The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Page 12

  “Do you mean, when your parents got divorced?” I stepped over her mattress and climbed into bed.

  We heard my mother come in with the groceries. She quickly whapped them away in the cupboards, then stuck her head through my bedroom doorway and presumably counted us: one, two. “Wallis, do you need anything?” she asked. “Should I turn out the light?”

  “I don’t need anything; thanks,” I said.

  Wallis said she might read for a while. “But I don’t want to disturb Adrienne.”

  My mother left the room and came back with a headlamp on an elastic band—the one we had bought for my camping trip. She gave the headlamp to Wallis, who had put her copy of The House on Mango Street by her bed. “See you in the morning.”

  “Your mother’s nice,” Wallis said. She put the band around her knobby head and turned it on. The circular beam wobbled across the ceiling and came to rest on the wall right in front of me. “It’s too big.”

  That’s because it isn’t yours, I thought. “You have to adjust it.” I cantilevered the top half of my body over the edge of the bed and tightened the strap. I could smell the soil-like smell of Wallis’s hair. “Try it now.” Just before I pushed myself back to my pillow, I noticed a scar that began above Wallis’s ear and jutted into her hairline. It made me feel shivery. “What’s that from?”

  She touched the shining, uneven patch of skin. “It’s just a mark.”

  When I tried to get a better look at the scar, she switched on the headlamp. She looked like a cyclops, and when she turned toward me she nearly blinded me with her bluish-white beam.

  The next morning I woke up to the sound of voices in the kitchen. When I shuffled down the hall in my pj’s and flip-flops, conversation stopped.

  “Why aren’t you at work?” I asked my mother. I could smell French toast but the griddle was cold. Eggshells and bread crusts littered the sink.

  “Because it’s only seven-fifteen. You got up early for a change. I hope we didn’t wake you. Wallis and I have already had breakfast.”

  I noticed that Wallis was wearing my mother’s yellow bathrobe. “Am I interrupting or something?” I had never borrowed my mother’s robe. I stared at the eggshells in the sink.

  “We were just talking about books,” my mother said. “I was telling Wallis that my favorite Jane Austen novel is probably Northanger Abbey. It’s a novel about reading. About a girl who has her head in the clouds and bumbles along thinking that life is a book.”

  Well, lah-dee-dah. “She sounds like a real weirdo,” I said. I took an egg from its plastic egg-shaped home in the refrigerator door and turned on the griddle. In the bread department, we were down to two ancient whole-wheat heels. I checked for mold, then quickly submerged the heels in a cinnamon- and-eggy mixture.

  “Northanger Abbey always reminds me of Adrienne,” my mother told Wallis, who blinked appreciatively behind her thick lenses. “That kind of dreaminess, I mean. But I haven’t been able to convince her to read it.”

  “That’s because you’ve already summarized it about a hundred times,” I said.

  My mother asked me whether I’d gotten up on the wrong side of the bed—probably a rhetorical question, so I didn’t answer.

  The first piece of French toast stuck like glue. I’d forgotten the butter. “Shit.” I used a spatula to scrape up the blackened, soggy bread and catapult the doughy mess into the sink. It landed with a wet whomping noise, like a squid being hurled against a rock.

  “Adrienne,” my mother said.

  “Sorry.” I turned off the stove.

  “Do you and Wallis have a plan for the day?” my mother asked.

  Did she mean separately (I hoped) or together? “I’m going to the pool.” I dumped a cylinder of shredded wheat into a bowl, then crushed it flat with the back of a spoon. “Are we out of milk?” I stared into the refrigerator. “You just went to the store.”

  “I didn’t realize we were running low on milk,” my mother said. She was doing the crossword. “And we only had a quart left.” The empty container was next to the sink, where Wallis was pushing eggshells down the drain.

  “What am I supposed to eat?” I asked.

  “You could make a fried egg,” Wallis suggested.

  “Adrienne doesn’t like fried eggs, for some unknown reason,” my mother said.

  “The reason I don’t like fried eggs,” I explained, “is because they’re disgusting.”

  “You have such high standards,” my mother said. She suggested that I stay home from the pool for the day and get some things done around the house.

  “What things?” I had already put sugar on my shredded wheat; now I stared at the haylike mixture, considered my options, and decided to eat it dry.

  “Do you remember offering to reshelve the books?”

  I groaned. Offering wasn’t the right word: as punishment for my recent lack of good judgment, aka my drinking episode with CeeCee (and my mother still didn’t know we’d been driving around in a car that belonged to someone nicknamed “the eel”), I had agreed to alphabetize and reorder our collection of books. This had struck me as a pleasant, mindless task when my mother brought the shelves home from the store; later, counting up the mysteries my mother hoarded under her bed, the boxes of “sale books” she had hauled up from the basement, and the twelve-foot span of volumes on the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the cattle chute, I estimated that we owned a gazillion books.

  “I don’t want to do that today,” I said.

  “Why not?” My mother stood up and cleared the dishes, moving around me because I was eating standing up. “Maybe Wallis would help you.”

  I said that I usually worked better alone.

  Wallis wandered off to get dressed.

  “Are you all right? You seem pretty crabby,” my mother said.

  Chewing the biscuit without milk made me feel like a horse. Miniature javelins of straw protruded from between my teeth. “How long is she going to stay?” I asked.

  “Until her mother gets back,” my mother said. We heard my bedroom door shut with a click. “Or until she has somewhere else to go.”

  Should it have bothered me, that day and the next, that Wallis wore my headlamp strapped to her forehead even in daylight? That she tucked her mattress under my bed and followed me around the house like a shadow? That she took long baths and began to smell like my mother’s shampoo?

  “Do you mind my being here?” she asked. This was the second day of her visit, and we were trying to assemble my mother’s bookshelves in the den. We had managed to put them together with some of the wrong (unfinished) sides facing out, and then had to dismantle them. Then I lost the pegs that were supposed to hold the shelves together.

  “I guess you’re used to being alone,” Wallis said when I didn’t answer. (I was trying to look distracted by my search for the pegs.) “I like being alone, too. Do you talk to yourself?”

  “Why would I talk to myself?” Backing up on the rug away from the shelves, I accidentally knelt on the hammer. Tears flooded my eyes.

  “That looked like it hurt,” Wallis said. “Was that your bad knee?”

  I breathed through clenched teeth.

  “Do you want me to look at it?” she asked.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  She picked up the hammer and seemed to weigh it in her hand. “I think of my life as a book sometimes, the way you do.”

  “That’s mostly my mother’s theory,” I said. “Do you and your mother get along?”

  “Yes,” Wallis said. “We’re very close.”

  “Even though you don’t know where she is, and she didn’t tell you when she’s getting back?”

  Wallis’s expression was smooth, almost blank. “She left me a message at home yesterday. She’ll be back soon.”

  I stacked some of the shelf pieces behind me. “You went home yesterday?”

  “I walked past the pool and saw Jill,” she said. “We talked through the fence.”

  Perfect, I thought. I w
as stuck at home because of Wallis, while she was strolling around town being social. “Are you going to walk home today, too?” I asked. “In case your mother left another message?”

  She probably heard the snarky but hopeful tone in my voice. “Maybe,” she said.

  I told her she should feel free. And—though she had found the pegs and helpfully lined them up on the couch—I repeated that I would rather work on the bookshelves alone.

  Being rude to Wallis was tiring somehow—I’ve always found guilt to be exhausting—so I shut myself in my room and ate a handful of semisweet chocolate before doing my physical therapy and getting dressed. Wallis was gone by the time I had finished. Good. I texted CeeCee, who hadn’t been answering her phone, and then I closed the front and back doors and turned the AC on. Let Wallis ring the bell, I thought, when she wanted to come in.

  I checked my phone. Still nothing from CeeCee, but there was a text from my mother, just sent from work: Have you got the shelves fixed yet?

  No, I hadn’t fixed them. What was I, a carpenter?

  We can set them up when I get home. Maybe you and Wallis could finish alphabetizing today.

  Sigh. I had already collected the A’s (of course my mother owned a dozen Austens), intending to move them to the top left shelf in the hall, stashing the B’s and C’s immediately below. But when I cleared off the books that were already taking up space on those shelves, I discovered a colony of flesh-colored spiders and their cottony eggs. I ended up spilling twenty or thirty volumes onto the floor.

  I texted my mother: You don’t need me to alphab within each letter, do you?

  She texted back: Order them the way a librarian would.

  Resisting the impulse to shovel the books into the yard and then set them on fire, I poured myself a glass of mint iced tea, sat down in front of my mother’s desktop, and did a couple of Sudoku online. I looked at a video about a sloth crossing a road in Australia. Finally I created a new blank document for my mother: Books. Beneath the heading I typed the letter A. I went back to the hallway and shuffled through the paper- and hardbacks. Alvarez, Abbott, Achebe, Atwood, Atwood, Anderson, Andersen, Amis, Adichie, Allende, Allen, Agee, Austen, Austen, Austen, Austen, Austen … I picked up Northanger Abbey and read the first sentence. No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine. This was the novel—apparently a portrait of low expectations—that reminded my mother of me?

  I put Catherine Morland in a stack with the other Austens and randomly opened a few other books. Opening a book in the middle of a chapter always made me feel like I was interrupting a group of strangers, wandering unannounced into their villages and apartments and taxis and slums.

  Could I be an unlikely heroine?

  I imagined the Librarian of Congress insisting on sitting down to interview me. We would probably sit across from each other at the kitchen table. I pictured him as an old-fashioned man, something like the white-haired smiling Quaker on the oatmeal box, with a piece of parchment and a feather pen. I imagined him revising his earlier classification:

  Haus, Adrienne. 1. Unlikely heroines—Nonfiction. 2. Drunkards. 3. Inhospitable book club members. 4. Sloths.

  My phone was vibrating on the table, doing a buzzing circle dance.

  “How’s it going with the new roommate?” Jill asked.

  “She isn’t here right now,” I said. “But I’m stuck at home. My mother has turned me into a slave-librarian.” I could hear splashing. “Why is Wallis staying with me instead of you?” I asked. “Maybe tomorrow she should stay at your house.”

  “Nope. Not going to happen,” Jill said. “For some unknown reason, she seems to like you. I have a theory about this. Do you want to hear it?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you anyway. Whatever her situation is at home, even without all those guns being baked into loaves of bread, Wallis doesn’t like it. Maybe she’s lonely, or maybe her mom’s antisocial. So she’s decided to experiment. She’s developed a crush on your mom—that’s pretty obvious—and she’s trying her out. It’s a little fantasy. You know: What would it be like if I lived in an ordinary house and had a normal family and didn’t live in a railroad car by a crumbling tower?”

  “I never said she lived in a railroad car.” Jill was probably picturing Wallis as one of the kids in The Boxcar Children, catching fish in a stream and sweeping the pine planks of her home with a handmade broom. “I don’t think she has a crush on my mom,” I said. “But my mom definitely likes her. Probably because she’s polite. And neat. And smart. And not me.”

  “Hey, maybe your mom will decide to adopt her,” Jill said. A whistle blew in the background. “Then you could write your summer essay about what it’s like to have a sibling all of a sudden.”

  I tried not to imagine my mother coming home with a set of bunk beds, or presenting Wallis and me with matching lunch boxes on the first day of school. “Wallis is too old to be adopted.”

  “Oh no, she isn’t,” Jill said. “Haven’t you seen those sad little pictures of ‘waiting children’ on local TV? People give older kids up for adoption all the time. I think there’s a law that lets you drop them off in Nebraska.”

  “Maybe I can buy her a one-way ticket there,” I said. I heard the clank of the cash box—the sound of Jill being useful and earning money.

  “Have you started the new book?” she asked.

  “No. We just finished the last one,” I said. I missed Genly Ai.

  “I read the first twenty pages,” Jill said. “It’s short but you have to go slow. I can’t tell if these little sections are paragraphs or chapters. And I don’t know who this person is talking to—this Esmeralda or Esperanza: is she talking to me?”

  “I’m trying to talk to you,” I said. “What if Wallis doesn’t want to leave? I don’t want her living here forever.”

  “Well, you can’t kill her off. Not in real life,” Jill said. “Unbelievable: we’re out of fudge pops.”

  “Tragic,” I said. “So am I going to like this book?”

  “Not sure,” Jill said. “At first I felt like I was reading a little kid’s book, but I think there’s a creep factor coming. Somebody’s going to end up dead or abused.”

  “Great.” I looked down at the pile of books on the floor and thought about Wallis’s Rule of Three Thousand. “Do people really drop their kids off in Nebraska?”

  “Yeah. I guess they have extra room out there,” Jill said; then she hung up the phone.

  After talking to Jill I had a brainstorm: I realized I could alphabetize the books on my mother’s computer. I finished typing in the authors whose last names started with A and hit “sort.” Ding! I was a genius. I rewarded myself with a dish of strawberry ice cream (Jill’s mention of fudge pops had made me hungry) and used a dish towel to get rid of the spiders so I could shelve through the C’s. Sitting back down at the computer, I noticed that my mother had left her email open. This was obviously not an invitation to read her email; still, without giving it much thought one way or the other, I clicked on her in-box.

  She had gotten a bunch of boring messages from people at work (Please note meeting time change) and several pleas from a Nigerian lawyer representing our long-lost millionaire relatives killed in a plane crash.

  Farther down in the queue was a message from my aunt Beatrice, my mother’s sister. My finger dangled above the mouse; then, as if making up its own little fingery mind (my mother didn’t have any secrets, did she?), it punched down.

  There was a long string of emails going back and forth, so I scrolled to the bottom. My aunt was going to Thailand in September and my mother was jealous. My mother told my aunt about the book club. My aunt asked about me.

  She’s doing okay, I think, my mother answered. It’s a difficult age.

  Difficult how? my aunt asked.

  My mother said she had caught me drinking. She said I’d dyed my hair. Not terribly flattering, she wrote.

 
I felt my face heat up. Did I email people in order to comment on my mother’s appearance?

  A few lines later, she told my aunt that I’d been asking about my father. And she’s been out all night once or twice. She denies it but I suspect there are boys involved.

  So my mother assumed I was a liar.

  What does she want to know about her father? my aunt asked.

  I’m not sure. And it’s hard to know what to tell her.

  How about trying the truth? I thought.

  I know what you’re saying. You don’t want her repeating your biggest mistakes, my aunt wrote.

  “You did a lot of work here,” said a voice behind me.

  I almost leapt out of my skin. Wallis. “Where did you come from? I locked the doors.” I logged out of the email account, then realized (I didn’t have my mother’s password) that I wouldn’t be able to get back in.

  “I wasn’t outside. I was in the basement,” Wallis said.

  “What were you doing in the basement?” My mother thought I was “difficult.” The cursor blinked mindlessly on the screen. “Are you wearing my shorts, Wallis?” I asked.

  “Yes.” Wallis looked down as if to double-check. “Your mother said I could go through the bags near the washer and dryer.”

  “Oh.” The shorts—and now I also recognized the T-shirt—had probably been rescued from a collection of clothes I’d outgrown.

  “You’re up to D,” Wallis said. She started moving books around on the shelves. From the back, wearing my shorts, she looked like a smaller, neater version of me. “Have you read The House of the Scorpion?” she asked.

  I said I hadn’t.

  “It’s about clones.” Wallis knelt on the floor and started sifting through the E’s and F’s on the rug. “Your mother has a lot of good books. Have you read Rebecca?”

  My aunt said my mother had made a mistake. “No.”

  “Have you read Brave New World?” Wallis asked.

  The mistake was my mother getting pregnant, I thought.

  “Or how about—”

  “No,” I said.

  The mistake they were talking about—the big irreversible error of my mother’s life—was me.