* * *
—
Our car went through a couple of checkpoints—passports, Angels peering in the window to make sure we were us—but Agnes had told me to let the driver do the talking, and he did: Pearl Girls this and that, and how noble we were, and what sacrifices we were making. At one of them, the Angel said, “Good luck on your mission.” At another one—farther out of town—they joked among themselves.
“Hope they don’t bring back any ugly girls or sluts.”
“It’s one or the other.” Laughs from both checkpoint Angels.
Agnes put her hand on my arm. “Don’t talk back,” she said.
When we’d reached the countryside and were on a highway, the driver handed us a couple of sandwiches: Gilead fake cheese. “I guess this is breakfast,” I said to Agnes. “Toe jam on white.”
“We should give thanks,” said Agnes in her pious Aunt’s voice, so I guess she was still in a snit. It was weird to think of her as my sister; we were so unlike. But I hadn’t really had time to figure any of that out.
“I’m glad to have a sister,” I said, to make peace.
“I’m glad too,” said Agnes. “And I give thanks.” But she didn’t sound very thankful.
“I give thanks too,” I said. Which was the end of that conversation. I thought of asking her how long we had to keep it up, this Gilead way of talking—couldn’t we stop and act natural, now that we were escaping? But then, maybe for her it was natural. Maybe she didn’t know another way.
* * *
—
In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the driver of our car let us out at the bus station. “Good luck, girls,” he said. “Give ’em hell.”
“See? He’s not a real Guardian,” I said, hoping to get Agnes talking again.
“Of course not,” she said. “A real Guardian would never say ‘hell.’?”
The bus station was old and crumbling, the women’s washroom was a germ factory, and there was no place we could exchange our Gilead food tokens for anything a person would want. I was glad I’d eaten the orange. Agnes, however, was not squeamish, being used to the crap that passed for food at Ardua Hall, so she bought some kind of pretend doughnut with two of our tokens.
The minutes were ticking; I was getting jittery. We waited and waited, and finally a bus did come. Some people on board nodded at us when we got on, as they might to the military: a salute of the head. An older Econowife even said, “God bless you.”
About ten miles along there was another checkpoint, but the Angels there were super polite to us. One of them said, “You’re very brave, heading into Sodom.” If I hadn’t been so scared I might have laughed—the idea of Canada being Sodom was hilarious, considering how boring and ordinary it mostly was. It wasn’t like there was a non-stop countrywide orgy going on.
Agnes squeezed my hand to tell me she would do the talking. She had the Ardua Hall knack of keeping her face flat and calm. “We are simply doing our service for Gilead,” she said in her underspoken robot Aunt’s way, and the Angel said, “Praise be.”
The ride got bumpier. They must have been keeping their road repair money for roads more people were likely to use: since trading with Canada was practically shut down nowadays, who’d want to go to North Gilead unless you lived there?
The bus wasn’t full; everyone on it was Econoclass. We were on the scenic route, winding along the coast, but it wasn’t all that scenic. There were a lot of closed-down motels and roadside restaurants, and more than one big red smiling lobster that was falling apart.
As we went north, the friendliness decreased: there were angry looks, and I had the feeling that our Pearl Girls mission and even the whole Gilead thing was leaking popularity. No one spat at us, but they scowled as if they would like to.
I wondered how far we had come. Agnes had the map that had been marked up by Aunt Lydia, but I didn’t like to ask her to take it out: the two of us looking at a map would be suspicious. The bus was slow, and I was getting more and more anxious: How soon before someone noticed we weren’t in Ardua Hall? Would they believe my bogus note? Would they call ahead, set up a roadblock, stop the bus? We were so conspicuous.
Then we took a detour, and it was one-way traffic, and Agnes started fidgeting with her hands. I nudged her with my elbow. “We need to look serene, remember?” She gave me a wan smile and folded her hands in her lap; I could feel her taking deep breaths and letting them out slowly. They did teach you a few useful things at Ardua Hall, and self-control was one of them. She who cannot control herself cannot control the path to duty. Do not fight the waves of anger, use the anger as your fuel. Inhale. Exhale. Sidestep. Circumvent. Deflect.
I would never have made it as a real Aunt.
* * *
—
It was around five in the afternoon when Agnes said, “We get off here.”
“Is this the border?” I said, and she said no, it was where we were supposed to meet our next ride. We took our backpacks off the rack and stepped down out of the bus. The town had boarded-up storefronts and smashed windows, but there was a fuel station and a shabby convenience store.