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 anymore 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 in there knitting, remembering her own former and now amputated glory: Hallelujah.
It’s warm for the 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 filthy 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 anymore, 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 find on the 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 she 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 floor. 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’ stuff. Lace crotches, snap garters. Bras that push your tits up. She finds my lighter, lights the cigarette she’s extracted from my purse. Want one? Tosses the package, with great generosity, considering they’re mine. Thanks piles, I say sourly. You’re crazy. Where’d you get an idea like that? Working my way through college, says Moira. I’ve got connections. Friends of my mother’s. It’s big in the suburbs, once they start getting age spots they figure they’ve got to beat the competition. The Pornomarts and what have you. I’m laughing. She always made me laugh. But here? I say. Who’ll come? Who needs it? You’re never too young to learn, she says. Come on, it’ll be great. We’ll all pee in our pants laughing. Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories. From below, from the driveway, comes the sound of the car being started. It’s quiet in this area, there isn’t a lot of traffic, you can hear things like that very clearly: car motors, lawn mowers, the clipping of a hedge, the slam of a door. You could hear a shout clearly, or a shot, if such noises were ever made here. Sometimes there are distant sirens. I go to the window and sit on the window seat, which is too narrow for comfort. There’s a hard little cushion on it, with a petit point cover: FAITH, in square print, surrounded by a wreath of lilies, FAITH is a faded blue, the leaves of the lilies a dingy green. This is a cushion once used elsewhere, worn but not enough to throw out. Somehow it’s been overlooked. I can spend minutes, tens of minutes, running my eyes over the print: FAITH. It’s the only thing they’ve given me to read. If I were caught doing it, would it count? I didn’t put the cushion here myself. The motor turns, and I lean forward, pulling the white curtain across my face, like a veil. It’s semisheer, I can see through it. If I press my forehead against the glass and look down, I can see the back half of the Whirlwind. Nobody is there, but as I watch I see Nick come around to the back door of the car, open it, stand stiffly beside it. His cap is straight now and his sleeves rolled down and buttoned. I can’t see his face because I’m looking down on him. Now the Commander is coming out. I glimpse him only for an instant, foreshortened, walking to the car. He doesn’t have his hat on, so it’s not a formal event he’s going to. His hair is gray. Silver, you might call it if you were being kind. I don’t feel like being kind. The one before this was bald, so I suppose he’s an improvement. If I could spit, out the window, or throw something, the cushion for instance, I might be able to hit him. Moira and I, with paper bags filled with water. Water bombs, they were called. Leaning out my dorm window, dropping them on the heads of the boys below. It was Moira’s idea. What were they trying to do? Climb a ladder, for something. For our underwear. That dormitory had once been coeducational, there were still urinals in one of the washrooms on our floor. But by the time I’d got there they’d put things back the way they were. The Commander stoops, gets into the car, disappears, and Nick shuts the door. A moment later the car moves backward, down the driveway and onto the street, and vanishes behind the hedge. I ought to feel hatred for this man. I know I ought to feel it, but it isn’t what I do feel. What I feel is more complicated than that. I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t love.
...a tape playing, Les Sylphides. That’s what I hear now, in my head, as I lift, tilt, breathe. Behind my closed eyes thin white dancers flit gracefully among the trees, their legs fluttering like the wings of held birds. In the afternoons we lay on our beds for an hour in the gymnasium, between three and four. They said it was a period of rest and meditation. I thought then they did it because they wanted some time off themselves, from teaching us, and I know the Aunts not on duty went off to the teachers’ room for a cup of coffee, or whatever they called by that name. But now I think that the rest also was practice. They were giving us a chance to get used to blank time. A catnap, Aunt Lydia called it, in her coy way. The strange thing is we needed the rest. Many of us went to sleep. We were tired there, a lot of the time. We were on some kind of pill or drug I think, they put it in the food, to keep us calm. But maybe not. Maybe it was the place itself. After the first shock, after you’d come to terms, it was better to be lethargic. You could tell yourself you were saving up your strength...
We hear Serena coming, down the stairs, along the hall, the muffled tap of her cane on the rug, thud of the good foot. She hobbles through the doorway, glances at us, counting but not seeing. She nods, at Nick, but says nothing. She’s in one of her best dresses, sky blue with embroidery in white along the edges of the veil: flowers and fretwork. Even at her age she still feels the urge to wreathe herself in flowers. No use for you, I think at her, my face unmoving, you can’t use them anymore, you’re withered. They’re the genital organs of plants. I read that somewhere, once. She makes her way to her chair and footstool, turns, lowers herself, lands ungracefully. She hoists her left foot onto the stool, fumbles in her sleeve pocket. I can hear the rustling, the click of her lighter, I smell the hot singe of the smoke, breathe it in. “Late as usual,” she says. We don’t answer. There’s a clatter as she gropes on the lamp table, then a click, and the television set runs through its warm-up. A male choir, with greenish-yellow skin, the color needs adjusting; they’re singing “Come to the Church in the Wildwood.” Come, come, come, come, sing the basses. Serena clicks the channel changer. Waves, colored zigzags, a garble of sound: it’s the Montreal satellite station, being blocked. Then there’s a preacher, earnest, with shining dark eyes, leaning towards us across a desk. These days they look a lot like businessmen. Serena gives him a few seconds, then clicks onward. Several blank channels, then the news. This is what she’s been looking for. She leans back, inhales deeply. I on the contrary lean forward, a child being allowed up late with the grown-ups. This is the one good thing about these evenings, the evenings of the Ceremony: I’m allowed to watch the news. It seems to be an unspoken rule in this household: we always get here on time, he’s always late, Serena always lets us watch the news. Such as it is: who knows if any of it is true? It could be old clips, it could be faked. But I watch it anyway, hoping to be able to read beneath it. Any news, now, is better than none. First, the front lines. They are not lines, really: the war seems to be going on in many places at once. Wooded hills, seen from above, the trees a sickly yellow. I wish she’d fix the color. The Appalachian Highlands, says the voice-over, where the Angels of the Apocalypse, Fourth Division, are smoking out a pocket of Baptist guerillas, with air support from the Twenty-first Battalion of the Angels of Light. We are shown two helicopters, black ones with silver wings painted on the sides. Below them, a clump of trees explodes. Now a close shot of a prisoner, with a stubbled and dirty face, flanked by two Angels in their neat black uniforms. The prisoner accepts a cigarette from one of the Angels, puts it awkwardly to his lips with his bound hands. He gives a lopsided little grin. The announcer is saying something, but I don’t hear it: I look into this man’s eyes, trying to decide what he’s thinking. He knows the camera is on him: is the grin a show of defiance, or is it submission? Is he embarrassed, at having been caught? They only show us victories, never defeats. Who wants bad news? Possibly he’s an actor.
I had purchased this book quite some time ago when a friend of mine mentioned it to me... I had thoughts of Fifty Shades of Grey which I had purchased because another individual had liked it... Let me say right away that I read less than 50 pages of the latter and stopped reading. On the other hand, when, in a discussion with a good friend, I was talking about the latest attempt to control women, looking to stop the use of an abortion pill that was been on the market for decades... At that point, she cried "OMG, The Handmaiden is Happening!"
After that conversation was over and I was home, I pulled up my copy of The Handmaid's Tale. It seemed like I was led to be reading it now.. I knew immediately what my friend meant. At the end, I began to read the Historical Notes, but at first overlooked the date 2195... I went in search of what is referred to as the Gileadean Regime. Which was to have been the time during which a religious group had taken over America... Suddenly I had to agree. The Handmaid's Tale was now moving forward as had begun during the beginning of the decade... I've added a few videos for immediate reference, but you will find many more on YouTube... Women have been talking about this book since 2016, in particular!
The main character is a young woman, much like my friend, who has a loving husband and a child. Soon, both of them have disappeared and she never sees them again. As we watch the woman, now given another name, which, if something happens to her, will be immediately given to another young female, she imagines what might have happened to her family. And she strives to remember the past, what was happening in her life and in the world... She is not allowed to have any contact with that world; she remembers though and hopes she will not lose those memories--of Luke, her husband and her child, a little girl... Once during the book, a picture of her daughter was shared by the wife of the man who now owned her... She wants a child enough that she is willing to bargain with his Handmaid... She thinks the problem may be with her husband, so she arranges for the Handmaid to have sex with their chauffeur...
There is more than one handmaid(s) for this man. We never know exactly who or what he does. It is irrelevant since they are closeted away and are only seen when sex is to occur. Both of the prospective parents are included in this charade... It is described in the book; it is terrible to visualize...
And then after been raped by her owner a number of times, he arranges through his driver to have her visit him in his office. Interestingly, he asks her to play a board game... As time goes by, he introduces a magazine no longer in print, having been banned, and allows her to sit in the room to read it; he sits watching her... and they talk. He shares that he and his wife no longer talk to each other like they once did. He misses that. She now talks mostly with the wives of other leaders, as they are permitted to interact only with them... It seems that every woman who is living at the time, has been given a job in their new locations... Marthas, for instance are the cooks, obviously named after the two sisters in the Bible, Martha being the one who quickly prepares a meal when Jesus visits...
But there is little to do about religion in this world in which a new world has been created... except what is important to ensure that women know their places... the reason seems to be close to what is being spouted now... white women are not now producing enough children... something had to be done... work was no longer possible. The women needed to be free to be available for those times when it was possible to get pregnant. Nothing else mattered.
The entire book is centered into one household full of women--and one older man. Other men may work for the man as well; but the women all had specific tasks. And those who "believed" in what was happening were called Aunts; they were to train, supervise, and, if necessary, punish the handmaids. A cow prod was used.
Soon the woman who has a new name is comfortable enough with the head of the house to have him ask her if she would like to have an adventure... She is taken to what we would call a brothel, she is dressed for the occasion from old, used, sex-oriented clothing that has been hidden away after all such activities were forbidden in the world... Only men of the Gilead Regime were members of the Club... And, yes, it was a sex club where the leaders of the group participated in their sexual interests--beyond what were performed with the Handmaids with their wives. Sound familiar?
I consider this a must-read for every woman, and man, who will be left without a wife or forced to give up all children from their marriage... Margaret Atwood watched what was happening. She wrote a futuristic novel to illustrate what she foresaw... I, too, now firmly believe, "The Handmaid Tale is NOW Happening..."
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