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

done this, one after the other. The first symptom is that they ask her whether Loulou is short for something – Louise, maybe? When she says no, they look at her in that slightly glazed way she recognizes instantly, as if they’ve never paid proper attention to her or even seen her before. This look is her favourite part of any new relationship with a man. It’s even better than the sex, though Loulou likes sex well enough and all the poets have been good in bed. But then, Loulou has never slept with a man she did not consider good in bed. She’s beginning to think this is because she has low standards.
    At first Loulou was intrigued by this obsession with her name, mistaking it for an obsession with her, but it turned out to be no such thing. It was the gap that interested them, one of them had explained (not Bob though; maybe Phil, the second and most linguistic of them all).
    “What gap?” Loulou asked suspiciously. She knew her upper front teeth were a little wide apart and had been self-conscious about it when she was younger.
    “The gap between the word and the thing signified,” Phil said. His hand was on her breast and he’d given an absent-minded squeeze, as if to illustrate what he meant. They were in bed at the time. Mostly Loulou doesn’t like talking in bed. But she’s not that fond of talking at other times, either.
    Phil went on to say that Loulou, as a name, conjured up images of French girls in can-can outfits, with corseted wasp-waists and blonde curls and bubbly laughs. But then there was the real Loulou – dark, straight-haired, firmly built, marmoreal, and well, not exactly bubbly. More earthy, you might say. (Loulou hadn’t known then what he meant by “earthy,” though by now she’s learned that for him, for all of them, it means “functionally illiterate.”) The thing was, Phil said, what existed in the space between Loulou and her name?
    Loulou didn’t know what he was talking about. What space? Once she’d resented her mother for having saddled her with this name; she would rather have been called Mary or Ann. Maybe she suspected that her mother would really have preferred a child more like the name – blonde, thin, curly-headed – but had disappointingly got Loulou instead, short, thick, stubborn-jawed, not much interested in the frilly dolls’ clothes her mother had painstakingly crocheted for her. Instead, Loulou was fond of making mud pies on the back porch, placing them carefully along the railing where people wouldn’t step on them and ruin them. Her mother’s response to these pies was to say, “Oh, Loulou!”, as if Loulou in itself meant mud, meant trouble and dismay.
    “It’s just a name,” she said. “Phil is kind of a dumb name too if you ask me.”
    Phil said that wasn’t the point, he wasn’t criticizing her, but Loulou had stopped the conversation by climbing on top of him, letting her long hair fall down over his face.
    That was early on; he’d liked her hair then. “Rank,” he’d called it in a poem, quite a lot later. Loulou hadn’t thought much of that when she looked it up. It could mean too luxuriant or offensive and foul-smelling . The effect of this poem on Loulou was to cause her to wash her hair more often. Sooner or later all the poets got into her hair, and she was tired of having it compared to horses’ tails, Newfoundland dog fur, black holes in space and the insides of caves. When Loulou was feeling particularly enraged by the poets she would threaten to get a brushcut, though she knew it would be pushing her luck.
    When she has dried her hands, Loulou takes off her smock. Underneath it she’s wearing a mauve sweatshirt with RAVING OPTIMIST stencilled across the front. The poets gave it to her, collectively, one Christmas, because a few weeks before one of them had said, “Why are you so grumpy, Loulou?” and Loulou had said, “I’m only grumpy when you pick on me,” and then, after a pause, “Compared to you guys I’m a