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Authors: Margaret Atwood
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know, will call her on the intercom to come and see about the bread. It isn’t that they wouldn’t take it out themselves, if she asked them to. Among the four or five of them they’d likely manage. It’s just that Loulou doesn’t trust them. She decided long ago that none of them knows his left tit from a hole in the ground when it comes to the real world. If she wants the bread taken out when it’s done but not overdone, and she does, she’ll have to do it herself.
She wonders who will be in the kitchen at the main house by now: her first husband for sure, and the man she lived with after that for three years without being married, and her second husband, the one she has now, and two ex-lovers. Half a dozen of them maybe, sitting around the kitchen table, drinking her coffee and eating her hermit cookies and talking about whatever they talk about when she isn’t there. In the past there have been periods of strain among them, especially during the times when Loulou has been switching over, but they’re all getting along well enough now. They run a collective poetry magazine, which keeps them out of trouble mostly. The name of this magazine is Comma , but among themselves the poets refer to it as Coma . At parties they enjoy going up to young female would-be poets (“proupies,” they call them behind their backs, which means “poetry groupies”), and saying, “I’d like to put you in a Coma.” A while ago Comma published mostly poems without commas, but this is going out now, just as beards are going out in favour of moustaches and even shaving. The more daring poets have gone so far as to cut off their sideburns. Loulou is not quite sure whether or not she approves of this.
She doesn’t know whether the poets are good poets, whether the poems they write in such profusion are any good. Loulou has no opinion on this subject: all that matters is what they are writing about her. Their poems get published in books, but what does that mean? Not money, that’s for sure. You don’t make any money with poetry, the poets tell her, unless you sing and play the guitar too. Sometimes they give readings and make a couple of hundred bucks. For Loulou that’s three medium-sized casseroles, with lids. On the other hand, they don’t have her expenses. Part of her expenses is them.
Loulou can’t remember exactly how she got mixed up with the poets. It wasn’t that she had any special thing for poets as such: it just happened that way. After the first one, the others seemed to follow along naturally, almost as if they were tied onto each other in a long line with a piece of string. They were always around, and she was so busy most of the time that she didn’t go out much to look for other kinds of men. Now that her business is doing so well you’d think she would have more leisure time, but this isn’t the case. And any leisure time she does have, she spends with the poets. They’re always nagging her about working too hard.
Bob was the first one, and also her first husband. He was in art school at the same time she was, until he decided he wasn’t suited for it. He wasn’t practical enough, he let things dry out: paint, clay, even the leftovers in his tiny refrigerator, as Loulou discovered the first night she’d slept with him. She devoted the next morning to cleaning up his kitchen, getting rid of the saucers of mummified cooked peas and the shrivelled, half-gnawed chicken legs and the warped, cracked quarter-packages of two-month-old sliced bacon, and the bits of cheese, oily on the outside and hard as tiles. Loulou has always hated clutter, which she defines, though not in so many words, as matter out of its proper place. Bob looked on, sullen but appreciative, as she hurled and scoured. Possibly this was why he decided to love her: because she would do this sort of thing. What he said though was, “You complete me.”
What he also said was that he’d fallen in love with her name. All the poets have
She wonders who will be in the kitchen at the main house by now: her first husband for sure, and the man she lived with after that for three years without being married, and her second husband, the one she has now, and two ex-lovers. Half a dozen of them maybe, sitting around the kitchen table, drinking her coffee and eating her hermit cookies and talking about whatever they talk about when she isn’t there. In the past there have been periods of strain among them, especially during the times when Loulou has been switching over, but they’re all getting along well enough now. They run a collective poetry magazine, which keeps them out of trouble mostly. The name of this magazine is Comma , but among themselves the poets refer to it as Coma . At parties they enjoy going up to young female would-be poets (“proupies,” they call them behind their backs, which means “poetry groupies”), and saying, “I’d like to put you in a Coma.” A while ago Comma published mostly poems without commas, but this is going out now, just as beards are going out in favour of moustaches and even shaving. The more daring poets have gone so far as to cut off their sideburns. Loulou is not quite sure whether or not she approves of this.
She doesn’t know whether the poets are good poets, whether the poems they write in such profusion are any good. Loulou has no opinion on this subject: all that matters is what they are writing about her. Their poems get published in books, but what does that mean? Not money, that’s for sure. You don’t make any money with poetry, the poets tell her, unless you sing and play the guitar too. Sometimes they give readings and make a couple of hundred bucks. For Loulou that’s three medium-sized casseroles, with lids. On the other hand, they don’t have her expenses. Part of her expenses is them.
Loulou can’t remember exactly how she got mixed up with the poets. It wasn’t that she had any special thing for poets as such: it just happened that way. After the first one, the others seemed to follow along naturally, almost as if they were tied onto each other in a long line with a piece of string. They were always around, and she was so busy most of the time that she didn’t go out much to look for other kinds of men. Now that her business is doing so well you’d think she would have more leisure time, but this isn’t the case. And any leisure time she does have, she spends with the poets. They’re always nagging her about working too hard.
Bob was the first one, and also her first husband. He was in art school at the same time she was, until he decided he wasn’t suited for it. He wasn’t practical enough, he let things dry out: paint, clay, even the leftovers in his tiny refrigerator, as Loulou discovered the first night she’d slept with him. She devoted the next morning to cleaning up his kitchen, getting rid of the saucers of mummified cooked peas and the shrivelled, half-gnawed chicken legs and the warped, cracked quarter-packages of two-month-old sliced bacon, and the bits of cheese, oily on the outside and hard as tiles. Loulou has always hated clutter, which she defines, though not in so many words, as matter out of its proper place. Bob looked on, sullen but appreciative, as she hurled and scoured. Possibly this was why he decided to love her: because she would do this sort of thing. What he said though was, “You complete me.”
What he also said was that he’d fallen in love with her name. All the poets have
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