4

Agnes Jemima remembers being around eight or nine, noting the absence of calendars and revisiting the meanings of her names. Tabitha links Agnes to the lamb and to Jemima, Job’s daughter given after loss, a story that initially pleases Agnes but later troubles her for its replacement of the dead. These reflections seed Agnes’s doubts about comforting narratives.

Spending time in the kitchen as Tabitha increasingly “rests” upstairs, Agnes favors the gentle Martha Zilla over the harsher Vera and scowling Rosa. She makes dough men to eat, feeling a secret power over men in a world where she otherwise senses none. When Agnes asks to make bread from scratch, the Marthas discourage her, saying future Marthas—or a Handmaid—will serve her, and a husband would disapprove of rough hands and labor smells.

The Marthas hint at a secret concerning Tabitha and fertility, which Zilla soothes by suggesting Agnes could bear a child without a Handmaid. Agnes insists she wants a baby but no husband, provoking laughter and warnings that she cannot always do what she wants. Hurt by their dismissal, Agnes flees the kitchen in tears.

Agnes goes to Tabitha’s room despite being told not to disturb her. Rejecting expected pieties, Tabitha comforts rather than corrects Agnes’s refusal of marriage, embracing her and recalling the “choosing” fairy tale. Now skeptical, Agnes challenges that story, asserting she was born from Tabitha’s body; Tabitha pointedly does not confirm it, heightening Agnes’s fear.

As Agnes presses—citing school lessons about birth—Tabitha holds her and, after a pause, tells Agnes to remember she has been very much loved. This grave assurance, paired with Tabitha’s decline and evasions, underscores hidden truths about Agnes’s origins and the constraints awaiting her in Gilead.