The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.

granular; it’s like running my hand over a plateful of dried rice;

The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand.

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.

From each, says the slogan, according to her ability; to each according to his needs.

She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way.

She said: Because they won’t want things they can’t have.

The Commander’s Wife looks down at the baby as if it’s a bouquet of flowers: something she’s won, a tribute.

Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies.

Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure.

But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.

I would rather have the disapproval, I feel more worthy of it.

We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.

But all around the walls there are bookcases. They’re filled with books. Books and books and books, right out in plain view, no locks, no boxes. No wonder we can’t come in here. It’s an oasis of the forbidden. I try not to stare.

It’s such a studied pose, something of the country squire, some old come-on from a glossy men’s mag. He probably decided ahead of time that he’d be standing like that when I came in. When I knocked he probably rushed over to the fireplace and propped himself up. He should have a black patch, over one eye, a cravat with horseshoes on it.

slowly and it seems to me elaborately.

as if I’m a kitten in a window. One he’s looking at but doesn’t intend to buy.

“You must find this strange,” he says. I simply look at him. The understatement of the year, was a phrase my mother uses. Used.

“I would like—” he says. “This will sound silly.” And he does look embarrassed, sheepish was the word, the way men used to look once. He’s old enough to remember how to look that way, and to remember also how appealing women once found it. The young ones don’t know those tricks. They’ve never had to use them. “I’d like you to play a game of Scrabble with me,” he says. I hold myself absolutely rigid. I keep my face unmoving. So that’s what’s in the forbidden room! Scrabble! I want to laugh, shriek with laughter, fall off my chair. This was once the game of old women, old men, in the summers or in retirement villas, to be played when there was nothing good on television. Or of adolescents, once, long long ago. My mother had a set, kept at the back of the hall cupboard, with the Christmas tree decorations in their cardboard boxes. Once she tried to interest me in it, when I was thirteen and miserable and at loose ends. Now of course it’s something different. Now it’s forbidden, for us. Now it’s dangerous. Now it’s indecent. Now it’s something he can’t do with his Wife. Now it’s desirable. Now he’s compromised himself. It’s as if he’s offered me drugs. “All right,” I say, as if indifferent. I can in fact hardly speak.

This is like being on a date. This is like sneaking into the dorm after hours. This is conspiracy. “Thank you,” he says. “For the game.” Then he says, “I want you to kiss me.” I think about how I could take the back of the toilet apart, the toilet in my own bathroom, on a bath night, quickly and quietly, so Cora outside on the chair would not hear me. I could get the sharp lever out and hide it in my sleeve, and smuggle it into the Commander’s study, the next time, because after a request like that there’s always a next time, whether you say yes or no. I think about how I could approach the Commander, to kiss him, here alone, and take off his jacket, as if to allow or invite something further, some approach to true love, and put my arms around him and slip the lever out from the sleeve and drive the sharp end into him suddenly, between his ribs. I think about the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands. In fact I don’t think about anything of the kind. I put it in only afterwards. Maybe I should have thought about that, at the time, but I didn’t. As I said, this is a reconstruction. “All right,” I say. I go to him and place my lips, closed, against his. I smell the shaving lotion, the usual kind, the hint of mothballs, familiar enough to me. But he’s like someone I’ve only just met.

He draws away, looks down at me. There’s the smile again, the sheepish one. Such candor. “Not like that,” he says. “As if you meant it.” He was so sad. That is a reconstruction, too.

Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

Time’s a trap, I’m caught in it.

Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good. Lead them around by the nose; that is a metaphor. It’s nature’s way. It’s God’s device. It’s the way things are.

But how to fit the Commander into this, as he exists in his study, with his word games and his desire, for what? To be played with, to be gently kissed, as if I meant it.

through the curtains gauzy as a bridal dress, as ectoplasm, one of my hands holding the other, rocking back and forth a little, no matter what I do there’s something hilarious about it. He wanted me to play Scrabble with him, and kiss him as if I meant it. This is one of the most bizarre things that’s happened to me, ever. Context is all.

but I remember the quality of the pictures, the way everything in them seemed to be coated with a mixture of sunlight and dust, and how dark the shadows were under people’s eyebrows and along their cheekbones.

What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation. A big child, she would have said to herself. Her heart would have melted, she’d have smoothed the hair back from his forehead, kissed him on the ear, and not just to get something out of him either. The instinct to soothe, to make it better. There there, she’d say, as he woke from a nightmare. Things are so hard for you. All this she would have believed, because otherwise how could she have kept on living? She was very ordinary, under that beauty. She believed in decency, she was nice to the Jewish maid, or nice enough, nicer than she needed to be.

She was aiming, positioning the blades of the shears, then cutting with a convulsive jerk of the hands. Was it the arthritis, creeping up? Or some blitzkrieg, some kamikaze, committed on the swelling genitalia of the flowers? The fruiting body.

There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

The willow is in full plumage and is no help, with its insinuating whispers. Rendezvous, it says, terraces; the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever. The summer dress rustles against the flesh of my thighs, the grass grows underfoot, at the edges of my eyes there are movements, in the branches; feathers, flittings, grace notes, tree into bird, metamorphosis run wild. Goddesses are possible now and the air suffuses with desire. Even the bricks of the house are softening, becoming tactile; if I leaned against them they’d be warm and yielding. It’s amazing what denial can do. Did the sight of my ankle make him lightheaded, faint, at the checkpoint yesterday, when I dropped my pass and let him pick it up for me? No handkerchief, no fan, I use what’s handy.

her form of procreation, it must be.

The first time, I was confused. His needs were obscure to me, and what I could perceive of them seemed to me ridiculous, laughable, like a fetish for lace-up shoes.

To be asked to play Scrabble, instead, as if we were an old married couple, or two children, seemed kinky in the extreme, a violation in its own way. As a request it was opaque.

but now I think that his motives and desires weren’t obvious even to him. They had not yet reached the level of words.

It was a look you’d give to an almost extinct animal, at the zoo.

At the same time I saw this longing of mine as trivial and absurd, because I’d taken such magazines lightly enough once.

The real promise in them was immortality.

In here, it is, he said quietly. I saw the point. Having broken the main taboo, why should I hesitate over another one, something minor? Or another, or another; who could tell where it might stop? Behind this particular door, taboo dissolved.

What’s dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough for those whose motives are . . . Beyond reproach, I said.

Who else could I show it to? he said, and there it was again, that sadness.

So there it was, out in the open: his wife didn’t understand him. That’s what I was there for, then. The same old thing. It was too banal to be true.

Butter, he said, musing. That’s very clever. Butter. He laughed. I could have slapped him.

But she might smell it on you. I wondered if this fear of his came from past experience. Long past: lipstick on the collar, perfume on the cuffs, a scene, late at night, in some kitchen or bedroom. A man devoid of such experience wouldn’t think of that. Unless he’s craftier than he looks.

The trouble is, I said, I don’t have anywhere to keep it. In your room, he said, as if it were obvious. They’d find it, I said. Someone would find it. Why? he asked, as if he really didn’t know. Maybe he didn’t. It wasn’t the first time he gave evidence of being truly ignorant of the real conditions under which we lived. They look, I said. They look in all our rooms. What for? he said. I think I lost control then, a little. Razor blades, I said. Books, writing, black-market stuff. All the things we aren’t supposed to have. Jesus Christ, you ought to know. My voice was angrier than I’d intended, but he didn’t even wince. Then you’ll have to keep it here, he said. So that’s what I did. He watched me smoothing it over my hands and then my face with that same air of looking in through the bars. I wanted to turn my back on him—it was as if he were in the bathroom with me—but I didn’t dare. For him, I must remember, I am only a whim.

Now that I was seeing the Commander on the sly, if only to play his games and listen to him talk, our functions were no longer as separate as they should have been in theory. I was taking something away from her, although she didn’t know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn’t want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious “it” I couldn’t quite define—for the Commander wasn’t in love with me, I refused to believe he felt anything for me as extreme as that—what would be left for her?

Also: I now had power over her, of a kind, although she didn’t know it. And I enjoyed that. Why pretend? I enjoyed it a lot.

Don’t do that again, I said to him the next time we were alone. Do what? he said. Try to touch me like that, when we’re . . . when she’s there. Did I? he said. You could get me transferred, I said. To the Colonies. You know that. Or worse. I thought he should continue to act, in public, as if I were a large vase or a window: part of the background, inanimate or transparent. I’m sorry, he said. I didn’t mean to. But I find it . . . What? I said, when he didn’t go on. Impersonal, he said. How long did it take you to find that out? I said. You can see from the way I was speaking to him that we were already on different terms.

It’s my job to provide what is otherwise lacking. Even the Scrabble. It’s an absurd as well as an ignominious position.