The Testaments(21)

“Yes you will,” said Shunammite. “Everyone does.”

“No they don’t,” said Becka, but only to me.





15


A few months after the wedding of Paula and my father, our household received a Handmaid. Her name was Ofkyle, since my father’s name was Commander Kyle. “Her name would have been something else earlier,” said Shunammite. “Some other man’s. They get passed around until they have a baby. They’re all sluts anyway, they don’t need real names.” Shunammite said a slut was a woman who’d gone with more men than her husband. Though we did not really know what “gone with” meant.

And Handmaids must be double sluts, said Shunammite, because they didn’t even have husbands. But you weren’t supposed to be rude to the Handmaids or call them sluts, said Aunt Vidala, wiping her nose, because they were performing a service to the community by way of atonement, and we should all be grateful to them for that.

“I don’t see why being a slut is performing a service,” Shunammite whispered.

“It’s because of the babies,” I whispered back. “The Handmaids can make babies.”

“So can some other women too,” said Shunammite, “and they aren’t sluts.” It was true, some of the Wives could, and some of the Econowives: we’d seen them with their bulging stomachs. But a lot of women couldn’t. Every woman wanted a baby, said Aunt Estée. Every woman who wasn’t an Aunt or a Martha. Because if you weren’t an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn’t have a baby?

What the arrival of this Handmaid meant was that my new stepmother, Paula, wanted to have a baby because she did not count me as her child: Tabitha was my mother. But what about Commander Kyle? I didn’t seem to count as a child for him either. It was as if I had become invisible to both of them. They looked at me, and through me, and saw the wall.



* * *



—

When the Handmaid entered our household, I was almost of womanly age, as Gilead counted. I was taller, my face was longer in shape, and my nose had grown. I had darker eyebrows, not furry caterpillar ones like Shunammite’s or wispy ones like Becka’s, but curved into half-circles, and dark eyelashes. My hair had thickened and changed from a mousey brown to chestnut. All of that was pleasing to me, and I would look at my new face in the mirror, turning to take it in from all angles despite warnings against vanity.

More alarmingly, my breasts were swelling, and I had begun to sprout hair on areas of my body that we were not supposed to dwell on: legs, armpits, and the shameful part of many elusive names. Once that happened to a girl, she was no longer a precious flower but a much more dangerous creature.

We’d been prepared for such things at school—Aunt Vidala had presented a series of embarrassing illustrated lectures that were supposed to inform us about a woman’s role and duty in regard to her body—a married woman’s role—but they had not been very informative or reassuring. When Aunt Vidala asked if there were any questions, there weren’t any, because where would you begin? I wanted to ask why it had to be like this, but I already knew the answer: because it was God’s plan. That was how the Aunts got out of everything.

Soon I could expect blood to come out from between my legs: that had already happened to many of the girls at school. Why couldn’t God have arranged it otherwise? But he had a special interest in blood, which we knew about from Scripture verses that had been read out to us: blood, purification, more blood, more purification, blood shed to purify the impure, though you weren’t supposed to get it on your hands. Blood was polluting, especially when it came out of girls, but God once liked having it spilled on his altars. Though he had given that up—said Aunt Estée—in favour of fruits, vegetables, silent suffering, and good deeds.

The adult female body was one big booby trap as far as I could tell. If there was a hole, something was bound to be shoved into it and something else was bound to come out, and that went for any kind of hole: a hole in a wall, a hole in a mountain, a hole in the ground. There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it. I considered shrinking myself by not eating, and I did try that for a day, but I got so hungry I couldn’t stick to my resolution, and went to the kitchen in the middle of the night and ate chicken scraps out of the soup pot.



* * *



—

My effervescent body was not my only worry: my status at school had become noticeably lower. I was no longer deferred to by the others, I was no longer courted. Girls would break off their conversations as I approached and would eye me strangely. Some would even turn their backs. Becka did not do that—she still contrived to sit beside me—but she looked straight ahead and did not slip her hand under the desk to hold mine.

Shunammite was still claiming to be my friend, partly I am sure because she was not popular among the others, but now she was doing me the favour of friendship instead of the other way around. I was hurt by all of this, though I didn’t yet understand why the atmosphere had changed.

The others knew, however. Word must have been going around, from mouth to ear to mouth—from my stepmother, Paula, through our Marthas, who noticed everything, and then from them to the other Marthas they would encounter when doing errands, and then from those Marthas to their Wives, and from the Wives to their daughters, my schoolmates.