The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Read online

  John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies—

  “I bet you think about him subconsciously.”

  “What?” The noise and splashing and heat and commotion filtered into my brain; I pulled the book closer.

  He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine—

  “That’s probably why you couldn’t answer my question.”

  … a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to—

  CeeCee pressed her icy can of soda against my arm. The yellow room fizzled and disappeared. “What question?” I asked.

  “About what kind of person you are,” she said. “You couldn’t tell me and now I’m curious. You couldn’t even describe yourself. Don’t you think that’s”—she glanced at my knee—“lame?”

  “Why are you talking to me?” I asked.

  CeeCee tipped back her head and finished her soda. “This chair was empty. I saw the book in your hands. You could say that literature brought us together. Also, I felt like messing with your head.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re extremely welcome,” she said, and for the first time since she had sat down, I didn’t dislike her.

  Another blast from the whistle. Adult swim was over. CeeCee stood up and stretched. “Time to get in the water. Are you coming?”

  I told her I’d rather stay in my chair and finish the book. “There are too many people in the pool right now.”

  “There are always too many people in the pool,” CeeCee said. She tied her hair into a perfect golden knot. “The water’s just a big tub of chlorine full of skin flakes and gobs of hair and snot and bacteria. But you can’t let that stop you.”

  I hesitated. “I don’t want anyone bumping into me,” I said. “My leg’s really sore.”

  CeeCee was poised at the lip of the pool. “You said you’re supposed to be exercising. I’ll run interference for you.” She hopped in, holding her elbows above the surface. The water was full of little kids diving for pennies and swimming through each other’s legs. She turned to face me. “Jump to Mommy.”

  Different moments in my life remind me of books. Looking at CeeCee holding her arms out in front of her, I thought about Heidi coaxing Clara to walk. I limped to the stairs and took hold of the handrail. Two little boys came churning toward me, thrashing their limbs.

  CeeCee grabbed the nearer kid by the ankle. “Out of my way,” she said, “or I crush you.” She turned him around and launched him like a boat in the other direction. “Let’s go, Grandma.” I walked down the stairs, the water a cool blue bandage against my leg.

  Liz was probably swimming in a lake somewhere. She was taking AP English, too. She was planning to read the books in the tent the two of us were supposed to have shared. She would probably write the entire essay in an afternoon—Liz was a model of efficiency—when she got back.

  “Why is that strange little person staring at you?” CeeCee asked. She created a narrow lane at the edge of the pool, where I paced back and forth.

  “What strange little person?” I wiped the chlorine out of my eyes. Behind our recliners, on the other side of the diamond-chain-link fence, was a scrawny girl wearing oversized shorts and a shirt and sneakers.

  “That’s Wallis,” I said. She was the final daughter in the mother-daughter book club. Unlike CeeCee and Jill and me, Wallis had apparently found out about the group and asked to be included.

  “Is she … in special ed?” CeeCee asked.

  “No. She skipped a grade,” I said. “It might have been two.”

  “Unsettling. Why is she outside the fence?” CeeCee shaded her eyes. “It’s a hundred degrees. And isn’t Wallace a guy’s name?”

  “No, it’s spelled W-A-L-L-I-S,” I said. “She was in my history class last term. She moved here in January and made a speech on her first day, telling everyone in the room that she was named for the woman who was supposed to be the queen of England.”

  “Do you mean Elizabeth?”

  “No. Elizabeth is the queen,” I said.

  Wallis had turned away from us and was shuffling through the uncut grass between the parking lot and the locker rooms. She had a book with her. I didn’t have to see its cover to know what it was: “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

  CeeCee stiff-armed a little girl wearing orange floaters out of our way.

  “Do you want me to tell you what the book’s about?” I asked.

  CeeCee shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

  I paused at the edge of the pool, where a filter was sucking and spitting out water like a plastic mouth. “It’s set about a hundred years ago,” I said. “The main character, the protagonist, is a wealthy woman who’s depressed. She has a baby, and—”

  “Did you say ‘protagonist’?” CeeCee asked. “Are you deliberately using the words on that literary terms list?”

  I noticed that Jill, beneath the awning above the snack bar, was staring at us. “I’m not using them deliberately,” I said. I tried to ignore a stabbing feeling at the base of my knee. “Anyway, the woman is married to a doctor who spends all his time hovering over her and making her rest in a yellow room. Whenever she looks at the wallpaper—”

  “You don’t have to tell me the end,” CeeCee said. She caught a dead bug in her hands and threw it out of the pool. “I read that part already.”

  Wallis shuffled past the pool’s main entrance, still outside the fence, head down and reading. She didn’t stop to buy a ticket or a summer pass.

  “So you read the end but not the beginning?”

  “Yeah. There are a couple of lines in the last few pages that made me laugh.”

  I tried to imagine which parts of a story about a person losing her mind would be funny.

  “Hang on.” CeeCee swam to the ladder and climbed out and flipped through the book. “Here it is. The ‘protagonist’ keeps telling her husband that she feels like crap but he doesn’t believe her. He calls her a ‘blessed little goose.’ And when she says she wants to get out of the yellow room because it’s making her sick”—CeeCee tossed the book back onto her chair—“her husband says, ‘Bless her little heart. She shall be as sick as she pleases.’ ”

  I pulled myself to the ladder and got out, feeling thousands of drops of water chatter and prickle against my skin. The cement cooked my feet.

  “ ‘She shall be as sick as she pleases,’ ” CeeCee sang. “You don’t think that’s hilarious?”

  I shrugged. Having done nothing all day, I was exhausted. Lying down on the plastic slats of my recliner, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the scene from above: a flat green park, a silver fence with one scrawny girl positioned outside it, and set in the center, like a gaudy gem in a ring, the shimmering turquoise body of the pool.

  I listened to the whap-ap-ap-ap-ap of the diving board. “This heat could kill a person,” I said.

  “Blessed little goose,” CeeCee said. “I wonder who it will be.”

  2. METAPHOR and SIMILE: A metaphor is a fancy way of describing something by comparing it to something else. Instead of saying, “He has bad breath,” you could say, “His mouth is a fiery pit of odorous garbage.” A simile is the same thing but you use like or as. So you would say, “His mouth is like a fiery pit of odorous garbage.”

  “How would you describe me?” I asked. “If we weren’t related.”

  It was Sunday, our first book club day, and my mother and I were in the front yard, weeding the lawn. This was a completely pointless activity: my mother refused to use pesticides, so most of what was green in the lawn needed pulling.

  “How would I describe you to whom?” my mother asked. My mother is the sort of person who uses the word whom. She teaches English to immigrants, mostly adults.

  “You answered my question with a question,” I said, “which probably means you’re stalling for time. Wh
ich means you think I’m not describable.”

  “Would that be good or bad, if you were indescribable?” My mother tossed a dandelion into the plastic bucket between us. I was in charge of removing tangled networks of creeping Charlie with a tool that looked like a witch’s hand, while my mother was extracting—with a big two-pronged metal fork—the rat-tail roots of dandelions.

  “Probably bad,” I said, remembering my conversation at the pool with CeeCee. “Other people can be described.” I thought about a phrase I had read somewhere—“neither fish nor fowl.” That sounds like me.

  “If you want a description,” my mother said, “I’d be happy to describe you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  My mother moved on to a new crop of weeds. “I’d definitely describe you as imaginative,” she said. “A little absentminded. And certainly impressionable.”

  “What do you mean, ‘impressionable’?”

  “Impressionable means … susceptible. Open to influence,” my mother said.

  “I know what the word means,” I told her.

  She sat back on her heels. “When you were younger you used to act out parts from the books you liked. Do you remember? For weeks you followed me around and finger-spelled into my hands because you were pretending to be Helen Keller.”

  “That makes me sound like an idiot,” I said. But I remembered the Helen Keller phase. And I suddenly wanted to shut my eyes and put on a pair of sound-canceling headphones and plunge my hand in a stream of cool W-A-T-E-R.

  “And I think you’re amusing and good-natured—most of the time,” my mother said. “You’re fairly independent. Easygoing. How’s that?”

  “That’s it?” I asked. “Impressionable? Easygoing?” She might as well have looked up bland in a thesaurus. Easygoing described the interchangeable roster of strangers who delivered our mail.

  “How would you characterize yourself?” my mother said. She plunged her metal fork into the ground.

  This was the same question CeeCee had asked me. It reminded me of my discovery, a few years earlier, that at the beginning of a lot of books, there’s a Library of Congress classification. It might say World War II, biography or Elephants, fiction. It made me wish that the Librarian of Congress, whoever he was, would make some categories like that for me:

  Haus, Adrienne. 1. People with knee ailments—Biography. 2. Bored fifteen-year-old Delawareans—Nonfiction. 3. People without hobbies who have only one friend, and that friend is away for the summer. 4. People who have never met their fathers.

  But I seemed to be a person without a category. I was impressionable. Easily molded, average, shapeless. When I opened my closet door in the morning and looked in the mirror, I almost expected to see a paramecium wearing a wig. Who are you supposed to be?

  “Do you think I should part my hair on the other side?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” my mother said. “Would that make you look different?”

  “It might.” I had a low and irregular forehead. Even Liz had once told me I had the hairline of an australopithecine. I swept my bangs from right to left, but they immediately flopped back into place as if to say, Don’t joke around; we live over here.

  My mother wiped the sweat from her neck. It was hot again. Every day it was hot, as if the weather had been imported from a place where people sewed palm leaves together and used them for clothing. “How’s your knee?” she asked. “Have you been doing your physical therapy?”

  “Yes, on land and at sea,” I said. “I walked through the pool the other day. It was very exciting.”

  My mother sighed. “I’m sorry you couldn’t go on your canoe trip. I’ve probably said that already. I know it’s a terrible disappointment.”

  Of course she was right. It was a disappointment. But it occurred to me, maybe because she’d mentioned it several times, that my mother was at least as disappointed as I was. She had bought me a new sleeping bag and a backpack and hiking boots (she had managed to return everything except the boots) and had been looking forward to seeing me off for the entire summer. She had probably imagined that after forty days of wilderness adventure (followed by a week at Liz’s grandparents’ farm in Minnesota) I was going to return to West New Hope fit and decisive, like Ernest Shackleton or Admiral Peary. My mother believed in goals and projects and self-improvement. She might have thought the trip would improve me. She might have wanted me to be improved.

  I adjusted my brace. Maybe CeeCee was right about the smell. I detected a subtle mix of eggshell and roadkill and pee.

  “What time are they coming tonight?” I asked.

  “Seven-thirty. Did you finish the book?”

  “Twice,” I said. “It was only around thirty pages.”

  I don’t know why I should write this, wrote the woman in the yellow room. I don’t want to. I don’t feel able.

  Feeling limp, I lay down on the lawn. “Just so you’re warned ahead of time,” I said, “this book club is probably going to be a disaster.”

  “Why’s that?” My mother speared another dandelion.

  “Because, first of all, fifteen is too old to be in a mother-daughter book club. Second of all, the thing about books? They’re made for one person at a time. That’s why they’re small. You can hold them in your hand. Movies are made for groups of people. It’s a different thing.”

  My mother thanked me for this explanation and said that we didn’t have to read simultaneously; the book club was based, instead, on discussion.

  “And third of all,” I said, “Wallis and Jill and CeeCee and I are too different. We’re not the same types of people.”

  “Wouldn’t that make the meetings more interesting?” my mother asked.

  “Actually, no.” I rolled onto my stomach. Deep in the grass, a group of caramel-colored ants was migrating from one ant village to another, probably carrying ant-sized tables, chairs, dishes, pillows, and lamps into their tiny homes. “You’d have to be sentenced to high school all over again to understand it,” I said, “but you can’t force people my age to talk to each other. Bad things will happen.”

  “Why are you staring at the ground like that?” my mother asked. She tugged the bucket of weeds across one of the anthills, wiping out half a civilization. “The book club’s not permanent,” she said. “It’s just for the summer—once a week—and it’ll give you a chance to widen your social circle.”

  This was my mother’s tactful way of pointing out that, since Liz was in Canada and every other able-bodied person in town was gainfully employed, I would probably be spending most of my summer alone. Liz and I had been best friends for six years. She had earned my eternal affection at the end of fourth grade by intercepting a series of scribbled insults directed toward me by Billy Secor. She had opened the crumpled sheet of paper and read it, then put the entire thing in her mouth and chewed and swallowed it, saying only that Billy had spelled retarded “redarded.”

  “People my age don’t have ‘social circles.’ ” I sat up, hauling my leg behind me like a suitcase. “And I don’t want to have ‘story time’ with these other girls. I barely know them.”

  “You’ll get to know them,” my mother said. “That’s what happens when you spend time with people. It’s good to be social.”

  “Hm,” I said. I watched as the neighbors’ cat, Mr. Finkle, his orange belly nearly touching the ground, carried a chipmunk along the sidewalk in his yellow teeth. The chipmunk was obviously dead, and Mr. Finkle, swaying side to side, somehow managed to look mournful about it. He ambled slowly across the sidewalk, our local Charon, a furry ferryboat king.

  “Are you weeding or daydreaming over there?” my mother asked.

  I pulled up a cluster of creeping Charlie as thick as a bath mat and threw it, Frisbee-style, into the bucket. I felt sticky and restless. There is something absent in me, I thought. Something incomplete. Even my mother couldn’t describe me. There was something empty in me that in other people was full.

  “Do you think it screwed me up t
hat I never met my father?” I asked.

  My mother stopped weeding and turned to face me. “Where did that come from? Do you think you’re screwed up?”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. A beetle crawled toward me, its blue-gray body like a metal toy lost in the grass. “But maybe that’s why I’m not describable. I never met my father but I might take after him. Maybe it’s his fault that I’m clumsy and average and boring and bland.”

  “I didn’t realize that you were clumsy and average and boring and bland,” my mother said.

  Mr. Finkle tenderly positioned the departed chipmunk on a bed of grass in the shade of the house. His usual pattern was to devour the body, then deposit the head—with its terrified milky-white eyeballs—next to the driver’s-side door of my mother’s car.

  “Do you think I’d have turned out different if I had two parents?” I asked.

  “Of course you would have. And you’d have turned out differently if you had three parents. Is there a reason you’re bringing this up? Something you want to ask?”

  We hadn’t talked about my nonexistent father for a while. My mother had always been honest about him. If he’d known about me, she always said, he would have loved me. But my mother had no idea where he lived and didn’t know his last name. When I got older and asked her more specific questions, she told me that her (very brief) relationship with my father was “consensual”—but that he wasn’t a boyfriend. She also assured me that I wasn’t an “accident.” She was twenty-eight when I was born. “And if I had decided I didn’t want a baby, you wouldn’t be here,” she said.

  I cleaned some dirt from my fingernails. My mother’s policy about father-related questions was clear and consistent: she would answer any question at all, at any time—but she would not over answer. I suspected she had taken this question-and-answer idea from a parenting book.

  “It’s not like I spend a lot of time thinking about him,” I said.

  My mother was waiting, but I wasn’t sure what to ask her. When I was little, I mainly wanted to know what my father looked like. Given my own indefinite shape, I wanted to know if he was fat. (She said he wasn’t.) For a while I pictured him as Professor Bhaer from Little Women: a roundish, full-bearded man whose pockets had holes in them. Later, I imagined him as Herman E. Calloway from Bud, Not Buddy, and then as Sergeant Flannigan from Mrs. Mike.