Our Moment, At Last
Sometimes the perfect song comes on while I’m running and I imagine I am Offred in the Handmaids Tale escaping. Today it was Arcade Fire Wake Up. The fantasy is always the same. I am somewhere near the Canadian border and I just keep running, all the way to freedom. It’s an odd thing, a strange kind of imagining, that’s happened more than once. And every time, I can feel the corners of my mouth turn up into a smile. I can taste freedom as if I have anything to run from. And who am I kidding anyway. With my age and barrenness, I’d be a Martha if I were allowed to live at all, not a handmaid. Still, the feeling of it lasts for the whole song and then my music shuffles and I’m me again, on country roads, running in the heat and counting the number of 5-minute segments, sometimes counted in guessing the number of songs left to hear, until my run is finished.
I’m a clock watcher. Always have been. Even when I enjoy the activity, I know exactly how much time I’ve been doing it, and exactly how much is left. Except for two things. Just two activities in my life where I lose track of time. One is when I write. The tips of my fingers moving the words from my brain to the page have no use for clocks. And the other is when that song comes on, that perfect song that makes me want to flee captivity and keep running until I reach the border. I stop counting. I stop estimating song lengths. I stop thinking about whether there’s .8 tenths of a mile or 2.3 miles left, and I feel like Atalanta, the girl in Free to Be You and Me. Swift of feet, she raced for her freedom from being forced to marry. She was the OG handmaid, really. Expected to marry and procreate in the service of an heir. Given little choice in the matter, really. Maybe it’s not Offred I imagine, but Atalanta. Outsmarting her father, outrunning her suitors, outrunning expectations, outrunning her fate.
In the post-apocalyptic world of my dreams, middle-aged women will be in high demand, heralded as heroes, with their weathered necks and thick thighs. The mothers who demand action for their dead children, gunned down on a suburban street jonesing for skittles, or while hiding in a closet in their pre-school. The mothers who lock arms in Portland holding the line against Federal agents who tear gas and beat with batons. The women with their grey braids and soft bones who march in orthopedic shoes on behalf of someone else’s children. They will be the center of the ticker tape parade, the mothers of revolution, the subjects of the next Lin Manuel Miranda hit. Not poor Eliza Hamilton, relegated to a coda to cover 50 years of fighting slavery, supporting orphans and masterminding the Washington Monument. These middle-aged women forming a human barricade will be the lyrics and the chorus, the melody and the harmony.
In the post-apocalyptic world of my dreams, Charlize Theron doesn’t age out of Mad Max, and there are no reboots with younger, slimmer actors. Angelina Jolie never plays the mother to an actor her age and Meryl Streep is always, always, always the love-interest.
Chris is worried that if Trump loses, the local yahoos, driving their mufflerless motorcycles in circles on our country road, will lose their shit. “Should we get a gun,” he asks me while we’re driving back from the lake. My arms are tired from pushing against the current but the cold water felt good. I regret that we didn’t bike there now that I am cooled off. I roll down the window and stick my hand out to feel the pressure of the air against it, the wind pushes on my wrist. I imagine catching bullets in my cupped hand, a martyr for the cause. I don’t like the feel of guns, the urge to pull the trigger is like the urge to fly when high up – sudden and nauseating and overwhelming. It’s hard to control the twitch. “I’m not shooting anybody,” I say. “Let them come at me, I’m not shooting anybody.”
