The Handmaid's Tale (30 page)

We stare at one another, keeping our faces blank, apathetic. Then she makes a small motion of her head, a slight jerk to the right. She takes the cigarette back from the woman in red, holds it to her mouth, lets her hand rest in the air a moment, all five fingers outspread. Then she turns her back on me.

Our old signal. I have five minutes to get to the women's washroom, which must be somewhere to her right. I look around: no sign of it. Nor can I risk getting up and walking anywhere, without the Commander. I don't know enough, I don't know the ropes, I might be challenged.

A minute, two. Moira begins to saunter off, not glancing around. She can only hope I've understood her and will follow.

The Commander comes back, with two drinks. He smiles down at me, places the drinks on the long black coffee table in front of the sofa, sits. “Enjoying yourself?” he says. He wants me to. This after all is a treat.

I smile at him. “Is there a washroom?” I say.

“Of course,” he says. He sips at his drink. He does not volunteer directions.

“I need to go to it.” I am counting in my head now, seconds, not minutes.

“It's over there.” He nods.

“What if someone stops me?”

“Just show them your tag,” he says. “It'll be all right. They'll know you're taken.”

I get up, wobble across the room. I lurch a little, near the fountain, almost fall. It's the heels. Without the Commander's arm to steady me I'm off balance. Several of the men look at me, with surprise I think rather than lust. I feel like a fool. I hold my left arm conspicuously in front of me, bent at the elbow, with the tag turned outwards. Nobody says anything.

I
find the entrance to the women's washroom. It still says
Ladies
, in scrolly gold script. There's a corridor leading in to the door, and a woman seated at a table beside it, supervising the entrances and exits. She's an older woman, wearing a purple caftan and gold eye-shadow, but I can tell she is nevertheless an Aunt. The cattle prod's on the table, its thong around her wrist. No nonsense here.

“Fifteen minutes,” she says to me. She gives me an oblong of purple cardboard from a stack of them on the table. It's like a fitting room, in the department stores of the time before. To the woman behind me I hear her say, “You were just here.”

“I need to go again,” the woman says.

“Rest break once an hour,” says the Aunt. “You know the rules.”

The woman begins to protest, in a whiny desperate voice. I push open the door.

I remember this. There's a rest area, gently lit in pinkish tones, with several easy chairs and a sofa, in lime-green bamboo-shoot print, with a wall clock above it in a gold filigree frame. Here they haven't removed the mirror, there's a long one opposite the sofa.
You need to know, here, what you look like. Through an archway beyond there's the row of toilet cubicles, also pink, and wash basins and more mirrors.

Several women are sitting in the chairs and on the sofa, with their shoes off, smoking. They stare at me as I come in. There's perfume in the air and stale smoke, and the scent of working flesh.

“You new?” one of them says.

“Yes,” I say, looking around for Moira, who is nowhere in sight.

The women don't smile. They return to their smoking as if it's serious business. In the room beyond, a woman in a cat suit with a tail made of orange fake fur is re-doing her makeup. This is like backstage: greasepaint, smoke, the materials of illusion.

I stand hesitant, not knowing what to do. I don't want to ask about Moira, I don't know whether it's safe. Then a toilet flushes and Moira comes out of a pink cubicle. She teeters towards me; I wait for a sign.

“It's all right,” she says, to me and to the other women. “I know her.” The others smile now, and Moira hugs me. My arms go around her, the wires propping up her breasts dig into my chest. We kiss each other, on one cheek, then the other. Then we stand back.

“Godawful,” she says. She grins at me. “You look like the Whore of Babylon.”

“Isn't that what I'm supposed to look like?” I say. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

“Yes,” she says, pulling up her front, “not my style and this thing is about to fall to shreds. I wish they'd dredge up someone who still knows how to make them. Then I could get something halfway decent.”

“You pick that out?” I say. I wonder if maybe she's chosen it, out of the others, because it was less garish. At least it's only black and white.

“Hell no,” she says. “Government issue. I guess they thought it was me.”

I still can't believe it's her. I touch her arm again. Then I begin to cry.

“Don't do that,” she says. “Your eyes'll run. Anyway there isn't time. Shove over.” This she says to the two women on the sofa, her usual peremptory rough-cut slapdash manner, and as usual she gets away with it.

“My break's up anyway,” says one woman, who's wearing a baby-blue laced-up Merry Widow and white stockings. She stands up, shakes my hand. “Welcome,” she says.

The other woman obligingly moves over, and Moira and I sit down. The first thing we do is take off our shoes.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Moira says then. “Not that it isn't great to see you. But it's not so great for you. What'd you do wrong? Laugh at his dick?”

I look up at the ceiling. “Is it bugged?” I say. I wipe around my eyes, gingerly, with my fingertips. Black comes off.

“Probably,” says Moira. “You want a cig?”

“I'd love one,” I say.

“Here,” she says to the woman next to her. “Lend me one, will you?”

The woman hands over, ungrudging. Moira is still a skilful borrower. I smile at that.

“On the other hand, it might not be,” says Moira. “I can't imagine they'd care about anything we have to say. They've already heard most of it, and anyway nobody gets out of here except in a black van. But you must know that, if you're here.”

I pull her head over so I can whisper in her ear. “I'm temporary,” I tell her. “It's just tonight. I'm not supposed to be here at all. He smuggled me in.”

“Who?” she whispers back. “That shit you're with? I've had him, he's the pits.”

“He's my Commander,” I say.

She nods. “Some of them do that, they get a kick out of it. It's like screwing on the altar or something: your gang are supposed to be such chaste vessels. They like to see you all painted up. Just another crummy power trip.”

This interpretation hasn't occurred to me. I apply it to the Commander, but it seems too simple for him, too crude. Surely his motivations are more delicate than that. But it may only be vanity that prompts me to think so.

“We don't have much time left,” I say. “Tell me everything.”

Moira shrugs. “What's the point?” she says. But she knows there is a point, so she does.

This is what she says, whispers, more or less. I can't remember exactly, because I had no way of writing it down. I've filled it out for her as much as I can: we didn't have much time so she just gave the outlines. Also she told me this in two sessions, we managed a second break together. I've tried to make it sound as much like her as I can. It's a way of keeping her alive.

“I left that old hag Aunt Elizabeth tied up like a Christmas turkey behind the furnace. I wanted to kill her, I really felt like it, but now I'm just as glad I didn't or things would be a lot worse for me. I couldn't believe how easy it was to get out of the Centre. In that brown outfit I just walked right through. I kept on going as if I knew where I was heading, till I was out of sight. I didn't have any great plan; it wasn't an organized thing, like they thought, though when they were trying to get it out of me I made up a lot of stuff. You do that, when they use the electrodes and the other things. You don't care what you say.

“I kept my shoulders back and chin up and marched along, trying to think of what to do next. When they busted the press they'd picked up a lot of the women I knew, and I thought they'd most likely have the rest by now. I was sure they had a list. We were dumb to think we could keep it going the way we did, even underground, even when we'd moved everything out of the office and into people's cellars and back rooms. So I knew better than to try any of those houses.

“I had some sort of an idea of where I was in relation to the city, though I was walking along a street I couldn't remember having seen before. But I figured out from the sun where north was. Girl Scouts was some use after all. I thought I might as well head that way, see if I could find the Yard or the Square or anything around it. Then I would know for sure where I was. Also I thought it would look better for me to be going in towards the centre of things, rather than away. It would look more plausible.

“They'd set up more checkpoints while we were inside the Centre, they were all over the place. The first one scared the shit out of me. I came on it suddenly around the corner. I knew it wouldn't look right if I turned around in full view and went back, so I bluffed it through, the same as I had at the gate, putting on that frown and keeping myself stiff and pursing my lips and looking right through them, as if they were festering sores. You know the way the Aunts look when they say the word
man
. It worked like a charm, and it did at the other checkpoints, too.

“But the insides of my head were going around like crazy. I only had so much time, before they found the old bat and sent out the alarm. Soon enough they'd be looking for me: one fake Aunt, on foot. I tried to think of someone, I ran over and over the people I knew. At last I tried to remember what I could about our mailing list. We'd destroyed it, of course, early on; or we didn't destroy it, we divided it up among us and each one of us memorized a section, and
then we destroyed it. We were still using the mails then, but we didn't put our logo on the envelopes any more. It was getting far too risky.

“So I tried to recall my section of the list. I won't tell you the name I chose, because I don't want them to get in trouble, if they haven't already. It could be I've spilled all this stuff, it's hard to remember what you say when they're doing it. You'll say anything.

“I chose them because they were a married couple, and those were safer than anyone single and especially anyone gay. Also I remembered the designation beside their name. Q, it said, which meant Quaker. We had the religious denominations marked where there were any, for marches. That way you could tell who might turn out to what. It was no good calling on the C's to do abortion stuff, for instance; not that we'd done much of that lately. I remembered their address, too. We'd grilled each other on those addresses, it was important to remember them exactly, zip code and all.

“By this time I'd hit Mass Ave. and I knew where I was. And I knew where they were too. Now I was worrying about something else: when these people saw an Aunt coming up the walk, wouldn't they just lock the door and pretend not to be home? But I had to try it anyway, it was my only chance. I figured they weren't likely to shoot me. It was about five o'clock by this time. I was tired of walking, especially that Aunt's way like a goddamn soldier, poker up the ass, and I hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast.

“What I didn't know of course was that in those early days the Aunts and even the Centre were hardly common knowledge. It was all secret at first, behind barbed wire. There might have been objections to what they were doing, even then. So although people had seen the odd Aunt around, they weren't really aware of what they were for. They must have thought they were some kind of army nurse. Already they'd stopped asking questions, unless they had to.

“So these people let me in right away. It was the woman who came to the door. I told her I was doing a questionnaire. I did that so
she wouldn't look surprised, in case anyone was watching. But as soon as I was inside the door, I took off the headgear and told them who I was. They could have phoned the police or whatever, I know I was taking a chance, but like I say there wasn't any choice. Anyway they didn't. They gave me some clothes, a dress of hers, and burned the Aunt's outfit and the pass in their furnace; they knew that had to be done right away. They didn't like having me there, that much was clear, it made them very nervous. They had two little kids, both under seven. I could see their point.

“I went to the can, what a relief that was. Bathtub full of plastic fish and so on. Then I sat upstairs in the kids' room and played with them and their plastic blocks while their parents stayed downstairs and decided what to do about me. I didn't feel scared by then, in fact I felt quite good. Fatalistic, you could say. Then the woman made me a sandwich and a cup of coffee and the man said he'd take me to another house. They hadn't risked phoning.

“The other house was Quakers too, and they were paydirt, because they were a station on the Underground Femaleroad. After the first couple left, they said they'd try to get me out of the country. I won't tell you how, because some of the stations may still be operating. Each one of them was in contact with only one other one, always the next one along. There were advantages to that – it was better if you were caught – but disadvantages too, because if one station got busted the entire chain backed up until they could make contact with one of their couriers, who could set up an alternate route. They were better organized than you'd think, though. They'd infiltrated a couple of useful places; one of them was the post office. They had a driver there with one of those handy little trucks. I made it over the bridge and into the city proper in a mail sack. I can tell you that now because they got him, soon after that. He ended up on the Wall. You hear about these things; you hear a lot in here, you'd be surprised. The Commanders tell us themselves, I guess they
figure why not, there's no one we can pass it on to, except each other, and that doesn't count.