How Should a Person Be? (4 page)

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chapter
4
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SHEILA ­CAN'T FINISH HER PLAY

M
argaux 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 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 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.

Then one day, without warning, the air pressure dropped. The feeling was just gone. I had done nothing to make it go. I looked about me, relieved. But it was only a pause, for
then began a building-up, a feeling worse than what had
come before, like I was about to hurtle through space and time, like I was a rock that had been placed into a slingshot, drawn back to that August and held there. Then the hand let me go.

I felt the blood inside me gathering fast, the pulse drum
up in my ears, my skin grow tense and cold, like I was pushing
through the atmosphere too fast. My body was filled to bursting with dread, the anticipation of something I did not know, and an equal re­sis­tance overtook me—­I wanted nothing more than to stave off this terrifying end to which
I was hurtling, which I saw in my head as some kind of pain,
and which was accompanied by a phrase that went through my head, over and over again:
Punch yourself through a brick wall, punch yourself through a brick wall
.

One eve­ning, I saw what the brick wall was: my marriage. A tension came over me, an unbearable feeling of just wanting to get it over with. The wall was there; the pressure could only be released one way. I sat on my hands the entire day, but inside I was hurtling through space and time like a rock, and I told myself not to see anyone—­not to speak to anyone—­but when my husband lay down beside me that night, I turned over and said, as though I had thought it all
through, considered his side, and was making a thoughtful
decision: “I cannot be with you anymore.”

He'd had no sense of the storm clouds that had been
building within me, and when he slammed out of the room,
the storm clouds burst into rain, and all over my face and body was the cool wet of relief.

The next morning, I woke up in our bed alone. It was almost noon. I turned my head to look out the window. The sun was
shining. I sat up and smelled the air, and I could tell I was
in a new day. Those six months ­were over. The hurt­ling
feeling was gone. That time was permanently behind
me now, and I knew it would never visit me again. I felt an unbelievable joy; a freedom such as I could not remember feeling since I was a child. There was a lightness all through me, and I told myself,
This is the happiest day of your life
.

I slept on and off all day, exhausted, like someone who has been washed ashore on an island, safe and still and dry. The whipping about in the waves that had propelled me into my husband's arms, through our marriage, then sud
denly away from him, had died down; the sea was calm and rolled back. I stood up on the sand and looked about me. I was alone, and I was free.

I knew that from then on I would have to make deci
sions
without any footprints in the sand to follow, without any hand
guiding my path. There would be no telling what would lead to what. I would have to use my judgment—­not just my intuition. I would have to weigh things, take responsibility. I would have to look out at reality, not only within myself.

I was finally in the midst of the universe's indifference. It
was like my mom and pop had died. It was up to me to choose. I saw that I could try and return to my husband if I wanted, but that this would not be destined, but my choice, but that this was no more required of me than not returning to my husband, which would also be a choice. The difference in these two paths had no intrinsic value—­just difference. I could finally make up my own mind. I would have to decide how to be.

Living alone in my new apartment, I spent months staring at the play I had written under the influence of destiny.
The first draft had come to me in that other time, and though
not great, it seemed like it had been written by someone
who had been living in some other world entirely. Finishing it now felt like an impossibility. Any direction I might take with
it seemed as likely as any other. I didn't know what mark on
earth I should make.

Of course, I did not know how to say any of this, or how to tell anyone any of this. I also didn't know why I would tell it, or what telling it might mean, or who I could tell it to—­not Margaux, not Misha, not anyone I knew—­none of whom had time for words like
destiny.

So I turned to Margaux and said what I always said whenever
anyone asked how the play was going. “Fine.”

Then I stood up from the grass, brushed myself off, and said I had to go to the salon.

ACT

2

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chapter
1
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SHEILA GOES TO THE SALON

S
ince leaving my marriage, I had been working at a beauty salon.

When I was in high school, I had done a career test to see what career I was most suited for. There ­were three hundred questions: Would you rather mow the lawn or rock a baby? Would you rather groom a ­horse or make dinner?
Would you rather shit in the toilet or on the floor? When
I went to the guidance counselor for the results, she handed
me some stapled forms that listed six hundred careers. Beside
each career was a line, and along each line was a star. The farther to the right of the page the star was, the more suited to that career you ­were.

Most careers I was not cut out for. With others, like photographer,
the star went halfway across. But one star went
all the way to the farthest right margin of the page and
almost off it:
hairdresser
. Of all the people in the world, hairdressers ­were the people most like me. And so I always had it in the back of my head that this was the job I was most suited for and which would give me the most plea­sure. When I compared it with finishing my play, it seemed so nice and easy.

I brought this up with my Jungian analyst, worried about money and frustrated at wasting my time with a play that was going nowhere. She said I should speak to a hairdresser she had seen for many years—­a German man named Uri who ran a salon a bike ­ride from where I lived. He was a very cultured man, she told me, and he liked mentoring young people. I held on to his number for a few months, then lost it, then found it and wrote him a letter, explaining
that I had long dreamed of being a hairdresser, and could I
meet him to talk about working there?

The salon was in a high-­end commercial building with
a large bookstore, a ritzy shoe store, a perfume shop, and
two expensive restaurants. The salon was very spacious, with a pink-­and-­white color scheme. Many stylists ­were at work
at their stations on the day that I arrived. Uri came out
from his office to meet me. He was a tall and impressive man with lots of white hair and a
youthful air, strength and vitality, good posture, and an elegant
and engaging manner. His wife, Ruby, who was waiting
for us in the office, was dressed all in white and was very
feminine with light hair, lovely curves, and an appealing,
girlish quality.

The three of us spoke for fifteen minutes. Uri cautioned me that many people had fantasies of becoming a hairdresser, but that it was a lot of work and not a game. I assured him that there was no one more suited to this job than me, and, nodding his head, he offered me some shifts. “Do you want them?” he asked, and I said, “I do,” welling up with meaning, gratitude, and responsibility, like a real bride.

Misha and Margaux seemed happy for me. They could tell how much I enjoyed being at the salon. I felt suited to it too. I dressed up nicely every day and made sure to move elegantly while I was there, wanting to express in every pore of my being the beauty that people came to a salon to experience. When my birthday arrived, Misha gave me a book called
Hair Heroes
, which profiled the most important hairdressers of the twentieth century. In it, one of the hairdressers is quoted as saying, “I know all the secrets of the Western world—­but I'll never tell!”

The secrets of the Western world! I had found my kin.

My tasks ­were varied but limited. I shampooed the clients and cleaned up—­collected dirty towels from the bins by the basins, put them in the wash, then put them in the dryer and folded them perfectly and returned them to the shelves by the bins. It was work I could believe in; making people look and feel their best. I swept up hair and washed the plastic bowls used to mix and apply the color. I moved about the floor as if on a stage, fluidly and with ease. There was a great simplicity to my life when I was there, and I looked forward to going, and I was never bored. I knew what was expected of me, and I was happy that I could comply. It fulfilled my
serving instincts—­my desire to uplift humanity. I knew
nothing bad could happen in a hair salon, and nothing out of the ordinary ever did. I felt more comfortable and safe there
than I had ever felt anywhere. The days I spent at home,
working on my play, ­were miserable days; I longed to be at the salon. When I was at the salon, I wished to be nowhere ­else.

One day, watching me wipe down the basins, Uri came up beside me, put his heavy hand on my shoulder, and said, “I have decided to teach you everything I know.” I bowed my head in gratitude.

Uri had been a stylist since he was fifteen years old. His
mother had owned a salon, and she had supported herself
during the war by cutting hair. He learned from this that a hairstylist could go anywhere in the world, live in any conditions, and always be able to feed his family. All he needed was his talent and the scissors in his hand.

One afternoon he wanted to show me a cut, and I stood near and observed as he chopped away at the woman's puffy brown hair in the back. “Most people would rather have more hair,” he said, “but if the hair at the sides is thinner than at the back, you have to cut away some of the hair at the back in order that the head be balanced. Balance masks flaws,” he told me. I wanted to write this on my arm.
Beauty is balance—­yes!
As much in a haircut, as in a work of art, as in a human being.

As I was taking a break by reception later that day, my
hands in the big pocket of my black rubber apron, the receptionist
told me about the few days she had spent with Ruby and Uri when she first moved into the city. When I asked what Uri was like at home, she said, “He's exactly the same as ­here. You will never meet a more consistent person than
Uri.” In that moment, I wanted nothing so much as for someone
to say of me:
She is the most consistent person you have ever met. Even at home, she never changes!

I vowed to attend closely to Uri, to learn how he could be this way, so I could become it too.