The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale #2) - Margaret Atwood Page 0,8
I liked. But right then the smell of them was making me feel sick.
“I heard it from my Martha,” Shunammite whispered when Aunt Estée’s attention was elsewhere. “And your Martha told her. So it’s true.”
“Which one?” I said. I couldn’t believe any of our Marthas would be so disloyal as to pretend that my mother was dying—not even scowling Rosa.
“How should I know which one? They’re all just Marthas,” said Shunammite, tossing her long thick braids.
* * *
—
That afternoon when our Guardian had driven me home from school, I went into the kitchen. Zilla was rolling pie dough; Vera was cutting up a chicken. There was a soup pot simmering on the back of the stove: the extra chicken parts would go into it, and any vegetable scraps and bones. Our Marthas were very efficient with food, and did not waste supplies.
Rosa was over at the large double sink rinsing off dishes. We had a dishwasher, but the Marthas didn’t use it except after Commanders’ dinners at our house because it took too much electricity, said Vera, and there were shortages because of the war. Sometimes the Marthas called it the watched-pot war because it never boiled, or else the Ezekiel’s Wheel war because it rolled around without getting anywhere; but they only said such things among themselves.
“Shunammite said one of you told her Martha that my mother is dying,” I blurted out. “Who said that? It’s a lie!”
All three of them stopped doing what they were doing. It was as if I’d waved a wand and frozen them: Zilla with the lifted rolling pin, Vera with a cleaver in one hand and a long pale chicken neck in the other, Rosa with a platter and a dishcloth. Then they looked at one another.
“We thought you knew,” Zilla said gently. “We thought your mother would have told you.”
“Or your father,” said Vera. That was silly, because when could he have done that? He was hardly ever at our house nowadays, and when he was, he was either eating dinner by himself in the dining room or shut inside his study doing important things.
“We’re very sorry,” said Rosa. “Your mother is a good woman.”
“A model Wife,” said Vera. “She has endured her suffering without complaint.” By this time I was slumped over at the kitchen table, crying into my hands.
“We must all bear the afflictions that are sent to test us,” said Zilla. “We must continue to hope.”
Hope for what? I thought. What was there left to hope for? All I could see in front of me was loss and darkness.
* * *
—
My mother died two nights later, though I didn’t find out until the morning. I was angry with her for being mortally ill and not telling me—though she had told me, in a way: she had prayed for her pain to be over soon, and her prayer was answered.
Once I’d finished being angry, I felt as if a piece of me had been cut off—a piece of my heart, which was surely now dead as well. I hoped that the four angels round her bed were real after all, and that they had watched over her, and that they had carried her soul away, just as in the song. I tried to picture them lifting her up and up, into a golden cloud. But I could not really believe it.
III
Hymn
The Ardua Hall Holograph
6
Readying myself for bed last night, I unpinned my hair, what is left of it. In one of my bracing homilies to our Aunts some years ago, I preached against vanity, which creeps in despite our strictures against it. “Life is not about hair,” I said then, only half jocularly. Which is true, but it is also true that hair is about life. It is the flame of the body’s candle, and as it dwindles the body shrinks and melts away. I once had enough hair for a topknot, in the days of topknots; for a bun, in the age of buns. But now my hair is like our meals here at Ardua Hall: sparse and short. The flame of my life is subsiding, more slowly than some of those around me might like, but faster than they may realize.
I regarded my reflection. The inventor of the mirror did few of us any favours: we must have been happier before we knew what we looked like. It could be worse, I told myself: my face betrays no signs of weakness. It retains its leathery texture,