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It seems like a lot of our thematic chickens are coming home to roost, so to speak. Last time we got a culmination of sorts on the “domestic abuse imagery” front, and now we've reached the peak of the literal and figurative cliffs mentioned throughout the book. We're standing on the edge of this theme, ready to take the plunge (I don't really know where I'm going with this). Plus, next time we'll get the weirdest Romeo & Juliet-based extended metaphor ever written. So there's that. Previous entries can be found in the directory.I'm irrationally proud of this week (and last week's) title. Just wanted to mention that.
Chapter 15: Pressure
It's spring break again; I forgot Bella even went to a school! But school's out for a week, so that's one less ball she has to juggle (that's what she said after he recovered from testicular cancer). Not that she (or S. Meyer) was really juggling it to begin with; I'm really envious of Bella's life that way. In high school I felt like academics dominated my life. I couldn't believe the amount of free time afforded by college, and for a while I couldn't get anything done in the face of such opportunity. I sort of feel the same way now, now that college is over. Of course in most ways I am not envious of Bella's life at all. For one thing she's spending her spring break alone, wandering around La Push because Jacob is hunting Victoria.
Last spring break I'd been hunted by a vampire, too. I hoped this wasn't some kind of tradition forming.
That's a little meta-wink for us, isn't it? Too bad it's nestled into one of the most awkward sentences we've encountered so far. Even “I hoped this wouldn't be a reoccurring occurrence” would have been better.
Jacob turns up occasionally, and he and Bella walk along the beach and hold hands. I've defended our heroine before against accusations of being a passive cipher, but one could see where people would get that idea. Really, it seems less like Bella is supposed to barely exist and more like she's letting Jacob have his (admittedly chaste) way with her because it is easier than doing anything else. “His hand felt nice as it warmed mine, and I didn't protest,” she says. Bella's justifications are getting really flimsy these days, huh? Buy an electric blanket, bitch! Also, Bella being an old soul extends to her having cold hands all the time? Is she always complaining at Billy to turn up the thermostat? Does she have arthritis and diabetes, too?
One day at Newton's Mike finally decides to try and earn my favor, calling Bella on her bullshit when she denies that she and Jacob are an item:
Mike's eyes narrowed shrewdly. “Don't kid yourself, Bella. The guy's head over heels for you.”
“I know,” I sighed. “Life is complicated.”
“And girls are cruel,” Mike said under his breath.
I never thought Mike Newton would win me over, but there it is. It doesn't hurt that Jacob and more recently Sam Uley have been out-creeping him by leaps and bounds. Tyler is still on my shit list, if he even still exists.
We drift fluidly through a couple of days; this time S. Meyer doesn't experiment with the formatting so it works quite nicely. It's like reading a montage! One night, Sam and Emily join Billy, Charlie, Jacob and Bella (they're like a weird, incestuous, two-dad family now) for dinner, and Emily bakes a cake “that would have won over a harder man than Charlie.” I love Charlie so much I'm delighted even when he's buried in the predicate like that, some kind of double-reverse indirect object. Emily, meanwhile, is really quite the docile little Betty Draper, huh? If she goes nuts at some point in Eclipse and crashes Sam's car or cheats on him with that meth dealer, all will be forgiven. And to Sam's credit, he doesn't rip anyone's face off at dinner. So good for him?
After dinner, Jacob and Bella go off alone and sit in Jacob's car. We learn that werewolves run a temperature of about 109 (rendered awkwardly as “one-oh-nine”) and Jacob talks about how he could stand in a snowstorm, shirtless as he is now, and be perfectly fine. Wait, Jacob was shirtless at dinner?
TWSS Alert: This happens when Bella continues to ask Jacob about being a wolf. (Why is this conversation happening? How many werewolf facts do we need to force out in these weird, static, expository scenes? Apparently two scenes worth!)
“...And being so big – that's part of it?”
And later, when Jacob talks about his initial struggles:
“That was hard, before.”
Jacob talks about his misgivings; it's basically the same speech we've heard Edward give before, though he gets points for mentioning Sam as the kind of “nightmare” he doesn't want to be.
“Sam lost control of his temper for just one second... and [Emily] was standing too close.”
For those of you who doubted my domestic abuse argument: there's your exhibit A. It also turns out that Jacob is descended from several other werewolves and Quil is in the same bloodline (they're second cousins), so he'll be a wolf any day now. But on the bright side, he can run really fast. To be fair, these scenes of exposition are easier to read than to summarize; it doesn't feel as awkward as I can't help but make it sound. You can only do so much Showing – when you're trying to build a mythology from the ground up sometimes you just have to Tell.
Jacob starts asking about the vampires, and Bella explains the circumstances that led to James's death. When she tells him about Edward sucking the venom out of her hand Jacob starts twitching with rage. You're going to get jealous that Edward got to suck a wound on her hand, Jacob?
You can almost see S. Meyer free-associating her way through this chapter – Bella tells Jacob to calm down and he repeats it: “Calm.” Who did you think of? Immediately Jacob starts asking about the other powers the Cullens have, and Bella tells him about Jasper! I feel like I'm inside S. Meyer's mind!
Bella starts talking about Alice, and it gets her depressed – she can't seem to breathe. See? SOUL MATES. Okay, maybe it's because she talks about Alice's visions, and then remembers Alice's vision that she would become a vampire herself one day, and then realizes that will never happen, but I don't think that's what is really going on, you know?
Bella starts holding her chest and Jacob asks why she does it. She explains feeling like she's breaking into pieces and then is surprised by the fact that she told him about it so easily.
“We're a pretty messed-up pair, aren't we?” Jacob said. “Neither one of us can old our shapes together right.”
I see what you did there, Jacob!
A couple more days go by, and Bella spends some awkward time with Billy and worries a lot. There's Victoria and the threat she poses to Charlie and Jacob, plus the fact that she's “getting deeper and deeper with Jacob without ever having consciously decided to progress in that direction.” Funny how that happens, isn't it? You fail to act and fail to act and shit just collapses all around you.
At this point Bella is walking on the beach, and she gets so overwhelmed that she lies on the ground and curls up into a ball. Sometimes I feel like I'm reading The Bell Jar over here. Will someone take Bella to the hospital, please? Jacob finds her like that and promises to spend the following day with her. When he's trying to think of an activity (other than sex) his eyes fall on the cliffs, and he decides that tomorrow they will finally jump.
Bella wakes up the next morning pumped for her “date” with Jacob and Edward's Imaginary Angry Daddy Spirit. It's sad that this is the closest she'll get to a threesome. But when she shows up on the Rez, Billy is alone in the house, “eating cold cereal.” As opposed to hot cereal? The pack got a lead on Victoria, so Jacob had to go. Bella bites her lip. She ends up wandering down to the beach alone, remarking that the forest seems oddly vacant.
I didn't see any animals – no birds, no squirrels. I couldn't hear any birds, either.
Yep, that's pretty vacant. No birds, or squirrels, or birds! Nothing! Bella realizes it's probably because there's a big-ass storm brewing. You know what that means: something bad. Bella looks out at the angry, churning waves, and decides to jump off the cliff anyway. Well, I guess we all knew she was going to commit suicide sooner or later. Cue Elliott Smith, or maybe old Cat Power, on the soundtrack.
She's excited by the notion that this will be “one of the stupidest, most reckless” things she's ever done, and when she can't find the path to the lower cliff she says “fuck it” and climbs to the top. When she reaches the edge of the precipice, Edward's voice starts bitching and moaning. “It was only when he was disapproving like this that I could hear the true memory of his voice,” she says. Hey Bella – do you ever think about why that is? He tries to convince her not to jump, but she does, screaming with exhilaration as she falls. She lands in the water successfully (as in, not landing on any rocks or breaking her bones as she hits the water – that surface tension is a motherfucker) but gets caught by the revved-up current and immediately loses track of what is up and what is down. Not that she tries very hard to figure it out! She basically gives up right away! Edward reappears and urges her to fight against the current, but she decides not to. As always, she's all quips and one-liners in the face of certain death; she's relieved that her life isn't flashing before her eyes and asks (rhetorically) “Who wants to see a rerun anyway?” Very funny, Bella. Now swim! Or not, or whatever. She takes pleasure in Edward's anguished screams of “No! Bella, no!” which is a deeply weird little moment.
Happiness. It made the whole dying thing pretty bearable.
Something she thinks is a rock hits her in the chest and all the air goes out of her lungs. Her last thought is of Edward. And then she dies.
Chapter 15: Pressure
It's spring break again; I forgot Bella even went to a school! But school's out for a week, so that's one less ball she has to juggle (that's what she said after he recovered from testicular cancer). Not that she (or S. Meyer) was really juggling it to begin with; I'm really envious of Bella's life that way. In high school I felt like academics dominated my life. I couldn't believe the amount of free time afforded by college, and for a while I couldn't get anything done in the face of such opportunity. I sort of feel the same way now, now that college is over. Of course in most ways I am not envious of Bella's life at all. For one thing she's spending her spring break alone, wandering around La Push because Jacob is hunting Victoria.
Last spring break I'd been hunted by a vampire, too. I hoped this wasn't some kind of tradition forming.
That's a little meta-wink for us, isn't it? Too bad it's nestled into one of the most awkward sentences we've encountered so far. Even “I hoped this wouldn't be a reoccurring occurrence” would have been better.
Jacob turns up occasionally, and he and Bella walk along the beach and hold hands. I've defended our heroine before against accusations of being a passive cipher, but one could see where people would get that idea. Really, it seems less like Bella is supposed to barely exist and more like she's letting Jacob have his (admittedly chaste) way with her because it is easier than doing anything else. “His hand felt nice as it warmed mine, and I didn't protest,” she says. Bella's justifications are getting really flimsy these days, huh? Buy an electric blanket, bitch! Also, Bella being an old soul extends to her having cold hands all the time? Is she always complaining at Billy to turn up the thermostat? Does she have arthritis and diabetes, too?
One day at Newton's Mike finally decides to try and earn my favor, calling Bella on her bullshit when she denies that she and Jacob are an item:
Mike's eyes narrowed shrewdly. “Don't kid yourself, Bella. The guy's head over heels for you.”
“I know,” I sighed. “Life is complicated.”
“And girls are cruel,” Mike said under his breath.
I never thought Mike Newton would win me over, but there it is. It doesn't hurt that Jacob and more recently Sam Uley have been out-creeping him by leaps and bounds. Tyler is still on my shit list, if he even still exists.
We drift fluidly through a couple of days; this time S. Meyer doesn't experiment with the formatting so it works quite nicely. It's like reading a montage! One night, Sam and Emily join Billy, Charlie, Jacob and Bella (they're like a weird, incestuous, two-dad family now) for dinner, and Emily bakes a cake “that would have won over a harder man than Charlie.” I love Charlie so much I'm delighted even when he's buried in the predicate like that, some kind of double-reverse indirect object. Emily, meanwhile, is really quite the docile little Betty Draper, huh? If she goes nuts at some point in Eclipse and crashes Sam's car or cheats on him with that meth dealer, all will be forgiven. And to Sam's credit, he doesn't rip anyone's face off at dinner. So good for him?
After dinner, Jacob and Bella go off alone and sit in Jacob's car. We learn that werewolves run a temperature of about 109 (rendered awkwardly as “one-oh-nine”) and Jacob talks about how he could stand in a snowstorm, shirtless as he is now, and be perfectly fine. Wait, Jacob was shirtless at dinner?
TWSS Alert: This happens when Bella continues to ask Jacob about being a wolf. (Why is this conversation happening? How many werewolf facts do we need to force out in these weird, static, expository scenes? Apparently two scenes worth!)
“...And being so big – that's part of it?”
And later, when Jacob talks about his initial struggles:
“That was hard, before.”
Jacob talks about his misgivings; it's basically the same speech we've heard Edward give before, though he gets points for mentioning Sam as the kind of “nightmare” he doesn't want to be.
“Sam lost control of his temper for just one second... and [Emily] was standing too close.”
For those of you who doubted my domestic abuse argument: there's your exhibit A. It also turns out that Jacob is descended from several other werewolves and Quil is in the same bloodline (they're second cousins), so he'll be a wolf any day now. But on the bright side, he can run really fast. To be fair, these scenes of exposition are easier to read than to summarize; it doesn't feel as awkward as I can't help but make it sound. You can only do so much Showing – when you're trying to build a mythology from the ground up sometimes you just have to Tell.
Jacob starts asking about the vampires, and Bella explains the circumstances that led to James's death. When she tells him about Edward sucking the venom out of her hand Jacob starts twitching with rage. You're going to get jealous that Edward got to suck a wound on her hand, Jacob?
You can almost see S. Meyer free-associating her way through this chapter – Bella tells Jacob to calm down and he repeats it: “Calm.” Who did you think of? Immediately Jacob starts asking about the other powers the Cullens have, and Bella tells him about Jasper! I feel like I'm inside S. Meyer's mind!
Bella starts talking about Alice, and it gets her depressed – she can't seem to breathe. See? SOUL MATES. Okay, maybe it's because she talks about Alice's visions, and then remembers Alice's vision that she would become a vampire herself one day, and then realizes that will never happen, but I don't think that's what is really going on, you know?
Bella starts holding her chest and Jacob asks why she does it. She explains feeling like she's breaking into pieces and then is surprised by the fact that she told him about it so easily.
“We're a pretty messed-up pair, aren't we?” Jacob said. “Neither one of us can old our shapes together right.”
I see what you did there, Jacob!
A couple more days go by, and Bella spends some awkward time with Billy and worries a lot. There's Victoria and the threat she poses to Charlie and Jacob, plus the fact that she's “getting deeper and deeper with Jacob without ever having consciously decided to progress in that direction.” Funny how that happens, isn't it? You fail to act and fail to act and shit just collapses all around you.
At this point Bella is walking on the beach, and she gets so overwhelmed that she lies on the ground and curls up into a ball. Sometimes I feel like I'm reading The Bell Jar over here. Will someone take Bella to the hospital, please? Jacob finds her like that and promises to spend the following day with her. When he's trying to think of an activity (other than sex) his eyes fall on the cliffs, and he decides that tomorrow they will finally jump.
Bella wakes up the next morning pumped for her “date” with Jacob and Edward's Imaginary Angry Daddy Spirit. It's sad that this is the closest she'll get to a threesome. But when she shows up on the Rez, Billy is alone in the house, “eating cold cereal.” As opposed to hot cereal? The pack got a lead on Victoria, so Jacob had to go. Bella bites her lip. She ends up wandering down to the beach alone, remarking that the forest seems oddly vacant.
I didn't see any animals – no birds, no squirrels. I couldn't hear any birds, either.
Yep, that's pretty vacant. No birds, or squirrels, or birds! Nothing! Bella realizes it's probably because there's a big-ass storm brewing. You know what that means: something bad. Bella looks out at the angry, churning waves, and decides to jump off the cliff anyway. Well, I guess we all knew she was going to commit suicide sooner or later. Cue Elliott Smith, or maybe old Cat Power, on the soundtrack.
She's excited by the notion that this will be “one of the stupidest, most reckless” things she's ever done, and when she can't find the path to the lower cliff she says “fuck it” and climbs to the top. When she reaches the edge of the precipice, Edward's voice starts bitching and moaning. “It was only when he was disapproving like this that I could hear the true memory of his voice,” she says. Hey Bella – do you ever think about why that is? He tries to convince her not to jump, but she does, screaming with exhilaration as she falls. She lands in the water successfully (as in, not landing on any rocks or breaking her bones as she hits the water – that surface tension is a motherfucker) but gets caught by the revved-up current and immediately loses track of what is up and what is down. Not that she tries very hard to figure it out! She basically gives up right away! Edward reappears and urges her to fight against the current, but she decides not to. As always, she's all quips and one-liners in the face of certain death; she's relieved that her life isn't flashing before her eyes and asks (rhetorically) “Who wants to see a rerun anyway?” Very funny, Bella. Now swim! Or not, or whatever. She takes pleasure in Edward's anguished screams of “No! Bella, no!” which is a deeply weird little moment.
Happiness. It made the whole dying thing pretty bearable.
Something she thinks is a rock hits her in the chest and all the air goes out of her lungs. Her last thought is of Edward. And then she dies.
It's weird that there is so much book left, since our narrator just drowned and everything. I wonder who will take the narration in the next chapter! I'm hoping it's Quil. RIP, Bella.
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