The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Page 11

  “Yeah, I like sausage.” She created a bed of paper towels on one of the plates. “Anyway, I’m going to graduate and go to college and become a nurse. Because that’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Pretty soon we can drain these little piggies.”

  Twenty minutes later we were dipping the last of the sausage into a greasy plateful of maple syrup.

  “Man, I feel sick again,” I said. “My mother told me I should stick to white bread and crackers. Now the house reeks of pork.” I put our dishes in the sink. “Sorry we didn’t call you last night.” I walked Jill to the door. “I don’t think CeeCee’s as bad as you say she is. But you’re right about Wallis. If she wants us to leave her alone, we should leave her alone.”

  Jill unlocked her bike from the railing. “It’s probably too late for that,” she said.

  11. FORESHADOWING: This is one of those words teachers write on the board and draw a line through. Fore/shadowing. A shadow/before. It means a hint or a clue, and it usually doesn’t point to anything good.

  “The most important thing,” Jill said, quoting from The Left Hand of Darkness, “the heaviest single factor in one’s life, is whether one’s born male or female. I’m not sure I agree with that. What about being born poor? Or being born with one arm?”

  “Or being born with an extra arm,” CeeCee said. “One that sticks out of the middle of your forehead.”

  We were gathered in CeeCee’s living room for round three of the Society of Feminine and Literary Despair. The meeting hadn’t started, and still I had a bad feeling. My mother had made a beeline for CeeCee’s mother as soon as we arrived, and she didn’t look happy; then there was the paper grocery bag Wallis was carrying tucked under her arm. Wallis and CeeCee and Jill and I were circling the buffet table, trolling for food; but even with a plate and a fork in her hand, Wallis didn’t put the grocery bag down. I remembered Jill’s word from our first meeting: ominous.

  “What do you think they’re talking about over there?” Jill asked. She gestured toward the mothers, three of whom (Wallis’s mother hadn’t come—she was busy, or she didn’t exist, or both) were huddled in a corner near the grand piano. We couldn’t hear what they were saying—the living room was huge, with a cathedral ceiling, a fireplace big enough to cook a human being in, and a U-shaped leather couch that probably seated a dozen people—but given the recent tension between my mother and me ever since “The Episode of Adrienne and the Booze,” I had a good idea about their topic of conversation.

  Mom #1 (mine): I didn’t raise Adrienne to turn out to be such a lush. She was supposed to be normal. And smart. It turns out she’s an idiot.

  Mom #2 (Jill’s): We chose our daughter from a lineup of millions, making sure we picked one who wasn’t a derelict.

  Mom #3 (CeeCee’s): I certainly hope that Adrienne, who has no more personality than a fruit fly, isn’t going to try to blame my daughter for her absurd behavior.

  “Maybe they’re discussing the book,” Wallis said.

  My mother was gesturing, slicing the air with the blade of her hand. About an hour before we left for book club, she had found the bent golf club in the bushes. “Why do I think you might know something about this?” she’d asked.

  “Or,” Jill suggested, “maybe they’re talking about Adrienne’s evening with Aunt Beast.”

  CeeCee pursed her lips and nodded; Jill had taken it upon herself, about ten minutes before my mother and I rang the doorbell, to fill CeeCee in.

  I stared across the table at Wallis, who was filling her plate with deviled crab. I’d definitely seen her that night. But here she was, as if nothing had happened—except for that creepy paper bag clamped under her arm.

  CeeCee added a radish and a hunk of cheese to the edge of my plate. “They might be setting up guidelines for tonight’s discussion,” she said. “No graphic references to transsexualism. No drawing diagrams of what might have happened between Genly and what’s-his-name, out on the ice.”

  “I don’t think they consummated their friendship,” Wallis said, her mouth full of food. “Their union was strictly metaphorical.”

  CeeCee widened her eyes and mouthed these words back to me: strict-ly met-a-phor-i-cal.

  “Just think if one of us turned into a guy every other month.” Jill pointed at me with a plastic toothpick shaped like a sword. “You’d get a big old patch of hair on your chest. You’d start hitting on girls.”

  “I’m sure Adrienne would be a perfect gentleman,” CeeCee said.

  Wallis refilled her plate. “This food is very good.”

  Jill inserted a bacon-wrapped slice of melon into her cheek. “Did you guys know that there are animals in the … whatever, the animal kingdom, where the male has the babies? I think it’s starfish. My mother and I were talking about it at breakfast.”

  “A frank discussion of sex at breakfast is very healthy,” CeeCee said.

  “Actually, it might have been the sea horse,” Jill said. “I think it was.”

  “I have a statistic,” CeeCee said. “Did you know ten percent of Americans are gay? That means that, here in this room, one of us has to be a lesbian. I already asked Adrienne—in fact, we took her out for a test run—but she says she’s not.”

  “What kind of test run?” Jill reached for a chocolate.

  “It wasn’t a test run,” I said. I knew that CeeCee kissing another girl would be seen as stylish, erotic. My kissing another girl would mean harassment for at least a year. “Anyway, ten percent of us would be less than one person. That’s point-seven people.”

  “Or point-three-five of two different people,” Wallis said.

  “Your mom is single.” Jill poked my arm with her plastic sword. “Maybe that explains the missing dad. Short hair. No sign of a male-female romance—”

  “Are you telling me my mother is a lesbian?”

  “Are you girls discussing the book without us?” Jill’s mother asked.

  “No worries, Mom. Take your time.” Jill waved with her sword, and the mothers began chatting again, in their corner of the room.

  The front door opened, then closed with an expensive and satisfying thud, and CeeCee’s father paused in the doorway, briefcase in hand. He was handsome and tall, like an ad for vigorous, silver-haired older men. He seemed to pose for us; he waved and smiled, showing his teeth. “Hello, ladies.”

  “Hello, the Dad,” CeeCee said. “He’s home from work so he can work at home. There’s no end to working for a living, is there, Dad?”

  “Apparently not,” her father said. “Have a good discussion.”

  Jill’s mother abandoned the adults-only corner and picked up a plate, oohing and aahing over the food. She said she couldn’t remember the last time she’d done so much reading. She wasn’t sure she would ever be a member of our Three Hundred Club: was that the name we’d come up with?

  CeeCee made a gun with her thumb and finger and shot herself in the heart.

  “Those have meat on them, Jilly,” Jill’s mother said as Jill speared another globe of bacon-wrapped melon. Then she turned to my mother and CeeCee’s: “We’re ready to start over here.”

  Wallis tucked the paper bag between her feet when she sat down.

  Discussion didn’t go very well at first. We talked about politics on the planet Winter, and about whether it was sexist to say that women are more sensitive than men.

  Jill’s mother said something about male and female sea horses, which we all ignored. Then someone brought up the subject of men getting pregnant and having children, which led us to a discussion of Mr. Crandall, the geometry teacher, who everyone at school assumed was gay. It turned out that Mr. Crandall and his male partner had hired a surrogate. “They rented a womb,” Jill’s mother said, “and they’re having twins.”

  CeeCee’s mother was leaning forward: I thought she was trying to look past me, but then I realized she was staring at my ear.

  I untucked my hair.

  Jill said Mr. Crandall was her favorite teacher, but she never ima
gined any of the teachers at West New Hope high school having flesh-and-blood families or kids; she thought of them as an alien species, spawned in the utility room by the furnace. She imagined them sleeping under the wooden desks in their rooms.

  “Like vampires,” I said.

  CeeCee yawned. It was too bad, she said, that, since he appeared to have his own impressive pair of man-boobs, Mr. Crandall couldn’t give birth and nurse a baby himself.

  “Leave poor Kevin Crandall alone,” my mother said. “He’s allowed the unmitigated joys of family and children, isn’t he?”

  All three mothers started to laugh. They laughed a bit longer than seemed appropriate.

  “I think somebody spiked the punch,” CeeCee said.

  My mother stopped laughing.

  “Whoops. Bad joke. Is it time for a break?” CeeCee picked up the empty juice pitcher and left the room.

  I looked at Wallis. Maybe she had her mother’s gun in that bag, I thought. I wondered how much it hurt, to be shot. I wondered if I could use the tray of melon balls as a shield.

  Jill stepped on my foot. “Are you coming?” she asked. She and Wallis and I found CeeCee in the kitchen, at the black granite island in front of the sink.

  “I thought it was written in our constitution that we have to meet in bathrooms,” Jill said.

  “Ordinarily that’s true. But I know the bathrooms in this house already,” CeeCee said. “There’s nothing in them but toilet paper and soap.”

  “There’s nothing but toilet paper and soap in our bathrooms, either,” Jill said.

  Wallis held the paper bag in her hand.

  CeeCee opened a packet of lemonade and dumped it into the pitcher, sending little nano-whiffs of sour powder into my nose. “Well?” she asked. She was looking at me.

  “Well, what?”

  She added water to the pitcher and stirred. “We have two meetings left. Are we going to talk about it, or not?”

  Wallis set the bag next to the sink. It was halfway between us. If she made a sudden move I could try to slap it to the floor.

  CeeCee sighed. “So, Wallis,” she said. “You might have noticed that Adrienne and I showed up at your house a few nights ago.”

  Wallis looked unconcerned.

  “Jill thinks we were just being nosey, and I admit I’ve been curious; but I think all three of us suspect that something’s not right over there on Weller Road.”

  “Everything’s fine,” Wallis said.

  CeeCee kept stirring. “You’ve been pretty secretive, to be honest. And you didn’t invite your mother into the book club.”

  “She’s really busy,” Wallis said. Her voice was thick, as if she had swallowed a mouthful of syrup.

  “Anyway,” CeeCee went on, “we made a little field trip last week. An investigation. Unfortunately, we ended up with a sort of emergency—”

  “Adrienne tripped,” Jill said, “and a bottle of gin spilled straight into her mouth.”

  “But even with the confusion caused by the alcohol,” CeeCee said, “Adrienne seems to think she saw you that night. She says she saw both you and your mother, but when Jeff and I showed up you ran away.”

  “I don’t know what Adrienne saw,” Wallis said.

  I’m not sure whether other people have this ability, but even with my eyes wide open I can picture something—a memory—letting it run like a DVD in my head. So even while I was watching CeeCee stir the pitcher of lemonade in the sink, I could see the two white-gowned figures coming out of the woods. “Get Wallis to open the bag,” I said.

  CeeCee stopped stirring.

  Wallis’s mother had definitely been holding something. “It looked like a loaf of bread,” I said. “I saw it. And Wallis brought it here in that bag.”

  “What looked like a loaf of bread?” said Jill.

  I turned to Wallis. “Was it a gun? Did your mother have a gun in her hand?” I asked.

  We all looked at the grocery bag on the counter.

  “What kind of gun looks like bread?” muttered Jill.

  “Girls? Knock-knock?” Jill’s mother was standing in the doorway. “I hate to interrupt, but we wanted to talk about next week’s meeting. And we were also hoping … Wallis, sweetheart, would you mind coming out here for a minute?”

  My mother and CeeCee’s were hovering like birds of prey in the hall.

  “Wallis, honey?”

  “You can talk to her in front of us,” CeeCee said. The grocery bag waited on the counter. “She doesn’t mind.”

  Jill’s mother approached slowly. “We just thought it might be nice for one of us moms to drive Wallis home. And meet Wallis’s mom.”

  “My mother’s not home right now,” Wallis said.

  “When will she be back?”

  “She’s out of town.” Wallis pushed her glasses up on her nose. “I can take care of myself,” she said.

  Silence dropped over the group of us like a cloth. My mother asked if there was a way to reach Wallis’s mother.

  Wallis said she wasn’t sure, but her mother trusted her to be on her own.

  “Sweetheart,” Jill’s mother said. “You’re fifteen.”

  “Fourteen,” I corrected. I remembered lying on my back in a puddle of vomit while the stars bumped and zigzagged overhead; I knew the wallpaper woman had stood above me, peering down as if at a baby in its crib.

  “You can’t stay home alone,” my mother told Wallis. “I think you should stay with one of us. Would you need to pick anything up at your house?”

  “No,” Wallis said. She glanced at me, then unrolled the top of the grocery bag, which turned out to contain a hairbrush, a bar of soap, some underwear and socks, and a copy of The House on Mango Street.

  “You packed?” I asked.

  “I’m glad those socks didn’t shoot anyone,” Jill muttered.

  My mother put her hand on Wallis’s shoulder. “You’ll come home with us, then?”

  Wallis tucked the bag under her arm. “I guess I could do that,” she said.

  12. RHETORICAL QUESTION: Rhetorical questions are almost always used by adults who want to make other people feel bad. For example, a teacher might ask, “Did you think it was a good idea to show up in class without a pencil?” These are questions you can get in trouble for answering.

  “Weren’t you just telling me I couldn’t have any more sleepovers this summer?” I asked. My mother and I were having a not-very-subtle but whispered conversation in the hall outside CeeCee’s kitchen.

  “You think this counts as a sleepover?” asked my mother.

  “Why wouldn’t it count?” I asked. “If she sleeps at our house isn’t that sleeping over?”

  Someone pushed through the swinging door to the kitchen and I caught sight of Wallis standing at the granite island as if marooned.

  “I’m not going to argue about the definition of sleepover,” my mother said. “She’ll stay for a night or two. What’s the problem with that?”

  Wallis gives me the creeps, I wanted to say. “Why can’t she stay with Jill or CeeCee? Their houses are bigger.”

  “Because you and I offered. That’s why.”

  CeeCee’s mother walked past us and the kitchen door swung open again, revealing Wallis standing in the very same place, looking steadily and unperturbedly at me. “Is there something going on here?” my mother asked. “A problem between the two of you?”

  A problem? I said there wasn’t.

  “All right. Then I’ll drop you both off at home and go pick up some groceries. You know where the air mattress is, I hope?”

  Yes, I knew where the air mattress was; didn’t I live at our house?

  “Wallis? We’re ready to go,” my mother said.

  “Thanks so much for coming to book club. It was lovely to see you,” CeeCee said, opening the door for us when we left. She made a phone with her thumb and finger. “A—call me,” she said as Wallis and my mother and I walked to the car.

  At the top of the hall closet, I found the air mattress an
d some sheets and a blanket and an extra pillow; in the bathroom drawer I scrounged up an unused toothbrush (Wallis hadn’t packed one) in its crinkly box. I would have put the blow-up bed in the den, but my mother had just bought a new set of bookshelves, and, surrounded by a dozen boxes of books, they were in pieces all over the floor. I stared down at the mess and briefly considered inflating the mattress in my mother’s room, but decided I would rather not deal with the parental anger when she got back.

  I lugged the plastic-smelling mattress out of its package and unfurled it on the rug in my room. “This might have a leak in it,” I said, attaching the pump and inflating the bed while Wallis watched. Putting sheets on the mattress was awkward—like dressing a shark. “Maybe I was wrong about the gun,” I said. “And maybe you’re mad at me for spying on you. You probably think I’m an imbecile. But I know I saw you that night.”

  “I don’t think you’re an imbecile.” Wallis’s expression didn’t change.

  “You were wearing a white nightgown,” I reminded her.

  “I don’t wear nightgowns,” Wallis said. “Can I borrow a T-shirt to sleep in?”

  I gave her my Delaware Blue Hens shirt. She put it on in the bathroom; it came down to her knees.

  “Is your mother really away?” I asked. “Or is there …”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and together we contemplated the blow-up bed, already softening in the middle. Insects were making their electric noises in the trees.

  I went off to the bathroom, brushed my teeth and changed into my pj’s, and came back to find Wallis already tucked beneath the covers. She had taken off her glasses, and her eyes were small and dark and round, the eyes of an animal peering out of its burrow. “Why did you call me Lily War Gas?” she asked.

  I explained about the anagram finder.

  “Oh.” She stared at the ceiling while I brushed my hair. “Actually, Gray isn’t my real last name.”

  I stopped brushing. “What’s your real last name?”

  “Well, now it’s Gray,” she said. “But I used to have a different name. My mother changed it.”