to me, unless she can’t avoid it. I am a reproach to her; and a necessity. We stood face to face for the rst time ve weeks ago, when I arrived at this posting. The Guardian from the previous posting brought me to the front door. On rst days we are permitted front doors, but after that we’re supposed to use the back. Things haven’t settled down, it’s too soon, everyone is unsure about our exact status. After a while it will be either all front doors or all back. Aunt Lydia said she was lobbying for the front. Yours is a position of honour, she said. The Guardian rang the doorbell for me, but before there was time for someone to hear and walk quickly to answer, the door opened inwards. She must have been waiting behind it. I was expecting a Martha, but it was her instead, in her long powder-blue robe, unmistakeable. So, you’re the new one, she said. She didn’t step aside to let me in, she just stood there in the doorway, blocking the entrance. She wanted me to feel that I could not come into the house unless she said so. There is push and shove, these days, over such toeholds. Yes, I said. Leave it on the porch. She said this to the Guardian, who was carrying my bag. The bag was red vinyl and not large. There was another bag, with the winter cloak and heavier dresses, but that would be coming later. The Guardian set down the bag and saluted her. Then I could hear his footsteps behind me, going back down the walk, and the click of the front gate, and I felt as if a protective arm were being withdrawn. The threshold of a new house is a lonely place. She waited until the car started up and pulled away. I wasn’t looking at her face, but at the part of her I could see with my head lowered: her blue waist, thickened, her left hand on the ivory head of her cane, the large diamonds on the ring nger, which must once have been ne and was still nely kept, the ngernail at the end of the knuckly nger led to a gentle curving point. It was like an ironic smile, on that nger; like something mocking her. You might as well come in, she said. She turned her back on me and limped down the hall. Shut the door behind you. I lifted the red bag inside, as she’d no doubt intended, then closed the door. I didn’t say anything to her. Aunt Lydia said it was best not to speak unless they asked you a direct question. Try to think of it from their point of view, she said, her hands clasped and wrung together, her nervous pleading smile. It isn’t easy for them. In here, said the Commander’s Wife. When I went into the sitting room she was already in her chair, her left foot on the footstool, with its petit-point cushion, roses in a basket. Her knitting was on the floor beside the chair, the needles stuck through it. I stood in front of her, hands folded. So, she said. She had a cigarette, and she put it between her lips and gripped it there while she lit it. Her lips were thin, held that way, with the small vertical lines around them you used to see in advertisements for lip cosmetics. The lighter was ivory-coloured. The cigarettes must have come from the black market, I thought, and this gave me hope. Even now that there is no real money any more, there’s still a black market. There’s always a black market, there’s always something that can be exchanged. She then was a woman who might bend the rules. But what did I have, to trade? I looked at the cigarette with longing. For me, like liquor and co ee, cigarettes are forbidden. So old what’s-his-face didn’t work out, she said. No, Ma’am, I said. She gave what might have been a laugh, then coughed. Tough luck on him, she said. This is your second, isn’t it? Third, Ma’am, I said. Not so good for you either, she said. There was another coughing laugh. You can sit down. I don’t make a practice of it, but just this time. I did sit, on the edge of one of the sti -backed chairs. I didn’t want to stare around the room, I didn’t want to appear inattentive to her; so the marble mantelpiece to my right and the mirror over it and the bunches of owers were just shadows, then, at the edges of my eyes. Later I would have more than enough time to take them in. Now her face was on a level with mine. I thought I recognized her; or at least there was something familiar about her. A little of her hair was showing, from under her veil. It was still blonde. I thought then that maybe she bleached it, that hair dye was something else she could get through the black market, but I know now that it really is blonde. Her eyebrows were plucked into thin arched lines, which gave her a permanent look of surprise, or outrage, or inquisitiveness, such as you might see on a startled child, but below them her eyelids were tired-looking. Not so her eyes, which were the at hostile blue of a midsummer sky in bright sunlight, a blue that shuts you out. Her nose must once have been what was called cute but now was too small for her face. Her face was not fat but it was large. Two lines led downwards from the corners of her mouth; between them was her chin, clenched like a fist. I want to see as little of you as possible, she said. I expect you feel the same way about me. I didn’t answer, as a yes would have been insulting, a no contradictory. I know you aren’t stupid, she went on. She inhaled, blew out the smoke. I’ve read your le. As far as I’m concerned, this is like a business transaction. But if I get trouble, I’ll give trouble back. You understand? Yes, Ma’am, I said. Don’t call me Ma’am, she said irritably. You’re not a Martha. I didn’t ask what I was supposed to call her, because I could see that she hoped I would never have the occasion to call her anything at all. I was disappointed. I wanted, then, to turn her into an older sister, a motherly gure, someone who would understand and protect me. The Wife in my posting before this had spent most of her time in her bedroom; the Marthas said she drank. I wanted this one to be di erent. I wanted to think I would have liked her, in another time and place, another life. But I could see already that I wouldn’t have liked her, nor she me. She put her cigarette out, half-smoked, in a little scrolled ashtray on the lamp table beside her. She did this decisively, one jab and one grind, not the series of genteel taps favoured by many of the Wives. As for my husband, she said, he’s just that. My husband. I want that to be perfectly clear. Till death do us part. It’s final. Yes, Ma’am, I said again, forgetting. They used to have dolls, for little girls, that would talk if you pulled a string at the back; I thought I was sounding like that, voice of a monotone, voice of a doll. She probably longed to slap my face. They can hit us, there’s Scriptural precedent. But not with any implement. Only with their hands. It’s one of the things we fought for, said the Commander’s Wife, and suddenly she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking down at her knuckled, diamond-studded hands, and I knew where I’d seen her before. The rst time was on television, when I was eight or nine. It was when my mother was sleeping in, on Sunday mornings, and I would get up early and go to the television set in my mother’s study and ip through the channels, looking for cartoons. Sometimes when I couldn’t nd any I would watch the Growing Souls Gospel Hour, where they would tell Bible stories for children and sing hymns. One of the women was called Serena Joy. She was the lead soprano. She was ash-blonde, petite, with a snub nose and huge blue eyes which she’d turn upwards during hymns. She could smile and cry at the same time, one tear or two sliding gracefully down her cheek, as if on cue, as her voice lifted through its highest notes, tremulous, e ortless. It was after that she went on to other things. The woman sitting in front of me was Serena Joy. Or had been, once. So it was worse than I thought. CHAPTER FOUR I walk along the gravel path that divides the back lawn, neatly, like a hair parting. It has rained during the night; the grass to either side is damp, the air humid. Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips. I open the white picket gate and continue, past the front lawn and towards the front gate. In the driveway, one of the Guardians assigned to our household is washing the car. That must mean the Commander is in the house, in his own quarters, past the dining room and beyond, where he seems to stay most of the time. The car is a very expensive one, a Whirlwind; better than the Chariot, much better than the chunky, practical Behemoth. It’s black, of course, the colour of prestige or a hearse, and long and sleek. The driver is going over it with a chamois, lovingly. This at least hasn’t changed, the way men caress good cars. He’s wearing the uniform of the Guardians, but his cap is tilted at a jaunty angle and his sleeves are rolled to the elbow, showing his forearms, tanned but with a stipple of dark hairs. He has a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, which shows that he too has something he can trade on the black market. I know this man’s name: Nick. I know this because I’ve heard Rita and Cora talking about him, and once I heard the Commander speaking to him: Nick, I won’t be needing the car. He lives here, in the household, over the garage. Low status: he hasn’t been issued a woman, not even one. He doesn’t rate: some defect, lack of connections. But he acts as if he doesn’t know this, or care. He’s too casual, he’s not servile enough. It may be stupidity, but I don’t think so. Smells shy, they used to say; or, I smell a rat. Mis t as odour. Despite myself, I think of how he might smell. Not sh or decaying rat: tanned skin, moist in the sun, filmed with smoke. I sigh, inhaling. He looks at me, and sees me looking. He has a French face, lean, whimsical, all planes and angles, with creases around the mouth where he smiles. He takes a nal pu of the cigarette, lets it drop to the driveway, and steps on it. He begins to whistle. Then he winks. I drop my head and turn so that the white wings hide my face, and keep walking. He’s just taken a risk, but for what? What if I were to report him? Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette. Perhaps it was a test, to see what I would do. Perhaps he is an Eye. I open the front gate and close it behind me, looking down but not back. The sidewalk is red brick. That is the landscape I focus on, a eld of oblongs, gently undulating where the earth beneath has buckled, from decade after decade of winter frost. The colour of the bricks is old, yet fresh and clear. Sidewalks are kept much cleaner than they used to be. I walk to the corner and wait. I used to be bad at waiting. They also serve who only stand and wait, said Aunt Lydia. She made us memorize it. She also said, Not all of you will make it through. Some of you will fall on dry ground or thorns. Some of you are shallow-rooted. She had a mole on her chin that went up and down while she talked. She said, Think of yourselves as seeds, and right then her voice was wheedling, conspiratorial, like the voices of those women who used to teach ballet classes to children, and who would say, Arms up in the air now; let’s pretend we’re trees. I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree. A shape, red with white wings around the face, a shape like mine, a nondescript woman in red carrying a basket, comes along the brick sidewalk towards me. She reaches me and we peer at each other’s faces looking down the white tunnels of cloth that enclose us. She is the right one. “Blessed be the fruit,” she says to me, the accepted greeting among us. “May the Lord open,” I answer, the accepted response. We turn and walk together past the large houses, towards the central part of town. We aren’t allowed to go there except in twos. This is supposed to be for our protection, though the notion is absurd: we are well protected already. The truth is that she is my spy, as I am hers. If either of us slips through the net because of something that happens on one of our daily walks, the other will be accountable. This woman has been my partner for two weeks. I don’t know what happened to the one before. On a certain day she simply wasn’t there any more, and this one was there in her place. It isn’t the sort ofthing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know. Anyway there wouldn’t be an answer. This one is a little plumper than I am. Her eyes are brown. Her name is Ofglen, and that’s about all I know about her. She walks demurely, head down, red-gloved hands clasped in front, with short little steps like a trained pig’s on its hind legs. During these walks she has never said anything that was not strictly orthodox, but then, neither have I. She may be a real believer, a Handmaid in more than name. I can’t take the risk. “The war is going well, I hear,” she says. “Praise be,” I reply. “We’ve been sent good weather.” “Which I receive with joy.” “They’ve defeated more of the rebels, since yesterday.” “Praise be,” I say. I don’t ask her how she knows. “What were they?” “Baptists. They had a stronghold in the Blue Hills. They smoked them out.” “Praise be.” Sometimes I wish she would just shut up and let me walk in peace. But I’m ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it’s false news, it must mean something. We reached the rst barrier, which is like the barriers blocking o roadworks, or dugup sewers: a wooden crisscross painted in yellow and black stripes, a red hexagon which means Stop. Near the gateway there are some lanterns, not lit because it isn’t night. Above us, I know, there are oodlights, attached to the telephone poles, for use in emergencies, and there are men with machine guns in the pillboxes on either side of the road. I don’t see the oodlights and the pillboxes, because of the wings around my face. I just know they are there. Behind the barrier, waiting for us at the narrow gateway, there are two men, in the green uniforms of the Guardians of the Faith, with the crests on their shoulders and berets: two swords, crossed, above a white triangle. The Guardians aren’t real soldiers. They ’re used for routine policing and other menial functions, digging up the Commander’s Wife’s garden for instance, and they’re either stupid or older or disabled or very young, apart from the ones that are Eyes incognito. These two are very young: one moustache is still sparse, one face is still blotchy. Their youth is touching, but I know I can’t be deceived by it. The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven’t yet learned about existence through time. You have to go slowly with them. Last week they shot a woman, right about here. She was a Martha. She was fumbling in her robe, for her pass, and they thought she was hunting for a bomb. They thought she was a man in disguise. There have been such incidents. Rita and Cora knew the woman. I heard them talking about it, in the kitchen. Doing their job, said Cora. Keeping us safe. Nothing safer than dead, said Rita, angrily. She was minding her own business. No call to shoot her. It was an accident, said Cora. No such thing, said Rita. Everything is meant. I could hear her thumping the pots around, in the sink. Well, someone’ll think twice before blowing up this house, anyways, said Cora. All the same, said Rita. She worked hard. That was a bad death. I can think of worse, said Cora. At least it was quick. You can say that, said Rita. I’d choose to have some time, before, like. To set things right. The two young Guardians salute us, raising three ngers to the rims of their berets. Such tokens are accorded to us. They are supposed to show respect, because of the nature of our service. We produce our passes, from the zippered pockets in our wide sleeves, and they are inspected and stamped. One man goes into the right-hand pillbox, to punch our numbers into the Compuchek. In returning my pass, the one with the peach-coloured moustache bends his head to try to get a look at my face. I raise my head a little, to help him, and he sees my eyes and I see his, and he blushes. His face is long and mournful, like a sheep’s, but with the large full eyes of a dog, spaniel not terrier. His skin is pale and looks unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab. Nevertheless, I think of placing my hand on it, this exposed face. He is the one who turns away. It’s an event, a small de ance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of a drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes. What if I were to come at night, when he’s on duty alone – though he would never be allowed such solitude – and permit him beyond my white wings? What if I were to peel o my red shroud and show myself to him, to them, by the uncertain light of the lanterns? This is what they must think about sometimes, as they stand endlessly beside this barrier, past which nobody ever comes except the Commanders of the Faithful in their long black murmurous cars, or their blue Wives and white-veiled daughters on their dutiful way to Salvagings or Prayvaganzas, or their dumpy green Marthas, or the occasional Birthmobile, or their red Handmaids, on foot. Or sometimes a black-painted van, with the winged eye in white on the side. The windows of the vans are dark-tinted, and the men in the front seats wear dark glasses: a double obscurity. The vans are surely more silent than the other cars. When they pass, we avert our eyes. If there are sounds coming from inside, we try not to hear them. Nobody’s heart is perfect. When the black vans reach a checkpoint, they’re waved through without a pause. The Guardians would not want to take the risk of looking inside, searching, doubting their authority. Whatever they think. If they do think; you can’t tell by looking at them. But more likely they don’t think in terms of clothing discarded on the lawn. If they think of a kiss, they must then think immediately of the oodlights going on, the ri e shots. They think instead of doing their duty and of promotion to the Angels, and of being allowed possibly to marry, and then, if they are able to gain enough power and live to be old enough, of being allotted a Handmaid of their own. The one with the moustache opens the small pedestrian gate for us and stands back, well out of the way, and we pass through. As we walk away I know they’re watching, these two men who aren’t yet permitted to touch women. They touch with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It’s like thumbing your nose from behind a fence or teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach, and I’m ashamed of myself for doing it, because none of this is the fault of these men, they’re too young. Then I find I’m not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surreptitiously. They will su er, later, at night, in their regimented beds. They have no outlets now except themselves, and that’s a sacrilege. There are no more magazines, no more lms, no more substitutes; only me and my shadow, walking away from the two men, who stand at attention, sti y, by a roadblock, watching our retreating shapes. CHAPTER FIVE Doubled, I walk the street. Though we are no longer in the Commanders’ compound, there are large houses here also. In front of one of them a Guardian is mowing the lawn. The lawns are tidy, the façades are gracious, in good repair; they’re like the beautiful pictures they used to print in the magazines about homes and gardens and interior decoration. There is the same absence of people, the same air of being asleep. The street is almost like a museum, or a street in a model town constructed to show the way people used to live. As in those pictures, those museums, those model towns, there are no children. This is the heart of Gilead, where the war cannot intrude except on television. Where the edges are we aren’t sure, they vary, according to the attacks and counterattacks; but this is the centre, where nothing moves. The Republic of Gilead, said Aunt Lydia, knows no bounds. Gilead is within you. Doctors lived here once, lawyers, university professors. There are no lawyers any more, and the university is closed. Luke and I used to walk together, sometimes, along these streets. We used to talk about buying a house like one of these, an old big house, xing it up. We would have a garden, swings for the children. We would have children. Although we knew it wasn’t too likely we could ever a ord it, it was something to talk about, a game for Sundays. Such freedom now seems almost weightless. We turn the corner onto a main street, where there’s more tra c. Cars go by, black most of them, some grey and brown. There are other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of the Marthas, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and green and cheap and skimpy, that mark the women of the poorer men. Econowives, they’re called. These women are not divided into functions. They have to do everything; if they can. Sometimes there is a woman all in black, a widow. There used to be more of them, but they seem to be diminishing. You don’t see the Commanders’ Wives on the sidewalks. Only in cars. The sidewalks here are cement. Like a child, I avoid stepping on the cracks. I’m remembering my feet on these sidewalks, in the time before, and what I used to wear on them. Sometimes it was shoes for running, with cushioned soles and breathing holes, and stars of uorescent fabric that re ected light in the darkness. Though I never ran at night; and in the daytime, only beside well-frequented roads. Women were not protected then. I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: don’t open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a laundromat, by yourself, at night. I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control. Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles. There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it. In front of us, to the right, is the store where we order dresses. Some people call them habits, a good word for them. Habits are hard to break. The store has a huge wooden sign outside it, in the shape of a golden lily; Lilies of the Field, it’s called. You can see the place, under the lily, where the lettering was painted out, when they decided that even the names of shops were too much temptation for us. Now places are known by their signs alone. Lilies used to be a movie theatre, before. Students went there a lot; every spring they had a Humphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice. I don’t know when they stopped having the festival. I must have been grown up. So I didn’t notice. We don’t go into Lilies, but across the road and along a side-street. Our rst stop is at a store with another wooden sign: three eggs, a bee, a cow. Milk and Honey. There’s a line, and we wait our turn, two by two. I see they have oranges today. Ever since Central America was lost to the Libertheos, oranges have been hard to get: sometimes they are there, sometimes not. The war interferes with the oranges from California, and even Florida isn’t dependable, when there are roadblocks or when the train tracks have been blown up. I look at the oranges, longing for one. But I haven’t brought any tokens for oranges. I’ll go back and tell Rita about them, I think. She’ll be pleased. It will be something, a small achievement, to have made oranges happen. Those who’ve reached the counter hand their tokens across it, to the two men in Guardian uniforms who stand on the other side. Nobody talks much, though there is a rustling, and the women’s heads move furtively from side to side: here, shopping, is where you might see someone you know, someone you’ve known in the time before, or at the Red Centre. Just to catch sight of a face like that is an encouragement. If I could see Moira, just see her, know she still exists. It’s hard to imagine now, having a friend. But Ofglen, beside me, isn’t looking. Maybe she doesn’t know anyone any more. Maybe they have all vanished, the women she knew. Or maybe she doesn’t want to be seen. She stands in silence, head down. As we wait in our double line, the door opens and two more women come in, both in the red dresses and white wings of the Handmaids. One of them is vastly pregnant; her belly, under her loose garment, swells triumphantly. There is a shifting in the room, a murmur, an escape of breath; despite ourselves we turn our heads, blatantly, to see better; our ngers itch to touch her. She’s a magic presence to us, an object of envy and desire, we covet her. She’s a ag on a hilltop, showing us what can still be done: we too can be saved. The women in the room are whispering, almost talking, so great is their excitement. “Who is it?” I hear behind me. “Ofwayne. No. Ofwarren.” “Show-o ,” a voice hisses, and this is true. A woman that pregnant doesn’t have to go out, doesn’t have to go shopping. The daily walk is no longer prescribed, to keep her abdominal muscles in working order. She needs only the oor exercises, the breathing drill. She could stay at her house. And it’s dangerous for her to be out, there must be a Guardian standing outside the door, waiting for her. Now that she’s the carrier of life, she is closer to death, and needs special security. Jealousy could get her, it’s happened before. All children are wanted now, but not by everyone. But the walk may be a whim of hers, and they humour whims, when something has gone this far and there’s been no miscarriage. Or perhaps she’s one of those, Pile it on, I can take it, a martyr. I catch a glimpse of her face, as she raises it to look around. The voice behind me was right. She’s come to display herself. She’s glowing, rosy, she’s enjoying every minute of this. “Quiet,” says one of the Guardians behind the counter, and we hush like schoolgirls. Ofglen and I have reached the counter. We hand over our tokens, and one Guardian enters the numbers on them into the Compubite while the other gives us our purchases, the milk, the eggs. We put them into our baskets and go out again, past the pregnant woman and her partner, who beside her looks spindly, shrunken; as we all do. The pregnant woman’s belly is like a huge fruit. Humungous, word of my childhood. Her hands rest on it as if to defend it, or as if they’re gathering something from it, warmth and strength. As I pass she looks full at me, into my eyes, and I know who she is. She was at the Red Centre with me, one of Aunt Lydia’s pets. I never liked her. Her name, in the time before, was Janine. Janine looks at me, then, and around the corners of her mouth there is the trace of a smirk. She glances down to where my own belly lies at under my red robe, and the wings cover her face. I can see only a little of her forehead, and the pinkish tip of her nose. Next we go into All Flesh, which is marked by a large wooden pork chop hanging from two chains. There isn’t so much of a line here: meat is expensive, and even the Commanders don’t have it every day. Ofglen gets steak, though, and that’s the second time this week. I’ll tell that to the Marthas: it’s the kind of thing they enjoy hearing about. They are very interested in how other households are run; such bits of petty gossip give them an opportunity for pride or discontent. I take the chicken, wrapped in butcher’s paper and trussed with string. Not many things are plastic, any more. I remember those endless white plastic shopping bags, from the supermarket; I hated to waste them and would stu them in under the sink, until the day would come when there would be too many and I would open the cupboard door and they would bulge out, sliding over the oor. Luke used to complain about it. Periodically he would take all the bags and throw them out. She could get one of those over her head, he’d say. You know how kids like to play. She never would, I’d say. She’s too old. (Or too smart, or too lucky.) But I would feel a chill of fear, and then guilt for having been so careless. It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted fate, back then. I’ll keep them in a higher cupboard, I’d say. Don’t keep them at all, he’d say. We never use them for anything. Garbage bags, I’d say. He’d say … Not here and now. Not where people are looking. I turn, see my silhouette in the plate-glass window. We have come outside then, we are on the street. A group of people is coming towards us. They’re tourists, from Japan it looks like, a trade delegation perhaps, on a tour of the historic landmarks or out for local colour. They’re diminutive and neatly turned out; each has his or her camera, his or her smile. They look around, bright-eyed, cocking their heads to one side like robins, their very cheerfulness aggressive, and I can’t help staring. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen skirts that short on women. The skirts reach just below the knee and the legs come out from beneath them, nearly naked in their thin stockings, blatant, the high-heeled shoes with their straps attached to the feet like delicate instruments of torture. The women teeter on their spiked feet as if on stilts, but o balance; their backs arch at the waist, thrusting the buttocks out. Their heads are uncovered and their hair too is exposed, in all its darkness and sexuality. They wear lipstick, red, outlining the damp cavities of their mouths, like scrawls on a washroom wall, of the time before. I stop walking. Ofglen stops beside me and I know that she too cannot take her eyes o these women. We are fascinated, but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this. Then I think: I used to dress like that. That was freedom. Westernized, they used to call it. The Japanese tourists come towards us, twittering, and we turn our heads away too late: our faces have been seen. There’s an interpreter, in the standard blue suit and red-patterned tie, with the winged-eye tie pin. He’s the one who steps forward, out of the group, in front of us, blocking our way. The tourists bunch behind him; one of them raises a camera. “Excuse me,” he says to both of us, politely enough. “They’re asking if they can take your picture.” I look down at the sidewalk, shake my head for No. What they must see is the white wings only, a scrap of face, my chin and part of my mouth. Not the eyes. I know better than to look the interpreter in the face. Most of the interpreters are Eyes, or so it’s said. I also know better than to say Yes. Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen – to be seen – is to be – her voice trembled – penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable. She called us girls. Beside me, Ofglen is also silent. She’s tucked her red-gloved hands up into her sleeves, to hide them. The interpreter turns back to the group, chatters at them in staccato. I know what he’ll be saying, I know the line. He’ll be telling them that the women here have di erent customs, that to stare at them through the lens of a camera is, for them, an experience of violation. I’m looking down, at the sidewalk, mesmerized by the women’s feet. One of them is wearing open-toed sandals, the toenails painted pink. I remember the smell of nail polish, the way it wrinkled if you put the second coat on too soon, the satiny brushing of sheer pantyhose against the skin, the way the toes felt, pushed towards the opening in the shoe by the whole weight of the body. The woman with painted toes shifts from one foot to the other. I can feel her shoes, on my own feet. The smell of nail polish has made me hungry. “Excuse me,” says the interpreter again, to catch our attention. I nod, to show I’ve heard him. “He asks, are you happy,” says the interpreter. I can imagine it, their curiosity: Are they happy? How can they be happy? I can feel their bright black eyes on us, the way they lean a little forward to catch our answers, the women especially, but the men too: we are secret, forbidden, we excite them. Ofglen says nothing. There is a silence. But sometimes it’s as dangerous not to speak. “Yes, we are very happy,” I murmur. I have to say something. What else can I say? CHAPTER SIX A block past All Flesh, Ofglen pauses, as if hesitant about which way to go. We have a choice. We could go straight back, or we could walk the long way around. We already know which way we will take, because we always take it. “I’d like to pass by the church,” says Ofglen, as if piously. “All right,” I say, though I know as well as she does what she’s really after. We walk, sedately. The sun is out, in the sky there are white u y clouds, the kind that look like headless sheep. Given our wings, our blinkers, it’s hard to look up, hard to get the full view, of the sky, of anything. But we can do it, a little at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world in gasps. To the right, if you could walk along, there’s a street that would take you down towards the river. There’s a boathouse, where they kept the sculls once, and some bridges; trees, green banks, where you could sit and watch the water, and the young men with their naked arms, their oars lifting into the sunlight as they played at winning. On the way to the river are the old dormitories, used for something else now, with their fairytale turrets, painted white and gold and blue. When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that. The football stadium is down there too, where they hold the Men’s Salvagings. As well as the football games. They still have those. I don’t go to the river any more, or over bridges. Or on the subway, although there’s a station right there. We’re not allowed on, there are Guardians now, there’s no o cial reason for us to go down those steps, ride on the trains under the river, into the main city. Why would we want to go from here to there? We would be up to no good and they would know it. The church is a small one, one of the rst erected here, hundreds of years ago. It isn’t used any more, except as a museum. Inside it you can see paintings, of women in long sombre dresses, their hair covered by white caps, and of upright men, darkly clothed and unsmiling. Our ancestors. Admission is free. We don’t go in, though, but stand on the path, looking at the churchyard. The old gravestones are still there, weathered, eroding, with their skulls and crossed bones, memento mori, their dough-faced angels, their winged hourglasses to remind us of the passing of mortal time, and, from a later century, their urns and willow trees, for mourning. They haven’t ddled with the gravestones, or the church either. It’s only the more recent history that offends them. Ofglen’s head is bowed, as if she’s praying. She does this every time. Maybe, I think, there’s someone, someone in particular gone, for her too; a man, a child. But I can’t entirely believe it. I think of her as a woman for whom every act is done for show, is acting rather than a real act. She does such things to look good, I think. She’s out to make the best of it. But that is what I must look like to her, as well. How can it be otherwise? Now we turn our backs on the church and there is the thing we’ve in truth come to see: the Wall. The Wall is hundreds of years old too; or over a hundred, at least. Like the sidewalks, it’s red brick, and must once have been plain but handsome. Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new oodlights mounted on metal posts above it, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top. No one goes through those gates willingly. The precautions are for those trying to get out, though to make it even as far as the Wall, from the inside, past the electronic alarm system, would be next to impossible. Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders. There must have been a Men’s Salvaging early this morning. I didn’t hear the bells. Perhaps I’ve become used to them. We stop, together as if on signal, and stand and look at the bodies. It doesn’t matter if we look. We’re supposed to look: this is what they are there for, hanging on the Wall. Sometimes they’ll be there for days, until there’s a new batch, so as many people as possible will have the chance to see them. What they are hanging from is hooks. The hooks have been set into the brickwork of the Wall, for this purpose. Not all of them are occupied. The hooks look like appliances for the armless. Or steel question marks, upside-down and sideways. It’s the bags over the heads that are the worst, worse than the faces themselves would be. It makes the men look like dolls on which faces have not yet been painted; like scarecrows, which in a way is what they are, since they are meant to scare. Or as if their heads are sacks, stu ed with some undi erentiated material, like our or dough. It’s the obvious heaviness of the heads, their vacancy, the way gravity pulls them down and there’s no life any more to hold them up. The heads are zeros. Though if you look and look, as we are doing, you can see the outlines of the features under the white cloth, like grey shadows. The heads are the heads of snowmen, with the coal eyes and the carrot noses fallen out. The heads are melting. But on one bag there’s blood, which has seeped through the white cloth, where the mouth must have been. It makes another mouth, a small red one, like the mouths painted with thick brushes by kindergarten children. A child’s idea of a smile. This smile of blood is what fixes the attention, finally. These are not snowmen after all. The men wear white coats, like those worn by doctors or scientists. Doctors and scientists aren’t the only ones, there are others, but they must have had a run on them this morning. Each has a placard hung around his neck to show why he has been executed: a drawing of a human foetus. They were doctors, then, in the time before, when such things were legal. Angel makers, they used to call them: or was that something else? They’ve been turned up now by the searches through hospital records, or – more likely, since most hospitals destroyed such records once it became clear what was going to happen – by informants: ex-nurses perhaps, or a pair of them, since evidence from a single woman is no longer admissible; or another doctor, hoping to save his own skin; or someone already accused, lashing out at an enemy, or at random, in some desperate bid for safety. Though informants are not always pardoned. These men, we’ve been told, are like war criminals. It’s no excuse that what they did was legal at the time: their crimes are retroactive. They have committed atrocities, and must be made into examples, for the rest. Though this is hardly needed. No woman in her right mind, these days, would seek to prevent a birth, should she be so lucky as to conceive. What we are supposed to feel towards these bodies is hatred and scorn. This isn’t what I feel. These bodies banging on the Wall are time travellers, anachronisms. They’ve come here from the past. What I feel towards them is blankness. What I feel is that I must not feel. What I feel is partly relief, because none of these men is Luke. Luke wasn’t a doctor. Isn’t. I look at the one red smile. The red of the smile is the same as the red of the tulips in Serena Joy’s garden, towards the base of the owers where they are beginning to heal. The red is the same but there is no connection. The tulips are not tulips of blood, the red smiles are not owers, neither thing makes a comment on the other. The tulip is not a reason for disbelief in the hanged man, or vice versa. Each thing is valid and really there. It is through a eld of such valid objects that I must pick my way, every day and in every way. I put a lot of e ort into making such distinctions. I need to make them. I need to be very clear, in my own mind. I feel a tremor in the woman beside me. Is she crying? In what way could it make her look good? I can’t a ord to know. My own hands are clenched, I note, tight around the handle of my basket. I won’t give anything away. Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary. III NIGHT CHAPTER SEVEN The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don’t move. As long as I lie still. The di erence between lie and lay. Lay is always passive. Even men used to say, I’d like to get laid. Though sometimes they said, I’d like to lay her. All this is pure speculation. I don’t really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it. I lie, then, inside the room, under the plaster eye in the ceiling, behind the white curtains, between the sheets, neatly as they, and step sideways out of my own time. Out of time. Though this is time, nor am I out of it. But the night is my time out. Where should I go? Somewhere good. Moira, sitting on the edge of my bed, legs crossed, ankle on knee, in her purple overalls, one dangly earring, the gold ngernail she wore to be eccentric, a cigarette between her stubby yellow-ended fingers. Let’s go for a beer. You’re getting ashes in my bed, I said. If you’d make it you wouldn’t have this problem, said Moira. In half an hour, I said. I had a paper due the next day. What was it? Psychology, English, Economics. We studied things like that, then. On the oor of the room there were books, open face down, this way and that, extravagantly. Now, said Moira. You don’t need to paint your face, it’s only me. What’s your paper on? I just did one on date rape. Date rape, I said. You’re so trendy. It sounds like some kind of dessert. Date Rapé. Ha ha, said Moira. Get your coat. She got it herself and tossed it at me. I’m borrowing five bucks off you, okay? Or in a park somewhere, with my mother. How old was I? It was cold, our breaths came out in front of us, there were no leaves on the trees; grey sky, two ducks in the pond, disconsolate. Breadcrumbs under my ngers, in my pocket. That’s it: she said we were going to feed the ducks. But there were some women burning books, that’s what she was really there for. To see her friends; she’d lied to me, Saturdays were supposed to be my day. I turned away from her, sulking, towards the ducks, but the fire drew me back. There were some men, too, among the women, and the books were magazines. They must have poured gasoline, because the ames shot high, and then they began dumping the magazines, from boxes, not too many at a time. Some of them were chanting; onlookers gathered. Their faces were happy, ecstatic almost. Fire can do that. Even my mother’s face, usually pale, thinnish, looked ruddy and cheerful, like a Christmas card; and there was another woman, large, with a soot smear down her cheek and an orange knitted cap, I remember her. You want to throw one on, honey? she said. How old was I? Good riddance to bad rubbish, she said, chuckling. It okay? she said to my mother. If she wants to, my mother said; she had a way of talking about me to others as if I couldn’t hear. The woman handed me one of the magazines. It had a pretty woman on it, with no clothes on, hanging from the ceiling by a chain wound around her hands. I looked at it with interest. It didn’t frighten me. I thought she was swinging, like Tarzan from a vine, on the TV. Don’t let her see it, said my mother. Here, she said to me, toss it in, quick. I threw the magazine into the ames. It ri ed open in the wind of its burning; big akes of paper came loose, sailed into the air, still on re, parts of women’s bodies, turning to black ash, in the air, before my eyes. But then what happens, but then what happens? I know I lost time. There must have been needles, pills, something like that. I couldn’t have lost that much time without help. You have had a shock, they said. I would come up through a roaring and confusion, like surf boiling. I can remember feeling quite calm. I can remember screaming, it felt like screaming though it may have been only a whisper, Where is she? What have you done with her? There was no night or day; only a ickering. After a while there were chairs again, and a bed, and after that a window. She’s in good hands, they said. With people who are t. You are un t, but you want the best for her. Don’t you? They showed me a picture of her, standing outside on a lawn, her face a closed oval. Her light hair was pulled back tight behind her head. Holding her hand was a woman I didn’t know. She was only as tall as the woman’s elbow. You’ve killed her, I said. She looked like an angel, solemn, compact, made of air. She was wearing a dress I’d never seen, white and down to the ground. I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off. It isn’t a story I’m telling. It’s also a story I’m telling, in my head, as I go along. Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one. A story is like a letter. Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like an old love song. You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I’m not in any immediate danger, I’ll say to you. I’ll pretend you can hear me. But it’s no good, because I know you can’t. IV WAITING ROOM CHAPTER EIGHT The good weather holds. It’s almost like June, when we would get out our sundresses and our sandals and go for an ice-cream cone. There are three new bodies on the Wall. One is a priest, still wearing the black cassock. That’s been put on him, for the trial, even though they gave up wearing those years ago, when the sect wars rst began; cassocks made them too conspicuous. The two others have purple placards hung around their necks: Gender Treachery. Their bodies still wear the Guardian uniforms. Caught together, they must have been, but where? A barracks, a shower? It’s hard to say. The snowman with the red smile is gone. “We should go back,” I say to Ofglen. I’m always the one to say this. Sometimes I feel that if I didn’t say it, she would stay here forever. But is she mourning or gloating? I still can’t tell. Without a word she swivels, as if she’s voice-activated, as if she’s on little oiled wheels, as if she’s on top of a music box. I resent this grace of hers. I resent her meek head, bowed as if into a heavy wind. But there is no wind. We leave the Wall, walk back the way we came, in the warm sun. “It’s a beautiful May day,” Ofglen says. I feel rather than see her head turn towards me, waiting for a reply. “Yes,” I say. “Praise be,” I add as an afterthought. Mayday used to be a distress signal, a long time ago, in one of those wars we studied in high school. I kept getting them mixed up, but you could tell them apart by the airplanes if you paid attention. It was Luke who told me about Mayday though. Mayday, Mayday, for pilots whose planes had been hit, and ships – was it ships too? – at sea. Maybe it was SOS for ships. I wish I could look it up. And it was something from Beethoven, for the beginning of the victory, in one of those wars. Do you know what it came from? said Luke. Mayday? No, I said. It’s a strange word to use for that, isn’t it? Newspapers and co ee, on Sunday mornings, before she was born. There were still newspapers, then. We used to read them in bed. It’s French, he said. From M’aidez. Help me. Coming towards us there’s a small procession, a funeral: three women, each with a black transparent veil thrown over her headdress. An Econowife and two others, the mourners also Econowives, her friends perhaps. Their striped dresses are worn-looking, as are their faces. Some day, when times improve, says Aunt Lydia, no one will have to be an Econowife. The rst one is the bereaved, the mother; she carries a small black jar. From the size of the jar you can tell how old it was when it foundered, inside her, owed to its death. Two or three months, too young to tell whether or not it was an Unbaby. The older ones and those that die at birth have boxes. We pause, out of respect, while they go by. I wonder if Ofglen feels what I do, a pain like a stab, in the belly. We put our hands over our hearts to show these stranger women that we feel with them in their loss. Beneath her veil the rst one scowls at us. One of the others turns aside, spits on the sidewalk. The Econowives do not like us. We go past the shops and come to the barrier again, and are passed through. We continue on among the large empty-looking houses, the weedless lawns. At the corner near the house where I’m posted, Ofglen stops, turns to me. “Under His Eye,” she says. The right farewell. “Under His Eye,” I reply, and she gives a little nod. She hesitates, as if to say something more, but then she turns away and walks down the street. I watch her. She’s like my own reflection, in a mirror from which I am moving away. In the driveway, Nick is polishing the Whirlwind again. He’s reached the chrome at the back. I put my gloved hand on the latch of the gate, open it, push inward. The gate clicks behind me. The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer winecups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, then explode slowly, the petals thrown out like shards. Nick looks up and begins to whistle. Then he says, “Nice walk?” I nod, but do not answer with my voice. He isn’t supposed to speak to me. Of course some of them will try, said Aunt Lydia. All esh is weak. All esh is grass, I corrected her in my head. They can’t help it, she said, God made them that way but He did not make you that way. He made you di erent. It’s up to you to set the boundaries. Later you will be thanked. In the garden behind the house the Commander’s Wife is sitting, in the chair she’s had brought out. Serena Joy, what a stupid name. It’s like something you’d put on your hair, in the other time, the time before, to straighten it. Serena Joy, it would say on the bottle, with a woman’s head in cut-paper silhouette on a pink oval background with scalloped gold edges. With everything to choose from in the way of names, why did she pick that one? Serena Joy was never her real name, not even then. Her real name was Pam. I read that in a pro le on her, in a news magazine, long after I’d rst watched her singing while my mother slept in on Sunday mornings. By that time she was worthy of a pro le: Time or Newsweek it was, it must have been. She wasn’t singing any more by then, she was making speeches. She was good at it. Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacri ce she was making for the good of all. Around that time, someone tried to shoot her and missed; her secretary, who was standing right behind her, was killed instead. Someone else planted a bomb in her car but it went o too early. Though some people said she’d put the bomb in her own car, for sympathy. That’s how hot things were getting. Luke and I would watch her sometimes on the late-night news. Bathrobes, nightcaps. We’d watch her sprayed hair and her hysteria, and the tears she could still produce at will, and the mascara blackening her cheeks. By that time she was wearing more makeup. We thought she was funny. Or Luke thought she was funny. I only pretended to think so. Really she was a little frightening. She was in earnest. She doesn’t make speeches any more. She has become speechless. She stays in her home, but it doesn’t seem to agree with her. How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word. She’s looking at the tulips. Her cane is beside her, on the grass. Her pro le is towards me, I can see that in the quick sideways look I take at her as I go past. It wouldn’t do to stare. It’s no longer a awless cut-paper pro le, her face is sinking in upon itself, and I think of those towns built on underground rivers, where houses and whole streets disappear overnight, into sudden quagmires, or coal towns collapsing into the mines beneath them. Something like this must have happened to her, once she saw the true shape of things to come. She doesn’t turn her head. She doesn’t acknowledge my presence in any way, although she knows I’m there. I can tell she knows, it’s like a smell, her knowledge; something gone sour, like old milk. It’s not the husbands you have to watch out for, said Aunt Lydia, it’s the Wives. You should always try to imagine what they must be feeling. Of course they will resent you. It is only natural. Try to feel for them. Aunt Lydia thought she was very good at feeling for other people. Try to pity them. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. Again the tremulous smile, of a beggar, the weak-eyed blinking, the gaze upwards, through the round steel-rimmed glasses, towards the back of the classroom, as if the green-painted plaster ceiling were opening and God on a cloud of Pink Pearl face powder were coming down through the wires and sprinkler plumbing. You must realize that they are defeated women. They have been unable … Here her voice broke o , and there was a pause, during which I could hear a sigh, a collective sigh from those around me. It was a bad idea to rustle or dget during these pauses: Aunt Lydia might look abstracted but she was aware of every twitch. So there was only the sigh. The future is in your hands, she resumed. She held her own hands out to us, the ancient gesture that was both an o ering and an invitation, to come forward, into an embrace, an acceptance. In your hands, she said, looking down at her own hands as if they had given her the idea. But there was nothing in them. They were empty. It was our hands that were supposed to be full, of the future; which could be held but not seen. I walk around to the back door, open it, go in, set my basket down on the kitchen table. The table has been scrubbed o , cleared of our; today’s bread, freshly baked, is cooling on its rack. The kitchen smells of yeast, a nostalgic smell. It reminds me of other kitchens, kitchens that were mine. It smells of mothers; although my own mother did not make bread. It smells of me, in former times, when I was a mother. This is a treacherous smell, and I know I must shut it out. Rita is there, sitting at the table, peeling and slicing carrots. Old carrots they are, thick ones, over-wintered, bearded from their time in storage. The new carrots, tender and pale, won’t be ready for weeks. The knife she uses is sharp and bright, and tempting. I would like to have a knife like that. Rita stops chopping the carrots, stands up, takes the parcels out of the basket, almost eagerly. She looks forward to seeing what I’ve brought, although she always frowns while opening the parcels; nothing I bring fully pleases her. She’s thinking she could have done better herself. She would rather do the shopping, get exactly what she wants; she envies me the walk. In this house we all envy each other something. “They’ve got oranges,” I say. “At Milk and Honey. There are still some left.” I hold out this idea to her like an o ering. I wish to ingratiate myself. I saw the oranges yesterday, but I didn’t tell Rita; yesterday she was too grumpy. “I could get some, tomorrow, if you’d give me the tokens for them.” I hold out the chicken to her. She wanted steak today, but there wasn’t any. Rita grunts, not revealing pleasure or acceptance. She’ll think about it, the grunt says, in her own sweet time. She undoes the string on the chicken, and the glazed paper. She prods the chicken, exes a wing, pokes a nger into the cavity, shes out the giblets. The chicken lies there, headless and without feet, goose-pimpled as though shivering. “Bath day,” Rita says, without looking at me. Cora comes into the kitchen, from the pantry at the back, where they keep the mops and brooms. “A chicken,” she says, almost with delight. “Scrawny,” says Rita, “but it’ll have to do.” “There wasn’t much else,” I say. Rita ignores me. “Looks big enough to me,” says Cora. Is she standing up for me? I look at her, to see if I should smile; but no, it’s only the food she’s thinking of. She’s younger than Rita; the sunlight, coming slant now through the west window, catches her hair, parted and drawn back. She must have been pretty, quite recently. There’s a little mark, like a dimple, in each of her ears, where the punctures for earrings have grown over. “Tall,” says Rita, “but bony. You should speak up,” she says to me, looking directly at me for the rst time. “Ain’t like you’re common.” She means the Commander’s rank. But in the other sense, her sense, she thinks I am common. She is over sixty, her mind’s made up. She goes to the sink, runs her hands briefly under the tap, dries them on the dishtowel. The dishtowel is white with blue stripes. Dishtowels are the same as they always were. Sometimes these ashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick. I see the dishtowel, out of context, and I catch my breath. For some, in some ways, things haven’t changed that much. “Who’s doing the bath?” says Rita, to Cora, not to me. “I got to tenderize this bird.” “I’ll do it later,” says Cora, “after the dusting.” “Just so it gets done,” says Rita. They’re talking about me as though I can’t hear. To them I’m a household chore, one among many. I’ve been dismissed. I pick up the basket, go through the kitchen door and along the hall towards the grandfather clock. The sitting-room door is closed. Sun comes through the fanlight, falling in colours across the oor: red and blue, purple. I step into it brie y, stretch out my hands; they ll with owers of light. I go up the stairs, my face, distant and white and distorted, framed in the hall mirror, which bulges outward like an eye under pressure. I follow the dusty-pink runner down the long upstairs hallway, back to the room. There’s someone standing in the hall, near the door to the room where I stay. The hall is dusky, this is a man, his back to me; he’s looking into the room, dark against its light. I can see now, it’s the Commander, he isn’t supposed to be here. He hears me coming, turns, hesitates, walks forward. Towards me. He is violating custom, what do I do now? I stop, he pauses, I can’t see his face, he’s looking at me, what does he want? But then he moves forward again, steps to the side to avoid touching me, inclines his head, is gone. Something has been shown to me, but what is it? Like the ag of an unknown country, seen for an instant above a curve of hill, it could mean attack, it could mean parley, it could mean the edge of something, a territory. The signals animals give one another: lowered blue eyelids, ears laid back, raised hackles. A ash of bared teeth, what in hell does he think he’s doing? Nobody else has seen him. I hope. Was he invading? Was he in my room? I called it mine. CHAPTER NINE My room, then. There has to be some space, nally, that I claim as mine, even in this time. I’m waiting, in my room, which right now is a waiting room. When I go to bed it’s a bedroom. The curtains are still wavering in the small wind, the sun outside is still shining, though not in through the window directly. It has moved west. I am trying not to tell stories, or at any rate not this one. Someone has lived in this room, before me. Someone like me, or I prefer to believe so. I discovered it three days after I was moved here. I had a lot of time to pass. I decided to explore the room. Not hastily, as one would explore a hotel room, expecting no surprise, opening and shutting the desk drawers, the cupboard doors, unwrapping the tiny individually wrapped bar of soap, prodding the pillows. Will I ever be in a hotel room again? How I wasted them, those rooms, that freedom from being seen. Rented licence. In the afternoons, when Luke was still in ight from his wife, when I was still imaginary for him. Before we were married and I solidi ed. I would always get there rst, check in. It wasn’t that many times, but it seems now like a decade, an era; I can remember what I wore, each blouse, each scarf. I would pace, waiting for him, turn the television on and then o , dab behind my ears with perfume, Opium it was. It came in a Chinese bottle, red and gold. I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an a air. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit. The knock would come at the door; I’d open, with relief, desire. He was so momentary, so condensed. And yet there seemed no end to him. We would lie in those afternoon beds, afterwards, hands on each other, talking it over. Possible, impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy? But now it’s the rooms themselves I miss as well, even the dreadful paintings that hung on the walls, landscapes with fall foliage or snow melting in hardwoods, or women in period costume, with china-doll faces and bustles and parasols, or sad-eyed clowns, or bowls of fruit, sti and chalky-looking. The fresh towels ready for spoilage, the wastebaskets gaping their invitations, beckoning in the careless junk. Careless. I was careless, in those rooms. I could lift the telephone and food would appear on a tray, food I had chosen. Food that was bad for me, no doubt, and drink too. There were Bibles in the dresser drawers, put there by some charitable society, though probably no one read them very much. There were postcards, too, with pictures of the hotel on them, and you could write on the postcards and send them to anyone you wanted. It seems like such an impossible thing, now; like something you’d make up. So. I explored this room, not hastily, then, like a hotel room, wasting it. I didn’t want to do it all at once, I wanted to make it last. I divided the room into sections, in my head; I allowed myself one section a day. This one section I would examine with the greatest minuteness: the unevenness of the plaster under the wallpaper, the scratches in the paint of the baseboard and the windowsill, under the top coat of paint, the stains on the mattress, for I went so far as to lift the blankets and sheets from the bed, fold them back, a little at a time, so they could be replaced quickly if anyone came. The stains on the mattress. Like dried ower petals. Not recent. Old love; there’s no other kind of love in this room now. When I saw that, that evidence left by two people, of love or something like it, desire at least, at least touch, between two people now perhaps old or dead, I covered the bed again and lay down on it. I looked up at the blind plaster eye in the ceiling. I wanted to feel Luke lying beside me. I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head. Sometimes it can hardly be borne. What is to be done, what is to be done, I thought. There is nothing to be done. They also serve who only stand and wait. Or lie down and wait. I know why the glass in the window is shatterproof, and why they took down the chandelier. I wanted to feel Luke lying beside me, but there wasn’t room. I saved the cupboard until the third day. I looked carefully over the door rst, inside and out, then the walls with their brass hooks – how could they have overlooked the hooks? Why didn’t they remove them? Too close to the oor? But still, a stocking, that’s all you’d need. And the rod with the plastic hangers, my dresses hanging on them, the red woollen cape for cold weather, the shawl. I knelt to examine the oor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a ngernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. I didn’t know what it meant, or even what language it was in. I thought it might be Latin, but I didn’t know any Latin. Still, it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered. Except by me, for whom it was intended. It was intended for whoever came next. It pleases me to ponder this message. It pleases me to think I’m communing with her, this unknown woman. For she is unknown; or if known, she has never been mentioned to me. It pleases me to know that her taboo message made it through, to at least one other person, washed itself up on the wall of my cupboard, was opened and read by me. Sometimes I repeat the words to myself. They give me a small joy. When I imagine the woman who wrote them, I think of her as about my age, maybe a little younger. I turn her into Moira, Moira as she was when she was in college, in the room next to mine: quirky, jaunty, athletic, with a bicycle once, and a knapsack for hiking. Freckles, I think; irreverent, resourceful. I wonder who she was or is, and what’s become of her. I tried that out on Rita, the day I found the message. Who was the woman who stayed in that room? I said. Before me? If I’d asked it di erently, if I’d said, Was there a woman who stayed in that room before me? I might not have got anywhere. Which one? she said; she sounded grudging, suspicious, but then, she almost always sounds like that when she speaks to me. So there have been more than one. Some haven’t stayed their full term of posting, their full two years. Some have been sent away, for one reason or another. Or maybe not sent; gone? The lively one. I was guessing. The one with freckles. You knew her? Rita asked, more suspicious than ever. I knew her before, I lied. I heard she was here. Rita accepted this. She knows there must be a grapevine, an underground of sorts. She didn’t work out, she said. In what way? I asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible. But Rita clamped her lips together. I am like a child here, there are some things I must not be told. What you don’t know won’t hurt you, was all she would say. CHAPTER TEN Sometimes I sing to myself, in my head; something lugubrious, mournful, presbyterian: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound Could save a wretch like me, Who once was lost, but now am found, Was bound, but now am free. I don’t know if the words are right. I can’t remember. Such songs are not sung any more in public, especially the ones that use words like free. They are considered too dangerous. They belong to outlawed sects. I feel so lonely, baby, I feel so lonely, baby, I feel so lonely I could die. This too is outlawed. I know it from an old cassette tape, of my mother’s; she had a scratchy and untrustworthy machine, too, that could still play such things. She used to put the tape on when her friends came over and they’d had a few drinks. I don’t sing like this often. It makes my throat hurt. There isn’t much music in this house, except what we hear on the TV. Sometimes Rita will hum, while kneading or peeling; a wordless humming, tuneless, unfathomable. And sometimes from the front sitting room there will be the thin sound of Serena’s voice, from a disc made long ago and played now with the volume low, so she won’t be caught listening as she sits there knitting, remembering her own former and now amputated glory: Hallelujah. It’s warm for this time of year. Houses like this heat up in the sun, there’s not enough insulation. Around me the air is stagnant, despite the little current, the breath coming in past the curtains. I’d like to be able to open the window as wide as it could go. Soon we’ll be allowed to change into the summer dresses. The summer dresses are unpacked and hanging in the closet, two of them, pure cotton, which is better than synthetics like the cheaper ones, though even so, when it’s muggy, in July and August, you sweat inside them. No worry about sunburn though, said Aunt Lydia. The spectacles women used to make of themselves. Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and shoulders, on the street, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder those things used to happen. Things, the word she used when whatever it stood for was too distasteful or lthy or horrible to pass her lips. A successful life for her was one that avoided things, excluded things. Such things do not happen to nice women. And not good for the complexion, not at all, wrinkle you up like a dried apple. But we weren’t supposed to care about our complexions any more, she’d forgotten that. In the park, said Aunt Lydia, lying on blankets, men and women together sometimes, and at that she began to cry, standing up there in front of us, in full view. I’m doing my best, she said. I’m trying to give you the best chance you can have. She blinked, the light was too strong for her, her mouth trembled, around her front teeth, teeth that stuck out a little and were long and yellowish, and I thought about the dead mice we would nd on our doorstep, when we lived in a house, all three of us, four counting our cat, who was the one making these offerings. Aunt Lydia pressed her hand over her mouth of a dead rodent. After a minute she took her hand away. I wanted to cry too because she reminded me. If only he wouldn’t eat half of them first, I said to Luke. Don’t think it’s easy for me either, said Aunt Lydia. Moira, breezing into my room, dropping her denim jacket on the oor. Got any cigs, she said. In my purse, I said. No matches though. Moira rummages in my purse. You should throw out some of this junk, she says. I’m giving an underwhore party. A what? I say. There’s no point trying to work, Moira won’t allow it, she’s like a cat that crawls onto the page when you’re trying to read. You know, like Tupperware, only with underwear. Tarts’ stu . Lace crotches, snap garters. Bras that push your tits up. She...
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