“You have two houses?” That one came from the back seat, from the bolder girl, the one who’d been in the Punishment Hut. I had a feeling that the Punishment Hut could be a badge of honor for these girls.
Fruitful, her name was. Daisy had better get onto those names pretty smartly, because they were awful.
“Yeh,” I told her, looking in the rearview mirror and seeing both girls look away fast. Not allowed to meet a man’s eyes? What kind of horrible place was that? “I do.”
“I didn’t know anybody had two houses,” Fruitful said. “It sounds sinful.”
I laughed out loud at that. “Oh, we’re all sinful,” I told her. “Haven’t you heard? The trick is knowing it and trying to do better. At least that’s what the man said.” I smiled at her in the mirror again. Let them get used to it this way, once removed. “My mum’s not very sinful, though. She’s pretty safe harbor, my mum. You’ll see.”
9
Hope and Change
Daisy
This time through, it was light enough to see the town.
I tried to experience it as my sisters would. They’d have come here, same as me, every year or so for the odd dental appointment, or an illness or injury that wouldn’t resolve with home remedies. They’d have kept their eyes cast down as they crossed the pavements, aware of the looks, the whispers and laughter. Maybe they’d have looked around when their chaperone’s attention was distracted, though, trying to take in all the overstimulating excess and make sense of it.
The scenic, much-photographed lake with the mountains rising above it in all their snow-capped splendor, you’re thinking. Wanaka, the beauty spot. That isn’t the part that overwhelms you, though, if you’ve grown up in the shadow of the Southern Alps and views like that have been the backdrop to your entire life. No, it’s the cafés spilling out onto the pavement, the tempting shops with all those different, decorative objects in the windows. It’s all that humanity, the boldness and the individuality of it. Everybody dressed differently, everybody expressing themselves, competing for the world’s attention. The singlets and shorts, the bare shoulders and legs, and the women with their loose hair, their makeup, the confident way they moved. As if they owned their own bodies and their own selves, as if they were entitled to take up their own space and nobody was going to tell them different.
And then the dentist’s office itself. Had Fruitful jumped out of the chair the moment the dentist left the room to grab a copy of Woman’s Weekly or Next off the table in the same way I had, stuffing it down inside her undies like the contraband it was? Had she crept away to the hollowed-out trunk in the stand of poplars the next day to find the spot where she’d stashed it after Laundry Rotation, then sat on the ground with her knees pulled up and the magazine resting on them, poring over some blond celebrity’s description of her first crush, first kiss, first car? Had she rolled the idea over in her mind of a boy you could dream about and kiss and touch, a boy you could choose for yourself, when you wanted? Or not choose, if you wanted that? Had she been ashamed of her thoughts, known she couldn’t share them with anyone, but been unable to keep them from crowding in?
Had she even, maybe, read an interview with the Prime Minister, jolted by the concept that a woman could lead a nation of men, and that they’d allow it?
I gazed through my sisters’ eyes at the town, just starting to wake in the dawn light. A man in a fluorescent vest out collecting rubbish with a spiked pole, a woman opening the doors to a café. And I wondered how much of my impetus to run had come not from the treatment I’d received in Mount Zion, but from those tantalizing glimpses of Outside.
If you want to keep somebody prisoner, don’t let her see outside the cell. It’s not so much your punishments that will drive her to escape, you see. It’s that square of blue sky.
You can try to oppress a woman. You can hurt her and demean her. You can make her question her abilities and even her sanity, and make her doubt that she can survive on her own. You can do all of that, but it’s her hope that will defeat you in