ANNIE'S TALE
Annie: June?
June: Yeah….
Annie: I'm Annie. Luke's wife?
June: Um. Hi.
Annie: I need you, I want to ask you to…. back off. - pause - Give us the space we need to work on our marriage. - pause - Please.
June: You should probably talk to Luke about this.
Annie: - frustrated - You don't think I have!? Jesus, all we do is talk about this, talk about you. - silence - He thinks he's in love with you. I still…. love him.
June: - sharply - Sometimes people grow apart.
Annie: -plainly - We made vows. Before God. That means something. He's a good man who wants to do the right thing, you have to let him do it.
June: - abruptly - I have to go…
Annie: No, you just can't wreck people's lives like they don't matter. - silence - Did you ever think about me? About what you were doing to me? Do you think about me when you're screwing my husband? You selfish bitch!
- June walked away to her car -
Annie: He's just playing with you. He'll come back home to me.
June: You've been separated for three months…..
Annie: You are never going to know him like I do. I was his first, did he tell you that? You think you can just take him from me because you want him? FUCKING WHORE!
- June strode purposely to her car, fumbled for keys, as emergency vehicles responded to the Sons of Jacob disturbance at the university. Serena Joy Waterford had just been shot -
LECTURE BY MARGARET ELEANOR ATWOOD
CC Oont CH FRSC FRSL
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
Holly Maddox had only barely heard of Margaret Atwood, the latter being Canadian - as well as an academic. Holly mistrusted academics. Quite frankly, Holly had paid little mind to foreign feminists, if, indeed, Atwood could be called one.
On hearing her, Maddox's first thought? She was good! 'Why had I ignored this'? Atwood simply needed a better press agent.
This evening's lecture in Toronto? Holly with her RCMP escort? "Gender and Identity, Religion and Myth, Colonizing power of language, power politics, and other childhood Fairy Tales."
Canada's grande dame of their literary world, which once had extended into Harvard in Boston - Holly asked herself a question? 'Atwood was going to deal with all THAT in an evening?'
She did. Holly was impressed. Atwood began with Canada, saying as part of her 'preliminary remarks' - "please remember, Canada does not wish to enrage Gilead too much. The present extraditions back to Gilead, I predicted as much. Me, if I were a refugee at this end of the underground-femaleroad, I'd head to England."
"Besides, Gilead still sends to Canada ears, fingers, and other appendages of loved ones through Canada Post, sometimes with postage due. My point is that what we read in our Toronto press about that theonomic state to the south, none of it is new. Gilead didn't invent anything, especially in relation to women. They just packaged it differently. All of it has precedent in recent cultures of the world, including Canada's. Please remember, women in Canada were not legally considered 'persons' until 1922."
Mr Tuello, he had told her RCMP escort to Massey Hall (to hear Atwood), that Moddox was to be returned by 11 pm. It meant she could not stay after for the Q & A with Ms. Atwood. She needed to get back to her non-detention detention centre.
Still, if she'd had the chance, this late in life she was afraid she wouldn't have asked Atwood anything about things like the academically oriented, 'interstitial spaces of eco-feminism'.
She would have simply asked: "Ms. Atwood, would you happen to know where June Osborne is?" Atwood looked to be the kind of non-ideological feminist who might dream-up a woman as complex, and flawed, as June Osborne.
VISITING HOURS
Luke Bankole: My oh my, Holly! Wow, you are a sight for sore eyes. June thought you were dead. How did you get out?
Holly Maddox: You look good, Luke! Me, at my age I'm closer to 'dead' than I was when we last saw each other. Gilead almost got me, I won't lie.
Luke: How long have you been out? I take it you never saw June. Or Nichole…..
Holly: Well, I wanted to ask her about the baby. - pause - But first, Luke, about you…. in here.
Luke: A Canadian prison is no picnic. Not with me having 'American' tatoo'ed on my forehead. Americans here are no longer the flavour of the week. 'Refugee', it's become a term of derision.
Holly: Did you really kill that guy? Rita Blue, she can't believe you were ever charged.
Luke: Well, I pulled him off of June, if you must know. Other than that, my lawyer says to stay quiet. -- pause - It's good that you've connected with Rita. That lady needs to stop cleaning our house. But she's still the sanest of the bunch who escaped that hell hole. Present company excepted, of course.
Holly: Don't bet on that. - pause - By how much did I miss her by….. June…. and Nichole?
Luke: Well, that was three weeks ago. She and Nichole must be in British Columbia by now, the trains can't be THAT slow. But good luck, B.C. is bigger than Texas. The Canadian prairies make Montana look like Rhode Island. It's a big place out west, and there are a lot of internment camps. The Okanagan, on Vancouver Island, one in Vancouver, a big one. Dozens of others. - pause - I mean, if the train made it that far. - pause - Me, I promised her, it's why she got on the train, I told her we'd find each other. We'd done it before.
Holly: Luke, I have a million questions…..
Luke: So, Holly, look at you, no sour look in my presence. So, I'm no longer 'the dork' who married your daughter. I'm the guy, remember, who 'fucked up with Annie'. So you said warning June, 'so he could fuck up with you'. I can't believe a mother would advise her daughter, to 'get a little on the side'? Remember that, Holly? You don't like me, do you? No matter. June and I, we have our little family…..
- silence, as more visitors greeted prisoners in the visiting area -
Holly: I've got to ask. - silence, then quietly - Is June in league with Gilead?
Luke: - pause - What!?
Holly: - quietly, secretively - Did she help Gilead shoot down those planes?
Luke: Holy fuck, Holly, who have you been talking to? - pause - No! Well, to begin with they were helicopters….. but, no! Holly, who told you that? Do you know who 'June Osborne' is? Who your daughter is? Who she is to Gilead? She's public enemy number one!
- silence -
Holly: What about Nicolas Blaine, Commander Blaine?
Luke: - cautious - What about him?
Holly: I take it that they had an affair, while in Gilead. Not a sex slave, not a Bilhah thing. One that June continued here once she made it to Canada - I mean, I don't know how that works, him a Commander….
Luke: Wow, you'd bring him up! - silence - I don't like the guy, okay! I don't like talking about him. Did you come here to throw him in my face? -pause - You never did like me, Holly. - pause - Okay, he did do us one solid. Tuello, he arranged it. Commander fucking Blaine, he met with June…. we found out where Hannah was held. Got her whole dossier, Hannah at a 'Wives School'. She was 12 at the time, Holly, twelve. - silence - June, she's never been honest with me about that Commander fascist. Okay, well once. She sent me a tape, a Handmaid's Tale is what Tuello called it. By the way, I hate him, too.
Luke, he's still Luke. Holly hated all that macho shit, where Luke claimed he had 'sacrificed himself' at the train station so that the 'little lady' could get away. He told Holly he had punched out Fred Waterford…. there was a sight, Luke punching anyone!
SYLVIA AND OLIVER
Technically I could come and go from the ITWC facility at my leisure. The heavy metal door, it was rarely locked.
What I had not counted upon, was that I would actually get visitors! Me. Not just like Luke in his prison, me in my non-detention detention centre. I mean, other than June's crew, who did I know north of the border, who'd visit me? What if they asked me a question about maple syrup, or hockey?
Or Atwood?
Me, I was more comfortable with Betty Friedan or Angela Davis. Me, I know I had time on my hands, and I was allowed to read without being tased. So, I was going to have to see if the ITWC unlocked lock-up…. I was going to see if it would let in copies of The Edible Woman, Lady Oracle, Life before Man, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake (and its companion The Year of the Flood), The Penelopiad, or The Testaments. That latter title, it was Atwood's supposed take on dystopian societies like Gilead.
No wonder The Commanders forbade reading.
Why had I not read Atwood before my time in Canada? There was all that time in the old-USA when we were allowed to put our traumas to the bonfire. I'd made bad use of that time, obviously.
At that thought, my imagining, I was startled by a slight knock. It was not the knock of a guard, nor even the purposeful, let's-get-on-with-it knock of one of the 'cart women'. The people who came to our 'open cell' area with confections and a small assortment of otherwise non-vegetarian sandwiches. Which I paid for by a cash card Tuello had given me. (He gave it to me and said, 'go nuts, but not the Royal York, okay?)
Instead, a young woman poked her head into my 'cell', she had a small boy in tow.
She said, "excuse me, are you Dr. Holly Maddox? I'm Sylvia, I'm Em's wife, Emily Malek. This is Oliver, our son. We'd like to talk about Em."
What did I know to tell Sylvia about Dr. Emily Malek? Except she was one of the most broken people I'd ever run across. And that the Bootheel Colony for unwomen, it had made her worse.
Sylvia: Em, she had two nights at our place. She spoke of you, June's mom. She slept in the spare room. Oliver crawled in with her. He'd startled her, she'd been asleep, and in the dark she'd thrown him to the floor. It took an hour for me to calm both of them down. God bless him, he then asked to stay, to stay with mom-Em. But he asked me, mom-Syl to stay in the room. Which I did. All night. The second night, it went better.
Holly: I don't know what to tell you, Sylvia. Gilead, it changes people.
Sylvia: - silence - I wish you'd known Em. From before, I mean. I wish you'd known how bookish she was. It was hard to believe she was from small-town Montana!
- silence -
Sylvia: Our wedding day, that had been her first. I mean, she was unnaturally smart and could be useful to the world, but she'd never had a girlfriend before, not really. She'd gone out with a firefighter from Charlestown for a while, Pina Delvaglio. I knew Pina. I knew her, that lady was really closeted. But by our wedding day - Em had never….. but she was stubborn. Oliver, she was the one going to deliver Oliver. I wish you'd known her from before.
Holly: I take it she knew June, from New Gilead.
Sylvia: I'd told Em - when she showed up with Nichole - I told her I didn't care what she'd done in Gilead. The Swiss, they raked her over the coals. She admitted to killing a Wife at the Colonies….
Holly: Mrs. O'Connor. I was at that Colony.
Sylvia: None of that mattered, not to me. - pause - I think she went back south because she couldn't trust herself - she saw herself as a danger to me, to Oliver. - pause - But then she shows up again, with you.
Holly: - heavy sigh -
Sylvia: So I'm going to ask you, Dr. Maddox. Do you know where she is?
Holly: - pause - You mean, now? - pause - Jeez, I was going to ask you, if you knew where June was?
Sylvia: I thought she would pick your brain about June, I mean, isn't that why she's with you? She said something about getting even with June. That's why I thought you might know.
Tuello, from the US Consulate, he should know. I mean he'd assigned me 'round-the-clock surveillance, and not for my health. I thought he'd done that for Emily as well.
Now Emily was gone. Again.
My fear? She's hunting for June. The rumour that June is pal-ing around with Serena Joy Waterford, that does not sit well with people. It had not sat well with Emily.