Free Bluebeard's Egg by Margaret Atwood

raving optimist.” This was true, though they made fun of her for it. In a group they can laugh, but it’s only Loulou who has seen them one at a time, sitting in chairs for hours on end with their heads down on their arms, almost unable to move. It’s Loulou who’s held their hands when they couldn’t make it in bed and told them that other things are just as important, though she’s never been able to specify what. It’s Loulou who has gone out and got drunk with them and listened to them talking about the void and about the terrifying blankness of the page and about how any art form is just a way of evading suicide. Loulou thinks this is a load of b.s.: she herself does not consider the making of casseroles with lids or the throwing of porcelain fruit bowls as an evasion of suicide, but then, as they have often pointed out, what she’s doing isn’t an art form, it’s only a craft. Bob once asked her when she was going to branch out into macramé, for which she emptied the dust-pan on him. But she matches them beer for beer; she’s even gone so far as to throw up right along with them, if that seemed required. One of them once told her she was a soft touch.
    The intercom buzzes as Loulou is hanging up her smock. She buzzes back to show she has heard, takes her hair out of the elastic band and smooths it down, looking in the round tin-framed Mexican mirror that hangs over the sink, and checks up on little Marilyn, her new apprentice, before heading out the door.
    Marilyn is still having trouble with cup handles. Loulou will have to spend some time with her later and explain them to her. If the cup handles aren’t on straight, she will say, the cup will be crooked when you pick it up and then the people drinking out of it will spill things and burn themselves. That’s the way you have to put it for trainees: in terms of physical damage. It’s important to Loulou that the production pieces should be done right. They’re her bread and butter, though what she most likes to work on are the bigger things, the amphora-like vases, the tureens a size larger than anyone ought to be able to throw. Another potter once said that you’d need a derrick to give a dinner party with Loulou’s stuff, but that was jealousy. What they say about her mostly is that she doesn’t fool around.
    Loulou flings her pink sweater-coat across her shoulders, bangs the coach-house door behind her to make it shut, and walks towards the house, whistling between her teeth and stomping her feet to get the clay dust off. The kitchen is filled with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Loulou breathes it in, revelling in it: a smell of her own creation.
    The poets are sitting around the kitchen table, drinking coffee. Maybe they’re having a meeting, it’s hard to tell. Some nod at her, some grin. Two of the female poets are here today and Loulou isn’t too pleased about that. As far as she’s concerned they don’t have a lot to offer: they’re almost as bad as the male poets, but without the saving grace of being men. They wear black a lot and have cheek-bones.
    Piss on their cheek-bones, thinks Loulou. She knows what cheek-bones mean. The poets, her poets, consider these female poets high-strung and interesting. Sometimes they praise their work, a little too extravagantly, but sometimes they talk about their bodies, though not when they are there of course, and about whether or not they would be any good in bed. Either of these approaches drives Loulou wild. She doesn’t like the female poets – they eat her muffins and condescend to her, and Loulou suspects them of having designs on the poets, some of which may already have been carried out, judging from their snotty manner – but she doesn’t like hearing them put down, either. What really gets her back up is that, during these discussions, the poets act as if she isn’t there.
    Really, though, the female poets don’t count. They aren’t even on the editorial board of Comma; they are