Handmaid's Tale: A Mother's Love.
Four: A few minutes later.
Grace settles me into the tub and jerks off the water. It emits a brisk, quick squeak. I float around, buoying myself by holding onto the tub's sides. She enters the closet and my gown shrieks on the hanger in the wooden wardrobe. It falls with a soft thud on the bed. Her feet drum in a hurried rhythm for the door. The Guardian's impatient banging grows louder.
The Major's wife opens her bedroom door with a shriek.
"Dammit! Who else did he kill?" she shouts. She was never content to be a Wife. I've heard stories about her being involved in the sex trade before the Overthrow. She's too brassy, too tough, too crude. I'm just a proper English girl. Like Alice in a terrible Wonderland. OfRichard comes from the same stock. All these Philadelphians are rough and tough. I almost went to Oxford. The University.
No one wants to hear that. Why am I here?
The banging gets louder.
"C'mon, Aunt Jemimia!" the Guardian roars. "We haven't got all day!"
Grace laughs to hide her worry. She used to be a Baptist. African American Name it and claim it.
"I'm getting her ready!" she says. "She's taking her bath!"
"Probably the only one who's allowed to in this country! I thought we'd have the same rights but it didn't look that way!" A second Guardian sneers.
"Jack!" the first one hisses. "You wind up on the Wall on Market Street!"
Jack, the Second Guardian, moans in pain.
"Rue!" he cries, "Why'd you do that?"
"So's you won't get hung!" Rue, the First Guardian whispers. He clears his throat.
"We can wait! She's a foreign national anyway. Good riddance to bad rubbish!" he chuckles.
They're sending me back to England. Covered in suds and smelling of wet lavender, my mouth falls open. They don't want their shredder, either? I rinse myself off and step out of the tub. Hurrying across the bathroom, I snatch the towel off and vigorously dry myself off. All I think about at this moment is getting dressed and ready.
I struggle into my knickers and bra. They itch against my porcelain skin. Fundamentalist Christianity is a bitch as OfRichard told me once when I started carrying OfJohn's baby. At least when I went to Mass, I wore silk from Victoria's Secret. The priests didn't care. What they didn't know wouldn't hurt them, she chuckled deep within her gravelly throat.
Silk undergarments were a sin of the flesh. Just like the Roman Catholics used to say. I don't have time to dwell on it. My heart swells with hope because maybe they'll give me back my baby.
I pull the whole length of my golden river of hair under my white cap. I was never much of a housekeeper. Father used to yell at me if I was the marrying kind, he'd make sure he'd send me some place to teach me Home Economics. He hated the fact that I wanted to study Law.
The Guardians sit downstairs, telling another Martha, Donna, who's not black, about the latest news. I smell illegal cigarette smoke rolling up to attack me with its coarse, metallic odor.
"Let me tell you this," Rue hacks for a moment, "Your Handmaid is an illeggial alien. She could be shipped back to England by tonight!"
"Do y'all want some coffee?" Grace asks. "I got it for a bar of soap off the black market,"
"Shut up, tree monkey!" Jack whines, "He's talkin' here!"
"Yeah. Shadow!" Donna brays, "Get to the back of da bus!"
"Can' wait 'til they send her to th' Republic of Ham!" Rue laughs, then explodes into a wild, hacking fit.
"Let's clean up America!" Donna breaks out laughing.
"Well, then who's going to clean up after y'all?" Grace sneers. "Y'all be too drunk t' stand when I'm not around!"
A chorus of chair legs scratch their cacophony across the kitchen floor's tiles. The trio of poor, white trash grumble and curse.
"At least my handmaid knows how to wash an' dress herself!" she snorts. "Unlike y'all!"
Her feet rumble up the stairs.
She calls out my name in honey sweet tones.
"You can't call her that!" Jack shouts. "It's illiggle!"
"So's racism!" Grace shouts. "Y'all didn't know that, too!"
She storms upstairs.
"You ready?" she asks me.
Swallowing my nervousness, I come down the stairs as slowly as possible. Did those charm schools my stepmother send me to teach me anything valuable? I wanted to study law but Father took me out of England for this dark, Trumpian vision of my Wonderland. My hand trembles as it tries its earnestness to hold onto the smoothly varnished stair railing.
Rue chuckles deep within his throat. Jack's lean pimply face turns florid pink. Donna scowls behind her thick glasses and wild, unruly hair.
"So this is the English chick," Rue's blood shot nose flexes its nostrils. "Let's go, Lady Godiva. Your carriage awaits," he sweeps a deep, mock reverent bow from the waist as they take me outside.
Grace stands in the door and looks back at the still fuming Donna.
"We shall overcome!" she trills in her sweet, choir perfect voice at her antagonists.