The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Page 4

“I think everyone has finished writing down suggestions,” Jill’s mother said. “Should we see what they are?”

  CeeCee stood up. “It must be time for a bathroom break,” she said.

  Like an old-fashioned butler in a mansion, I said I’d show her the way. Jill stood up as if attached to us by a string, and a minute later the three of us were bumbling into the bathroom, Jill nudging us from behind and then closing the door.

  “Okay, what was that about?” Jill asked. “Were you making fun of my mother?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t think I needed to,” CeeCee said. She sat on the counter next to the sink, swinging her pedicured feet back and forth. “This is going well so far, isn’t it? Our first meeting? My sister gave me the lowdown on the book; she had to read it in college. I might have read it myself but it sounded slow.”

  “How inconvenient for you,” Jill said. “First you have to be in a book club; then you’re expected to read the books.”

  “I know. It sucks.” CeeCee opened the medicine chest and examined the contents of its sticky shelves: a bottle of aspirin, a package of bandages, a wrinkled sponge, some cleanser, a box of stomach meds, a thermometer, a lipstick, a container of baby powder, a toothbrush missing most of its bristles, and a plastic jar full of safety pins.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Just browsing,” she said. “What did you and Jill talk about before I got here? Have you told her about your missing dad?”

  “He isn’t ‘missing,’ ” I said, glancing at Jill. “He’s just … not around.”

  CeeCee unscrewed the lid on a plastic jar and peered inside. “Absent, missing, whatever,” she said. “If I were you, which I’m obviously not, I would be curious. I’d want to know where fifty percent of my cells were from.”

  Jill pulled back the curtain in front of the window, which looked onto the porch. “I wonder if it’s too late to switch to regular English.”

  There was a knock at the door. “Hello? Is this the bathroom?” It was Wallis. She stood on the threshold when Jill opened the door. “They sent me to find you,” she said. “Why are you meeting in here?”

  “The best book clubs always meet in bathrooms,” CeeCee said as Jill and I shuffled aside to make room.

  Wallis scratched at a scaly patch of skin on her leg and glanced quickly at each of us. “There were only four books that got more than one vote,” she announced. She seemed to be speaking to the towel rack behind me.

  CeeCee closed the bathroom door with her foot. “Before we get caught up in business details,” she said, “I need to ask you a question, Wallis. Why are you not shaving your armpits?”

  Wallis lifted one arm as if to check beneath it. “In most of the world, the women don’t shave,” she said. The hair under her arms was a thick black tangle, as if twin dark animals had crawled up there to die.

  “Is this meeting over yet?” Jill asked.

  I told Wallis to hurry up and let us know which books we were going to read.

  CeeCee said she was hoping for The Kama Sutra, The Joy of Sex, and Your Difficult Teen.

  Wallis cleared her throat. “The books are Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley; The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula Le Guin; The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros; and The Awakening, by Kate Chopin.”

  Frankenstein was the only one I had heard of. “The mothers must have voted together,” I said. “They probably cheated.”

  Through the open window overlooking the porch, CeeCee and Jill and I heard our mothers starting to laugh. The sound was high-pitched, sharp, and female; it made me wonder whether people consciously changed the way they laughed as they grew up, whether a switch in their heads made them shift from teenage snickering to what my friend Liz called martini laughs.

  Jill filled a paper cup with water. “What do you think they’re talking about?” she asked.

  “Us,” I said.

  “Definitely,” CeeCee agreed. “That’s the whole idea behind this book club. They’ve arranged for us to read the same books they’re reading so we can think their thoughts and start living their lives. They want us to turn into them.”

  Jill muttered something about conspiracy theories, but I thought CeeCee might have a point. Sometimes I imagined that growing older meant that, at twenty-five or thirty, I’d be forced to weave my own awful cocoon and climb inside it, emerging several years later wearing ill-fitting pants and yammering on about the price of gas and milk. “The Mother-Daughter Book Club and Conspiracy League,” I said.

  More laughter filtered through the window.

  “That’s a good idea. We need a title—a name for our book club,” CeeCee said.

  “Titles are hard.” Wallis scratched the rash on her leg.

  “What about The Literary Enslavement Society of West No Hope?” CeeCee asked.

  “Catchy,” said Jill.

  I suggested The Involuntary Book Bondage Guild.

  After exchanging a few more title ideas we went back to the porch, where someone had switched on the overhead light. Outside the screens, fireflies were puncturing the night with their yellow bodies. To them, we might have looked like a collection of oversized creatures in a very large jar.

  Wallis picked up the crackers she had brought. We confirmed our next meeting.

  “I wish your mother had been able to be here.” Jill’s mother patted Wallis on the shoulder. “I don’t think I’ve met her. What sort of project is she working on?”

  “A book. It’s about philosophy. My mother is a philosopher,” Wallis said. The lenses of her glasses were covered with specks.

  “I thought philosophers were extinct,” I said.

  Jill asked Wallis if we could read her mother’s book.

  But Wallis said the book wasn’t intended for people like us. We wouldn’t be able to understand it. It was only for other philosophy professors to read.

  There was an awkward pause.

  “Well, this is very exciting!” Jill’s mother beamed. “We’re like characters in a book ourselves. We were almost strangers to each other a few hours ago, but now here we are, getting ready for something to happen. For the plot to begin!”

  “Mom? It’s time to go,” Jill said.

  My mother asked Wallis if she wanted someone to drive her home. Where did she live?

  Wallis opened the screen door, letting several moths flutter in. “Weller Road,” she growled. “Past the tower.”

  “Past the old water tower?” CeeCee’s mother looked surprised. “I didn’t think anyone lived out there.”

  “We’re renting,” Wallis said. “I don’t need a ride.” She pushed through the door and headed into the dusk beneath the trees.

  CeeCee raised an eyebrow in my direction. “There’s a plot waiting to happen. Don’t you think so, A?” From that moment on, all summer, she called me A.

  4. PLOT: This word has kind of a bad feeling about it because of terrorist plots and plots to commit murder and plots in graveyards. But in a book it just means the main events in a story and the order they’re in.

  Frankenstein was slow going at first. It starts with a sea captain writing letters to his sister. He complains about his lousy education and tells his sister he’s lonely on his ship and wants a friend. Then, as if by magic, a friend appears: a crazy half-starved castaway who tells the captain that he built a monster. Now we’re getting somewhere, I thought. I could feel myself sinking into the story. I dug into the box of cereal I was feeding myself by the handful and turned the page.

  The phone rang. It was my mother, calling from work. Was I awake yet? she wanted to know.

  I reported back in the affirmative. Every night I was oppressed by a slow fever, I read, my fingers combing through the crunchy depths of the box. I became nervous to a most painful degree.

  “Adrienne? Did you hear what I said?” my mother asked. “I won’t be home until six-fifteen.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Why don’t we ever buy donuts?”

  “We had donuts
last week. The problem with my getting home later,” my mother said, “is that I won’t be able to drive you to the pool.”

  “Huh.” I had reentered the book. Victor Frankenstein’s family had sent him to college, where he had apparently signed up for Immortality 101: he was spending most of his classroom time watching bodies decay.

  “Have any of the girls from the book club called you?” my mother asked. “Adrienne?”

  I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime.

  “Adrienne?”

  “What? Don’t worry about the pool,” I said. “I don’t have to get there every day.” My mother spent fifty hours a week teaching people about the different uses of in, at, on, and of, and she was worried about my being bored. She must not have realized that I had an impressive to-do list.

  Adrienne’s list:

  1) Read advice columns online.

  2) Find out whether a donut-delivery service exists in West New Hope.

  3) Train hair to part on the left side.

  4) Talk to self in a British accent. Wot did yew saaay?

  “Put the book down for a second,” my mother said. “The problem is that my schedule at work has changed. I won’t be able to drive you to the pool at all.”

  “Oh.” I ate a handful of cereal and noticed the trail of crumbs that had followed me—how did these things happen?—across the kitchen floor.

  “Which is why I asked if you’d heard from anyone in the book club. I spoke to CeeCee’s mother—I think she’s going to have CeeCee call you.”

  Wot did yew saaay? “Why would CeeCee call me?” I asked.

  “Because I asked her mother if they could give you a ride to the pool. And it turns out they can, at least Monday to Thursday. They can pick you up after CeeCee’s summer school class. I think it ends at twelve-thirty.”

  I picked up my cell phone and checked for messages: none. “CeeCee doesn’t want to hang out with me.”

  “Well, you don’t know that,” my mother said. “She’s probably as bored as you are. And you need to get to the pool. I’m trying to do you a favor.”

  “I don’t want you setting up playdates for me,” I said. Did my mother think I was entirely helpless? “It makes me look pathetic.”

  “Fine.” My mother said she had to get to a meeting. “But answer your phone if it rings. And you saw the note I left on the counter? You’ll clean up the kitchen and take out the trash?”

  I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived that I had become.

  “What? Yeah,” I said. “You don’t have to remind me.” But in fact I did forget, and the dirty dishes and the trash were still in the kitchen when my mother got home.

  That night, turning over in bed to prop my knee on a pillow, I heard something moving through the leaves by the side of the house. Mr. Finkle, I thought: harassing songbirds at the feeder. My mother claimed to like cats but detested Finkle, who staggered away from the feeder several mornings a week with a finch in his teeth, like a heavy man pushing away from the table after a meal.

  I sat up, sweating; when I looked out the window it was still dark—too early for Finkle, who didn’t make his murderous rounds until dawn.

  “I know this is it,” a voice said. “I was here last week and scoped it out.”

  A second, lower voice seemed to disagree.

  I am going to be murdered in my bed because my mother doesn’t believe in air-conditioning, I thought. My window was open because fluorocarbons were depleting the ozone. Being alive has been nice, Mom, I thought. Enjoy your planet!

  “A! Are you in there?”

  “Who is it?” I asked, peeling the sheet from my legs.

  “Come out, come out wherever you are,” a voice sang, just loud enough to thread its way into my room.

  “CeeCee?” I crept to the edge of my mattress—the thick fabric of the night only inches away—opened the screen, and stuck my head out. CeeCee was standing on the grass about eight feet below. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “My mother informs me that I’m supposed to be calling you,” she said. “But I don’t have your cell.”

  “Oh. Should I give you the number?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t need it right now, because I’m already here. Are you coming out?”

  “Outdoors?” I asked. In the thicker darkness near the pom-pom blooms of my mother’s hydrangeas, I saw the orange tip of a cigarette. “Is somebody with you?”

  “Yeah, that’s Jeff,” CeeCee said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Who’s Jeff?”

  “Jeff Pardullo. He’s going to catch you.”

  I looked at the cigarette tip. “I could just come to the front door,” I said.

  “Look, A. I came all the way over here to see you,” CeeCee said. “Just come out the window. That’s the plan. Your mom’ll hear you if you open the door.”

  My mother probably wouldn’t have heard me. She went to bed at night as if assembling equipment for a difficult voyage, sleeping with a bite plate in her mouth (to keep her from grinding her molars) and a satin eye mask over her face. And she had a machine on her bedside table that played an endless whssshhing of ocean waves against the shore.

  “It’s not like you’re busy. You were only sleeping,” CeeCee said. “All you have to do is sit on the windowsill. Jeff does the rest.”

  How strong is Jeff? I wondered. CeeCee stepped into a narrow patch of moonlight that briefly illuminated her upturned face like a coin. It made no sense to climb through the window. But maybe I didn’t want to be bored all summer. And maybe this was the sort of new and invigorating experience my mother had been recommending, one of the ways I could broaden my view of the world.

  “All right,” I said. “But I have to get dressed. And put on my brace.”

  “What the hell—is she in a wheelchair?” the Jeff-voice asked.

  CeeCee told me to hurry up.

  On an unnamed island near the Canadian border, Liz was probably turning over in her sleeping bag, dreaming peacefully under the stars. I put on a pair of pajama pants and flip-flops and a shirt and my brace, and at the last minute—thinking strategically—I picked up my purse so I’d have a key. I could sit on the purse on my way out the window, and I’d have a phone in case CeeCee’s plan was to play an amusing joke on me that involved my being kidnapped or killed.

  Once I stuck my head through the window again, I saw her out in the yard, fake-boxing with a person who must have been Jeff. I put my purse on the sill and sat on it, perched above them as if on a swing.

  Girl Plunges Needlessly Through Window and Mangles Already-Injured Leg, the morning headline would say. I braced my arms against the window frame. “Ready?” I asked.

  A pair of hands with knobby fingers grabbed my hips and tugged and lifted me down. I lost a few chunks of skin from the back of one thigh.

  “Uooof,” a voice said. Whoever Jeff was, I could feel him stagger when I collided with his chest. I grabbed his shoulder to steady myself, and looked up.

  He was taller than I was, and his face was interesting but not handsome. His eyes were set deeply and close together, and his eyebrows were thick, like dark slashes of paint. He was probably nineteen or twenty. He smelled like cigarettes and mint, and his cheeks were stubbly, as if he was thinking of growing a beard.

  I let go of his shoulder and we started walking away from the house. I had left the window open behind me. I thought about the books I had read in which a character discovers a door into a place she didn’t know existed: Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, Mary Lennox opening the hidden gate to the secret garden, Lucy Pevensie pushing her way through the back of the wardrobe.

  “I get so bored at night,” CeeCee said. “I have insomnia. Do you?”

  “Not usually,” I said. “I love to sleep. My astrological sign is the sloth.”

  CeeCee was twirling a golf club in her hands like a baton. Jeff walked in front of us. “I was lying in bed doing nothing,” CeeCee said, “and for some reason I started thinkin
g about our Intolerable Book Bondage Group for Wayward Girls, and I remembered that my mother had told me to call you. What was it about?”

  “Getting a ride to the pool,” I said.

  We had reached the curb. Jeff took a set of keys from his pocket.

  “The pool’s probably closed,” CeeCee said. “But we can drive past it.”

  I said I was looking for a ride during the daytime.

  “Well, we need to go somewhere,” CeeCee said. “We have a car. I found this old putter in my dad’s closet, so maybe we should go to the mini-putt.”

  Jeff popped the locks on a rusted blue four-door.

  “The mini-putt is probably closed also,” I said. I had looked at my clock—a parting glance—on my way out the window: it was two-fifteen.

  “The best part is that Jeff’s decided to let me drive,” CeeCee said. “I’m an excellent driver.”

  Jeff let out a yip—a single high-pitched laugh, like a hyena’s. “You’re not touching the driver’s side of my car.”

  I paused on the slope of my neighbors’ lawn. A chain of events, I thought, was being set into motion, and it seemed very likely that, at some future time, this particular link in the chain would be the one I’d regret.

  “What’s the matter?” Seeing me hesitate, CeeCee had opened the front passenger door of the car. “A, he’s my sister’s boyfriend,” she said. “Do you think I’d drive off with a total stranger? Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  Kind of, I thought. But I got in. She sat in front next to Jeff; I climbed in back.

  I wasn’t used to driving around West New Hope in the middle of the night, and I didn’t like the way the ordinary landmarks seemed to have changed, the trees looming larger, the houses like sinister imitations of themselves.

  CeeCee sat sideways in her seat, with her feet in Jeff’s lap. “Look at the earring I found,” she said. She twirled it in her fingers near Jeff, but he ignored her. “A, are your ears pieced? Jeff doesn’t want to pierce his ear.”

  I had one hole in each earlobe. That was the extent of my fashion sense.

  “This would look good on you,” CeeCee said.