#tess mcgeer

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.

More than anything else, what Mad Men makes me feel is profoundly apathetic.

Week after week, year after year, that’s what the show stirs inside me. Apathy of a nervous sort. Not indifferent, but sad and uncomfortable in a vague, detached way, like a mild ache that doesn’t debilitate but will not be ignored. A nuisance. The nuisance of someone else’s very expensive existential crisis. Where a show like Breaking Bad induces an anxiety fiery and acute, an anxiety like that is one I find easier to brush off when I’m done watching, because the horror of Breaking Bad takes its root in a specific, extreme, dynamic evil. The evil presented in Mad Men, however, is the most banal kind. Don Draper gives us the evil of the everyday. Quiet and almost natural, ingrained in the system, but evil all the same. Apathy, I said.

Mad Men is a well-made piece of television about how terrible the world is and people are, about how difficult it is to exist in this world and as ourselves, and lately that theme, however true, however resonant, falls flat for me, especially when the leading players (i.e. rich white dudes) are exactly the ones to blame for that terribleness. Which, like,clever, Matthew Weiner,I guess.I get what you’re doing. But, like, whatever. Even the most snobby and stylized interrogation of pain needs to have something in it that compels anybody to watch or care, and my patience is wearing out. My only remaining investment in the success and well-being of Don Draper, the reason I can spare for him at all, is rooted in my emotional investment in his teenage daughter Sally. I’m bored with Don’s demons, but for Sally’s sake I’d like to see him get a handle on them.

Sally Draper, at fourteen, has impeccable style, knows how to make a Tom Collins, and absolutely will not put out for dudes in turtlenecks and sandals, even under duress. I’m twenty-one and own three rompers, order diet coke and vodka in a self-conscious mumble nine times out of ten because just saying something more sophisticated intimidates me, and once allowed a guy to hide me in his closet while his ex-girlfriend cried and played him a song she wrote on her ukulele. Sally Draper is very cool, both for a fourteen year old, and, I guess, by comparison to me, for anyone, is my first point here. My second, and larger, point, is that Sally Draper is doing remarkably well for her young self, all things considered.

Of course, Sally exists only inside of a television series, so of course the glimpses we’ve had of her growing years are the ones worthy of primetime; the moments that were outside the ordinary day-to-day of a little girl, the moments of some extreme, the moments that were, as is the Mad Men way, the worst. Those moments are the ones that scar and form, though, aren’t they?

Sally Draper came alive as a television character for me when she stood in the kitchen in her tiny leotard, red-faced and round, racked with sobs and angry at the adults for drinking and laughing when her grandfather had just died. The pureness of her grief, the sense that the world must come to a halt in the face of this loss, may have been that of a child, reserved for only those who have not yet learned that time goes on no matter what you have suffered, but the passion with which she begged for her sadness to be seen and acknowledged, her simmering indignation when it was not, carried a power that stayed with me. Sally, in seasons since, has proven to be wise and defiant and always a little sad, chopping off her own hair and fretting over the infinite nature of the Land O’ Lakes logo, forever growing taller and more interesting the way children do, but it was that wailing ballerina who stole my heart.

Sally Draper has expanded in the world of the show beyond what I ever would have expected, and I applaud this choice by the writers. However, the bulk of the credit belongs to the young lady who’s been filling Miss Draper’s saddle shoes for six seasons now. Thirteen year old Kiernan Shipka is a marvel. Matthew Weiner could not possibly have known, in casting a cute little kid with a lisp to play his protagonist’s little daughter, that the girl would grow into a precociously commanding actor who carries weighty emotional scenes with apparent ease and seamlessly co-opts the mannerisms of both her on-screen parents into an incredibly intuitive performance. The influence that Shipka’s blossoming talent has had over Sally’s expanding role in the show is obvious when you compare the scant attention paid to the show’s other child, Sally’s younger brother Bobby. I mean, what are we on now, like, Bobby Draper, seventeenth of his name? Casting Kiernan Shipka was a turn of great luck for this show, and she more than earned her upgrade to series regular. She also has the best eyebrows on TVand is impossibly well-spoken and fashion savvy, which absolutely does not make me feel any shame or embarrassment or even the teeniest bit of unreasonable resentment when I think back to the braces and ripped jeans of my own early teenage years. Nope. Not at all.

So, this season Sally caught her father with his pants down, literally, in the middle of an extramarital tryst. She was devastated, left slumped on her bed in tears, unable to look at him, and while certainly any child might be upset to see their parent in such a light, considering the myriad calamities of Sally’s years thus far, the depth of her woundedness seems almost odd. Remember when she got caught masturbating at a sleepover and her mother threatened to cut off her fingers? Remember when she was convinced her dead grandfather’s spirit was existing inside of the new baby brother bearing his name? Remember when her two new step grammies, respectively, slipped the poor child a sleeping pill to deal with nightmares about murderers and gave Roger Sterling a blowjob within our little darling’s line of sight? Remember when she was left home alone with her younger brothers and got robbed by a con artist? Compared with all of that, it seems like maybe the girl should’ve been able to shrug off finding out that daddy can’t keep it in his pants.

It seems that way, except that this new tragedy was far more to Sally than just an insult or embarrassment, another trauma for the memoirs or men in bars jonesing for a tear-soaked anecdote. In that moment, Sally lost the only father she’d ever known. In that moment, the fantasy of her father that Sally had held so dear, had adored, the glittering, ever-distant image she’d favored deeply to the real and irrefutable presence of her mother, so enticing in his inaccessibility, the dream of a father who got her Beatles tickets just because her loved her, not to make up for other wrongdoings or to tip the scales in his favor, all of it was torn away. In that moment, Sally saw the Don Draper facade shatter into a million pieces, irreparably broken, and, as we the viewer have long known, behind that facade lies no Don Draper to speak of.

Don is eternally the story’s central figure, and so it is in their relationship that Sally, as a character, but also as a person, as Sally the girl within this universe, is given the most opportunity for development. Her turn away from him in the latter part of season six allowed room to explore the changing dynamic of Sally and Betty, mother and daughter seeing each other unlike before, and to note the ways in which Sally is coming into her own, striding forward on the shaky colt legs of adolescence, but all of it happens in reaction to the fracturing of her bond to her father.

This rift between them also served as part of the catalyst for Don’s attempt to reveal some truth about himself. Their shared glance at the end of the season finale, standing before the brothel in which Dick Whitman was raised, did seem to suggest the possibility of a new understanding between them, a first small penance on a father’s part for being such a phantom in his daughter’s life as to leave her sadly sighing into a phone receiver, “and then I realized, I don’t know anything about you.” Sally is only fourteen. There is time for these two yet.

In Sally, there is an audience touchstone and narrative viewpoint available entirely separate from that of any of the show’s adults. Armed with a side ponytail and go-go boots, she is the cool flow of potential in a wasteland of ennui. Sally is potential for hope, for real, loud, simmering life, a little happiness, some enthusiasm inside the limbs, potential just to grow up into any kind of person less depressing to watch than the rest of the variety pack discontents Weiner’s given us. Sally Draper still has the chance to be something else entirely.

As an audience, we have watched Sally get her first puppy, her first period, and her first (and second and third…) taste of what a disappointment the world around you can be once you’re old enough to notice. We have watched her take shape in the small moments. Sally the child was a prop or a plot point for her parents to play off of, but Sally at fourteen has her own voice, newly emboldened, and she could become anything. The magic appeal of teen angst, in countless texts and in high school cafeterias everywhere, is the world of possibility churning under all the pain. All future failures and heartbreaks are, at fourteen, still gleaming avenues of choice down which one might saunter, so many beginnings to choose from no matter the past, so many ways to be a person when you are still only just in the becoming. Sally Draper could become anything. And if not, if things go badly, if she’s just as doomed as anyone, then I suppose we can at least take comfort in knowing her therapy bills are gonna take Don to the cleaners.

Review by Tess McGeer.