The Handmaid's Tale(67)

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 ate, 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.


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,” say 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.


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 silent 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 evergreen 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, watercolour, 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; cob-webbed, that’s closer. The wool is grey and has absorbed moisture from the air, it’s like a wetted baby blanket and smells faintly of damp sheep. At least my hands will get lanolined.