Free Bluebeard's Egg by Margaret Atwood Page A

only on the edges, like mascots, and today Loulou all but ignores them.
    “You could’ve put on more coffee,” she says in her grumpiest voice.
    “What’s the matter, Loulou?” says Phil, who has always been the quickest on the uptake when it comes to Loulou and her bad moods. Not that Loulou goes in for fine tuning.
    “Nothing you can fix,” says Loulou rudely. She takes off her sweater-coat and sticks out her chest. Marmoreal , she thinks. So much for the female poets, who are flat-chested as well as everything else.
    “Hey Loulou, how about a little nictitation?” says one of the poets.
    “Up your nose,” says Loulou.
    “She thinks it’s something dirty,” says a second one. “She’s confusing it with micturition.”
    “All it means is winking, Loulou,” says the first one.
    “He got it out of Trivial Pursuit,” says a third.
    Loulou takes one loaf out of the oven, turns it out, taps the bottom, puts it back into the pan and into the oven. They can go on like that for hours. It’s enough to drive you right out of your tree, if you pay any attention to them at all.
    “Why do you put up with us, Loulou?” Phil asked her once. Loulou sometimes wonders, but she doesn’t know. She knows why they put up with her though, apart from the fact that she pays the mortgage: she’s solid, she’s predictable, she’s always there, she makes them feel safe. But lately she’s been wondering: who is there to make her feel safe?

    It’s another day, and Loulou is on her way to seduce her accountant. She’s wearing purple boots, several years old and with watermarks on them from the slush, a cherry-coloured dirndl she made out of curtain material when she was at art school, and a Peruvian wedding shirt dyed mauve; this is the closest she ever comes to getting dressed up. Because of the section of the city she’s going to, which is mostly middle-European shops, bakeries and clothing stores with yellowing embroidered blouses in the windows and places where you can buy hand-painted wooden Easter eggs and chess sets with the pawns as Cossacks, she’s draped a black wool shawl over her head. This, she thinks, will make her look more ethnic and therefore more inconspicuous: she’s feeling a little furtive. One of the poets has said that Loulou is to subdued as Las Vegas at night is to a sixty-watt light bulb, but in fact, with her long off-black hair and her large dark eyes and the strong planes of her face, she does have a kind of peasant look. This is enhanced by the two plastic shopping bags she carries, one in either hand. These do not contain groceries, however, but her receipts and cheque stubs for the two previous years. Loulou is behind on her income tax, which is why she got the accountant in the first place. She doesn’t see why she shouldn’t kill two birds with one stone.
    Loulou is behind on her income tax because of her fear of money. When she was married to Bob, neither of them had any money anyway, so the income tax wasn’t a problem. Phil, the man she lived with after that, was good with numbers, and although he had no income and therefore no income tax, he treated hers as a game, a kind of superior Scrabble. But her present husband, Calvin, considers money boring. It’s all right to have some – as Loulou does, increasingly – but talking about it is sordid and a waste of time. Calvin claims that those who can actually read income-tax forms, let alone understand them, have already done severe and permanent damage to their brains. Loulou has taken to sending out her invoices and totting up her earnings in the coach-house, instead of at the kitchen table as she used to, and adding and subtracting are acquiring overtones of forbidden sex. Perhaps this is what has led her to the step she is now about to take. You may as well be hung, thinks Loulou, for a sheep as a lamb.
    In addition, Loulou has recently been feeling a wistful desire to be taken care of. It comes and goes, especially on cloudy