The Testaments

Hanging from a belt around my waist is a taser. This weapon reminds me of my failings: had I been more effective, I would not have needed such an implement.

I’ve become swollen with power, true, but also nebulous with it—formless, shape-shifting. I am everywhere and nowhere: even in the minds of the Commanders I cast an unsettling shadow. How can I regain myself? How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman?

I know too much about the leaders—too much dirt—and they are uncertain as to what I may have done with it in the way of documentation. If they string me up, will that dirt somehow be leaked? They might well suspect I’ve taken back up precautions, and they would be right.

Aunt Estee […] always put things in a positive light. That was a talent women had because of their special brains, which were not hard and focused like the brains of men but soft and damp and warm and enveloping, like…like what? [Aunt Estee] didn’t finish the sentence.

Like warmed-up mud in the sun, I thought. That what was inside my head: warmed-up mud.

I did not wish Aunt Sally dead: I simply wished her incoherent; and so it has been. The Margery Kempe Retreat House has a discreet staff.

But if we were to put too much emphasis on the theoretical delights of sex, the result would almost certainly be curiosity and experimentation, followed by moral degeneracy and public stonings.

“Perhaps one day you will be able to help me as you yourself have been helped. Good should be repaid with good. That is one of our rules of thumb, here at Ardua Hall.”

Becka had decided to offer up this silent suffering of hers as a sacrifice to God. I am not sure what God though of this, but it did not do the trick for me. Once a judge, always a judge. I judged, I pronounced the sentence.

Aunt Beatrice ordered in pizza for lunch, which we had with ice cream from the freezer. I said I was surprised that they were eating junk food: wasn’t Gilead against it, especially for women?

“It’s part of our tests as Pearl Girls,” said Aunt Dove. “We’re supposed to sample the fleshpot temptations of the outside world in order to understand them, and then reject them in our hearts.” She took another bite of pizza.

“She wanted to live on her own and work on a farm. Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Vidala said this is what came of reading too early: she’d picked up the wrong ideas at the Hildegard Library, before her mind had been strengthened enough to reject them, and there were a lot o f questionable books that should be destroyed.”

Being able to read and write did not provide answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.

“God isn’t what they say,” [Becka] said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both.

This is what the Aunts did, I was learning. They recorded. They waited. They used their information to achieve goals known only to themselves. Their weapons were powerful but contaminating secrets, as the Marthas had always said.

Was my soft, muddy brain hardening? Was I becoming stony, steely, pitiless? Was I exchanging my caring and pliable woman’s nature for an imperfect copy of a sharp-edged and ruthless man’s nature? I didn’t want that, but how to avoid it if I aspired to be an Aunt?