Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [81]
She thought to call Greta, but she didn’t know how to get her feelings up and over the transom. How could she explain? Eric wasn’t her boyfriend. He wasn’t her anything. Why did she feel like she needed him so desperately?
She sat on the dock at the lake and watched the clouds thicken. She wished it would rain hard and long and clear everything away. Rain never came when you asked for it.
She couldn’t sit. She paced. She kicked a soccer ball around an empty field. The lightning in the distance wasn’t the real thing. It was empty, dissipated and fake: heat lightning. It brought no rain.
As much as she prided herself on making this summer with Eric different from the one before, it was beginning to seem eerily similar.
Like before, she was laid open by a glimpse of intimacy, and when she tried to find it again, there was no one and nothing there. Eric offered, whether he meant to or not, some giant idea of love. But she only grasped it long enough to know her poverty. He pushed her to destroy herself. He made her want and then gave her no satisfaction.
Why did he do this to her? Why did she let him? How could she give herself away like this, even after she’d already learned such a bitter lesson?
She wished he hadn’t found her in that feverish, vulnerable state. She wished he hadn’t worried over her and taken care of her and held her all night. Having it was ecstasy, but its sudden, inexplicable loss was too painful to bear. She’d rather go through her life doubting such a thing was possible than knowing it was real and she couldn’t have it.
What a pitiful waste she was. She was willing to give away, to throw away, the very best she had. For what? It was one thing to sacrifice yourself for a great cause. It was another to destroy yourself for a person who didn’t even want you. It was an act of self-immolation, a sacrifice nobody wanted, that did nobody any good. What could be more tragic than that?
She thought she was independent and strong, but she got one small taste of love and she was hungrier than anyone. She was ravenous.
All the drawings had been difficult, but Lena saved the hardest for last.
She’d procrastinated. She’d gotten a manicure and pedicure with Effie. She’d spent mornings shopping and cooking for Carmen’s household, wanting to help out with the new baby. She and Carmen had spent happy evenings together on the floor talking about drawing and Win and the beach, simply watching the baby breathe.
But now the time had come. Her portfolio had to be postmarked by the following day; she couldn’t put it off any longer. When the house was quiet and the light was good, she pulled on the Traveling Pants and sat herself in front of the mirror in her bedroom, and got to work.
It was one thing looking at other people’s troubles. It was another looking at your own. If feelings and expectations made it difficult to see a loved one’s face, how blind were you to your own face?
But one surprising thing, Lena found as she looked at her face in the mirror, was that it wasn’t as familiar to her as some. Yes, she had looked at herself plenty over the years. But her face wasn’t as rutted in her brain as her mother’s or her father’s.
Lena had a funny relationship with her face. She wanted it to be beautiful, and she also didn’t. She looked at it with the desire to find some overriding flaw that would kick her from one category (beautiful) into another (not). And she also looked at it with the fear that she’d succeed. Either way, she usually didn’t find it.
It was like what Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina about all happy families being alike. Lena felt that all pretty faces were all alike—straight, even, regular. It was the ugliness, the sadness that set them apart. Lena couldn’t find that much objective ugliness in hers. But the sadness was apparent.
As she began to draw the outer edge of her cheek, she realized she had the look of a person who was waiting. Not impatient, not tortured, not frustrated. Just waiting. What was she waiting for?
The eight-thousand-pound elephant in the middle of her