The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Read online

  My mother shaded her eyes. “What’s that cat doing over there? He’d better not be heading toward my car.”

  “He is,” I said. “And he’s got a severed head in his mouth. He wants you to add it to the collection.” Mr. Finkle glanced sadly toward us, then meandered across the driveway, clasping his prize. “What if it turns out I’m related to a psychopath?” I asked. “Or a serial killer?”

  My mother seemed to consider this possibility. “Do you feel you have psychopathic blood in your veins?”

  I looked down at my forearms, where a couple of bluish veins were visible. “I don’t have the energy to be a murderer,” I said.

  “And you feel queasy at the sight of blood,” my mother added. “Which would be a deterrent.”

  I picked up the witch’s hand again. “I just want to be … interesting,” I said. “And don’t tell me you think I’m interesting. That doesn’t count. You have to be interested in me, because you’re my mother.”

  “What? I’m sorry,” my mother said. “Did you say something? I might have dozed off.”

  “Ha ha,” I said. “I’m trying to have a serious conversation here. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m almost an adult.” I paused. “If you died—if you were hit by a bus—would I still have to live with Aunt Beatrice?”

  Aunt Beatrice was my mother’s sister, who lived in Atlanta.

  “I suppose, now that you’re ‘almost an adult,’ you’d have the option of moving in with Liz,” my mother said. “We could talk to her parents.”

  “Okay.” I scratched at the ground with the witch’s fingers. “That would probably be better: you don’t get along all that well with Aunt Beatrice.”

  “I wouldn’t have to get along with her. I’d be squashed by the bus, remember?” She tapped the back of my wrist. “You don’t need to claw at the ground like that.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I looked at the patch of earth between us: it was nearly bare, with narrow fingermarks streaking the dirt.

  My mother went back to her dandelions. “Is there anything else you want to ask, while we’re having our Serious Adult Conversation?”

  Several questions jostled for position in my brain.

  1) Why did my mother always answer my questions with a question?

  2) Why did I feel like half a person sometimes?

  3) What kind of wacky nine-year-old liked to pretend to be Helen Keller?

  “What other books are we going to read?” I asked. “I mean, in this book club.”

  “We’ll have to choose from Ms. Radcliffe’s list,” my mother said. “Maybe we should stick to books by women. That would narrow it down.”

  The tiny, fictional Ms. Radcliffe who lived in my brain snapped her metal ruler. “Are we almost done out here?” I asked. Our lawn was small, but we seemed to have weeded only about two percent of it.

  “Five more minutes,” my mother said. “And I think you should give this book club a chance. What terrible things could possibly happen just because a group of mothers and daughters decided to get together to talk about books?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  Mr. Finkle’s golden hindquarters flashed in the bushes.

  “It’s good to interact with people you wouldn’t ordinarily talk to, and read books you wouldn’t ordinarily read. Be open-minded. Be willing to experiment. That’s my advice.” My mother wiped her forehead and said it was impossible that the entire summer was going to be this hot.

  She was wrong about the heat.

  And she would come to regret her advice to me as well.

  3. CHARACTERS: The people in a novel or story. In this essay I guess the main characters are CeeCee and Jill and Wallis and me. And maybe my mother, who would be offended if I left her out.

  Unlike CeeCee, who didn’t seem to enjoy reading, Jill D’Amato was the sort of person you’d expect to find in a book club. At school she was the queen of extra-curriculars: the catcher on the softball team, the assistant editor of the yearbook, a member of Debate Club (I had heard her give an animal rights presentation in the school cafeteria), and apparently a fan of country music. Even when she was obviously wrong, Jill assumed she was right. When she and her mother showed up for book club fifteen minutes earlier than anyone else, Jill insisted that my mother and I had made a mistake about the time. “It was definitely seven-fifteen,” she said.

  Then she followed me into the kitchen and gave me a Coming Attractions summary of the rest of her life, which was all planned out: she would go to the University of Delaware for college, join a sorority, and become a nurse. After she graduated, she was going to adopt a greyhound, and she wasn’t going to get married until she’d had a good job for at least two years.

  Jill had a way of inhaling before she talked, sucking the air through her nose. “Nursing is a great profession,” she said while I searched for a can of lemonade. “You don’t have to work in a hospital. You can do home care or private practice, or you can work in a nursing home or do research. There are a lot of different possibilities.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got it all worked out.” I burrowed into the freezer—a wasteland of shattered pie shells, half-empty ice cream containers, runaway coffee beans, and ancient hamburgers dressed up in thick frosted jackets. “But why don’t you want to be a doctor?”

  She inhaled through her nostrils. “Why would I want to be a doctor?”

  “I don’t know. Because they make more money?” I plucked a can of frozen pink lemonade from underneath a package of peas. “It seems kind of weird that you’ve already made those kinds of decisions.”

  “I don’t think it’s weird,” Jill said. “What do you want to be?”

  “I don’t know.” I remembered the rhyme my mother used to recite when I was little: Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, gentleman, apothecary—out go you. But wasn’t that a rhyme about who you would marry? And what the heck was a tinker? “I definitely don’t want to be a nurse.”

  Jill tossed an ice cube into the pink cave of her mouth. I could tell she was irritated with me; but she didn’t have to listen to the air whistling into my nose. “I’ve been wondering why you invited me here,” she said.

  “I didn’t invite you.” I rinsed out a pitcher; there were several dead fruit flies inside it. “No offense,” I said. “I didn’t invite anyone.” Remembering my mother’s advice about being open-minded and friendly, I shared my current theory: that we might as well have started a reading group with the Virgin Mary, Abraham Lincoln, Oprah Winfrey, and Genghis Khan.

  “Okay. Then I know who Genghis is,” Jill said. “I saw her this afternoon coming out of the drugstore, wearing a tiny white skirt and yellow sandals. You were at the pool with her. What do you think she weighs?”

  “You want to know what CeeCee weighs?” I asked. “I haven’t weighed her.”

  “Probably one-oh-five. I’m good at estimating,” Jill said. “I weigh one thirty-five. You probably weigh, what: one fifty? One fifty-five?”

  I looked at the clock: Only two more hours, I thought, and this first unfortunate evening will be over.

  Jill tossed another ice cube into her mouth. Her face was round and tan and smooth, her skin the color of a light brown egg. “What I heard about CeeCee,” she said, “in case you’re interested, is that her parents have forced her to be in the book club. Which means you and Wallis and I are her punishment.”

  “That’s a nice way of looking at it,” I said. “We’re like a penal colony, with books.”

  Jill pulled her thick black hair into a ponytail. “I’m just agreeing with what you said earlier. We’re not a typical group. Wallis is a miniature prodigy, and I’m into sports, and you—” Jill looked me quickly up and down. “You’ve screwed up your leg or whatever. But CeeCee’s different. She’s …”

  “What?” I dumped the lemonade—plop—into the plastic pitcher.

  “I’m trying to think of the word,” Jill said. “Omino
us? I’ve been doing flash cards, getting ready for the PSAT. Are you going to sign up for the SAT prep class this fall?”

  “I don’t think you can use ominous for people,” I said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes sense for CeeCee,” Jill said.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Adrienne, would you get that?” my mother called.

  “Hang on,” I yelled. I mixed the lemonade with water.

  Jill lingered next to me at the sink. “Why do you think CeeCee was hanging out with you at the pool?”

  “It was only for a couple of hours,” I said. Was the idea of someone spending time with me suspicious?

  The doorbell rang again: ba-DANG-ba-DUM. “Adrienne?” my mother called.

  “Go ahead. It’s probably her,” Jill said. “My theory? CeeCee thinks you’re going to be easy to push around.”

  Because my mother didn’t believe in using the air conditioner even though we had one, the first meeting of the Mother-Daughter Literary Punishment Group was held out on the porch. Our house was small: two narrow bedrooms, a kitchen, a TV room/den, and a long book-filled hallway my mother referred to as “the cattle chute.” The screen porch, surrounded by lilacs that shaded and perfumed it, was the only space we had for “entertaining.” It stuck out from the back of our little blue house like an after thought.

  Jill’s mother, Glory, who had a bubbly, exaggerated way of speaking, was effervescing about the snacks my mother had assembled: a plate of celery and carrots, some warped-looking breadsticks, and a sagging block of cheese that smelled like the inside of a sweat-stained shoe.

  “We’re waiting for two more people,” my mother said. She asked if anyone had read anything interesting lately.

  Jill had just read The Lovely Bones. Her mother had read something frightening (she couldn’t remember the title) by Stephen King. CeeCee’s mother, Dana, who looked like an older and more expensive version of CeeCee, was halfway through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—because that was what CeeCee had told her the book club had decided to read.

  My mother said that no matter which books we chose, she could probably find copies for us at the community college library because of her job.

  I put Ms. Radcliffe’s list on the table, next to the cheese. Judging from the number of books she listed as “college preparatory—highly recommended,” she was going to work us hard all year. Still, I thought, she would have to be better than Mrs. Dierks, the other English 11 teacher. Mrs. Dierks was famous for keeping a cot and a pillow in her classroom, because (she claimed) her students’ opinions exhausted her to the point where she had to lie down.

  The first embarrassing moment of the book club: my mother felt inspired to make a speech about my literary habits. “Adrienne doesn’t read fast,” she said. “But she truly immerses herself in a book.”

  “That’s right. I read deep,” I said. Then I looked at my mother. Please don’t tell them about Helen Keller.

  “CeeCee used to read almost every day when she was younger.” CeeCee’s mother, a collection of thick gold bracelets clinking gracefully around one of her wrists, reached for my copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” “I used to take her to the library once a week and get her a big stack of books. But even in elementary school her social life began to take the place of reading. I suppose that happens.”

  CeeCee had been adjusting the speed on a portable fan with her toes. But as soon as her mother spoke, she went still, as if a tiny electric current had run up her spine. “I hate it when you do that,” she said.

  Jill’s mother smiled and said she hadn’t heard of some of the books on the list. Where was Little Women? Where were Sounder and Where the Red Fern Grows?

  “You hate it when I do what?” CeeCee’s mother asked.

  “When you talk about me like I’m not even here.” CeeCee reached for the carrots. “Or like I’m some kind of pet.”

  Her mother brushed a crumb from her lap, sending a cascade of bracelets tinkling down the length of her arm. “A pet?” she asked.

  “You start talking to somebody else’s parent, and then you point at me”—CeeCee gestured toward her mother with a carrot stick—“and you say, ‘We’re having such trouble with ours these days. Just look at her over there: she’s such a problem. I wish she wouldn’t poop in the yard.’ ”

  “I didn’t know you were pooping in the yard,” her mother said. “You should have told me.”

  “Mine’s acting surly today,” CeeCee went on. “And she doesn’t eat. I think she’s bulimic.” She chewed up a carrot, then opened her mouth and caught the slimy orange debris in a napkin. She turned to Jill’s mother, who seemed both confused and fascinated, as if she were watching a play and had begun to realize she was in the wrong theater.

  “Does yours do that?” CeeCee asked.

  Behind them, the screen door creaked open. Wallis had crossed the sea of dry grass at the back of the house, and stood on the bristly welcome mat with a sleeve of crackers in her hand. “I’m here for the book club,” she said.

  The six of us turned toward her. Wallis wore thick black plastic glasses and a button-down shirt and loose khaki shorts like an archaeologist’s. She had a buzzing monotone of a voice, scratchy and low. If a bear could be trained to talk, I thought, it would sound like Wallis.

  My mother opened the door and thanked her for the crackers.

  “My mother couldn’t come tonight,” Wallis said, stepping onto the porch. “She’s working on something and said we should go ahead without her. She sends regrets.” Wallis blinked and looked at each of us, her face washed clean of all human expression, and then sat next to me. She clutched a library copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper” in her hands.

  Our order of business: to discuss book number one, which every student in Ms. Radcliffe’s class had to read, and then decide—in consultation with the AP English list—on our next four choices.

  “Whatever we decide to read should be short,” Jill said. “Some of us are working this summer. At least one of us is.”

  Jill’s mother added that it was important that we consider diversity.

  We all looked at Jill. She was adopted and Chinese; her parents were white.

  My mother suggested that we could narrow our choices by limiting ourselves to books written by women. “Pride and Prejudice is on the list,” she said.

  Wallis asked whether we were limiting ourselves to novels or if we could also include nonfiction.

  “I always loved Black Beauty,” Jill’s mother gushed.

  “Animal cruelty is always inspiring,” CeeCee agreed. “But I don’t think Black Beauty counts as nonfiction, unless the horse wrote it.”

  My mother suggested Pride and Prejudice again.

  “You’ve already read that,” I said. “You’ve probably read it a dozen times.” My mother was obsessed with Jane Austen. Only a few hundred years kept her and Jane from being friends.

  Finally we decided that, based on the list, each of us would write down the titles of four different books—written by women—that we wanted to read.

  In the meantime, in an effort to discuss “The Yellow Wallpaper,” we veered into a meandering conversation about Vincent van Gogh and his missing ear, then listened to Jill tell a story (she claimed it was true) about a woman with some sort of dream disorder who had chewed through a wooden bedpost in her sleep.

  Anyone who gnawed through a wooden bedpost, CeeCee said, probably deserved to be locked in a yellow room.

  “Adrienne?” Jill’s mother asked. “You’ve been quiet over there. What did you think of the book?”

  I looked at the paperback in my hand. I found it almost impossible, after I’d just finished reading a book, to formulate an opinion about it. To me, a recently read novel was like a miniature planet: only a few hours earlier I had been breathing its air and living contentedly among its people—and now I was expected to pronounce a judgment about its worth? What was there to say? I enjoyed that planet. I believe that planet and i
ts inhabitants are very worthwhile.

  “I liked it,” I said. “It was good.”

  “That’s it?” My mother passed me the crackers.

  “I thought the story was about claustrophobia,” Wallis said. “All the characters are trapped. They’re limited by the perspectives they were born with. Even the husband.”

  “The husband’s a total creep,” Jill said.

  Frowning, Wallis examined a stalk of celery. I was going to have trouble not thinking about her as a little brown cub. “He thinks he’s being good to his wife,” she growled. “He thinks he loves her. But he can’t see beyond the conventions of his time.”

  The three mothers were nodding. In another hour, I thought, everyone would be gone, and I could be in bed eating an ice cream sandwich.

  “It is no use, young man,” CeeCee said, tossing her hair. “You can’t open it.”

  “I beg your pardon?” her mother asked.

  “That’s what the wife tells her husband.” CeeCee nudged the fan with her foot. “You should try to keep up with the reading next time.”

  “ ‘It is no use, young man,’ ” Wallis echoed.

  I stared at CeeCee.

  “It’s at the very end,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “The wife is telling her husband that he can’t open her bedroom door because it’s locked. Of course there are multiple interpretations. She’s saying that he can’t understand her—he can’t open her mind. And she’s obviously talking about sex, too, which they probably aren’t having anymore because of her little breakdown. She’s closed herself up in her yellow room, or maybe her womb, and now she’s telling him he can’t come in. She won’t let him knock down her personal entryway and—”