The Handmaid’s Tale

XII Jezebels
31
Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own
house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn't happened this
morning, either.
I put on my clothes, summer clothes, it's still summer; it seems to have stopped
at summer. July, its breathless days and sauna nights, hard to sleep. I make a
point of keeping track. I should scratch marks on the wall, one for each day of
the week, and run a line through them when I have seven. But what would be the
use, this isn't a jail sentence; there's no time here that can be done and finished
with. Anyway, all I have to do is ask, to find out what day it is. Yesterday was
July the fourth, which used to be Independence Day, before they abolished it.
September first will be Labor Day, they still have that. Though it didn't used to
have anything to do with mothers.
But I tell time by the moon. Lunar, not solar.
I bend over to do up my red shoes; lighter weight these days, with discreet slits
cut in them, though nothing so daring as sandals. It's an effort to stoop; despite
the exercises, I can feel my body gradually seizing up, refusing. Being a woman
this way is how I used to imagine it would be to be very old. I feel I even walk
like that: crouched over, my spine constricting to a question mark, my bones

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leached of calcium and porous as limestone. When I was younger, imagining
age, I would think, Maybe you appreciate things more when you don't have
much time left. I forgot to include the loss of energy. Some days I do appreciate
things more, eggs, flowers, but then I decide I'm only having an attack of
sentimentality, my brain going pastel Technicolor, like the beautiful-sunset
greeting cards they used to make so many of in California. High-gloss hearts.
The danger is gray out.
I'd like to have Luke here, in this bedroom while I'm getting dressed, so I could
have a fight with him. Absurd, but that's what I want. An argument, about who
should put the dishes in the dishwasher, whose turn it is to sort the laundry, clean
the toilet; something daily and unimportant in the big scheme of things. We
could even have a fight about that, about unimportant, important. What a luxury
it would be. Not that we did it much. These days I script whole fights, in my
head, and the reconciliations afterwards too.
I sit in my chair, the wreath on the ceiling floating above my head, like a frozen
halo, a zero. A hole in space where a star exploded. A ring, on water, where a
stone's been thrown. All things white and circular. I wait for the day to unroll, for
the earth to turn, according to the round face of the implacable clock. The
geometrical days, which go around and around, smoothly and oiled. Sweat
already on my upper lip, I wait, for the arrival of the inevitable egg, which will
be lukewarm like the room and will have a green film on the yolk and will taste
faintly of sulphur.
Today, later, with Ofglen, on our shopping walk:
We go to the church, as usual, and look at the graves. Then to the Wall. Only two
hanging on it today: one Catholic, not a priest though, placarded with an upside-
down cross, and some other sect I don't recognize. The body is marked only with
a J, in red. It doesn't mean Jewish, those would be yellow stars. Anyway there
haven't been many of them. Because they were declared Sons of Jacob and
therefore special, they were given a choice. They could convert, or emigrate to
Israel. A lot of them emigrated, if you can believe the news. I saw a boatload of
them, on the TV, leaning over the railings in their black coats and hats and their
long beards, trying to look as Jewish as possible, in costumes fished up from the
past, the women with shawls over their heads, smiling and waving, a little stiffly
it's true, as if they were posing; and another shot, of the richer ones, lining up for
the planes. Ofglen says some other people got out that way, by pretending to be

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Jewish, but it wasn't easy
because of the tests they gave you and they've tightened up on that now.
You don't get hanged only for being a Jew though. You get hanged for being a
noisy Jew who won't make the choice. Or for pretending to convert. That's been
on the TV too: raids at night, secret hoards of Jewish things dragged out from
under beds, torahs, tal-liths, Magen Davids. And the owners of them, sullen
faced, unrepentant, pushed by the Eyes against the walls of their bedrooms,
while the sorrowful voice of the announcer tells us voice-over about their perfidy
and ungratefulness.
So the J isn't for Jew. What could it be? Jehovah's Witness? Jesuit? Whatever it
meant, he's just as dead.
After this ritual viewing we continue on our way, heading as usual for some open
space we can cross, so we can talk. If you can call it talking, these clipped
whispers, projected through the funnels of our white wings. It's more like a
telegram, a verbal semaphore. Amputated speech.
We can never stand long in any one place. We don't want to be picked up for
loitering.
Today we turn in the opposite direction from Soul Scrolls, to where there's an
open park of sorts, with a large old building on it; ornate late Victorian, with
stained glass. It used to be called Memorial Hall, though I never knew what it
was a memorial for. Dead people of some kind.
Moira told me once that it used to be where the undergraduates ale, in the earlier
days of the university. If a woman went in there, they'd throw buns at her, she
said.
Why? I said. Moira became, over the years, increasingly versed in such
anecdotes. I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.
To make her go out, said Moira.
Maybe it was more like throwing peanuts at elephants, I said. Moira laughed;
she could always do that. Exotic monsters, she said.

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We stand looking at this building, which is in shape more or less like a church, a
cathedral.
Ofglen says, "I hear that's where the Eyes hold their banquets."
"Who told you?" I say. There's no one near, we can speak more freely, but out of
habit we keep our voices low.
"The grapevine," she says. She pauses, looks sideways at me, I can sense the
blur of white as her wings move. "There's a password," she says.
"A password?" I ask. "What for?"
"So you can tell," she says. "Who is and who isn't."
Although I can't see what use it is for me to know, I ask, "What is it then?"
"Mayday," she says. "I tried it on you once."
"Mayday," I repeat. I remember that day. M'aidez.
"Don't use it unless you have to," says Ofglen. "It isn't good for us to know about
too many of the others, in the network. In case you get caught."
I find it hard to believe in these whisperings, these revelations, though I always
do at the time.
Afterwards, though, they seem improbable, childish even, like something you'd
do for fun; like a girls'
club, like secrets at school. Or like the spy novels I used to read, on weekends,
when I should have been finishing my homework, or like late-night television.
Passwords, things that cannot be told, people with secret identities, dark
linkages: this does not seem as if it ought to be the true shape of the world. But
that is my own illusion, a hangover from a version of reality I learned in the
former time.
And networks. Networking, one of my mother's old phrases, musty slang of
yesteryear. Even in her sixties she still did something she called that, though as
far as I could see all it meant was having lunch with some other woman.

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I leave Ofglen at the corner. "I'll see you later," she says. She glides away along
the sidewalk
and I go up the walk towards the house. There's Nick, hat askew; today he
doesn't even look at me. He must have been waiting around for me though, to
deliver his silenl message, because as soon as he knows I've seen him he gives
the Whirlwind one last swipe with the chamois and walks briskly off towards the
garage door.
I walk along the gravel, between the slabs of ovcrgreen lawn. Serena Joy is
sitting under the willow tree, in her chair, cane propped at her elbow. Her dress is
crisp cool cotton. For her it's blue, wa-tercolor, not this red of mine that sucks in
heat and blazes with it at the same time. Her profile's towards me, she's knitting.
How can she bear to touch the wool, in this heat? But possibly her skin's gone
numb; possibly she feels nothing, like one formerly scalded.
I lower my eyes to the path, glide by her, hoping to be invisible, knowing I'll be
ignored. But not this time.
"Offred," she says.
I pause, uncertain.
"Yes, you."
I turn towards her my blinkered sight.
"Come over here. I want you."
I walk over the grass and stand before her, looking down.
"You can sit," she says. "Here, take the cushion. I need you to hold this wool."
She's got a cigarette, the ashtray's on the lawn beside her, and a cup of
something, tea or coffee. "It's too damn close in there. You need a little air," she
says. I sit, putting down my basket, strawberries again, chicken again, and I note
the swear word: something new. She fits the skein of wool over my two
outstretched hands, starts winding. I am leashed, it looks like, manacled;
cobwebbed, that's closer.
The wool is gray and has absorbed moisture from the air, it's like a wetted baby

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blanket and smells faintly of damp sheep. At least my hands will get lanolined.
Serena winds, the cigarette held in the corner of her mouth smoldering, sending
out tempting smoke. She winds slowly and with difficulty because of her
gradually crippling hands, but with determination. Perhaps the knitting, for her,
involves a kind of willpower; maybe it even hurts. Maybe it's been medically
prescribed: ten rows a day of plain, ten of purl. Though she must do more than
that. I see those evergreen trees and geometric boys and girls in a different light:
evidence of her stubbornness, and not altogether despicable.