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five bathrooms in all, though one was a powder room—Why was it called that? What was “powder”?—and a cellar with supplies.
There were swings in one of the parks, but because of our skirts, which might be blown up by the wind and then looked into, we were not to think of taking such a liberty as a swing. Only boys could taste that freedom; only they could swoop and soar; only they could be airborne. I have still never been on a swing. It remains one of my wishes.
As the year unfolds into spring, may our hearts unfold; bless our daughters, bless our Wives, bless our Aunts and Supplicants, bless our Pearl Girls in their mission work beyond our borders, and may Fatherly Grace be poured out upon our fallen Handmaid sisters and redeem them through the sacrifice of their bodies and their labour according to His will. And bless Baby Nicole, stolen away by her treacherous Handmaid mother and hidden by the godless in Canada; and bless all the innocents she represents, doomed to be raised by the depraved. Our thoughts and prayers are with them. May our Baby
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Despite what you may have thought, my reader, there was beauty to be had in Gilead. Why would we not have wished for it? We were human after all.
Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua: A Defence of One’s Life. No one reads that weighty tome anymore, Catholicism being considered heretical and next door to voodoo,
She wore bright colours, like orange and hot pink, because she said they created a positive and energetic atmosphere, and anyway she was part gypsy at heart.
I would get irritated by her singing; I’m sorry about that now.
You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.
“Her name would have been something else earlier,” said Shunammite. “Some other man’s. They get passed around until they have a baby. They’re all sluts anyway, they don’t need real names.” Shunammite said a slut was a woman who’d gone with more men than her husband.
And Handmaids must be double sluts, said Shunammite, because they didn’t even have husbands. But
Because if you weren’t an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn’t have a baby?
Paula, wanted to have a baby because she did not count me as her child: Tabitha was my mother.
Why couldn’t God have arranged it otherwise? But he had a special interest in blood,
The adult female body was one big booby trap as far as I could tell. If there was a hole, something was bound to be shoved into it and something else was bound to come out, and that went for any kind of hole: a hole in a wall, a hole in a mountain, a hole in the ground. There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without
Whenever there was a secret to tell—especially a shocking one—Shunammite loved to be the messenger. “Guess what I found out?” she said one day while we were eating our lunchtime sandwiches.
“Your mother wasn’t your real mother,” said Shunammite. “They took you away from your real mother because she was a slut. But don’t worry, it’s not your fault, because you were too young to know that.”
No wonder Paula and Commander Kyle wanted a Handmaid: they wanted a real child instead of me. I was nobody’s child.
Maybe she was like God—real but unreal at the same time. What if I were to pray to Aunt Lydia at night, instead of to God? I did try, later in the week. But the idea was too unthinkable—praying to a woman—so I stopped.
“She’s a Handmaid?” I asked. It was true, then, what Shunammite had said. “My mother?”
He said, “Perfect teeth. Perfect.” Then he said, “You’re getting to be a big girl, Agnes.” Then he put his hand on my small but growing breast. It was summer, so I was wearing the summer school uniform, which was pink and made of light cotton.
“I should have gone with you,” she said. “But he’s the best dentist. Everyone agrees.” She knew. Or she suspected. She was warning me not to say anything. That was the kind of coded language they used.
It was a boy, a healthy son for Paula and Commander Kyle. He was named Mark. But Ofkyle died.
“At least the baby was saved,” said Vera. “It was one or the other,” said Rosa. “They had to cut her open.”
It was Crystal. And that is how I remember her now. I remember her as Crystal.
The truth was that they’d cut Crystal open to get the baby out, and they’d killed her by doing that. It wasn’t something she chose. She hadn’t volunteered to die with noble womanly honour or be a shining example, but nobody mentioned that.
I spent as much time in my room as possible, avoiding the cheerfulness in the kitchen and brooding on the unfairness of the universe.
“God will prevail,” concluded the speaker. There was a chorus of baritone Amens. Then the men who’d escorted the blindfolded women raised their guns and shot them. Their aim was good: the women keeled over. There was a collective groan from all of us who were seated in the bleachers. I heard screams and sobbing. Some of the women leapt to their feet, shouting—I could not make out the words—but were quickly silenced by being hit on the backs of their heads with the butts of guns. There were no repeated blows: one sufficed. Again, the aim was good: these men were trained.
He smiled at me, showing white teeth with a molar missing on the left. A tooth missing like that makes a person look illegal.
“That’s where you were born,” he said. “In Gilead.” “You’re joking,” I said. “You were smuggled out by your mother and Mayday. They’d risked their lives. Gilead made a big fuss about it; they wanted you back. They said your so-called legal parents had the right to claim you. Mayday hid you; there were a lot of people looking for you, plus a media blitz.”
“Like Baby Nicole,” I said. “I wrote an essay about her at school.” Elijah looked down at the floor again. Then he looked straight at me. “You are Baby Nicole.”
Some of us were past menopause, but others were not, so the smell of clotting blood was added to the sweat and tears and shit and puke. To breathe was to be nauseated. They were reducing us to animals—to penned-up animals—to our animal nature.
I can get through. I was right, but only just. You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.
One day, if it was a day, three men came into my cell without warning, shone a glaring light into my blinking purblind eyes, threw me onto the floor, and administered a precise kicking, and other attentions. The noises I emitted were familiar to me: I had heard them nearby. I won’t go into any further details, except to say that Tasers were also involved. No, I was not raped. I suppose I was already too old and tough for the purpose.
This kicking and tasing procedure was repeated two more times. Three is a magic number.
It did not weep: it saw. And behind it someone was thinking: I will get you back for this. I don’t care how long it takes or how much shit I have to eat in the meantime, but I will do it.
was supposed to be finishing a hateful petit-point project, to keep my mind occupied—the design was a bowl of fruit suitable for being made into a footstool, intended for my future husband, whoever he might be. In one corner of the footstool square I embroidered a small skull: it represented the skull of my stepmother, Paula, but if anyone asked me about it I planned to say that it was a memento mori, a reminder of the fact that we must all die someday.
After Paula had left, I plucked the Wife doll out of her chair and threw her across the room.
note here that lively was a word the Wives used in a disapproving way: it meant brash.
“But I don’t want to!” she would wail to us when Aunt Lise was out of the room. “To have some man crawling all over you, like, like worms! I hate it!” It occurred to me that she didn’t say she would hate it, she said she already hated it. What had happened to her?
“You had an abortion,” he said. So they’d been rifling through some records. “Only one,” I said fatuously. “I was very young.” He made a disapproving grunt. “You are aware that this form of person-murder is now punishable by death? The law is retroactive.”
for the ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.”
Our birth rate—for various reasons, but most significantly through the selfish choices of women—is in free fall.
it is to be a separate female sphere,” I said, “it must be truly separate. Within it, women must command. Except in extreme need, men must not pass the threshold of our allotted premises, nor shall our methods be questioned. We shall be judged solely by our results. Though we will of course report to the authorities if and when it’s necessary.”
“Evidence?” I’d thought Elizabeth had merely been eating those eggs. This was a more creative use for them: I was quite proud of her.
“I believe she’s preparing to denounce you. To divert attention from herself and her own disloyal activities. She may be the traitor within us, here at Ardua Hall—working with the Mayday terrorists. I have long suspected her of heresy,” said Aunt Vidala.
I experienced a jolt of excitement. This was a development I hadn’t anticipated: Vidala snitching on Elizabeth—and to me of all people, despite h...
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Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Having no friends, I must make do with enemies.
Melanie and Neil just sat in the car. Looking back—they were slumping, as if they were asleep.” “Or dead,” said Ada. “Yeah, could be,” said George. “The three guys went off. About one minute later the car blew up.” “That’s way worse than what we thought,” said Ada. “Like, what did they tell before, inside the store?”
“Oh, around 1740,” she said. “They used to catch girls from New England, hold them hostage, trade them for money or else marry them off. Once the girls had kids, they wouldn’t want to go back. That’s how I got my mixed heritage.” “Mixed like what?” “Part stealer, part stolen,” she said. “I’m ambidextrous.”
“Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give,”
