| A Complilation of Bridget Vreeland |
[27 Jun 2008|10:23am] |
Bridget Vreeland, although a fictional character, is one of my heroes in life. I know I'll never manage to be a carbon copy of her; after all, she's 5'10", Caucasian, blonde, hooks up boys like fish and is hella good at soccer, but I just looove her personality, the way she deals with shit in life, and her lifestyle. So here are some parts about her collected from the Sisterhood series (because I'm a creepy, crazy fictional-person stalker like that):
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"Bee had changed so much in the last year, but a few things had stayed the same. Most people, including Lena herself, backed away when they sensed some out-of-control emotion. Bee went right out to meet it."
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"If a person hadn't seen Bee in a year, they might not have recognized her sitting there. She wasn't blond and she wasn't thin and she wasn't moving. She had tried to dye her hair really dark, but the dye she'd used had barely conquered the famous yellow struggling underneath. Bee was normally so thin and muscled that the fifteen or so pounds she'd gained over the winter and spring sat heavily and obviously on her arms and legs and torso."
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"'I think about the person I used to be, and she seems so far away. She walked fast, I walk slow. She stayed up late and got up early, I sleep.'"
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"'Do I want to?' Bee thought about the words carefully. Some people (like Tibby, for instance) tended to listen in a muffled, sheltered way. Bee was the opposite."
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"Bee would have ordered a huge bowl of spaghetti. She wouldn't care if she had noodles hanging out of her mouth like tentacles. Bee didn't subscribe to the list of acceptable date foods."
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"She banged on the door a little harder than she'd meant to. She needed to keep it moving. 'Come on, comon on,' she mumbled to herself. She heard footsteps. She shook out her hands to keep the blood flowing."
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"It was that Bridget had been thin and striking and outgoing, and, of course, she'd had the hair."
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"Greta had breakfast waiting for her. Juice and whole-wheat toast with butter and jam, just the way she liked it. She had mentioned that in passing a few days before, and Greta had had it all set up the next day."
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"Burgess won 1-0. The guys on the team and their friends and all their pretty groupies went out to celebrate, and Bridget went home to her boardinghouse alone. But she was too ramped up to stay in her room, so she dug her running shoes out of the bottom of her suitcase. She hadn't used them in months. She put them on and stepped outside.
She ran straight down Market Street all the way to the river. She remembered the pretty, overgrown path that ran alongside it. The place with the arrowheads. On the far side of the river she saw the ancient, broken-down oak trees giving shelter to hardy weeds and climbers at the expense of their own failing branches.
She'd run so many miles in her life, her body seemed to welcome the exercise. On the other hand, it started to complain after only a mile or so in the July heat. She felt all the extra weight on her hips and shoulders and arms. It wrecked her stride and it wrecked her breathing.
Her mind flashed to the Traveling Pants. Just this morning she'd sent them on their way. She hadn't even worn them. She felt angry at herself, and it made her run faster and farther. And the longer she ran, the more she felt like she was carrying a burden and she wanted it off."
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"She wasn't so crazy about te brown anymore, but she didn't want to risk blowing her cover, either, so she dug a baseball cap out from a pile of dirty clothes and put it on her head. Voila. As a fashion statement, it wasn't much."
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"On Saturday, Bridget went for a run in the morning before the soccer game. She'd gotten up to four miles. Slow ones, but still. When she arrived at the field, she was sweaty and sticky, but happy in the way only running could make her happy."
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"Her body needed to be in motion. She was a voracious person."
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"Billy practically accosted Bridget on her way to the hardware store, where she was going to buy parts to fix Greta's refrigerator door. She was now paying her seventy-five dollars a week to Greta and was busy vanquishing every disobedient thing on the property -- the weeds in the lawn, the wobbly coffee table, the peeling paint at the back of the house. Bridget was in her running clothes, her hair was stuffed into a scarf, and her mood was giddy because she'd been thinking about Lena."
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"Friday night Bridget ran almost seven miles, all the way to the bend in the river where Billy's old house sat. Maybe he still lived there.
Her body was changing, she could feel it. She wasn't totally back to normal, but she was most of the way there. Her legs and her stomach were getting muscular and strong again. Her hair was blond again. Running by herself, she took off her baseball cap, which felt like a relief. SHe let her hair breathe in the warm evening air.
She stopped by Greta's to pick up her ball and went straight to the soccer field. It had become a ritual for her, kicking around by herself at night in the three patches of light.
'Gilda!'
She turned around and saw Billy coming toward her. He was probably on his way to a party where all the girls enjoyed crushes from all the boys.
'Hi,' she said, out of breath, glad she'd remembered to put her baseball cap back on her head."
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"She noticed he was looking at her legs. She might not be a beauty, but she knew her legs were getting nice again. They were toned and tan from running for five weeks straight, not to mention her nightly soccer workout. He didn't looked spooked and he didn't look grateful."
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"She felt panicked, like she had to keep moving. She burst through the side door and out into the yard. She heard Grandma's voice calling behind her, but she couldn't focus on it. She kept walking.
She walked through the needling rain for blocks down to the river and then walked straight alongside it, on her familiar path. Walking didn't feel fast enough, so she started running. The river was up, lapping against its sides. She felt tears dribbling from her eyes, mixing with and disappearing in the rain."
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"She ran and ran, and when she couldn't run anymore, she fell on the ground and let it catch her."
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"Sometime before sunrise, Bridget picked herself up and walked back home. She let herself in the side door and numbly walked up the steps to the bathroom. She took a long, blasting hot shower, wrapped herself in a towel, took a comb from her shelf, and walked down to the kitchen. She poured a big glass of water and sat at the table in the dark."
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"Bridget needed a run. A long, fast one. For days she'd been hanging close to the house, padding around in Greta's slippers and letting Grandma make her lemonade and rub her back. She'd gone a long time without a mother.
Usually when she slept twelve hours at night it meant she was falling apart, but these nights, with her quiet dreams, she felt as if she were remaking herself, putting herself together.
She washed her hair vigorously, four times in a row, watching the last of the faint brown dye go down the drain. Then she put on her running shoes.
The air was a little cooler than usual, and her breath settled into an easy rhythm right away. Her body felt light and wonderful, as if she'd cast of a very heavy, very dark blanket.
The river was still extra full from the day and night of storms. Her feet slipped a little on the muddy parts of the path, but she slowed down without breaking her stride. She could have run a million miles today, but she decided to turn back once she was five miles out. The trees were so lush and thick they drooped heavily over the river's edge. Big-leafed magnolias towered to the sky. A thick coat of moss seemed to cover every boulder and rock."
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"'You look...' He considered her. 'The same too,' he decided.
'Funny how that is,' she said, feeling giddy."
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"When Bridget got home from running one afternoon, there was a package waiting for her. She ripped it open instantly, standing at the kitchen table.
The Pants! They'd come back to her. With a clanging in her chest, she tore up the stairs, stripped off her running clothes, and jumped into the shower. You weren't allowed to wash the Pants. She wasn't crazy enough to try them on just after she'd run ten miles on an August day in Alabama. (16 k!!!! That's FORTY LAPS AROUND THE TRACK!)
She dried herself, put on underwear, and took up the Pants. Please fit, she begged them. She pulled them up and closed them in one fluid motion. Ahhhh. They felt so good. She did a victory lap around the attic. She ran downstairs and outside and did a victory lap around the house. 'Yay!' she shouted to the sky, because it felt so good to feel good again."
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"Bridget rose and rose until she was up in the clouds. She could afford to be generous. She assisted Rusty. She assisted Gary Lee. She assisted Billy twice. She set up the plays and doled them out like Christmas presents until the game was tied, the shouts of protest from the opposing team grew deafening, and the last minute began ticking away. Then she took the last goal for herself. She'd never said she was Mother Teresa."
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"Bridget was never careful, so she said what she was thinking. 'You know what, Grandma, if I didn't have three friends I loved, I would stay here with you. This feels like home now.'"
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"She liked herself enough again to feel like she deserved it.
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But she wondered. Did she really want that? Hadn't she had enough boys look at her that way? Would she partly hate him if he changed the way he liked her because she was pretty and blond?"
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"In a flash of wonderment she saw firm, continuous ground under her feet, stretching from back then to right now and on and on as far as her eyes could take her."
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