“He can’t,” I said. “Not with that.” It was a thin gold band, and that was all. “Bring it with you, though, and we’ll help you can get rid of it.”
Daisy said, “Yes.”
“But what else?” Obedience asked. “It can’t be sewn into the hem of a dress, because you have two dresses, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wearing the right one. And would a … a chip be waterproof? For washing?”
Daisy told me, “Washing at Mount Zion is done communally, like everything else. No, I don’t think a dress would work. A bra would be better, with the chip tucked into a pocket in the center, maybe, where you could have some reinforcing anyway. You’d always be wearing your bra. You have two of those, too, but if one was in the washing basket, he could go in at night and get the chip out again.”
Fruitful closed her eyes for a second. Imagining, I was sure, a tracking chip tucked into her bra, over her heart. She opened them again and said, “I threw my bra in the rubbish today, as soon as we bought the new ones. I’ll go get it and see.” The tears were gone, replaced by action. Exactly like Daisy.
She turned for the cupboard under the sink and hauled out the metal bin, and I said, “I’ll do it.”
“It’s not for you to do,” Fruitful said. “It’s for me.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. “I don’t care that it’s a … kitchen task, or whatever you’re thinking. It’s a dirty, disgusting job, and I’ll be glad to do it.”
“No,” Fruitful said. “I don’t care what you say. I’m doing it.”
She said it like a tigress. I stepped back, put up my hands, and said, “Fine. You do it.”
Daisy pulled out another rubbish bag without comment, and the two of them went methodically through all of it without a bit of squeamishness. Bones. Pizza and salad remains. Bits of meat. Slimy vegetable parings. Coffee grounds.
No woman I’d ever dated would’ve picked through a pile of stinking rubbish without even a pair of gloves. No woman I’d known—except my mother. If my mother’d been here, she’d have been right there on the floor with them.
“I shoved them well down there,” Fruitful said. “I wish I hadn’t.” Eventually, though, she got to a pile of white cotton. Two bras, and two pairs of enormous white undies of the type not even my mum would wear. Four white socks. She pulled all of them out and held them up, and Obedience made a sound of distress. Fruitful said, “Gray doesn’t care. He thinks they’re ugly. Anyway, Daisy said that men Outside don’t care about lusts.”
“Well, no,” I felt compelled to point out. “We care about lusts. We just don’t lust over white cotton undies without a woman in them.”
“Daisy only has colors,” Fruitful said, sorting the bras out and feeling around the centers. “The lady at the shop said you’re meant to wear nude bras with light-colored shirts, but Daisy doesn’t have anything like that. She doesn’t have nude, or white, or anything. Not bras, or undies, either. ‘Nude’ doesn’t mean it doesn’t cover you, it just means it’s colored more like your skin.”
Obedience said, “Fruitful,” in a despairing tone, and I thought about Daisy’s red bra showing under her damp, pale-blue T-shirt and said nothing.
Daisy said, “I like colors, and I don’t care what you’re meant to do. I wear scrubs to work, and outside of work, I wear exactly what I like. Do you feel anything?”
Fruitful sat back and said, “No. There’s nothing here. There can’t have been anything, either. It all looks new. Regular. Besides, it doesn’t make sense. Gilead can’t sew.”
“One of the women could have done it,” Daisy said. “Mercy, for example. You know she would. The midwife,” she explained to me, though I remembered. “Or she could have had somebody else do it, because there’s no woman who’d refuse. They could take it out in the laundry, then put it back in again afterward.” She was feeling over the bras now herself, then shaking her head. “No. This can’t be it.” She sat back on her knees, small and lithe, and I thought two things at once.
First, that I wished I’d been a second faster, had jumped into the bed of that ute like Thor and stayed there, possibly kicking in the back window, until Gilead had got out to deal with me. I was sure he’d think he was tougher