The Handmaid's Tale(18)

In the park, said Aunt Lydia, lying on blankets, men and women together sometimes, and at that she began to cry, standing up there in front of us, in full view.

I’m doing my best, she said. I’m trying to give you the best chance you can have. She blinked, the light was too strong for her, her mouth trembled, around her front teeth, teeth that stuck out a little and were long and yellowish, and I thought about the dead mice we would find on our doorstep, when we lived in a house, all three of us, four counting our cat, who was the one making these offerings.

Aunt Lydia pressed her hand over her mouth of a dead rodent. After a minute she took her hand away. I wanted to cry too because she reminded me. If only he wouldn’t eat half of them first, I said to Luke.

Don’t think it’s easy for me either, said Aunt Lydia.


Moira, breezing into my room, dropping her denim jacket on the floor. Got any cigs, she said.

In my purse, I said. No matches though.

Moira rummages in my purse. You should throw out some of this junk, she says. I’m giving an underwhore party.

A what? I say. There’s no point trying to work, Moira won’t allow it, she’s like a cat that crawls onto the page when you’re trying to read.

You know, like Tupperware, only with underwear. Tarts’ stuff. Lace crotches, snap garters. Bras that push your tits up. She finds my lighter, lights the cigarette she’s extracted from my purse. Want one? Tosses the package, with great generosity considering they’re mine.

Thanks piles, I say sourly. You’re crazy. Where’d you get an idea like that?

Working my way through college, says Moira. I’ve got connections. Friend of my mother’s. It’s big in the suburbs, once they start getting age spots they figure they’ve got to beat the competition. The Pornomarts and what have you.

I’m laughing. She always made me laugh.

But here? I say. Who’ll come? Who needs it?

You’re never too young to learn, she says. Come on, it’ll be great. We’ll all pee our pants laughing.


Is that how we lived then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now.

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

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

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.


From below, from the driveway, comes the sound of the car being started. It’s quiet in this area, there isn’t a lot of traffic, you can hear things like that very clearly: car motors, lawn mowers, the clipping of a hedge, the slam of a door. You could hear a shout clearly, or a shot, if such noises were ever made here. Sometimes there are distant sirens.

I go to the window and sit on the window seat, which is too narrow for comfort. There’s a hard little cushion on it, with a petit-point cover: FAITH, in square print, surrounded by a wreath of lilies. FAITH is a faded blue, the leaves of the lilies a dingy green. This is a cushion once used elsewhere, worn but not enough to throw out. Somehow it’s been overlooked.

I can spend minutes, tens of minutes, running my eyes over the print: FAITH. It’s the only thing they’ve given me to read. If I were caught doing it, would it count? I didn’t put the cushion here myself.

The motor turns, and I lean forward, pulling the white curtain across my face, like a veil. It’s semi-sheer, I can see through it. If I press my forehead against the glass and look down, I can see the back half of the Whirlwind. Nobody is there, but as I watch I see Nick come around to the back door of the car, open it, stand stiffly beside it. His cap is straight now and his sleeves rolled down and buttoned. I can’t see his face because I’m looking down on him.

Now the Commander is coming out. I glimpse him only for an instant, foreshortened, walking to the car. He doesn’t have his hat on, so it’s not a formal event he’s going to. His hair is grey. Silver, you might call it if you were being kind. I don’t feel like being kind. The one before this was bald, so I suppose he’s an improvement.