The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Page 7

  For a while we ate button mushrooms and yogurt-covered pretzels and talked about monster books in general: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Twilight, Interview with the Vampire, Dracula, and Lives of the Monster Dogs. CeeCee summarized a few of the slasher films she’d seen, at which point we learned that Wallis didn’t own a TV.

  “Why not?” Jill asked. She wanted to know if Wallis was Amish.

  “Show us your butter churn,” CeeCee said.

  The collective motherhood in the room seemed to think the lack of a TV qualified Wallis for a Nobel Prize.

  “You’ve probably read more books than the rest of us,” my mother said. She had apparently forgotten that I was spending my summer reading.

  “I read one book a week,” Wallis said in her animal’s voice. “I made a rule. One book a week, times roughly fifty books per year, over a reading lifetime of sixty years: that’s three thousand books.” She paused. “I call it the Rule of Three Thousand.”

  “Three thousand books,” my mother said. “But that’s so few, for an entire lifetime.”

  Apparently thrilled with this encouragement, Wallis went on to explain that people who read two books a week, with a few weeks off for travel or sickness, would be abiding by the Rule of Six Thousand.

  No one said anything, probably because—mathematically speaking—three of us were humbled and three were annoyed.

  CeeCee took out her phone to snap a picture of Wallis, but Wallis immediately turned away.

  “I don’t want my picture taken,” she said.

  “Can we talk about the book for a while?” I asked.

  Jill tucked her feet under one of the flowered cushions on the couch and started us off. She said she didn’t understand why Victor Frankenstein insisted on keeping his creation a secret. “Why didn’t he just bring his family together and sit them down and say, ‘Hey. Guess what? I made a dead guy, and now he’s roaming around killing people’?”

  “He was probably ashamed,” her mother said. “He must have realized that creating the monster was wrong.”

  “Maybe,” CeeCee said. “But wasn’t it worse for him to run away after he brought it to life?” She put her cell phone back in her purse. “He’s like a parent who takes one look at his newborn baby and then abandons it.”

  Jill’s mother stared at the two remaining bananas.

  “I hope I’m not touching on a difficult subject.” CeeCee balanced a plate of stuffed mushrooms on the palm of her hand. “But it does seem relevant, now that I think of it. Right here in this room, we have one person abandoned at birth”—she looked at Jill—“one abandoned before birth”—she looked at me—“and one question mark.” She looked at Wallis.

  “Why am I a question mark?” Wallis asked, without sounding curious.

  “Anyway,” CeeCee went on, “it’s no wonder the monster is screwed up. He has no mother, and his father turns out to be a deadbeat dad. He’s a poor nameless orphan.”

  I had never thought of myself as abandoned; the word had a pleasant, dramatic ring to it. “Jill thinks if the monster was alive today he’d be a school shooter,” I said, noticing that Jill looked a little snarly.

  “That makes sense to me. Neglect breeds violence,” CeeCee said. She offered me a mushroom, which gave way in my mouth with a squish and a pop: it had been injected with some kind of cheese.

  My mother proposed her theory about Frankenstein and his monster being somewhat the same. Maybe that was the point of most monster books, she said: to point out that everyone had good and evil characteristics, like Jekyll and Hyde.

  Finally we talked about the women in the book, who were prone to fainting spells and to getting themselves strangled, and Wallis explained that strangling someone could take up to five full minutes of continuous pressure around the neck. It wasn’t as easy to kill a person as most people assumed.

  CeeCee said she would remember that information for future use.

  The phone rang. Jill’s mother excused herself and went off to answer it.

  We took advantage of what seemed to be a break in the proceedings. CeeCee’s mother and mine talked about yoga, Jill stacked some plates, and I ate another mushroom, wondering whether an evil person lived inside me and was quietly waiting for a chance to emerge.

  CeeCee stood up and plucked at my sleeve. “Meeting in the conference room,” she said.

  I followed her down the hall and into the greenest bathroom I had ever seen: four green walls with green ruffled hand towels and a green furry rug and green-and-white curtains and—on top of the toilet—a crocheted toilet paper–roll cover in the shape of a green hoopskirted doll. I felt as if I’d tumbled into a bottle of kiwi shampoo.

  Jill stuck her foot in the door as CeeCee started to close it.

  “Why do you want to come in?” CeeCee asked. “You don’t like this book club.”

  “Neither do you,” Jill said.

  “Good point.” CeeCee opened the door and let Jill in. “I think I might be getting used to it, even though it is extremely unbearable,” she said. “We should be the Extremely Unbearable Book Club—for Irresponsible Girls. I might change our name.” She picked up the toilet-paper doll. “What’s with the deep-forest theme, by the way?”

  “Leave that alone. My mom likes to decorate. And we’re not all irresponsible.” Jill straightened the crocheted hoopskirt. “Why are we always meeting in bathrooms?”

  “I think that’s explained in our founding documents,” CeeCee said. She opened the medicine cabinet, found a bottle of aspirin, and pried off its lid.

  We heard a knock at the door. “That’s probably Lily War Gas,” I said. “I mean Wallis.”

  “This group gets weirder by the minute,” Jill said. She let Wallis in. Behind the specks on her thick glasses, Wallis’s watery eyes glanced quickly at mine. She stepped over the threshold and took in our surroundings as if she were a tourist in a cathedral. “This is beautiful,” she growled.

  “It’s green,” said Jill.

  CeeCee picked up a bottle of cough syrup and examined the label. “I’m glad we’ve decided to start making personal comparisons between these books and our lives,” she said. “I was afraid our group was going to be too scholarly.”

  “You aren’t even reading the books,” Jill said. “And no one else is making comparisons.”

  CeeCee put the cough syrup away and picked up a can of air freshener—mountain pine. “But don’t you want our group to be relevant?” she asked. “Isn’t that the purpose of a book club? The books don’t matter: it’s what we find out about each other. We know Jill is an orphan, and we’ve learned that Adrienne is half an orphan, and—”

  “How can I be half an orphan?” I asked.

  “The point is …,” CeeCee said; she shook the air freshener and pointed the can like a weapon at Jill. “Shouldn’t we be telling each other our secrets?”

  “No. And stop fishing through our stuff,” Jill said. “Put that away.” She tried to get control of the air freshener but CeeCee was taller and held it over our heads. “I’m the Statue of Liberty,” she said. She pressed the button, releasing a long, wet blast in a circle above us. The piney fragrance trickled down on us like rain.

  “You are a seriously disturbed individual.” Jill finally wrestled the spray can away from her.

  Wallis wiped pine scent from the back of her neck. “I thought the idea of the book club was to get ready for AP English,” she muttered.

  “That’s only if you aren’t insane,” Jill said.

  “Where on earth did they go?” It was CeeCee’s mother, out in the hall.

  In the bathroom, all four of us, as if by previous agreement, went quiet and still. We heard a pair of shoes click-clacking away.

  Browsing through the medicine chest again, CeeCee picked up a container of baby powder. “So, twice in a row, Wallis,” she said. “Why did your mother decide not to come? I’m starting to think she doesn’t exist.”

  “My mother exists,” Wallis said. She turn
ed to me. “I’m like Adrienne. I live with my mother. It’s just the two of us. She got divorced.”

  “Being divorced shouldn’t keep her away from the book club,” CeeCee said. “Does she think she’s better than our mothers?”

  “No.” Wallis’s face was expressionless.

  “We obviously have different kinds of moms in the group,” CeeCee went on. “A’s mom is the teacher/librarian model, and Jill’s is the business executive or ruffle queen. My mother’s the tennis-playing trophy wife, complete with vibrator in the bedside table. I doubt your mom would feel out of place.”

  “Your mother has a vibrator?” I asked.

  “Everybody over twenty has a vibrator,” CeeCee said. “It reduces stress.”

  Jill took the baby powder away from her. “Sit down over there and stop talking.” She pointed to the toilet, then turned to Wallis. “Are we going to meet at your house next week? We’ll have to meet your mother eventually, won’t we?”

  For some reason Wallis looked at me as if I could answer this question for her, or as if there were something about her life that I understood.

  “Does your mother even know about the book club?” I asked. “Did you invite her?”

  No answer from Wallis.

  “Oh. Amazing,” CeeCee said. She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet. “You never told her. I’m so impressed! The three of us are showing up every week with our mothers like good little girls, and you waltz over here with your three bananas—”

  Jill cut her off. “Wallis, do you want us to meet at your house next time? Yes or no?”

  “No,” Wallis said. Her hair looked like it had been cut with a kitchen knife.

  “Okay. Then we’ll meet somewhere else. And I guess we’re finished with Frankenstein now,” Jill said.

  There was a knock at the door. “Girls?”

  Back in the pink and blue living room, we agreed to move on to Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. My mother had brought a stack of well-thumbed library copies from work. I announced to the group in general that we would be reading about hermaphrodites.

  “I don’t think that’s an accurate description,” said my mother, sounding annoyed.

  “Hermaphrodites that live on another planet,” I amended. “Sometime in the future.”

  Jill’s mother turned to CeeCee’s mom. “Dana? Could we meet at your house next week?”

  Dana examined an imperfection on her arm—Is she really a trophy wife? I wondered—and then said that we could.

  My mother hunted around for her car keys and said that she and I would drive Wallis home.

  But Wallis was gone. I had seen her leave a few minutes earlier and opened my mouth to tell her to wait, but she threw me a look so cool and bloodless, the words caught in my throat. So I didn’t stop her. I watched as she picked up her two uneaten bananas and walked out the side door.

  7. MOOD: The mood of a book is kind of like the mood of a person. It can be funny or sarcastic or wacky or sad. I wonder if the mood of a book depends on the mood the writer was in when she wrote it.

  Back in what was quickly becoming our regular spot at the pool, CeeCee was turning the pages of a magazine. “Who has a theory about Wallis?” she asked.

  Jill rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to start that conversation.”

  CeeCee held up a picture of a model in a shampoo ad. “You should definitely dye your hair,” she said. “It’ll perk you up. Jill, don’t you think A should dye her hair?”

  “You don’t dye your hair,” Jill told her.

  “My hair is blond,” CeeCee said.

  I had just reread the same paragraph for the third or fourth time. It was still hot and I was feeling peevish. My knee was sore, my ear was probably infected, and Jill, who was on a fifteen-minute break from the snack bar, was usurping space at the foot of my chair.

  “Maybe red highlights,” CeeCee said. “Brown is not an attractive color.”

  I saw someone walking outside the fence. “Is that Wallis?” I asked. I thought I recognized her archaeologist’s shorts. But Jill pointed out that the person I was looking at was a tiny old lady.

  “Right: back to Wallis. Here’s one possible theory,” CeeCee said. “Her mother is dead and divided into a bunch of plastic bags in the freezer. Or, theory number two: her mother is bat-shit insane, and Wallis has locked her in the attic and every night she slides her a tray of food through a slot in the door.”

  Jill was staring at the side of my head. “Your ear looks like crap, Adrienne.” She leaned toward me. “There’s a bunch of pink crust growing around the hole.”

  “Is anyone listening to me?” CeeCee asked.

  “You should take that earring out and start over,” Jill said. “You have to use fourteen-karat gold or surgical steel.”

  “Hello? That gold is easily sixteen karat,” CeeCee said. “And you probably shouldn’t let my mother see that you have it.”

  I touched my ear. It was swollen. “This earring’s your mother’s? You said you found it.”

  “I did. My mother’s always losing things. She’s very careless.” CeeCee adjusted the tiny battery-operated fan on the arm of her chair. “A, admit it. You want to know what Wallis’s deal is. You want to figure her out.”

  Did I? I thought I wanted to figure myself out. “She has a rash on her legs,” I said.

  “That’s probably psoriasis.” Jill picked up my water bottle and drank from it. “She can get a prescription.”

  Mr. Vonn, our music teacher, walked by with a newspaper under his arm. His stomach was furry with black and gray hair, and he was wearing a bathing suit printed with musical notes. He wiggled his fingers at us, humming.

  “Absolutely no comment,” CeeCee said.

  I tried to go back to The Left Hand of Darkness, but now I was thinking about Wallis.

  CeeCee noticed me staring into space. “I bet she’s got a little crush on you,” she said, turning another page in her magazine. “Didn’t I hear her say, ‘I’m like Adrienne’?”

  “That’s only because we live with our mothers,” I said. “I didn’t skip a grade, and I didn’t magically appear in the middle of the school year, and I don’t live in the woods.”

  Jill handed me my empty water bottle. “You make her sound like one of those feral children,” she said. “The ones that are raised by packs of wolves.”

  An image of Wallis as Red Riding Hood filtered into my brain.

  Jill picked up my copy of The Left Hand of Darkness. A postcard Liz had sent me fell out of the book. Mosquitoes the size of raccoons here, she’d written. No shower for 17 days. All my clothes smell. I’m washing my underwear in the lake.

  “How much of this book have you read?” Jill asked.

  I shoved the postcard into my purse. I had finished the first four or five chapters. The main character, Genly Ai, was a sort of ambassador to the planet Winter, where it was always cold, and where there was no difference between men and women because everybody shifted back and forth from male to female. Genly had trouble understanding what was happening at first, and so did I.

  Jill flipped through the book to chapter seven. “Look,” she said. “ ‘The Question of Sex.’ ”

  “There’s a whole chapter about sex?” CeeCee asked.

  “Not the kind you’re hoping for,” Jill said. “It’s mostly incest. Between two brothers—or maybe a brother and a pseudosister.”

  “I don’t think it counts as incest if the people are aliens,” I said.

  Outside the fence, two guys I recognized from school were throwing a basketball through a rusted hoop.

  “Why are the only people in town this summer either unattractive or mentally ill?” CeeCee asked.

  Jill gave me the book back. What had struck me most about the novel, so far, was the way the characters were allowed to change. On the planet Winter, you could be a certain type of person one day, but then the next day, or the next week, everyone you knew accepted you as someone else.

  “Here
’s a thought. We could pay her a visit,” CeeCee said.

  “You want to visit Wallis?” I asked.

  “Why not? You’re obviously concerned about her. And the two of you have a lot in common. Besides, we haven’t seen her in a couple of days. Maybe we could stop by and check things out.”

  Like ambassadors, I thought. Like Genly Ai.

  “Or here’s a different idea,” Jill said. “We could leave Wallis alone. We could let her not shave her armpits. We could let her wear ugly glasses and have psoriasis on her legs.”

  “They are ugly glasses,” CeeCee said. “And I notice you used the word we. There’s so much togetherness in this group. It’s really touching.”

  A cluster of younger boys swaggered past us. I waved to Liz’s little brother, Max.

  “I hope you aren’t flirting with that nine-year-old,” CeeCee said.

  Jill groaned and got up. “I have to work. Break’s over.”

  A dozen people were milling around, listless, in a scrap of shade by the concession stand. CeeCee and I watched Jill unlock the money box and corral the little kids into a line.

  “Our only problem,” CeeCee said, filing her nails, “will be getting a car.”

  Maybe it was the heat, or my knee, or the fact that Liz was away, but I felt irritable and restless. Maybe some sort of change would be a good idea, I thought. Nothing drastic or permanent—just something to make me feel more confident and less like a blank; closer to edgy and further from bland. I spent an hour in the beauty aisle at the drugstore and, remembering CeeCee’s suggestion, chose a box of Rich Auburn. It had to be better than my natural shade, which was probably best described as Playground Dust.

  In case she might try to talk me out of it, I waited until my mother had gone to a coffee shop with a friend; then I cranked the air-conditioning down to sixty-five, turned the radio to its highest volume, and took the hair dye into the tub. One of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite books is the part in Little Women when Jo cuts her hair. Because her family needs money, she sacrifices her “one beauty” and sells her long, thick hair to a man who makes wigs. My hair wasn’t long, and my mother didn’t need me to sell anything; still, squishing the color around on my scalp, I imagined myself whipping a scarf off my head and astounding everyone with my thoughtfulness and generosity.