Only in heaven, I thought. And this is not heaven. This is a place of snakes and ladders, and though I was once high up on a ladder propped against the Tree of Life, now I’ve slid down a snake. How gratifying for the others to witness my fall! No wonder Shunammite could not resist spreading such baleful and pleasing news. Already I could hear the snickering behind my back: Slut, slut, daughter of a slut.
Aunt Vidala and Aunt Estée must know as well. The two of them must always have known. It was the kind of secret the Aunts knew. That was how they got their power, according to the Marthas: from knowing secrets.
And Aunt Lydia—whose frown-smiling gold-framed picture with the ugly brown uniform hung at the backs of our schoolrooms—must know the most secrets of all because she had the most power. What would Aunt Lydia have to say about my plight? Would she help me? Would she understand my unhappiness, would she save me? But was Aunt Lydia even a real person? I had never seen her. Maybe she was like God—real but unreal at the same time. What if I were to pray to Aunt Lydia at night, instead of to God?
I did try, later in the week. But the idea was too unthinkable—praying to a woman—so I stopped.
16
I went through the rest of that terrible afternoon as if sleepwalking. We were embroidering sets of petit-point handkerchiefs for the Aunts, with flowers on them to go with their names—echinacea for Elizabeth, hyacinths for Helena, violets for Vidala. I was doing lilacs for Lydia, and I stuck a needle halfway into my finger without noticing it until Shunammite said, “There’s blood on your petit point.” Gabriela—a scrawny, smart-mouthed girl who was now as popular as I had once been because her father had been promoted to three Marthas—whispered, “Maybe she’s finally getting her period, out her finger,” and everyone laughed because most of them already had theirs, even Becka. Aunt Vidala heard the laughing and looked up from her book and said, “That’s enough of that.”
Aunt Estée took me to the washroom and we rinsed off the blood on my hand, and she put a bandage on my finger, but the petit-point handkerchief had to be soaked in cold water, which is the way we’d been taught that you got out blood, especially from white cloth. Getting out blood was something we would have to know as Wives, said Aunt Vidala, as it would be part of our duties: we would have to supervise our Marthas to make sure they did it right. Cleaning up things such as blood and other substances that came out of bodies was part of women’s duty of caring for other people, especially little children and the elderly, said Aunt Estée, who always put things in a positive light. That was a talent women had because of their special brains, which were not hard and focused like the brains of men but soft and damp and warm and enveloping, like…like what? She didn’t finish the sentence.
Like mud in the sun, I thought. That’s what was inside my head: warmed-up mud.
“Is anything wrong, Agnes?” Aunt Estée asked after my finger had been cleaned up. I said no.
“Then why are you crying, my dear?” It seemed that I was: tears were coming out of my eyes, out of my damp and muddy head, despite my effort to control them.
“Because it hurts!” I said, sobbing now. She didn’t ask what hurt, though she must have known it wasn’t really my needled finger. She put her arm around me and gave me a little squeeze.
“So many things hurt,” she said. “But we must try to be cheerful. God likes cheerfulness. He likes us to appreciate the nice things in the world.” We heard a lot about the likes and dislikes of God from the Aunts who taught us, especially Aunt Vidala, who seemed to be on very close terms. Shunammite once said she was going to ask Aunt Vidala what God liked for breakfast, which scandalized the more timid girls, but she never actually did it.
I wondered what God thought about mothers, both real and unreal. But I knew there was no point in questioning Aunt Estée about my real mother and how Tabitha had chosen me, or even how old I’d been at the time. The Aunts at school avoided talking to us about our parents.
When I got home that day, I cornered Zilla in the kitchen, where she was making biscuits, and repeated everything that Shunammite had told me at lunchtime.
“Your friend has a big mouth,” was what she said. “She should keep it shut more often.” Unusually harsh words, coming from her.
“But is it true?” I said. I still half-hoped, then, that she would deny the whole story.
She sighed. “How’d you like to help me make the biscuits?”
But I was too old to be bribed with simple gifts like that. “Just tell me,” I said. “Please.”
“Well,” she said. “According to your new stepmother, yes. That story is true. Or something like it.”
“So Tabitha wasn’t my mother,” I said, holding back the fresh tears that were coming, keeping my voice steady.
“It depends what you mean by a mother,” said Zilla. “Is your mother the one who gives birth to you or the one who loves you the most?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the one who loves you the most?”
“Then Tabitha was your mother,” said Zilla, cutting out the biscuits. “And we Marthas are your mothers too, because we love you as well. Though it may not always seem so to you.” She lifted each round biscuit with the pancake flipper and placed it onto the baking sheet. “We all have your best interests at heart.”
This made me distrust her a little because Aunt Vidala said similar things about our best interests, usually before doling out a punishment. She liked to switch us on the legs where it wouldn’t show, and sometimes higher up, making us bend over and raise our skirts. Sometimes she would do that to a girl in front of the whole class. “What happened to her?” I asked. “My other mother? The one who was running through the forest? After they took me away?”
“I don’t truly know,” said Zilla, not looking at me, sliding the biscuits into the hot oven. I wanted to ask if I could have one when they came out—I craved warm biscuits—but this seemed like a childish request to make in the middle of such a serious conversation.
“Did they shoot her? Did they kill her?”
“Oh no,” said Zilla. “They wouldn’t have done that.”
“Why?”
“Because she could have babies. She had you, didn’t she? That was proof she could. They would never kill a valuable woman like that unless they really couldn’t help it.” She paused to let this sink in. “Most likely they would see if she could be…The Aunts at the Rachel and Leah Centre would pray with her; they would talk to her at first, to see if it was possible to change her mind about things.”
There were rumours about the Rachel and Leah Centre at school, but they were vague: none of us knew what went on inside it. Still, just being prayed over by a bunch of Aunts would be scary. Not all of them were as gentle as Aunt Estée. “And what if they couldn’t change her mind?” I asked. “Would they kill her then? Is she dead?”
“Oh, I’m sure they changed her mind,” said Zilla. “They’re good at that. Hearts and minds—they change them.”
“Where is she now, then?” I asked. “My mother—the real—the other one?” I wondered if that mother remembered me. She must remember me. She must have loved me or she wouldn’t have tried to take me with her when she was running away.
“None of us know that, dear,” said Zilla. “Once they become Handmaids they don’t have their old names anymore, and in those outfits they wear you can hardly see their faces. They all look the same.”
“She’s a Handmaid?” I asked. It was true, then, what Shunammite had said. “My mother?”