Mandy This Country Quotes

Why?’ Karin says, again and again. ‘Because in the end, we’re proof, aren’t we? This whole country is – that you can’t control people’s thoughts. What goes on in their heads.

The duke raises his arm and sort of flicks his wrist, and they swoop into action, coming at me with a platter full of food. The first guy is holding a tower of eggs. Ew. I don’t do eggs. “Oh, um, no thank you, I’m not an egg person.” All noise stops. Everyone stares at me. Am I not supposed to talk to the servants? I smile weakly at the duke and his mother as the servant walks away, and another approaches with ham. I clamp my mouth shut as he plops a hearty portion down on my plate. My mouth is suddenly very dry. I turn to the servant standing motionless behind me. “Can I get some water?” Yeah. Definitely not supposed to talk to them. The guy’s eyes flicker over to the old lady, as if he needs permission to get me some water. “There is lemonade in front of you,” the old lady says. “Oh.” Is that what that is? I take a quick swallow and try not to choke. This obviously is not Country Time, if you know what I mean. I was starving ten minutes ago, but now that I’m sitting in the same room as these weird people, my appetite is gone. This breakfast needs to be over, stat. I can barely keep up with the glove and servant etiquette; I’m bound to screw something up. I need to maintain my fake identity, wrangle a ride to town, and say sayonara.

Women still bear the vast brunt of the physical, emotional, and organizational labor involved in contraceptive use — whether any devices are available at all, whether they are safe or not, and when they fail. For the majority of the world’s women modern contraceptive measures such as the pill, condoms, injectibles, or IUDS are simply not an option—a situation that is exacerbated by the matricidal policies toward abortion and family planning by many of the world’s wealthiest countries (only family planning based on abstinence was supported under the “pro-Africa” Bush administration — a policy with extremely deleterious consequences for the ability of anti-retroviral treatment to prevent the spread of AIDS as well as for rates of maternal and child mortality). Access to safe, affordable, or free abortion is similarly limited. Famously, there is no country in the world where women have the legal right freely to make up their own minds about termination or continuation of pregnancy. Thus, despite the emphasis by many modern democratic nations on the protection of various individual rights and freedoms, women’s reproductive rights remain in an essentially pre-modern condition—a condition decried by both Firestone and Beauvoir as biological feudalism.

Years ago, a woman named Amanda Holmes also vanished in Langley Woods. She went missing from the area. I remember that she was twenty-two at the time, a senior in college. Her case was strange, the kind that captured national attention. It was all over the news. I followed her story at the time because it was interesting. I didn’t think it would ever matter to me on a more personal level. When Amanda first went missing, her car was found about a quarter mile from Langley Woods. There was a suicide note set on the dashboard. The search for her should have been cut-and-dried. It was anything but. Search parties looked for her for days that stretched into weeks. They used bloodhounds and then cadaver dogs to scavenge the woods and the residential areas around them. Even the dogs couldn’t find her. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people searched for Amanda, whose friends called her Mandy, by air and by foot. Her family was devastated. This was maybe five years ago. I remember at the time watching her parents cry on TV. I remember that months passed without finding her. Eventually everyone gave up. People stopped talking about Amanda Holmes. They came to believe that she wasn’t at Langley Woods or anywhere even close to it, that something else had happened to her, something far more mysterious and insidious, but no one knew what. There were theories, and unconfirmed reports of Amanda sightings all over the Chicagoland area and around the country. Had someone met her and driven her elsewhere? Was the suicide note just part of a cunning plan? Had she abandoned her life, her family, and was she living a new life somewhere else? But why? No one knew. The case went cold. A year passed and still she wasn’t found, until one day when some hikers stumbled upon her body in the woods. The medical examiner determined the cause of death: suicide. Amanda Holmes took her own life. She hung herself from a tree. She had been in these woods the whole time everyone was looking for her, and still no one could find her.