You Look Great Too

MAGGIE’s living room. SHE and SALLY are surrounded by paperwork from MAGGIE’s back taxes. THEY take a break; having a few glasses of wine while playing a favourite game of “My House.”

MAGGIE
My house . . . My house is one of those big old places on Palmerston. No . . . Brunswick! The kind that’s been divided into twelve tiny apartments. But we knock down the dividing walls and rip out the extra doorbells—

SALLY
Who’s we?

MAGGIE
My husband and I.

SALLY
Oh.

MAGGIE
Anyway, we are both so successful in our careers that we are able to pay for this house in cash.

Sally
Yowza!

MAGGIE
I know. We renovate and decorate. We turn it into a comfortable home and a showplace for entertaining. The neighbours say it’s the best the house has ever looked and everyone says how great it is that we never have to move no matter how many kids we have.

SALLY
How man—

MAGGIE
Three. But I only have to get pregnant twice because the two youngest are twins. I get my figure back right away without even trying [SALLY tries to interject but MAGGIE is on a roll. SHE becomes more and more frenzied to the end of the speech] and the best part about our house is that we live a block away from where Adam is still living in his dingy basement apartment. Every day, he walks home from the subway in his Canada Customs uniform and he cringes at the possibility of running into me and or my secure, successful, gorgeous husband and our equally gorgeous children as we push them in their multiple stroller or drive them around in our four door, four by four, limited edition, red Jeep Grand Cherokee!

MAGGIE
He has to move. And not just to another neighbourhood. He moves out west. To BC. There, he tries his best to forget me, but the woman he marries always has a sneaking suspicion that he’s had this one true love that he secretly keeps comparing to her.

On his dying day, he murmurs my name in that bittersweet way that says he was richer for knowing me but is filled with the deepest regret for ever hurting me.

SALLY
You spend way too much time alone.

MAGGIE
I know.