How Should a Person Be? Read online

  My husband left our ­house for hers, and I was fast asleep when he came home.

  One week later, Sheila receives an email from Margaux . . .

  1.i have always admired a lack of social obligation. in fact, i aspire to it. the number of birthday parties i attend is too many. apart from that, i assumed you ­weren’t coming to my party and you did not.

  2.at my party, your husband, probably being nothing but sweet and drunk and feeling generous, and probably having nothing to do with your sentiments, said, “hell, you and sheila should spend more time together.”

  3.and i laughed and thought nothing of it.

  4.but then when i saw you on the street yesterday, i was very annoyed and probably annoying. my annoyance was unfair and a little silly.

  5.i could never find fault in someone for choosing not to be my friend. but i was disappointed not to have a girl, after searching high and low.

  6.but the boys i know might be girly enough for me. and girly boys are much easier to boss around than a girl, of course.

  7.to sum up, i’m not very smooth with married women, am i? but i will relax a little.

  8.no response required, my pet, especially if i have hurt or troubled you.

  I was thrown off by this email—­I had not figured that my presence at her party would mean a single thing! I went to take a walk to sort out how I felt and how I ought to reply. As I wandered through the neighborhood, I zipped and unzipped my jacket as my body went from hot to cold.

  Strolling beneath the sun, I realized I’d never had a woman either. I supposed I didn’t trust them. What was a woman for? Two women was an alchemy I did not understand. I hadn’t been close to a girl since Angela broke my heart when I was ten years old and told all of my secrets to everyone. It would have been so easy to count the ways I had been betrayed by girls, all the ways I had been hurt by them. And if I wanted, I could have as easily made a list of all the girls to whom I had caused pain. First there was Lorraine.

  But it was not that way with men. Ever since I was a teenager, I had been drawn to men exclusively, and they drew themselves to me—­as lovers, as friends. They pursued me. It was simple. It was men I enjoyed talking to at parties, and whose opinions I was interested in hearing. It was men I wanted to grow close to and be influenced by. It was easy. There was a way in which I felt they would always come home. The good ones had a natural regard for me, and there was always an attempt to treat me nicely. Even if they could be neglectful or forgetful, they ­were rarely cruel, and though they ­weren’t necessarily so reliable, they ­were trustworthy in the deeper sense: I never worried that a man’s heart would turn against me—­at least not before mine turned against him—­and certainly not for no reason at all. There would always be a veil over their eyes when they looked at me, which was a kind of protection.

  With a woman, who was too much the same, it never felt that way. So much had to be earned—­but no earnings built up! Trust had to be won from zero at every encounter. That’s the reason you always see women being so effusive with each other—­crying out shrilly upon recognizing each other in the street. Women always have to confirm with each other, even after so many years: We are still all right. But in the exaggeration of their effusiveness, you know that things are not all right between them, and that they never will be. A woman ­can’t find rest or take up home in the heart of another woman—­not permanently. It’s just not a safe place to land. I knew the heart of a woman could be a landing ground for a man, but for a woman to try to land in another woman’s heart? That would be like landing on something wobbly, without form, like trying to stand tall in Jell-­O. Why would I want to stand tall in Jell-­O?

  Yet there ­were things in Margaux’s email I could not resist. I admired her courage, her heart, and her brain. I envied the freedom I suspected in her, and wanted to know it better, and become that same way too.

  Back at home, I emailed her to say that I regretted missing her party, explaining that I’d thought I would finish my play that night. I said I would drop by her studio with champagne soon to make it up.

  Then I went to bed. My husband was out drinking somewhere.

  My first day of typing school, I sat there resolute. The instructor stood before us like a piece on a chessboard. She was stiff and without divinity. I knew I would learn nothing from such a wooden shoe.

  I sat up straight and smiled at everyone in their seats. I wanted all those liars on my side. I wanted them to stand up and cheer my name later in the semester—to be a hero to all those liars! It didn’t even matter that they ­were liars. I was willing to be a hero even to liars. Even to thieves! I hoped my smiling would convince them all of my good-­naturedness. At the very root of me, I hoped they would see, was a friendly idiot who didn’t know her own interests. With this in their minds, they’d relate to me as a peer, I hoped, and would one day let me lead them.

  I prayed I ­wouldn’t create any enemies, as I had done in football school. There, all of my plans backfired. The jocks seemed to have more integrity of spirit than I did. They ­weren’t going to let some withered wanderer with half a plan lead them. By the end of the first afternoon, they ­were laughing at me. The next morning, I went in wearing a different sweater, but they still knew it was me and stuffed me in a locker. I saw I ­wasn’t going to outwit them. Those people didn’t deal in wit. Even if I did outwit them, that ­wouldn’t shake them. Their assurance was rooted in something deeper, more solid, from which it flowed.

  I should have stuck around to discover the nature of that soil for myself—­but I belong with the liars and weaklings. I cannot lead my betters. If I want to be a hero, it will not be to the jocks, whose interiors have an integrity that springs up from the very center of the earth itself. It will be to the utter liars I find myself sitting with ­here, in the white-­walled room that is the typing school’s second-­floor studio.

  Photocopied and handed out to us at the beginning of class was a second-rate artist’s rendering of the placement of the keys as you would find them on a real typewriter.

  “Hold on to it,” we were told. “This will be your typewriter for the next two weeks.”

  One morning, Sheila finds an email from Margaux . . .

  1.i’m free:

  2.this afternoon, night

  3.tomorrow afternoon, night

  4.the next afternoon, night and day

  5.just hiding inside painting

  6.wearing a matching tracksuit and listening to the bbc.

  They continue to write back and forth. Margaux emails Sheila . . .

  1.there was a robbery and they’re blaming it on me.

  2.i ­can’t leave the neighborhood! i ­haven’t felt this at home in de­cades!

  3.legally i don’t think they can make me leave but they live above me and work below me and my tolerance is gone.

  4.i was pretty upset, but now i’m glad. i have decided to find a much better studio with an absentee landlord.

  5.i’m scouring the neighborhood with my cell phone.

  1.selena’s gallery is having a private viewing of an artist whose one previous show i saw. it’s a fancy exclusive affair with lots of directors, curators, and free martinis or something.

  2.you and i have very personally not been invited.

  3.i heard gossip that selena felt pretty stupid about telling me she didn’t like female writers. i nodded.

  1.i’ve been throwing out old art for the last couple of days, trying hard not to, trying hard to, but i just now figured that it’s only fair to explain to you who i am, so i am emailing you my very first painting (17 yrs of age—­i wish i could say 14 but the date is written on it along with my very fancy signature) even though i want to throw it out.

  2.and i found my cigarettes in the street!

  3.my paintings look pretty good when i’m wearing your special glasses. thank you.<
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  1.misha and i ­were taking a walk this afternoon. we passed a please come in for our open ­house sign. we went through a small little door in a fence into a small little garden into a small little ­house. it was leaning about 5 degrees to the left. the windows open like doors and the bedroom is the size of a car.

  2.i thought maybe you could buy it. “it’s 240 thousand, no money down,” the meek woman said, “and 100 years old.”

  3.i wish i could buy a ­house for a friend like i can buy a cake.

  4.if you’re curious about what i think you look like as a ­house, you should see it.

  1.i am surprised at how much i miss you, like a real teenage girl.

  1.hello. i was wondering, if you have red bike lights, could i borrow them tomorrow night?

  1.i’m going to paint your portrait a hundred times and never mention it to anyone—­articulately.

  1.yes, i would like to see you. i have all the time in the world.

  When I was little, I would lie in bed and stare at the ceiling in the darkened room at night, and quietly sing the song we had been taught in Hebrew school on the first day of the year, which we sang every morning.

  Love is something if you give it away,

  Give it away, give it away,

  Love is something if you give it away,

  You end up having more.

  Love is like a magic penny!

  Hold on tight and you won’t have any!

  Lend it, spend it, you’ll have so many,

  They’ll roll all over the floor, oh!

  This seemed impossible to me, just crazy! If you give it away you’ll end up having more? It was the only poem I knew and my favorite one, for it baffled me. I recited it over and over to myself, as if there was something I could learn from it. In my head, in rooms in homes, zillions of pennies rolled all over the floors, thick and encompassing like waves.

  While I was lying there, overcome with wonder like that, Margaux was down in Texas, fighting with the pop­u­lar girls beneath the harsh Texas sun. The afternoon of her grade-­six graduation ceremony, she knew she would have to climb the stairs of the gym and stand on stage before everyone to receive an award for being the smartest kid in the school. That morning, as she was getting dressed, she went into her father’s closet and pulled out a brown suit and her father’s brown shoes and stuffed them in a duffel bag and took them with her as she left the ­house. Right before the announcement, she put them on and walked across the stage, the arms of his jacket hanging low beneath her hands, the cuffs of his pants bunched and dragging, to the laughter of the audience, her dignity intact.

  For so long I had been looking hard into every person I met, hoping I might discover in them all the thoughts and feelings I hoped life would give me, but hadn’t. There are some people who say you have to find such things in yourself, that you cannot count on anyone to supply even the smallest crumb that your life lacks.

  Although I knew this might be true, it didn’t prevent me from looking anyway. Who cares what people say? What people say has no effect on your heart.

  • chapter 4 •

  SHEILA ­CAN’T FINISH HER PLAY

  Margaux wanted to take me for ice cream in the park.

  I was living in a crummy basement apartment, having just left my marriage and the suffocating feeling of leading a life that was not my own. I ­couldn’t understand how it had come to that. I briefly considered leaving Toronto for L.A., but I had a fear that with my soul gone missing, if I left the place we had last been in together, it might not know where to find me if it wanted to return. What if it came looking for me and I was gone? So I stayed, but ever since moving out, my days had been upside down and strange. I could not tell what season it was, or if I was moving through water or air.

  I heard a kick at the window—­the doorbell didn’t work—­and I peeked out and saw Margaux’s legs. I was so happy to see her. Every time it was a plea­sure, and it really felt like we ­were coming to some new meaning. I called for her to wait and quickly finished dressing.

  The night before, I had made out with a man in a bar. On his hands ­were warts—­big ones covering his palms and wrists—­and I let him put his acrid saliva all up and down my face and neck. It had given me satisfaction that he was so ugly. This is the great privilege of being a woman—­we get to decide. I have always welcomed the hunchbacks with a readiness I can only call justice.

  As we walked to the park, I asked Margaux if she had begun her ugly painting yet.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  When we arrived at the park, we discovered the ice cream truck was gone, so we lay on our backs with our heads in the grass and watched the tree branches float above us. We talked for a while about this and that, then Margaux asked me how my play was going.

  If I had known she was going to ask me that, I would never have gone to the park.

  I had spent the past few years putting off what I knew I had to do—­leave the world for my room and emerge with the moon, something upon which the reflected light of my experience and knowledge could be seen: a true work of art, a real play. I had been avoiding the theater’s calls and felt ashamed—­my distress only growing as the time I spent on the play expanded, as the good work I had done represented an ever smaller percentage of the time I had applied to it. A feminist theater company had commissioned me to write it during my first year of marriage, and my only question had been, “Does it have to be a feminist play?”

  “No,” they said, “but it has to be about women.”

  I didn’t know anything about women! And yet I hoped I could write it, being a woman myself. I had never taken a commission before, but I needed the money, and figured I could just as easily lead the people out of bondage with words that came from a commissioned play as I could writing a play that originated with me. So I accepted, but the ­whole time I was married, I was concerned only with men—­my husband in par­tic­u­lar. What women had to say to one another, or how a woman might affect another, I did not know. I put off giving them the play and put it off until I hoped the theater would forget and stop calling me, but they did not.

  Now that I had left my marriage and had moved into an apartment of my own, my mind was free to think of anything I wanted, and I vowed to return to the play with new vigor, but it had not yet happened. No amount of work could compensate for what I had lost since my decision to marry—­a feeling of ease, of having some direction in the world. And I had once felt the benevolent operation of destiny in every moment! For most of my life, one thing led to the next. Each step bore its expected fruit. Every coincidence felt preordained. It was like innocence, like floating in syrup. People ­were brought to me. Luck unfurled at the slightest touch. I had a sense of the inevitability of things as they occurred. Every move felt part of a pattern, more intelligent than I was, and I merely had to step into the designated place. I knew this was my greatest duty—­this was me fulfilling my role.

  But once I was married, my relationship to my destiny began to change. The signs grew more obscure. It was not enough to read them once. I had to consult them again and again to try and figure out the best direction, which would lead me down a path to an end I could admire.

  I was always second-­guessing myself, always changing my mind. I would return down the wrong road, then set off along what I hoped was the right one. Destiny became like an opaque, demanding, poorly communicative parent, and I was its child, ever trying to please it, to figure out what it wanted from me. I tried to read its face for clues to understand how it wanted me to behave. In all of this, there was an overarching question that never left my mind, an ongoing task that could never be called complete, though I hoped one day it would be: What was the right way to react to people? Who was I to talk to at parties? How was I to be?

  But in answer to this, the universe gave me no solid signs. That didn’t prevent me from looking, anyway,
or from believing an answer was out there. It was, in a sense, how I spent all my time, for how ­else could I make the universe love me? If I did things badly, I would surely lose all its favors, all its protection—­as if the universe would delight in me for being a certain way.

  Living in that ­house with my husband, I could not escape my every mistake; the walls ­were permanently scuffed with all the dark marks I had made while foolishly living. All I saw ­were the smudges, prominently there on what otherwise would have been a pure white wall.

  Since the beginning, there had been an empathy between me and my husband; there had always been a sweetness. It was like we ­were afraid of breaking the other. We never fought or pushed, as though the world was hard enough. As for difficult conversations that might hurt the other—­we left those matters alone. It could have gone on—­our life and our love—­but a few years into my marriage, I tripped. I tripped and stumbled and I regained my step, but in the wrong place this time, and my days began to mirror exactly, in smell and sensation, a monthlong period when I was eigh­teen: a hot and sticky August. I’d just moved out of the ­house I had been living in with my high school boyfriend, and was now in my father’s basement. It was a month of limbo, between life in a house with my boyfriend and the freedom of theater school in another town.

  That month, I experienced a tense idleness waiting for my new life to begin. It was a month of impatience, of stillness, like being set in amber. A certain smell followed me everywhere, like the smell of rotten candy. My insides ­were queasy. My skin was always sweating.

  A vivid echo of those days, a living memory of it, entered my life again, came into my marriage, and remained with me for a ­whole six months. I wanted to break out of that loop—­it felt terrible; something a person should not experience—­just wrong! Every day should feel new, but I was back in the atmosphere of another time; one I had lived in already.

  Every morning I woke up beside my husband and looked around to see if the feeling was still there; it always was. And I would get up for the day, exhausted by it already, sticky with the same tense idleness I had felt back then.