Last week, I read all four of the Twilight novels in five days. That's quite a feat, given that I must wake once or twice each night to feed the baby, and that my days consist of feeding, changing, reading to, playing with, and chasing the baby, who can crawl wicked fast now. I have also been busy perfecting the pinky-sweep method for removing food/foreign objects from his mouth. So far, I've had to remove pieces of banana that were far too big (we let him take his own bites, now that he's ten months old), too-big pieces of strawberries, dusty Cheerios that he found on the floor (because he flings most of his Cheerios on the floor and I can't find them all later) and bits of cat food kibble. Years ago, I was talking on the phone to a friend who paused to say to her baby, "No, Adrienne, that's cat food." What was going on in her house? Now I know.
So last week, in between nursing the baby at all hours and herding him away from the cat food, I read all of the Twilight novels. Two or three years ago, when I first heard about this series, I thought, "What a silly fad. It will pass." When the movies started coming out, I honestly did not notice. When my parents-in-law hiked in the Olympic National Forest and, staying in Forks, accidentally found themselves in a teen vampire festival, I laughed. Oh ho ho. Like British people, down their noses with an intellectually superior smirk. So funny. Bunch of nerds. Then last Christmas my own mother made me watch one of the movies and I was simultaneously disgusted (so cheesy) and enraptured. Reading the books this week was even better; I could enjoy the teen drama without feeling embarrassed that someone, even my own mother, could see me enjoying it.
Wow. All the angst and desperate passion of first love, intensified by literal (okay, fictitious) life-and-death choices. It was magical. I loved the setting, the re-created vampire/werewolf lore, and the voice of this clumsy, sarcastic girl who, though many have called her weak, is of course just generic enough for us all to imagine that she is us, that we are her. I even loved her clunky truck and her job at the sporting goods store. I laughed out loud at the scene where a queasy Mike rides home in the back of Jacob's '86 Rabbit and Bella tries to ignore Jake's take-no-prisoners flirting. I stayed up reading till four in the morning, twice.
How embarrassing, though, in the morning, to go about my business enthralled with a teen vampire series. I'm thirty-five. Luckily, I found a friend who likes the series even more than me, and she's thirty-eight. Am I cool again now?
"Isn't Edward fantastic?" said my friend. We're both English teachers, so even though we're blushing and fanning our faces, you know we're really debating the literary merits of Edward's character development.
"No," I had to say. "I find him pushy and condescending. Besides, I'm on Team Jacob."
More blushing--I mean, analyzing the, uh, literature. Sigh. Jacob is just the kind of hunky dreamboat I would have fallen for as a teen. ("Hunky dreamboat?" you say. Yes. That's the best I got--can't think of a better word cuz I'm still blushing.) I like how Edward and Jacob are foils for each other. And how they're both so dreamy. Dreamy hunkboats. ("Is that a word?" you may ask. It is now.) When I got to the end of the third book, I actually cried. Meyer created two equally compelling heroes, and it was heartbreaking that Bella could only choose one.
My husband does not want to go to the Dazzled by Twlight store in Forks, or see Bella's high school, or even go to First Beach on our vacation this summer. There's far too much to see and do in the ONP, he says, to waste time following crowds of screaming teens and their too-much-eye-make-up-wearing moms. Besides, he says, Twilight is not real.
Whaaaaat?! Okay, I kind of knew that. I knew that when we get to Forks, we won't be seeing Edward or Bella. We probably won't see Jacob either because he'll be down at La Push--I mean, because he's a fictional character. But damn, that's hard to remember. Am I insane? In planning the trip today, I remember thinking that I didn't want to go to the Quileute Reservation because I might be invading Jacob's space. I mean, I don't know him, and he didn't invite me there. And when I called the Forks Motel (so, so sad that all the rooms in Port Angeles were unavailable), I felt a little thrill talking to the lady at the desk, thinking that even though Bella and Edward don't live there, perhaps she knows someone who works at the school, who maybe saw Bella and Edward last fall, so that's like only three degrees of separation...between me and madness.
If my husband won't stop at the tour spots in Forks, I'll just have to keep my eyes open while we're hiking. Maybe we'll see some wolves, size X-tra, X-tra hunky. Or maybe, if I'm really quiet, he won't notice when I slip out of the hotel bed, raise the window, and dangle my pasty-white arms out into the night air like a pair of neon white rubber worms on a line. Who knows? Maybe I smell delicious.
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