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You are ice and fire,
The touch of you burns my hands like snow.
You are cold and flame.
You are the crimson of amaryllis,
The silver of moon-touched magnolias.
When I am with you,
My heart is a frozen pond
Gleaming with agitated torches.
("Opal" by Amy Lowell)
The house turns heavy with quietness, after. The Commander goes to work every morning. Before he leaves, he lurches over to his wife, still unsteady and - June suspects - pathetic on purpose with that cane, making a real show of himself. What a hero, triumphing over death. (More like cheating it.) He murmurs a goodbye to Serena. Kisses her cheek quaintly. He treats her with extra softness now, like a father who only grounded you to teach you a lesson, not because he wanted to. Not angry, just disappointed.
June keeps a demure little smile on when he looks at her. Behind it, she thinks, Fuck you, you fucking asshole, you wife-beating piece of shit, I’ll tear your fucking heart out.
Not any promises she can actually keep, but hey. It helps keep her steady.
June wonders what Serena thinks when he lurches over to her like that. She doesn’t flinch, which is something, but she doesn’t smile either. Stays very prim and proper, like she’s posing for a Victorian photograph.
Maybe the Bible doesn’t say anything about having to smile for your husband.
Maybe that little gem showed up later. Hey, smile, beautiful.
Why aren’t you smiling, huh?
When the Commander’s gone, they sit in the same rooms in silence, eating breakfast or knitting in the parlor. June’s punishment for witnessing Serena’s humiliation didn’t extend to any The Yellow Wallpaper treatment; Serena allows June free run of the house, but doesn’t speak to her. Gone are the questions about how she’s feeling and the little rhapsodies over the baby kicking. There aren’t even any vicious threats. Serena doesn’t seem to speak much to anyone at all, and comes home from her routine visits to the other wives looking exhausted. June can’t blame her. She can’t be sleeping well. Not next to him.
She bets Waterford is sleeping like he’s on a god damn cloud.
In the afternoons, June listens to the steady click of the knitting needles across the room from her and thinks about Serena hating it. That one true little thing, given like a music box or a flower with gleaming white petals.
Wherever she is, Serena always sits up very straight, with perfect finishing school posture. It must hurt like hell.
June doesn’t tell anyone about what happened that night. It sneaks its way through the household anyway. They must have heard the cries that Serena tried to suppress. Rita tells June to get extra red pears when she goes out for the shopping, since they’re Serena’s favorite. The Commander winds up eating most of them with his breakfast.
Eden, meanwhile, tries to play detective. Of course she fucking does.
“What did she do?” she asks June one afternoon in a whisper as June is heading toward the stairs. Her Bambi eyes are out of control.
“It’s not my business to say,” June replies.
“I just want to make sure that I’m doing this right,” Eden says desperately. “I don’t ever want to disappoint my husband like that.”
There’s a flash of true worry across her face. June thinks it’s annoying, and then hates herself for that. Eden’s a child. She should be in high school, drowning in homework and friend drama and crushes on inferior boys. She shouldn’t be devoting her life to an adult man.
And then there’s the man in question.
June tells Nick when they have a moment alone in the kitchen one early morning, the birds just beginning to sing outside. The story spills out like vomit. June is shocked, as she talks, by how much she remembers. There were thirteen lashes, she somehow knows now, even though she can’t recall counting at the time.
Nick pulls her close, but just for a second. They can’t risk anything longer.
“You can’t worry about Serena,” he mutters. “You have to focus on what’s important.”
June knows he’s right. You don’t survive in this world by getting emotionally invested in the fuckers that put you here.
Still, she can’t help it. It’s like she’s possessed. “You weren’t there. He beat her right in front of me.”
“I’ve seen worse. So have you. Don’t let her get to you.”
“You don’t get it.” She feels irrationally furious at him. It probably goes back to the fact that there’s a cute teenager in his bed. “He’s never hurt you like that. Never violated you.”
“No, he hasn’t,” Nick agrees. “But remember who was holding you down when he did it to you.”
And there’s no arguing with that, now, is there?
Then Nick goes home to Bambi Eyes (because he has to, for them, to protect them, but damned if that makes her feel any less like shit), and June stays in the house with Serena. She feels a little like Serena’s ghost. Or maybe Serena’s hers -- more shadow than woman these days. Serena wasn’t ready to suffer at Waterford’s hands. But June? June’s the old pro.
Sometimes June sneaks glances at Serena, mostly for something to do. She tries to read her icy expressions, and wonders what Serena looks like when she cries. Not just a poignant tear or two. Really cries. Ugly cries. June knows Serena was crying on the other side of the door on that night, that awful night, and it still makes June’s skin crawl that she didn’t just burst through the door and--
Well, she doesn’t know what. She hadn’t really planned that far. But she’d really wanted the door to open.
It’s insane. There’s almost no one in her life who deserves a beating like that more than Serena Joy Waterford. The Commander, and maybe Aunt Lydia, but that’s it. No one else is higher on the list than Serena. June deserves to watch her hurt.
But not like that. Not from him. Not in a way that turned June into the Wife.
June replays those awful minutes in her head all the time, imagining herself grabbing a bookend from the shelf and bashing in his fucking skull. Serena trembling as it dawned on her that she was safe.
You’re okay, you’re okay, June would have said. The other June. The June who hadn’t stood there frozen.
Maybe this is Stockholm Syndrome. Throw in some talking dishes and a sassy candle and it’s Beauty and the Beast. To distract herself from living -- from the stillness of this room, from Serena’s stillness -- she tries to see how many of the lyrics she can remember to the songs, and thinks of Hannah making her cutlery dance at mealtimes for a week after they watched it together. Luke did such a cringe-worthy Lumiere, but Hannah loved it. It made her shriek with laughter.
June remembers all the way to Barely even friends, then somebody bends unexpectedly. Then she stops before she has a friggin’ stroke. The knitting needles click, click, click.
Serena looks older and worse with each day that passes. It’s a shame. She’s a natural beauty. The kind that magazines used to promise you, too, could be with a simple forty-five minute no-makeup makeup routine. The chick at soul cycle class you’d hate but definitely have at least one sexually confusing dream about.
When June dreams about Serena now, Serena is hanging from the wall. There’s no hood turning her anonymous, though. Instead her blonde hair spills down her naked shoulders, muddied with blood. Her eyes are open and blue as winter, her lips parted to say something important, and June realizes that it isn’t Serena at all. It’s her . Serena is the one looking from down below, feet on the ground. She’s crying.
June wakes up with a thundering heart. She rests her hands on her belly until the fear curls up, dormant, and goes to sleep.
One afternoon, a neverending week after that night in the Commander’s office, June is eating her nutritionally balanced lunch while Rita putters around in the kitchen. Serena comes in, putting on her cloak.
“Offred, come help me cut some flowers,” she says lightly. June’s red cloak is folded over her arm.
It’s the first thing she’s said to her in seven days.
June takes her time finishing her green beans. She’s the master of tiny rebellions, and maybe this one is for the fact that Serena said Go to your room instead of -- well, the fuck if she knows. Help me, or I’m sorry, or I was wrong about all of it, let’s burn this motherfucker down.
Serena hands June her cloak. The red looks so deep against the cheerful blue, like something to fall into.
They walk outside in silence, their footsteps slipping into unison, their hoods turned up against the rain. It’s been raining for days now.
Maybe it will never stop. Now, there’s Biblical for you.
The greenhouse feels like another world. It smells rich and earthy in a way that June hadn’t even realized she missed, and the plants are magnificent, in their prime after months of diligent effort. They have just a little longer now, before they’ll fade away into yellowy death.
It’s raining outside, musical against the roof. The way the raindrops shimmy down the glass makes June feel like they’re underwater, or in another world.
“It’s really beautiful out here,” June says. In spite of everything, she wants to give Serena something. Maybe it’s her survival instinct. If Serena cares, June can use that. If Serena sees June as a person instead of a slutty incubator, a person who’s kind and supportive and sees into her soul when she looks at her, sees her for all her sharpness and competence and brilliance--
Well. Serena must be starving for that. June knows what it’s like to starve. How you’ll take anything when it brushes up against you.
There’s a few pairs of gardening shears sitting on the work table in the middle of the greenhouse. Once she would have fantasized about taking them to Serena’s throat. Once she wouldn’t have been allowed out here.
Now, she just drinks in the sight of the flowers.
“It’s been a fruitful summer,” Serena answers at last, long after June had figured she wouldn’t.
June wonders if Serena ever gets tired of saying ‘fruitful.’ Blessed be the god damned thesaurus.
“Pick whichever ones you like best,” Serena goes on, waving a hand across her small demesne. “I’d like to brighten up the house. It’s been so dark with all this rain.”
That and the domestic abuse, June thinks.
They each take up some shears and get to work. June takes her time deciding which flowers to cut. She hates the idea of wasting them. The scent is wonderful; she leans in and closes her eyes, and remembers standing in the floral department of the grocery store with Moira, bantering over which flowers would best redeem Moira after a fight she’d just had with Odette.
June forces herself to open her eyes and come back.
She quickly gets used to the silence and the rain, and doesn’t expect any conversation.
But then Serena speaks.
“I suppose we’re even now,” she says, and punctuates it with the rusty squeak of the shears. June doesn’t need her to explain what she means.
It’s bullshit.
June will always feel Serena’s hands like claws on her wrists. She feels that grip in her body like a ghost; it’s stayed long after the Commander’s grim businesslike thrusts have faded. There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. June remembers things like that being used to sell mascara and pop albums in the old days. Now, it beats in her head like a drum or a headache. Every time she sees Aunt Lydia, or watches Serena’s face harden, there it is.
Ergo, bullshit.
But there’s part of June that’s still in the Commander’s office, watching it happen, feeling every lash on her own skin and just fucking standing there. She’s carried around a sharp, squirming sickness ever since. It’s growing, like the baby is. It makes her think of that thing about the two wolves that everybody’s got inside, and how the one you feed is the one you become.
And so June says, softly but honestly too, “We’re getting there.”
Serena nods, just barely.
She doesn’t let them linger in that place. Instead, she says, “Baby Angela’s recovery is a miracle. It seems Janine’s presence was essential. The doctors don’t understand why yet, but it seems smartest to keep her close. She’s been relieved of her Handmaid duties; she’s staying with the Putnams again now.”
Janine. Not ‘the Handmaid.’
June waits to see if Serena notices the slip-up.
She doesn’t. Just goes on talking. “If any of this is going to work, this has to be taken into account. If the babies need to be around their biological mothers, then we need to change the system. There’s nothing more important than their survival, no matter what Fred--”
She cuts herself off abruptly.
Still no bad-mouthing the hubby. Never mind how many scars he leaves on your ass.
“Have you tried telling him that?” June says.
Serena looks at her, eyes hollow and sad, and June regrets her words. It feels like going for the jugular with the gardening shears.
“He wouldn’t listen to me,” Serena says simply.
There’s no arguing with that.
They turn away from each other and continue their women’s work. The essential business of flowers. Making the house pretty. It's so Mrs. Dalloway. June remembers the click of the pen in her hand, the smooth gliding of the ink, and the rhythm of Serena’s quick typing in her ears.
And now flowers.
She knows Serena misses the work too. Why else would she bring June out here, to the place that’s always been her sanctuary away from all of the household shit? She’s trying to recapture what they had.
It’s a little pathetic, really. Serena’s just not as experienced at being ground into the dirt as June. She’s still in the place where she thinks you can keep something good alive if you only want it badly enough.
June might as well take advantage of this chance to remind Serena that she’s an actual person. It’s like putting coins in a piggy bank, and hoping that one day you’ll have enough to buy something.
Mercy, in this case. Serena’s mercy, when she needs it most. (Getting Hannah back, or at least seeing her one more time. Getting to stay with the baby, says an idiotic, impossible voice in her skull.)
“When it first started happening,” June says, leaving out Because of you, “and I lost my bank account, my husband was so … gallant. ‘Don’t worry about the money. I’ll always take care of you.’ He cared, and he was horrified on my behalf. But he didn’t understand.”
The shriek of the shears. Then: “At least he cared.”
June can’t find the strength to lie about the Commander being a nice misunderstood guy. Fuck that. She thinks, absurdly, of crooning, ‘Girl, dump him.’ Spending a day binge watching tacky reality shows and eating ice cream with two spoons out of the same giant container. Painting each other’s nails.
She can’t find anything to say.
After a moment’s silence, Serena keeps going. “History is full of examples of men passing their wives’ work off as their own. It’s part of marriage, helping them, staying selfless. I should have anticipated it. And … and that he’d like it. Too much. But before all this, he was just so …”
She gives up on her sentence again, turning back to the flowers. She starts arranging her chosen blooms in one of the vases kept out here. June notices that the mouth of it is chipped. (Is it the mouth or the lip? She can never remember that kind of thing. She used to put flowers in big water glasses from Target.)
June hands over the few flowers she's picked. Serena takes them, pulling them into her own design.
When Serena finishes arranging the flowers, she turns to June, expectant.
“Pretty,” June says.
“Thank you,” Serena answers politely. Even in this hellscape, life with her can feel like being at a friggin’ cotillion.
The quiet resumes. It’s taken on a muggy, stifling quality. Serena wants to keep talking. June can feel it.
And so she decides to push a little more.
“There are no exceptions here,” she says. “For any of us. No matter how smart we are.”
“No,” Serena agrees after a long moment.
“So congratulations, I guess,” she adds. She feels that little thrill that comes with saying something that’s a gamble. “It worked.”
June wins. Serena lets out a dark laugh, more like a cough than anything. Still, she doesn’t grab the shears and plunge them into June’s eyes. Maybe she’s grown.
Or maybe she’s just been humbled.
Either way, June allows herself a little smirk. Serena gives her a look of amused exasperation, the sort wives used to toss at their incorrigible husbands on bad sitcoms. Then she catches herself, and goes back to her flowers.
June obediently does the same. She traces petals with a lazy fingertip, glad that she doesn't have to pick any more flowers to cull.
“But,” Serena says then, still inspecting the vase of flowers, “we’ll do whatever it takes to keep our baby safe, won’t we?” Her voice flutters a little with hope, or maybe hopelessness.
That ‘our’ sticks in June like a needle.
Of course there is no ‘our’. There’s mine, and mine and Nick’s, and that’s all.
And yet that little word is everything. ‘Our’ means June is real to Serena. Capable of having and holding. Something it would hurt to lose.
“Of course we will,” June says gently. She looks right into Serena’s tired eyes.
Something like a smile, fluttering and tearful, flits across Serena’s face, uncontrolled for once. She crosses the space between them, then reaches for June’s hand and squeezes it tight, clinging to what she’s got left.
June puts her free hand on top of Serena’s, her two hands enveloping Serena’s one-- a remarkably fragile, dainty hand for someone made of iron. It should be sickening to touch her after the history that lives in their bodies colliding. The staggering blows, the fingernails digging into her wrists month after month, that one late night visit with desperate hands crawling over her round belly like a lover searching for the just-right spot.
But June finds that she likes this. How strong her own grip is, and Serena weak and yielding inside it. She could snap this pretty wrist if she wanted to. She’s got enough anger inside, burning at a sure steady heat. Serena wouldn’t move away in time. Serena’s falling apart into the simple touch, the relief of it overwhelming after months of chaste, closed-mouth kisses from the man who bent her down like a naughty child and beat her, the man who worshipped her brilliance until he could steal it and then decided she was nothing. June almost thinks Serena might swoon into her arms.
So instead, June gives softness. She holds Serena’s hand in hers like she used to hold baby Hannah, like she held Luke when he finally left his wife, like she held Moira at Jezebel’s, like she clung to Nick as pleasure swallowed her up. There’s something lovely about it. The rain serenades them on the roof. The glass walls start to turn foggy with their breath. June finds that she almost loves this moment, if only because she’s so sick of hating. Besides, between love and hate, love is the stronger weapon. There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women, and Serena seems awfully keen on heaven.
It would have been normal to let go by now. Instead they stay still, hand-in-hand in this little forest of blooming.
“Bless you,” Serena murmurs. The phrase slips out of her mouth like an involuntary sigh. It sounds strangely blasphemous.
June rubs her thumb across the faint lines of Serena’s palm, like a promise or a kiss, and knows that she’ll use this when she has to. Until then, she’ll nurture it, like any careful gardener.