Pug Hill - Alison Pace [90]
“Really fun night, Hope,” he says as he leans over and opens up the door for me. “Thanks for coming out.”
“I had fun, too,” I say. “Bye, Elliot.”
“Good night, Hope. See you Monday,” he says and the door slams shut and even though we’re already driving away and if I turned around, which I won’t, I’d see Elliot getting smaller and smaller on Smith Street, I say, “Yeah, see you Monday.” Only the cab driver is here to hear me say it, and I don’t think he’s listening either.
As we speed over the Brooklyn Bridge, as I look at the lights of the city in front of me, I think that if there is any part of being single that I actually really want to run away from, it is the hopefulness, the feeling that at any moment, everything might be about to change. It’s the hopefulness that’s got to go.
I wonder if maybe instead of getting kissed by Elliot, if what the universe owes me now, after everything, is a really good cry. I wonder if what the universe owes me is a hall pass to just sit in the back of a taxi and sob.
And then it hits me. I don’t want to be this type of person. I don’t want to be the type of person who will spend as long as I’ve spent thinking so much about someone else’s boyfriend. I don’t want to spend any more time staring across a room, wondering what’s going to happen next. I don’t want to wait so much for things to change, for things to get better, for things to pass. I don’t want to be a spectator, staring across the giant Conservation Studio of my life, waiting for something to happen.
Starting right now, I think, I don’t want to wait anymore. I don’t want to be standing on Smith Street wishing someone else’s boyfriend, no matter that he is Elliot, would kiss me. I think that the first thing I’m not going to wait for anymore will be this: I’m not going to wait anymore to not have a crush on Elliot.
And I know, as much as I feel I’ve known anything, that with Elliot, at last, it’s over.
I wish I’d known all along that turning the corner, and leaving Elliot, someone else’s boyfriend, someone not at all interested in me, behind, would be so easy. But the thing is, and I know this, it wouldn’t have always been so easy.
chapter twenty-seven
I Want to Tell You a Story
“Claaass,” Beth Anne says, looking around, full of assurance and nurturing, at the six of us assembled. “Today, we’ll be watching our videos,” and with the word video, I feel myself tense up. I feel everyone around me stiffen, so automatically and so uniformly that it’s as if I can actually feel the air, the energy, changing completely.
We watch our poems in the order they took place. A month earlier version of Lawrence looks out at us from the television screen. He’s just finished saying the first of many lines that end in the ee sound. I think of the first time I heard Lawrence’s birdie poem, how it seems, so concretely, like years and years ago.
Throughout the video playback of Lawrence’s poem, he’s saying, really loudly, “I’m never wearing white again,” and “I’m definitely never wearing that sweater again,” and then, “Maybe I need to overcome my weight problem before I overcome my presentation anxiety! I’m sooo fat! Beth Anne, really, do I look that fat?”
As soon as the videotaped version of himself finishes his birdie poem, Lawrence stands up and wails, “The camera adds ten pounds!” and I look at the television screen and look back at Lawrence, and I have to agree with him, it really does.
When we get to the end, to my poem, I feel like I must speak, like I have to jump to my defense, and I have to do that not in a little while, not after I mull it over for minutes and minutes and hours and hours and days and days, but right this very second, right now before everyone, my poor introverted self included, has to watch the hideousness of those first few moments of my poem.
“I really think we should start my tape after I left the class,” I say. Beth Anne looks over at me.
“Um, I just think it’d be better to start it from after we talked,” I explain and Beth Anne, bless her,