The Handmaid's Tale (24 page)

Luke found the cat, who was hiding under our bed. They always know. He went into the garage with her. I don't know what he did and I never asked him. I sat in the living room, hands folded in my lap. I should have gone out with him, taken that small responsibility. I should at least have asked him about it afterwards, so he didn't have to carry it alone; because that little sacrifice, that snuffing out of love, was done for my sake as well.

That's one of the things they do. They force you to kill, within yourself.

Useless, as it turned out. I wonder who told them. It could have been a neighbour, watching our car pull out from the driveway in the morning, acting on a hunch, tipping them off for a gold star on someone's list. It could even have been the man who got us the passports; why not get paid twice? Like them, even, to plant the passport forgers themselves, a net for the unwary. The Eyes of God run over all the earth.

Because they were ready for us, and waiting. The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt
that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

I try to conjure, to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't.

It's my fault. I am forgetting too much.

Tonight I will say my prayers.

No longer kneeling at the foot of the bed, knees on the hard wood of the gym floor, Aunt Elizabeth standing by the double doors, arms folded, cattle prod hung on her belt, while Aunt Lydia strides along the rows of kneeling nightgowned women, hitting our backs or feet or bums or arms lightly, just a flick, a tap, with her wooden pointer if we slouch or slacken. She wanted our heads bowed just right, our toes together and pointed, our elbows at the proper angle. Part of her interest in this was aesthetic: she liked the look of the thing. She wanted us to look like something Anglo-Saxon, carved on a tomb; or Christmas-card angels, regimented in our robes of purity. But she knew too the spiritual value of bodily rigidity, of muscle strain: a little pain cleans out the mind, she'd say.

What we prayed for was emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and babies.

Oh God, King of the universe, thank you for not creating me a man.

Oh God, obliterate me. Make me fruitful. Mortify my flesh, that I may be multiplied. Let me be fulfilled …

Some of them would get carried away with this. The ecstasy of abasement. Some of them would moan and cry.

There is no point in making a spectacle of yourself, Janine, said Aunt Lydia.

I pray where I am, sitting by the window, looking out through the curtain at the empty garden. I don't even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it's an equal darkness. Or light.

My God. Who Art in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within.

I wish you would tell me Your Name, the real one I mean. But
You
will do as well as anything.

I wish I knew what You were up to. But whatever it is, help me to get through it, please. Though maybe it's not Your doing; I don't believe for an instant that what's going on out there is what You meant.

I have enough daily bread, so I won't waste time on that. It isn't the main problem. The problem is getting it down without choking on it.

Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

I suppose I should say I forgive whoever did this, and whatever they're doing now. I'll try, but it isn't easy.

Temptation comes next. At the Centre, temptation was anything much more than eating and sleeping. Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you, Aunt Lydia used to say.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

I think about the chandelier too much, though it's gone now. But you could use a hook, in the closet. I've considered the possibilities. All you'd have to do, after attaching yourself, would be to lean your weight forward and not fight.

Deliver us from evil.

Then there's Kingdom, power, and glory. It takes a lot to believe in those right now. But I'll try it anyway.
In Hope
, as they say on the gravestones.

You must feel pretty ripped off. I guess it's not the first time.

If I were You I'd be fed up. I'd really be sick of it. I guess that's the difference between us.

I feel very unreal, talking to You like this. I feel as if I'm talking to a wall. I wish You'd answer. I feel so alone.

All alone by the telephone. Except I can't use the telephone. And if I could, who could I call?

Oh God. It's no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living?

E
very night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.

It hasn't happened this morning, either.

I put on my clothes, summer clothes, it's still summer; it seems to have stopped at summer. July, its breathless days and sauna nights, hard to sleep. I make a point of keeping track. I should scratch marks on the wall, one for each day of the week, and run a line through them when I have seven. But what would be the use, this isn't a jail sentence; there's no time here that can be done and finished with. Anyway, all I have to do is ask, to find out what day it is. Yesterday was July the Fourth, which used to be Independence Day, before they abolished it. September First will be Labour Day, they still have that. Though it didn't used to have anything to do with mothers.

But I tell time by the moon. Lunar, not solar.

I bend over to do up my red shoes; lighter weight these days, with discreet slits cut in them, though nothing so daring as sandals. It's an
effort to stoop; despite the exercises, I can feel my body gradually seizing up, refusing. Being a woman this way is how I used to imagine it would be to be very old. I feel I even walk like that: crouched over, my spine constricting to a question mark, my bones leached of calcium and porous as limestone. When I was younger, imagining age, I would think, Maybe you appreciate things more when you don't have much time left. I forgot to include the loss of energy. Some days I do appreciate things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like the beautiful-sunset greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts.

The danger is greyout.

I'd like to have Luke here, in this bedroom while I'm getting dressed, so I could have a fight with him. Absurd, but that's what I want. An argument, about who should put the dishes in the dishwasher, whose turn it is to sort the laundry, clean the toilet; something daily and unimportant in the big scheme of things. We could even have a fight about that, about
unimportant, important
. What a luxury it would be. Not that we did it much. These days I script whole fights, in my head, and the reconciliations afterwards too.

I sit in my chair, the wreath on the ceiling floating above my head, like a frozen halo, a zero. A hole in space where a star exploded. A ring, on water, where a stone's been thrown. All things white and circular. I wait for the day to unroll, for the earth to turn, according to the round face of the implacable clock. The geometrical days, which go around and around, smoothly and oiled. Sweat already on my upper lip, I wait, for the arrival of the inevitable egg, which will be lukewarm like the room and will have a green film on the yolk and will taste faintly of sulphur.

Today, later, with Ofglen, on our shopping walk:

We go to the church, as usual, and look at the graves. Then to the Wall. Only two hanging on it today: one Catholic, not a priest though, placarded with an upside-down cross, and some other sect I don't recognize. The body is marked only with a J, in red. It doesn't mean Jewish, those would be yellow stars. Anyway there haven't been many of them. Because they were declared Sons of Jacob and therefore special, they were given a choice. They could convert, or emigrate to Israel. A lot of them emigrated, if you can believe the news. I saw a boatload of them, on the TV, leaning over the railings in their black coats and hats and their long beards, trying to look as Jewish as possible, in costumes fished up from the past, the women with shawls over their heads, smiling and waving, a little stiffly it's true, as if they were posing; and another shot, of the richer ones, lining up for the planes. Ofglen says some other people got out that way, by pretending to be Jewish, but it wasn't easy because of the tests they gave you and they've tightened up on that now.

You don't get hanged only for being a Jew though. You get hanged for being a noisy Jew who won't make the choice. Or for pretending to convert. That's been on the TV too: raids at night, secret hoards of Jewish things dragged out from under beds, Torahs, talliths, Mogen Davids. And the owners of them, sullen-faced, unrepentant, pushed by the Eyes against the walls of their bedrooms, while the sorrowful voice of the announcer tells us voice-over about their perfidy and ungratefulness.

So the J isn't for Jew. What could it be? Jehovah's Witness? Jesuit? Whatever it meant, he's just as dead.

After this ritual viewing we continue on our way, heading as usual for some open space we can cross, so we can talk. If you can call it talking, these clipped whispers, projected through the funnels
of our white wings. It's more like a telegram, a verbal semaphore. Amputated speech.

We can never stand long in any one place. We don't want to be picked up for loitering.

Today we turn in the opposite direction from Soul Scrolls, to where there's an open park of sorts, with a large old building on it; ornate late Victorian, with stained glass. It used to be called Memorial Hall, though I never knew what it was a memorial for. Dead people of some kind.

Moira told me once that it used to be where the undergraduates ate, in the earlier days of the university. If a woman went in there, they'd throw buns at her, she said.

Why? I said. Moira became, over the years, increasingly versed in such anecdotes. I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

To make her go out, said Moira.

Maybe it was more like throwing peanuts at elephants, I said.

Moira laughed; she could always do that. Exotic monsters, she said.

We stand looking at this building, which is in shape more or less like a church, a cathedral. Ofglen says, “I hear that's where the Eyes hold their banquets.”

“Who told you?” I say. There's no one near, we can speak more freely, but out of habit we keep our voices low.

“The grapevine,” she says. She pauses, looks sideways at me, I can sense the blur of white as her wings move. “There's a password,” she says.

“A password?” I ask. “What for?”

“So you can tell,” she says. “Who is and who isn't.”

Although I can't see what use it is for me to know, I ask, “What is it then?”

“Mayday,” she says. “I tried it on you once.”

“Mayday,” I repeat. I remember that day.
M'aidez
.

“Don't use it unless you have to,” say Ofglen. “It isn't good for us to know about too many of the others, in the network. In case you get caught.”

I find it hard to believe in these whisperings, these revelations, though I always do at the time. Afterwards though they seem improbable, childish even, like something you'd do for fun; like a girls' club, like secrets at school. Or like the spy novels I used to read, on weekends, when I should have been finishing my homework, or like late-night television. Passwords, things that cannot be told, people with secret identities, dark linkages: this does not seem as if it ought to be the true shape of the world. But that is my own illusion, a hangover from a version of reality I learned in the former time.

And networks.
Networking
, one of my mother's old phrases, musty slang of yesteryear. Even in her sixties she still did something she called that, though as far as I could see all it meant was having lunch with some other woman.

I leave Ofglen at the corner. “I'll see you later,” she says. She glides away along the sidewalk and I go up the walk towards the house. There's Nick, hat askew; today he doesn't even look at me. He must have been waiting around for me though, to deliver his silent message, because as soon as he knows I've seen him he gives the Whirlwind one last swipe with the chamois and walks briskly off towards the garage door.

I walk along the gravel, between the slabs of evergreen lawn. Serena Joy is sitting under the willow tree, in her chair, cane propped at her elbow. Her dress is crisp cool cotton. For her it's blue, watercolour, not this red of mine that sucks in heat and blazes with it at the same time. Her profile's towards me, she's knitting.
How can she bear to touch the wool, in this heat? But possibly her skin's gone numb; possibly she feels nothing, like one formerly scalded.

I lower my eyes to the path, glide by her, hoping to be invisible, knowing I'll be ignored. But not this time.