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

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.
    â€œNot 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?”
    â€œNo,” 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 h ad 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 coinci dence 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