How Should a Person Be? Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 miss ing 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.
    â€œHold 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