The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Read online

  We drove past the high school and the junior high, Jeff driving with one hand as if barely involved in the car’s operation.

  “I could pierce your ear for you right now.” CeeCee turned around in her seat and faced me. “I’m really good.”

  I was going to say that I might consider her offer, but CeeCee was already worming her way between the bucket seats into the back. “I’ve got everything we need,” she said. “Because I was going to give the earring to Jeff but he doesn’t want it. He actually spurned my generosity.”

  Jeff caught my eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Now he’s going to be jealous of you,” CeeCee told me, holding the earring—some kind of sparkly stud—near my ear.

  We drove past the drugstore and the bakery and then the graveyard, with its gravestones slanting to the left as if in a breeze. CeeCee knelt on the seat beside me, and I let her wipe my ear with hand sanitizer and then sat patiently under the five-watt bulb while she searched for a needle in her purse. It might seem strange that I let her perform this minor surgery. But as we drove past the graveyard I looked at the graves and thought about the bodies underground, all those people lying on their backs doing nothing, and I thought any one of them would jump at the chance to be alive and to be riding in a car with the windows down, the hot breeze of a summer night streaming in. If anyone asked me later why I let CeeCee put a hole in my ear in a moving vehicle, I could truthfully say, Dead people told me I should.

  But I thought she was going to pierce the lobe, not the flap and gristle of my upper ear.

  “Don’t yell,” she said. She was using a bar of soap as a backstop. “I haven’t punched it all the way through yet.” She had pushed my head against the window and was leaning over me, her bony elbow on my shoulder, her knee on my leg.

  “I think I’m gonna throw up,” I said.

  Jeff jerked the wheel, CeeCee’s head smacked the window, and I felt a slow and painful pop as the earring tore a path through my skin. We pulled into a gravel parking lot by the mini-putt. A cloud of dust blossomed like a colorless flower around the car.

  I wrenched the door open and leaned out, and CeeCee gave me a tissue for my ear. “Now we’ll distract you with some golf,” she said. “Jeff can keep score. You’ll share my putter.”

  I stood up and tested my shaky legs, then walked behind her to the wooden shack where Mr. Baxter usually sold tickets. Even in daylight the mini-putt was faded and pale, the sign over our heads reading AIRY GOLF and the artificial turf peeling up at the edges; now, after dark, the battered fiberglass fairy-tale characters lurked in the gloom. “I don’t think we’ll be able to see the holes,” I said.

  CeeCee started slashing through the brush beneath the sign. “Jeff, come and help me find a ball.”

  Jeff sat on the fence, consulting his phone.

  “Jeff’s moody tonight. We can ignore him. Here.” CeeCee found a dented yellow ball. “You first.”

  My ear was throbbing. Trying not to touch it, I set the ball on the slab of artificial grass that served as a tee. I looked down the length of raggedy carpet toward Snow White, who was dancing with half a dozen dwarves. (The seventh dwarf had been abducted; only his fiberglass foot had been left behind.)

  I’d never played mini-golf in the middle of the night and was trying to orient myself. “Aren’t you going to be tired during summer school tomorrow?” I asked. The ball collided with the hem of Snow White’s dress.

  “That doesn’t matter. Je ne me soucie pas,” CeeCee said.

  Though I couldn’t quite tell where the hole was, I took two more strokes. The ball thwocked squarely against the boards.

  Jeff climbed off the fence and announced that he had to run an errand. At two-thirty a.m.?

  “Come back soon,” CeeCee called. She tapped the ball into the cup, and we watched Jeff get into his car and drive off.

  We took turns at Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, and the Three Billy Goats Gruff. “That middle goat looks like Jeff,” CeeCee said. “Do you have a crush on him yet?”

  “Why are we out here?” I asked.

  “I needed to get out,” CeeCee said. “I can’t think during the day, when other people are awake. I feel like everybody clogs up the air with their thoughts.”

  A pair of headlights painted the weeds in the empty lot across the street. CeeCee crouched behind one of the goats and grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me down with her; I tumbled over, awkward because of my leg.

  “We should have brought something to eat,” she said when the car squealed away. She opened my purse and rooted through it. “Do you have any gum in here, or—” She held up my copy of Frankenstein. “You brought this with you?”

  “I forgot it was in there.” I rubbed some gravel off my arm.

  CeeCee angled the book so she could read the back cover in a swath of moonlight. “What’s a … charnel house?” she asked.

  “It’s one of those aboveground graves,” I said. “You know—where instead of burying people underground they build a sort of miniature stone house and put the bodies on shelves inside it.”

  “Dead people in bunk beds,” CeeCee said. “Weird.” She lay down on the artificial turf. The wind rattled the birch trees behind us. “Have you ever dug up anything in a graveyard?”

  “No.” I was afraid to ask her if she had.

  She glanced at her phone. “Maybe your father’s dead and buried somewhere and your mother hasn’t told you. Do you think she’s lying to you about him?”

  “Why would she lie about him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know your mother.” CeeCee gave me the book. “Read me something.”

  “You want me to read to you? Out loud?”

  “Well, I won’t be able to hear you if you read to yourself.” She tucked my purse under her head, for a pillow. “You don’t have to start at the beginning. I’ll follow along. Just read something good.”

  I flipped through the chapters, leaning against the largest of the billy goats and holding the book so its pages caught the light of the moon. “It was on a dreary night of November,” I began, “that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”

  “So he’s going to flip a switch and electrocute the monster?” CeeCee asked.

  “Something like that.”

  Her face was shaded by the lily pad that belonged to the Frog Prince. “Go ahead. Keep going.”

  I felt embarrassed, reading aloud in the middle of the night at the mini-putt, but Jeff wasn’t back and no one else was around, so I read about the monster coming to life, about his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips, and about Frankenstein, his creator, running away and then fainting because of what he had done. I read about the monster tearing around Switzerland, insulted and lonely. My leg started to ache but I ignored it.

  “The monster’s a good character,” CeeCee said. “I like it when he gets ticked off. A total stranger sews him together out of spare parts and then leaves him to wander around and figure out who he should be. No wonder he’s pissed.”

  I agreed. I felt a wave of sympathy for the monster, who eventually decided to kill a few people off. Of course he shouldn’t have done it, but I understood his reasons. Even though he was huge and strong and ugly, he felt powerless. The world had set him aside. It had no interest in him and nowhere to put him. Every moment of his life he felt he was staring at a giant stop sign, so he finally took hold of it with his oversized corpse’s hands and decided to shake it.

  CeeCee twitched.

  “Are you awake?” I asked. Something crawled across my leg but I brushed it away.

  She sat up. “I think we should read only monster books,” she mumbled. “Vampires, zombies, werewolves. Hunchbacks and lepers.” She opened her phone.

  “Lepers and hunchbacks aren’t monsters.” I stretched, feeling sti
ff. “When is Jeff coming back?”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem with Jeff. He’s not very reliable.” CeeCee stood up. “I texted him a couple of times but he won’t text back. He probably went to bed and turned his phone off.”

  I stared at her. “But we can’t walk home from here. It’s too far.”

  She shrugged. “Call him yourself. Or is there someone else you want to ask for a ride?”

  I pictured my mother tugging off her sleep mask, spitting out her bite plate, and switching off her ocean on her way to the phone. Shoving my book into my purse, I stood up. CeeCee handed me the golf club, which I started using as a cane.

  “If you were a character in this book,” she said, “which one would you be? I’d have to be the crazy doctor. I’d be robbing graves and sewing flesh together.”

  “I guess that means I’d be the monster,” I said. I was clumsy and large, and here I was, limping down a gravel road at four in the morning, lurching along. Besides, in terms of personality, I seemed to be a little bit of this and a little of that. I was probably some sort of gruesome composite, a hybrid quilted together from other people’s moldy castoffs.

  I started to worry that I was bending the golf club. A circle of pain had ignited itself within my knee. “Shit,” I said.

  CeeCee turned around. “What?”

  I opened my purse. I had remembered my house key but I’d forgotten that my mother always locked the dead-bolts when we were in for the night. And climbing up into my bedroom window—without Jeff—would be impossible. I explained this to CeeCee.

  “Do you want to stay at my house?” she asked.

  “No.” That would make things worse. It wasn’t that my mother would be mad; she would be … confused. And that would make two of us. Dead people had told me that I should let CeeCee pierce my ear, but why had I climbed out my bedroom window? And why was I dragging a golf club around in the dark, with my knee on fire? Inexplicable. “Why didn’t Jeff come back for us?” I asked.

  “Because he’s a jackass,” CeeCee said. “He only showed up in the first place because he owes me a favor.”

  “What kind of favor?” I stopped to rest my leg for a minute.

  “I’m going to cut through this way,” CeeCee said. “To my house, it’s shorter.”

  “You don’t think it’s better if we stick together?” I had just spent an hour reading aloud about a patchwork corpse with a special talent for strangling people. From the side of the road, the weeds seemed to reach for us like fingers.

  “We can’t stick together if we’re going to different places,” CeeCee said. She told me to keep her father’s golf club. “He has plenty of other ones.” She walked away, fading into the night like a blot of ink on a piece of dark paper.

  When I finally got home, my leg was throbbing and my ear felt like it had expanded to twice its size. I stood, exhausted, on the front lawn, thinking about my mother calling the police to report me missing. But our windows were dark, so she must not have noticed I was gone.

  I sat down on the sidewalk in front of the house. It was after four-thirty. I propped my aching leg on a flowerpot, knowing that my mother, as predictable as a metronome, would wake up at six-forty-five, make a pot of strong coffee, and then open the front door to get the morning paper, at which point she would undoubtedly be relieved and amused (ha ha!) to find Adrienne Kathleen, her only daughter—seeker of experience!—her injured leg carefully propped on a terra-cotta pot full of pink geraniums and a battered copy of Frankenstein in her hands.

  5. CONFLICT: The stuff that goes wrong and ticks the characters off in a book so they get motivated to do things. I guess if nothing went wrong in a book, you’d end up with three hundred pages of somebody watching her grandmother sleep.

  Relieved and amused were not the right words for my mother’s reaction. She stepped outside in her yellow bathrobe to get the paper and to nip the dead flowers from her potted plants, and even before she looked up and fully noticed me sprawling across the sidewalk, I knew the more accurate term for what she was feeling was pissed.

  “Adrienne? What are you doing?”

  I waved at her in a gruesome, exhausted attempt to be cheerful. “Hey.” I had barely slept, and I was wearing pajama pants, a shirt with blood on its collar, and a dew-dampened Velcro brace on my leg. I had ditched the golf club in the bushes because it was bent and would require the divulging of information. And although I had worked out a speech in my head—a speech full of reasonableness and calm explanatory phrases—what I ended up saying was, “I went out.”

  My mother stared at me, a dead geranium leaf in her hand.

  She wanted to know who I’d been with, and if I’d been drinking.

  “Drinking?” I laughed, making an unfortunate cawing sound. “I was reading a book. Frankenstein.” Brushing some dirt and a few crushed insects from my clothes, I pulled myself up. “I climbed out the window. CeeCee came to get me. She has insomnia.” Maybe the insomnia wasn’t relevant. “I don’t drink,” I said.

  “But you climbed out a window in the middle of the night. And there’s blood on your neck.” My mother’s partially flattened hair made her head look uneven.

  “I pierced my ear,” I said. “CeeCee pierced it. But most of the time we were reading.” I explained that CeeCee had showed up outside my window to get my cell number, so I climbed out to talk to her. I skipped the part about Jeff and the car and the mini-putt and staggering home in the dark. “So that’s it,” I said. “End of story. I got locked out.”

  “Let me look at your ear,” my mother said. “And how did CeeCee get here?”

  “My ear is fine.” I tried to fluff up my hair to cover the injury. “I’ll take a shower; then I’ll go back to bed.”

  “You can’t go to bed. You have a doctor’s appointment at eight-fifteen.” My mother glanced down at the sidewalk. Near the place I’d been sitting there was a cigarette butt. She nudged it toward me with her foot. “Is that yours?”

  “No.”

  My mother bent down and picked it up. “I’m going to make some coffee,” she said. “And I’ll read the paper while you take a shower. And after we both have breakfast and get ourselves dressed, I’m going to take you to your appointment. So maybe we should continue this conversation later.”

  “We don’t need to continue it.” I tried to sound confident. Dismissive. I limped up the three cement steps to the house. “I wasn’t drinking. Or smoking. I was reading a book.”

  “Go take your shower.” My mother unfolded the paper and started to read it.

  I looked at her asymmetrical hair and her yellow bathrobe and I knew she wished I were up in Canada with Liz, paddling my way toward physical and spiritual fitness. “You don’t need to assume I’m screwing up all the time,” I said.

  My mother said there was no reason to be so touchy, and we went inside.

  My knee was swollen. And sore. Dr. Ramsan frowned and handled my leg as if it were a roast he intended to put in an oven. “It is still bothering you?” he asked, his voice an elegant singsong. Dr. Ramsan wore a turban and had a black beard thick enough for birds to live in. “I’d hoped it would heal a bit faster.”

  My mother, in a chair in a corner of the examining room, suggested that leaping through a bedroom window in the middle of the night might not have helped.

  “You leapt through a window?” Dr. Ramsan looked impressed. “What for?”

  “She had some reading to do,” my mother said.

  I explained to Dr. Ramsan that I’d been out with a girlfriend, and we were reading Frankenstein because my mother had coerced us into joining a mother-daughter book club, even though we were too old for such a thing.

  “I didn’t coerce you,” my mother said. “Your teacher is the one who assigned the books. I asked you a few weeks ago about the idea of the book club.”

  “I wasn’t really listening when you asked me, though,” I said.

  “I remember reading Frankenstein!” Dr. Ramsan smiled. “The tormented d
octor! I think it inspired me to apply to medical school. Of course, the cadavers we worked with didn’t have to be brought to life, so our job was simpler.” He positioned my leg so my knee was bent. “Hubris! Does that hurt?”

  “No.”

  “And this?” He pushed at a fleshy spot near the base of my kneecap. I flinched.

  “Still tender,” he said. “Make another appointment to come back in two weeks. And I advise you to go in and out of houses by walking through doors, no matter the time of day or night. Will you do that?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  My mother went off to make an appointment at the reception desk, and I asked Dr. Ramsan to check the new piercing—CeeCee’s big fake diamond stud—in my ear. He lifted my hair away from my face; I saw him frown. “Literature,” he said, turning away to get a piece of gauze. “Books can be very powerful. They bring a feeling of freedom, isn’t that right? You almost feel, while you are reading”—he wiped my ear with an ointment that stung—“as if you have entered an alternate life. As if you could be an entirely different person.”

  I nodded, and he let my hair fall. “Are you doing your exercises?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Most of the time. I might go swimming later today.”

  “Very good. Walk in the water. Swim with your friends. Read for your book club. But no more windows.”

  “No more windows,” I agreed.

  An hour later, to save CeeCee’s mother the trouble of coming to get me, my mother handed me a beach towel and a bottle of water and my copy of Frankenstein and dropped me off at the pool.

  It had just opened. I flashed my pass at the gate and, at the shallow end, walked past a dozen little kids lined up in a fleshy, squiggling row for swimming class. I thought about CeeCee showing up at my window. Why did she ask if my mother would lie to me?

  I put on some sun lotion and spread out my towel. Dr. Ramsan was right about books, I thought. Books were powerful and appealing because the things that happened in them added up and made sense. In life—at least in my life—a lot of things seemed pointless or random; it was hard to find a pattern in them at all.