“And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.
“Notwithstanding she shall be saved by childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.”
Saved by childbearing, I think. What did we suppose would save us, in the time before?
“He should tell that to the Wives,” Ofglen murmurs, “when they’re into the sherry.” She means the part about sobriety. It’s safe to talk again, the Commander has finished the main ritual and they’re doing the rings, lifting the veils. Boo, I think in my head. Take a good look, because it’s too late now. The Angels will qualify for Handmaids, later, especially if their new Wives can’t produce. But you girls are stuck. What you see is what you get, zits and all. But you aren’t expected to love him. You’ll find that out soon enough. Just do your duty in silence. When in doubt, when flat on your back, you can look at the ceiling. Who knows what you may see, up there? Funeral wreaths and angels, constellations of dust, stellar or otherwise, the puzzles left by spiders. There’s always something to occupy the inquiring mind.
Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went.
No, why?
You moved.
Just don’t move.
What we’re aiming for, says Aunt Lydia, is a spirit of camaraderie among women. We must all pull together.
Camaraderie, shit, says Moira through the hole in the toilet cubicle. Right fucking on, Aunt Lydia, as they used to say. How much you want to bet she’s got Janine down on her knees? What you think they get up to in that office of hers? I bet she’s got her working away on that dried-up hairy old withered –
Moira! I say.
Moira what? she whispers. You know you’ve thought it.
It doesn’t do any good to talk like that, I say, feeling nevertheless the impulse to giggle. But I still pretended to myself, then, that we should try to preserve something resembling dignity.
You were always such a wimp, Moira says, but with affection. It does so do good. It does.
And she’s right, I know that now as I kneel on this undeniably hard floor, listening to the ceremony drone on. There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It’s like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with. In the paint of the washroom cubicle someone unknown had scratched: Aunt Lydia sucks. It was like a flag waved from a hilltop in rebellion. The mere idea of Aunt Lydia doing such a thing was in itself heartening.
So now I imagine, among these Angels and their drained white brides, momentous grunts and sweating, damp furry encounters; or, better, ignominious failures, cocks like three-week-old carrots, anguished rumblings upon flesh cold and unresponding as uncooked fish.
When it’s over at last and we are walking out, Ofglen says to me in her light, penetrating whisper: “We know you’re seeing him alone.”
“Who?” I say, resisting the urge to look at her. I know who.
“Your Commander,” she says. “We know you have been.”
I ask her how.
“We just know,” she says. “What does he want? Kinky sex?”
It would be hard to explain to her what he does want, because I still have no name for it. How can I describe what really goes on between us? She would laugh, for one thing. It’s easier for me to say, “In a way.” That at least has the dignity of coercion.
She thinks about this. “You’d be surprised,” she says, “how many of them do.”
“I can’t help it,” I say. “I can’t say I won’t go.” She ought to know that.
We’re on the sidewalk now and it’s not safe to talk, we’re too close to the others and the protective whispering of the crowd is gone. We walk in silence, lagging behind, until finally she judges she can say, “Of course you can’t. But find out and tell us.”
“Find out what?” I say.
I feel rather than see the slight turning of her head. “Anything you can.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Now there’s a space to be filled, in the too-warm air of my room, and a time also; a space-time, between here and now and there and then, punctuated by dinner. The arrival of the tray, carried up the stairs as if for an invalid. An invalid, one who has been invalidated. No valid passport. No exit.
That was what happened, the day we tried to cross at the border, with our fresh passports that said we were not who we were: that Luke, for instance, had never been divorced, that we were therefore lawful, under the new law.
The man went inside with our passports, after we’d explained about the picnic and he’d glanced into the car and seen our daughter asleep, in her zoo of mangy animals. Luke patted my arm and got out of the car as if to stretch his legs and watched the man through the window of the immigration building. I stayed in the car. I lit a cigarette, to steady myself, and drew the smoke in, a long breath of counterfeit relaxation. I was watching two soldiers in the unfamiliar uniforms that were beginning, by then, to be familiar; they were standing idly beside the yellow-and-black-striped lift-up barrier. They weren’t doing much. One of them was watching a flock of birds, gulls, lifting and eddying and landing on the bridge railing beyond. Watching him, I watched them too. Everything was the colour it usually is, only brighter.