#eleanor and park

Teaser Tuesday (5th August)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
•BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title &…

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A stranger on the bus watched me trying not to cry. First he watched me trying not to cry and then he watched me crying, crying barely and then barely more. Somewhere under eyelid flickers and mascara stripes on my wrist I could see him watching, but there were fifty more pages in my book so I had nothing to say. A pothole, a lurch, we banged elbows so we bared teeth weakly and then he was fishing for something in the pocket of an army coat. This boy I didn’t know shifted and made a mouth sound, not quite a word, and he held out a tissue folded neat, and when I took it our fingers touched. I am watercolor edges and too many romantic comedies, I’m all nerve-endings, our fingers touched and I noticed. Our fingers touched and I noticed. In my lap was Eleanor & Park.

This was a new young adult book I grabbed during my shift at the library on a whim. I liked the cover. I liked Rainbow Rowell’s name. I liked in my hand the size and shape of it and it was there on a cart so fine. Whatever, we’ll see. A lazy Tuesday afternoon with bottled Diet Coke to wake me up and I started to read. I opened it across my knees on a bench and when my break was over and it was time to go back inside I was shaking. Vibrating, rather. I was buzzing. I’d read, say, thirty pages. I wanted to read thirty thousand. I was floating on the fragile sugar shimmer of teen love that wasn’t even teen love yet, it was two teenagers on a bus together and I never wanted it to end, I was worried already, I was digging my nails in against goodbyes.

I love this book. I loved reading this book. I love Eleanor. I love Park. I loved Eleanor and Park, Eleanor and Park, EleanorandParkParkandEleanor, Eleanor & Park. I loved them and I loved their love and I loved every part of them that hurt and that love meant it hurt me, too. I loved, out of nowhere and with shame dissipated, The Smiths as much as I had when I was a gloomy ninth grader. I love this book. I loved reading this book. I sighed aloud in public spaces about this book and pulled my sleeves down over my fingers and whimpered and melted. I loved the me I was when I was reading this book, this tear-damp tender twist of myself with a heart pounding big and brave and completely stupid, alive in Technicolor now and breathing as if to make music from the pumps of my lungs, and I loved, I loved, loved, this book.

If he were to look up at her now, he’d know exactly how stupid she was. She could feel her face go soft and gummy. If Park were to look up at her now, he’d know everything.

He didn’t look up. He wound the scarf around his fingers until her hand was hanging in the space between them.

Then he slid the silk and his fingers into her open palm.

And Eleanor disintegrated.

I remember very clearly that I was sitting at a picnic table at Mount Holyoke waiting for my bus when I read this part and emitted from my body an involuntary high-pitched screech of delight. A huddle of well dressed young women passing by at that very moment, looking admirably smarter and better mannered than I, looked back at me in something like fear, but I stand by the reaction entirely.

Do you want me to tell you what the book is about? It’s about weird teenagers falling in bright, shining, incredible first love with each other in a bus and a living room and suburban streets and on a waterbed in Omaha, Nebraska in 1986. Some scenes are set in a high school. So, okay. Are you satisfied?

What is Eleanor & Parkabout?Eleanor & Park is about what a gift it is to be so fragile, how everything is more because we’re just these scared little mockingbirds and every heartbeat makes our delicate bodies quake. That’s true of everyone—it’s more true of everyone in love and it’s most true of everyone in love in high school, first love that’s everything, that devastates all that existed before it, first love that reconstructs, however fleetingly, a kinder world where you are less alone. Eleanor & Park is about wanting someone so bad it hurts. Eleanor & Park is about wanting to be wanted and being wanted and when bodies aren’t enough. Eleanor & Park is about kissing. Eleanor & Park is about class and race and abuse and body image and identity and the oppressive unfairness of this stupid world. This book broke my heart into a million pieces, sad little shards of dust on my shoes, but in the process, all along, not after or in the end but in tandem, it put the dumb bloody thing back together as something better. Eleanor & Park is about learning or remembering or being patiently reminded with warm hands and kind mouths that you are something tender and you deserve to be loved.

Eleanor & Park is a book about the crushing swell of first love, the whole heady mess of it, but it’s also a book that captures the tiny things, memorializes the miraculous minutiae of becoming someone’s someone. Magical nothings that feel, all of a sudden, like what you have been waiting for every single second of your life.

They talked about the White Album on the way to school, but just as an excuse to stare at each other’s mouths. You’d think they were lip-reading.

Maybe that’s why Park kept laughing, even when they were talking about ‘Helter Skelter’– which wasn’t the Beatles’ funniest song, even before Charles Manson got a hold of it.

It’s sad. Please do not mistake me. It’s funny, too. It’s funny, like, when Park complains that gift certificates aren’t very punk. It’s funny and brave and smart, just like its protagonists, but this book is very sad. Sad seems like an empty word to apply to what I mean, to the carving out of my middle I felt on certain pages; this acute sting, the lingering sorrow I’ve still got a piece of. This is a book about first love and it hurts like it, it marks you like it. Eleanor, round and ruddy in a way that high school hallways do not welcome; Park, physically small and itching always with the fear that he is too soft, too girly, too in his head, these still-children scared and sweet and slipping into a love that repaints the world, that builds itself up from nowhere like a secret space in which to stow away, they’ll break your heart, but it’ll be good for you. To be sixteen and have something so special it could make you sick, when everything means everything and everything is next to you in the car holding your knee, breaking the rules of their learner’s license to drive you along the river so you can swallow the night air in your laughs. To be sixteen and sparkling more and more with every touch, glance. To be sixteen and soft.

“All I do when we’re apart is think about you, and all I do when we’re together is panic. Because every second feels so important. And because I’m so out of control, I can’t help myself. I’m not even mine anymore, I’m yours, and what if you decide that you don’t want me? How could you want me like I want you?”

He was quiet. He wanted everything she’d just said to be the last thing he heard. He wanted to fall asleep with ‘I want you’ in his ears.

Bus Boy and I did not stumble wildly from the tissue sharing into an intense and soul-shaking affair. Wouldn’t that have been great, though? Great for this essay, great for the hopes of romantics everywhere, a great how-we-met story to tell over the table at the kind of couple-y dinner parties with wine and one-upping that I have never actually attended but have a very vivid idea about inside my head. We didn’t ever kiss, we didn’t ever speak, we didn’t ever become a we anywhere but in that bus seat and this essay, and if I were to see him again I doubt that I would even be sure what face was his face. I don’t know that I know this face, one of a thousand faces on so many bus rides and all these breathing bodies in a jumble moving along all over. I’m self-absorbed but not quite enough to really believe he’d know mine. When the bus released us in a throng to the world outside it was raining and I think I had a French test; we scattered for good. But we saw each other there. For a quick flash that time will forget, we were humans peeking out from our shells and seeing softness with gentle eyes.

Romance is intoxicating and this story brims with it, but if there is one thing that Eleanor & Park made me certain of, one thing that rang over and over in my cluttered head, while I was reading the book, amid all my tears and all caps emails and pained, evangelical Tweets, and for months afterwards, it’s that we all deserve to know the exhilaration of being very, very soft, even if it scars.

Review by Tess McGeer.