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It's always either adoration or loathing. Nothing in between, nothing with a solid foundation. Not for a long time, anyway. For awhile I thought I'd forgotten what real affection felt like.
But then there's the girl, the Handmaid who's lost an eye and half her mind, cradling a baby over the edge of a bridge, and there is my Handmaid, whose real name, it suddenly occurs to me, I have never known, and somehow she is able to talk her friend down from the ledge.
That is real. That is something I've forgotten. Or perhaps deliberately pushed aside.
I think I've begun to suffer bouts of real madness. I lose myself in a fragment of a feeling, too big to be real, too all-encompassing to have any foothold in this world, only real enough to be destructive. I hate her again, and I can hardly remember why, because in truth I have no reason to hate her. To hate myself? Certainly. To hate my husband?
But he is not here to respond to my madness. He is not here even when he is here, and she? She cannot respond because she is powerless, because I made her thus, because I...
And so she receives the brunt of my self-loathing, even as a part of me remembers her trying to save her friend, trying to save her friend's child, and admires her. How can anything real have survived what I have created?
In the aftermath of my madness we sit on her bathroom floor, together but a lifetime apart. She is bleeding and I can scarcely put together in my mind that I have caused it. I lean my head against the wall, feel the solidity of it, and press my hands against my face. I am real. This is real, even if it isn't. This is real, and she is bleeding, and I have caused it.
She is kneeling over her bathtub, weeping silently, body shaking, as blood drips from the wound at her temple.
"I'm sorry," I say, but I feel hollow, like the rage from before ate up everything real inside of me.
"For what?" says Offred, whose real name I don't know, and it makes me feel ill to think of the name I forced upon her, the name of my husband and betrayer.
I try to take in a breath, but it aches somewhere deep in my chest, and I wrap my arms about my knees. "So many things," I say simply.
Offred looks over her shoulder at me. There's blood running down her face, and I have caused it. There's disbelief and pain in her eyes, but surprisingly no loathing. Not now, anyway. Perhaps it moves in cycles for her, too. Though I imagine for her there can be no adoration. What do I have to offer her but momentary salvation from a terrible end?
We give one another life, but how can my paltry offering compare to hers?
"You used to sing," she says to me at last. "I remember you. My mother...hated you. Because of your books, your..." she closes her eyes, swallows hard. "She'd leave you on, on the TV, just to complain about you, but... I always liked it when you sang, anyway. You looked..."
I almost smile. "Happy?"
She opens her eyes. "Different."
I wonder what she was like before. I wonder who her mother was, who must now be long-dead or wasting away in the Colonies. A lot of women hated my books. Hated me, I thought, but now I'm not so sure. I've learned in recent years that you can hate what a person is saying or doing without hating the person. People are more than ideas.
At least, I hope they are.
I close my eyes and remember the feeling of singing, or try to. It's been so long, I wonder if the musculature has atrophied completely. I studied singing almost as intensely as I studied scripture. Now both have become so tainted in my mind that I wonder whether I can truly recall either.
"The Lord calls upon us to make sacrifices," I say, but the words don't feel as true as they once did. They feel false and affected, no better than the bullshit words of comfort Mrs. Putnam spat upon earlier or the bullshit apology Fred will no doubt cough up later when I confront him regarding his latest treachery.
"All my life I wanted nothing more than to be a mother," I begin again, truthfully this time. "Maybe it was my family, maybe it was the time I lived in, when babies were so scarce and so precious, but I'd have sacrificed anything, everything for a child. And in the end, I..." I open my eyes, but the room is out of focus, and I feel dizzy even though I'm already sitting down. I can see the shadow of Offred still looking at me and I wish I didn't have to think of her as of him. "In the end, I did. I have. And now, you're right. You're...you're right. I've created a world I wouldn't wish to grow up in."
The room grows deadly silent for awhile, then there's the sound of shifting fabric, and Offred says, "It's not like this entire...thing is your fault."
I think I might see my entire life flash before my eyes in the instant that follows. "It might as well be," I breathe into the heavy silence of the little room.
Offred doesn't understand, or doesn't want to, and she leans her head over the edge of the bathtub again. I want to do something, anything, but my mind is sluggish and overwrought, and I am slow to process. Finally my eyes land upon a pile of washcloths within my reach. "Let me help," I say, but feel apart from myself.
Apart from myself. This is an accurate description of the way I've felt for months on end, yet I imagine I wouldn't have been able to name the sensation before now. Before I was so apart from myself, I wouldn't have even known what I was missing.
She doesn't move. How could she, I suppose, for I've taken this power from her, too. As time passes I like to deceive myself into thinking that she was at least a little honest in that moment, but it's a feeble excuse at best. In stories sometimes people are furious or upset when others confess their wrongdoing, but in life I often find it's the opposite. No matter how one might feel about the matter later, sometimes there's this immediate, visceral need not to see someone in distress before your eyes, and it colours your actions, even your own emotions.
Someone confesses that she is the cause of all your life's miseries and you ought to be furious, but instead, you offer her words of comfort. You allow her to clean the wound she has inflicted.
"What was your name, before?" I ask her, as though I have any right to demand it, really, but I have to know. I can't keep thinking of her by my husband's name.
She hesitates, a little gasp and a shudder, but eventually, she answers me, and again, I like to think that she's honest with me in that moment, even though she has no reason to be. "June," she says. "My name is June."
"June," I echo as I dab warm water on the wound at her temple. "I'm..." but there are no words for this. Sorry could never, ever cover all that I've done, all that I've allowed, all that I've convinced myself to be the right thing to do, to mask my own suffering. "I'm going to make this better. At least some of it. I promise you that."
She doesn't respond. I like to pretend she believes me, or maybe just that she wants to.