The Testaments

25

I will now describe the preparations leading up to my proposed marriage, as there has been some interest expressed in the way such things were conducted in Gilead. Due to the twist my life took, I was able to observe the marriage process from both sides: that of the bride being prepared, and that of the Aunts responsible for the preparing.

The arrangement of my own wedding was standard. The temperaments of the parties involved, as well as their respective positions in Gilead society, were supposed to have some influence on the choices made available. But the goal in every instance was the same: girls of all kinds—those from good families as well as the less favoured—were to be married early, before any chance encounter with an unsuitable man might occur that would lead to what used to be called falling in love or, worse, to loss of virginity. This latter disgrace was to be avoided at all costs, as the consequences could be severe. Death by stoning was not a fate anyone wanted for their children, and the stain of it on a family could be next to indelible.

One evening Paula called me into the living room—she’d sent Rosa to pry me out of my shell, as she put it—and told me to stand in front of her. I did as required, as there was no point in not doing it. Commander Kyle was there, and so was Aunt Vidala. There was another Aunt there as well—one I had never seen—who was introduced to me as Aunt Gabbana. I said I was pleased to meet her, but I must have said it in a surly voice because Paula said, “You see what I mean?”

“It is her age,” said Aunt Gabbana. “Even formerly sweet and tractable girls go through this stage.”

“She’s certainly old enough,” said Aunt Vidala. “We have taught her all we can. If they stay in school too long, they become disruptive.”

“She’s truly a woman?” said Aunt Gabbana, eyeing me shrewdly.

“Of course,” said Paula.

“None of that’s padding?” said Aunt Gabbana, nodding towards my chest.

“Certainly not!” said Paula.

“You’d be amazed at what some families try. She has nice wide hips, none of these narrow pelvises. Let me see your teeth, Agnes.”

How was I supposed to do that? Open my mouth wide, as at the dentist? Paula saw I was confused. “Smile,” she said. “For once.” I drew back my lips in a grimace.

“Perfect teeth,” said Aunt Gabbana. “Very healthy. Well then, we will start looking.”

“Only among the Commander families,” said Paula. “Nothing lower.”

“That is understood,” said Aunt Gabbana. She was making some notations on a clipboard. I watched in awe as she moved her fingers, which held a pencil. What potent symbols was she inscribing?

“She’s a little young,” said Commander Kyle, whom I no longer thought of as my father. “Possibly.” I was grateful to him for the first time in a long while.

“Thirteen is not too young. It all depends,” said Aunt Gabbana. “It does wonders for them if we can find the proper match. They settle right down.” She stood. “Don’t worry, Agnes,” she said to me. “You’ll have a choice among at least three candidates. They will consider it an honour,” she said to Commander Kyle.

“Let us know if there’s anything else you need,” said Paula graciously. “And sooner is better.”

“Understood,” said Aunt Gabbana. “There will be the usual donation to Ardua Hall, once there are satisfactory results?”

“Of course,” said Paula. “We’ll pray for your success. May the Lord open.”

“Under His Eye,” said Aunt Gabbana. The two Aunts left, exchanging smiles and nods with my non-parents.

“You may go, Agnes,” said Paula. “We’ll keep you informed as matters develop. Entering into the blessed state of married womanhood must be done with every precaution, and your father and I will take those precautions for you. You are a very privileged girl. I hope you appreciate that.” She gave me a malicious little smirk: she knew she was talking froth. In reality I was an inconvenient lump that had to be disposed of in a socially acceptable manner.

I went back up to my room. I should have seen this coming: such things had happened to girls who’d not been much older than me. A girl would be present at school and then one day not present: the Aunts didn’t like a lot of fuss and sentiment, with tearful goodbyes. Then there would be rumours of an engagement, then of a wedding. We were never allowed to go to these weddings even if the girl had been our close friend. When you were being readied for marriage, you disappeared from your former life. The next time you were seen, you’d be wearing the dignified blue dress of a Wife, and unmarried girls would have to let you go first through doorways.

This was now going to be my reality. I was to be ejected from my own house—from Tabitha’s house, from the house of Zilla and Vera and Rosa—because Paula had had enough of me.

“You won’t go to school today,” said Paula one morning, and that was that. Then nothing much happened for a week except some moping and fretting on my part, though since I pursued these activities alone in my room they had no influence.

I was supposed to be finishing a hateful petit-point project, to keep my mind occupied—the design was a bowl of fruit suitable for being made into a footstool, intended for my future husband, whoever he might be. In one corner of the footstool square I embroidered a small skull: it represented the skull of my stepmother, Paula, but if anyone asked me about it I planned to say that it was a memento mori, a reminder of the fact that we must all die someday.

This could hardly be objected to, as it was a pious motif: there were skulls like that on the gravestones of the old churchyard near our school. We were not supposed to go in there except to attend funerals: the names of the dead were on the stones, and that might lead to reading, and then to depravity. Reading was not for girls: only men were strong enough to deal with the force of it; and the Aunts, of course, because they weren’t like us.

I had begun to wonder how a woman changed into an Aunt. Aunt Estée had said once that you needed to have a calling that told you God wanted you to help all women and not just a single family; but how did the Aunts get that calling? How had they received their strength? Did they have special brains, neither female nor male? Were they even women at all underneath their uniforms? Could they possibly be men in disguise? Even to suspect such a thing was unthinkable, but what a scandal if so! I wondered what the Aunts would look like if you made them wear pink.

On the third day of my idleness, Paula had the Marthas bring several cardboard boxes to my room. It was time to put away childish things, she said. My belongings could go into storage as very soon I would not be living here anymore. Then, once I was ordering my new household, I could decide which of these belongings should be donated to the poor. A less privileged girl from an Econofamily would take great joy in my old dollhouse, for instance; although it was not top quality and was in a shoddy state, some paint here and there would do wonders.

The dollhouse had stood near my window for many years. The happy hours I’d spent with Tabitha were still contained within it. There was the Wife doll, sitting at the dining table; there were the little girls, behaving themselves; there were the Marthas in the kitchen, making bread; there was the Commander, safely locked into his study. After Paula had left, I plucked the Wife doll out of her chair and threw her across the room.

26

The next thing Aunt Gabbana did was to bring in a wardrobe team, as Paula put it, since I was considered incapable of choosing what I was to wear in the time leading up to my wedding, and especially at the wedding itself. You must understand that I was not anybody in my own right—although of the privileged class, I was just a young girl about to be confined to wedlock. Wedlock: it had a dull metallic sound, like an iron door clicking shut.

The wardrobe team was in charge of what you might call the stage set: the costumes, the refreshments, the decor. None of them had a dominating personality, which was why they had been relegated to these relatively menial duties; so even though all Aunts had high status, Paula—who did have a dominating personality—was able to boss the wedding-brigade Aunts around, within limits.

The three of them came up to my bedroom, Paula accompanying them, where—having finished my footstool project—I was amusing myself as best as I could by playing Solitaire.

The deck I used was normal in Gilead, but in case this deck is not known to the outside world I will describe it. Naturally there were not any letters on the Ace, King, Queen, or Jack cards, nor were there any numbers on the number cards. The Aces were a large Eye looking out of a cloud. Kings wore Commander uniforms, Queens were Wives, and Jacks were Aunts. The face cards were the most powerful cards. Of the suits, Spades were Angels, Clubs were Guardians, Diamonds were Marthas, and Hearts were Handmaids. Each face card had a border of smaller figures: a Wife of Angels would have a blue Wife with a border of small black-clad Angels, and a Commander of Handmaids would have a border of tiny Handmaids.

Later, once I had access to the Ardua Hall library, I researched these cards. Far back in history, Hearts were once Chalices. Perhaps that is why the Handmaids were Hearts: they were precious containers.

The three wardrobe-team Aunts advanced into my room. Paula said, “Put your game away and stand up, please, Agnes,” in her sweetest voice—the voice of hers that I disliked the most because I knew how fraudulent it was. I did as I was told, and the three Aunts were introduced: Aunt Lorna, plump-faced and smiling; Aunt Sara Lee, stoop-shouldered and taciturn; and Aunt Betty, dithery and apologetic.

“They’re here for a fitting,” Paula said.

“What?” I said. Nobody ever alerted me about anything; they did not see the need for it.

“Don’t say What, say Pardon,” said Paula. “A fitting for the clothes you will be wearing to your Premarital Preparatory classes.”

Paula ordered me to take off my pink school uniform, which I was still wearing since I didn’t have any other kinds of clothes, apart from my white dress for church. I stood in the middle of the room in my slip. The air wasn’t cold, but I could feel the goose bumps rising on my skin, from being looked at and considered. Aunt Lorna took my measurements, and Aunt Betty wrote them down in a small notebook. I watched her carefully; I always watched the Aunts when they were writing secret messages to themselves.

Then I was told I could put my uniform back on, which I did.

There was a discussion about whether I would need new underclothing for the interim period. Aunt Lorna thought it would be nice, but Paula said it was unnecessary because the time in question would be short and what I had still fit me. Paula won.

Then the three Aunts went away. They came back several days later with two outfits, one for spring and summer and one for fall and winter. They were themed in green: spring green with white accents—pocket trims, collars—for spring and summer, and spring green with dark green accents for fall and winter. I’d seen girls my age wearing these dresses, and I knew what they meant: spring green was for fresh leaves, so the girl was ready for marriage. Econofamilies were not allowed such extravagances, however.

The clothes the Aunts brought had already been worn, but they weren’t worn out, since nobody wore the green clothing for long. They’d been altered to fit me. The skirts were five inches above the ankle, the sleeves came to the wrist, the waists were loose, the collars high. Each had a matching hat, with a brim and a ribbon. I hated these outfits, though moderately: if I had to have clothes, these were not the worst. I found some hope in the fact that all the seasons had been provided for: maybe I would make it all the way through fall and winter without having to get married.

My old pink and plum clothes were taken away to be cleaned and reused for younger girls. Gilead was at war; we did not like to throw things out.

27

Once I had the green wardrobe, I was enrolled in another school—Rubies Premarital Preparatory, a school for young women of good family who were studying to be married. Its motto was from the Bible: “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.”

This school was also run by the Aunts, but—despite the fact that they wore the same drab uniforms—these Aunts were somehow more stylish. They were supposed to teach us how to act as mistresses of high-ranking households. I say “act” in a dual sense: we were to be actresses on the stages of our future houses.

Shunammite and Becka from the Vidala School were in the same class with me: Vidala School pupils often went on to Rubies. Not much real time had passed since I’d last seen the two of them, but they seemed much older. Shunammite had coiled her dark braids around behind her head and plucked her eyebrows. You wouldn’t have called her beautiful, but she was as lively as she always had been. I note here that lively was a word the Wives used in a disapproving way: it meant brash.

Shunammite said she was looking forward to being married. In fact, she could talk of nothing else—what sorts of husbands were being vetted for her, what kind she would prefer, how she could hardly wait. She wanted a widower of about forty who hadn’t loved his first Wife all that much and had no children, and was high-ranking and handsome. She didn’t want some young jerk who’d never had sex before because that would be uncomfortable—what if he didn’t know where to put his thing? She’d always had a reckless mouth, but now it was more so. Possibly she’d picked up these new, coarser expressions from a Martha.

Becka was even thinner. Her green-brown eyes, always large in proportion to her face, were if anything even larger. She told me that she was glad to be in this class with me, but she was not glad to be in the class itself. She’d begged and begged her family not to marry her yet—she was too young, she wasn’t ready—but they’d received a very good offer: the eldest boy of a Son of Jacob and Commander who was well on his way to becoming a Commander himself. Her mother had told her not to be silly, she would never have an offer like this again, and if she didn’t take this one the offers would become worse and worse the older she became. If she reached eighteen unmarried, she’d be considered dried goods and would be out of the running for Commanders: she’d be lucky to get even a Guardian. Her father, Dr. Grove the dentist, said it was unusual for a Commander to consider a girl of her lower rank, and it would be an insult to refuse, and did she wish to ruin him?

“But I don’t want to!” she would wail to us when Aunt Lise was out of the room. “To have some man crawling all over you, like, like worms! I hate it!”

It occurred to me that she didn’t say she would hate it, she said she already hated it. What had happened to her? Something disgraceful that she couldn’t talk about? I remembered how upset she’d been by the story of the Concubine Cut into Twelve Pieces. But I didn’t want to ask her: another girl’s disgrace could rub off on you if you got too close to it.

“It won’t hurt that much,” said Shunammite, “and think of all the things you’ll have! Your own house, your own car and Guardians, and your own Marthas! And if you can’t have a baby you’ll be given Handmaids, as many as it takes!”

“I don’t care about cars and Marthas, or even Handmaids,” said Becka. “It’s the horrible feeling. The wet feeling.”

“Like what?” said Shunammite, laughing. “You mean their tongues? It’s no worse than dogs!”

“It’s much worse!” said Becka. “Dogs are friendly.”

I didn’t say anything about what I myself felt about getting married. I couldn’t share the story of my dental appointment with Dr. Grove: he was still Becka’s father, and Becka was still my friend. In any case, my reaction had been more like disgust and loathing, and now seemed to me trivial in view of Becka’s genuine horror. She really did believe that marriage would obliterate her. She would be crushed, she would be nullified, she would be melted like snow until nothing remained of her.

Away from Shunammite, I asked her why her mother wouldn’t help her. Then there were tears: her mother wasn’t her real mother, she’d found that out from their Martha. It was shameful, but her real mother had been a Handmaid—“Like yours, Agnes,” she said. Her official mother had used that fact against her: why was she so afraid of having sex with a man, since her slut of a Handmaid mother hadn’t had such fears? Quite the contrary!

I hugged her then, and said I understood.

28

Aunt Lise was supposed to teach us manners and customs: which fork to use, how to pour tea, how to be kind but firm with Marthas, and how to avoid emotional entanglements with our Handmaid, should it turn out that we needed a Handmaid. Everyone had a place in Gilead, everyone served in her own way, and all were equal in the sight of God, but some had gifts that were different from the gifts of others, said Aunt Lise. If the various gifts were confused and everyone tried to be everything, only chaos and harm could result. No one should expect a cow to be a bird!

She taught us elementary gardening, with an emphasis on roses—gardening was a suitable hobby for Wives—and how to judge the quality of the food that was cooked for us and served at our table. In these times of national scarcity it was important not to waste food or to spoil its full potential. Animals had died for us, Aunt Lise reminded us, and vegetables too, she added in a virtuous tone. We needed to be thankful for this, and for God’s bounty. It was as disrespectful—one might even say sinful—to Divine Providence to mistreat food by cooking it badly as it was to discard it uneaten.

Therefore we learned how to poach an egg properly, and at what temperature a quiche ought to be served, and the difference between a bisque and a potage. I can’t say I remember much about these lessons now, as I never was in a position to put them into practice.

She reviewed with us the proper prayers to say before meals too. Our husbands would recite the prayers when they were present, as heads of the household, but when they were absent—as they would be often, since they would have to work late hours, nor should we ever criticize their lateness—then it would be our duty to say these prayers on behalf of what Aunt Lise hoped would be our numerous children. Here she gave a tight little smile.

Through my head was running the pretend prayer that Shunammite and I used to amuse ourselves with when we were best friends at the Vidala School:

The sound of our giggling receded into the distance. How badly we’d thought we were behaving then! How innocent and ineffectual these tiny rebellions seemed to me now that I was preparing for marriage.

As the summer wore on, Aunt Lise taught us the basics of interior decorating, though the final choices about the style of our homes would of course be made by our husbands. She then taught us flower arrangement, the Japanese style and the French style.

By the time we got to the French style, Becka was deeply dejected. Her wedding was planned for November. The man selected for her had paid his first visit to her family. He’d been received in their living room, and had made small talk with her father while she’d sat there silently—this was the protocol, and I would be expected to do the same—and she said he’d made her flesh crawl. He had pimples and a scraggly little moustache, and his tongue was white.

Shunammite laughed and said it was probably toothpaste, he must have brushed his teeth just before coming because he wanted to make a good impression on her, and wasn’t that sweet? But Becka said she wished she was ill, severely ill with something not only prolonged but catching, because then any proposed wedding would have to be called off.

On the fourth day of French-style flower-arranging, when we were learning to do symmetrical formal vases with contrasting but complementary textures, Becka slashed her left wrist with the secateurs and had to be taken to the hospital. The cut wasn’t fatally deep, but a lot of blood came out nonetheless. It ruined the white Shasta daisies.

I’d been watching when she did it. I could not forget her expression: it had a ferocity I had never seen in her before, and which I found very disturbing. It was as if she’d turned into a different person—a much wilder one—though only for a moment. By the time the paramedics had come and were taking her away, she’d looked serene.

“Goodbye, Agnes,” she’d said to me, but I hadn’t known how to answer.

“That girl is immature,” said Aunt Lise. She wore her hair in a chignon, which was quite elegant. She looked at us sideways, down her long patrician nose. “Unlike you girls,” she added.

Shunammite beamed—she was all set to be mature—and I managed a little smile. I thought I was learning how to act; or rather, how to be an actress. Or how to be a better actress than before.