The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

Think of it as being in the army, said Aunt Lydia.

Like other things now, thought must be rationed.

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

But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or.

The white wings too are prescribed issue; they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen.

The door of the room—not my room, I refuse to say my—is not locked.

A sitting room in which I never sit, but stand or kneel only.

Her face might be kindly if she would smile. But 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.

Better her than me, Rita said, and I opened the door. Their faces were the way women’s faces are when they’ve been talking about you behind your back and they think you’ve heard: embarrassed, but also a little defiant, as if it were their right. That day, Cora was more pleasant to me than usual, Rita more surly.

The tulips are red, a darker crimson towards the stem, as if they have been cut and are beginning to heal there.

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

I once had a garden. I can remember the smell of the turned earth, the plump shapes of bulbs held in the hands, fullness, the dry rustle of seeds through the fingers. Time could pass more swiftly that way. 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.

They aren’t scarves for grown men but for children.

I am a reproach to her; and a necessity.

So, you’re the new one, she said. She didn’t step aside to let me in, she just stood there in the doorway, blocking the entrance. She wanted me to feel that I could not come into the house unless she said so. There is push and shove, these days, over such toeholds. Yes, I said.

The threshold of a new house is a lonely place.

Not so her eyes, which were the flat hostile blue of a midsummer sky in bright sunlight, a blue that shuts you out. Her nose must once have been what was called cute but now was too small for her face. Her face was not fat but it was large. Two lines led downward from the corners of her mouth; between them was her chin, clenched like a fist.

As for my husband, she said, he’s just that. My husband. I want that to be perfectly clear. Till death do us part. It’s final.

She was ash blond, petite, with a snub nose and huge blue eyes which she’d turn upwards during hymns. She could smile and cry at the same time, one tear or two sliding gracefully down her cheek, as if on cue, as her voice lifted through its highest notes, tremulous, effortless. It was after that she went on to other things.

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

He has a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth, which shows that he too has something he can trade on the black market.

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette. Perhaps it was a test, to see what I would do. Perhaps he is an Eye.

Sidewalks are kept much cleaner than they used to be.

She said, 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.

We aren’t allowed to go there except in twos. This is supposed to be for our protection, though the notion is absurd: we are well protected already. The truth is that she is my spy, as I am hers. If either of us slips through the net because of something that happens on one of our daily walks, the other will be accountable.

with short little steps like a trained pig’s, on its hind legs.

even if it’s false news, it must mean something.

Nothing safer than dead,

They are supposed to show respect, because of the nature of our service.

Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes.

The windows of the vans are dark-tinted, and the men in the front seats wear dark glasses: a double obscurity. The vans are surely more silent than the other cars. When they pass, we avert our eyes. If there are sounds coming from inside, we try not to hear them.

As we walk away I know they’re watching, these two men who aren’t yet permitted to touch women. They touch with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. It’s like thumbing your nose from behind a fence or teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach, and I’m ashamed of myself for doing it, because none of this is the fault of these men, they’re too young.

Then I find I’m not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there.

There is the same absence of people, the same air of being asleep. The street is almost like a museum, or a street in a model town constructed to show the way people used to live. As in those pictures, those museums, those model towns, there are no children.

This is the heart of Gilead, where the war cannot intrude except on television.

but this is the center, where no...

Luke and I used to walk together, sometimes, along these streets.

Such freedom now seems almost weightless.

Econowives, they’re called.

I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control.

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.

Habits are hard to break.

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.

It’s hard to imagine now, having a friend.

vastly pregnant;

She’s a magic presence to us, an object of envy and desire, we covet her.

She’s come here to display herself. She’s glowing, rosy, she’s enjoying every minute of this.

Humungous, word of my childhood.