Free How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

difference—­it’s only natural. It’s to be expected. I should put a lot of shit in the play, so it will be a multicolored shit.
    Everyone enjoys economy for its relation to a certain morality, but if I have to suffer from other people’s excesses, why should I not suffer doubly from my own?

• chapter 8 •
    MARGAUX PAINTS
    I worked on my play for several days, badly. Finally one night, needing to get out of my apartment, I picked up my computer and went with it to our studio. It was early on a Friday eve­ning, and I was walking slowly when I heard someone call out my name.
    I turned and saw Margaux coming down the alley. She was pushing something on a trolley in front of her, and as she got closer I saw it was a tree—­a baby tree in a pot! We hugged hello, and then I asked her if it was a tree she had grown. She said it was. Margaux grew plants on her balcony and she was really good at getting them strong. I was curi ous to know what her secret was. She told me she was going now to plant the tree in a friend’s yard, a friend whose father had recently died. I decided to go with her, and as we walked together, we talked.
    SHEILA
    You know what? If we ever have kids, I really like the idea of trading babies.
    MARGAUX
    ( laughing ) Yeah, that’d be fun—­getting pregnant together. And you’re right! We’d have such adoring love for each other’s baby. But it might be hard ...
    SHEILA
    What? To give up your own?
    MARGAUX
    Maybe... Do you think you’d prefer one to the other?
    SHEILA
    I think I’d have more fun if it was yours.
    MARGAUX
    Yeah, exactly, you would!
    Laughter.
    I think it’s a great idea. I think I always want culture to work like that. I think it would be less emotionally complicated if I was raising society’s child. But you’d have to sleep with somebody who’s really big with black hair.
    SHEILA
    No, because babies can be anything.
    MARGAUX
    But when they turn twenty, boy!
    They laugh.
    When we got to the yard, I watched as she dug a neat, deep hole and placed the tree inside it. I leaned against the fence and waited until she was done. I said I would walk her home, but on the way to her apartment, we stopped in at my place so I could pick up a sweater. Inside, Margaux pointed to a pile of papers on my desk, which ­were labelled on top with a black marker, Margaux.
    â€œWhat’s that?” she asked.
    â€œOur conversations,” I said.
    Margaux was quiet. She went to wait by the stairs.
    On the walk to her place, Margaux mentioned that she had been painting swimming pools. In every painting she had made that month, there was a pool. She said she had been working on a painting of me in a pool before she left her ­house that night, based on the naked photos she had taken of me in the whirl­pool at the Y. Did I want to see it? Of course I did! All my life I had dreamed of being friends with a paint­er who would make me into an icon that people would admire.
    In her painting studio we stood before her fresh canvases. I recognized my narrow body in a small angular pool, seemingly outdoors, my head wooden and stiff. She put on the prescription glasses I had given her, without which she ­couldn’t see. I had told her, when I gave them to her, that it might be nice for her to see her paintings. She said she had never considered it, the images coming directly from inside her head.
    Now she explained, touching its sides, “I wanted to call it The Genius but instead I’m calling it House for a Head . I don’t believe enough in genius, but I do believe in having a ­house for a head.”
    I almost cried. I didn’t want to say it, but I felt pretty crummy at being demoted from genius to simply having a  ­house for a head.
    Alone in our studio, sitting before my computer, I was deter mined to finish my play, but instead I grew distracted and stared out the window. I now saw that