Margaret Atwood - The Testaments

Ada didn’t look to me like the charitable type. She wasn’t soft and smiling, she was angular, and when she walked she strode. She never stayed long, and she never left without a couple of cardboard boxes of castoffs, which she stowed in whatever car she’d parked in the alleyway behind the store. I could see these cars from where I sat. They were never the same.

—

There was a third kind of person who came into The Clothes Hound without buying anything. These were the young women in long silvery dresses and white hats who called themselves Pearl Girls and said they were missionaries doing God’s work for Gilead. They were a lot creepier than George. They worked the downtown, talking to street people and going into shops and making pests of themselves. Some people were rude to them, but Melanie never was because she said it served no purpose.

They always appeared in twos. They had white pearl necklaces and smiled a lot, but not real smiling. They would offer Melanie their printed brochures with pictures of tidy streets, happy children, and sunrises, and titles that were supposed to lure you to Gilead: “Fallen? God Can Still Forgive You!” “Homeless? There Is a Home for You in Gilead.”

There was always at least one brochure about Baby Nicole. “Give Back Baby Nicole!” “Baby Nicole Belongs in Gilead!” We’d been shown a documentary about Baby Nicole at school: her mother was a Handmaid, and she’d smuggled Baby Nicole out of Gilead. Baby Nicole’s father was a top-brass super-nasty Gilead Commander, so there had been a huge uproar, and Gilead had demanded her return, so she could be reunited with her legal parents. Canada had dragged its feet and then caved in and said they would make every effort, but by that time Baby Nicole had disappeared and had never been found.

Now Baby Nicole was the poster child for Gilead. On every Pearl Girls brochure there was the same picture of her. She looked like a baby, nothing special, but she was practically a saint in Gilead, said our teacher. She was an icon for us too: every time there was an anti-Gilead protest in Canada, there would be the picture, and slogans like BABY NICOLE! SYMBOL OF FREEDOM! Or BABY NICOLE! LEADING THE WAY! As if a baby could lead the way on anything, I would think to myself.

I’d basically disliked Baby Nicole since I’d had to do a paper on her. I’d got a C because I’d said she was being used as a football by both sides, and it would be the greatest happiness of the greatest number just to give her back. The teacher had said I was callous and should learn to respect other people’s rights and feelings, and I’d said people in Gilead were people, and shouldn’t their rights and feelings be respected too? She’d lost her temper and said I needed to grow up, which was maybe true: I’d been aggravating on purpose. But I was angry about the C.

Every time the Pearl Girls came, Melanie would accept the brochures and promise to keep a pile of them at point of sale. Sometimes she would even give some of the old brochures back to them: they collected the leftover ones for use in other countries.

“Why do you do that?” I asked her when I was fourteen and taking a greater interest in politics. “Neil says we’re atheists. You’re just encouraging them.” We’d had three modules in school on Gilead: it was a terrible, terrible place, where women couldn’t have jobs or drive cars, and where the Handmaids were forced to get pregnant like cows, except that cows had a better deal. What sort of people could be on the side of Gilead and not be some kind of monsters? Especially female people. “Why don’t you tell them they’re evil?”

“There’s no point arguing with them,” said Melanie. “They’re fanatics.”

“Then I’ll tell them.” I thought I knew what was wrong with people then, especially adult people. I thought I could set them straight. The Pearl Girls were older than me, it isn’t as if they were children: how could they believe all that crap?

“No,” said Melanie quite sharply. “Stay in the back. I don’t want you talking to them.”

“Why not? I can deal—”

“They try to con girls your age into going to Gilead with them. They’ll say the Pearl Girls are helping women and girls. They’ll appeal to your idealism.”

“I would never fall for that!” I said indignantly. “I’m not fucking brain-dead.” I didn’t usually swear around Melanie and Neil, but sometimes those words just slipped out.

“Watch the potty mouth,” said Melanie. “It makes a bad impression.”

“Sorry. But I’m not.”

“Of course not,” said Melanie. “But just leave them alone. If I take the brochures, they go away.”

“Are their pearls real?”

“Fake,” said Melanie. “Everything about them is fake.”

9

Despite all that she did for me, Melanie had a distant smell. She smelled like a floral guest soap in a strange house I was visiting. What I mean is, she didn’t smell to me like my mother.

One of my favourite books at the school library when I was younger was about a man who got himself into a wolf pack. This man could never take a bath because the wolf pack scent would wash off and then the wolves would reject him. With Melanie and me, it was more like we needed to add on that layer of pack-scent, the thing that would tag us as us—us-together. But that never happened. We were never very snuggly.

Also, Neil and Melanie weren’t like the parents of the kids I knew. They were too careful around me, as if I was breakable. It was like I was a prize cat they were cat-sitting: you’d take your own cat for granted, you’d be casual about it, but someone else’s cat would be another story because if you lost that cat you would feel guilty about it in a completely different way.

Another thing: the kids from school had pictures of themselves—a lot of pictures. Their parents documented every minute of their lives. Some of the kids even had photos of themselves being born, which they’d brought to Show and Tell. I used to think that was gross—blood and great big legs, with a little head coming out from between them. And they had baby pictures of themselves, hundreds of them. These kids could hardly burp without some adult pointing a camera at them and telling them to do it again—as if they lived their lives twice, once in reality and the second time for the photo.

That didn’t happen to me. Neil’s collection of antique cameras was cool, but cameras that actually worked were non-existent in our house. Melanie told me that all the early pictures of me had been burnt up in a fire. Only an idiot would have believed this, so I did.

—

Now I’m going to tell you about the stupid thing I did, and the consequences of it. I’m not proud of how I behaved: looking back, I realize how dumb it was. But I couldn’t see that at the time.

A week before my birthday, there was going to be a protest march about Gilead. Footage of a new batch of executions had been smuggled out of Gilead and broadcast on the news: women being hanged for heresy and apostasy and also for trying to take babies out of Gilead, which was treason under their laws. The two oldest grades in our school had been given time off so we could go to the protest as part of World Social Awareness.

We’d made signs: NO TRADE WITH GILEAD! JUSTICE FOR GILIBAD WOMEN! BABY NICOLE, GUIDING STAR! Some kids had added green signs: GILEAD, CLIMATE SCIENCE DE-LIAR! GILEAD WANTS US TO FRY!, with pictures of forest fires and dead birds and fish and people. Several teachers and some volunteer parents were going to come with us to make sure nothing violent happened to us. I was excited because it would be my first-ever protest march. But then Neil and Melanie said I couldn’t go.

“Why not?” I said. “Everyone else is going!”