stupid passages Flashcards
No guns though, even they could not be trusted with guns. Guns were for the guards, specially picked from the Angels
The guards weren’t allowed inside the building except when called, and we
weren’t allowed out, except for our walks, twice daily, two by two around the football field which was enclosed now by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
The Angels stood outside it with their backs to us.
They were objects of fear to us, but of something else as well.
If only they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some trade-off, we still had our bodies.
That was our fantasy.
We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semi-darkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren’t looking, and touch each other’s hands across space. We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other’s mouths.
In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed
Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.
first chapter, HIERARCHY, CONFINEMENT, GENDER ROLES
Or we would gossip. The Marthas know things, they talk among themselves, passing the unofficial news from house to house. Like me, they listen at doors, no doubt, and see things even with their eyes averted. I’ve heard them at it sometimes, caught whiffs of their private conversations. Stillborn, it was. Or, Stabbed her with a knitting needle, right in the belly. Jealousy, it must have been, eating her up.
Or, tantalizingly, It was toilet cleaner she used. Worked like a charm, though you’d think he’d of tasted it. Must’ve been that drunk; but they found her out all right.
Or I would help Rita make the bread, sinking my hands into that soft resistant warmth which is so much like flesh. I hunger to touch something, other than cloth or wood. I hunger to commit the act of touch.
But even if I were to ask, even if I were to violate decorum to that extent, Rita would not allow it. She would be too afraid. The Marthas are not supposed to fraternize with us.
Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin. He liked knowing about such details. The derivations of words, curious usages. I used to tease him about being pedantic.
chapter 2: DIVISION, PATRIARCHAL LANGUAGE, IDENTITY
So you’re the new one, she said, She didn’t step aside to
let me in, she just stood there in the doorway, blocking the
entrance. She wanted me to feel that I could not come into
the house unless she said so. There is push and shove, these
days, over such toeholds
Yes, I said
Leave it on the porch. She said this to the Guardian, who
was carrying my bag, with the winter cloak and heavier
dresses, but that would be coming later.
The Guardian set down the bag and saluted her. Then I
could hear his footsteps behind me, going back down the
walk, and the click of the front gate, and I felt as if a
protective arm were being withdrawn. The threshold of a
new house is a lonely place.
chapter 3: DIVISION and HIERARCHY WITHIN GENDER
This woman has been my partner for two weeks. I don’t
know what happened to the one before. On a certain day she simply
wasn’t there anymore, and this one was there in her
place. It isn’t the sort of thing you ask questions about,
because the answers are not usually answers you want to
know. Anyway there wouldn’t be an answer
This one is a little plumper than I am. Her eyes are brown.
Her name is Ofglen, and that’s about all I know about her.
She walks demurely, head down, red-gloved hands clasped in
front, with short little steps like a trained pig’s on its hind
legs. During these walks she has never said anything that was
not strictly orthodox, but then, neither have I. She may
be a real believer, a Handmaid in more than name.
I can’t take the risk.
“The war is going well, I hear,” she says
“Praise be,” I reply.
chapter 4: INDIVIDUALITY, VALUE, NOMENCLATURE/LANGUAGE
I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out
but that every woman knew: don’t open your door to a
stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his
ID under the door. Don’t stop on the road to help a motorist
pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep
going. If anyone whistles, don’t turn to look. Don’t go into a
laundromat, by yourself, at night.
I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts,
jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes,
my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I
think about having such control.
Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no
man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No
one whistles.
There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia.
Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was
freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t
underrate it.
chapter 5: FREEDOM
These men, we’ve been told, are like criminals. It’s no
excuse that what they did was legal at the time: their crimes
are retroactive. They have committed atrocities, and must be
made into examples, for the rest. Though this is hardly needed.
No woman in her right mind, these days, would seek to
prevent a birth, should she be so lucky as to conceive.
What we are supposed to feel towards these bodies is hatred
and scorn. This isn’t what I feel. These bodies hanging on the
Wall are time travelers, anachronisms. They’ve come here from
the past.
What I feel towards them is blankness. What I feel is that I must
not feel. What I feel is partly relief, because none of these men is
Luke. Luke wasn’t a doctor. Isn’t.
chapter 6: SYSTEMIC CHALLENGES
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to
believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such
stories are only stories have a better chance.
If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the
Ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real
life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
It isn’t a story I’m telling.
It’s also a story I’m telling, in my head, as I go along.
Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with, and writing is in any case forbidden.
But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t
tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else
Even when there is no one.
chapter 7: STORIES MOTIF
I put my gloved hand
on the latch of the gate, open it, push inward. The gate clicks
behind me. The tulips along the border are redder than ever,
opening, no longer winecups but chalices; thrusting them-
selves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When
they are old they turn themselves inside out, then explode
slowly, the petals thrown out like shards.
…
In your hands, she said, looking down at her
own hands as if they had given her the idea. But there was
nothing in them. They were empty. It was our hands that
were supposed to be full, of the future; which could be held
but not seen.
chapter 8: FEMALE REPRODUCTION IMAGERY
I was nervous. How was I to know he loved me? It might
be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that
time, men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits,
rejecting whatever did not fit.
The knock would come at the door; I’d open, with relief,
desire. He was so momentary, so condensed. And yet there
seemed no end to him. We would lie on those afternoon beds,
afterwards, hands on each other, talking it over. Possible,
impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such
problems. How were we to know we were happy?
But now it’s the rooms themselves I miss as well, even the
dreadful paintings that hung on the walls, landscapes with fall
foliage or snow melting in hardwood, or women in period
costume, with china-doll faces and bustles and parasols, or
sad-eyed clown, or bowls of fruit, stiff and chalky looking.
chapter 9: RELATIONSHIPS + TENSION
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 instantly: 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 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 the print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.
chapter 10: IGNORANCE vs IGNORING (NOSTALGIA)
“I hate to see what they put you through,” he murmurs. It’s genuine, genuine sympathy; and yet he’s enjoying this, sympathy and all. His eyes are moist with compassion, his hand is moving on me, nervously and with impatience.
“It’s too dangerous,” I say. “No. I can’t.” The penalty is death. But they have to catch you in the act, with two witnesses. What are the odds, is the room bugged, who’s waiting just outside the door?
His hand stops. “Think about it,” he says. “I’ve seen your chart. You don’t have a lot of time left. But it’s your life.”
“Thank you,” I say. Imust leave the impression that I’m not offended, that I’m open to suggestion. He takes his hand away, lazily almost, lingeringly, this is not the last word as far as he’s concerned. He could fake the tests, report me for cancer, for infertility, have me shipped off to the Colonies, with the Unwomen. None of this has been said, but the knowledge of his power hangs nevertheless in the air as he pats my thigh,withdrew himself behind the hanging sheet.
“Next month,” he says.
I put on my clothes again, behind the screen, My hands are shaking. Why am I frightened? I’ve crossed no boundaries, I’ve given no trust, taken no risk, all is safe. It’s the choice that terrifies me. A way out, a salvation.
chapter 11: HARASSMENT, POWER DYNAMICS
My nakedness is strange to me already. My body seems outdated. Did I really wear bathing suits, at the beach? I did, without thought, among men, without caring that my legs, my arms, my thighs and back were on display, could be seen. Shameful, immodest. I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.
I step into the water, lie down, let it hold me. The water is soft as hands. I close my eyes, and she’s there with me, suddenly, without warning, it must be the smell of the soap. I put my face against the soft hair at the back of her neck and breathe her in, baby powder and child’s washed flesh and shampoo, with an undertone, the faint scent of urine. This is the age she is when I’m in the bath. She comes back to me at different ages. This is how I know she’s not really a ghost. If she were a ghost she would be the same age always.
chapter 12: MEMORY, BODILY CONTROL
I wait, washed, brushed, fed, like a prize pig. Sometime in the eighties they invented pig balls, for pigs who were being fattened in pens. Pig balls were large colored balls; the pigs rolled them around with their snouts. The pig marketers said this improved their muscle tone; the pigs were curious, they liked to have something to think about.
I read about that in introduction to Psychology; that, and the chapter on caged rats who’d give themselves electric shocks for something to do. And the one on the pigeons, trained to peck a button that made a grain of corn appear. Three groups of them: the first got one grain per peck, the second one grain every other peck, the third was random. When the man in charge cut off the grain, the first group gave up quite soon, the second group a little later. The third group never gave up. They’d peck themselves to death, rather than quit. Who knew what worked?
I wish I had a pig ball.
chapter 13: BOREDOM
It’s a Saturday morning in September, I’m wearing my shining name. The little girl who is now dead sits in the back seat, with her two best dolls,
her stuffed rabbit, mangy with age and love. I know all the details. They are sentimental details but I can’t help that. I can’t think about the rabbit too
much though, I can’t start to cry, here on the Chinese rug, breathing in the smoke that has been inside Serena’s body. Not here, not now, I can do that later.
She thought we were going on a picnic, and in fact there is a picnic basket on the back seat, beside her, with real food in it, hard-boiled eggs, thermos and all. We didn’t want her to know where we were really going, we didn’t want her to tell, by mistake, reveal anything, if we were stopped. We didn’t want to lay upon her the burden of our truth.
chapter 14: PRESERVATION
To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have them watching him all the time. To have them wondering, What’s he going to do next? To have them flinch when he moves, even if it’s a harmless enough move, to reach for an ashtray perhaps. To Have them sizing him up. To have them thinking, he can’t do it, he won’t do, he’ll have to do, this last as if he were a garment, out of style or shoddy, which must nevertheless be put on because there’s nothing else available.
To have them putting him on, trying him on, trying him out, while he himself puts them on, like a sock over a foot, onto the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate slug’s eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf, into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way, this journey into a darkness that is composed of women, a woman, who can see in darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.
chapter 15: GENDER HIERARCHY
