Read Online Bluebeard's Egg by Margaret Atwood - Free Book Online

one of them said – wrote, actually – causing Loulou to make one of her frequent sorties into the dictionary, to find out whether or not she’d been insulted.
    Once she had done this openly, whenever they’d used a word about her she didn’t understand, but when they’d discovered she was doing it they’d found it amusing and had started using words like that on purpose. “Loulou is so geomorphic,” one of them would say, and when she would blush and scowl, another would take it up. “Not only that, she’s fundamentally chthonic.” “Telluric,” a third would pipe up. Then they would laugh. She’s decided that the only thing to do is to ignore them. But she’s not so dumb as they think, she remembers the words, and when they aren’t watching she sneaks a look at the Shorter Oxford (kept in the study which really belongs to only one of them but which she thinks of as theirs) , washing her hands first so she won’t leave any tell-tale signs of clay on the page.
    She reads their journals, too, taking the same precautions. She suspects they know she does this. It’s her way of keeping up with what they are really thinking about her, or maybe only with what they want her to think they’re thinking. The journals are supposed to be secret, but Loulou considers it her right and also a kind of duty to read them. She views it in the same light as her mother viewed going through the family’s sock and underwear drawers, to sort out the clean things from the ones they’d already worn and stuffed back in. This is what the poets’ journals are like. Socks, mostly, but you never know what you will find.
    “Loulou is becoming more metonymous,” she’s read recently. This has been bothering her for days. Sometimes she longs to say to them, “Now just what in hell did you mean by that?” But she knows she would get nowhere.
    “Loulou is the foe of abstract order,” one would say. This is a favourite belief of theirs.
    “Loulou is the foe of abstract ordure.”
    “Loulou is the Great Goddess.”
    “Loulou is the great mattress.”
    It would end up with Loulou telling them to piss off. When that didn’t stop them, she would tell them they couldn’t have any more baked chicken if they went on like that. Threatening to deprive them of food usually works.
    Overtly, Loulou takes care to express scorn for the poets; though not for them, exactly – they have their points – but for their pickiness about words. Her mother would have said they were finicky eaters. “Who cares what a thing’s called?” she says to them. “A piece of bread is a piece of bread. You want some or not?” And she bends over to slide three of her famous loaves, high and nicely browned, out of the oven, and the poets admire her ass and haunches. Sometimes they do this openly, like other men, growling and smacking their lips, pretending to be construction workers. They like pretending to be other things; in the summers they play baseball games together and make a big fuss about having the right hats. Sometimes, though, they do it silently, and Loulou only knows about it from the poems they write afterwards. Loulou can tell these poems are about her, even though the nouns change: “my lady,” “my friend’s lady,” “my woman,” “my friend’s woman,” “my wife,” “my friend’s wife,” and, when necessary for the length of the line, “the wife of my friend.” Never “girl” though, and never her name. Ass and haunches aren’t Loulou’s words either; she would say butt .
    Loulou doesn’t know anything about music but she likes listening to it. Right now, the Queen of the Night runs up her trill, and Loulou pauses to see if she’ll make it to the top. She does, just barely, and Loulou, feeling vicarious triumph, rams her fist into the mound of clay. Then she covers it with a sheet of plastic and goes to the sink to wash her hands. Soon the oven timer will go off and one of the poets, maybe her husband but you never