Why Girls Are Weird

by Pamela Ribon

  I guess we never want to see them move on, do we? We want them on pause where we left them, always wishing they were still with us. We want to be the strong ones, don’t we? But here’s my secret: I’m not always that strong. I have so many flaws. And when I looked across the table at this guy last night, there were times when I would get so mad at him. And then, LD, I swear to you, I couldn’t say anything (ha-ha) because I wasn’t sure what was real. So much time has passed that it’s quite possible I’ve exaggerated or created entire arguments in my head that never actually happened between us. Isn’t that ridiculous? I think I’ve been creating fights and problems in my head to push the two of us away from each other so I don’t dwell on him anymore….

  So I go to dinner with this ex and I’m thinking about how cute he is and I’m wondering if we were better people when we were together and the truth is maybe I’m not good enough for anyone. All of my relationships are doomed to be failures. Because I have patterns. Because I date a certain type of man. Because I’m not strong enough to make it work. Because I’m too trusting too soon. For whatever reason. Eventually he’s going to move on and marry that invisible perfect person that drives us crazy just like your ex did with the Frenchie.

  In my case, I know the person my ex is seeing. That makes it even worse, because I know she’s not perfect. I know where I’m better and where I’m worse. I keep comparing myself to everyone, so I can’t seem to find a calm happiness about myself.

  And you’re now probably wondering about Ian, and why I’m out with some other guy who isn’t my boyfriend, wishing that he still had the hots for me. Well that is another complicated story that’s difficult to explain to you here. Let me put it this way: Ian is the reason I was out tonight. Can I just leave it at that? Great. Another plus of e-mail: You can’t get me to say any more than I want to say. So there.

  Oh, and I got the Haircut from Hell. I look horrible and now I’m going to stay inside of my house and write to you full-time. So no, I’m not crazy-sexy with a body that stops men cold. Currently I look like I’m auditioning for a role in Oliver!

  And here’s the last thing I’m telling you before I hit “Send” and you read this and judge me: I’ve made another date to see my ex. This is dumb. I know I’m going to get myself into trouble. I don’t seem to know how to stop myself from doing things that make my heart ache.

  Don’t tell anyone.

  -AK

  P.S. Wait. Are you hot? Please describe.

  P.P.S. Check out these apostrophes: ’ ’ ’ ’ (mmm).

  -----

  000026.

  There’s nothing that turns Ian on more than emotionally unavailable women. He wants to dig in, break them open, look at their insides, and then move on. He’s a relationship spelunker. That night at the Mexican food restaurant I quietly ate nacho chips and politely drank margaritas while listening to him talk about how he’s thinking of asking for a raise at his job. I watched him tug his earlobes and scratch the backs of his hands and go through all of his physical tics that I knew so well. I could tell he was comfortable around me. And I knew that the quieter I was, the more intriguing he’d find me. My silence meant I was fine without him. He didn’t know I was wondering what he’d think if he ever found out about the webpage. He didn’t know that I was dying to tell him about LDobler and Tess. He had no idea that I’d been living in a world where we still slept together every single night. He didn’t know what was going on with me and that was his sweetest ambrosia.

  So Ian asked me to his house the next Saturday to watch a movie. I followed the directions to his place, convincing myself we were going to have a casual evening—one where we’d talk like adults. Maybe we’d sit and share a bottle of wine, watch the night sky, and laugh at how much we’d matured. We’d take some blame on our past faults. We’d share stories of our love like it was an old friend that had moved away. We’d respect each other and remind each other of our hopes and dreams. We’d have that wistful look old lovers have at the possibilities that never came to fruition. We’d suffer those tiny heartbreaks of what-never-was that made us stronger lovers for our future relationships. As I parked my car on his street, I congratulated myself for being such a mature, independent, modern girl.

  Ian answered the door wearing a T-shirt and boxers. He pulled a pair of jeans over his thighs as he informed me we were having popcorn and watching a movie. So much for waxing nostalgic over Merlot.

  Continuing the strange John Cusack thing going on in my life, Ian had rented High Fidelity, which I’d seen before but he hadn’t. I knew what it did to me emotionally. I probably should have warned him what would happen. I watched the movie in silence, a good distance from Ian’s side of the couch. I watched Rob, John Cusack’s character, mope and wander from one woman to the next, wailing and whining, begging to find out what was wrong with him. I watched him ruin his long-term relationship with a girl named Laura, only to practically stalk her until she came back to him, when he finally decided to just be with her because she loved him in a way he liked being loved.

  As soon as the movie ended, I started to leave. But I stopped at the door, holding my jacket in my hands, wondering if I should say something to Ian. Would he know why I was upset?

  “Do you want to go get a drink?” he asked.

  I didn’t know what I wanted. I looked at Ian, wondering what he wanted. What did he really want from me all of those years? Why couldn’t he just say it?

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” He was standing by his couch, and I was frozen by the door. I could feel the rage bubbling up inside of me. I knew I should have left. I didn’t. I just started talking.

  “You liked the movie, didn’t you?” I asked, more like a challenge than a question.

  “I loved it,” he answered with total oblivion.

  “I knew you’d like it.” I walked back and forth, trying to find a spot in the room that was welcoming. I couldn’t breathe so well. My insides were twisting with spite and rage. Of course he liked it. He loved it. Anyone would love to watch a movie about himself.

  “You say that with so much spite.” The more confused he looked, the more I wanted to kick him in the shins.

  “Because that movie makes me mad at you.” I folded my arms.

  “The movie?”

  Kick him in the shins.

  “The movie, the book, all of it. Mad. Mad!” I was regressing right there in his cheap apartment, standing next to a bar mirror on his wall. The neon light from the mirror hummed in my ear. I walked away from it. I hoped Susan’s retinas bled nightly from the Guinness billboard in his living room.

  “It does?” He laughed.

  “Yes, it does.” I wasn’t about to be mocked.

  “Why?”

  I inhaled. “I really don’t think you need me to tell you why the movie makes me mad. And if you do need me to tell you why the movie makes me mad at you, then I’m really mad at you for not knowing why I am mad at you. You should be apologizing.”

  “Um…”

  I tried speaking slowly so he’d understand. “I knew the movie would get me riled up. I knew it, but I also knew you’d really like the movie. And you rented the damn thing. I had no control.”

  “I did really like it.”

  “I knew you’d really like it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, don’t be sorry. I love that movie. Just like the book. I love that book.”

  “Right.” He sat down, defeated. I stood behind his couch, near his kitchen. I was still holding my jacket. I wasn’t looking at him. It was as if I was talking to his refrigerator.

  “I threw that book across the room when I finished it. I loved it.”

  “Right.”

  “But the end makes me want to scream.”

  “How about you tell me this while I walk you to your car?” He was walking me away from his breakables.

  We walked and at first it was quiet. I didn’t appreciate him cutting me off like that, like he had decided our ev
ening was over even though I was in the middle of a conversation. He wasn’t going to get the last word. Not if I could still breathe.

  I stopped him suddenly, grabbing his arm. “Why do men think that being with someone who loves you is settling?”

  “Oh, man.”

  “And why did Laura have to be so boring? She was just there to love Rob and understand Rob and be confused over Rob. Couldn’t she have her own passions and desires?”

  “I really liked Laura. I thought she was charming. And she did get to have her own thing, like when her father died and she’s sad at the funeral. I thought she was normal. Just the most normal person in the movie.” He took a step back from me.

  I jumped onto the trunk of my car, stomping a bit too hard on the bumper. My brown boots made a decisive clack on the metal. “She’s only sad at the funeral so they can have sex,” I said.

  “To be honest,” he continued, “I thought she was a lot like…”

  Don’t say me. Don’t say me. Say me and I will throw myself into my side-view mirror. I am not like that weak, boring girl. I am infinitely more interesting than that woman. I’m my own person and not an object for you to validate.

  “…Like a normal person.”

  But I wasn’t listening to him anymore. I kept talking. “I hate that theory where the guy’s like ‘Well, I’m an asshole. That’s my thing. I screw up every relationship I’ve ever been in, and that’s how that works. I’m going to be lonely and miserable forever, and occasionally moan about “Me Da” while I down a pint and no one is ever going to love me.’ Meanwhile, someone loves him and he doesn’t even notice.”

  “Me Da?”

  “You know, like in those Irish books, like Frank McCourt. Always raising a pint to Me Da.”

  “Jesus, you’re hard to keep up with tonight.”

  My hands flew up, palsied in front of my face, and then slapped down on my thighs. “And Rob’s not even learning anything from these relationships. And I hate ‘Well, things are going too well with my relationship right now, so there must be something wrong. I bet you don’t love me anymore. Or I don’t love you. Oops! I just thought it, so now it’s a fact. We’re breaking up.’”

  He wasn’t looking at me. I wasn’t talking about High Fidelity anymore and he knew it. I wanted him to admit that there was nothing wrong with us and that we broke up because he got tired of being in a relationship. He got tired of being two people.

  I lit a cigarette. I made myself calm down. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad that you can identify with the film so easily. Because when I watch it I think of you and I wish I didn’t. I don’t want Lloyd Dobler all grown up and miserable because Diane slept with some French boy when she went to Europe.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  He couldn’t possibly understand. He didn’t watch films searching for the kind of person to fall in love with. He didn’t understand the power of Lloyd Dobler. He didn’t even know about my fake Lloyd Dobler who sent letters in the middle of the night.

  “I hated how Laura’s new boyfriend was such a loser. Laura should have gone out with someone Rob could have a real problem with. But since he was lame, Rob’s only concern was if she had slept with him yet. Not her happiness. Not if the new guy made her coffee the right way. He didn’t want to know if he was funnier or richer or if he stole the covers. But he wasn’t worried that someone was loving her better, he just wanted to make sure nobody had sex with her yet.”

  “He does love Laura.” Ian said it quietly, looking down.

  “How? How do we know that? Why? Because he finally figured out after two years how to make a mix tape? Buddy, if you didn’t know that eighteen months ago—give it up. He wooed her with a mix tape, for fuck’s sake.”

  “But he didn’t just move on to the next new thing. He loved Laura and stayed with her.”

  “He settled.”

  And there it was. The basis of our breakup, spoken out loud. Ian said he loved me, but then he wasn’t sure. Then he decided he was sure, which only succeeded in making me unsure. So then we both weren’t sure. I didn’t want Ian settling for me. I didn’t want to just be “good enough.”

  Ian lit a cigarette and sat down next to me on the back of the car. I could hear him crafting his sentence. “He didn’t settle. He realized that he liked what he had. And other girls might be exciting, but they wouldn’t be Laura. You understand?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then why are you so riled up?”

  Because I’m never going to be good enough. Because we missed our chance. Because I’m the only one still in our relationship. Because I’m the only one who remembers how good it was. Because I’m in the past. Because I’m lonely. Because maybe he was the one. Maybe I should have let him settle.

  “He’s not settling,” Ian said again, as if he could read my thoughts. “He’s realizing what he has. And he knows it’s good.”

  “But not great.”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “Whatever.”

  Somehow he let me end our conversation with that. He kissed my cheek and held my hand as he searched my eyes. He walked away quietly, that final “Whatever” still floating around my ears. My dismissive tone ended the first conversation we’d had about us in a long time, even though we spoke in fictional characters. It was appropriate, since I’d recently turned our relationship into a work of fiction.

  I sat in my car alone. I was afraid to turn the key. I was afraid to drive away. I was afraid of what I’d do next.

  When I finally drove home, I read over all the entries I’d posted, looking to see the difference between Anna K and me. Would Anna K settle? Had I made more out of my relationship with Ian than there really was? Or was it possible that the two of us were so good together that it made people like LDobler want just a taste of it?

  I felt like I was reaching backwards, desperately trying to find something to hold on to. Suddenly settling didn’t seem like such a bad idea. At least settling had a forward motion to it.

  000027.

  Smith handed me one of her Marlboro Lights.

  “You owe me, like, a pack now,” she said as she lit up. She gave a quick glance around to make sure we were safe. I couldn’t see anybody. We had been sneaking off behind the track bleachers during breaks. A crumpled pink hall pass was half-jammed into Smith’s jeans pocket. I couldn’t remember how Smith had first convinced me to write out a handful of hall passes, but it felt like she’d been cutting more and more homeroom classes and I had been taking longer and longer breaks as I’d continually bummed cigarettes off her for the past few weeks.

  “I can’t believe we do this,” I said for the tenth time that month. “When did I join the Pink Ladies?”

  “You love it,” she said with a smirk.

  I had to admit that I did. Smith allowed me to play the bad girl. She was my favorite thing about my job. I wish I had been like her when I was in high school. I would have been the one studying in the library while Smith skipped homeroom. Hell, I still was.

  I liked hearing about her troubles. There was a comfort in high school woes, a reminder that worlds can shrink and grow depending on how much you let yourself see. Smith’s entire world revolved around her college fantasies and she used me as the big sister to debate her new ideas.

  “I’m breaking up the group,” she said to me. She leaned over the track railing and spit in the dirt near my toes.

  “You say that every week,” I said.

  “For real, Miss. I hate those bitches.”

  The Action Grrlz were getting larger and larger, but Smith still hadn’t found a direction for the group. Every meeting ended in arguments. Smith tried taking the lead by deciding they were going to protest the dress code, and then quickly changed her mind when she realized the dress code wasn’t strict enough nor enforced often enough for them to make a fuss. If anything, it’d make the school more aware of the constant violations throughout the student body.

  “Ever
yone’s fighting all the time,” she said. “I don’t think that I should have to choose which direction the group goes in. I like that everyone likes different things. It’s all that different shit that makes people interesting. It’s boring to all talk about one thing.”

  “That’s a good point,” I said.

  “Says the girl who only thinks about one thing,” Smith teased.

  “Then have your group be about making change.”

  “I want to have a rally to get people motivated to talk to each other about important stuff. Issues. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll have a rally to get more people to join Action Grrlz. It’ll be about having an opinion and expressing it. And in our meetings we’ll, like, discuss topics and current events and exchange ideas and theories to stimulate change and shit. Is that a group?”

  I put out my cigarette with my toe and smiled at her. “Smith, I think that’s a damn fine group.”

  She smiled back, the rubber bands in her braces giving a quick flash of yellow. She saw something behind me and quickly put out her cigarette. “We gotta go. Coach Butler’s coming over here and he’ll bust us.”

  We ran back to the library.

  000028.

  “I think they broke up back in October.”

  I watched Dale drink his Cosmopolitan, which he made me order so he didn’t have to. He ordered a martini. The Cosmopolitan switch-off had been happening for over a year. Once Dale realized I could order things he was too embarrassed to admit he liked, he made me order everything from salads and chicken nuggets to drinks with umbrellas to IHOP’s Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity.

  Dale handed me an olive and searched my eyes. “It’s November. You know that, right?”

  “I don’t need you to tell me what month it is. And I don’t care if they broke up. I mean, I care. I care very much. But I’m not supposed to care, so I don’t care.” We were on our third round of drinks. “Let me ask you something, Dale. If they broke up back in October, why didn’t Ian tell me that when we went out?”