Bluebeard's Egg by Margaret Atwood

Author:Margaret Atwood [Atwood, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary, Short Stories, Short Stories (Single Author)
ISBN: 9781551994871
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2010-12-17T21:31:03+00:00

Sally takes the sauce off the stove and sets it aside for later: she’ll do the last steps just before serving. It’s only two-thirty. Ed has disappeared into the cellar, where Sally knows he will be safe for a while. She goes into her study, which used to be one of the kids’ bedrooms, and sits down at her desk. The room has never been completely redecorated: there’s still a bed in it, and a dressing table with a blue flowered flounce Sally helped pick out, long before the kids went off to university: “flew the coop,” as Ed puts it.

Sally doesn’t comment on the expression, though she would like to say that it wasn’t the first coop they flew. Her house isn’t even the real coop, since neither of the kids is hers. She’d hoped for a baby of her own when she married Ed, but she didn’t want to force the issue. Ed didn’t object to the idea, exactly, but he was neutral about it, and Sally got the feeling he’d had enough babies already. Anyway, the other two wives had babies, and look what happened to them. Since their actual fates have always been vague to Sally, she’s free to imagine all kinds of things, from drug addiction to madness. Whatever it was resulted in Sally having to bring up their kids, at least from puberty onwards. The way it was presented by the first wife was that it was Ed’s turn now. The second wife was more oblique: she said that the child wanted to spend some time with her father. Sally was left out of both these equations, as if the house wasn’t a place she lived in, not really, so she couldn’t be expected to have any opinion.

Considering everything, she hasn’t done badly. She likes the kids and tries to be a friend to them, since she can hardly pretend to be a mother. She describes the three of them as having an easy relationship. Ed wasn’t around much for the kids, but it’s him they want approval from, not Sally; it’s him they respect. Sally is more like a confederate, helping them get what they want from Ed.

When the kids were younger, Sally used to play Monopoly with them, up at the summer place in Muskoka Ed owned then but has since sold. Ed would play too, on his vacations and on the weekends when he could make it up. These games would all proceed along the same lines. Sally would have an initial run of luck and would buy up everything she had a chance at. She didn’t care whether it was classy real estate, like Boardwalk or Park Place, or those dingy little houses on the other side of the tracks; she would even buy train stations, which the kids would pass over, preferring to save their cash reserves for better investments. Ed, on the other hand, would plod along, getting a little here, a little there. Then, when Sally was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.