Chapter Nine: Rice Husband-->Lena St. Clair Term--> Antithesis

American Translation

"I had stopped eating, not because of Arnold, whom I had long forgotten, but to be fashionably anorexic like all the other thirteen-year-old girls who were dieting and finding other ways to suffer as teenagers" (153).
People try to fit in; whether that means starving yourself, playing sports, or doing drugs, if it makes the person "cool" than its alright to do it. There were struggles in the past as well as today. This passage describes the thought process of most teenage girls though.
In this chapter, Lena discusses how her mother always seemed to know if something bad was going to happen, and she wondered if her mother was going to have an insight about her and her husband. Her mother told her when she was younger her mother told her that because she left rice in her bowl her future husband will have a pock mark for every rice she didn't eat. The boy she thought her mother was speaking of dies at age seventeen when Lena was starving herself, and she thought she caused his death. Ever since Harold and Lena met they always split what they had. They kept close track on what they spent. Lena worked for Harold's archetechtural firm, but he refused to promote her. They split the bill to make each other equal, but Lena realized they were not truly equal.
"And I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomitting something so terrible could make me feel so good" (154). The antithesis describes how something good may not always be good, and something bad may not always be bad. Though it doesn't make perfect sense, one can see the circumstances in which it would apply.