How We Are by Vincent Deary

How We Are by Vincent Deary

Author:Vincent Deary
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374713218
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux


Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids.

Aristotle

I fancied him until he opened his mouth.

James B. L. Hollands

So, Act Two begins, the first steps in the dance of adjustment. Having received our summons, heard our call, the great or terrible or merely uneasy news, we need to begin to become, to become other than we are. Something as complex as you and me doesn’t change easily. We get set in our ways, comfortable, accustomed. This is what makes daily life work: how good we are at getting comfortable. But the call to change has come, and a new accommodation, a new relationship to our circumstance, needs to be negotiated. New habits need acquiring, old ones shedding. We have seen how we are and have counted the ways we are set in. Now we must begin to depart from them, and to establish new ones. Now the work, the drama, begins.

* * *

Playing House. The set is empty. Well, not quite. But the set is new. In boxes in the hall, there are the things that will fill the rooms. In the front room there are only two red sofas, stark on a new carpet in a room smelling of fresh paint. No other signs of life. Everything as fresh as a newly dug grave. And here comes the body, here comes the bride. Well, not quite. Here comes Maureen. ALL ALONE. As a graphic novel this could really resonate. Comic strips of long bare halls, empty rooms with single light bulbs. In each frame a figure with the light behind it, darkened, small already, further dwarfed by the empty rooms. We would know she was alone and not loving it. This is the beginning of living alone. No death has precipitated this, except the death of expectations. At thirty-something, no husband has appeared; the move she always thought she’d make together she has decided to make alone. Her new home, alone.

And so on, pages of images of a little figure in empty rooms. But the rooms – life goes on – don’t stay empty for long. Maureen is a woman of considerable drive, not the kind to hang about in empty rooms. She is tough, extravert and – orphaned young – used to being alone. She just thought it might be over by now. But no. So she fills the rooms, but not too much, gives each room an identity with a few carefully chosen things, creates a dining room, a drawing room, a bedroom, a snug. The house is really shaping up. She adds a cat, a lodger and telephones a friend.

Maureen cries down the phone. Not the uncontrolled wailing of the loveless, only that natural overflow that occasionally escapes us when the good-enough is reminded of the might-have-been. ‘It’s fine,’ she says, both believing it and crying, ‘it’s really all fine, it just feels like I’m playing house.’

Let’s call the lodger Jack. He’s a bit player, we needn’t bother filling this one in too much – pale and quiet man-boy will suffice.



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