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When Furiosa is escorted into the wives’ vault, the colossal door swallows sound the way these chambers stifle life. The metal is so thick that it obscures the sound of locks sliding into place. She doesn’t need to throw her whole weight against it just to ascertain that she has been sealed inside. She doesn’t need to do so, but it is a temptation she must fight every time.
This is the first thing she always notices, more than her surroundings, more than what awaits her.
This is a world of cool lighting, soft sounds, and an undemanding temperature. This is a world in which Furiosa must trust the most untrustworthy of all. Every time Immortan Joe sends her to guard (and spy) on his women, she knows he could imprison her in here as well. No one would oppose him. There would be many who would be willing to lay claim to her war rig and her prestige.
So she approaches this duty with the same sharp-eyed attentiveness she extends to the fury road, and to all the wastelands that sprawl around it. In the earlier days, when her wounds were still raw, and she still heard her mother’s death rattle in her dreams, she might have seen the vault as a site of untold convenience and luxury. Now Furiosa knows this is a battlefield too.
She squares her shoulders, and marches on into it.
Furiosa encounters Cheedo right away. This is the second thing she notices. She takes stock it of it in the same way she’s aware of foreboding changes in the wind, or the brutal landscape of Immortan Joe’s moods.
For a long time, Angharad made herself into a shield for the other women, a shield to protect them from an imperator aligned with Immortan Joe. Angharad would meet Furiosa at the vault’s door, and artfully monopolize her time. It took months for her to allow Furiosa to be alone with any of the other women (Angharad had practically hissed at Furiosa for speaking to the Dag so soon after arrival in the vault.) It took months more for Angharad to stop looking for signs of harm in the wives after those encounters. Lately, she even smiles at Furiosa, though it’s a tight, shuttered smile, and it sometimes makes the newest scratch on her face open and bleed.
Thus, Furiosa instant thought is that Angharad might be sick or even dead. Her pregnancy has been an eventful one, replete with illness and seemingly random pains. In recent weeks she's had several false labors. However, if the worst had happened, Furiosa would expect Cheedo to be red-faced, with salt-soaked cheeks. She would not expect the girl to be doing a split, bent over so that her nose practically touches the open book on the floor. Absorbed in information, not in grief. Cheedo’s calmness ignites a blaze of relief that Furiosa does not expect in herself.
Cheedo looks up. “Oh, Furiosa. Hello.” She maneuvers out of her unexpected position, long black hair sliding from her shoulder, down to her back. Cheedo’s face is scrubbed free of cosmetics, which means she must not be anticipating Joe to visit.
“Interesting way to read.” It’s not what she meant to say, but it’s too late to retract the statement.
“Yes, I know.” Cheedo stands, practically jumping to her feet. She’s been given the epithet “Fragile,” but Furiosa wonders if Joe knows how much tension and energy is coiled into this outrageously young wife of his. “Angharad read a book that described calisthenics and stretching. She wants us to exercise now, because she thinks it’s good for our spirits.”
“I think she wants to model herself after Furiosa,” Toast says, poking her head out of her room, before ducking back in.
“Yes, maybe…” Cheedo looks down at her feet. Her book was open to a drawing of the-world-that-was, and somehow Furiosa wants to stomp it out beneath her shoe. Knowing that there’s a vast expanse of lands out there is enraging when there’s only one place she wants to be and cannot reach. “Either way, that’s why I was doing that while I stretch. Reading helps make it more interesting.”
This is one activity out of many that has trickled down to Furiosa. Poetry readings, sewing, competitions to memorize the scientific names of long-dead plants. Once, the wives had performed an ancient, ancient play for Furiosa and Miss Giddy. There had been five acts, and they had performed one act for each of Furiosa's visit. Furiosa had understood one word out of three, but somehow she had pieced the story together the way cars were pieced together from scraps of metal. She wonders how Angharad has the vitality for everything that she does, just as she often wonders how the rest might cope with Angharad's absence .
Furiosa finds her preparing some tea. In a pinch, even this weak stove could be used as a weapon. However, according to hearsay, it’s been decades since a wife has attacked him directly.
Angharad and Furiosa sit across from each other at a table. Angharad’s wordlessly hands Furiosa the mysterious pills that could be swallowed to dull pain. Her phantom limb has long since stopped aching, but her life is one that constantly introduces new physical agonies. Sometimes Furiosa swallows them right there. Sometimes, like this afternoon, she stores them for later.
“He spent the night yesterday.” Angarad’s skin is dark below her eyes, dark like a bruise. However, Furiosa thinks it’s from lack of sleep, not from physical harm. “We were up until dawn. I was trying to convince him to make the Libation last longer.”
Angharad fills their cups with tea, and Furiosa thinks of all the dispossessed scrambling in the dirt for this same water. They both stare at their drinks for a while, before Angharad reaches for hers and takes a sip.
“It’s supposed to help nausea,” she says, inclined, as ever, to disregard doing anything for pleasure. For all that Angharad promotes art and knowledge, she seems to prize practicality most of all.
“Well did you?” Furiosa asks.
“Did I what?”
“Convince him to keep the water going a bit longer next time.” Furiosa has attended every single one for years now. Not for water (she is given a decent ration of it), but to hear the cries of disappointment every time Joe’s benevolence runs out. It’s always an outpouring of distress, one that ricochets off the boulders and cliffs and drying sand. It fills her bones and lungs and she knows this stockpiled sound will burst out of her one day.
“Yes. After pleading, and analyzing, and appealing to his ego for hours on end I got him to agree to a few seconds more.” Angharad takes a great gulp of tea, and then looks as if she wants to spit it out. She sets the cup down on the table.
Furiosa wonders what others might say in this moment. Some might praise Angharad, others might wonder why she tries so hard for so little. Furiosa is often mentally inclined to both opinions.
“It’s better than the last time he visited us. He tried to pit Toast against the Dag, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Well, he did.”
Furiosa might be aware about that particular incident, but it was in accordance with Joe’s general behavior. He likes to boast about his wives, and how they were so enraptured with him that they despised the others for receiving his attentions. In reality, he often tried to convince them to despise one another. He told lies, some obvious, some a slant version of the truth. It was a ham-fisted way to avoid mutiny and rebellion, and Furiosa knows that it was a decent strategy for a long while.
(Once, Angharad had told Furiosa that Capable had been here long before the rest of them, and had borne witness to the harm Joe's manipulations could inspire. When Capable was even younger than Cheedo, the rest of her sister-wives had all killed each other over the course of the afternoon. Capable had survived by hiding herself in a closet and praying to be forgotten.)
“It might have worked this time.” Now, Angharad grips the edge of the table, and her knuckles turn white. “The Dag just found out she’s pregnant, so she’s miserable. Joe’s trying to get Toast pregnant now, so she’s miserable. But we wouldn’t let him ruin things. They sat down, they talked, and figured out all his lies."
Angharad doesn’t say so, but Furiosa suspects it must be like this all of the time. She knows that the wives are united in disdaining Immortan Joe. They are united in their professed care for one another. But it’s one thing to spout such ideals, and another to engage in the work of maintaining a united front. And so Angharad seems to do daily battle with resentment and illness, depression and fear. Angharad engages in this precarious balancing act to provide them all with a solid foundation of trust and, for the most part, it works. It works so well it makes Furiosa homesick for the green place.
“We don’t have to be the closest of friends, I tell them,” Angharad says, “but we have to help each other. Otherwise, what’s the point?”
Furiosa makes a sound, that could mean all sorts of things.
Angharad tilts her head, and gives Furiosa an appraising sort of look. There are no new cuts on her face, and Furiosa suspects that’s because Angharad has been taking solace in the pain of ideas.
“Come walk with me in the garden, Furiosa.”
That was Angharad’s name for it. It was really a collection of edible greenery, and they were constantly being sprayed with a fine mist. The water pelted the leaves, and the machines rumbled endlessly.
“You’re doing an oil run in a month, aren’t you?” Angharad asks, even though she must know the answer.
“Yes,” Furiosa says. “As always.”
“We aren’t guarded as diligently then.” The mist collects on Angharad’s forehead and lip and scars. Like glaze on shattered bits of pottery. Her hair is already damp. “There are just a few men to take out between us and your war rig.”
Furiosa turns from Angharad, and watches rivulets pool down the stalk of a plant. Even now that is adequately hydrated, some animal instinct demands that she lap it up. To prepare, to survive, to fight her own mortality.
“You do realize I’ve been assigned to inform on you right?” She looks over her shoulder at Angharad. Barely.
“But you don't.” Angharad almost looks insulted. “And of course I know. Joe is not that subtle.”
“Neither were you just now.”
Angharad walks away from her, and Furiosa wonders if that is the end of things. But, no, it's not. Angharad walks around ‘garden,’ looking like a woman who wishes she were physically capable of running. Her bare feet barely leave an impression where they land. When she stands in front of Furiosa again, she is panting, but less than expected. Her dress is streaked in dirt.
“We are not things,” she says, in a ragged voice. “Neither are you.”
Furiosa has nothing to say to that.
“He’s going after Cheedo soon. We all know it.”
Furiosa has nothing to say to that.
“And, if nothing else, I want him to know how much I despise him. Even if my absence has to speak for me.”
Furiosa takes a step forward, and almost enjoys the hope in Angharad’s eyes. “It’s not a decision I can make right away.”
“Of course not!” But Angharad grins, and Angharad clearly thinks she has made her case.
When Furiosa is ushered out of the vault that day, she knows Angharad is right to feel triumphant. Just as she knows the hard work has only just begun.