The Handmaids Tale | Page 9

one of them a Guardian is mowing the lawn. The lawns are tidy, the
facades are gracious, in good repair; they're like the beautiful p
ictures
they used to print in the magazines about homes and gardens and
interior decoration. There is the same absence of people, the sa me air
of being asleep. The street is almost like a museum, or a street i n a
model town constructed to show the way people used to live. As i n
those pictures, those museums, those model towns, there are no
children.
This is the heart of Gilead, where the war cannot intrude except o n
television. Where the edges are we aren't sure, they vary, accordi ng to
the attacks and counterattacks; but this is the center, where no thing
moves. The Republic of Gilead, said Aunt Lydia, knows no boun ds.
Gilead is within you.
Doctors lived here once, lawyers, university professors. There are n o
lawyers anymore, and the university is closed.
Luke and I used to walk together, sometimes, along these street s. We
used to talk about buying a house like one of these, an old big h ouse,
fixing it up. We would have a garden, .swings forthe Children. We
would have children. Although we knew it wasn't too likely we c ould
ever afford it, it was something to talk about, a game forSunday s.
Such freedom now seems almost weightless.
We turn the corner onto a main street, where there's more traffic. Cars go by, black most of them, some gray and brown. There are
other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of t he
Marthas, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and green and
cheap and skimpy, that mark the women of the poorer men.
Econowives, they're called. These women are not divided into
functions. They have to do everything; if they can. Sometime s there is
a womanall in black, a widow. There used to be more of them, but

they seem to be diminishing. You don't see the Commanders' Wiv
es
on the sidewalks. Only in cars.
The sidewalks here are cement. Like a child, I avoid stepping on the
cracks. I'm remembering my feet on these sidewalks, in the time
before, and what I used to wear on them. Sometimes it was shoes f or
running, with cushioned soles and breathing holes, and stars of
fluorescent fabric that reflected light in the darkness. Though I never
ran at night; and in the daytime, only beside well-frequented ro ads.
Women were not protected then. I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that ev ery
woman knew: Don't open your door to a stranger, even if he says he
is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don't stop o n the
road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on
and keep going. If anyone whistles, don't turn to look. Don't g o into a
laundromat, by yourself, at night.
I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans,
jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soa p,
my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having
such control.
Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts
obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles.
There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to
and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now
you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it. In front of us, to the right, is the store where we order dresses. Soni c
people call them habits, a good word for them. Habits are hard to
break. The store has a huge wooden sign outside it, in the shape o f a
golden lily; Lilies of the Field, it's called. You can see the place, under
the lily, where the lettering was painted out, when they decide d that
even the names of shops were too much temptation for us. Now
places are known by their signs alone.

Lilies used to be a movie theater, before. Students went there a l
ot;
every spring they had aHumphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bac all
or Katharine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds .
They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested th e
possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone ; or
not. They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to
choose, then. We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too m uch
choice.
I don't know when they stopped having the festival. I must hav e been
grown up. So I didn't notice.
We don't go into Lilies, but across the road and along a side stree t.
Our first stop is at a store with another wooden sign: three eggs, a
bee, a cow. Milk and Honey. There's a line, and we wait our turn,