The Child by Sarah Schulman Page A

messenger, delivered a package to his office, and confronted him in person.
    “I asked, and you said yes ,” Mary cried. “So I believed you.”
    “What I really meant,” Steve said, looking at his watch, “was that if someone else were to do all the work of shepherding this not uninteresting play through the system, well then, at that time the door may not be closed, especially if you get famous for something else. I was just being polite, but you clung to my kindness. You fixated on it and became so needy that I had to protect myself from your monstrous, diseased insanity.”
    “Couldn’t you just have said ‘I changed my mind. I’m sorry I hurt you’?”
    Innocent outsiders who have neither the calling to be playwrights nor the experience of being absolutely the opposite of the profile for privilege would often ask if she couldn’t hold on to some small kindness. This was a loaded question. Yes, she was ultimately happy that he finally took the responsibility to say no. In fact, this was a great relief, and it helped a lot. But it did not get her play produced. And for those for whom expression through vapid but beautiful actors is the only time they feel alive, there is nothing that makes not getting your play performed okay.
    At the root of this was that Mary had been raised to keep her word, so she believed what other people told her. Second-guessing them was a skill she had never acquired. She just believed what others said. If they said yes, then her investment of faith in other human beings was to believe they were telling the truth. She could not live and do otherwise.

    Yet, as was inevitable, after many experiences like the one above, Mary came to know these creepy people like the backs of her hands. She could see their pubic hair through their clothes. That’s how intimately she had come to know this kind of person. The Unaccountables. Mary stared at herself in the mirror. How could she become like them? She wanted to. It was the only way to have the opportunity to be herself.
    Trying to learn this system was difficult. It was a new language of a subculture she had not been trained in. It was taught in some schools and some families and some circles, but not hers. So after serious observational study and consultation with various participant observers also on the hovering fringe, Mary wrote out these phrases on flash cards with their interpretive meanings on the back. So, whenever she was stuck on a subway train, or on her way home from a temp job, she would take out the cards and try to get their information through her thick skull.
    Here were some of her flash cards:
    –“Let’s get together for coffee” actually means “Go away, I hate you.”
    –“Send me your materials and I’ll call you next month” actually means “Go away.”
    –“I’ll call you on Wednesday” means “Go away.”
    –“I’d love to see the next draft” means “Go away.”
    She practised speaking the new lingua franca when she was alone, to see if comprehension would improve with practise. But when she meant to say “I’ll call you on Wednesday,” she just said “Go
away,” which defeated the purpose of the code in the first place. Because saying “Go away” made her accountable. It was easier to say “Ill call you tomorrow.”
    What was the bright spot in her light? Hope. No one goes to these lengths unless positive fantasy is at the wheel. Every time she tried to be like them, she imagined it would work. That felt great. Then she imagined what it would be like to be treated with respect, to live decently, and, most important, to see her plays alive before her. And that felt so sweet, so dear, so tender and right that the imagining was itself satisfying, comforting, and fun. She couldn’t wait to see how good the real thing was going to feel. And it would. Feel.
    If after all the joyous hope it in fact did not work out, she was devastated and had to think it all through again. In some ways she did