The Handmaid's Tale

In her room, Offred attempts to pass the “unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing” (79). She remembers Moira showing up at the Centre with “a bruise on her left cheek” (81) after she had already been there for three weeks. Her arrival “makes me feel safer” (81), and they arrange to talk secretly in the bathroom later that day.

Offred recalls the “Testifying” sessions at the Centre and “Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion” (81). Aunt Helena asks the Handmaids, “But whose fault was it?” (81), and they all chant, “Her fault, her fault, her fault” (82). When Janine weeps, the others chant, “Crybaby. Crybaby. Crybaby” (82). Offred admits that “[w]e meant it, which is the bad part” (82). Offred and Moira both manage to get themselves excused, and they talk through a hole in the stall wall. Offred “feel[s] ridiculously happy” (83).

Back in her room in the Commander’s house, Offred considers how menstruation now “means failure. I have failed once again to fulfil the expectations of others, which have become my own” (83). She “used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure […] or an implement for the accomplishment of my will” (83), but “[n]ow the flesh arranges itself differently.