Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [46]
“Sit there.” Lena pointed to the living room couch, green velvet, with pillows carefully arranged. She studied her mother. No. She didn’t really repose in the living room very often.
“Let’s try the kitchen,” Lena said, and her mother followed her there. She sat Ari down at the kitchen table. Better. But her mother was never really sitting down.
“Stand, okay?” Lena said. She let her mother gravitate to her own spot at the counter. That made sense. Without thinking, her mother put her chin in her hands, her elbows resting on the granite counter, waiting for Lena to pick.
“Don’t move,” Lena said. “That’s good.” She brought a stool opposite her mother and propped her drawing board on her lap. Lena made herself look for a long time before she started. She wanted to see all that was real and also what was there. She didn’t want to let herself shy away.
She started. She liked the softness of her mother’s skin contrasting with the gleaming granite countertop, the way the skin of her elbows puddled a bit upon it. Her mother eschewed softness, longed for hardness, but softness was what she had.
Lena wanted to capture her mother’s worn, slightly bagging knuckles with the hard permanence of her wedding ring pressing as it now did into her mother’s cheek. She considered her mother’s severely glinting diamond studs, a twentieth anniversary gift from Lena’s father, sitting in her soft, tired earlobes.
Drawing wasn’t a passive exercise, Annik liked to say. You had to find the information; you had to go in after it.
Lena pushed herself to look deeper into the tentative set of her mother’s eyes, the lines burrowing toward her lips, made more pronounced by the careful, deliberate way she held them.
Ari wanted to support Lena in some way. She would sit for this drawing until every one of her limbs went to sleep. But she needed to stay allied with her husband, too. She’d made too many compromises already this year to pull out. She was an appeaser, maybe, but by now she was accountable herself.
Lena saw these conflicts fighting in each quadrant of her mother’s face. She saw the tiny fault lines betraying the feelings that pulled her mother apart. Ari was so placid in some ways, her smooth hair, her plucked brows, her elegant clothes in every soft shade of beige. And in other ways, Lena could see she was waging an internal war.
Lena imagined herself a field marshal, overseeing the hostilities between her mother’s eyebrows. Then she imagined herself a cartographer, mapping out each curve and concavity between Ari’s cheekbone and her jaw. She imagined herself a blind person, feeling her way around her mother’s neck and collarbone with her charcoal. She pictured herself the size of a mite, crawling over the canyonlike hollows of her mother’s shoulders.
When Lena brought the drawing in to Annik the next day, Annik was plainly excited. She was near speechless.
“Do you think I got the chair?” Lena asked timidly.
Annik hugged her, knocking Lena’s legs into her wheels. “I really do.”
Should we have stayed home and thought of here?
—Elizabeth Bishop
“Hey, Naughty.”
Bridget hadn’t told Naughton exactly the time of her run that evening, but he was there nonetheless. She wondered how long he’d been waiting by the road at the foot of the hill. Eric, this evening, had not come.
They ran in silence for quite some time. The air was so heavy you could practically feel the water squishing around in it. Bridget had to hand it to Naughty. The uphill stretch was fairly brutal—she liked to start a run tough—and he kept right with her even when he looked like he was going to die.
He was fourteen. He seemed infinitely younger than she, but she realized with some mortification that he was no more distant from her age than she was from Eric’s.
He kept turning his head to look at her. He was nervous.
She paused briefly at the top of the mountain to enjoy the view. It was part of her ritual. The silence was punctuated by Naughton, who was breathing