The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in miniskirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair.

palimpsest

We yearned for the future.

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

Like other things now, thought must be rationed.

It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

So. Apart from these details, this could be a college guest room, for the less distinguished visitors; or a room in a rooming house, of former times, for ladies in reduced circumstances. That is what we are now. The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances.

some fairy-tale figure in a red cloak, descending towards a moment of carelessness that is the same as danger. A Sister, dipped in blood.

the frown isn’t personal: it’s the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for. She thinks I may be catching, like a disease or any form of bad luck.

The Marthas know things, they talk among themselves, passing the unofficial news from house to house.

I hunger to commit the act of touch.

Many of the Wives have such gardens, it’s something for them to order and maintain and care for.

Sometimes the Commander’s Wife has a chair brought out, and just sits in it, in her garden. From a distance it looks like peace.

It’s good to have small goals that can be easily attained.

The threshold of a new house is a lonely place.

There’s always a black market, there’s always something that can be exchanged.

They can hit us, there’s Scriptural precedent. But not with any implement. Only with their hands.

The woman sitting in front of me was Serena Joy. Or had been, once. So it was worse than I thought.

Think of yourselves as seeds, and right then her voice was wheedling, conspiratorial, like the voices of those women who used to teach ballet classes to children, and who would say, Arms up in the air now; let’s pretend we’re trees. I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree.

She may be a real believer, a Handmaid in more than name.

It’s an event, a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of a drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes.

Nobody’s heart is perfect.

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

here, shopping, is where you might see someone you know, someone you’ve known in the time before, or at the Red Center. Just to catch sight of a face like that is an encouragement. If I could see Moira, just see her, know she still exists. It’s hard to imagine now, having a friend.

Now that she’s the carrier of life, she is closer to death, and needs special security. Jealousy could get her, it’s happened before. All children are wanted now, but not by everyone.

They wear lipstick, red, outlining the damp cavities of their mouths, like scrawls on a washroom wall, of the time before.

Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to be—her voice trembled—penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable. She called us girls.

remember the smell of nail polish, the way it wrinkled if you put the second coat on too soon, the satiny brushing of sheer pantyhose against the skin, the way the toes felt, pushed towards the opening in the shoe by the whole weight of the body.

We have learned to see the world in gasps.

When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

It’s only the more recent history that offends them.

The Wall is hundreds of years old too; or over a hundred, at least. Like the sidewalks, it’s red brick, and must once have been plain but handsome. Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts above it, and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the top. No one goes through those gates willingly. The precautions are for those trying to get out, though to make it even as far as the Wall, from the inside, past the electronic alarm system, would be next to impossible. Beside the main gateway there are six more bodies hanging, by the necks, their hands tied in front of them, their heads in white bags tipped sideways onto their shoulders. There must have been a Men’s Salvaging early this morning. I didn’t hear the bells. Perhaps I’ve become used to them. We stop, together as if on signal, and stand and look at the bodies. It doesn’t matter if we look. We’re supposed to look: this is what they are there for, hanging on the Wall.

These men, we’ve been told, are like war criminals. It’s no excuse that what they did was legal at the time: their crimes are retroactive. They have committed atrocities and must be made into examples, for the rest. Though this is hardly needed. No woman in her right mind, these days, would seek to prevent a birth, should she be so lucky as to conceive.

The red of the smile is the same as the red of the tulips in Serena Joy’s garden, towards the base of the flowers where they are beginning to heal. The red is the same but there is no connection. The tulips are not tulips of blood, the red smiles are not flowers, neither thing makes a comment on the other.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive. Even men used to say, I’d like to get laid. Though sometimes they said, I’d like to lay her. All this is pure speculation. I don’t really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it.

Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.

The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, then explode slowly, the petals thrown out like shards.

How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.

In this house we all envy each other something.

Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick.

Rented license.

Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound Could save a wretch like me, Who once was lost, but now am found, Was bound, but now am free.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.

Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.