Margaret Atwood - The Testaments

But my fall in value went beyond the loss of my father’s favour. There was a new piece of information circulating, one that was very harmful to me.

—

Whenever there was a secret to tell—especially a shocking one—Shunammite loved to be the messenger.

“Guess what I found out?” she said one day while we were eating our lunchtime sandwiches. It was a sunny noon: we were being allowed to have a picnic outside on the school lawn. The grounds were enclosed by a high fence topped with razor wire and there were two Angels at the gate, which was locked except when the Aunts’ cars went in and out, so we were perfectly safe.

“What?” I said. The sandwiches were an artificial cheese mixture that had replaced real cheese in our school sandwiches because the real cheese was needed by our soldiers. The sunlight was warm, the grass was soft, I had made it out of the house that day without Paula seeing me, and for the moment I was feeling marginally content with my life.

“Your mother wasn’t your real mother,” said Shunammite. “They took you away from your real mother because she was a slut. But don’t worry, it’s not your fault, because you were too young to know that.”

My stomach clenched. I spat a mouthful of sandwich onto the grass. “That’s not true!” I almost shouted.

“Calm down,” said Shunammite. “Like I said, it’s not your fault.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

Shunammite gave me a pitying, relishing smile. “It’s the truth. My Martha heard the whole story from your Martha, and she heard it from your new stepmother. The Wives know about things like that—some of them got their own kids that way. Not me, though, I was born properly.”

I really hated her at that moment. “Then where’s my real mother?” I demanded. “If you know everything!” You are really, really mean, I wanted to say. It was dawning on me that she must have betrayed me: before telling me, she’d already told the other girls. That’s why they’d become so cool: I was tainted.

“I don’t know, maybe she’s dead,” Shunammite said. “She was stealing you from Gilead, she was trying to run away through a forest, she was going to take you across the border. But they caught up with her and rescued you. Lucky for you!”

“Who did?” I asked faintly. While telling me this story, Shunammite was continuing to chew. I watched her mouth, out of which my doom was emerging. There was orange cheese substitute between her teeth.

“You know, them. The Angels and Eyes and them. They rescued you and gave you to Tabitha because she couldn’t have a baby. They were doing you a favour. You have a much better home now than with that slut.”

I felt belief creeping up through my body like a paralysis. The story Tabitha used to tell, about rescuing me and running away from the evil witches—it was partly true. But it hadn’t been Tabitha’s hand I’d been holding, it had been the hand of my real mother—my real mother, the slut. And it wasn’t witches chasing us, it was men. They would’ve had guns, because such men always did.

Tabitha did choose me though. She chose me from among all the other children pried loose from their mothers and fathers. She chose me, and she cherished me. She loved me. That part was real.

But now I was motherless, because where was my real mother? I was fatherless as well—Commander Kyle was no more related to me than the man in the moon. He’d only tolerated me because I was Tabitha’s project, her plaything, her pet.

No wonder Paula and Commander Kyle wanted a Handmaid: they wanted a real child instead of me. I was nobody’s child.

—

Shunammite continued to chew, watching with satisfaction as her message sank in. “I’ll stick up for you,” she said in her most pious and insincere voice. “It doesn’t make any difference to your soul. Aunt Estée says all souls are equal in heaven.”

Only in heaven, I thought. And this is not heaven. This is a place of snakes and ladders, and though I was once high up on a ladder propped against the Tree of Life, now I’ve slid down a snake. How gratifying for the others to witness my fall! No wonder Shunammite could not resist spreading such baleful and pleasing news. Already I could hear the snickering behind my back: Slut, slut, daughter of a slut .

Aunt Vidala and Aunt Estée must know as well. The two of them must always have known. It was the kind of secret the Aunts knew. That was how they got their power, according to the Marthas: from knowing secrets.

And Aunt Lydia—whose frown-smiling gold-framed picture with the ugly brown uniform hung at the backs of our schoolrooms—must know the most secrets of all because she had the most power. What would Aunt Lydia have to say about my plight? Would she help me? Would she understand my unhappiness, would she save me? But was Aunt Lydia even a real person? I had never seen her. Maybe she was like God—real but unreal at the same time. What if I were to pray to Aunt Lydia at night, instead of to God?

I did try, later in the week. But the idea was too unthinkable—praying to a woman—so I stopped.

16

I went through the rest of that terrible afternoon as if sleepwalking. We were embroidering sets of petit-point handkerchiefs for the Aunts, with flowers on them to go with their names—echinacea for Elizabeth, hyacinths for Helena, violets for Vidala. I was doing lilacs for Lydia, and I stuck a needle halfway into my finger without noticing it until Shunammite said, “There’s blood on your petit point.” Gabriela—a scrawny, smart-mouthed girl who was now as popular as I had once been because her father had been promoted to three Marthas—whispered, “Maybe she’s finally getting her period, out her finger,” and everyone laughed because most of them already had theirs, even Becka. Aunt Vidala heard the laughing and looked up from her book and said, “That’s enough of that.”

Aunt Estée took me to the washroom and we rinsed off the blood on my hand, and she put a bandage on my finger, but the petit-point handkerchief had to be soaked in cold water, which is the way we’d been taught that you got out blood, especially from white cloth. Getting out blood was something we would have to know as Wives, said Aunt Vidala, as it would be part of our duties: we would have to supervise our Marthas to make sure they did it right. Cleaning up things such as blood and other substances that came out of bodies was part of women’s duty of caring for other people, especially little children and the elderly, said Aunt Estée, who always put things in a positive light. That was a talent women had because of their special brains, which were not hard and focused like the brains of men but soft and damp and warm and enveloping, like…like what? She didn’t finish the sentence.

Like mud in the sun, I thought. That’s what was inside my head: warmed-up mud.

—

“Is anything wrong, Agnes?” Aunt Estée asked after my finger had been cleaned up. I said no.

“Then why are you crying, my dear?” It seemed that I was: tears were coming out of my eyes, out of my damp and muddy head, despite my effort to control them.

“Because it hurts!” I said, sobbing now. She didn’t ask what hurt, though she must have known it wasn’t really my needled finger. She put her arm around me and gave me a little squeeze.

“So many things hurt,” she said. “But we must try to be cheerful. God likes cheerfulness. He likes us to appreciate the nice things in the world.” We heard a lot about the likes and dislikes of God from the Aunts who taught us, especially Aunt Vidala, who seemed to be on very close terms. Shunammite once said she was going to ask Aunt Vidala what God liked for breakfast, which scandalized the more timid girls, but she never actually did it.