Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares [68]
“I should go,” she said.
“No, you shouldn’t. Tibby would never forgive me if I sent you away.” Some small part of his face had opened toward her.
“I know you want to be left alone.” She felt genuinely terrible for him. Over the last three months she’d taken the opportunity to fall apart, but he hadn’t been able to do that, had he? He looked like he wasn’t far from it, like a skeleton with slippery joints. She couldn’t push him for answers. It was wrong of her to think she could find what she needed here.
“Listen.” He was at least talking to her now, and not to the side of the porch. “I have a project for work hanging over my head. It was due a couple of months ago, but I—well—Anyway, it’s a big software job I have to do and I need to hold myself together and finish it before we move. It’s not that I don’t want to talk about Tibby, but I wasn’t prepared for this. I can’t do it now.”
There was something about Brian. The sincerity of his eyebrows and the way his eyes hardly blinked. She couldn’t help but feel sympathy for him and shame at her selfishness. And strangely she felt a little bit afraid of him, for the unhappiness he had allowed to grow under his roof.
She looked up at the sky. If she was going to reconstruct the steps that had led Tibby to the bottom of the world, she was going to do it without his help.
Bridget forgot until she got into bed in Brian’s guest room that night the thing that was going on in her uterus. She didn’t remember it in a panicky way. She remembered it as an abstraction. And even as an abstraction, it didn’t suit her at all.
She pictured the sure way Brian bathed Bailey and read to her and knew when to put on a new diaper and what she was supposed to eat and wear to bed. She couldn’t imagine knowing or doing any of that. If felt as foreign to her as standing up in front of a college classroom and lecturing on chemistry. She had nothing to say about it.
She wondered if her own mother had felt that way. She could remember how her mother’s face looked when confronted with lacing Bridget’s skates or getting gum out of her hair. It was just too taxing, too foreign, too much. She wondered if that was the way Tibby had felt.
Look up … and see them.
The teaching stars,
beyond worship
and commonplace tongues.
—Dorothy Dunnett
It was strange for Lena to attempt to dress herself and do her makeup in an attractive way without calling Effie or Carmen for help, but attempt it Lena did. She piled all her clothes up on her bed and tried on every defensible outfit she could come up with.
In between the navy blue shirtdress and the black and white patterned skirt with the white blouse, she stood still in her underwear. She turned to the mirror and studied her image carefully and honestly, in a way she hadn’t done in a long time. She’d spent a lot of years dressing down, being every quiet and serious thing other than pretty.
“God, your looks are wasted on you,” Effie used to say.
But was that true anymore? Was she even pretty anymore? Was there any point in spending energy pushing away something she didn’t even have?
She stepped closer to the mirror, so close her two eyes became one stretched cyclops eye, and then she stepped back again. She couldn’t tell, honestly. Her hair was still thick and shiny, but was long and shapeless from not having been cut in a couple of years. Her eyes were still that odd pale celery color. If anything, they were getting lighter as she got older. It was hard to say they were pretty, exactly.
She was thinner than she used to be. She was thin by her own standards, by normal people standards, but certainly not by Kate Moss standards. Not even by the new Carmen Lowell standards. She squinted and felt insecure. She wanted Kostos to think she was pretty. That was about all the use she had for pretty.
This year she’d be thirty. Maybe when she was forty or fifty she’d look back and think, Why didn’t I enjoy it when I had it? Why did I spend my pretty years