The Testaments

Most of the guests at Tabitha’s funeral ignore Agnes, except for a Wife named Paula, whose Handmaid had famously killed her husband. Paula’s version of the story was that the Handmaid had stolen a kitchen skewer and ambushed her husband. Shunammite told Agnes another version, overheard from her Martha, that involved “lustful demands” by the husband: “Demands that had been unnatural, and had driven the Handmaid mad, not that it would take that much with some of them, because they were borderline as it was, but this one must have been worse than most” (74). Paula found her dead husband in the morning with his trousers off and had gotten blood all over herself putting them back on. Paula tells Agnes that it must be nice to have a new dress, which angers Agnes. Afterall, her mother is dead.

Agnes’s father marries Paula a few months later and gives her the “magic ring” that had belonged to Tabitha, the one that helped her save Agnes in the fairytale. Agnes is furious, but cannot say anything, so she broods and sulks. Her father and Paula talk about her in the third person in her presence: “I see Agnes is in one of her moods.