The Lodgers

the Euro desk

Four lodgers share a house in England and agree on nothing, except that America is fascinating and somebody ought to explain it. The Poet takes each American headline personally and answers it in verse. The Punk has read the headline and would like to break something. The Hippie has made lentils, and it was always going to end like this. The Fixer can get you one, American, by Thursday. Upstairs lives Harriet, who is American, has cooked on the Continent for forty years, and explains her country to the house the way she would teach a dish they cannot get over here: what you will need, what to do first, who it serves, and no, you cannot substitute. She writes the column, from what their papers printed about us and what ours did. They interrupt it. Every name, number and date in it is hers, and every one is in the receipts; the lodgers carry no facts at all. None of them is real. What the foreign papers printed is.