The Handmaid’s Tale

Behind this sign there are other signs, and the camera notices them briefly: FREEDOM TO CHOOSE. EVERY BABY A WANTED BABY.

RECAPTURE OUR BODIES. DO YOU BELIEVE A WOMAN'S PLACE IS ON

THE, KItchen TABLE? Under the last sign there's a line drawing of a woman's body, lying on a table, blood dripping out of it.

Now my mother is moving forward, she's smiling, laughing, they all move forward, and now they're raising their fists in the air. The camera moves to the sky, where hundreds of balloons rise, trailing their strings: red balloons, with a circle painted on them, a circle with a stem like the stem of an apple, the stem of a cross. Back on the earth, my mother is part of the crowd now, and I can't see her anymore.

I had you when I was thirty-seven, my mother said. It was a risk, you could have been deformed or something. You were a wanted child, all right, and did I get shit from some quarters! My oldest buddy Tricia accused me of being pronatalist, the bitch. Jealousy, I put that down to. Some of the others were okay though. But when I was six months' pregnant, a lot of them started sending me these articles about how the birth-defect rate went zooming up after thirty-five. Just what I needed. And stuff about how hard it was to be a single parent. Fuck that shit, I told them, I've started this and I'm going to finish it. At the hospital they wrote down "Aged Pri-mipara" on the chart, I caught them in the act. That's what they call you when it's your first baby over thirty, over thirty for god-sake. Garbage, I told them, biologically I'm twenty-two, I could run rings around you any day. I could have triplets and walk out of here while you were still trying to get up off the bed.

When she said that she'd jut out her chin. I remember her like that, her chin jutted out, a drink in front of her on the kitchen table; not young and earnest and pretty the way she was in the movie, but wiry, spunky, the kind of old woman who won't let anyone butt in front of her in a supermarket line. She liked to come over to my house and have a drink while Luke and I were fixing di

That was the way she talked, even in front of Luke. He didn't mind, he teased her by pretending to be macho, he'd tell her women were incapable of abstract thought and she'd have another drink and grin at him.

Chauvinist pig, she'd say.

Isn't she quaint, Luke would say to me, and my mother would look sly, furtive almost.

I'm entitled, she'd say. I'm old enough, I've paid my dues, it's time for me to be quaint. You're still wet behind the ears. Piglet, I should have said.

As for you, she'd say to me, you're just a backlash. Flash in the pan. History will absolve me.

But she wouldn't say things like that until after the third drink.

You young people don't appreciate things, she'd say. You don't know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are. Look at him, slicing up the carrots. Don't you know how many women's lives, how many women's bodies, the tanks had to roll over just to get that far?

Cooking's my hobby, Luke would say. I enjoy it.

Hobby, schmobby, my mother would say. You don't have to make excuses to me. Once upon a time you wouldn't have been allowed to have such a hobby, they'd have called you queer.

Now, Mother, I would say. Let's not get into an argument about nothing.

Nothing, she'd say bitterly. You call it nothing. You don't un derstand, do you. You don't understand at all what I'm talking about.

Sometimes she would cry. I was so lonely, she'd say. You have no idea how lonely I was. And I had friends, I was a lucky one, but I was lonely anyway.

I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.

I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

21

It's hot in here, and too noisy. The women's voices rise around me, a soft chant that is still too loud for me, after the days and days of silence. In the corner of the room there's a bloodstained sheet, bundled and tossed there, from when the waters broke. I hadn't noticed it before.

The room smells too, the air is close, they should open a window. The smell is of our own flesh, an organic smell, sweat and a tinge of iron, from the blood on the sheet, and another smell, more animal, that's coming, it must be, from Janine: a smell of dens, of inhabited caves, the smell of the plaid blanket on the bed when the cat gave birth on it, once, before she was spayed. Smell of matrix.

"Breathe, breathe," we chant, as we have been taught, "Hold, hold. Expel, expel, expel." We chant to the count of five. Five in, hold for five, out for five. Janine, her eyes closed, tries to slow her breathing. Aunt Elizabeth feels for the contractions.

Now Janine is restless, she wants to walk. The two women help her off the bed, support her on either side while she paces. A contraction hits her, she doubles over. One of the women kneels and rubs her back. We are all good at this, we've had lessons. I recognize Ofglen, my shopping partner, sitting two away from me. The soft chanting envelops us like a membrane.

A Martha arrives, with a tray: a jug of fruit juice, the kind you make from powder, grape it looks like, and a stack of paper cups. She sets it on the rug in front of the chanting women. Ofglen, not missing a beat, pours, and the paper cups pass down the line.

I receive a cup, lean to the side to pass it, and the woman next to me says, low in my ear, "Are you looking for anyone?"

"Moira," I say, just as low. "Dark hair, freckles."

"No," the woman says. I don't know this woman, she wasn't at the Center with me, though I've seen her, shopping. "But I'll watch for you."

"Are you?" I say.

"Alma," she says. "What's your real name?"

I want to tell her there was an Alma with me at the Center. I want to tell her my name, but Aunt Elizabeth raises her head, staring around the room, she must have heard a break in the chant, so there's no more time. Sometimes you can find things out, on Birth Days. But there would be no point in asking about Luke. He wouldn't be where any of these women would be likely to see him.

The chanting goes on, it begins to catch me. It's hard work, you're supposed to concentrate. Identify with your body, said Aunt Elizabeth. Already I can feel slight pains, in my belly, and my breasts are heavy. Janine screams, a weak scream, partway between a scream and a groan.

"She's going into transition," says Aunt Elizabeth.